My Struggle: Book Three

“Hi,” I said. “This is Karl Ove. Is that Kajsa?”

“Yes,” she said. “Hi.”

“We forgot to talk about when I should come,” I said. “Is there any particular time that would be good? It makes no difference to me.”

“Errrm,” she said. “Well, in fact, it’s all off.”

“Off,” I said. “Can’t you make it? Aren’t your parents going out after all?”

“What I mean to say is,” she started. “Erm … erm … I can’t … well, go out with you any longer.”

What?

Was she ending it? But … we’d only been going out for five days!

“Hello?” she said.

“Is it over?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s over.”

I said nothing. I could hear her breathing at the other end. Tears were running down my cheeks. A long time passed.

“Well goodbye,” she said suddenly.

“Bye,” I said, and put down the phone and went to the bus stop. My eyes were blinded by tears. I wiped them with the back of my hand, sniffed, got on my bike, and began to pedal homeward. I barely saw the road in front of me. Why had she done that? Why? Now that things had started to click? On the day we were going to be alone in her house? She liked me a few days ago, so why didn’t she like me now? Was it because we hadn’t talked much?

And she was so good-looking. She was so unbelievably good-looking.

Jesus Christ.

JesusfuckingChrist.

JesusfuckingshittingChrist.

When I got to B-Max I dried my tears on the sleeves of my jacket, it was Saturday just before closing time, the parking lot was full of cars and people with shopping bags and kids, loads of kids. But if they saw my tears, could they have been caused by the wind? I was cycling after all.

I plodded up the little hill before the flat stretch. Completely empty, neutral spaces were developing inside me, ten seconds could pass without my thinking a single thought, without knowing that I even existed, and then the image of Kajsa was suddenly there, it was over, and a sob shook through me, impossible to stop.

I locked my bike and put it in its place outside the house, stood still inside the house listening to hear where the others were, now was not the time to bump into anyone, and when it sounded as if the coast was clear I went upstairs and into the bathroom, where I washed my face carefully before going into my room and sitting down on the bed.

After a while I got up and went to Yngve’s room. He was on the bed playing the guitar and glanced up when I entered.

“What’s up? Have you been crying?” he said. “Is it Kajsa? Did she end it?”

I nodded and started crying again.

“It’s all right, Karl Ove,” he said. “It’ll soon pass. There are so many girls out there waiting. The world is full of girls! Forget her. It’s no big deal.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “We only went out for five days. And she’s so good-looking. She’s the only one I want to be with. No one else. And today of all days. When we were going to be alone at her place.”

“Hang around,” he said, getting up. “I’ll play a song for you. It might help.”

“What kind of song?” I said, sitting down on the chair.

“Hang on,” he said, flicking through a pile of singles on the shelf. “This one,” he said, holding up one of The Aller Værste!’s. “ ‘No Way Back.’ ”

“Oh, that one.”

“Listen to the lyrics,” he said, removing the single from the sleeve, placing the plastic core in the middle of the turntable, then the forty-five, lifting up the stylus, and putting it down on the first groove, which was already whizzing around. After a second’s scratching the energetic drums pumped into life, then came the bass, the guitar, and the Farfisa organ with the rest, followed by the jangling, unbelievably exciting guitar riff and then the voice of the singer with the Stavanger accent:

I’m not lying when I say I knew

That me and you were already through

I saw you were trying to hide it

Until the sensi thin condom split

Long-term plans and our shared visions

Blown to bits in one minute flat

You gave me a hug; I wanted to give you more

But you certainly put paid to that

“Listen now!” Yngve said.

All things pass — all things must decay

You go to sleep; you wake up to a new day

No way back now, nuthin’ to thank you for

Nuthin’ to say, there’s your coat, there’s the door

“Yes,” I said.

We were on the point of going banal

I heard myself speaking and got irritated

We had one too many and went sentimental

But the words were still infected

You broke my heart and gave me the clap

I still haven’t finished the penicillin rap

Why must we bang our heads against the same old wall

When we know deep down we hate it all

All things pass — all things must decay

You go to sleep; you wake up to a new day

No way back now, nuthin’ to thank you for

Nuthin’ to say, there’s your coat, there’s the door

“All things pass,” Yngve said when the song was over and the stylus had returned to its little rest. “All things must decay. You go to sleep; you wake up to a new day.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” I said.

“Did it help?”

“Yes, a bit. Could you play it again?”

Fortunately Mom and Dad didn’t notice that I had been crying when we were having dinner. Afterward, too restless to stay inside, I went out and as the road was empty and the children I knew best were on vacation I ambled down to the pontoons. There was a whole crowd standing around Jørn’s boat, which was brand new. Lots of people had a new boat that spring, both Geir Håkon and Kent Arne had one, a GH 10 and a With Dromedille respectively, a ten-footer as well, both with a five-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor.

I walked over to them.

“Here’s our jessie,” Jørn said as I stopped.

That word again.

They laughed, from which I concluded it wasn’t well meant.

“Hi,” I said.

Jørn started the engine after a few tugs on the cord.

“Come here, Karl Ove,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Not likely.”

“I want to show you something,” he said, looking at his little brother. “You reverse when I tell you, right.”

His little brother nodded.

“Come on,” he said, moving to the bow.

I took a few hesitant steps forward. When I was on the edge of the pontoon he threw himself around my legs.

“Reverse!” he shouted to his brother.

The boat reversed, I went into a crouch, my legs were pulled away from beneath me, I fell and was dragged over the edge because Jørn didn’t let go and the boat continued to reverse. I made a grab for the edge and clung on by my fingers. Jørn’s brother accelerated, the engine revved, and I hung there with my legs on board the boat, my body over the water, and my hands on the pontoon. I shouted to them to stop. I started to cry. The bystanders smiled and looked on calmly at what was happening.

“That’s enough!” Jørn shouted.

The whole incident had lasted maybe a minute. Jørn’s brother revved forward, Jørn let go of my legs, and I climbed up and walked off as quickly as I could, crying. The tears didn’t stop until I was up by the rock face, where I sat down in the hot, perfectly still air, saturated with aromas of the sun-warmed rocks, dry grass, and wild flowers.

I mulled over whether I should call Kajsa and ask her why she had broken up with me, so that I could learn from it for the next time, but it was too complicated, I could hear it all now, her hesitation and my groping for words, for what? It was over, she didn’t want to be with me, simple as that.

Still weak at the knees and shaking, I got up and walked home. Washed my face slowly in cold water in the bathroom, drew the curtains, didn’t want anything from outside to slip in, put on Motörhead, Ace of Spades, but it felt wrong, so I took it off and put on the new solo record by Paul McCartney instead and started a Desmond Bagley book I had bought with my own money called The Vivero Letter. I had read it before, but it was about the pyramids in South America, the enormous underwater grottos, where the protagonists dived in search of a hoard of gold others were also after …

When I sat down to have supper Mom looked at me and smiled.

“It might be time for you to start wearing a deodorant, Karl Ove?” she said. “I can buy you one tomorrow.”

“Deodorant?” I repeated stupidly.

“Yes, don’t you think so? You’ll be starting at the new school soon.”

“You do stink, in fact,” Yngve said. “No girls like that, you know.”

Was that why?

But when I asked Yngve about it afterward, he smiled and said he doubted it was that simple.

The next morning Dad came in and told me I couldn’t spend the whole summer in bed reading, I had to get out, what about a swim? he said.

I closed my book without a word and walked past him without a second glance.

