Dancing in the Dark

~ ~ ~

The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing towards the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighbouring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table.

The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.

An avalanche blocked the road, a ferry service was started, and the fact that you were only able to leave twice a day increased the feeling that this village was the only village, these people the only people. I was still getting lots of letters, and spent a lot of time answering them, but the life they represented was no longer the one that counted, the one that did was this: up in the morning, out into the snow, up the hill to school and into class. Stay there all day, in a low-roofed illuminated bunker, weighed down by the darkness, go home, go shopping, have dinner and then in the evening train in the gym with the youngest fishermen, watch TV at school, swim in the pool or sit at home reading or writing until it was so late that I could go to bed and sleep off the dead hours before the next day started.

At weekends I drank. Someone always came over and asked if I wanted to go to Finnsnes or a village a few hours away, if the road was open. When it was closed it was up to someone’s place or down to someone’s, there were always people sitting around and drinking and they always wanted company. I didn’t say no, I joined in, and a bottle of spirits over the evening was no longer the exception but the rule, so I was invariably wandering around doing things which I had forgotten by the next day. Once I fell out of the band bus, started walking away from the village instead of towards it, no one said anything until I had gone a hundred metres wearing only a shirt and a thin jacket, shivering and trembling, and then I heard their shouts, over here you twat, over here! At another party I danced with a substitute teacher from Husøya, her name was Anne, she came from somewhere in Østland and was pretty in that cold blonde way I was so attracted by, we stood smooching for ages in a corner of the corridor where the coat room was, I rang her a few days later, invited her to dinner at my place with her girlfriend and Tor Einar and Nils Erik, I tried to kiss her then but she lowered her head, she had a boyfriend, she said, she had someone else, what happened at the party should never have happened, I wasn’t her type at all, she had no explanation except that she had been drunk. And perhaps that it had been dark? I said, trying to make a joke out of it, but she didn’t laugh, she wasn’t the sort. Cold and sincere, that was Anne.

At other weekends people came home from schools or universities across Norway, and just the fact that they had different faces was a liberation. I traipsed after one of them like a dog, her name was Tone, she was Frank’s sister and the daughter of the teacher who couldn’t stand me, but I didn’t care about that, I was drunk and had been watching her all evening.

Now she was about to leave, and I decided to follow her.

Snowflakes were whirling through the darkness. She walked fifty metres down the road with her head lowered, beneath the light of the street lamps. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and set off. She went into her parents’ house, banged the snow off her boots, then closed the door behind her.

I stood outside for a few minutes. I thought she would be happy to see me because she had wanted to sleep with me all evening.

The kitchen window was dark, the living-room window too. But light streamed out from the narrow window at the end of the house.

I opened the door and went in. Didn’t bother to remove my shoes, glanced around the living room, it was dark and empty, walked down the hall towards the open door at the end.

She was standing in the bathroom cleaning her teeth in front of the mirror. Her mouth was full of foam.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She must have heard me, yet didn’t appear the slightest bit frightened when she turned towards me.

‘Get out,’ she said.

I sat down on a chair by the wall and stared intensely at her. First at her face, then at her breasts under the green jumper.

She shook her head.

‘You’re wasting your time. You haven’t got a hope with me,’ she said almost incomprehensibly as everyone does when cleaning their teeth and talking at the same time.

‘Do you want me to go?’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Fine,’ I said, got up and went out. The wind formed a wall in front of the door filled with small frozen-hard particles of snow. What a shame, I thought, looking up at the immense darkness above us. She is so classy. Yes, unbelievably classy! After wandering to and fro in the snow-blown road under the light from the street lamps, which with the snow and the darkness as background had a greenish glare and cast an underwater glow over the surroundings, I found my way back to the party, which was no longer a party but a table littered with glasses and bottles, empty cigarette packets and ashtrays in an otherwise empty room. All sense of time in me must have stopped — had I really been away that long? — and then my sense of space went too because the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at home.

Actually doing things, not denying myself anything when I was drunk, in that intoxicating state of total freedom, had in the course of these months gradually begun to take its toll. At gymnas I was either hungover or not, there were no other consequences. If I felt any pangs of conscience at all, they were pinpricks, nothing a hearty breakfast and a walk to town couldn’t cure. Up here in the north, however, it was different. Perhaps the gulf between the person I usually was and the one I became when I drank was too great. Perhaps it was impossible for a man to have such a wide gulf inside himself. For what happened was that the person I usually was began to draw in the person I became when I was drinking, the two halves slowly but surely became sewn together, and the thread that joined them was shame.

Oh hell, did I do that? the cries resounded inside me the next day as I lay in the darkness. Oh no, shit, did I say that? And that? And that?

I lay there, rigid with fear, as though someone were throwing bucket after bucket of my own excrement over me.

Look what an idiot he is. Look what a bloody twat he is.

But I got up, started a new day and I always got through it.

The worst was probably the notion that others saw me, that I put on a show for them on these nights, and that the side of me I displayed then was reflected in the way they looked at me every day.

I pretended I was a young teacher who took the best possible care of their children, whom they watched on his way to and from the post office or the shop, while in reality I was a babbling idiot who sat drooling over all sorts of girls at night, who would cut off both his hands for one of them to take him home, but none wanted to, after all he was a babbling, drooling idiot.

At school too I occasionally felt like that, but not with the pupils, I had the situation fully under control there, nor with Nils Erik and Tor Einar, they of course knew what was what.

Yes, I had the situation under control, yet that didn’t prevent me from feeling the pain and torment there too, opposite my pupils, sitting at my desk in the minutes before the new week started in earnest, with the disgraceful behaviour of the weekend still fresh in my mind.

They had taken off their padded jackets, and were sitting there in their Icelandic sweaters, their skin still red from the cold, squirming restlessly on their chairs, wanting to go home and back to bed while the presence of the others drew them in the opposite direction, for they were exchanging glances, whispering little comments, sniggering, breathing, living.

The light glared from the ceiling, and against the deep darkness that always hovered above us the windows reflected back the other end of the whole classroom. There sat Kai Roald, there sat Vivian, there sat Hildegunn, there sat Live, there sat Andrea. Light blue jeans, white boots, a white jumper with a high neck. And there was I, behind the desk, in a black shirt, black jeans, trembling inside with exhaustion. Even the slightest little transgression seemed monstruous to me, all I wanted and needed was security.

I opened the book at the chapter we were going to read. The room was full of the buzz of voices from other classes. My own pupils were sleepy, not interested.

‘Right, take your books out! There’s a limit to sleepiness!’

Andrea smiled as she bent forward and took the book from her satchel. It was bound in matt brown paper and covered with the names of pop stars and film stars in felt-tip pen. Kai Roald groaned, but when I met his eyes he smiled. Hildegunn already had her book ready of course. Live turned to the window. I looked in the same direction. A figure was on its way up the hill, though more like a ghost, for it was impossible to distinguish a body from the shadowy contours coming towards us, enveloped in swirling snow.

‘Live! Get out your book!’

‘OK, OK. What subject have we got now?’

‘Are you serious? Don’t you know?’

‘No-oo!’

‘Six months you’ve been here for the first lesson on Monday morning. We always have the same subject. And that is. .?’

Her eyes stared at me nervously.

‘You don’t remember?’ I said.

Neither did I. Panic rose in me like water in a blocked toilet.

She shook her head.

‘Does anyone know?’

Everyone looked at me. Did they understand?

No.

There. Kai Roald opened his mouth. ‘Christianity,’ he said.

‘Oh yes, Christianity!’ she said. ‘Of course. I knew that. I just went all blank for a moment.’

‘You’re always all blank,’ Kai Roald said.

She looked daggers at him.

‘And you aren’t?’ I said.

He chuckled. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘I’ve gone blank too for the moment,’ I said. ‘But it’s no good. We have to get through the syllabus. And we can only do that by working hard.’

‘That’s what you always say,’ Vivian said.

‘But it’s true. Do you think I stand here talking about Martin Luther for my sake? I know enough about him. But you don’t know anything. You’re a bunch of ignoramuses. But on the other hand all thirteen-year-olds are, so it’s not your fault. By the way is there anyone who knows what an ignoramus is?’

