Dancing in the Dark

~ ~ ~

When I woke up the next morning she was on my mind. Jon Olav, who had slept at our place, went home to Dale in the morning. He was the only connection I had with her, and before he left I made him promise to send me her address when he got home even though something told me he would only do so with a heavy heart, after all she was going out with someone he knew.

It felt completely meaningless going back to Håfjord, but on the other hand there were only three more months until it finished for ever and I could spend the whole of the rest of my life in familiar surroundings, if that was what I wanted.

The letter from Jon Olav lay in my post box a few days after I returned. She lived in Kaupanger, he wrote, and was in the third class at gymnas in Sogndal.

Kaupanger, I thought, that must be a fantastic place.

I spent more than a week on the letter to her. She knew nothing about me, had no idea what my name was and had no doubt forgotten me the moment she left the disco that night. So I didn’t immediately reveal my identity, I touched on car driving a couple of times so that she could, if she remembered, work out who I was. I didn’t give an address; if she wanted to answer the letter she would have to make an effort to get hold of it, and in that way, I thought, I would have a deeper impact on her consciousness.

That same week I prepared my application for the writing course at the akademi in Bergen. They wanted twenty pages of prose or poetry and I enclosed the first twenty pages of my novel in the envelope, wrote a short letter of introduction and sent it off.

Now the mornings were light when I woke and went downstairs for a shower and breakfast, outside the house gulls were screaming, and if we opened the kitchen window we could also hear the waves lapping and gurgling over the pebbles beneath. At school the younger children were running around in sweaters and trainers in the breaks, the older ones sat on the ground leaning back against the wall with their faces to the sun. Everything that had happened in the darkness, when life had closed itself around me and even the tiniest details had become charged with tension and destiny, seemed incredible now, for out in the open, beneath this slow deluge of light, I saw it as it was.

How was it?

It was nothing special. It was how it was.

Oh I still cast glances at Liv when I had the opportunity and could do so unobserved, and in English classes a shiver could still go through me when I saw Camilla’s shapely body sitting there, but the mounds and curves, all the softness and grace they possessed, no longer had a disorientating effect, I was no longer fascinated. I saw, and I liked what I saw, but it was not part of me. With Andrea it was different, she was special, but if I was happy when she looked up at me from the corner of her eyes in the way she did, I didn’t let it show, no one could see what I felt, not even her.

What was it I felt?

Well, it was nothing. A tenderness, that was all, something light and sparkling that whistled past and was gone, it had no right to exist.

One day a letter from Kaupanger arrived.

I couldn’t read it standing in the post office or sitting at home or lying in bed, the conditions had to be perfect, so I put it aside, ate with Nils Erik, had a smoke, drank a cup of coffee, then I took the letter with me to the beach, sat on a rock and opened it.

A strong smell of salt and decay rose from around me. The air was still and warmed by the sun, but every so often a gust swept in from the fjord taking everything with it, which then had to be painstakingly built up again. The mountaintops on the other side of the fjord were still white, but if I turned and looked towards the village there was a faint green glimmer on the ground, and although all the low trees and bushes were still leafless they didn’t appear to be dead, as in winter, they stood as though they could sense life was on its way back.

I opened the letter and began to read.

She wrote nothing about herself. Nonetheless she began to take shape within me, I could sense who she was, this is different, I thought. This is quite, quite different.

When I folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope it was as though I was a new person. I walked slowly back to the house. She had an aura around her, and every sentence, no matter how tentative and probing, was testimony to that.

I considered getting on a bus the next morning, catching the boat to Tromsø, flying to Bergen, taking the boat to Sogndal and then simply standing in front of her and declaring that the two of us belonged together.

I couldn’t of course, that would have ruined everything, but that was what I wanted to do.

Instead I sat down and wrote another letter. Any hint of emotion or openness was stifled at birth, this was going to be an eloquent calculating letter that would press all the buttons I had at my disposal, make her laugh, make her reflect, arouse a desire in her to want to know me.

Writing was, after all, something I could do.