I sat on the concrete barriers for a few minutes throwing pebbles into the road. But I couldn’t stay there, everyone would see that I had nothing to do or anyone to be with, so I trudged down toward the big cherry tree at the edge of the forest by the road, where Kristen’s field started, to see if the cherries were ripe enough to eat yet. Who owned this tree was unclear, some said it was a wild cherry, others said it belonged to Kristen, but we had still stripped it every summer since we were old enough to climb, and no one had complained so far. Knowing every branch, I climbed almost to the top and along a branch until it began to bend. The berries weren’t quite ripe yet, the skin was hard and green on one side, but the other exhibited a faint redness and that was enough for me to bite into their skins, chew and swallow, and spit the pits as far as I could afterward.

Sitting there, I saw Jørn come cycling toward me. He was holding a canister of gasoline on the luggage rack with one hand and steering with the other. When he spotted me he braked gently and stopped.

“Karl Ove!” he shouted.

I climbed down as fast as I could. It took roughly the same time to clamber down as it took him to get off his bike and come to the tree because by the time I was on the ground he was only a few meters from me. Our eyes met, then I hared off, up toward the forest.

“I only wanted to say I was sorry!” he said. “About yesterday! I heard you crying.”

I didn’t turn.

“I didn’t mean it!” he said. “Come back down, so that we can shake hands on it!”

Ha ha, I thought, and stumbled on up between thickets and bushes until I was at the top and could watch him amble back to his bike, get on, and continue on his wobbly way down to the boats. Then I went back down. But the hard, bitter cherries had lost their fascination, so I gave up on the tree, and instead wandered off in the hope that someone would appear on the road after a while. Sometimes people came out if they saw you from a window, so I went for a walk up the hill, staring into the gardens on both sides as I went. Not a soul anywhere. People were in their boats or they had driven to swimming holes on the far side of the island or they were at work. Tove Karlsen’s husband was lying on a sunbed in the middle of their yellowing lawn with a radio beside him. Fru Jacobsen, the mother of Geir, Trond, and Wenche, was sitting under a parasol on the veranda smoking. On her head she was wearing a white bucket hat. She had covered the rest of her body in light, white clothes. Their two-year-old brother was sitting on the floor beside her; I glimpsed him between the bars of his playpen. Behind me, someone called my name. I turned. It was Geir; he sprinted up with his palms facing inward.

He stopped in front of me.

“Where’s Vemund?” I said.

“On vacation,” Geir said. “They left today. Are you coming in the boat?”

“All right,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

Geir shrugged.

“Gjerstadsholmen. Or one of the small islands beside it?”

“OK.”

Geir only had a row boat, so the radius of his activities was much more limited than that of the other boat owners. Nevertheless, it took us out to the islets and on occasion we had rowed several kilometers along the coast of the island. He wasn’t allowed to row in Tromøya Sound.

We scrambled on board, I pushed off, he positioned the oars in the rowlocks, applied force with his feet, and rowed so hard, with his oars so deep, that a grimace distorted his entire face.

“Ugh,” he groaned at every pull. “Ugh. Ugh.”

We glided along the light-blue surface of the sea, which was sporadically ruffled by gusting shoreward winds. The waves further out in the sound had white tips.

Geir turned and located the little island, adjusted his course with one oar, and then resumed his grunts while I hung my hand in the water and rested my eyes on the little there was of a wake.

As we approached, I stood up, leaped ashore, and pulled the boat into a tiny inlet. I didn’t know how to tie any knots, so it was Geir who tethered the rope to one of the metal rods that appeared to be fixed to every single little crag in the archipelago.

“Feel like a swim?” he said.

“Fine by me,” I said.

On the side facing Tromøya Sound, a rock rose from the sea into a two-meter-high pinnacle from which we jumped and dived. It was cold in the wind but warm in the water, so we swam for almost an hour before getting out and lying on the cliff to dry.

When we had dressed, Geir took a lighter from his pocket and showed it to me.

“Where did you get hold of that?” I said.

“It was in the cabin,” he said.

“Want to set fire to something?”

“Yes, well, that was the idea.”

Grass grew in all the cracks on the rock face, and in the middle of the islet there was a grass plain.

Geir crouched down, cupped his hand around the lighter, and set fire to a little tuft. It caught at once with a clear, transparent flame.

“Can I try?” I said.

Geir stood up, swept his stiff bangs to one side, and passed me the lighter.

“Hey!” I said. “Watch out! It’s spreading!”

Geir laughed and stamped on the fire. It was as good as out when flames suddenly flared up further away, where he had already put it out.

“Did you see that?” he said. “It started all on its own!”

He stamped it out, and I walked over to the plain and lit the grass there. At that moment a strong wind gusted in. The fire was raised like a little carpet.

“Give me a hand,” I said. “There’s so much to put out.”

We jumped and stamped for all we were worth, and the fire was suffocated.

“Give me the lighter,” Geir said.

I passed it to him.

“Let’s light the grass in lots of places at once,” he said.

“OK,” I said.

He lit it where he was, passed me the lighter, I ran to the other side and lit it there, ran over to him, to where he had moved, and he lit it there.

“Can you hear it crackling!” he said.

It was indeed. The fire crackled and spat as it slowly ate its way across. Where I had lit the grass the fire resembled a snake.

Another rush of wind blew in off the sea.

“Ooooh yikes!” Geir said as the flames rose and took a substantial chomp out of the middle.

He started stamping like a wild man. But suddenly it didn’t help.

“Give me a hand,” he said.

I heard a growing panic in his voice.

I started stamping as well. Another blast of wind, and now some of the flames were up to our knees.

“Oh, no!” I shouted. “It’s burning like hell over there, too!”

“Take your sweater off! We’ll put it out with those. I saw them do it in a film once!”

We took off our sweaters and began to beat the ground with them. The wind continued to whip up the flames, which spread even further with every gust.

Now the grass was well alight.

We stamped and beat at the flames like crazy men, but it was no use.

“It’s no good,” Geir shouted. “We won’t be able to put this out.”

“No,” I said. “It’s just getting worse and worse!”

“What shall we do?”

“I don’t know. Can we use the bailer, do you think?” I said.

“The bailer? Are you completely stupid or what?”

“No, I am not stupid,” I said. “It was just a suggestion.”

Oh, no. The fire was burning out of control. I could feel the heat from several meters away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Geir said. “Come on!”

And so, as the flames danced and crackled across the grass, with ever greater ferocity, we shoved out the boat. Geir got behind the oars and began to row, even harder than before.

“God Almighty,” he kept saying. “What a fire! What a fire!”

“Yes,” I said. “Who would have thought it?”

“Not me anyhow.”

“Me neither. Hope no one sees it.”

“Makes no difference,” Geir said. “The important thing is that no one saw us.”

On reaching land we dragged the boat deep into the forest to hide any possible traces. There was soot on our T-shirts; we dipped and wrung them in the water, and for safety’s sake we removed our shorts and rinsed them as well. If anyone asked we would say we had been swimming in our shorts and our T-shirts had fallen in the sea. Then we dived in to get rid of the smell of fire and walked home.

From a distance I could see there was no one in the front garden. I stopped in the hall: not a sound. Slipped into the boiler room, hung up the T-shirt, and went up to my room bare-chested, took another T-shirt from the wardrobe, and changed my shorts.

From the window in Yngve’s room I saw Dad lying on the sun bed on the lawn. He could lie in the sun for hours without moving, like a lizard. And the tan he had bore witness to it. The sound of a radio drifted over from somewhere; Mom must have been sitting on the terrace under the living-room window.

An hour later she came into my room with some deodorant for me. MUM for Men, it was called. It was a glass bottle, blue, and smelled sweet and good. I thought: for men. I was a man. Or a young man at least. I would be starting a new school in a few weeks and would use the deodorant.