Complete silence.

‘Has it got something to do with ignorant?’ Andrea said. A faint blush rose up her cheeks as she watched her hand doodling on her book.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To ignore is to fail to notice or to show no interest. An ignorant person is someone who shows no interest in anything. And if you aren’t interested in anything you don’t know anything about it either.’

‘Then I’m ignorant,’ Kai Roald said.

‘No, you’re not. You know lots of things.’

‘Such as what?’

‘You know a lot about cars, don’t you? More than me anyway! And you know a lot about fishing. I know nothing about that.’

‘Why haven’t you got your driving licence, by the way? You’re eighteen after all,’ Vivian said.

I shrugged. ‘I can manage fine without.’

‘But you have to get a lift whenever you want to go anywhere!’ Vivian said.

‘I get around, don’t I?’ I said. ‘But that’s enough now. Let’s get on with our work.’

I stood up.

‘What do you know about Martin Luther?’

‘Nothing,’ Hildegunn said.

‘Nothing?’ I said. ‘Absolutely nothing?’

‘Yes,’ said Live.

‘Was he Norwegian?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Hildegunn.

‘What nationality was he then?’

Hildegunn shrugged. ‘German, wasn’t he?’

‘Is he alive now?’

‘Of course not!’

‘When did he live? When your parents were small? 1960s?’ I said.

‘He lived in the olden days,’ Vivian said.

‘In the 1500s,’ Hildegunn said.

‘What did he do? Was he a plumber? Fisherman? Driver?’

‘No,’ Kai Roald said and giggled.

‘He was a priest,’ Andrea said in the casual way that was intended to show that this was one of many things she knew.

‘You know loads,’ I said. ‘Martin Luther was a priest who lived in Germany in the sixteenth century. Now you find out ten things about Martin Luther and write them down. Then we’ll go through them at the end of the lesson.’

‘How will we find them out?’ Vivian asked.

‘Isn’t it your job to tell us actually?’ Hildegunn said. ‘Isn’t that what you get paid for?’

‘I get paid for teaching you,’ I said. ‘And there won’t always be a teacher in front of you telling you what you need to know. So what do you do? You have to learn where you can find things out. Don’t you? Look them up in a book. Find an encyclopedia. I don’t mind what you do as long as you find out ten things. Off you go!’

With sighs and groans and grimaces they got up and made for the school’s modest library, each armed with a pencil and a notebook. I sat down behind my desk and looked up at the clock on the wall. Half an hour left. Once this was over, there were five lessons left. And Monday was crossed off. Then there were Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday left.

This weekend I would definitely have to write. No trip to Finnsnes during the day, no party in the evening, just sit in front of the computer from the moment I got up to the moment I went to bed.

I had five short stories now, apart from the two stories based on dreams. All of them had the same protagonist, Gabriel, and the same cast of characters. The action took place in Tybakken. What was strange was how close the place was to me. Sitting in front of the typewriter was like opening a door to it. The scene rose inside me in its entirety and repressed everything around me. There was the road outside the house, there was the tall spruce with the stream running past, there was the slope down to Ubekilen, the stone wall, the rocky outcrop, the boathouse, the crooked rickety pontoon, the island with all the seagulls. If anyone rang my doorbell now, and they did all the time, fourth years, seventh years, the tall ninth year who for some reason gravitated towards me, some of the young fishermen, I would jump out of my skin. It didn’t feel as though my childhood surroundings were intruding on the present but vice versa: I was really back in my childhood, and it was the present that was intruding. If I was interrupted, a whole hour or more could pass before Tybakken would be in the ascendancy again.

That was what I longed for. When the trees were trees, not ‘trees’, cars not ‘cars’, when dad was dad, not ‘dad’.

I got up and took a few steps into the open-plan area so that I could see what they were doing. Everyone was sitting around the table in the library, apart from Andrea and Hildegunn, who were heading for their chairs.

‘Did you find anything?’ I said as they walked past.

‘Of course,’ Hildegunn said. ‘We’ve finished. What shall we do now?’

‘Sit down and wait.’

In the classroom beyond, separated from the library by a long stack of bookshelves, sat the third and fourth years bent over their desks, some with their hands in the air, while Torill went round helping them. In the other corner of the room sat the first years, on cushions, around Hege, she was reading from a book, they were staring ahead, their eyes dreamy, their faces sleepy. She caught my gaze, looked up without a pause in her reading and smiled at me. I rolled my eyes, turned to my classroom and met Andrea’s look. She had been sitting watching me. Now she looked down.

‘What did you find out then?’ I said.

‘Do you want to hear now?’ Hildegunn said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really. We’ll wait until the others have finished.’

‘Why did you ask then?’ said Andrea.

‘Reflex action,’ I said.

Across the carpet came Kai Roald and Vivian. After they had sat down I walked over to the library corner, where Live was still busy writing.

‘How’s it going?’ I said.

‘I’ve got five,’ she said. ‘No, six.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘That’ll do. You can write down the last four as we go through them.’

She picked up her bits and bobs with that serious expression she put on when somebody told her to do something. But she was unable to conceal her great inner insecurity, at least not from me. What her peers saw when they looked at her was not easy to say.

We spent the last twenty minutes of the lesson going through their points. I talked and expanded while they watched me with vacant eyes. What good Martin Luther would do them I had no idea. For them it was probably more about being here and writing in their notebooks with their pencils. Sitting on their seats and listening to someone talking about something.

The bell rang. They asked if they could stay indoors in the break, the weather was so bad, I said absolutely not, off you go, waited while they put on their jackets and hats, went into the staffroom, where everyone was busy with their own preoccupations, and sat down with a cup of coffee, which was already bitter after an hour in the machine.

Nils Erik, who was sitting reading the local paper, glanced across at me.

‘Coming up to the pool later today?’ he said.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Drop by my place.’

In front of us Torill opened the fridge door, leaned forward and took out a yoghurt. She removed the lid and licked it before throwing it in the bin under the sink, found a spoon in the drawer and started to eat. She looked at us and smiled with a streak of pink yoghurt on her lower lip.

‘I get so hungry at this time,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ I said. ‘We snack as well.’

Beside me Nils Erik folded the newspaper, got up and went to the toilet. I drank a mouthful of coffee and turned to Jane, who came out of the photocopy room at that moment with a pile of papers in her hand. The corners of her mouth drooped as always, her eyes were bored and introspective, leaving you with no real desire to find out what went on inside her.

‘Did you make the coffee, Jane?’ I said.

She scrutinised me. ‘Yes, I’m on kitchen duty today. Why?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Except that this is the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted.’

She grinned.

‘You’ve been spoilt then,’ she said. ‘But I can put a fresh pot on if you like.’

‘Not at all. I was only joking! It’s good enough for me.’

She went to her desk, and I got up and stood by the window. A lamp post was encircled by light, thick with tiny white snowflakes whirring around like a swarm of insects. Some children were fighting in the snow below, four of them on top of one another in a drift, and my hand twitched when I saw them, so strong was my impulse to knock the top ones off, for I couldn’t imagine anything more claustrophobic than lying underneath them, face down into the snow.

I stepped to the side and scanned the playground.

Where was the teacher?

Oh when would I get it into my head? This was my playground duty!

I hurried towards the line of hooks in the vestibule.

‘Three minutes left of the break,’ Sture said. ‘No point going out now. You can catch up after school.’

He smirked at his own joke. I looked at him without smiling, pulled my hat down over my head, grabbed my gloves. Even though he was right that there was no point going out now, I had an additional reason: the impression of regret and energy I would leave behind me as I jogged out and came into the view of those standing behind the window. The last thing I wanted to give was an impression of slackness. The last thing I wanted was for people to think I was a shirker.

Out of the wet-weather shelter came a small plump figure. I dashed over to the boys who had been wrestling in the snow and were now brushing it off their jeans. The denim material was almost black from where it had melted.

‘Karl Ove!’ he said from behind me, and tugged at my jacket.

He must have run after me.

