Some Rain Must Fall

~ ~ ~

Rounding off the week at either Wesselstuen or Henrik had started to become a habit. I hadn’t gone along the first two Fridays, but that afternoon I decided I couldn’t sit at home waiting every single weekend and, if Ingvild were to come this evening of all evenings, she would probably leave a note to say she had been.

During the month we had been at the Academy we had got to know the teachers better and better, they weren’t stiff and uncomfortable any more even though I had a suspicion the awkwardness would never quite go, it was in their characters and nature, especially in Fosse, who had less of the outgoing spirit that Hovland revealed with his repartee and the constant, though slightly evasive, glint in his eye. No such repartee with Fosse, no such glint. But he still got close to us, expressed his opinions about what we were discussing, at first in a serious tone, but that often dissipated into laughter, in his rather sniffling, semi-giggling way, and sometimes he told us anecdotes about experiences he’d had, which, taken as a whole, gave us a picture of who he was. Not a complete one though because he was a very private person, like Hovland, who hardly ever spoke about anything to do with his private life, but with what they revealed of themselves in class there was enough for me to have a sense of who they were. Fosse was shy but also self-assured, to a very high degree he knew who he was and what he was good at, the shyness was more like a cloak he had wrapped around himself. With Hovland it was the opposite, I established: with him the shyness was protected by his quick tongue and ironic sense of humour. It was obvious that Hovland and Fosse liked and respected each other, although what they wrote was like night and day. Twice they had sung a children’s song — ‘Blåmann, blåmann bukken min’ — at the end of the evening.

We walked up the gentle slope from Nøstet, put down our umbrellas, shook them and closed them, went up to the first floor at Henrik, found a table, ordered beers and chatted. It was several days since the immaturity comment had been made, and I had come up with a new idea for a novel, inspired somewhat by the handful of novels I had read by Borges and Cortázar that week, also any thoughts about Ingvild had been entirely lost in all the tensions at the Academy so I was in a relatively good mood. After maybe an hour most of us had drunk enough for the limits on what could be said and what could not, which everyone felt to varying degrees, started to loosen. Jon Fosse was describing his childhood and he said that at a certain point he could have ended up on the streets. Petra laughed in derision. You could not, she declared. You’re just mythologising your own past. On the streets indeed! Ha ha ha. No, no, Fosse insisted in his quiet way, looking down at the table, that was precisely how it had been. He could have been on the streets. Who’s ever heard of a street urchin in a village? Petra countered. No, this was Bergen, Fosse replied. Everyone listening to this exchange was ill at ease. Fortunately Petra dropped the topic. The evening continued, more beer was drunk, the atmosphere was good until Jon Fosse got up to go to the bar. The street urchin wants some beer, Petra said. Jon Fosse didn’t respond, got his beer, came back, sat down. Petra taunted him with another gibe a little later, in the same way, calling him a street urchin. In the end he rose to his feet.

‘Well, I can’t be bothered with this,’ he said, put on his jacket and went down the stairs.

Petra laughed as she looked down at the table.

‘Why did you do that? You made him leave,’ Trude said.

‘Argh, he’s so pompous and self-important. On the streets …’

‘But you didn’t have to bully him. What good could that do?’ I said. ‘We wanted him here. We thought it was fun drinking with him.’

‘Since when have you been our rep?’

‘Come on. You behaved very badly,’ Knut said.

‘Jon’s a nice friendly man. There’s no reason to treat him like that,’ Else Karin said.

‘Now all of you just pack it in,’ Petra said. ‘You’re a bunch of hypocrites. Everyone thought what he said about ending up on the streets was ridiculous.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said.

‘No, because you’re another one who’d like to be a street urchin. Street urchin! Have you ever heard anything so stupid!’

‘Now let’s drop this,’ Knut said. ‘You apologise on Monday if you dare.’

‘I certainly will not,’ Petra said. ‘But we can drop it. I agree. It’s a trivial matter.’

Everything was different after Fosse had gone, people packed up and left one by one soon after, apart from Petra and me, and we went to Café Opera. She asked if she could doss at my place, I said, of course, and we found ourselves a table and carried on drinking. I told her about my new idea for a novel. Firstly, it would consist of a variety of dialogues, people talking in various contexts, in cafés, on buses, in parks and so on, all the conversations would be about central themes in these people’s lives, so they spoke about something important, one said he had just been told he had cancer, for example, or a son had been sent to prison, perhaps for a murder, but then, I told Petra — who was listening, though not looking at me apart from the odd fleeting glance followed by one of her equally fleeting smiles — but then, the context for these conversations is slowly revealed. There was a man recording them on tape. Why did he do that? I said to Petra, well, come on, tell me, she answered, I smiled, she smiled, well, that’s what I’m working on, I said. He belongs to, or is employed by, an organisation, you see. In all towns of a certain size there are people who work for this organisation, they all go round recording conversations, which are written down and filed away somewhere, and this isn’t something that started this year, it’s been going on since time immemorial. I think there are conversations in existence from the Middle Ages, and from antiquity, thousands upon thousands of them, all in some way important to the respective individuals.

‘And?’ Petra said.

‘And? Nothing else. That’s it. Do you believe it?’

‘I think it’s a fun idea. But why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why do they collect conversations? What do they do with them?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I suppose they just document them.’

‘Now I’ve remembered what this reminds me of. Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Have you seen it? There are some angels going round and listening to people’s thoughts.’

‘But this is conversations. And they’re not angels.’

‘Yes, yes, but have you seen it?’

‘A long time ago. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of. Not at all, in fact.’

And it was true, I hadn’t had that film in my mind for one second, although I understood what she meant, there was a similarity.

‘Do you want another beer?’ I said, getting up.

‘Please,’ she said.

In the queue I scanned the room to see if Ingvild might have come, which I had been doing ever since I set foot in Café Opera, but she was nowhere to be seen. I raised two fingers in the air and, not without a mild sense of pride, saw the almost imperceptible twitch in the barman’s eye that told me he had registered the order, I was a dab hand at this game now.

What if they were angels?’

That would solve everything! They were collecting material for a Bible in reverse, one about humans they couldn’t understand. For them humanity was incomprehensible! So they analysed these conversations!

I placed the two large beers on the table and sat down.

‘I’ve heard you shouldn’t talk about what you’re planning to write,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ Petra said, not that interested, she was staring into the distance and her lips slid over her teeth the way they did when she was thinking about something else or when I imagined she was thinking about something else.

‘You should keep your powder dry, in a way,’ I said. ‘Save it.’

‘Ach, that’s just what people say. You do as you like. If you want to talk about it, you just talk away to your heart’s content.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said.

I always felt so pure and innocent when I was with her, like a squeaky-clean middle-class son, the teacher’s pet, good at school but zero at life. She told me that in recent weeks she had gone out nearly every night, on her own to the bar at Wesselstuen, and men always came up and bought her a drink, she didn’t spend a single krone all night, she said, and did nothing in return, except listen to them, not even that sometimes. It amused her, these men were entertaining, she said, and she would never have met them otherwise. I didn’t understand what pleasure she could derive from that, but I respected her, admired her even, for it, I had read Bukowski and Kerouac of course and all the other books about people hanging out in bars drinking, and I had been drawn to life in the glittering shadows ever since gymnas, but I didn’t know it, didn’t go there myself, to sit alone in a bar chatting with strangers would have been inconceivable for me, it was closer to my nature to make waffles alone in my bedsit, I reflected, that at least was the feeling Petra evoked in me, I was that type, a shallow happy-go-lucky chap who was always ringing mum and was a bit afraid of dad. She got off her high horse when she sat with me, and I didn’t understand why, but I was happy she did and so I just had to put up with her laughing at me and making derogatory comments. She did that to everyone anyway.

I looked behind me at all the small knolls, the heads.

Ingvild?

No.

Anyone else I knew?

No.

I looked at my watch. Half past eleven.

Angels studying the Bible in reverse!

Could I pull that one off?

‘I’m writing a short story about a hairdresser’s,’ Petra said. ‘There are two dogs lying in a basket. This is my idea!’

‘I’m sure it’ll be really good,’ I said.

‘Talking about it isn’t a problem anyway,’ she said, and smiled as her eyes narrowed into a sudden sneer.

‘Hello,’ said a familiar voice behind me.

It was Yngve.

‘Hello!’ I said. ‘I was hoping you would be out tonight.’

‘I’m just nosing around. I’ve come from work, thought I’d see if there was anyone here I knew.’

‘Get yourself a beer and sit down! This is Petra, by the way, from the Academy. This is my brother Yngve.’

‘Guessed as much,’ Petra said.

When he sat down a few minutes later I was a bit concerned that Petra would have a go at him, in her eyes he would seem really straight-laced, but that didn’t happen at all, on the contrary, they chatted while I leaned back and drank beer and relaxed and listened with half an ear. Petra asked Yngve what he was studying, and that alone was unexpected. Perhaps it was the Fosse incident that had forced her to pull herself together. Yngve started telling Petra about a book by Baudrillard on America, she was interested and I was happy. She got up to go to the toilet, Yngve said he liked her, she was nice, I said yes, but she’s got a terrible tongue on her when the mood takes her.

We stood in the taxi queue outside Wesselstuen, we waited twenty minutes, then we were in the back seat of an elegant low-slung Mercedes gliding through the rain-gleaming streets up to my place. I paid, checked there wasn’t a message by the front door or the door to my room, unlocked it, not caring what Petra might think about what she saw, which I would have done with almost anyone else, made some tea, put on some Velvet Underground, who for some reason I associated with her, perhaps it was her cynicism and urbanity that did it, she said Yngve had been pleasant and asked how we got on, I answered that we had a good relationship, but I might be too dependent on him in Bergen, at least that thought had gone through my head, I didn’t have any of my own friends, except for those at the Academy, so I had to rely on Yngve. Once a younger brother, always a younger brother, she commented. We smoked our cigarettes, I said I didn’t have a spare duvet, but she could have mine, she snorted and said the bedspread was enough, she would sleep in her clothes, that wasn’t a problem, she often did that. OK, I replied, but what about a sheet? She snorted again, as you wish, I said and stood up.

Should I get undressed in front of her? Or sleep with my clothes on as well?