She explained I should rub it in under my arms after washing, but always after washing, never without, otherwise the smell would be worse.

After she had gone I did as she said, inhaled the new aroma for a while, then resumed the book I was reading, it was Dracula, my all-time favorite, I was reading it for the second time, but it was just as exciting now.

“Supper’s up!” Mom called from the kitchen, I put it down and went in.

Dad was sitting in his place, dark-skinned and dark-eyed. Mom poured boiling water in the tea pot and put it down on the table between us.

“Martha has invited us to their cabin today,” she said.

“Out of the question,” Dad said. “Did she say anything else?”

Mom shook her head.

“Nothing special.”

I looked down at the table and ate as fast as I could without giving the appearance of haste.

An engine was started up nearby, it coughed a couple of times, then died. Dad got up to look out the window.

“Isn’t Gustavsen away?” he said.

No one answered; he looked at me.

“Yes,” I said. “But not Rolf or Leif Tore. They’re the only ones at home.

The car was started again. This time the engine was revved hard. Then it was put into first gear, and the drone rose and sank and stuttered.

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

I stood up to see.

“Sit down!” said Dad.

I sat down.

“What’s going on?” Mom said.

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

He turned and looked at Mom.

“Isn’t that incredible?” he said.

Jerking and stuttering, the drone went up the hill.

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

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

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

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

“Think so,” I said.

“Good night then.”

“Good night.”

He came in before I switched off the light.

“Sit up,” he said.

I sat up.

He fixed me with a long stare.

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

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

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

I glanced up and met his eye.

“Have you?” he said.

I looked down.

“No,” I said.

There it was, his hand around my ear.

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

“Noooo!” I yelled.

He let go.

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

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

“Why would Rolf lie?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

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

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

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

But he had known I had done something.

How did he know?

How could he have known?

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

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

We laughed so much we almost fell in the water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A dead seagull,” I said.

He lowered the flashlight.

“Let me see,” he said. “Where is it?”

“There,” I said, pointing.

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

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

“Do you think so?” I said.

“Yes, they still have chicks in the nests. That was why they were so angry at us. Come on.”

Back toward the glittering lights of Arendal, through Tromøya Sound to the quay, with the constant clicking of the crabs and the ghostly rattle from the two full tubs. Dad boiled them as soon as he got home, and there was a sense of liberation at witnessing the pitilessness of the operation: they were taken from the tubs alive, they were dropped into the boiling water alive, and, dead, they floated around slowly on their backs in their bone-white and leaf-brown shells.

Two days after our nocturnal trip Dad was transferred to Kristiansand. He had been offered a job at a gymnas in Vennesla, it was too far to commute, so he had rented a flat in a block in Slettheia. He took all the things he needed in three loads of a hired trailer, and from then on he turned up at home every weekend, and after a while barely that. The idea was that he would look for a house in the Kristiansand area and we would move there the following summer.

It was a great relief when he left. And an incredible stroke of luck that he would change his job the precise autumn I started at the school where he had been employed for thirteen years. If he had been working there I would have felt his eyes on me the whole time and hardly dared to lift a finger without first considering the consequences. That was how it had been for Yngve. But that was not how it would be for me.

The first days at my new school reminded me of those we had experienced when we started the first class six years earlier. All the teachers were new and unfamiliar, all the buildings were new and unfamiliar, and apart from those in our class, all the other students were new and unfamiliar. Here, other rules and codes held sway; here, other rumors and stories circulated; here, the atmosphere was quite different. No one played at this school. No one did French skipping, no one did any skipping, no one played ball, no one played tag or any of the games we played on the playground. The sole exception was soccer. No, what kids did during the break here, in the new school, was lounge about. The smokers hung around in a corner on their own by the wet weather shelter, chatting and laughing and flicking their lighters and smoking their cigarettes, some of them in leather jackets, some in denim jackets, almost all with a moped of some description because a vehicle was part of the life they led. Rumors circulated about some of them, that they had been involved in burglaries, for example, that they had turned up at school drunk, or even that they had tried drugs, which of course they didn’t deny, but nor did they confirm it, they were somehow surrounded by an air of mystery and danger, and who else but John should stand side by side with them on the very first normal school day, laughing his gruff laugh? All of those standing there despised bookish learning, hated school, most were good with their hands, and already wanted to be out in the world of work in the eighth year, and they were given permission, all lost causes were given permission, the school was only too happy to get rid of them. But, the cigarette hanging from the corner of the mouth aside, in practice they behaved no differently from any of the other students because they hung around in gangs as well and chatted and laughed. The girls stood in groups, the boys in other groups. Sometimes the boys baited the girls and there could be a bit of running back and forth and jeering, and on rare occasions fights broke out between two boys, which attracted everyone on the playground to the two of them, like swimmers on a tidal wave, it was impossible to resist.

It took us several weeks to adjust to our new school life. Everything had to be tested. We had to explore the teachers’ limits and preferences. We had to explore the boundaries. Of what went on inside the classroom walls and what went on outside.

In natural sciences we had Larsen, the teacher who had come to school drunk, he always looked as if he had spent the night on the sofa in his clothes and had just been awoken, whatever time of day we had him, he was always a bit torpid and unfocused, but he loved experiments, smoke, and bangs, so we liked his lessons. In music we had Konrad, he was in charge of the youth club, he wore blouse-like shirts under a black vest, had glasses, a round face, moustache, and a little bald patch, was jovial and youthful, so he was on first-name terms with all of us; for math we had Yngve’s previous form teacher, Vestad, a ruddy-faced, bald man with glasses and gimlet eyes; in domestic science, we had Hansen, a bespectacled, gray-haired, strict, missionary-type Frøken who seemed to be genuinely interested in teaching us to fry fishcakes and boil potatoes; in English, Norwegian, history, and social sciences we had our form teacher, Kolloen, a tall, thin man in his late twenties with pointed features and very little patience, who generally kept a distance from us but who could show flashes of empathy and sympathy.

These teachers not only gave general comments and evaluations, as the teachers at our first school had done, no, here they gave us grades for everything we did. This created a very new tension in the class for now we were all given our ideas of one another’s strengths and weaknesses in black and white. It was impossible to keep your grades secret, or it was possible, but it was regarded as bad form. I averaged around a B or B+ and on rare occasions achieved an A, and dropped to a C, but if I didn’t keep the grades quiet inside the classroom, I began to tone them down outside as in recent months I had begun to detect signs that it was not cool to be good at school, that an A, despite what one might assume, was indicative of a character flaw, a deficiency, and not the opposite, which originally it had been meant to express. My status had long been on the wane, now I tried to reverse the process and reestablish a good reputation without of course thinking of anything specific or tangible, it was all based on hunches and intuition according to the social codes people confronted everywhere. In this task I had a huge advantage, namely soccer, where I had met many of the boys in the eighth and ninth classes, among whom there were four or five who were really respected by both boys and girls. I was the only person in my class who could go over to the gang Ronny was in, for example, or Geir Helge, or Kjell, or all of them at once, without them staring at me with eyebrows raised or starting to harass me. They didn’t think that much of me either, I didn’t get a lot from them, but that wasn’t the main point, the main point was that I could actually stand there and be seen standing there. Geir and Geir Håkon and Leif Tore had gone overnight from being little nabobs to becoming little idiots, here they were nobody, here they had to build themselves up anew, and God knows whether they would manage that in the course of the three years they had. I didn’t look their way any longer, except in class, which no longer counted.