On 17 May I sat reading at home the whole day. There was an expectation that teachers would take part in the Constitution Day procession and the subsequent activities, but it was not compulsory, so when the meagre procession passed by on the road outside I was sitting on the sofa and watched it through the window, heard the pathetic flutes and the scattered cheers, lay back and continued reading The Lord of the Rings, which I had read only two years before but had already completely forgotten. I couldn’t get enough of the battle between light and darkness, good and evil, and when the little man not only resisted the superior powers but also showed himself to be the greatest hero of them all, there were tears in my eyes. Oh, how good it was. I had a shower, donned a white shirt and black trousers, put a bottle of vodka into a bag and walked up to Henning’s, where there was a whole gang of people drinking. There was a party on Fugleøya, we drove there a few hours later, one minute I was standing in the car park chatting, the next I was on the dance floor rubbing up against someone or other, or up on an embankment scrapping with Hugo, trying to prove that I wasn’t the weakling everyone took me for. He laughed and threw me to the ground, I jumped up and he threw me to the ground again. He was much smaller than me, so it was humiliating, I ran after him and said he wouldn’t be able to do it again, but he’d had enough and came over, wrapped his arms around me and threw me to the ground with such force that he knocked the air out of my lungs. And that was how they left me, gasping for air like a fish. I took the nearly empty vodka bottle with me and sat on a little mound beside the car park. The light hovered above the countryside. There was something sickly about it, it seemed to me, and I don’t remember anything until I was trying to prise open a door surrounded by young fishermen, I must have told them I had some experience in such matters, presumably I had given the impression that a locked door was no problem for me, I could do a bit of everything, had done a bit of everything, but now, trying all the keys I had found in the drawer downstairs, and then a screwdriver and various other tools, it began to dawn on them that we were not going to get into the locked bedsit in the house Nils Erik and I were renting, and one after the other they trooped back down to the sitting room, which was already bathed in sunlight.

When I woke up I couldn’t remember a thing at first. I didn’t know where I was or what time of day it was. Fear pumped through me.

The light outside told me nothing, it could equally well have been morning as night.

But nothing had happened, had it?

Oh yes, it had. I had run after Hugo and had been thrown to the ground time after time.

I had tried to kiss Vibeke when we were dancing and she had averted her face.

And the girl standing by the entrance, the one with the cheeky expression, I had stopped and exchanged a few words with her, and then I had kissed her.

How old would she have been?

She had told me. She was in the seventh year.

Oh God, was that possible?

Please be kind to me.

Oh no, oh no.

I was a teacher, for goodness’ sake. What if this got out? Teacher kisses thirteen-year-old at party?

God almighty.

I covered my face with my hands. Heard music downstairs, scrambled out of bed, couldn’t stay there being tortured by the awfulness of my deeds. No, I had to be active, move on, talk to someone who would say it didn’t matter, that kind of thing happened.

But it didn’t.

It happened only to me.

Why did I have to kiss her? It had just been a spontaneous action, something I did on bloody impulse, it meant nothing.

Who would believe that?

As I left my bedroom I had to support myself on the wall, I was still drunk. Downstairs, Nils Erik was at the stove frying fish tongues. He turned when I entered the room. He was wearing a checked shirt and a pair of those green hiking pants with loads of pockets.

‘So you’re honouring me with your presence?’ he said with a smile.

‘I’m still drunk,’ I said.

‘I can believe that,’ he said.

I sat down at the kitchen table, rested my head on my hand.

‘Richard was not best pleased today,’ he said. He slipped the spatula under the fried tongues and transferred them to a plate, filled the pan with more tongues coated in white flour. They hissed.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I said you were ill.’

‘Which was true.’

‘Yes, but he was angry. He was.’

‘I don’t give a shit about him. There’s only a month left now. What’s he going to do? Give me the boot? Besides, I haven’t been ill once all damn year. So it’s no big deal.’

‘Would you like some cod tongues?’

I shook my head and got up.

‘Think I’ll have a bath.’