No, to hell with it, I lived here, I thought, and started getting undressed. She turned away and fidgeted with something or other until I was in bed, supporting myself on one elbow. She looked at me.

‘What’s that there? Ugh, how revolting!’ she said. ‘Have you got three nipples?’

What on earth was she blathering about?

I looked down at my nipples.

She was right. An extra nipple had grown next to one of the original two, equally as big.

Horrified, I held it between thumb and forefinger.

Could it be cancer?

‘Yuk!’ she said. ‘If I’d known you were a freak I wouldn’t have stayed here.’

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘It’s just a pimple. It’s grown in a pore or whatever you call them. Look now!’

I squeezed the new nipple and a yellow blob squirted onto my chest.

‘Ugh! Ugh! What are you doing!’ she said.

I got up, took a towel from the cupboard and wiped the pus, looked down at my chest, which was back to normal now, and got into bed.

‘Will you turn off the light?’ I said.

She nodded, went over to the switch and pressed it, sat down on the sofa, swung her legs up and pulled the white bedspread over her.

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘Goodnight,’ she said.

I woke to her walking through the room and sat up.

‘Are you going?’ I said.

‘Reckon so,’ she said. ‘It’s nine. Sorry to wake you up.’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want any breakfast?’

She shook her head.

‘What a racket you made last night. Do you remember?’

‘No.’

‘You stood up, threw the duvet on the floor and stamped on it, really hard again and again. “What are you doing?” I said. “There’s a mink in the duvet!” you shouted. I almost died laughing. What a sight that was.’

‘Is that true? I don’t remember anything.’

‘It’s true. Thanks for the use of the sofa. See you!’

I heard her walk through the hall, heard the front door open and shut, her footsteps round the corner and fade as she went down the hill. A vague image of an animal appeared, it was between the duvet cover and the duvet, I remembered it and remembered throwing down my duvet in fear and disgust. I had no memory of stamping on it at all. How spooky. For all I knew, there might have been scenes like that here every night.

Two evenings later there was a ring at the door, I jumped up, absolutely convinced it was Ingvild, who else would ring?

Jon Olav.

He wondered what had happened to me, was I writing twenty-four hours a day or what?

Yes, it was a bit like that.

He asked me if I fancied going out for a beer, Sunday was a good day for it, everything was so still and peaceful.

I said probably not, I had a lot to do.

‘OK,’ he said, getting up and putting on his jacket. ‘Thanks for the chat.’

‘Thank you. Are you going out anyway?’

‘I’ll see. Incidentally, I met Ingvild yesterday.’

‘Oh yes? Where?’

‘There was a party in Møhlenpris. Loads of people.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing special. Actually I didn’t talk to her that much.’

‘Anyone else I knew there?’

‘Yes, lots. Several of those at Yngve’s party. Asbjørn and Ola, was that his name? Very nice guy anyway.’

‘Yes, he is,’ I said. ‘Whose party was it?’

‘I don’t know. I went with some friends of friends. It was a big do. Half of Høyden was there.’

‘I was at home,’ I said.

‘So you said. You could catch up now.’

‘I fancy a drink, but no.’

‘OK. I respect a man who has self-discipline!’

He left, and I sat down to write. I had three complete conversations now and was going to try to finish a fourth before I went to bed. This one takes place in a café, the two participants are criminals and they become edgy and evasive when they catch sight of the microphone the collator positions on the table, they soon leave.

I went to bed early and fell asleep at once as usual. At seven I was woken by a dream, which was a very rare occurrence.

I had been dreaming about a party with Yngve and Ingvild. I went into the hall, stopped by the sitting-room door, they were standing at the far end, by a window. Ingvild looked at me, then she tilted her head and Yngve kissed her.

I lay back in bed.

Ingvild was going out with Yngve.

That was why she hadn’t come.

I brooded over it all morning. I believed in dreams, I believed they told you something about life and at a deeper level were always true. If so, the image had been unmistakable. They were standing together, Ingvild saw me and then she kissed Yngve.

Surely that couldn’t be true?

Dear God, tell me it isn’t so!

But I knew it was, and the truth burned inside me all day. The whole of my body ached, my stomach churned, at times I could barely breathe, my heart was beating so fast.

Oh God, tell me it isn’t true.

Suddenly it all changed. A dream? Was I a complete moron? Who believed in dreams?

It was only a dream.

I fetched my trainers and the old tracksuit I had once been given by Yngve, which I regarded as a good omen, he had never wished me any ill, and then I went into the street and began to run. I hadn’t run since I lived in northern Norway, I was gasping for breath after only a few hundred metres. But I had to smash this ridiculous idea, crush it and my method was to wear myself out, run and run until there was nothing left to run with, and then take a hot shower and sit reading a neutral novel of some kind which dealt with anything other than love, and then, as tired as a child after a long day, go to bed, hopefully to wake up refreshed the next morning, free of jealousy and unfounded suspicions.

It didn’t quite go according to plan, the image stayed with me all week, but it didn’t torture me in the same way, there was a lot to think about in connection with classes, and when I rang Yngve to arrange the details for the trip to Sørbøvåg I noticed nothing unusual about him.

It had just been a dream.

We had Friday free, and I planned to catch the boat north on Thursday afternoon, although Yngve couldn’t come until the day after. Mum was taking the Friday off and would pick me up from the quay at Rysjedalsvika.

The rain was teeming down as I jumped off the bus by Fisketorget and walked over to Strandkai Terminal, where the boat was moored with the engines running, waiting for passengers. The water level in Vågen was high, the bluish-grey sea bobbed up and down, a very different density from the angry raindrops lashing the surface. I bought a return ticket from the office window, crossed the quay, went up the gangway, found myself a seat at the very front so that I could see the countryside through the large sloping front windows while it was still light.

Hydrofoil had been one of the magic words in my childhood, along with catamaran and hovercraft. I didn’t know for sure, but I assumed this boat with its split hull was a hydrofoil. I still liked the word.

Through the side windows I saw passengers arriving with suitcases and bags, heads tucked into their coats beneath the rain, moments later they sat down around me, all performing the same series of movements. Waterproofs had to be removed, umbrellas closed and placed on the racks above the seats, bags placed on the floor under the back of the chair, tray tables raised and vacant seats pulled down before they could slump into their own seat with a sigh. The snack bar at the back of the boat, where you could get newspapers and coffee, hot dogs and chocolate, was open. Most of the passengers appeared to be from the rural areas of Sogn og Fjordane, there was something about the way they dressed that you rarely saw in Bergen, but also about the way they behaved, as though the thought that someone could see them had never occurred to them, and maybe also about their physiognomy, that is, their facial features and body types. In the weeks I had lived here I had started to recognise certain Bergen faces, there were similarities, whether they were boys, elderly women or middle-aged men they had some common features I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Among these faces there were hundreds, indeed probably thousands, which were not similar. They disappeared, dissolved the moment they had passed, while the Bergen faces returned, oh, there was that type! Bergen had been a town ever since the early Middle Ages, and I liked the idea that Håkon’s Hall and St Mary’s Church weren’t the only remnants of those times, as well as the countryside of course, and that the crooked trading houses in Bryggen weren’t the only remnants of the fifteenth century, but also the various facial features, appearing and reappearing in new generations, still visible around town. I saw elements of the same faces in the people around me on the boat, except that I associated them with the farms and villages of the fjord landscapes to the north. Mum told me that in her grandparents’ time they used to attribute specific characteristics to people from the various farms. This family was like this, that family was like that, and the idea was passed down through the generations. That mode of thinking belonged to a completely different era and was basically incomprehensible to me, who hadn’t come from any of the places I had grown up in, unlike all the others there. Everything was first generation with me, everything was happening as if for the first time, nothing, neither bodies, faces, customs nor language, originated in that place or had been bound up with it for a longer period, and so couldn’t be viewed in that way.

Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn’t. Both had always existed. Neither could be chosen.

I got up and went aft to the snack bar, bought a coffee and a chocolate Daim, and as I folded down the table and put the cup in the tiny round hollow, the mooring ropes were thrown on board, the gangway was lifted and the engine revs increased. The hull trembled and shook. Slowly the boat moved forward as it swung to the left and soon the bows were facing the islands off Bergen. I closed my eyes, enjoyed the throb of the boat, the regular hum that rose and sank, and fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes I saw the contours of an enormous forest stretching back and, behind it, in the distance, a range of mountains.

So, not far to go.

I got to my feet and walked to the stern, up the stairs and onto the deck. It was empty and as I approached the railings, no longer sheltered by the superstructure, the wind was so strong that it almost upended me. I held on tight and was laughing inside with joy because not only was the wind full of raindrops, which beat against my face, but darkness had fallen and the immense wake behind us was a luminous white.

Only when the lights of the ferry terminal became visible, just a few small twinkling dots in the dense darkness, still far off, although because of the boat’s great speed we would soon be gliding alongside, illuminating the waiting room, the ticket office window, the two buses, some cars and a crowd of people either about to embark or meet someone, only then did I go back in.

Mum was one of those waiting with their arms down by their sides and heads bowed in the rain and wind, she waved to me, I went over and gave her a hug, and as we walked towards the car the express ferry was already roaring into the distance.

‘Great to see you,’ she said.

‘Ditto,’ I said and got in. ‘How are things?’

‘Good, I think,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do, but it’s interesting work, so I’m not grumbling.’

We drove through the forest and came out by the bay on the other side, by the shipyard where Kjartan worked. There was an enormous hull visible in a shipbuilding hall or a dock. Kjartan crawled through shafts and small passages fitting pipes, and when he talked about his work it was not without a certain pride in his voice, although he did admit he was a mediocre, if not poor, pipefitter, it lay so far from who he was, it was an occupation poorly suited to him and had been ever since he joined the proletariat at the end of the 1970s. He was also the safety rep at the shipyard, which occupied a lot of his time, from what I gathered.

A steep climb up a forest-clad mountain, over the summit and down the other side to Hyllestad, the municipal centre at the end of Åfjord, along the fjord to Salbu, where grandma and grandad’s and Kjartan’s houses stood on top of a little hill.

Rain fell across the cones of light as mum parked in the yard, and when she switched off the headlamps it was as if for a moment the deluge had stopped until the engine died and the rat-a-tat-tat on the roof and bonnet took over.

I got out, took my bag, walked across the soft gravel and opened the front door.