During the first weeks of school Lars became my new best friend. He was in the parallel class and so represented something new: he lived in Brattekleiv, where we from Tybakken seldom went, and he played soccer. He was sociable, knew a lot of people, and got along well with everyone. He had curly, auburn hair, was permanently in a good mood, had a loud, ringing, confident laugh, and teased everyone, rarely in a malicious way. His father was a former European skating champion, had participated in various world championships and Olympic tournaments, among them Squaw Valley, their basement was full of cups, medals, diplomas, and a large, dried-up and faded laurel wreath. He was a friendly and considerate though firm man, married to a Dane who couldn’t do enough for those around her.

With Lars as a friend everything that Tybakken could throw at me bounced off. At the same time I had changed, it happened almost from one day to the next, I was no longer interested in good deeds, quite the contrary, I started swearing, I went apple scrumping, I threw stones at street lamps and shed windows, I was prone to talking back in class and I stopped praying to God. The freedom there was in that! I loved apple scrumping, and the greater the risk the better. Stopping my bike by the curb in the morning on the way to school, sprinting into a garden and helping myself to five or ten apples in broad daylight and then just straddling my bike and continuing on my way as though nothing had happened gave me a good feeling I hadn’t known before and hadn’t even known existed. One of the gardens I passed was newly established, and in the middle there was a little apple tree, with a single apple on it, and it didn’t require much imagination to see that the apple had special significance for the father who had planted the tree that spring and for his two children who were looking forward to the day the apple, which for them must have been the apple, became ripe. It was their apple that I saw dangling there every morning on the way to school and that in the end I grabbed.

Not in the evening when it was dark and the odds of doing it unseen were good, no, I did it in the morning on the way to school, just dropped the bike, climbed over the fence, walked across the lawn, snatched the apple, and sank my teeth into it as I was walking back. A world had opened. I wasn’t stealing from shops yet, but it was on my mind, I was considering the possibility. At home, however, the only way I had changed was that I behaved more freely, was happier, chatted more, which Mom didn’t appear to find unusual since a lack of liberty was strongly attached to Dad’s presence and his anger only found its most extreme expression when we were alone with him. With Mom and Yngve I had always been like that. With Mom I had always talked about everything, that is, seldom about things directly concerning the world outside, I spoke more about things that I was thinking at any given point, all kinds of ideas and notions, but these days I was beginning to become aware of what I said and what I didn’t say to her, for I understood that it was important that one world had to be light and clean and exclude any of the other world’s many, long shadows.

This autumn both these worlds opened, but it was no mechanical garage door being raised, this was a living, organic process governed by a muscle: every Friday when Dad came home the world closed around me again, the old patterns were resumed, and I stayed there as little as possible. But whereas the world at home was familiar and always the same, the world outside was completely unpredictable, or, to be precise, what happened, happened clearly and unequivocally and without any ambivalence; it was the causes of these events that were so murkily unclear.

Every Friday there was a youth club meeting in the school’s old gymnasium. It was open to all the students in the school. For a couple of years it had been a mythological place for me, as fascinating as it was unattainable. I had seen Yngve dress with meticulous care before going there, even with a scarf once, I knew they had dancing there, table tennis, and billiards, sold Coke and hot dogs, sometimes showed films, held concerts, and put on special events. There was quite a lot of talk about us being allowed to enter this miraculous place one day, mostly by the girls, for in some strange way they were the ones who identified with it most closely, as though it were primarily for them, but only now and then for us boys.

The first time I cycled there it felt as though I was about to go through a rite of passage. The evening air was cool, up the hill toward the school I passed some year-seven girls, all of them had made a special effort with their appearances, none looked as they did every day. I parked the bike outside, ambled past the crowd of kids smoking, bought an admission ticket, and entered the dark converted gymnasium with kaleidoscopic spotlights, flashing disco balls, and music pounding out from two enormous loudspeakers. I looked around. There were lots of year-eight and year-nine girls there, none of whom dignified me with a glance, of course, but most people were year-sevens like me. We were the only ones for whom the club had novelty value.

The dance floor was empty. Most of the girls were sitting at tables by the wall; most of the boys were hanging out in other rooms, where the table tennis and pool tables were, or outside the exit where kids always gathered with mopeds during the evening. Many belonged to boys who had left school, but not so long ago that they had stopped keeping an eye on the girls.

But I wasn’t there to play table tennis or hang around the parking lot with a Coke in my hand. I liked music, I liked girls, and I liked dancing.

I didn’t dare dance on my own on an empty floor. But when a couple of girls I was friends with tentatively began to dance and two more joined them, I also ventured out.

Captivated by the rhythm and the pleasurable awareness that I was so visible, I danced away. One song, two songs, and then I went to find someone I knew. Bought a Coke and sat down with Lars and Erik.

My whole being, with my liking for clothes, my long eyelashes, and soft cheeks, my know-all attitude, and poorly concealed academic prowess, was fertile and ready ground for a pre-puberty catastrophe. My behavior on these evenings didn’t exactly improve matters. But of that I knew nothing. I saw nothing from the outside, I experienced everything from the inside, where all that counted was the seductive, pumping rhythm of “Funkytown,” the Bee Gees’ strange falsetto singing, Springsteen’s catchy “Hungry Heart,” the glittering darkness, all the girls moving around inside it, with their breasts and thighs, mouths and eyes, the exciting aromas of perfume and sweat, that was what this was about. I could return home after these Friday evenings with my head totally in a spin, where normality had been cast under some mysterious spell and suddenly appeared in a murky light, unclear in a shadowy way, but endlessly rich and alluring, full of hope and possibilities. Because, hey, this was the gym we were talking about! This was Sølvi, Hege, Unni, and Marianne! Geir Håkon, Leif Tore, Trond, and Sverre! This was hot dogs and ketchup and mustard! The tables and chairs were the same ones that were in our classrooms. The bars on the walls, the ones we had in gym class. But they were of no significance when the darkness came and the flashing lights filled it, when everything was sucked into the dark circle of magic, so full of promise, when everything was dusky eyes and lovely, soft bodies, pounding hearts, and jangling nerves. I left the youth club after the first Friday in a daze, I arrived there on the next, tense and full of expectancy.

What was brilliant about the place was that it made it easier for you to approach girls. Usually they were out of your reach, in recent months the majority had a blasé, world-weary air about them, they sat there in the sun chatting or knitting during the breaks with their cassette recorders on, most of what we did was childish, they were impossible to reach. Even though I tried, because I still spoke their language, it never led to anything. As soon as the bell rang we went our separate ways.

But at the youth club it was different, there you could go straight up to a girl and ask her to dance. So long as you didn’t set your sights too high and approach the most attractive year-nine with boys buzzing round her, it always went well, they said yes and all you had to do was step onto the floor, press yourself against her warm, soft body, and sway from side to side until the song had finished. The hope was that it would develop into something more, perhaps being followed by stolen glances and tiny mischievous smiles, but even if it didn’t, these moments had value in themselves, not least because of all the promises they bore of a future paradise in complete nakedness. All the girls I had gone out with so far, Anne Lisbet, Tone, Mariann, and Kajsa, went to school and were at the youth club, but even though I could still feel a stab in the heart when I saw them with boys, they were dead to me, history, from them I wanted nothing except that they shouldn’t say anything to others about the person I had been. Especially in Kajsa’s case. I had realized that what happened in the forest was ridiculous, I had behaved like a complete clod, I was deeply ashamed, and had decided long ago that I would never tell anyone, not even Lars. Especially not Lars. But she had no reason to feel ashamed, and I kept a bit of an eye on her when she was in the vicinity, to see whether she would lean forward and whisper, and everyone would look at me. It didn’t happen. Instead the body blows came from other, unexpected sources. Right from the fourth class I’d had my eye on Lise in the parallel class, she was good-looking and I liked watching her, the way she smiled, what she wore, the sharpness in her character, she was one of those who would say if she didn’t agree, she was fearless, but her facial expressions were gentle, and when we started the seventh class, her figure was beautifully rounded. More and more my eyes were drawn to her. She was Mariann’s best friend, and after the arguments since I had ended it with her had subsided Mariann and I would often sit together and chat or walk together back from school, and it was on one of those occasions she repeated something Lise had said about me that day.