But it was unbearable lying in hot water staring at the ceiling, it didn’t fill me with peace, on the contrary, it gave all my painful thoughts ample room to spread, so I got out after a few minutes, dried myself, put on my tracksuit, which was the only clean clothing I could find, and lay down on the sofa with Felix Krull instead.

For a few minutes at a time I succeeded in engrossing myself totally in the book. Then the dreadful thoughts returned like an electric shock and everything became distorted. Again I had to force myself back into the confidence trickster’s world, where I could stay for several minutes until another shock reopened the sores.

Nils Erik came in and put on a record. It was half past five. He stood for a moment gazing across the fjord, then he sat down with a newspaper. His presence helped, what I had done didn’t seem so terrible when there was a friendly person in the room.

I read aloud a passage describing Krull’s view of the Jews.

‘He wasn’t so high-minded, this Thomas Mann,’ I said. ‘That’s pure anti-Semitism!’

Nils Erik looked at me.

‘You don’t think it’s ironic then?’

‘Ironic? No, do you?’

‘He’s famous for being ironic.’

‘So he doesn’t really mean it. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, because I hated it when Nils Erik thought he knew better than me. Which he often did.

The image of the seventh year with her tousled hair and cheeky expression was clear in my mind’s eye again. And my lips closing on hers.

Why had I done it? Oh why, oh why!

‘What’s up?’ Nils Erik said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You went like this,’ he said, and raised his head, narrowed his eyes and pinched his lips together hard.

‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about something.’

But nothing happened. I went to school the next day and no one there said anything about what had happened, everyone behaved as they normally did, even my pupils, who I thought might have heard about it, some of them probably knew her.

But no.

Could it simply pass, just like that?

The only place it existed was in me. And if I let it stay where it was, there was no problem, it would slowly lose its power and in the end vanish, as sooner or later all the other shameful things I had done had vanished.

Towards the end of May a letter from the akademi arrived in my post box, I tore open the envelope and read it standing outside the post office. I had been accepted. I lit a cigarette and started to walk back towards the school, I would ring mum and tell her, she would be pleased. And then I would ring Yngve because it meant I would be moving to Bergen that autumn. In a strange way I had expected to be accepted because although I knew what I had written might not have been that good and consequently they ought to have rejected me, it was me, however, who had done the writing and that, I felt, they would not be able to ignore.

May passed, June began and it was as though everything was dissolving into light. The sun no longer set, it wandered across the sky all day and night, and I had never seen anything like the light it cast over the wild terrain then. The light was reddish and full, it was as if it belonged to the ground and the mountains, it was them that were shining, as if after a catastrophe. On a couple of nights Nils Erik and I drove along the deserted coastal roads, and we seemed to be on a different planet, so alien was everything. Through sleeping villages, everywhere the reddish gleam and the strange shadows. The people were transformed too, out at night, couples walking, cars driving past, whole flocks of young people rowing out to the islands for picnics.

I received another letter from Ingvild. She said she had rolled up her trousers to her knees and was sitting with her feet in Sogne fjord while she was writing. I loved Sogne fjord, the feeling the surface gave of the enormous depth, the immense chains of mountains with the snowy peaks towering above it. All clear and still, green and cool. Ingvild, who was moving in these surroundings and who affected me in so many ways, wrote more about herself this time. But it wasn’t much. The tone approached self-irony, she was in defensive mode. Against what? She wrote that she had been an exchange student in the US for a year, that was why she was still in the third class. So we were the same age, I reflected. She was going back there in the summer for a holiday with her host family, they were going to cross the country in a camper van. She would write more from the States. In the autumn she would be going to Bergen to study.

The last day of school came. I wrote HAVE A GOOD SUMMER! on the board, handed out the grade books to my pupils, wished them luck for the rest of their lives, ate cake with the teachers in the staffroom, shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for the past year. As I walked downhill on my way home I was, as I had expected, neither happy nor relieved because I had been waiting for this day for more than six months, just empty inside.

In the afternoon Tor Einar dropped round. He had brought with him some gull eggs and a crate of Mack beer.