Oh, that smell.

I hung my jacket on the hook above grandad’s overalls, moved back a couple of steps to make room for mum, who hung up her coat, put her bag at the foot of the stairs and went into the sitting room.

Grandma was in the chair beside the window at the back, grandad on the sofa beneath the window in the long wall, both watching TV with the volume deafeningly loud.

‘Well, look who it is,’ grandma said.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Yes, the Norwegian population is growing!’ he said.

‘Think I’ve stopped growing now,’ I said, and turned to grandma, wanting in some way or other to greet her with more warmth, but I couldn’t exactly give her a hug where she was sitting, I had never done that and I never would. She held one arm across her chest, as if in a sling, it trembled and shook. Her head shook too and her feet were stretched out on a stool. Everything all right, Grandma? No, I couldn’t say that.

I walked towards her and smiled.

She looked at me and her mouth moved.

I went up to her and lowered my head to hers.

She had almost no voice left, all I heard was a breathy whisper.

What did she say?

Hi.

Her eyes smiled.

‘I came by boat,’ I said. ‘The rain’s terrible, I must say.’

Yes.

I straightened up and looked at the door as mum came in.

‘Shall we make some supper?’ she said.

The next morning I slept until twelve and went down in time for lunch, which they always had at this time here. Mum had made potato dumplings, we ate them in the kitchen, the mist hung heavy in the air and the leaves on the tall birch outside the window were yellow and glistened with moisture.

After lunch, while they rested, I went for a stroll around the two-hectare property. Beyond the little mere, which was black and covered with water-lily leaves alongside the banks, rose the spruce-clad hillside, silent and sombre against the low sky. I wandered over to the barn, even more sunken and run-down than I remembered, opened the door to the animals on the ground floor, the three cows shifted in their stalls, the one furthest away turned its head and watched me with its gentle eyes. I walked past them and through the low door leading to the barn. It was half-full of hay, I climbed to the edge of the loft and swung myself up, poked my head into what had once been a hen house, and where there were still feathers on the floor, even though it must have been ten years since a hen had roosted on a perch here.

I would have to bring Ingvild here one day.

This was such a happy thought, that she might sit on the sofa and chat to grandad, chat to mum and see this world here, which was so magical for me. At the same time there was something almost criminal about the idea, something transgressive and forbidden, of bringing two completely different worlds together in this way: if I saw her on the sofa I would immediately realise that she didn’t belong there.

I went onto the barn bridge and lit a cigarette, shielding it with my hand against the drizzle, which was turning into rain. Mum appeared outside the house, she opened the car door and got in, drove towards me so that she could turn. I went down to find out where she was going.

‘I’m off down to the shop. Want to come with me?’

‘No, I think I’ll do a bit of writing.’

‘OK. Is there anything you want?’

‘Some newspapers would be nice.’

She nodded, turned and drove back down. Soon afterwards her car passed me on the road below.

I tossed my cigarette where they usually burned paper and went indoors. Both of them had got up, they were in the kitchen. I quietly closed the door behind me, thought of going up to my room and trying to write a bit, but then I saw something through the open door and stopped. Grandma lifted her trembling hand and took a swipe at grandad, which with some doddery footwork he managed to sidestep. She sat down in her wheelchair, paddled it with her feet and took another swipe. He stepped to the side again. All this went on in eerie slow motion and without a sound. Grandad went out the other door, into the sitting room, and grandma manoeuvred her chair back to the table with tiny foot movements.

Upstairs in my room, I lay on the bed. My heart was pounding with agitation at what I had just witnessed. It had been like a dance, the grisly dance of the aged.

I had never considered what the relationship between my grandmother and grandfather was like, in fact, I had never thought they even had a relationship. But they had been married for what would soon be fifty years, they had lived on this smallholding, brought up four children, struggled and toiled to make ends meet. Once they had been young, as I was now, with their lives ahead of them, as I had mine. I had never considered that either, not seriously.

Why did she try to hit him?

She was heavily medicated, which made her paranoid, gave her delusions, that was why.

I knew that, but it didn’t help, the image of the two of them was stronger.

Through the floor I could hear the radio, the weather forecast and the news. I could imagine him sitting right next to it with one hand under his ear, staring straight ahead, unless his eyes were closed in concentration.

Grandma trembling in the kitchen.

The impact of what I had seen was so overwhelming that I got up and went downstairs in an attempt to smooth things over, my presence might re-establish a kind of normality, I thought vaguely, as the steps creaked beneath me and the sight of the grey telephone on the table under the mirror reminded me of the old telephone they’d had, the one hanging on the wall, consisting of a mouthpiece and an earpiece, all in black Bakelite.

But could that be right? Could there have been such an old nineteenth-century-style contraption here when I was young? Or had I seen it in a film and imagined there was one here and it had stuck in my memory?

I opened the sitting-room door, grandad instantly got up in the awkward way he did and straightened as he watched me.

‘It’s good you came,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking we should put up a new fence below the barn, and now you’re here perhaps you could help me?’

‘Be happy to,’ I said. ‘Right away?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

In silence we put on our outdoor gear, I followed him down to the cellar, where he had some green impregnated fence posts and a roll of wire netting. I carried everything down to the end of the property, to the top of the little mound where the neighbour’s land started, and went back to fetch the sledgehammer grandad had just pointed to.

Manual work was not my strong suit, to put it mildly, so I was a bit nervous as I walked towards him with the sledgehammer in my hand, I wasn’t sure I could do this or do it in a way that would satisfy him.

Grandad took some wire cutters from an overall pocket and snipped off the old netting, then wriggled the first post to and fro until it was loose enough for him to pull up. I did the same on the other side, according to his instructions. When we had done that he put one of the new fence posts in position and asked me to knock it in the ground with the sledgehammer. My first blows were circumspect and probing, but he didn’t say anything and soon I had built up enough courage to hit it harder and with more assured swings.

The black peaked cap he always wore was dotted with droplets of rain. The blue material of his overalls had darkened. He gazed across the fjord and told me the story about the plane crash on Mount Lihesten in the 1950s, I had heard it many times, it was the mist and the drizzle that had reminded him, I supposed. But I liked hearing him tell stories, and when he had finished and hadn’t said anything for a few minutes, he just stood there with his head bowed next to the fence post, which was now firmly bedded in, I asked him about the war. How had it been here during the war, had anyone offered any resistance and had there been any Germans stationed here? We moved towards where the next post would be and he started telling me about those days in April 1940. When the invasion was announced he and a pal went to Voss, where they were mobilising for war. They went on foot, borrowed a boat and rowed across Sognefjord, crossed the mountain, it was April, crusty snow and moonlit nights, he said, descended to Voss, to the military camp there, where everyone from Vestland was supposed to meet. He shook his head and laughed. They were all drunk when he arrived and there were hardly any weapons. Nor any uniforms. The officers were in Fleischer’s Hotel drinking. When they ran out of booze, he told me, they requisitioned the bar on the cruise ship Stella Polaris. It was moored in Bergen and the alcohol was sent up by train.

‘So what did you do?’ I said.

‘At first we tried to get hold of weapons and uniforms. We walked around Voss and asked all the uniformed soldiers we met if they could help us. No one could. My friend said to a guard, you know we’re soldiers even though we’re not in uniform. Can you ring someone? No, answered the guard, and then he showed us the telephone cable. It had been cut. So we went back home. When we rowed across Sognefjord we took boats with us and left them on the northern side so the Germans would find it harder if they followed us. But of course when we arrived, the country had been occupied.’

It took him an age to tell the story, no detail was too trivial, right down to the dogs barking as he approached the farms at night, and by the time he had finished there was only one post left. I hammered it in, he fetched the roll of wire netting, we started to attach it to the posts, he held it while I banged in fence staples.

‘There were Germans stationed here, yes,’ he said. ‘I got to know one of them well. He was an Austrian and had been to northern Norway when he was growing up, they sent poor kids up here in the summer in the 30s, and he had been one of them. A nice fellow. He had a lot of interesting things to say.’

Grandad told me there had been a prison camp in the district, mostly Yugoslavs and Russians working on a road scheme. Grandad had a lorry, it had been requisitioned by the Germans, and he often used to drive to the camp, which was in Fure. He took food with him for the prisoners, he said, grandma made packed lunches and he hid them under rocks in the surrounding terrain. He said he reckoned the guards knew, but they turned a blind eye. Once he had seen one of the prisoners being shot.

‘He was standing in front of the German soldiers screaming Schiesst! Schiesst! And that was when one of them shot him. But the officers were furious. Discipline was strict, you know. So the soldier who fired his gun was sent to the Eastern Front. For German soldiers Norway was a dream posting compared with all the other places they could have been stationed. Towards the end of the war they mostly sent old men and young boys here. I remember I saw a new contingent arriving, and one of the officers said to them, Was wollen Sie hier, alte Leute?’

He laughed. I hammered in the staples and unrolled the wire as far as the next post. He carried on telling me stories. The Austrian, who seemed to have been a friend from what he said, decided to make his escape in the days before the German capitulation, he boarded a boat with a woman from the village and her two sons and vanished. Later the two sons were found floating in the water on the other side of the fjord, presumably killed with a rock.

I looked at him. What on earth was he telling me?

‘Not so long ago a book came out about it. I’ve got it in the house. It’s very interesting. Who could have guessed he would be capable of something so awful? But he must have killed them. There is quite simply no other explanation. And then he disappeared. Into thin air. He may still be alive.’

I straightened up and helped grandad to roll out the wire to the next post, where I pulled it as tightly as I could and secured it at the top and bottom so that it would retain the tension, then I banged in more staples.

‘What was he like?’ I said, and looked up at grandad, who was gazing into the mist above the fjord.

‘He was a nice man, you know,’ he said. ‘Polite and cultivated and friendly. I haven’t got a bad word to say about him. But there must have been something else inside him,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did he get away, do you think, or did he die?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ he said. ‘He probably died trying to escape.’

That was the last post, grandad snipped off the ends of the wire and I carried the roll and the sledgehammer to the cellar while he walked beside me. As we entered the sitting room, both red in the face after the rain, mum was making pancakes in the kitchen. Grandma was sitting in her chair, and when she saw me she said something. I went up close and lowered my head.

The clock, I thought she said. He’s taken the clock.