I had gone into the old gymnasium, which during the day was used as a dining hall where we could tuck into our lunch boxes in the breaks. I had gone in, and when Lise, who was sitting at a very full table, saw me coming she had said, “Yuk, he’s so revolting! I get the heebie-jeebies whenever I see him!”

“Well, I don’t agree,” Mariann added after she had told me. “I don’t think you’re a jessie, either.”

“Jessie?” I said.

“Yes, that’s what everyone says.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

And as if there had been some secret pact not to call me a jessie to my face, before I had been properly but discreetly informed, after the conversation with Mariann it began to be used against me, spreading with the speed of sound. Suddenly I was the jessie. Everyone called me that. The girls in the class, the girls from other classes, some of the boys in the class, boys from other classes, in fact, even on the soccer team they would call me that. One day John turned to me in training and said, “What a damned jessie you are.” Even younger kids, fourth-years on the estate, had picked it up and would shout it after me. “Jessie, jessie, jessie,” I heard all around me. A sentence had been passed, and it could not have been worse. If I was arguing with someone, for example Kristin Tamara, she swept away all the arguments and crushed me totally by just saying: “You’re such a jessie. You jessie. Hey, Jessie! Come here, Jessie.” This got me down, I thought of almost nothing else, it was like a black wall in my consciousness and impossible to escape. It was the worst; there was nothing I could do.

It wasn’t as if I could behave in a less effeminate way for a couple of days and then everyone would say, “Oh, you aren’t a jessie after all!” No, this went deeper, and it would be there forever. They had something on me and they used it for all it was worth. Apart from Lars, he just said I shouldn’t take any notice, and for that I was grateful, one of my first thoughts when this all started was that Lars would no longer want to be seen with me, suddenly he had a lot to lose. But it didn’t bother him. Neither Geir nor Dag Magne nor Dag Lothar said it. And of course none of the teachers or parents. But everyone else did. The term undermined any other qualities I had, it made no difference what I could or couldn’t do, I was a jessie.

In a biology lesson, as we were about to focus on human reproduction, as Fru Sørsdal called it, Jostein from the parallel class, our goalkeeper, came into the class and sat down at a free table. At first he wasn’t noticed, the lesson began, Fru Sørsdal talked about homosexuality, and Jostein said, Karl Ove knows all about that! He’s one himself! You should ask him to tell you. The laughter that followed was desultory, he had gone too far and was at once ejected, but a seed was sown. Was I perhaps homosexual as well? Was that what was wrong with me? I began to ponder on that. I was a jessie, perhaps even a homo, and, if so, all hope was lost. Then there would be nothing to live for. Dark times, they had never been as dark as now.

I said nothing to Mom, of course, but after a few weeks I plucked up courage and told Yngve. He was on his way up the hill to the shop when I caught him.

“Are you in a hurry or what?” I said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got a problem,” I said.

“Oh, yes?” he said.

“They’re calling me names,” I said.

He glanced at me as though he didn’t really want to know.

“What names?”

“Yeah …,” I said. “Well, it’s …”

He stopped.

“What are they calling you? Tell me!”

“Well, they call me a jessie,” I said. “I’m the jessie.”

Yngve laughed.

How could he laugh?

“That’s no big deal, Karl Ove,” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Of course it is! Don’t you understand?”

“Think about David Bowie,” he said. “He’s androgynous. It’s a good thing in rock, you see. David Sylvian as well.”

“Androgynous?” I said, so disappointed that he hadn’t understood a thing.

“Yes, ambiguous sexual identity. A bit woman, a bit man.”

He looked at me.

“It’ll pass, Karl Ove.”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” I said, turning and walking back home while Yngve continued up the hill.

I was right, it never stopped, but somehow I became accustomed to it, that was how it was, I was the jessie, and even if thoughts about it tormented me in a way I had not experienced before, and the shadows it cast were long, there was enough happening around me, most of such an intensity it nullified everything else while this carried on.

We drifted around, that was what we did. Actually I always had but whereas the point for Geir and me during all these years had been to seek out secret places, places for ourselves, the opposite was now the case, with Lars we sought places where something might happen. We hitchhiked everywhere, to Hove if there was something going on there, over to Skilsø, to the east of the island, hanging around outside B-Max in the hope that something might happen, someone might come, hanging out around the Fina station, drifting around town, cycling up to the new sports hall even though we weren’t going to do any training, up to the parish hall where Ten Sing had their rehearsals, because at the sports hall there were girls, at Ten Sing there were girls, and that was all we talked and thought about. Girls, girls, girls. Who had big breasts and who had small ones. Who might become attractive and who was attractive. Who had the nicest butt. Who had the best legs. Who had the nicest eyes. Who we might have a chance with. Who was unattainable.

One dark winter evening we caught the bus to Hastensund, where there was a girl who went to Ten Sing, she had blonde hair, was a bit on the chubby side, but was stunningly beautiful, we were interested in her even if she was a year older, we knocked at the door, and then we sat there in her room, chatting shyly about this and that, burning with lust, and on the bus home we were so full of emotion we could barely utter a word.

One weekend Mom visited Dad in Kristiansand and Lars stayed over with me, we ate potato chips, drank Coke, ate ice cream, and watched TV, it was in the spring, the night before the first of May, the TV was showing a rock concert that night to keep Oslo kids indoors who might otherwise be wandering the streets and throwing stones. We didn’t have any porn magazines, I didn’t dare keep any in the house despite the fact that we were on our own, so we had to make do with Insect Summer by Knut Faldbakken, the passage I had read so many times the book automatically opened at the right page. We decided we couldn’t be alone, we had to invite some girls, and Lars suggested Bente.

“Bente?” I said. “Which Bente?”

“The one who lives up here,” Lars said. “She’s lovely.”

“Bente?” I almost shrieked. “But she’s younger than us!”

I had seen her all my life, she had always been smaller, never a girl I had considered. But now she had developed, Lars declared, he had seen, she had breasts and everything. And she was a beauty. A real beauty!

I hadn’t noticed, but now that he said it …

We threw on our jackets and ran up the hill and rang her doorbell. She was surprised to see us, but down to our house, no, she couldn’t do that, not tonight.

OK, we said, another time then!

Yes, another time.

So back we went and sat down in front of the TV to watch one band after the other while discussing what we saw and all the girls we would have liked to watch it with. Siv from our class, whom I hadn’t considered either, suddenly became the focus of our interest, we rang her doorbell, too. What would happen afterward we had no idea.

And so we went on, drifting around, restless, full of ungovernable desire. We read porn magazines, it physically hurt to look at the pictures, they were so close and yet so far, so endlessly far away, not that that prevented them from arousing all these tremendously powerful feelings in us. I felt like shouting as loudly as I could every time I saw a girl, knocking her over, and tearing off all her clothes. The thought made my throat constrict and my heart pulsate. It was incredible, the thought that they were naked under the clothes they were wearing beside us, all of them, and they could, theoretically, remove them themselves. It was an impossible thought.

How could everyone walk around knowing that, without ultimately running completely amok?

Did they repress it? Were they acting cool?

I couldn’t do that. I thought of nothing else, it was all I had in my head from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to bed at night.

