Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Three

“That was Thommesen, that was,” Geir said.

We hadn’t seen him since he had us in the second class.

“I thought he’d died ages ago!” I said.

We took the old shortcut through the forest and emerged on the edge above the garbage dump. The mountain of white plastic bags and black garbage bags glinted in the full sun. A dozen or so seagulls were screaming and flapping their wings. We clambered down the slope and wove our way between all the objects, which in some places were stacked high, perhaps four times higher than us, and in others lay strewn about with nothing on top. We were looking for bags and cardboard boxes, and there was no shortage of them, also containing magazines, weeklies that the elderly read: Hjemmet and Allers and Norsk Ukeblad, weeklies for girls: Starlet and Det Nye and Romantikk, piles of newspapers, mostly Verdens Gang and Agderposten, but also Vårt Land and Aftenposten and Dagbladet ; we found A-Magasinet and Kvinner og Klær, horsey magazines for girls, Donald Duck comics and a fat Fantomet album from the late sixties that I immediately put to one side, a Tempo album as well, some Kaptein Miki comics, and one Agent X9 paperback, which I was pretty pleased with, but it didn’t alter the fact that what we were searching for, that is, magazines like Alle Menn, Lek, Coctail, and Aktuell Report, and perhaps even a few foreign magazines, because there were quite a few Danish ones in circulation, one called Weekend Sex, for example, and some Swedish and English ones, was nowhere to be found. We didn’t find a single porn magazine! What was going on? Had someone beaten us to it? They had to be here!

After an hour’s searching we gave up and flopped down in the heather to read the normal magazines we had found. Perhaps because I’d had my mind set on something quite different and had felt the expectation all day, I wasn’t really happy about just sitting there. Something was missing, and I got up, paced between the trees, looked down at the stream, perhaps a wade in the water was the answer?

“Want to go for a wade?” I called.

“Sure. Just got to read this first,” Geir said without looking up from his magazine.

I went over to the two bags of bottles we had found. Most of them were the long, brown ones with the yellow Arendals Bryggeri label, but there was also the odd dumpy, green Heineken bottle. I took one of them out. There was a bit of earth and grass stuck to the outside, and I wondered if it had been lying on the edge of a lawn for a while and had been picked up when the garden was being prepared for winter.

The lust was still there in my stomach.

I rotated the bottle in my hand. The dark-green glass lit up in the sun.

“Do you think it’s possible to stick your willy in this?” I said.

Geir rested the magazine on his lap.

“Ye-eah,” he said. “If the neck’s not too narrow. Are you going to try?”

“Sure,” I said. “Are you?”

He got up and came over. Took a bottle.

“Think anyone can see us here?” he said.

“No, are you crazy?” I said. “We’re in the middle of the forest. But we could move over there, to be on the safe side.”

We walked toward the trunk of a large pine tree. I undid my belt and dropped my trousers to my knees, took out my willy with one hand and held the bottle in the other. I pressed my willy into the top, the glass neck was cold and hard against my soft, warm skin, and actually too narrow, but with a bit of humping and pumping and wriggling, it slipped inside. A tingle ran down my back as my willy throbbed and the bottle seemed to tighten around it, harder and harder.

“I can’t get it in,” Geir said. “It won’t go.”

“I’ve done it!” I said. “Look!”

I turned to him.

“But I can’t budge it,” I said. “There’s no room. It’s stuck!”

To show how stuck it was, I let go of the bottle. It hung between my legs.

“Ha ha ha,” Geir laughed.

I was about to pull my willy out when I felt a sharp pain shoot up.

“Ow. Ow, ow, ow, shit!”

“What’s the matter?” Geir said.

“Ow! Ow! Oh, FUCK!”

It was a stabbing pain, as if from a knife or a jagged piece of glass. I pulled as hard as I could and got my willy out of the bottle.

On the tip of it there was a black beetle.

“OH! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” I howled. I gripped the beetle or whatever it was, it was black with big claws, pulled it off, and hurled it as far as I could, while running back and forth waving my arms.

“What’s the matter?” Geir said. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Karl Ove?”

“A beetle. It was biting my willy!”

At first he stared at me, slack-jawed. Then he burst into laughter. It was exactly his kind of humor. He rolled around in the heather laughing.

“Don’t tell anyone!” I said, doing up my belt. “Have you got that?”

“Yeah-heh-heh-heh!” Geir said. “Ha ha ha ha!”

Three times I made him promise he wouldn’t tell anyone as we walked uphill, each carrying a bag and with the sun beating down on our necks. I also said a short prayer to apologize for my swearing.

“Should we go down and get the deposit on the bottles at Fina now?” Geir said.

“Do they take beer bottles there?” I said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Geir said. “We’d better hide them then.”

We walked back across the field, jumped over the stream, and there, on the other side, in a clump of trees below the chapel, we left the bags of bottles. Pulled up some ferns and tufts of grass and covered them as well as we were able, glanced around to make sure no one was nearby, then calmly moved away, knowing that if you ran you drew attention to yourself, up the road next to the chapel, which we then started to follow.

Outside the cellar door of the house where he lived stood Ketil, his bike turned upside down in front of him. He was revolving the rear wheel with a pedal in one hand while lubricating the chain with a small plastic bottle of oil he was holding in the other. His smooth, black hair hung down in front of his face.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” we said.

“Where’ve you been?”

“To the dump.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Searching for porn mags,” Geir said. I sent him a glare. What was he doing? This was a secret!

“Did you find any?” Ketil said, smiling at us.

Geir shook his head.

“I’ve got a pile of them in my room,” he said. “Would you like to borrow them?”

“Oh yes!” Geir said.

“Is that true?” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you want them now?”

“I’ve got to go home and eat,” I said.

“Me, too,” Geir said. “But we can take them with us and hide them in the forest.”

Ketil shook his head.

“No chance. Then they’d be ruined. You’ll have to take them home. But that’s OK. I can bring them over this afternoon.”

“That’s great. But then we’ll have to meet you outside. No ringing the bell. Agreed?”

“Oh?” he said, smiling with narrowed eyes. “Are you frightened I’ll show the mags to your Dad, or what?”

“No, but … he asks a lot of questions. And you haven’t been there before.”

“Fine,” he said. “Be outside at five and I’ll be there. OK?”

“That’s when the soccer’s on,” I said.

“Six then. And don’t tell me you want to watch children’s TV!”

“OK. Six.”

Mom was sitting in the kitchen reading a book with the radio on and rice boiling on the stove. The whole of one side of the pan was white with milk and in the area between the hotplates there was also milk and rice, almost dried up from the heat, so I could see it had boiled over.