Karl Knausgaard: My Struggle: Book Three

“Someone’s driving their car anyway,” Dad said.

I stood up to see.

“Sit down!” said Dad.

I sat down.

“What’s going on?” Mom said.

“The brats are taking their parents’ car without asking.”

He turned and looked at Mom.

“Isn’t that incredible?” he said.

Jerking and stuttering, the drone went up the hill.

“Have they no control over their kids?” he said. “Leif Tore is in Karl Ove’s class. And he goes and steals his parents’ car ?”

I gulped down the last bit of bread, poured a drop of milk in my tea to cool it enough to drink. Got up.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

“Pleasure,” Mom said. “Are you going to bed?”

“Think so,” I said.

“Good night then.”

“Good night.”

He came in before I switched off the light.

“Sit up,” he said.

I sat up.

He fixed me with a long stare.

“I hear you’ve been smoking, Karl Ove,” he said.

“What?” I said. “I have not! I promise you. I’m telling the truth.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard. I’ve heard you’ve been smoking.”

I glanced up and met his eye.

“Have you?” he said.

I looked down.

“No,” I said.

There it was, his hand around my ear.

“You have,” he said, twisting it. “Haven’t you.”

“Noooo!” I yelled.

He let go.

“Rolf told me you had,” he said. “Are you telling me Rolf was lying?”

“Yes, he must have been,” I said. “Because I have never smoked.”

“Why would Rolf lie?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And why are you crying? If you have a clear conscience? I know you, Karl Ove. I know you’ve been smoking. But you won’t do it again. So that’ll have to do this time around.”

He turned and left, as darkly as when he came.

I dried my eyes with the duvet cover and lay staring at the ceiling, suddenly wide awake. I had never smoked.

But he had known I had done something.

How did he know?

How could he have known?

The next day we were unable to keep away and rowed past the islet.

“It’s all black!” Geir said, resting on the oars.

We laughed so much we almost fell in the water.

Even if, on the outside, this summer was like all previous summers — we went to Sørbøvåg, we went to Grandma and Grandad’s cabin, and for the rest of the time I hung around the estate and headed off with anyone who was around, if I wasn’t on my own reading — on the inside, it was quite different, for what awaited me, when it was over, was not only a new school year like all the other new school years, no, at the end-of-term party in June the head teacher had given a speech, and he had done this because we were leaving Sandnes Barneskole, our time there was past, after the summer vacation we would be starting the seventh year at Roligheden Ungdoms skole. We were no longer children, but youths.

I worked in a market garden all July, standing in the fields from dawn under the burning hot sun picking or packing strawberries, thinning carrots, sitting on a knoll eating my packed lunch as fast as I could in the middle of the day so that I could cycle to Lake Gjerstad and have a swim before work resumed. Everything I earned I would use for pocket money during the Norway Cup. For the week the tournament lasted Mom and Dad went walking in the mountains. There was a heat wave that summer, we played one of the matches on shale, it was so hot I collapsed and was taken to a kind of field hospital on the plain, where I came round that night; someone was playing Roxy Music’s More Than This in the distance, I looked up at the tent ceiling and was as happy as I had ever been for some reason I did not comprehend but acknowledged.

Could it have been because I’d hung around with Kjell during those days, sung Police songs on the Metro so loud the walls reverberated, hit on girls, and bought lots of band badges from a street-seller, including ones of The Specials and The Clash, as well as a pair of black sunglasses I wore every waking hour?

Yes, it certainly could. Kjell was one year older and the most popular boy with the girls in the school. His mother was Brazilian, but he was not only brown-eyed, black-haired, and attractive, he was also tough and someone everyone respected. So it was an enormous boost that he didn’t seem to mind me, it elevated me at once to somewhere higher than Tybakken and the kids there. They didn’t want to have anything to do with me, but Kjell did, so what did it matter? I also went to Oslo with Lars, which was more than I could actually have hoped for.

This was possibly why I was so incredibly happy where I was. But it may have been the song by Roxy Music, More Than This. The song was so captivating and so beautiful, and around me in that pale, bluish summer night lay a whole capital, not only crowded with people, of whom I knew nothing, but also record shops with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of good bands on their shelves. Concert venues where the bands I had only read about actually played. The traffic hummed in the distance, everywhere there was the sound of voices and laughter, and Bryan Ferry singing More than this — there is nothing. More than this — there is nothing.

Late one evening in mid-August, we all went to the island of Torungen, south of Hisøy, to go crabbing. Dad had bought a powerful underwater flashlight and he had brought along a rake, as well as a diving mask, flippers, and an empty white tub. A whole colony of gulls took off when we went ashore, flew above our heads screaming, some diving so close they almost brushed us, it was intense and frightening, but it eased as we moved to the far side of the island and the night-black sea lay still before us. Mom lit a fire, Dad undressed, put on the flippers, and glided into the water with a flashlight in his hand, slipped on the mask, and swam under the surface. The water cascaded off the snorkel as he reemerged.

“None there,” he said. “Let’s try a bit further up.”

Yngve and I walked slowly along the smooth rocks. The gulls were still screaming behind us. Mom was preparing food for us.

There he was, coming up again, this time with a big crab with splayed claws in one hand.

“Bring the tub!” he said, Yngve went down to the water’s edge, Dad put the crab in, and swam off again.

I was a bit embarrassed, that wasn’t how you should catch crabs, you did it with a rake on land and a flashlight. On the other hand, there was no one else on the island but us.

Afterward, with the tub brim-full of crawling crustaceans, Dad sat down and warmed himself by the fire while we grilled sausages and drank pop. On the way down to the boat, after he had extinguished the fire with a bucket of sea water, and a hiss, I discovered a dead gull lying in a hollow in the rock face. I felt it. It was warm. A quiver went through its leg and I was startled. Wasn’t it dead? I leaned forward and poked a finger in its white breast. No reaction. I stood up. Its lying there was spooky. Not so much because it was dead but because its colors and lines seemed almost obscenely precise to me. The orange beak, the black and yellow eyes, the large wings. And its feet, scaly and reptilian.

“What have you found?” Dad said from behind me.

I turned and he shone the flashlight on my face. I raised a hand in defense.

“A dead seagull,” I said.

He lowered the flashlight.

“Let me see,” he said. “Where is it?”

“There,” I said, pointing.

The next instant it was the focus of the light, as if it were on an operating table. Its eyes flashed in the reflection.

“There may be some chicks in distress somewhere,” Dad said.