Yes, we looked at porn magazines. We also played cards, we pulled out the pack everywhere and in all situations, we went to friends’ homes, we went to the youth club, listened to music, played soccer, went swimming for as long as it was possible, went apple scrumping, drifted around, hung out here, hung out there, and chatted nonstop.

Kjersti?

Marianne?

Tove?

Bente-Lill?

Kristin?

Lise?

Anne Lisbet?

Kajsa?

Marian?

Lene?

Lene’s sister?

Lene’s mother?

Never, later in life, have I had my finger on the pulse the way I had then with the girls living around us in those years. Later I may have doubted whether Svein Jarvoll’s Journey to Australia was a good or a bad novel, or whether Hermann Broch was a better writer than Robert Musil, but I was never ever in any doubt that Lene was a good-looking girl and that she was in quite a different league from, for example, Siv.

Lars had a lot going on around him as well, he sailed quite a bit, with his mother and father, and alone in the Europe dinghy. He was good at skiing, light years better than me, sometimes he went with his father to Åmli or Hovden and he had his old pals out there, too, Erik and Sveinung. When he was busy I stayed in my room, played music, read books, talked to Yngve or Mom. I never went into the forest, up into the hills, down to the pontoons, or into Gamle Tybakken anymore.

One Sunday at the end of the winter I cycled out to see Lars. He was going to Åmli with his father and Sveinung to ski down the slalom slope there. I couldn’t join them as it had already been planned for a long time. I was so disappointed and it came so unexpectedly that my eyes filled with tears. Lars saw, and I turned away and cycled off. Tears, that was no good, that was the worst.

He called when I got home. There was room for me, too. They could drop by and pick me up. I should have said no, to show that I wasn’t upset and should have explained to him that the tears — I had seen from his expression that he didn’t like them — were not tears, I had something in my eye, the wind had upset my cornea. But I couldn’t, Åmli was a big slalom slope with a lift and everything, I had never been there, so I swallowed my pride and joined them.

His father skied with a fifties elegance I had never seen before.

But the tears had disappointed Lars, and they had disappointed me. Why couldn’t they stay away now that I was thirteen years old? Now that they could not be excused?

One woodworking lesson John started to tease me, I cried, and was so angry I hit him over the head with a wooden bowl as hard as I could, it must have hurt and I was thrown out of the classroom, into the corridor, but he just laughed and came over to me afterward and apologized, I didn’t realize it would make you cry, he said. I didn’t mean it. Everyone had seen how feeble and pathetic I was, and suddenly all the efforts I had made to appear tough, to be one of the tough boys, had gone down the drain. John, who had shown his butt to the teacher on the first day at the new school and who had come in one morning with his eyebrows shaved off and who had started ditching classes. Everyone was expecting him to be one of those looking for a job while still in the eighth class. He had to be rescued. I tried to rescue myself. Lars had weights in his father’s garage, but he pumped iron, too, and one afternoon I asked if I could have a try.

“Be my guest,” he said.

“How much do you lift?” I said.

He told me.

“Can you put the weights on for me?” I said.

“Can’t you do that yourself?”

“I don’t know how to.”

“OK. Come with me.”

I went downstairs with him. He added the weights and put the bar in position. Looked at me.

“I have to do this on my own,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” he said.

“No. Go ahead, I’ll be up soon.”

“OK.”

When he had gone I lay down on the bench. I couldn’t budge the bar. I couldn’t lift it a centimeter. I removed half of the weights. But I still couldn’t lift it. A fraction, though, perhaps two or three centimeters.

I knew you had to lower the bar onto your chest and raise it with your arms fully stretched.

I removed two more.

But I still couldn’t do it.

In the end, I had removed all of the weights and lay there lifting the bar, and nothing but the bar, up and down a few times.

“How was it?” Lars said as I emerged. “How much did you manage?”

“Not as much as you,” I said. “I had to take off two of the weights.”

“Hey, that’s not bad!” Lars said.

“Isn’t it?” I said.

Through all these years, right from the time when I was with Anne Lisbet in the first class, I thought I had learned something each time. That it would get better and better with every new girl I was with. After Kajsa there would be no more setbacks. After her, yes, it would all be fine, now I knew what it was about and could avoid any more mistakes.

But that was not how it turned out.

I fell in love with Lene. She was in the parallel class. She was the best-looking girl in the school. No contest, she won hands down. She was more beautiful than anyone else, but also shy, and I had never experienced that before. There was a fragility about her it was hard not to be attracted by and dream about.

She had a sister who was in the ninth class called Tove and she was the complete antithesis, although also beautiful, but in a boisterous, provocative, mischievous way. Both were very popular with the boys.

Lene only indirectly, though, she was the kind you looked at and pined for in secret. At least I did. Her eyes were narrow, her cheekbones high, cheeks soft and pale, often with a slight flush, she was tall and slim, she held her head at an angle, and often interlaced her fingers as she walked. But she also had something of her sister in her, you could occasionally see it when she laughed, the glint that appeared in her turquoise eyes, and in the obstinacy and unshakable certainty that sometimes shone through, so difficult to reconcile with the otherwise predominant impression of dreamy fragility. Lene was a rose. I looked at her and started to tilt my head the same way she did. That’s how I made contact with her, that’s how we had something in common. I couldn’t hope for more really, because I had set her on too high a pedestal to dare make any kind of approach. The thought of asking her to dance, for example, was absurd. Talking to her was unthinkable. I contented myself with looking and dreaming.

Instead I went out with Hilde. She asked me, I said yes, she was in the same class as Lene, she had a broad, powerful body, almost masculine, was half a head taller than me, with delicate features and a lovely, friendly personality, and she ended it with me two days later because, as she put it, you’re not in the slightest bit in love with me. With you, there is only Lene. No, I said, you’re wrong, but of course she was right. Everyone knew, I thought of nothing else, and when we were in the playground during the break I always knew where she was and who she was with, and that attentiveness couldn’t go unnoticed.

One day Lars said he had heard someone say they had heard her say she wasn’t at all ill-disposed toward me. Despite the fact that I was a jessie. Despite the fact that I had cried in the woodworking class. Despite the fact that I was slow on the soccer field and could barely manage a bench lift.

I looked at her on the playground, she met my eyes and smiled and turned away with pink cheeks.

I decided that I should strike while the iron was hot. I decided that it was now or never. I decided that I had nothing to lose. If she said no, well, nothing had changed.

If she said yes, on the other hand …

One Friday, therefore, I sent Lars over to her with a question. They had been in the same class for six years, he knew her well. And he returned with a smile playing around his lips.

“She said yes,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Now you’re going out with Lene.”

Then it started again.

Could I go over to her now?

I looked in her direction. She smiled at me.

What should I say when I was there?

“Off you go now,” Lars said. “Give her a kiss from me.”

He didn’t push me across the playground, but it wasn’t far from it.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

She looked down; one foot squirmed around on the tarmac.

God, how beautiful she was.

Ay yay yay yay.

“Thank you for saying yes,” my mouth said.

She laughed.

“My pleasure,” she said. “What class do you have now?”

“Class?”

“Yes.”

“Err … is it Norwegian?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said.

The bell rang.

“Will we see each other afterward?” I said. “After school, I mean?”

“All right,” she said. “I’ve got training in the sports hall. We can see each other afterward.”