I turned. ‘What’s up, Jo?’ I said.

He smiled.

‘Can I throw a snowball at you?’

Last week I had given them permission to throw snowballs at me. It had been a big mistake because they thought it was such great fun, especially when they hit my thighs with a couple of stingers, that they refused to stop when I told them. They had reached a kind of amnesty, what had not been allowed was suddenly allowed, and they had a sense of how difficult it would be to punish them if it wasn’t allowed any longer.

‘No, not today,’ I said. ‘Besides, the bell’s about to ring.’

The four boys scowled up at me from under dark woollen hats pulled down over their faces.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Reidar said. ‘Why wouldn’t we be all right?’

‘Less of that cheek now,’ I said. ‘You should show respect for adults.’

‘You’re not an adult,’ he said. ‘You haven’t even got a driving licence!’

‘No, that’s true,’ I said. ‘But at least I know my times tables. That’s more than you know. And I’m big enough to paddle your bottom three times a day if I have to.’

‘My dad would beat you up if you did,’ he said.

‘Karl Ove, come on,’ Jo said, pulling at my jacket again.

‘I’ve got a dad too, you know,’ I said. ‘He’s much stronger and taller than me. On top of that, he’s got a driving licence.’

I looked down at Jo. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘There’s something I want to show you. It’s something I’ve made.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a secret. No one else must know.’

I looked across. The girls in the seventh class were standing by the wall of the wet-weather shelter. Behind, on the fringes of the football pitch, a group of children were chasing after each other in the dark.

‘The bell’s about to ring, you know,’ I told him.

He took my hand. Didn’t he understand how this looked to his classmates?

‘It’ll be quick,’ he said.

He’d hardly uttered the words before the bell rang.

‘Next break then,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me?’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Off you go now.’

The children on the football pitch had either not heard the bell or they were ignoring it. I walked over to the pitch. Cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted that the bell had rung. They stopped and looked at me. The snow covering the pitch drew it into the surrounding terrain, it was a flat surface in the middle of a slope which, further up, became a mountain, and in all this whiteness, which the sky’s all-pervasive darkness muted to a blue, the pupils resembled tiny animals, rodents of some kind perhaps, it seemed to me, romping around outside the entrances to their ingenious networks of galleries and tunnels in the snow.

I waved to them. They set off at a lope towards me.

‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’ I said.

They shook their heads.

‘Didn’t you think it was time for the bell to ring?’

They shook their heads again.

‘Hurry up now,’ I said. ‘You’re very late.’

They ran past me. As I rounded the corner of the wet-weather shelter the door slammed after the last straggler. I kicked the snow off my shoes against the wall and followed. Opened the door to the staffroom, hung my coat and hat on the hook and went for my books for the lesson. Behind me the toilet door opened. I turned. It was Nils Erik.

‘Have you been in there all this time?’ I said.

‘What kind of question is that?’ he said.

‘I was just surprised,’ I said, scanning the book spines. ‘You were in there a long time. I wasn’t making any insinuations.’

I looked at him and smiled. Picked out a natural science booklet.

‘That’s good to hear,’ he said. ‘Insinuations are such crap. No, it was Torill. She’s so sexy it’s unbelievable. And when she bent forward. . I just had to go in and relieve the emergency that had arisen.’

‘Emergency?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He laughed. ‘You know. Man sees woman. Man is attracted. Man runs to the loo and tosses himself off.’

‘Oh, that emergency,’ I said, smiled and went to the class.

In the next break Jo ran over to me the second I stepped into the playground.

‘Come with me now!’ he said, taking my hand and dragging me off.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘What are you going to show me?’

‘Something I’ve made with Endre,’ he said.

‘Where’s Endre?’

‘I think he’s over there.’

Endre was in the third class, Jo was in the fourth. When they were together they usually kept away from the others.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a large snowdrift behind the building, out of sight of the rest of the school. ‘We’ve made a snow cave. It’s really big. Do you want to have a look inside?’

Endre saw us coming, crawled in the entrance and disappeared from sight.

‘That’s fantastic,’ I said, and stopped. ‘I think it’s probably too small for me. But you go in.’

He smiled up at me. Then he lay down on his stomach and wriggled in. I took a few steps back and looked across at the other children. Two fourth-year boys came round the corner and headed towards us. Jo stuck his head out of the cave.

‘There’s room for you too, Karl Ove. It’s really big.’

‘I have to keep an eye on everyone, you know,’ I said.

He spotted the two boys.

‘This is our snow cave,’ he said, looking at me. ‘We made it.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said.

‘Have you made a cave?’ Reidar shouted.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said. ‘You can’t come in.’

They stopped by the entrance.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Stig said, and tried to crawl past Jo.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said, looking at me again. ‘Isn’t it, Karl Ove?’

‘You made it,’ I said. ‘But you can’t refuse to let others in. You’d have to stand guard day and night if you did.’

‘But it’s ours!’ he said.

‘It’s on school premises,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop anyone going in.’

Reidar smiled and pushed past Jo. Soon the cave was full of kids. They immediately started planning how they could make it bigger and began to dig a tunnel from the end. Jo tried to take charge, but they ignored him, he had to find his place, which was and would always be at the bottom of the pecking order. I turned and went. I did have a bit of a bad conscience, Jo was as unhappy now as he had been happy a few minutes before, but there was nothing I could do about it, he would have to work out the social game for himself. He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.

‘Are you hanging around here again?’ I said to the gumchewing seventh-year girls standing inside the wet-weather shelter.

‘It’s snowing and it’s windy,’ Vivian said. ‘Surely you don’t think it’s right we should have to stand outside in this weather, do you?’

‘You don’t have to stand, do you?’ I said. ‘You could run like the other kids.’

‘We’re not kids,’ Andrea said. ‘And it’s not fair. The eighth and ninth years can be indoors.’

‘Only kids say something is unfair,’ I said. ‘Besides, the eighth and ninth years have a double slot, so they’re in class now.’

‘That’s what we want. Working indoors is better than being out in this weather,’ Andrea said and looked up at me. Her cheeks had reddened with the cold. Her eyes were narrow and beautiful.

I laughed.

‘So all of a sudden you want to work, do you? That’s a new tune,’ I said.

‘You just laugh at us,’ Vivian said. ‘You don’t have any respect for us.’

‘I treat you how you deserve to be treated,’ I said, eyeing the clock on the wall between the entrance to the main school building and the large wing where the swimming pool and gymnasium were. Four minutes left of the break.

I went to the other side to see how the fourth years were doing. No sooner had I rounded the corner than I saw Jo and Endre trudging along, heads bowed into the wind, feet stamping on the snow.

‘How’s the cave?’ I said.

‘It’s ruined!’ Jo said. ‘Reidar put his head through the roof. The whole blooming cave collapsed.’

His eyes were moist.

‘Don’t swear,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It can happen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.’

‘But it was our cave! We built it! And now it’s ruined.’

‘Build one with them next time,’ I said. ‘Then they won’t ruin it.’

‘We don’t want to,’ he said. ‘Come on, Endre.’

They walked past me.

‘I can help you make a new one, if you want,’ I said. ‘In the next break.’

‘Can you?’

‘We can make a start at any rate. But the others might join in.’

‘Yes, but then you’re there,’ he said. ‘They won’t dare smash it up.’

It had been a stupid offer to make, I thought as I went back into the staffroom a few minutes later. Now I would have to dig in the snow with the tenth years for the rest of the breaks. On the other hand, Jo’s face had lit up, I remembered, and I closed the toilet door behind me, unzipped and began to pee. I aimed the jet at the porcelain so that the teachers who were still in the toilet wouldn’t hear the splashing sound. While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries their hands on the towel and examines their soul in the mirror.

I was in the sitting room eating when Nils Erik rang at the door. Snow from the drift beside the porch swirled in the air around him. The gusting wind hung like an invisible cupola above the village.

‘I’m eating,’ I said. ‘But I’ll soon have finished. Come in.’

‘But you won’t want to go swimming after eating,’ he said.

‘I’m eating fish,’ I said. ‘They’re used to swimming.’

‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Do you want some? Fish roe and potatoes?’

He shook his head, untied his boots and came into the sitting room.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

I shrugged, swallowed and took a long drink of water.

‘How’s what going?’ I said.

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Writing, for example.’

‘It’s going fine.’

‘Teaching?’

‘Fine.’

‘Sex life?’

‘Erm. . what shall I say? Not very well. What about you?’

‘Well, you saw yourself today,’ he said. ‘That’s about all there is.’

‘Right,’ I said, scraping up the last roe, butter and some crumbly potato with the knife, offloading it onto the fork and lifting it to my mouth. My lips became greasy with the fat.

‘And my prospects in that direction are not particularly rosy either,’ he continued. ‘All the girls over sixteen have moved out. All that’s left is school pupils and their mothers. The age ranges in between have been wiped out.’

‘Completely wiped out,’ I said, got up, put the cutlery on the plate, took them in one hand and the glass in the other and went to the kitchen. ‘But you make it sound as though they’ve been hunted to destruction or something.’

‘They have been! If they’d stayed here we could have hunted them. But where they are, there are others chasing after them.’

I put the plate and glass on the worktop and went into the bedroom to fetch my swimming gear.

‘Now I finally understand what’s meant by the term “happy hunting grounds”,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood what was supposed to be so fantastic about it. Running around in the forest until eternity. But obviously it was meant in a figurative sense.’

‘I don’t know how fantastic it is,’ Nils Erik said in a loud voice so that I could hear him. ‘It’s a lot of work and there’s little to show for it at the end. At least for me. Much, much better to be in a relationship.’

I put my trunks and a towel into a plastic bag, considered whether I needed anything else, no, that should do it.

‘When was the last time you were in a relationship?’ I said.

‘Three years ago,’ he said and moved towards the door when he saw me emerge with the bag in my hand.

‘What about one of the other temporary teachers?’ I said. He was bending down and tying his laces, and straightened up a touch redder in the face.

‘If they fancy it, fine by me,’ he said.

We walked up the steep hill in silence, walking was as much as we could manage in the gale. Snow stung against the skin I hadn’t covered. When we closed the school door behind us it was like leaving the top deck of a large ship and going inside. Nils Erik switched on the light, we bounded down the stairs in long strides, sat on opposite sides of the dressing room and changed. Although the wind made the walls creak and the ventilation howl, it still seemed quiet indoors. Perhaps because of the lack of movement? All the rooms were empty, the pool was empty and smooth and still.

The smell of chlorine cast a spell over me. Childhood memories of when we used to go swimming every week in Stintahallen came flooding back: the conical bags of sweets we bought at the little shop, the taste of the boiled sweets shaped like nuts and bolts, green and black, liquorice and mint. The light displays around the pool, which were supposed to represent tropical waterfalls. The white bathing hat with the Norwegian flag on the side, the dark blue goggles.

I pulled on my trunks and went into the small swimming hall, the tiles were cold and rough on the soles of my feet, the snow eddied round in the light of the lamp outside, behind it the great black void.

The surface of the water was dark with a faint shimmer of blue from the bottom of the pool and as shiny as a mirror. Almost a shame to break it, I thought. I definitely wasn’t going to dive in. No, instead I would climb down the metal ladder and try to make as few ripples as possible. All in vain, for along came Nils Erik: he ran to the edge and threw himself into the water with a splash. Swam underwater to the far side, where he broke the surface with a snort and a toss of the head.

‘Wonderful!’ he shouted. ‘What’s up with you, you wimp?’

‘Me, nothing!’ I shouted back.

‘You’re getting into the water like some old dear!’

Suddenly I remembered how I had once tricked Dag Lothar. I had got into the pool a few minutes before him, turned my bathing cap inside out so that it was all white, pulled it away from my head so that it was wrinkled and looked like the caps old ladies wore, and started to swim in a studiously slow style with my head as far out of the water as I could manage. This mimicking of an old lady swimming was so good that Dag Lothar didn’t see me, even though there were only four of us in the big pool. He glanced at me, categorised me wrongly and thus I didn’t exist. He called my name and when he received no answer went back into the changing room.

Chest first, I moved slowly out into the water, ducked my head beneath the surface and took a couple of powerful strokes that were almost enough for me to glide to the far edge. Nils Erik was ploughing along on the other side, doing front crawl. I swam as fast as I could for a few lengths, then stopped at the end by the window and gazed out into the snowstorm.

I turned, rested my elbows on the edge and watched the white foam spraying up around Nils Erik’s thrashing arms and legs, and was reminded of what Geir’s father had once said, that you should lie as if on cotton when you swim crawl, and behind Nils Erik I saw the open door to the empty rooms beyond.

Shit, I had forgotten. The sauna.

I dragged myself out of the water, went to the changing room and switched on the stove. When I went back I dived in and swam back and forth for perhaps half an hour until we decided to give up.

We sat on the top bench in the sauna. I poured water on the stones in the stove, a wave of hot steam met my skin and drifted further into the small cube-shaped room.

‘This is the biggest fringe benefit we get with the job,’ Nils Erik said, stroking the wet hair at the back of his head.

‘It’s also the only one,’ I said.

‘Free coffee,’ he said. ‘And newspapers. And cake at the farewell do.’

‘Hurrah,’ I said.

There was a pause. He moved down to a lower bench.

‘Have you had lots of other jobs?’ I said at length, leaning back against the wall. The heat was making my head heavy, as though it was slowly being filled with lead or something similar.

‘No. Just the health service. Oh, and the parks a couple of summers ago. And you?’

‘Gardening, floor factory, newspaper, nuthouse. And radio. But it wasn’t paid, so I suppose that doesn’t count.’

‘No,’ he said lethargically. I looked at him. He had closed his eyes and was leaning back with his elbows on the step where I was sitting. There was an energy and vivacity about his personality that seemed to conflict with something else, an old-man-ish quality that was hard to define because it didn’t manifest itself in anything specific, it was more an aura he had, I only noticed it in a negative way, when for example I was taken aback that he had heard of the Jesus and Mary Chain and liked them, because why indeed would he not have heard of them?

He sat up straight and turned to me.

‘Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘Just had a thought. You know Hilda’s cottage?’

‘Hilda’s cottage? What’s that?’

‘The yellow house on the bend. It used to belong to Hilda, Eva’s mother-in-law. She died a few years ago, and now the house is empty. I’ve had a chat with them, and they’d be happy to rent it out. After all, it’ll fall into disrepair faster if no one’s living there. So they don’t want much rent. Five hundred a month, that’s all.’

‘And?’ I said.

‘Living in a whole house on my own is no good. I wondered perhaps if we could rent it? We’d save loads of money on accommodation, and food would be cheaper if there were two of us. What do you reckon?’

‘Ye-es,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘We can have a room each and share the rest.’

‘But everyone will think we’re a couple of gay boys,’ I said. ‘Two young teachers have found each other, they’ll say.’

He laughed. ‘And here we are in the sauna all alone. .’

‘So the rumours have already started?’

‘No, are you out of your mind? You’ve shown an unequivocal interest in the opposite sex up here. No one is in any doubt about your preferences. Well, are you in or out?’

‘Yes. I mean no. I have to write and for that I need to be alone.’

‘There’s a room next to the sitting room. You can have that. It’s perfect.’

‘OK, why not then,’ I said.

After we had got dressed and were on our way upstairs I asked him about something that had been occupying my mind for a long time but which my nakedness had prevented me from articulating.

‘I’ve got a little problem in the area we touched on the other day,’ I said.

‘What was that?’ he said.

‘About sex,’ I said.

‘Come on. Out with it!’ he said.

‘It’s not easy to talk about,’ I said. ‘But the thing is. . well, I come too quickly. Put bluntly. That’s the long and short of it.’

‘Ah, a classic,’ he said. ‘And?’

‘No, there’s nothing else. I was just wondering if you had any tips. When it happens it doesn’t feel great, but I’m sure you understand.’

‘How quickly are we talking about here? A minute? Three minutes? Five?’