‘Who has?’ I said.

Him, she said, looking at grandad, who sat down on the sofa.

‘He’s taken the clock?’ I whispered as softly as I could so that he wouldn’t hear.

Yes, she whispered.

‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘Why would he?’

I stood up, my stomach hurt, I went to join mum, half-closing the door behind me so that they wouldn’t hear us in the kitchen.

Mum was holding a ladle over the big hotplate and carefully pouring the mixture, which immediately began to solidify with a sizzle.

‘Grandma says grandad took her clock,’ I said. ‘Stole it, from what I could hear.’

‘Yes, I heard her say that too,’ mum said. ‘It’s the medication. It might be making her paranoid and causing her to imagine things. She’s pretty bad at the moment. But she’ll come out of it. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

For some reason I was close to tears and went into the hall, put on my boots and stood under the overhang by the front door to have a smoke.

A bus stopped down by the road outside the school. A few minutes later Kjartan walked up over the hill, dark-eyed and white-skinned, carrying a bag in one hand, some letters and a newspaper in the other. It was Klassekampen. He had read it for as long as I could remember.

‘Hello there,’ he said.

‘Hi, Kjartan,’ I said.

‘Did you arrive yesterday?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘We’ll have a chat later,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mum’s making pancakes. They’ll probably be ready in a quarter of an hour or so.’

He continued towards his door, stopped and looked across.

‘There’s that one-legged crow!’ he said.

I took a few steps towards him and stared in the direction he was pointing, up to the pole carrying the electricity cable to the barn. Sure enough, on the top, there was a crow with one leg.

‘Johannes shot its other leg off. It’s stayed here ever since.’

He chuckled and closed the door behind him, I stubbed out my cigarette in the soft gravel and took it with me to put in the waste bin under the sink.

‘Yngve rang, by the way,’ mum said. ‘He had to do an extra shift this evening and won’t be here until tomorrow morning. He’s driving up, he said.’

‘What a shame,’ I said. ‘Shall I set the table?’

‘That’d be nice, she said.’

After we had eaten at the table in the TV lounge, since grandma and grandad had moved their bedroom to the sitting room because of the trouble grandma had with stairs now, Kjartan looked at me and asked if I felt like a chat at his place. I nodded, we went up to the large, open and light top floor where he lived, he put on some coffee, I settled down on the sofa and flicked through the pile of books on the table.

Bobrowski. Hölderlin. Finn Alnæs, Musica, the first volume in his major oeuvre Ildfesten, which, according to mum, he had broken the back of now, only two of the promised five novels had come out anyway. Kjartan had been passionate about these books for several years, there was something about the presence of the cosmos that appealed to him, I inferred from the way he talked about them.

‘Are you learning anything at the Writing Academy?’ he said from the kitchen.

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘I’ve met Sagen,’ he said. ‘He’s run lots of the writing courses for Sogn Skrivarlag.’

‘We haven’t met him yet,’ I said. ‘We’ve only met Fosse and Hovland.’

‘I don’t know them,’ he said, and came in with two cups. They were wet, he had just rinsed them, in mine there were still coffee grains at the bottom, half-dissolved in the water.

‘We’ve finished the poetry course now,’ I said.

‘So you’ve been writing poems?’

‘Yes, we had to. But it didn’t go well.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he said. ‘You’re only nineteen. When I was nineteen I barely knew what a poem was. You’re lucky to be there.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have you written anything recently?’

‘A couple of poems.’

He got up and went over to the dining-room table where his typewriter was, grabbed a pile of sheets, flipped through them, came back and handed them to me.

‘You can have a browse if you like.’

‘Yes, I’d love to!’ I said, suddenly touched that he regarded me as his peer.

dwindling beck

skegges nibble

at the green rock

weave through the swaying grass

the shade cools

a brother of the sun

lashes its tail

‘What’s a skegge?’ I said, looking up at him.

‘Skegge? A trout. What do you think?’

‘It’s very good,’ I said. ‘I particularly like the start. It seems to elevate it somehow.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s the trout in the mere, you know.’

I read on.

with a mouth of lush church grass

I stand at the crossroads

drinking the light of faith

on the shores of eternity

I lead my body, on

like a dun horse in the dusk

towards the forest somewhere

I had tears in my eyes again, this time because of the poem, the image of the body which he leads towards the forest like a horse in the dusk.

I seemed to be full of tears, they had accumulated inside me, waiting for an opportunity to be released.

‘This poem is fantastic,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘Which one is it?’

I passed it to him.

He skimmed through it for a few seconds and snorted.

‘ “On the shores of eternity”,’ he recited. ‘I was being a bit ironic there, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless.’

He got up and fetched the jug of coffee, poured and placed it on a newspaper.

A door went downstairs; from the way it was closed I realised it was mum.

‘So this is where you are!’ she said.

‘We’re reading some poems,’ Kjartan said. ‘Have a look if you like.’

‘I’d love to,’ she said.

I got up and walked with the cup in my hand to the other end of the room, where there were bookshelves, an armchair and a stereo. I took out a few books and thumbed through them.

When they started talking I stood by the window and gazed out at Mount Lihesten, which had just become visible through the mist, a black wall rising where the sea began and falling at the end where the fjord finished.

Was that where Ingvild’s family cabin was?

When I entered the sitting room, grandma was asleep in her chair, her head lolled back, her mouth wide open. She’d had Parkinson’s disease for as long as I could remember, I had barely a memory in which she wasn’t shaking. But when I was a boy the illness wasn’t as far advanced, it didn’t prevent her from working on the smallholding she had moved to at the end of the 1930s, when she married grandad and where she had lived ever since. According to Borghild, she had been surprised how small it was and how small people were out here. It might have been simply that conditions were tougher here than in the inland region she came from, there was less food and therefore the people were also smaller. Mum told me she had always emphasised that they should be impeccable in the clothing they wore and the way they behaved and for that reason grandma had the reputation of wanting to be better than others. Grandad worked as a driver, he drove buses; grandma was in charge of nearly everything that was done on the farm. This was the 1950s, but from what mum had told me about her childhood it sounded more like tales from the previous century. A man came here in the autumn and did their slaughtering for them, she told me, grandad never did it himself. Nearly every single part of the animal found a use. Grandma rinsed the intestines in the stream to use them for sausages. The blood was boiled in big pots in the kitchen. I had no idea what else she did, apart from what mum told me. There were only two generations between us, yet I knew nothing of how she had spent her life, not really, not essentially, I knew nothing of her relationship with objects and animals, life and death. When grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm. For her, family was the central point in her life, in other words, her family, the one that came from the farm where she grew up, and then her children. I had the impression that grandad’s family, which had moved inland from the islands a generation earlier, was not important. Her family was the centre of her existence, and the soil. Kjartan would sometimes say that the soil was her religion, that they were soil-worshippers in Jølster, where she came from, a kind of ancient heathendom they had clad in the language and rites of Christianity. Look at Astrup’s pictures, he would say, all the fires they lit on Midsummer Eve, that’s Jølster folk for you, they dance around the flames as though they were their gods. Kjartan would laugh when he said such things, and it was not without disdain, yet there was always some ambivalence because Kjartan had a lot of her in him: the serious attitude to life and the deep sense of duty were in Kjartan too, and if she worshipped and cultivated the soil, Kjartan worshipped and cultivated nature, the presence of the universe in the form of birds and animals, mountains and skies. He would deny that any such connection existed between him and his mother, after all he was a communist, an atheist, a ship’s pipefitter. However, all you had to do was look them in the eye to banish any lingering doubts. They had the same brown eyes, the same wary gaze.

Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn’t even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.

Mum helped grandma into bed, undressed her, brushed her hair and helped her on with her nightdress, all while I read Ceremonies, my latest favourite book, trying not to look. Not because grandma was being undressed necessarily, but because it was mum doing it, and it seemed so intimate and private, the daughter caring for her old mother, this wasn’t meant for my eyes, so I sat with my eyes trained on my book, attempting to let it absorb me.

It wasn’t difficult, all the spaces in it were so open and still connected with one another in quite sensational ways. Not just the spaces, incidentally, also the characters, which were usually closed off, could suddenly open and simply merge into one another. A man staring at an axolotl in an aquarium is mysteriously transformed into an axolotl staring out from an aquarium at a man. A fire in antiquity becomes a fire in the modern age. Then there were all the other peculiar things that went on. A man suddenly starts regurgitating rabbits, it becomes a problem, a minor catastrophe, the whole of the flat he has rented is full of small white rabbits.

Mum said goodnight to her parents, came out and closed the sliding door.

‘Would you like some coffee? Or is it too late for you?’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t mind a cup,’ I said.

I liked these short stories so much, but I couldn’t write like this, I didn’t have the imagination. I didn’t have any imagination at all. Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.

Yes, but not the new novel.

A wave of pleasure surged through me.

It was really fantastic. Some mysterious men, maybe angels, who collect people’s conversations and reflect on them.

But this pleasure didn’t come alone, it also brought with it some despair, for I knew I would never be able to carry this off. I couldn’t write the story, it would never work.

Mum came in with a pot of coffee and two cups, put them down and went to fetch a dish of thin squares of potato pancake.

‘Borghild made them,’ she said. ‘Do you want to try a bit?’

‘Please.’

Borghild was mum’s sister, a strong vivacious woman who lived alone in a little house above the farm where they grew up. She usually cooked for the weddings in the district, she knew all the old recipes and she knew everything about the family, those who had died and those who were still alive. Mum was close to her, even more now, as they didn’t live far from each other.

‘How are you, Karl Ove?’ mum said. ‘You’ve said so little since we’ve been here. That’s not like you.’

‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But I’m fine. The Writing Academy’s pretty hard going, that’s all.’

‘What’s hard going about it?’

‘It feels as if I’m not good enough to be there. I don’t write well enough, as simple as that.’

‘Remember you’re only twenty,’ mum said.

I took a whole pancake and ate it in two bites.

‘Nineteen,’ I said. ‘But I’m at the Academy now, you know. It doesn’t help me to think it might be better when I’m twenty-five.’

Mum poured coffee into the two cups.

‘And I’m in love,’ I said. ‘That might be why I don’t say much.’

‘Someone you’ve met this autumn?’ she said, and lifted her cup to her lips and drank while watching me.