The question was not how this would go, the question was how many days it would last before it stuttered and she brought it to an end. I knew that, but I tried anyway, I had to put up a fight, you could never be sure, and she was present inside me for every single waking minute, partly as a kind of unconstrained, excited feeling, a constant sensation, partly as a more nebulous perception of her essence and character. Yes, I would have to fight, even though I didn’t really have anything to fight with. I didn’t even know what the fight was about. To keep her, yes, but how? By being myself? Don’t make me laugh. No, I would have to draw on others, I realized that, and during these days I sought out the company of others with her so that all the conversation didn’t rest on my shoulders. Up to the sports hall with Lene, over to Kjenna’s with Lene, over to the Skilsø ferry with Lene. We had all been given a Bible at school, the preparations for our confirmation would start next autumn, and it struck me that I could ask her what she had done with her Bible and then I could say I had ditched mine, and I would have a theme going, so that I could ask people I met what they had done with their Bible. Lene listened, Lene followed me, Lene started to get bored. She was a rose, we kissed at a crossroads, and we walked hand in hand on the playground, but I was only a little boy and even though I had perfectly even, white teeth after my braces had been taken off, that wasn’t enough, Lene was bored with me, and one evening when she came to soccer practice with me I saw her leave the spectators’ stand and disappear, she was gone for the whole of the last hour, I went in and changed with the others, suspecting that something was wrong, stopped in the entrance hall where the reception desk and the Coke machine were and looked outside: there was Lene Rasmussen, there was Vidar Eiker, they were chatting and laughing, and I could see from the way she was laughing it was over. Vidar Eiker had left school the year before, he was one of the group who hung around at the Fina station, and he had a moped, which he was leaning on at this minute.

I went up into the stand and sat down.

After half an hour or so Hilde came over. She sat down beside me.

“I’ve got bad news, Karl Ove,” she said. “Lene’s ended it.”

“Yes,” I said, averting my head so that she couldn’t see the tears streaming down my cheeks. But she saw them because she stood up as if she had been burned.

“Are you crying?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“You really do love her, don’t you?” she said with surprise in her voice.

I didn’t answer.

“But Karl Ove,” she said.

I wiped my tears away with one hand, sniffled, and drew a slow, quivering breath.

“Is she out there now?”

She nodded.

“Shall I walk out with you?”

“No, no. You just go, Hilde.”

As soon as she had gone through the door at the end of the stand I got up, swung my bag onto my back, and left. Wiped my tears again, hurried along the corridor, emerged in the entrance hall, and opened the door to where they had been standing before.

I bowed my head and walked past.

“Karl Ove!” she said.

I didn’t answer, and as soon as they were out of sight I burst into a run.

Lene went out with Vidar, I was crushed for several months, but then spring came and with its immense power it washed everything aside. The year-eights and the year-nines were at school camp for a week, there were only the year-sevens left at school, and a kind of mania spread through the ranks of the boys in those days, we began to attack the girls, one stole up on them from behind and lifted their sweaters while another came at them from the front and groped their naked breasts as they screamed and struggled to get away, but never so loudly that any of the teachers heard. We did this in the corridors between the classrooms, we did it in the playground, and we did it on the unpopulated parts of the road to school. There were rumors that Mini, Øystein, and others in the Fina crowd had frigged Kjersti, held her down, pulled down her trousers, and stuck a finger inside her, so one evening Lars and I went up to her house, thinking perhaps that we could experience some of the same, but when we rang the bell it was her father who answered, and when Kjersti came down and we asked if we could come in, her lips formed a clear no, we would certainly not be allowed in, what were we thinking about?

But the glint in her eyes was even more brazen than that in our own; she understood exactly what we were after. A few weeks later we met at the Boat Fair in Hove where Lars and I had been at the Trauma stall selling lottery tickets, among them a winning ticket that we put aside and took with us when our stint finished, and we walked around looking at boats and people so as not to arouse suspicion, because we had a little scam in mind, then casually stopped by the stall, bought a ticket each, and opened them, and while I leaned forward with mine to ask if I had won a prize, Lars swapped his for the winning ticket. Christian and John were manning the stall now and they refused to believe Lars when he passed them the winning ticket. They said it was an old one. We denied this with such vehemence that in the end they agreed to give us half the winnings. We said fine and walked off with the enormous box of chocolates under one arm, bubbling with laughter and tremulous with fear at what we had done. Nearby, we bumped into Kjersti.

“Feel like a walk?” Lars said.

“OK,” Kjersti said, and my body felt so strange when she said that.

We walked through the forest and down to the pebble beach where we lay down and started on the chocolates.

She was wearing red trousers and a blue padded jacket and she said nothing as I gently stroked the outside of her thigh with my hand. Nor when I stroked the inside. Lars was doing the same on the other side.

“I know what you want,” she said. “But you’re not going to get it.”

“We don’t want anything,” I said, swallowing, my throat thick with desire.

“Nothing,” Lars said.

I stroked her crotch, placed my whole hand against it, and could have screamed out with happiness and frustration. Lars snuck a hand up to her jacket zipper and pulled it down, then put his hand up her sweater. I did the same. Her skin was hot and white, and I felt her breasts in my hand. The nipples were stiff, her breasts firm. I stroked her thigh again, put my hand on her crotch again, but then, gulping repeatedly, I made the mistake of pulling down the zipper of her trousers.

“No,” she said. “What are you thinking of?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She straightened up and pulled down her sweater.

“Any more chocolate?” she said.

“Yes, help yourself,” Lars said, and we sat there eating chocolate and staring across the sea as if nothing had happened. The breakers resembled white snowdrifts the second they crashed against the smooth, low rocks. Some seagulls swept past with their wings flapping. When the box was empty we got up and walked back through the forest to the fair. Kjersti said goodbye, see you later perhaps, and we decided to go home. But to do that we had to drop by the lottery stall to collect our bikes. Øyvind, our coach, was there, and he didn’t look happy when he caught sight of us. We denied everything. He said he couldn’t prove anything, but he knew what we had done. Why else would we have been content with half the prize? We denied it point blank. He said he was disappointed, he didn’t want to have to look at us any more that day, and we cycled home.

On Monday, before school began, Lars lifted up Siv’s sweater and I pressed both my hands against her breasts. She screamed and said we were childish and calmly walked off.

In the first lesson, which was Norwegian, we had to borrow a book from the library, read it during the week, and then write about it in an essay. I said I had read all the books in the library. Kolloen didn’t believe me. But it was true. I could tell him about every book he pulled out. In the end he allowed me to write about another book. Which meant I had nothing to do that lesson. I took out a history book and sat at the desk under the window. Outside, it was misty but warm. The playground was deserted. I flicked through the book and looked at the pictures.

Suddenly I saw one of a naked woman. She was so thin her hips protruded like bowls. All her ribs were visible. Between her legs there was a small, black tuft. Behind her there were rows of bunk beds in which I glimpsed other female figures.

My insides shook.

Not because she was so thin but because there was nothing attractive about her, although she was naked, and because on the next page there was a picture of an enormous pile of corpses in front of a deep grave where many bodies lay strewn. What I saw was this: the legs were only legs, the hands were only hands, the noses were only noses, the mouths were only mouths. Something that had been shaped and formed elsewhere was now here, scattered across the ground. When I stood up I felt nauseous and confused. As I had nothing to do I went out and sat against the wall. The sun warmed, despite being covered by mist. The grass growing in the cracks and hollows of the boulder in the middle of the playground, surrounded by walls and tarmac, was long and swayed to and fro in the gentle breeze. The nausea didn’t pass, it became associated with what I saw, it became a part of them. The green grass, the yellow dandelions, Siv’s bare breasts, Kjersti’s fat thighs, the skeletal woman in the book.

I got up and went back in, called Geir, and he came over with a quizzical look.

“I’ve found a picture of a naked woman,” I said. “Do you want to see it?”

“Of course,” he said, and I opened the book in front of him and pointed to the skeletal woman.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Oh, my God,” Geir said. “Ugh.”