‘It’s a scandal you haven’t eaten seagull eggs before,’ he said. ‘There are two dishes which are the essence of Northern Norway. Mølje and seagull eggs. You can’t leave before you have tried them.’

Nils Erik had a temperature and was on the sofa, there was no question of him having beer or eggs, so it was left to Tor Einar and me to do them justice.

‘Shall we go down to the beach?’ Tor Einar said, eyeing me with that knowing grin of his. ‘It’s such fantastic weather.’

‘Can do,’ I said.

I had never quite found the right tone with Tor Einar. We were the same age and had a good deal in common, much more than I and Nils Erik had, but it didn’t help, it was irrelevant. I always assumed a role when I was with Tor Einar, which wasn’t the case with Nils Erik, and I didn’t like myself when I did, when there was a distance between the person I was and what I said, a kind of delay that allowed space for calculations, as if I wanted to say what he preferred to hear rather than what I had to say or talk about.

On the other hand, that is how I was with almost everyone, in fact it had even become like that with Jan Vidar, who was the closest friend I’d had for the last five years.

It wasn’t a problem, just rather unpleasant, and the only consequence was that by and large I tried to avoid being on my own with Tor Einar for any period of time.

Now this was not possible. Luckily, though, we had beer with us as we trudged down to the beach, it would only take a couple of bottles before such problems disappeared like blackboard chalk beneath a wet sponge.

Under the deep blue sky, beside the water, with the sun playing on it, we both sat down on a rock. Tor Einar opened a beer and passed it to me, opened one for himself, winked and said skål.

‘Now we’re laughing, eh!’ he said. ‘Last day of school, the sun’s shining and we’ve got enough beer for a long night.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Some fishing boats were chugging shoreward, bobbing up and down on the waves in the middle of the fjord, with a trail of gulls behind them.

What a scene.

‘Let’s sum up then, shall we?’ said Tor Einar.

‘Regarding the school year?’ I said, producing a pouch of tobacco.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Has it fulfilled our expectations?’

‘I didn’t have any, I don’t think,’ I said. ‘I just came up here and hoped for the best. But you? Are you happy with the year?’

He hesitated.

‘Every year without a girlfriend is a bad year,’ he said, squinting into the sunlight. Then he turned to me.

‘You had a couple of adventures anyway. Ine and Irene? And that temp on Fugleøya, what was her name? Anne?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it didn’t work out. Actually nothing worked out.’

‘Didn’t you have them?’

‘No.’

‘Not one of them?’

‘No.’

He stared at me in disbelief. ‘And there was me going round thinking at least one of us had struck lucky this year. Then you tell me you didn’t either.’

I looked at him and smiled, clinked my bottle against his, drank the last drop, opened another.

‘Who did you have your eye on?’ I said.

‘Tone,’ he said.

That was the girl who had rejected my approach while she was brushing her teeth.

‘Yes, she’s nice, she is,’ I said. ‘I had a go at her as well, but she wasn’t at all interested.’

‘No, it’s not easy,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a chance. We’re going inter-railing together. Well, not just us two, there are four others as well, but, Jesus, a month travelling together through Europe, surely there’s got to be a chance.’

‘You’re inter-railing?’

He nodded.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s not inter-railing. I’m going to hitch down through Europe with a friend after the Roskilde Festival.’

‘Then I’ll do my best to avoid you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to warm her up and prime her just so that you can take over.’

‘You must have a very high opinion of my qualities as a seducer,’ I said. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s that.’

‘My strategy is to be present,’ he said. ‘That’s the only chance I have. Amble along behind her like a dog, always be there, and then hope she’ll cuddle me sooner or later.’

I shuddered. ‘That’s a terrifying image.’

‘Yes, it is, but it’s true.’

‘That’s why it’s so terrifying. There’s a bit of the doggie about me as well.’

He stuck out his tongue and panted heavily a few times.

‘Anyone else you’ve been trotting along behind this year?’ I said.

‘Liv,’ he said, staring straight at me.