‘I met her at Easter, when I was staying with you. Just once. Then we wrote to each other, and then we met in Bergen. She’s studying psychology. Comes from Kaupanger. Same age as me.’

‘But you’re not going steady?’

I shook my head.

‘That’s the point. I don’t know if she wants me. I made a fool of myself and then … well, nothing.’

A snore that sounded like a snarl came from the other room. Then someone coughing.

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ mum said.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ll see. Otherwise I’m OK. I love being in the bedsit and Bergen generally.’

‘I might come and see you both in a couple of weeks,’ mum said. ‘There are also a couple of student friends I’d like to visit. Gerd, do you remember her?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’ve been wondering whether to do another course, you know. I’d like to do a degree as well. But it’s a question of finance and I would also have to apply for a leave of absence.’

‘Yes,’ I said, taking another pancake.

Upstairs in the bedroom I lay in the darkness for ages before I fell asleep. The darkness linked the little space inside with the enormous space outside. The old wooden bed was like a little boat, or that was how it felt. Now and then a tree whooshed and the rain on the leaves pitter-pattered against the window. When it stopped, there would be a whoosh somewhere else, from some other trees nearby, as though tonight the wind had strategically deployed its energies and was riding across the countryside in several units.

The feeling I had when I arrived here was that life was over. Not in the sense that the house stood under the sign of death, more that what was going to happen had happened.

I lay on my other side, my head on my arm. The sound of my pulse beating reminded me of something grandad had once said, that you shouldn’t lie listening to your heartbeat if you wanted to sleep. It was an odd thing to say, I couldn’t remember what had occasioned the comment, but whenever I lay like this and my pulse beat against my ear I was reminded of it.

Only a few months ago mum had told me that grandad had suffered from anxiety for a long period at the beginning of the 1960s, it had been so bad that he didn’t go to work, he didn’t move from the sofa, so terrified was he of dying. Kjartan was the last child at home then, he had been young and wouldn’t have understood anything.

This information was unsettling, in a way, most of all because I hadn’t known anything about it and would never have guessed. Were there more such pockets of drama in the lives of my closest family? But the information in itself, what it said about grandad, I couldn’t get it to tally because if there was one characteristic I associated with grandad it was his joie de vivre. Then again I had never thought of him as an independent person with an independent life, he had always been simply ‘grandad’, in the same way that grandma had always been ‘grandma’.

A whoosh went through the old birch again, and a little cascade of droplets hit the wall as though the tree were a dog shaking off the rain.

Darkness. Silence. The beat of my pulse. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Unlike grandad it wasn’t death I heard but life. My heart was young and strong, it would beat away through my twenties, it would beat away through my thirties, it would beat away through my forties, it would beat away through my fifties. If I got to grandad’s age, and he was eighty, I had used only a quarter of my life so far. Almost everything lay before me, bathed in the hopeful light of uncertainty and opportunity, and my heart, this loyal muscle, would take me through it whole and unscathed, ever stronger, ever wiser, ever richer in life lived.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

I saw Yngve’s car from the sitting-room window, the windscreen wipers sweeping from side to side, the dark shadow in the driver’s seat that was him, and told mum, who was massaging grandma’s feet on her lap, that Yngve had arrived. She gently lifted grandma’s feet to the floor and got up. Grandma and grandad had eaten lunch at twelve, we had waited, now she went into the kitchen to prepare the meal.

The car stopped outside. Straight afterwards the door went, I heard him in the hall and turned to him as he came in.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘The Norwegian population is growing, I can see,’ grandad said.

Yngve smiled. His eyes brushed mine.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Good trip?’

‘Absolutely fine,’ he said and passed me a pile of newspapers. ‘Brought these along for you.’

Mum came in.

‘There’s some food ready if you’re hungry.’

We went into the kitchen and sat down. Mum had made a big pot of stew. I guessed the plan was to freeze it so that grandad only had to heat it when they were alone again.

‘Was the drive OK?’ mum said, placing the pot on the table, where there were already crispbreads and butter and a jug of water.

‘Yep,’ Yngve said.

It was as though he had a membrane around him which prevented me from getting into proper contact. But that didn’t have to mean anything, sometimes that was how it was, and he had been driving for several hours, sitting alone in the car and thinking his own thoughts, it was a change coming here, where we had been all day and a very different atmosphere of familiarity and naturalness had been established.

Yngve filled his deep dish with stew, positioned the ladle on my side of the pot, I helped myself. Steam rose from the dish, I took a crispbread and bit off a piece, poured water into a glass, raised a spoonful of stew to my mouth, blew on it.

‘Ann Kristin says hello, by the way,’ Yngve said. ‘I met her yesterday and said I was coming up here.’

‘Thanks,’ mum said.

‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked as casually as I could. He had said he was staying in town to work, not to go out, and if he had gone out and met Ann Kristin, then he was lying and why would he lie?

‘In the canteen at Sydneshaugen,’ he said.

‘Oh, right,’ I said.

After the meal we drank coffee in the sitting room, grandad chatted, we listened. Kjartan came in wearing the same clothes he had worn for the last two days, his hair a mess, eyes flashing behind his glasses. Yngve didn’t respond to Kjartan’s monologic conversation as he usually did, there was something submissive and withdrawn about him, as though he were looking inwards and not outwards. Could be anything, I thought, he was just a bit reticent.

Outside, the rain was tipping down.

Kjartan went back to his flat, I read the newspapers, mum washed up in the kitchen, Yngve took his bags up to his room and was gone for a while. When he returned he sat in the chair by the fireplace with a book.

I lowered the newspaper and stared out of the window. Dusk was falling. The light from the lamp outside the neighbours’ house, a stone’s throw below us, was striped with rain.

Grandma was asleep in her chair. Grandad had also fallen asleep. Mum, on the sofa beside him, was reading. Yngve was reading too. I watched him and knew he had noticed, because you do when someone watches you in a silent room, you notice. Nevertheless, he didn’t look up, he kept his eyes firmly on the book.

There was something wrong.

Or was I being paranoid?

He was reading, for Christ’s sake, I couldn’t make that into a sign something was wrong.

I lifted the newspaper and continued reading. Then it was his turn to watch me. I concentrated on not looking up.

Why was he watching me?

He got up and went out. Grandad woke as the door was closed, blinked a few times, struggled to his feet and wandered over to the wood burner, opened it and threw in two logs. The wooden floor above creaked.

Then it went quiet.

Had he gone to bed?

Now?

Because he had been out last night? And hadn’t been working at the hotel as he said?

I took my cup to the kitchen and poured myself a refill. The fjord lay a somewhat lighter shade of dark in the growing murk. The rain drummed on the roof and walls. I went back to the sitting room, grabbed my pouch of tobacco and made myself a roll-up. Grandad was cleaning his pipe, he tapped it on the glass ashtray a few times, poked at some black clumps and flakes with a white pipe cleaner. Grandma had woken up, she tried to sit upright, leaned forward but fell back again. Then she moved her hand to the two buttons on the armrest, succeeded in pressing one, and the chair began to rise with a low hum as she was lifted up, or pushed forward, and a moment later was able to grasp her walking frame. But her back was too bent for her to walk, and mum got up and asked where she wanted to go. I couldn’t hear the answer that issued from her trembling lips, but it must have been the kitchen, because that was where mum steered her steps. While all this was going on, grandad was engrossed in his pipe activities.

The floorboards above creaked, and then the staircase. The door opened and Yngve fixed me with a look.

‘Coming for a walk, Karl Ove?’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to discuss.’

The hope that had held me aloft melted and my insides crumbled. Everything collapsed.

Yngve was going out with Ingvild.

I got to my feet and went into the hall. He had his back to me as he donned his waterproof jacket. He said nothing. I slipped my feet into my shoes, bent over and tied them, then rose and put on my jacket. He stood still, waiting. After I had zipped up, he opened the door. Fresh air streamed into the house. I pulled the hood over my head and tied it under my chin, Yngve walked over to the car, opened the door and took out his umbrella. The rain was a regular drumbeat on the gravel and the house, more of a soft patter beyond in the vast darkness, where it fell on grass and moss, trees and bushes.

Yngve opened the umbrella, I closed the door behind me, we set off down the hill. I stared at him, he had his eyes on the path ahead. My legs were trembling jelly, my insides in disarray, but there was also something hard in the centre. I wasn’t going to give him anything. He would get nothing from me.

We walked through the gate, past the neighbours’ house and down onto the tarmac road.

‘Shall we walk down?’ Yngve said.

‘OK,’ I said.

The junction, where three roads met, was illuminated by street lamps, but as soon as we had passed it and reached the road leading into the valley the night was all around us. Trees stood like a wall on either side. There was a faint rushing sound from the river and the rain falling in the forest. Otherwise all we heard was our own footsteps. I stared at him. He glanced at me.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.

‘Yes, so you mentioned,’ I replied. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

He looked straight ahead again.

‘Ingvild and I are going out together,’ he said.

I said nothing, just glared at him.

‘It’s only—’ he began.

‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ I said.

He went quiet, we carried on walking.

The falling rain, our footsteps, the wall of trees in the darkness. The smell of wet spruce, the smell of wet moss, the smell of wet tarmac.

‘I have to explain what happened,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘But, Karl Ove—’

‘I don’t want to hear about it, I told you.’

We reached the firing range, a shed in front of a long narrow piece of open ground to the right of the road.

In the distance was the drone of traffic. It came down the slope from the mountain at the end of the valley.

‘It wasn’t something I planned,’ he said.

‘I DON’T want to hear!’ I said. ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t want to hear anything!’

We walked on in silence. He glanced at me once, was about to say something, changed his mind, looked down, stopped.

‘I’m going back then,’ he said.

‘You do that,’ I said and carried on walking, listening to the sound of his fading footsteps behind me. The next moment a car came round the bend and transformed the darkness into an inferno of light, which lingered on the retina for several seconds after the car had passed, and I walked on blindly until my eyes had got used to the night again, and the road and the trees reappeared.

I would never talk to him again. I couldn’t leave until tomorrow morning, so I would see him, and I would see him in Bergen, that was inevitable, sooner or later I would bump into him, the town wasn’t that big, but I wouldn’t say anything then, nor here, I wouldn’t say a word to him ever again.