‘Erm, it varies,’ I said, inserting the key into the lock of the large glass door and pushing it open. My skin was so hot after the sauna that the cold wind didn’t bite, I watched it sweep between the buildings but barely noticed it. ‘Maybe three or four?’

‘That’s not bad, you know, Karl Ove,’ he said, winding his scarf around his neck, pulling his hat well down over his ears. ‘Four minutes, that’s a pretty long time.’

‘How do you get on in this area?’

‘Me? The opposite. I can hump away till eternity and nothing happens. In fact, that’s a problem too. I can be at it for half an hour without getting near an orgasm. Sometimes I just have to give up.’

We set off down the road.

‘And when you beat the meat?’ he said. ‘Is it the same?’

My cheeks went red, but he couldn’t see that in the dark. He wasn’t expecting a lie, so I was on safe ground.

‘About the same,’ I said.

‘Mhm,’ he said. ‘I’ve got problems there too. Well, you may have realised that today. I can keep at it for ever.’

‘Do you think it’s physiological?’ I said. ‘Or is it a mental thing? I wish I could swap. The opposite problem would be a thousand times better.’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Probably physiological. I’ve always been like this anyway. Ever since the first time. So I don’t know anything else. But I’ve heard it’s supposed to help if you pinch the tip. Hard. Or pull at the scrotum. Then just keep pumping.’

‘I’ll try that next time,’ I said and smiled into the darkness.

‘Yes, should an opportunity ever present itself,’ he said.

‘At Christmas, for example? All the young women from the district will be back then.’

‘Do you reckon they’ll be coming back here to get laid? I don’t think so. I think they’re getting it where they are now and they come back here for some R & R ready to go again in January.’

‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ I said, and came to a halt, we had reached the road to my flat. ‘If everything goes through with the house when do we move in?’

‘We have to give notice first and so on. After Christmas? If we shorten our holiday by two days we can do it then.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘See you!’

I raised my hand and waved, opened the door and went in. Ate eight slices of bread and drank half a litre of milk, lay down on the sofa and read the first pages of a new book I had bought: The Big Adventure by Jan Kjærstad. I had read Mirrors and Homo Falsus by him before and had just borrowed The Earth Turns Quietly from the library in Finnsnes. But this one was new, it had just been published, and the first thing I did when I held it in my hand was to smell the fresh paper. Then I flicked backwards and forwards. Every chapter started with a big O. Some of the chapters were set in several columns — one column looked like notes and popped up here and there alongside another, which was the main story. Some chapters were letters. Some were printed in bold type, some in italics, some in normal font. Something called Hazar and something called Enigma cropped up at regular intervals. And definitions of k — that had to stand for kjærlighet, love.

I started reading the first page.

She was very young. Neck as fresh as dew. They stood a metre apart, in their own worlds. He had felt the tension, even with his back to her, he turned and stole a glance. An enormous kick. Made a few feints with his leg. She noticed, smiled. Sparks between kohl and mascara. She thrust her right shoulder in his direction, twice, a different beat, bit her lower lip, lowered her gaze. The percussion and bass set off a funky groove in his sensory receptors. Contrary to nature to stand still. He took a few steps on the carpet, towards her, away from her, inviting, teasing. She mimicked his steps, same rhythm, tiger wrinkles by her nose. Black curly hair, neckerchief wound around her forehead, brazen make-up. What was she listening to? Cramps? Split Beavers? ViViVox? Kimono jacket with leaf pattern, baggy silk trousers, sandals with toe strap. Breath-taking. And around her: the covers’ flickering kaleidoscope of figures, forms and fancy calligraphy.

I read it over and over again. The style was so alien, and yet so cool with the short incomplete sentences, all the alliteration and the sprinkling of English words. And the foreign words. Kimono — that was Japanese. Tiger wrinkles — that was Indian and animalistic. Kohl — that sounded German, was it? Within the space of a few lines a whole world was opened up to me. And it was a different world, it had something futuristic about it, which attracted me. But I couldn’t write like that, even if I wanted to, it would be impossible. When I read Vinduet, which Kjærstad edited, I knew as good as none of the names and the featured titles and only a few of the terms used. About Burning The Aeneid, one article was called, for some reason it rumbled around in my head, cropping up here, there and everywhere, although I had no idea what the Aeneid was. All this was postmodernism, Kjærstad was the greatest Norwegian postmodernist writer, and although I liked it, or the whole world that I suspected lay behind what stood in the text, I didn’t know what it was or where it actually existed. Toe strap, tårem in Norwegian, was there some echo there with harem and the Orient? Kjærstad’s books were full of the Orient, a Thousand and One Nights atmosphere, narratives within narratives, and I imagined part of what he was doing was drawing that world into ours, along with a host of other worlds. What it meant, I had no idea, but intuitively I liked it, in the same way that intuitively I disliked Milan Kundera. Kundera was also a postmodernist writer, but he completely lacked this embracing of other worlds, with him the world was always the same, it was Prague and Czechoslovakia and the Soviets who had either invaded or were on the point of doing so, and that was fine, but he kept withdrawing his characters from the plot, intervening and going on about something or other while the characters stood still, waiting as it were, by the window or wherever it was they happened to be until he had finished his explanation and they could move forward. Then you saw that the plot was only ‘a plot’ and that the characters were only ‘characters’, something he had invented, you knew they didn’t exist, and so why should you read about them? Kundera’s polar opposite was Hamsun, no one went as far into his characters’ world as he did, and that was what I preferred, at least in a comparison of these two, the physicality and the realism of Hunger, for example. There the world had weight, there even the thoughts were captured, while with Kundera the thoughts elevated themselves above the world and did as they liked with it. Another difference I had noticed was that European novels often had only one plot, everything followed one track as it were, while South American novels had a multiplicity of tracks and sidetracks, indeed, compared with European novels, they almost exploded with plots. One of my favourites was A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, but I also loved Love in the Time of Cholera. Kjærstad had a little of the same, but in a European way, and there was also something of Kundera in him. That was my opinion anyway.

What about my own writing?

Writing in a postmodernist style like Kjærstad was way beyond my reach, I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to, I didn’t have it in me. I had only one world, so that was the one I had to write about. At least for the time being. But I tried to include the exuberance that García Márquez possessed. The multiplicity of stories too. And Hamsun’s being present in the moment.

I read on. I had seen in the reviews that in this novel Oslo was situated somewhere in the southern hemisphere. That was a fantastic idea, it meant Oslo became everything it wasn’t in reality. But the way this world was evoked was more important. There was something Márquezian about the exuberance and the density and the multiplicity in this passage.

I laid aside the book and went to the desk, sat down and started to flick through the little pile of texts I had written. It was so thin! So unbelievably thin! I only included the bare essentials — the forest, the road, the house — I let everything else go. But what if I let all the rest explode?

I took a fresh piece of paper and wound it into the typewriter, glanced at my reflection in the window as the typewriter carriage buzzed into position.

Where was there a subject with more breadth and depth and an abundance of detail?

I imagined the road outside the house in Tybakken.

I went onto the road. It was black and beside it the green spruce trees swayed in the wind. A car drove past. It was a BMW. On the pavement Erling and Harald stood by their bikes. Erling had an Apache, Harald a DBS. Behind them the hill was lined with houses. In the gardens there were chairs and tables, kennels, barbecues, tricycles, small plastic pools, hoses and an abandoned rake. In the sky above a plane flew past, so far up that only the white vapour trail was visible.

I tore the sheet out of the roller, screwed it up and threw it on the floor. Inserted another. Stared straight ahead for a while. Two years ago I had visited Yngve and mum in Bergen. The fish market there had swarmed with life: people, stalls, fishermen and crabs, cars and boats, flags and pennants, birds and water and mountains and houses. That would be a perfect place to get the density!

I started writing again.