‘Liv?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All the girls of our age have left the village. But she’s unbelievably pretty. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ I said with a smile. ‘Have you seen her body? Her bum?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘She’s fantastic. Camilla is not bad either.’

‘No, that’s true,’ I said. ‘But at least Liv’s sixteen. Camilla’s only fifteen.’

‘Who gives that a second thought?’ he said.

‘You’re right there.’

We opened another beer. He smiled, his face was bathed in sunlight.

‘Her breasts,’ he said. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Naturally,’ I said. ‘I’ve hardly looked at anything else in the lessons with them.’

‘She is pretty. But she can’t beat Liv.’

‘No,’ I said.

I turned and gazed into the distance. A car was coming up the hill from the fish hall, further along the road a child was holding a stick and hitting the poles used to demarcate the edge of the road in deep snow. A seagull was sitting on the ridge of our roof and surveying the scene.

‘And then there’s Andrea,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘She’s a real stunner too. Have you seen her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Actually, I’ve thought a lot about her,’ I said.

‘I can imagine,’ he said.

‘What else could we do?’ I said. ‘They were the only ones around!’

We laughed and said skål.

‘She’s got such incredible eyes,’ I said. ‘And what long legs she has.’

‘Yes. What about Vivian then?’

‘Nothing compared to her sister.’

‘No, that’s true. But she has something. A charm of her own.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think would happen if anyone heard this conversation?’ I said.

He shrugged.

‘We’d never get a teaching job again. That’s for sure.’

He laughed and raised his bottle to me.

‘A skål for schoolgirls!’ he said.

‘Skål!’ I said.

‘What about their mothers then?’ he said.

‘I’ve never thought about them.’

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Have you?’

‘Oh yes, of course I have.’

‘I think I might have been a little in love with Andrea,’ I said.

‘I had a soft spot for her too,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t in love. Liv, on the other hand. She brightened my days.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s good it’s all over.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

The next day I packed my things, taped up the cardboard boxes again and carried them to Nils Erik’s car. He was going to drive me down to the express boat quay in Finnsnes, where I would have them sent to Bergen. Apart from the new stereo, some records and quite a few books, my belongings were identical to those that had come up the year before.

Once that was done I fried some sausages and potatoes, which I ate with Nils Erik in the kitchen. This was my last meal in the village. Nils Erik would be staying on for a few more weeks, he was planning to spend the time walking, and except for my bedroom, which I lightly dusted, he would see to cleaning the house.

‘I’ll keep the deposit on the bottles as my reward,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’ll tot up.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Shall we go then?’

He nodded, and we got into the car. We slowly drew away, said our goodbyes to east and west, and for every metre we covered part of the village disappeared for good for me, I didn’t look back and I would never, under any circumstances, set foot here again.

The chapel disappeared, the post office disappeared, Andrea and Roald’s house disappeared, Hege and Vidar’s house disappeared, and then the shop was gone, and my old flat, and Sture’s house. And there went the community centre and the football pitch, and then the school. .

I leaned back in my seat.

‘How absolutely wonderful that it’s over,’ I said as the darkness of the tunnel filled the car. ‘I’ll never do a job again in my life, that’s for sure.’

‘So you are a shipowner’s son after all?’ Nils Erik said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Same shipping, new wrapping,’ he said. ‘Whack a cassette in, will you.’

After a night in a cheap hotel in Tromsø I caught a flight for Bergen the next morning, and at three I jumped off the airport bus in Bryggen and headed for the Hotel Orion, where Yngve worked as a receptionist. I was wearing black cotton trousers, wide at the thighs, a white shirt, a black suit jacket, black shoes and a pair of Wayfarer Ray-Bans. Slung over my shoulder was my seaman’s kitbag. The sun was shining, the water in Vågen glittered, a gentle wind blew in across the fjord.

I saw myself as a kind of primeval inhabitant going to a city for the first time because every time a car revved or a bus or a lorry thundered past I gave a start, and the sight of all these faces moving back and forth on the pavement made me feel insecure. Then I was reminded of something Yngve had once said, that his friend Pål always called them prime evil inhabitants, and once that was in your mind it was impossible to see anything else.