I walked to the end of the valley, to where the waterfall plunged down the mountainside and the river flowed beneath the road, saw the faint glint of water as it hit the rocks and the pool at the bottom, it seemed almost obscene, water in the water, in the pouring rain, what was more, and then I made my way back. My trousers were wet and I was frozen, and there was nothing good waiting for me in the house.

Had they slept together?

Everything in me seized up. I stopped.

Yngve had slept with her.

When he left here he would go home and sleep with her again.

Stroke her breasts, kiss her on the mouth, pull down her panties, penetrate her.

My heart was pounding wildly, as though I’d been running.

She called his name, whispered his name, kissed him, spread her legs for him.

I started off again.

She would ask how it had gone, what I had said. He would tell her. I was the ‘him’ they talked about. The little brother. The naïve little brother who sat in his room waiting for her, who thought she wanted him while she was out partying with Yngve, fucking at Yngve’s place. Just that, the fact that she spent the night at his place and in the morning showered in the bathroom there, sat down and had breakfast there, with a growing sense that it was normal and her due.

She caressed him, she must have done that, she looked into his eyes, she must have done that, she said she loved him, she must have done that, this wasn’t me being paranoid, this is what happened. It happened every day.

The little house on the hill shone before me, the darkness profound, almost impenetrable on all sides.

I would never be a part of his life again. I would never visit him wherever he lived. I wouldn’t give a damn about him in a way that I had never done with anyone else before. If he thought everything would be as it was between us, that I would ever tolerate this, then he had another think coming.

Now it was all about getting through the evening. He was here, I couldn’t avoid him, but it didn’t matter, I would ignore him, and that was good because then he would believe it was just something I was doing now and eventually everything would go back to normal, only later would he realise that in fact I would never speak to him again.

I opened the front door and went into the hallway, hung up my jacket, darted up to my room and changed my trousers, dried my face on a towel in the bathroom, then went down to the ground floor and into the sitting room, where they were watching TV.

Yngve wasn’t there. I looked at mum.

‘Where’s Yngve?’ I said.

‘He’s gone to see Kjartan,’ mum said.

I sat down.

‘What’s going on?’ mum said.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Something is going on, I can see,’ mum said.

‘Do you remember me saying I was in love?’ I said.

‘Yes, of course,’ mum said.

‘Yngve’s going out with her,’ I said. ‘He’s just told me.’

Mum took a deep breath and sighed as she looked at me.

‘Well, it’s not my doing,’ I said.

‘You mustn’t fall out,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass, Karl Ove. It’s bad now but it’ll pass.’

‘Yes, it might,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I ever want anything to do with him again.’

She got up.

‘I’ve made some supper,’ she said. ‘Can you set the table?’

‘All right.’

I carried in cups and plates, bread and butter, salmon and scrambled eggs, a selection of meats and cheese, a pot of tea and milk. Once I had finished mum asked me if I could fetch Yngve. I looked at her.

‘OK,’ I said. I slipped on my shoes and walked the few metres down the yard to the other door. Perhaps he would think everything was as it was when I arrived and he was welcome to think that.

I opened the door, entered the hall, went over to the stairs. Music was on loud upstairs. I took a few steps up, enough to see the sitting room. Yngve was sitting in a chair staring into the air. He hadn’t heard me. I could have shouted, but I didn’t because, to my horror, I saw tears running down his cheeks.

Was he crying?

I quietly went back down, out of sight. Stood for a moment in the hall, silent. That was the first time I had seen him crying since he was a little boy.

But why was he crying?

I stuffed my feet into my shoes, closed the door carefully behind me and shuffled across the yard.

‘He’s coming,’ I said as I went into the sitting room. ‘He said we should start away.’

Early the next morning mum drove me to the ferry in Rysjedalsvika. The boat was fairly empty when it arrived, I sat down in the same seat I’d had on the way over. The weather had eased a little during the night, the sky was still overcast, but the cloud cover was lighter and it wasn’t raining any more. The boat sliced through the heavy grey water at a strangely fast pace beneath the tall motionless overarching mountains between which the fjord lay.

I had gone to bed before Yngve returned in the evening and was up before he woke in the morning, so I hadn’t seen him since briefly catching sight of him in the chair at Kjartan’s, but I had heard him, his voice from the floor below as I was trying to sleep and his footsteps up the stairs to his room on his way to bed. Being under the same roof as him was unbearable, I seemed to burn inside, all I could think of was that he would regret what he had done.

Now, surrounded by light in a boat in the middle of the fjord, on my way home, everything seemed different. Now it was her I thought about. She had allowed herself to be taken in by him, to be blinded by his surface charm and had said yes. She didn’t realise I was better than him. She had no idea. But she would find out. And what then? Would I be there for her? Or would I let her go her own way?

Could I go out with her after she had been with Yngve?

Oh yes.

If she wanted to be with me, I would.

There was nothing to say I had to remain in Bergen after this year and nothing to say she had to, if they broke up.

I went to the back, to the snack bar, and ordered a coffee, took it with me up onto the deck and sat down on a bench under the roof from where I could see the forest, which on the way had just been a large deep shadow beneath the mountains, but was now clearly defined beneath the white sky. Dark green, almost black, spruces packed into a dense jagged area with the odd deciduous tree luminous in its autumn-yellow colours.

I caught a taxi home from the ferry quay, after all that had happened I deserved that. However, being back in my bedsit, surrounded by all my possessions, didn’t feel as good as I had imagined because this was where I had waited for her, day in, day out, and now, knowing what I did, that she had never been on the point of coming up to see me but had been with Yngve, I could see with total clarity how foolish I had been. All the fine thoughts I’d had about her, the whole dream I had built up around her appeared immeasurably naïve now that I knew how the land actually lay, what had actually gone on.

Yngve knew how I had felt, he knew that I was waiting at home, hoping, while he was meeting her and going out with her. Was that part of the thrill? I wondered. Having me sitting here like an idiot and looking out of the window?

I couldn’t stay in my room, so I put on my jacket and went out, but where could I go? It was Sunday, all the shops were closed and I didn’t want to sit on my own in the cafés that were open.

I stopped outside the block of flats where Jon Olav lived and rang the bell. No one answered, I walked on, up the hill and down past Støletorget, and soon I was crossing Torgalmenningen, burning inside the whole time, I was a fool, I had nowhere to go, no one to visit, I just walked, burning with shame about everything. I walked along Nygårdsgaten, cut up by the Science Building and went into the park, the plan was to sit down and have a smoke, it was Sunday, I was out for a Sunday walk, but in the park, look, that was where I held Ingvild’s hand and I didn’t want to think about that, even then she must have known she didn’t want me, that I was no good for her, and I didn’t want to go to Danmarksplass, Yngve lived there, and for all I knew she had his keys for the weekend and was in his flat now. I didn’t want to walk the other way either, Sydneshaugen School was there, where we had drunk coffee, the gate where we had stood talking when Morten appeared. Instead I walked down the first hill and came out by the Grieg Hall, followed the road past the library and the station, turned right where the old town gate once stood, and then continued uphill, back along the roads at the top of Fjellsiden.

Yngve was probably on his way home now. If Ingvild wasn’t in his flat he would drive straight up to Fantoft, where she would be expecting him.

She opens the door and gazes at him with tenderness and affection.

They embrace.

They kiss and kiss with mounting passion.

Glance at the room, then they undress each other at top speed.

A cigarette afterwards.

What did your little brother say?

He got angry. But it’ll pass. You should have seen him. Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha.

Wave upon wave of heat rose to my head, which I lowered, and into my face. I walked past an old fire station, it was made of wood and painted white, beneath it the town’s myriad colours vibrated, I walked along the very highest line of houses until I slowly began to descend and was back outside my bedsit.

That is where he lives, I thought. The brother who believes he is a writer. And when I opened the door and went into my room it was as though I was still in the street looking at myself, the conceited idiot who closed the curtains and kept out the world.

Rolf Sagen was going to teach us for the next two weeks. His course didn’t deal with genres, neither prose, nor poetry, nor drama, nor essays, but writing itself, the process of writing and a variety of relevant strategies. He gave us a number of practical tips, such as how it could be useful for prose writers and dramatists to make what he called a hinterland, you wrote down everything about the characters and their relationships and in so doing knew much more about why they acted as they did than was apparent from the finished text — a hinterland was the complete world of which the narrative revealed only glimpses — and also he talked about the underlying motives or premises of writing. Sagen was a trained psychologist, and he spoke a lot about how important it was to penetrate down into the deeper layers of consciousness when you wrote. He had a few activities for us to do. One of them was about emptying our minds of thoughts, it was like meditation, we should try to be ahead of our thoughts, deny them space, just forge on into the unthought, and then, at his command, write down the first things that occurred to us.

‘Let’s start now,’ he said, and so we sat around the table, all of us with our heads bowed and eyes closed. I couldn’t do it, I was just thinking about this situation, about having to empty my mind, but it was beyond me. Two minutes passed, three, maybe four.

‘Now write,’ he said.

The first thing that occurred to me was the name of a town: Darmstadt. I wrote a little story about it. When everyone had finished we had a break and when we resumed we had to read out what we had written.

Sagen held his beard between thumb and forefinger in concentration, nodded and said this was interesting, unusual, remarkable, fruitful. When it was my turn the string of superlatives came to an end. He listened to what I read out, then eyed me.

‘You’re using only the surface of your mind when you write,’ he said. ‘And if you do that there won’t be any depth in the text. What was the first word that occurred to you?’

‘Darmstadt.’

‘Hm, a German town,’ he said. ‘Have you been there?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t very much more to say about the text. You’ll have to try and penetrate deeper into your consciousness.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

What he was actually saying was that my writing was superficial. He was right, I had realised that, there was a chasm between what the others wrote and what I wrote. I described a young man walking the streets of Kristiansand. I hadn’t drawn either him or the streets he walked from the depths of my consciousness. Sagen confirmed what I had suspected, he articulated it in words, I had to descend into the depths of my own consciousness, into the darkness of my soul, but how the hell was I supposed to do that? This was not something I found easy! I had read Death Fugue, no writer had ever delved further into their consciousness than Celan when he wrote that, but what use was this insight to me?

The next day we had another activity. This time we were given a few nonsense words to keep repeating in our heads until Sagen told us to write the first thing that occurred to us.