The fish were lined up side by side on a bed of ice. They glistened in the sunlight. Women with money to spend and bulging bags walked back and forth between the stalls. A little boy was holding a balloon in one hand and clasping the pram his mother was pushing with the other. Suddenly he let go and ran over to the tank full of cod. ‘Look, Mum,’ he shouted. An old man in a black suit and hat was staggering along, supporting himself on a stick. A fat woman in a coat was examining some mackerel. A sparkling jewel hung from her neck. The two assistants had fish blood smeared over their white aprons. One was laughing at something the other had said. On the road behind them cars raced by. A girl with dark shoulder-length hair, a white T-shirt, her breasts visible beneath, and a blue Levi’s 501-clad bottom stood gazing across the harbour. I glanced at her as I hurried past. She looked at me and smiled. I thought how wonderful it would be to fuck her.

I leaned back, took out my watch, it was already a few minutes to nine. I was content, that was a good start, he could meet her again later, anything could happen then. I switched off the typewriter, put a pan of water on the stove, sprinkled some tea leaves into the bottom of the teapot and suddenly realised that this was the first time I had written without any music in the background. While waiting for the water to boil I re-read the passage. The sentences should be broken up a bit and made more abrupt. There should be something about the various smells and the sounds. Maybe even more detail. And some alliteration.

I switched on the typewriter again, took out the sheet and inserted another.

The fish were lined up side by side on a bed of ice, everything glinted and glistened in the sunlight. The air smelled of salt, exhaust fumes and perfume. Voluminous women with bulging bags and money to spend walked back and forth between the respective stalls, pointing authoritatively at what they wanted. Prawns, crabs, lobsters, mackerel, pollock, cod, haddock, eels and plaice. The sounds of mumbling and laughing filled the air. Some children were shouting. A bus issued a deep sigh as it stopped at the bus stop across the street. The pennants along the quay were flapping in the wind. Flap! Flap! Flap! A little boy, pallid and puny, was holding a Winnie the Pooh balloon in one hand and clutching the pram his mother was pushing with the other.

The steam from the boiling pan wafted in through the door. I switched off the typewriter again, poured the water over the tea leaves, took the teapot with a cup, a carton of milk and a bowl of sugar into the sitting room, sat down, rolled a cigarette and with it hanging from my lips continued to read The Big Adventure, this time without an eye for the detail or a thought about the style, within a few minutes I was totally absorbed. So when the doorbell shrieked through the flat a little later there was something brutal about the way it jerked me back into reality.

It was Hege.

‘Hi,’ she said, pulling the scarf down from her mouth. ‘You haven’t gone to bed?’

‘Gone to bed? No. It’s only half past nine.’

‘It’s ten actually,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course, sorry,’ I said. ‘Has something happened or what?’

She came into the hall, unwound the huge scarf, unzipped her down jacket.

‘No, but that’s the problem. Nothing is happening. Vidar’s at sea and I was mooching around getting bored. And then I thought you were probably up.’

‘Good timing,’ I said. ‘I’ve even got some tea on the go.’

We went into the sitting room, she sat down on the sofa, picked up the book and looked at the title.

‘It’s Kjærstad’s latest,’ I said. ‘Have you read it?’

‘Me? No. You’re talking to an illiterate. Am I going to get some tea or was that just polite conversation?’

I fetched a cup, placed it in front of her and sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the table. She tucked her legs beneath her and poured.

She was thin, long-limbed, with an almost boyish body. Her facial features were pronounced, long nose, full lips, hair big and curly. There was a hardness about her, but in her eyes, which were vivacious and sparkling, often something else would appear, something softer and warmer. She was sharp, had a ready answer for everything and treated the fishermen around her with a characteristic unflinching aloofness.

I liked her a lot, but I wasn’t attracted by her at all, and that was what I realised allowed us to be friends. If I had been attracted by her I would have been sitting there paralysed, thinking about what I should say and the impression I was making. As I wasn’t, I could be who I was, without a further thought, just chat away. The same applied to her. And as was so often the case when I talked to girls I liked but wasn’t attracted by, the conversations tended towards emotional intimate matters.

‘Anything new?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘Not really. Oh yes, Nils Erik has suggested we move into the yellow house on the bend.’

‘What was your response?’

‘I thought it was a good idea. So we’re going to move after Christmas.’

‘I can’t imagine two more different men than you and Nils Erik,’ she said.

‘I’m a man now all of a sudden, am I?’

She looked at me and laughed. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t feel like one.’

‘What do you feel like then?’

‘A boy. An eighteen-year-old.’

‘Yes, I can understand that. You aren’t a man like the others here in the village.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you ever had a look at your arms? They’re as thin as mine! Can’t say you’re broad-shouldered either.’

‘So?’ I said. ‘I’m not a fisherman.’

‘Oh, moody now, eh?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ she said with the same intonation and laughed. ‘You’re right though. All you have to do is sit still and write for the rest of your life. You don’t need big muscles to do that.’

‘No, you don’t,’ I said.

‘Come on, Karl Ove,’ she said. ‘You don’t take yourself that seriously, do you?’

‘It’s got nothing to do with how seriously I take myself,’ I said. ‘What you say is true. I’m very different from Vidar, for example. But that doesn’t mean you can walk all over me.’

‘Oooh, I obviously touched a sore spot there!’

‘Pack it in now.’

‘Ooh dear!’

‘Do you want me to throw you out?’

I raised my cup in a threatening manner.

She laughed again.

I leaned back, took my tobacco pouch and started to roll a cigarette.

‘I know you want men to be men,’ I said. ‘In fact, you’ve said that many times. The strong silent type. But what does Vidar do to get on your nerves? What do you usually complain about? He never says anything, he never talks about himself or the two of you, there isn’t a scrap of romanticism in him.’

She eyed me. ‘Is there anything more romantic than being fucked hard by a strong man?’

I could feel my cheeks glowing, made a grab for the lighter and lit the roll-up.

Then I laughed.

‘Actually, I know nothing about that. I can’t even imagine what it’s like.’

‘Have you never fucked a girl hard?’

I sensed she was watching me and our eyes met.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, averting my gaze. ‘I was thinking the other way round. Of your role in all of this.’

I got up and went over to my record collection.

‘Any requests?’ I said, turning to her.

‘You choose,’ she said. ‘I have to go soon anyway.’

I put on the latest deLillo record: Før var det morsomt med sne.

‘The biggest argument in favour of moving is that I won’t have to listen to the two upstairs any longer,’ I said, and pointed to the ceiling.

‘Torill and Georg?’

I nodded.

‘The walls are terribly thin here. Especially between bedrooms. And there’s lots of romanticism, to use your definition of the term.’

‘How nice for Torill.’

‘And him by the sound of it.’

I sat down again. ‘You don’t like Torill much, do you,’ I said.

‘No, I can’t say I do.’

A false smile slid across her mouth, she raised her face and chirruped some words. ‘She’s so good and sincere it hurts to watch and at the same time she offers herself to everyone who wants to look.’

‘Offers herself?’

‘Yes, you don’t think she walks around like that when she’s on her own, do you?’

She pushed out her bosom, wiggled her hips on the sofa and coquettishly stroked her hair from her forehead.

I smiled.

‘It had never struck me,’ I said. ‘But now you say that I believe it has struck Nils Erik. And pretty hard. He hurried into the loo immediately after she had bent forward in front of the fridge today.’

‘You see. She knows what she’s doing. And you?’

‘Torill?’ I said with a snort. ‘She’s twelve years older than me.’

‘Yes, of course, but do you like her?’

‘I don’t dislike her at any rate. She’s pleasant enough.’

There was a pause. The windows reflected the light from the lamps and between them the vague outlines of the furniture in a room that seemed to be underwater.

‘Have you got any plans for Friday coming?’ Hege said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not as far as I know.’

‘I was thinking of inviting some of the temps home. Making a pizza and drinking some beer. Are you up for it?’

‘Course.’

She got up.

‘Time to wend my way home. Sleep tight, you writer wuss.’

‘If you’re not careful I’ll start calling you names,’ I said.

‘I’m a woman, you know. That’s not done. For you I’m Frøken or Hege. And you’re overwatering your flowers. You’re drowning them.’

‘Is that what’s wrong? I thought it was imperative they shouldn’t get too dry.’

‘No, it’s almost always the opposite. Poor flowers. They’ve ended up with a murderer. The worst kind, in fact, one who doesn’t know he’s a murderer.’