“What’s the matter?” I said. “She’s naked, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yuk,” Geir said. “She looks as if she’s dead.”

That was exactly how she looked. Like the living dead. Or death in living form.

The next weekend Mom and I went to visit Dad. It was odd to see him in his flat. It was on a higher floor in a tower block, it was all white, the sun shone in through the windows, filling it completely, and there was so little furniture it almost seemed as if no one were living there.

What did he do here?

He drove us to Grandma and Grandad’s, where we ate, and then he drove us home. No one quite seemed to know when we were going to move, it was dependent on so many factors, the house had to be sold, a new one had to be bought, Mom had to find a job, we had to change schools, so I didn’t think too much about it. But I had no objection to leaving the estate or the school. It felt as if all my cards had been played. I made mistake after mistake. One day after gym, for example, when I was standing in the corridor outside the classroom, Kjersti came over to me.

“Do you know what, Karl Ove?” she said.

“No,” I said, fearing the worst, for her expression was sardonic.

“We’ve just been talking about you,” she said. “And we discovered that not one of the girls in the class likes you.”

I said nothing, I glared at her, filled with a sudden, enormous fury.

“Did you hear me?” she continued. “Not one of the girls in the class likes you!”

I smacked her cheek as hard as I could. The flash of my arm and the following slap, which turned her cheek crimson, caused people to turn their heads.

“You bastard,” she shouted, and punched me in the mouth. I grabbed her hair and pulled. She hit me in the stomach, kicked me in the calf, and grabbed my hair, too, we were a whirl of blows and kicks and hair-pulling, and I, poor, pathetic, miserable little shit, I burst into tears, it all became too much for me, a pathetic sob escaped my mouth; all those who had gathered around us within the space of seconds shouted, he’s crying, I heard them, but I couldn’t stop myself, and then I felt a heavy hand on my collar, it was Kolloen, he was holding Kjersti in the same way and asked what on earth was going on, are you fighting? I said it was nothing, Kjersti said it was nothing, and then we were frog-marched into the classroom, each with a teacher’s hand in the middle of our backs, me a laughingstock, for I had not only broken the rule about never crying but also the one about never fighting with a girl, Kjersti now had the status of a hero, for she had been hit and hit back, and she didn’t cry.

How low can you sink?

Kolloen said we had to shake hands. We did, Kjersti apologized, and smiled at me. The smile was not sardonic, it was heartfelt, in a way, as though we were complicit in something.

What did it mean?

In the last week of May the heat came, the whole class set off for Bukkevika to go swimming, the sand was white, the sea blue, and the sun burned in the sky above us.

Anne Lisbet emerged from the sea.

She was wearing a bikini bottom and a white T-shirt. It was wet, and her round breasts were visible. Her wet, black hair shone in the sun. She beamed her broadest smile. I watched her, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, but then I noticed something beside me, and turned my head, and there was Kolloen, he was watching her, too.

There was no difference in our gazes, I realized that at once, he saw what I saw and he was thinking what I was thinking.

About Anne Lisbet.

She was thirteen years old.

The moment didn’t even last for a second, he looked down as soon as I noticed him, but it was enough, and I’d had an insight into something that a moment before I didn’t even know existed.

Three days later Dad picked me up from school early, we were going off to look at a house, it was twenty kilometers from Kristiansand, by a river, we were considering buying it, now I had to say what I thought, and I had to be honest. From the way Dad was talking — it had a barn, the house was old, from the 1800s, it was on a big piece of land, you could have a normal garden and a vegetable garden, too, there were big, old fruit trees growing there, and perhaps we could keep hens, as well as grow our own potatoes, carrots, and herbs — I had already decided, I would tell him I liked it, whether I did or not.

When we arrived, with the sky blue, the grass green, and the river glinting down below I ran from window to window and peered in so that he could see how enthusiastic I was, which was not entirely insincere, just somewhat exaggerated, and the matter was decided. If it was available we would buy it. Mom applied for a job at the nursing college, Dad would continue at the gymnas, and I would start at a new school here. What Yngve would do was less clear. He refused to move. For the first time in his life he stood up to Dad. They argued, and that had never happened before. We had never argued with Dad. He was the one who told us off, and we were on the receiving end.

But there was Yngve saying no.

Dad was furious.

But Yngve continued to say no.

“I don’t want to spend my last year in Kristiansand,” he said. “Why should I? All my friends are here. I’ve only got one year of school left. It would be ridiculous to start afresh somewhere new.”

They stood face to face in the living room. Yngve was as tall as Dad.

I hadn’t noticed before.

“You might think you’re grown-up, but you’re not,” Dad said. “You have to stay with your family.”

“No, I do not,” Yngve said.

“All right,” Dad said. “Can you tell me how you’re going to manage? You won’t be getting one øre from me, you know.”

“I’ll take out a loan,” Yngve said.

“Who do you think will give you a loan?” Dad said.

“I can apply for a study loan,” Yngve said. “I’ve checked.”

“Are you going to take a study loan before you begin to study?” Dad said. “That’s very clever.”

“If I must, I must,” Yngve said.

“Where are you going to live?” Dad said. “The house will be sold, you know.”

“I’ll rent a bedsit,” Yngve said.

“You do that then,” Dad said. “But you won’t get any help from us. Not so much as a krone. Do you understand? If you want to live here, you can, but don’t you come running to us for any help. You’ll have to manage on your own.”

“OK,” Yngve said. “I’ll be fine.”

And that was what happened.

When the last day of the seventh class came, it had been announced that I was moving and my classmates of seven years had bought farewell presents. First of all, I was given a cabbage head as my name, Karl, as some called me, sounded in the broad dialect we spoke like “Kål,” cabbage, which became a nickname. Then I was given a cloth monkey because I looked like a monkey. That was it.

Then we went through the doors, and I never saw my classmates again.

But it wasn’t quite over. That evening there was to be a class party at Unni’s. Some of the girls met early that afternoon to get everything ready, and at around six the rest of us cycled over. The party was held in the garden and in the cellar, and as the summer night fell over the hills we could see across and all the red roofs of the houses on the estate glinted in the light of the setting sun, and the party slowly began to degenerate, even though no one was drinking. A year’s secret thoughts and desires began to stir. It was simply in the air. Hands wandered under sweaters, not as part of an assault or any brutality, it went on close by, among the lilac bushes in the garden, amid hot panting, mouths met, mouths kissed, and then some of the girls took off their tops, they walked around with their breasts bobbing, it was a kind of early puberty orgy that had been slowly building up steam and the very same girls who only one month earlier had said they didn’t like me offered themselves to me, one after the other, they sat on my lap, they kissed me, they rubbed their breasts against my face. The hierarchy the girls had been placed in, with some slowly climbing during autumn and others falling, had no significance here, it didn’t make any difference who it was, I pressed my face against their soft, white breasts, kissed their dark, erect nipples, ran my hands over their thighs and between their legs, and they didn’t say no, there wasn’t a no in their mouths on this night, instead they leaned forward and kissed me, their eyes were warm and dark, but also surprised, as mine must have been, is it really us doing this?

I haven’t seen any of them since that summer, and if I search for them on the Net to see what they look like or how life has treated them, there are no hits. They don’t belong to that class there, they belong to the class of blue- or white-collar parents who grew up outside the center and who have presumably remained outside the center of everything but their own lives. Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth. And, oh, wasn’t the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one’s own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?

After the moving van had left and we got into the car, Mom, Dad, and I, and we drove down the hill and over the bridge, it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that everything I saw I was seeing for the final time. That the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good. Little did I know then that every detail of this landscape, and every single person living in it, would forever be lodged in my memory with a ring as true as perfect pitch.