Once again all eight of us sat around the table with bowed heads and closed eyes. Now you can write, Sagen said, and I scribbled the first words that came into my mind.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

That was all.

Sagen scratched his chin.

‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Two chairs in the wind. They’re outside, I take it. Yes, they must be.’

‘That’s an exciting intro,’ Knut said.

‘You’ll have to work on it a bit more, Karl Ove,’ Trude said. ‘It might turn into a poem.’

‘It’s an image that doesn’t immediately make itself apparent,’ Sagen said. ‘There’s a tension, there’s nothing contrived about it. Yes, that is interesting. You’re on the right path, I think.’

I had been thinking about the two leather chairs we had at home when I was growing up. They stood on a green hill and the wind blew in from the sea. But this was just nonsense, I realised that, although I found myself unable to dismiss the others’ comments that it might be the beginning of something, a poem.

I carried on when I got home.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

a yellow bulldozer — that was the next bit that occurred to

me –

noise from a town

you have already left

As soon as I had written that I knew the sort of comments I would get. Delete the yellow bulldozer. Remove the ‘already’ from the last line, it’s redundant. So I did that and the poem was finished.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

noise from a town

you have left

At any rate it looked like a poem. I knew where the image of the leather chairs originated, ever since I was small I had been fascinated by the relationship between inside and outside, when what was supposed to be inside was outside, and vice versa. One of the most hypnotic memories I had was the time Geir and I had stumbled over a cellar full of water in a half-finished house. Not only that, there was no floor, so we stood on a little rock surrounded by water, indoors! The episode on the refuse site, which featured in one of the texts that got me accepted on the course, also dealt with this idea, the way Gordon and Gabriel set out chairs, a table and lamps in the forest. Two leather chairs in the wind had its roots there, the magic of childhood in six words. noise from a town/ you have left was different, I had seen many instances of it in the poems I had read, something is stated and revoked at the same time. Also the converse, where the same merges into the same, such as, the hare snows into the hare, but so far I hadn’t come up with any such images myself.

Up until now!

Oh!

In a trice I added two more lines.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

noise from a town

you have left.

The girl disappears

into the girl.

That was it. A fully fledged poem.

To celebrate I stuffed the photography book down my trousers, left my shirt hanging outside them and went down to the basement to have a wank. With the book, which I could now hold and leaf through simultaneously, open in my left hand, and my right hand around my dick, I stared at one photo after another. The girl with the basket of laundry was still my favourite, but there was no longer anything pure about it, every situation I imagined myself in with her was permeated by the thought of Yngve and Ingvild and the fact that I had lost Ingvild, the only girl who meant anything to me. I flicked to and fro to escape the thought — more or less as Sagen had advised us, it struck me — and I finally succeeded in concentrating long enough on one of the girls’ wonderful bodies for me to come.

That was at least something.

Back upstairs, I killed time until I could go to bed. Fortunately I had no problem sleeping twelve hours at a stretch. I couldn’t say I looked forward to going to the Writing Academy, not a day passed without something disparaging being said about me, or rather something disparaging about my writing. No one meant it as such, it was called critique and supposed to be constructive, but in my case it was so useless because there was nothing else in my texts to compensate for the criticism. It was immature, it was clichéd, it was superficial and I was truly incapable of penetrating deeper into my own consciousness, where the essence of a writer was to be found. In all the discussions we had I was reminded of this, it was my role, and if I wrote something good, such as the poem about the two leather chairs, it would still be seen in the light of the person I had shown myself to be, as a sort of fluke, the anthropoid who writes Hamlet.

The only benefit of the Academy during those days was that so much happened, there was so much to react to while I was there, that the thought of Yngve and Ingvild was pushed into the background. For the same reason, my room was unbearable, there were no distractions, so if we didn’t have any writing assignments I went out just for a walk — one night to Jon Olav’s, where I could have a cup of coffee, but then couldn’t visit again until a certain number of days had elapsed so that my lack of friends wouldn’t become a burden to him, I had placed myself in a kind of quarantine — the next night to Anne’s, for her the same rules applied, after a cup of tea and an hour-long chat I couldn’t show my face there until after four or five days, preferably more — and there was no one else to visit. I couldn’t go to the cinema alone, that carried too much of a stigma, and Café Opera was out of the question. To stand alone in the bar, ashamed not to know anyone, that wasn’t a situation I wanted to expose myself to. Besides, the chance that I would bump into Yngve and Ingvild, or their friends, was too great. Just the thought of being in the same room as them, of being present as they gazed at each other or even touched each other, made my flesh run cold. Morten was a saviour: even though we had nothing in common we could always chat for an hour about something, and he didn’t find it strange that I popped by, after all we were ‘neighbours’.

One evening there was a ring at the door. I thought it was Jon Olav and went to open up.

Ingvild stood on the steps.

‘Hi,’ she said, sending me a hurried glance.

At that second, as I met her eyes, it was as though nothing had happened. My heart was pumping as if I were in love.

‘You?’ I said.

‘Yes, I thought we should talk.’

She looked down as she said that, pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead.

‘Come in,’ I said.

She followed me in and sat down on the sofa.

‘Would you like some tea?’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘I won’t be long.’

‘I’ll put some on anyway,’ I said.

I went into the kitchen and put a pan of water on the stove. Her coming to see me was the last thing I had expected and the place was neither tidy nor clean. I sprinkled tea leaves over the bottom of the tea pot and went back to her. She had lit a cigarette. The ashtray was half-full, I took it and emptied it in the kitchen waste bin.

‘You don’t need to tidy up for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be off in a couple of minutes. There was just something I had to say to you.’

She laughed as she said it. She glanced down, she glanced up.

‘The tea will be ready soon,’ I said. ‘We’re doing poetry at the Academy and we’ve been given some fantastic poems. Especially one. Would you like to hear it?’

She shook her head.

‘Not now, Karl Ove,’ she said, squirming on the sofa.

‘But it’s not very long,’ I said. ‘Hang on a minute. I’ll find it.’

‘No, please don’t. It’s not the right moment.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, rummaging through the pile of photocopied poems, found what I was after and turned to her.

‘Here it is. It won’t take long.’

I stood in the middle of the floor with the piece of paper in my hand and started to read.

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out

he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave

he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown

we drink and we drink you

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play

he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue

jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown

we drink and we drink you

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany

he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then

as smoke you will rise into air

then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany

we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue

he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air

He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is

a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith¹

I read it as I had been taught, with a regular rhythm, not stressing individual words, not stressing anything because it carried meaning, rhythm was paramount, rhythm was everything.

While I was reading, Ingvild smoked and studied the floor in front of her.

‘Isn’t that good?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I think it’s fantastic. Absolutely brilliant. I’ve never read anything like it.’

I sat down at the other end of the sofa.

‘Yngve told you what happened, didn’t he?’ she said.

‘The tea,’ I said and got up. ‘Just a minute.’

I went to the kitchen, poured the boiling water over the dry tea leaves, which would swell up and become soft and supple within seconds, the biggest would go clumpy, while all the properties in them would be released and infuse the water and colour it, golden at first, then darker and darker.

I brought out the teapot with two cups, put them on the table.

‘It has to stew a bit first,’ I said.

‘I have to go soon,’ she said. ‘I only wanted to talk to you about what has happened.’

‘Can’t you have a cup of tea anyway?’ I said.

I filled her cup, the tea was too weak, and I poured it back into the pot, and then I poured again. This time it was darker, if not perfect, at least drinkable.

‘Do you take milk?’

She shook her head and grabbed the cup with both hands, took a sip and put the cup back on the table.

‘It had nothing to do with you,’ she said. ‘What happened.’

‘Right,’ I said, filling my own cup.

‘I hope we can be friends despite everything. I’d like to be friends with you.’

‘Of course we can be friends,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t we be able to?’

She smiled, no eye contact, took another sip.

‘How are things then?’ I said.

‘They’re fine,’ she said.

‘Course going well?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘Same here,’ I said. ‘But the Academy course only lasts a year, not six like in psychology. I’ll have to see what I do afterwards. Maybe lit. But I’m planning to keep writing.’

Silence.

It was painful with her there.

‘Do you still live in Fantoft?’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘I’m moving into a collective.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. I think I’ll have to go,’ she said and stood up. ‘Thank you for the tea. See you.’

I accompanied her to the hall, smiled at her and said bye, watched her disappear round the corner, went back in, washed the two cups, emptied the ashtray so that I wouldn’t be reminded of her visit, lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. It was eight o’clock. Two hours until I could sleep.

For as long as there were classes at the Academy I coped very well during the day. I trudged through the rain in the morning and, if nothing else, appreciated meeting the other students — we saw so much of one another that I was relatively natural with them — and then I trudged home through the rain in the afternoon beneath the fast-darkening sky. I made myself something to eat, I sat and read until my restlessness became too much and drove me out, mostly into the great nothing, in other words, I met no one. I had nowhere to go, and I couldn’t stay in my room, what was I supposed to do? Ten wild horses couldn’t drag me into a cinema on my own or into Café Opera. Living like this was fine for a while, there was nothing wrong with it as such, the situation was explicable, I was attending a course on which there were very few students, and those there were, were older than me, none would have been a friend of mine under normal circumstances, which contrasted sharply with the situation for the average student, who was surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of other likeminded people. Yes, there was a rational explanation: I was at the Writing Academy, and when I finished there I would take out a student loan and go to Istanbul to write, a town where no one expected me to know anyone, which furthermore was exotic and foreign, an adventure, by Christ, a room of my own in Istanbul!