‘Well, actually I am sorry when they die,’ I said.

‘What about fish?’ she said.

‘What about them?’

‘Are you sorry when they die too?’

‘Yes, I am. I hate it when they’re brought up from the sea, wriggling and squirming, and I have to kill them.’

She laughed.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said here before. I can’t imagine it. It must be the very first time.’

‘There’s one fisherman who’s been seasick all his life,’ I said. ‘That’s almost the same.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘But now I do have to go.’

I followed her into the hall.

‘OK, Frøken, I wish you goodnight,’ I said. I stood waiting in silence while she put on her outdoor gear. Smiled when she had finished. Only her nose was protruding from between her scarf and hat. She said bye and went out into the darkness.

The next morning I had the third and fourth years for the first two lessons. I got up ten minutes before the bell was due to ring, threw on my clothes and dashed up the hill under a sky that was as black and wild as it had been when Hege left ten hours earlier.

When the children ambled across the floor in their stockinged feet, wearing their jumpers, with their hair rumpled after removing their woollen hats, eyes narrow, I saw them as they were, tiny and vulnerable. It was barely comprehensible that I could on occasion get so irritated and angry with some of them. But there was something in them that rose and sank during the day, a vortex of shouting and screaming, pestering and fighting, games and excitement, which meant that I no longer saw them as small people but as whatever was coursing through their veins.

Sitting on his chair, Jo put his hand in the air.

‘What is it, Jo?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘What are we going to do in the first lesson?’

‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ I said.

‘Are you going to read to us at the end of the second lesson, as you usually do?’

‘All things come to he who waits. Have you heard that saying?’

He nodded.

‘Well, there you have it.’

The door at the end of the building kept opening and shutting as pupils trickled in. Every time it did I automatically looked up and across. To the right of the door was the part of the block my class used. Nils Erik was teaching them, he sat behind the desk staring into the air while waiting for them to quieten down.

In came Reidar and Andrea. They were brother and sister, they walked to school together, arrived late together, what was so touching about that?

Reidar set off at a run across the floor, must have remembered they weren’t allowed to run, then stopped with a jolt and looked at me, and walked quickly to his place. From the other side Andrea watched us. I met her stare. She immediately turned her head to the side, to where the seventh class was, and she joined them a moment later.

This little interlude ought to have been perfectly natural, but it wasn’t, there was a woodenness about Andrea’s movements, as though she was forcing herself to perform them.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ Reidar said with a smile. He used my name as a kind of buffer, to make a reprimand for lateness harder because of the friendly interaction. He was a crafty little devil.

‘Hi, Reidar,’ I said. ‘Sit down. You’ve held up the whole lesson now.’

Andrea was in love with me.

Of course.

That explained her behaviour. All the looks, all the evasiveness, all the blushes.

A warm feeling spread through me. I got up and went to the board.

‘What does it mean to have a profession?’ I said. ‘What is a profession?’

Poor little girl.

‘A job,’ Reidar said.

‘Put your hand up if you know,’ I said.

He put up his hand. Fortunately some others did too. I pointed to Lovisa.

‘It means having a job,’ she said.

‘That’s what I said!’ Reidar said.

‘Could you give me some examples of professions, Lovisa?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Fisherman.’

‘Good,’ I said and wrote it up. ‘Any more?’

‘Working in the fish hall?’

‘Yes! Any more professions? Hands up!’

Suggestions poured in. Bus driver, lorry driver, truck driver, shop assistant, ship’s captain, cleaner, policeman, fireman. It was typical that ‘teacher’ never occurred to them, even though one was standing right in front of them. For them it wasn’t a proper job. Chatting to children day in, day out.

‘What about me?’ I said at length. ‘Haven’t I got a profession?’

‘You’re a teacher! Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!’ they called out.

‘And if you’re ill?’

‘Nurse! Doctor! Ambulance driver!’

When the board was full I asked them to write down the job they would like to have, say why, describe what it involved and draw a picture. While they were doing that I walked around monitoring, chatting with them on an individual basis and standing by the window with my hands on my hips staring into the darkness. The thought that she was in love with me was touching, both warming and sad.

I went up to the desk, we began to go through what they had written and we covered a little more than half before the bell rang. In the following lesson we continued where we had left off, changed to reading from the textbook, they answered the questions in it, and then in the last twenty minutes I read an excerpt from One Thousand and One Nights. When I took out the book and started reading they left their chairs and sat in a semicircle on the carpet in front of me, they always did that, it must have been what they were used to from the first or the second class, and I liked it, I felt as if I was giving them something warm and secure. Or rather that they turned a normal situation into something warm and secure. Blank-eyed, they sat listening to the oriental tales, somehow turned in on themselves, as though they were sitting before the fount of their soul, in the midst of the desert of their minds, and saw all the camels, all the silk, all the flying carpets, all the spirits and robbers, mosques and bazaars, all the burning love and sudden death, the billowing mirages across the empty blue sky of consciousness. To them it made no difference that a world more different from theirs, from where they sat on the edge of the world in complete darkness and freezing temperatures, could hardly be imagined; the story took place in their minds, where everything was possible, where everything was permitted.

In the lesson afterwards I had the fifth, sixth and seventh years for Norwegian.

‘OK, let’s get cracking,’ I said as I entered. ‘Sit down and take out your books!’

‘Are you in a bad mood today?’ Hildegunn said.

‘Don’t you try any red herrings,’ I said. ‘Come on, books out. We’re going to do a bit of group work today. By which I mean you’re going to work in pairs. Hildegunn and Andrea, put your desks together. Jørn and Live. Kai Roald and Vivian. Come on. Do you always have to dilly-dally?’

They placed their desks together in the way I had explained. Apart from Kai Roald. He sat with his elbows on his desk and his cheeks in his hands.

‘You too, Kai Roald,’ I said. ‘Move your desk next to Vivian’s. You’ll be working together.’

He looked up at me and shook his head. Stared into space again.

‘There’s no choice,’ I said. ‘You have to. Come on now.’

‘I’m not doing it,’ he said.

I went over to him.

‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Come on now, move your desk over.’

‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing it.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

The others, who had finished their manoeuvres, sat watching us.

‘I don’t want to,’ he said.

‘Shall I do it for you?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not doing it.’

‘But you’ve GOT TO,’ I said.

He shook his head.

I grabbed the desk on both sides and lifted it. He pressed his forearms down on the top with all his might. I pulled harder, he grabbed it with his hands and held on, red-faced now. My heart was beating faster.

‘Now you do as I say!’ I said.

‘No!’ he said.

I snatched at the desk and took it from his grasp, carried it over to Vivian and put it down. He didn’t move from his chair.

‘I’m not budging,’ he said.

I held his arm, he wrenched it away.

‘Now you go and sit over there!’ I said in a loud voice. ‘Do you want me to carry you? Is that what you want?’

From the corner of my eye I sensed Hege watching us from the other side of the room.

He didn’t answer.

I went behind him and grabbed the seat of his chair, intending to lift it with him in it. He stood up, went behind his desk and grasped it with both hands, presumably to move it back.

‘Put the desk down!’ I said.

His face was scarlet, his eyes rigid and inaccessible. When he started moving the desk I seized it and tore it out of his hands.

‘You bloody horse prick!’ he shouted.

I put down the desk. Anger throbbed in my veins. My eyes were white with fury.

I took a deep breath to calm myself down, but it didn’t help, my entire body was shaking.

‘You can go home,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see you here any more today.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Go,’ I said.

He suddenly fought back tears and looked down. ‘But I haven’t done anything,’ he said.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see you. Come on. Out. Out.’

He lifted his head, sent me a wild defiant glare, slowly turned and left.

‘Let’s make a start, shall we,’ I said with as much composure as I could muster. ‘Open the practice book at page forty-six.’

They did as I told them. Outside the windows Kai Roald walked past, swinging his arms, apparently unconcerned, staring ahead. I explained to them what they had to do. Glanced out of the window, he was walking beneath the light from the last lamp on the school premises, neck bent, head down. But I had behaved correctly, no one should be allowed to call a teacher a horse prick and go unpunished.

