Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Time for another bottle. I didn’t want to use my teeth again, something told me that sooner or later I would come up short, sooner or later the molar would give way and break. And now that I had shown that I could open bottles with my teeth, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so homo to let Jan Vidar open it for me.

I went over to him, nabbed a few chips from the bowl on the table.

“Can you open this for me?”

He nodded, without taking his eyes off the film.

Over the last year he had been doing some kickboxing. I kept forgetting, was just as surprised every time he invited me to a session or some such thing. Of course I always refused. But this was Bruce Lee, the fighting was the whole point, and he had one foot in the door.

With a beer bottle in my hand I went back to my place by the wall. No one said anything. Øyvind looked at me.

“Take the weight off your feet, Karl Ove,” he said.

“I’m fine standing,” I said.

“Well, skål , anyway!” he said, raising his bottle to mine. I took two paces over to him, and we clinked.

“Down in one, John!” he said. His Adam’s apple pumped up and down like a piston as he drained the bottle.

Øyvind was big for his age, and unusually powerful. He had the body of a grown man. He was also good-natured, and didn’t take much notice of what was going on around him, or at least he was always relaxed about it. As if he were immune to the world. He played drums with us, yes, why not, might as well. He went out with Lene, yes, why not, might as well. He didn’t talk much to her, dragged her around to see his friends mostly, but that was fine, she wanted to be with him more than anyone else. I had checked her out once, a couple of months ago, just to see how the land lay, but even though I was two years older than them she was not in the slightest bit interested. Oh, how stupid that was. Surrounded by girls at the gymnas and I tried it on with her. Girl from the seventh class. But her breasts looked great under her T-shirt. I still wanted to take it off. I still wanted to feel her breasts in my hands, whatever her age. And there was nothing about her body or manner that indicated she was only fourteen.

I put the bottle to my lips and downed the rest. I really wouldn’t be able to keep this up, I thought as I placed it on the table and opened another with my teeth. My stomach was exploding with all the carbon dioxide. Any more and froth would be oozing out of my ears. Fortunately, it was nearly eleven now. At half past eleven we would leave and then be at the other party for the rest of the night. If not for that, I would have gone long ago.

A boy called Jens suddenly half-rose from the sofa, grabbed the lighter from the table and held it to his ass.

“Now!” he said.

He farted as he flicked the lighter, and a ball of flame flared out behind him. He laughed. The others laughed too.

“Stop that!” Lene said.

Jan Vidar smiled, and was careful not to meet my gaze. Bottle in hand, I wandered over to the far door in the room. Behind it there was a small kitchen. I leaned over the counter. The house was on a slope, and the window, well above ground level, faced the back of the garden. Two pine trees were swaying in the wind. There were more houses farther down. Through the window of one I saw three men and a woman standing, glass in hand, talking. The men wore black suits, the woman a black dress with bare arms. I went to the other door and opened it. A shower. On the wall was a wetsuit. Well, that’s something at least, I thought, closed the door and went back to the living room. The others were sitting, as before.

“Can you feel anything?” Jan Vidar asked.

I shook my head.

“No. Not a thing. You?”

He smiled.

“A bit.”

“We’ll have to be off soon,” I said.

“Where are you going?” Øyvind asked.

“Up to the intersection. Where everyone’s going at twelve.”

“But it’s only eleven! And we’re going there too. We can go together, for Christ’s sake.”

He looked at me.

“Why do you want to go there now?”

I shrugged.

“I’ve arranged to meet someone there.”

“She’ll wait for you, don’t worry,” Jan Vidar said.

It was half past eleven when we made a move to go. The quiet residential area where, apart from a few people on the odd veranda or drive, there had not been a soul half an hour earlier was now full of life and activity. Smartly dressed partygoers streamed out of the houses. Women with shawls over their shoulders, glasses in their hands and high-heeled evening shoes on their feet, men with coats over their suits, patent leather shoes, holding bags of fireworks, excited children running among them, many with fizzing sparklers, filled the air with shouts and laughter. Jan Vidar and I were carrying our white plastic bags of beer and walking alongside the pimply schoolkids dressed in everyday clothes with whom we had spent the evening. In actual fact, we were not alongside them. I kept a few steps ahead in case we should meet anyone I knew from school. Pretended to look with interest this way and that so it would be impossible for anyone who saw us to imagine we were together. Which of course we were not. I looked good, white shirt, sleeves rolled up the way Yngve had told me they should be that autumn. Over the suit jacket and my black suitlike trousers I was wearing a grey coat, on my feet Doc Martens, and leather straps around my wrists. My hair was long at the back and short, almost spiky, on top. The only thing that didn’t belong was the bag of beer. Of that, however, I was painfully aware. It was what also linked me with the shabby crowd lurching along behind me, because they had plastic bags as well, each and every one of them.

At the intersection, which was on higher ground, and had been an assembly point because you could see the whole bay from there, there was total chaos. People stood shoulder to shoulder, most were drunk, and everyone was letting off fireworks. There were bangs and crackles on all sides, the smell of gunpowder tore at your nostrils, smoke drifted through the air and one after another multicolored rockets exploded beneath the cloudy sky. It shook with flashes of light looking as if it could rupture and burst at any moment.

We stood on the perimeter of the noise. Øyvind, who had brought along fireworks, took out a huge, dynamite-shaped stick and placed it in front of his feet. He seemed to be swaying to and fro as he did so. Jan Vidar was jabbering away, as he did when he was drunk, with a permanent smile on his lips. At the moment he was talking to Rune. They had found a common theme in kickboxing. His glasses were still misted up, but he could no longer be bothered to remove or wipe them. I was standing a few steps away and allowed my gaze to wander through the crowd. When the stick exploded for the first time and a red light was eructated right next to me I jumped out of my skin. Øyvind burst out laughing.

“Not bad!” he shouted. “Shall we try it again?” he said, putting down another firework and lighting it, without waiting for an answer. It immediately began to spew forth balls of light, and this, the steady succession of the explosions, excited him so much that he rummaged around in feverish haste for a third even before this one had died.

He couldn’t contain his laughter.

Beside us, a man in a light-blue jacket, white shirt and red leather tie tumbled headlong into a snowdrift. A woman ran over to him in her high heels and pulled at his arm, not hard enough to lift him but enough to motivate him to stand up under his own steam. He brushed himself down while staring straight ahead as though he had not just been lying in the snow but had merely stopped to get a better overall view of the situation. Two boys were standing on the bus shelter roof, each holding a rocket at an angle; they lit them, and with their faces averted, gripped them in their hands as they hissed and fizzed until the rockets took off, flew a couple of meters and exploded with such intensity and power that all the bystanders looked round.