I smiled and gleefully slung the kitbag over my other shoulder.

Yngve was at the reception desk when I entered, wearing the hotel uniform, hunched over a little map on the counter explaining something to an elderly couple in shorts, caps and bumbags. He looked up and motioned with his head to the sofa, where I slumped down.

As soon as the Americans had gone he came over.

‘I’ll have finished in about ten minutes. Then I’ll have to get changed and we’ll be off. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

He had a car now, a little red Japanese number he had leased from the volleyball team he played for, and half an hour later we were heading for his flat in Solheimsviken. It was situated some way up the mountainside, towards the end of a long row of brick-built terraced houses originally designed for shipyard workers.

We sat on the doorstep with cold beers in our hands. From the sitting room ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones wafted over, evidently this summer’s favourite band.

‘Are you going to Roskilde then?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Think so.’

‘I may pop down there too,’ he said. ‘Arvid and Erling are going, but there are lots of others too, so I’ll just have to scrape together some money, then. . the Church are playing, you know?’

‘Are they?’

‘Yes. I wouldn’t like to miss out on the chance to see them.’

Cars were parked nose to tail on both sides of the street. People were constantly going in and out of the neighbouring houses. The town beneath us was buzzing, an endless stream of cars passing through the streets. In the sky there was the occasional flash of a plane, long white plumes of condensed water hovered in the air long after they had gone. The sun burned in the sky to the west. The roofs down the mountainside shimmered in red and orange, and between them stood trees swaying in the breeze.

After a while we went indoors, Yngve made pasta carbonara for dinner, and then we had another couple of beers on the doorstep. Our conversation flagged, it was as though a little distance had grown between us since we last met, but it didn’t matter, it could have been for all sorts of reasons.

In one of the letters he had sent he had, very discreetly, told me to remember to use a condom. I appreciated his concern, but I had smiled when I saw that, because he would never have been able to say it to my face. It was only possible in a letter, and then en passant. Or if he was drunk.

‘Are you still suffering after Kristin?’ I said after we had sat down.

‘It’s one big suffering,’ he said.

‘And you can’t get her back? There’s no hope of that?’

‘Do you think I would be sitting here with you if there were?’

‘Maybe not.’ I smiled.

‘It was my fault. I took her for granted. All of a sudden she didn’t want to go on, and by then it was too late. Shit, that’s the hardest part to deal with, that I could have prevented it. But I took it for granted. I didn’t value it highly enough.’

‘But you do now?’

‘Now I’m in the privileged position of being able to see what I had, yes.’

The sun was no longer shining on the doorstep, and I took off my sunglasses, folded them and put them in the breast pocket of my shirt.

‘You shouldn’t keep them there,’ Yngve said. ‘It doesn’t look good.’

‘You’re right,’ I said, and took them out again.

‘And while I’m at it, that studded belt of yours might have had its day.’

‘Possible,’ I said. ‘But I’ll give it a while yet.’

There was a silence. We smoked, gazed down at the sunless but warm street.

‘May I ask you something?’ I said at length.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘When did you. . first have it?’

He glanced at me. Then gazed down again.

‘When I was eighteen. On the trip to Greece. When I went with Helge, if you remember. On Antiparos beach. At night. In the moonlight.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes, it was late but good. Or, in retrospect, it seems better than it was. Why do you ask?’

I shrugged.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t slept with a girl yet? You’re not a virgin, are you?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘You know I’m not.’

We fell silent again. The air around us was full of noises. All the windows were open, all the shouting, bikes occasionally whizzing past, cars creeping slowly up the mountainside, the wonderful solid sound of car doors shutting.

It wasn’t a lie. Technically speaking, I wasn’t a virgin, I had penetrated that girl at the russ party — not much, a centimetre or two — but for Christ’s sake there had been contact, I had fucked. It wasn’t a lie.

‘I’ll order a taxi,’ Yngve said, getting up. ‘We’ll nip down to Ola’s first. Him you’ve got to meet.’