I sat down behind the desk. For the rest of the lesson I was completely out of myself, concerned only that the pupils should not notice anything.

In the staffroom Hege came over and asked what the kerfuffle had been about. I shrugged and said I’d had a difference of opinion with Kai Roald and he had called me a horse prick.

‘So I sent him home for the rest of the day. That’s not on.’

‘Things are different up here, you know,’ she said. ‘Swearing’s nowhere near as serious.’

‘It is for me,’ I said. ‘And I’m the form teacher.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said.

I went over and got a cup of coffee, sat down on my chair, leafed through a book. Then, in a flash, it came to me.

He didn’t want to sit next to Vivian because he was in love with her.

This sudden insight made me flush with embarrassment. Oh, what an idiot I had been! How stupid could you be? Sending a pupil home was serious, he would have to explain himself, and his parents wouldn’t believe it was the teacher’s fault. But it was.

I liked Kai Roald.

So he was in love, that was all!

But it was too late, I couldn’t undo anything now.

I went back into the staffroom, picked up the newspaper from the table, sat down and started reading. At the end of the small vestibule the door opened. It was Richard. He spotted me.

‘Karl Ove,’ he said, and beckoned. ‘Can I have a word with you?’

‘Certainly,’ I said, and got up.

‘Let’s go into my office, shall we,’ he said.

I followed him in silence. He closed the door behind us and turned to me.

‘Kai Roald’s mother has just rung,’ he said. ‘She said he’d been sent home. What happened?’

‘He refused to do what I asked him to do,’ I said. ‘We had a little altercation. He called me a horse prick, and so I told him to leave. That’s where I draw the line.’

Richard studied me for a while. Then he lowered himself onto the chair behind his broad desk.

‘Sending someone home is a serious measure,’ he said. ‘It’s the most severe punishment we have. A lot has to happen before we do that. But you know that. Kai Roald is a fine fellow. Do we agree on that?’

‘Yes, no question. But that isn’t what this is about.’

‘Hang on a moment. This is Northern Norway. It’s a bit rougher up here than down south. We don’t take swearing seriously, for example. Calling you what he called you isn’t good, but nor is it as grave a crime as you seem to believe. The boy’s got temperament. Surely he’s allowed to have that?’

‘I will not put up with being called a horse prick by a pupil. Regardless of where in the world it happens,’ I said.

‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that. But there are always ways of resolving conflict. There has to be a bit of give and take. Sending a pupil home is absolutely the last resort. I have a feeling that your disagreement hadn’t really got that far. Am I right?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You haven’t been a teacher for long, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘And even the most experienced of us make the wrong calls on a regular basis. But next time, if you can’t resolve a situation yourself, come and get me. Or bring the pupil to see me.’

In your dreams.

‘I’ll consider that if it happens again,’ I said.

‘It will happen again,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to sort this one out anyway. You’d better ring Kai Roald’s mother and explain why he was sent home.’

‘Isn’t it enough if I give him a message tomorrow?’ I said.

‘She rang here and was very worried. So I think it would be best if you spoke to her.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Then I will.’

He held out an open palm to indicate the grey telephone on his desk. ‘You can use this one.’

‘But the bell’s about to ring,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it in the next break.’

‘I’ll take your lesson for the first few minutes. Who have you got?’

‘Fifth, sixth and seventh years.’

He nodded, got up and stood beside his desk.

Was he going to stand there while I made the call? Was he going to listen to the conversation? Was he a total bloody control freak?

I looked up the number in the phone book, found it and glanced at Richard, who didn’t bat an eyelid.

What a sack of shit he was.

I dialled the number.

‘Hello,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Oh, hello, this is Karl Ove Knausgaard, Kai Roald’s form teacher.’

‘Oh, hi,’ she said.

‘Kai Roald and I had a disagreement this morning. He refused to do what I asked him to do and then he called me. . well, he swore at me to my face. So I sent him home.’

‘Perfectly correct,’ she said. ‘Kai Roald can sometimes be a bit unruly.’

‘Yes, he can,’ I said. ‘But he’s a fine lad. It wasn’t that serious and there won’t be any consequences for him. He had to be taught a lesson though. Tomorrow everything will be back to normal. Is that all right?’

‘Yes. Thank you for ringing.’

‘No problem. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

The moment I put down the phone the bell rang. Richard nodded to me, I left his office without a word and went straight to the teaching block, where I would have maths with the fifth, sixth and seventh years. This was my weakest subject, I had nothing to say about it, there was nothing there that I could develop or make interesting, they did their sums in their exercise books and every now and then we went through new material on the board. They knew this and perhaps tried even harder at the beginning of lessons to distract me.

‘Who were you ringing?’ Vivian said after they had sat down.

‘How do you know I rang anyone?’ I said.

‘We saw you through the window,’ Andrea said. ‘You used the head teacher’s phone.’

‘Did you ring Kai Roald’s parents?’ Hildegunn said.

‘Is he coming back today?’ Vivian said.

‘It’s none of your business who I ring, as you know,’ I said. ‘The fact is if you don’t quieten down soon I’ll phone your parents.’

‘But they’re at work,’ Vivian said.

‘Vivian!’ I said.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘That’s enough now. Come on, down to work! That means you too, Jørn.’

Andrea had stretched her legs out under the desk and was rubbing her feet against each other while reading through the passage in the book with a pencil in her hand. Live was looking around her as she always did when she was stuck and didn’t want to show it. I watched Jørn doing the mental calculations at breakneck speed with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Then I met Live’s gaze and she put her hand up.

I leaned over her desk.

‘I can’t do this one,’ she said.

She pointed to a sum with her pencil. Her eyes darted to and fro behind her glasses. I explained it to her, she sighed and groaned, which was her way of playing down her ignorance in front of friends.

‘Are you with me?’ I said.

‘Yes, I am,’ she said and waved me away.

‘Teacher.’ Vivian giggled. ‘Teacher, I can’t do this one, teacher!’

When I leaned over her it was as if she was completely at sea. Her face was blank and expressionless, her eyes were blank and expressionless. The receptivity I sensed in her was a little eerie.

‘Why have you got stuck on this one?’ I said. ‘You’ve cracked fifteen of them in exactly the same way before!’

She rolled her shoulders.

‘Have another go,’ I said. ‘Look at the other sums. If you can’t do it I’ll come and help. OK?’

‘OK, teacher,’ she said, glancing round with a giggle.

As I straightened up I looked straight into Andrea’s eyes.

There was a longing in them, and my cheeks burned.

‘Everything OK?’ I said.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I need some help.’

My heart beat faster as I stopped beside her. Oh, it was ridiculous, but the awareness that she might be in love with me made it suddenly impossible to behave normally.

I leaned over and she seemed to shrink back. Her breathing changed. Her eyes were locked on to the book. I could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, I studiously avoided any form of contact, placed my finger on the first number she had written. She stroked her hair to the side, rested one elbow on the table. It was as if everything we did had become conscious: every detail became visible and it was no longer unthinking and natural but considered and artificial.

‘There’s the slip,’ I said. ‘Can you see it?’

She blushed, said yes in a soft voice, pointed to the next sum, what about this one, said yes again after a few seconds in a soft low voice, and her breathing, hers, was tremulous.

I stood up and walked on, surveyed the whole class and the whole teaching area, but I had not been left unmoved, the tiny moment lived on, and to release myself from it I collected all the books on the desk, piled them high with a bang and addressed the whole class. The moment had to be destroyed by a new, a greater moment. And I had to make the class a place for everyone, a unit, a class that would learn.

‘It looks as if some of you are having the same problem,’ I said. ‘Let’s go through it on the board. Fifth and sixth years close your ears.’

Once it was done the lesson proceeded as before. Even before I realised that Andrea had feelings for me I had been careful to keep my distance from the pupils. I never put my arm around them, indeed I never touched them at all, and if the conversation or jokes went too far, into vaguely sexual areas, I always stopped them. The other teachers didn’t need to do this, for them distance was a fact of life which nothing could break. For me it was something I had to create.