I wrote letters and described my plans. I read novels I had heard about at the Academy, by Øystein Lønn, Ole Robert Sunde, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute. Although they were difficult for me I ploughed through them in the hope that something would stick. I walked down into the town centre and bought records, drank coffee in the cake shops old people frequented, where I didn’t care how I looked or what impression I made or if people wondered why I was on my own. I didn’t give a shit about old people and I didn’t give a shit about myself either. I sat there studying the records, reading books, drinking coffee and smoking. Then I walked home, killed time, went to bed, another day dawned. The weekdays were no problem, the weekends were more difficult, at two or three in the afternoon the urge to go out and have fun, like other students, slowly made itself felt, at six or seven it became acute, they were pre-loading all around me while I sat alone. At eight or nine it felt better, soon I would be able to go to bed. And occasionally something would hold my attention, a book or my writing, to make me forget time and the situation, and when I next checked my watch it could be twelve, one or even two. That was good, for then I would sleep in longer the following morning, thereby shortening the day. Some Saturdays I went out in the evening, I was sick of my room and my footsteps were drawn to the town centre, past Café Opera perhaps, where the windows were full of laughing chatting people and golden beers, and although all I had to do was open the door and go in, it wasn’t locked of course, I couldn’t do it, in some way or other this was how life had become. Once I did anyway, and it was as I had imagined, a nightmare, I burned inside as I stood in the bar drinking, my chest burned and my head burned, I knew no one, I had no friends, and everyone could see that, I was alone in the bar acting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I drank and calmly surveyed the room, is there anyone I know here tonight? … No, indeed, how strange, not one! Never mind, it’s nice anyway to have a beer before I go home to bed … busy day tomorrow, might as well take it easy now … As I hurried home afterwards I was furious at myself and my own stupidity, I shouldn’t have gone there, it was ridiculous, why did I have to display my failings in that way?

The following weekend I rang Yngve. He had a TV, I would ask him if he was planning to watch the Saturday match and, if so, could I pop up? I hadn’t forgotten the business with Ingvild, I would never forgive him for it, but we had been brothers for much longer than I had been in love with Ingvild, and it ought to be feasible to separate the two relationships from one another, to have two thoughts in your head at once.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hi, this is Karl Ove.’

‘Long time, no hear,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine. I was wondering, actually, if you were going to watch the football this afternoon?’

‘I was, yes.’

‘Would it be OK if I came up to see it?’

‘Yes, of course. It would be great.’

‘Will Ingvild be there? If so, I won’t come.’

‘No, she’s at home this weekend. Just come on up.’

‘Right, see you then. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘By the way, have you done the pools?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many lines?’

‘Thirty-four.’

‘OK. See you.’

I bought a bag of beers in the nearby shop, showered and changed my clothes, trotted up the hill in the rain, went into the kiosk and did the pools, waited for a bus, jumped on, sat looking at all the lights and movement that abounded in this town, the many dislocations of colour and form that occurred, all the light that glittered in the water, floated in the water, all the umbrellas and swishing windscreen wipers, all the lowered heads and laced-up hoods, all the rubber boots and waterproof jackets, all the water running down the gutters, by the kerbsides and on the roof, the gulls circling above and settling on the top of a flagpole, bedraggled, or on the ridiculously high statue in Festplassen, a man of normal dimensions standing on a pillar, how high was it, twenty metres? Thirty? Christian Michelsen, what had he done to deserve such a fate?

Bergen, the town of swishing windscreen wipers.

Bergen, the town of draughty toiletless bedsits.

Bergen, the town of human fish. See their gaping mouths.

This is where grandad came after selling books in the outlying districts, going from door to door, offering his little library, and with the money he bought himself a new suit. This is where he bought the ring to marry grandma. Bergen, this was the town for them. He dressed up when he came here, put on his best clothes and his finest hat, presumably he had always done that.

Across Danmarksplass, to the right under the signs by the little wooden shed where they sold tyres, to the left again straight afterwards, and uphill between the workers’ houses.

Everything was normal, I thought as I rang the bell and waited for him to open up. Everything was as it had been.

And it was.

Yngve had bought chocolate toffees, just like those dad used to give us while we watched the televised English football matches on a Saturday afternoon when we were growing up, he had brewed up a pot of coffee, which we drank before moving on to beer and crisps at the start of the second half. We kept track of the scores in the other eleven matches, he had ten right so far, but it all went haywire towards the end, I had seven correct results, which was more or less what I got whenever I did the pools.

After the match Asbjørn and Ola came up, we sat drinking and chatting for a while, then we caught a taxi into town and went to Café Opera. Ingvild’s name wasn’t mentioned once. I kept a fairly low profile for the first few hours, I had nothing to say, nothing to contribute, but I got drunker and drunker and then there I was, aglow at the centre of the world, babbling away about anything that came into my head. I told them I was going to move to Istanbul to write next year, I said I wrote better than Brett Easton Ellis, he had a cold heart and I didn’t, I said that Jan Kjærstad had read what I had written and liked it. We can’t go home now, I groaned, when they flashed the lights and fortunately no one had any plans to, almost everyone who had been in Café Opera was now in the streets chatting and waiting to hear about a party. Erling and Arvid were there, they lived in a big house up in Villaveien, right behind the Student Centre, in a collective, we could go there, apparently there wasn’t that much to drink, but that wasn’t a problem because someone immediately jumped into a taxi to get what booze they had from home while we slowly made our way uphill, Erling and Arvid first, then the rest of us dragging behind like the tail of a comet.

Both Erling and Arvid came from Tromøya. I remembered Erling as the goalkeeper in the team above us when I was growing up. He was always gentle, he always smiled, but he was not averse to making the odd acerbic comment. Although he was not especially tall there was something ungainly and sometimes almost limp about him, I had noticed that even in the days when he kept goal. Arvid was big and sturdy and always occupied a lot of space wherever he was. The two of them formed a focal point. If they gave a thumbs up or a thumbs down it was significant. But I was safe, apparently, as I was Yngve’s brother. At any rate, I had been when I arrived in Bergen.

The rooms in the old wooden house were spacious and almost entirely unfurnished, I wandered around, the booze came, I drank, someone was staring at me, I went over to him, asked him what he was staring at, he said he hadn’t seen me before and was just wondering who I was, I shook his hand and then I bent his fingers back until he screamed and I let go. What are you doing?! he hissed, Something wrong with you, is there? I left him and went into the adjacent room, where there was a whole crowd sitting on the floor, among them one of Yngve’s fellow students, the one who had been sitting at the table the first time we went to Café Opera. You’re the spitting image of Jan Kjærstad! I shouted, pointing at him. You look just the same! I do not, he said, I don’t look anything like him. He doesn’t, Karl Ove, said Asbjørn, who was also there. And you look like Tarjei Vesaas! I said, pointing at Arvid. Is that a compliment or what? He laughed. No, in fact it isn’t, I said, and turned away because Yngve was standing behind me. Just take it easy, will you, he said. I heard you almost broke someone’s fingers in there. That’s not on. You can’t do that here. Everyone knows everyone, right? Take it easy. I am taking it easy, I said. I’m having a good time. We’re talking about literature. Kjærstad and Vesaas. I left him and went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, the alcohol had made me so damned hungry, and I saw half a chicken, which I grabbed and sank my teeth into, sitting on the worktop and occasionally washing it down with whisky. That moment, which was wonderful, sitting on the worktop in a student flat eating chicken and drinking whisky was the last I remembered. Afterwards everything was black, apart from an image of me hauling rocks into the sitting room and putting them on the floor, running in and out and continuing until someone stopped me and then everything disappeared again.

This was the pattern for the end of autumn, I tagged along with Yngve and his friends, was silent and shy but polite and affable for the first few hours until alcohol had me in its grip and then anything could pass my lips, anything could happen with my hands, until I woke up in an internal darkness the next day, when image after image of what I had done and said was hurled back at me, and I could only get myself going with a huge effort of will, drag myself back to normality, which then slowly took over. Normality was where I belonged, I realised that more and more, the longer the semester went on, I didn’t have the depth or the originality you needed to become a writer, on the other hand I didn’t want to sit there with the others without saying a word, inhibited and silent, because that wasn’t me either, and so the only thing that helped, the only thing that could raise and transport me into something else, something freer, much closer to myself was: drinking. Sometimes it went well, sometimes the evening finished at the right moment, before anything of consequence had happened, except that I had been happy, but then there were the times it didn’t go well and I went off my head, the way I had gone off my head in northern Norway the year before, I was completely out of control. One habit I had developed was to feel car door handles as I walked past, if one was open I would get into the driver’s seat and try to start the engine, I knew you had to connect some wires but I wasn’t sure which, and I never succeeded in starting a car, but the following day just the fact that I had tried was terrible. I released the handbrake inside a car which was open and parked on the hill near where I lived, causing it to roll back down a metre or two and hit the car behind. I ran off chortling inside with amusement. Not only that, I also tried to make off with lots of bikes, I entered backyards and searched for ones that were unlocked, if I found one, well, then I would cycle home on it. Once there was a bike beside the bed in my room when I woke up. I had to wait until it was dark before I could take it out and leave it in a neighbouring street, scared all the while that someone would see me and the police would come. Another time I saw some people sitting behind a window on the second floor somewhere, I went up the stairs, knocked on the door and went in, they shook their heads, I turned round and went back out. There was no evil in me, I just wanted to destroy things, not people, but as long as my sense of judgement was so clouded anything at all could happen, I realised that, and presumably that was why my fears grew so inordinately in the days afterwards. Yngve, with whom I was now spending as much time as I had done before, told me I shouldn’t drink and suggested I smoke hash instead, maybe that would be better. He said I had begun to acquire a bad reputation and it was affecting him too. But he didn’t stop inviting me out, probably because he saw more of the person I was normally than the person I could become when we were on the town.

In the middle of November I was broke, but basically that suited me fine, we had a month-long writing period and so I went to mum’s, stayed in her tiny bedsit and wrote at night while she lay asleep at the far end of the same room, then slept in the hall during the day while she was at work. In the evenings we ate together, chatted or watched TV until she went to bed and my night shift started. After two weeks she drove me to Sørbøvåg, where there was more space, and I immersed myself in the life that went on there, so infinitely far from the life I lived in Bergen, but I was not without a guilty conscience, for what I was doing, the abjectness of it, became so clear when I was surrounded by frailty and disease, but also vitality and warmth.

After Christmas Yngve moved into a collective in Fjellsiden, the flat he had occupied until then was due to be sold. The collective was in a splendid large detached house, I often went there, it was one of the few places I could go. He lived with three others, one of whom, Per Roger, I talked to, he was interested in literature and was a writer himself, but as he was in Yngve’s circle I felt so inferior to him that I barely answered when he asked me something and nothing came of the relationship.

An essay course started at the Academy, I wrote about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of the books I was really passionate about, alongside Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and even though they didn’t fall into the category of literature the teachers favoured and taught, I still received some praise from Fosse, he said my language was tight and precise, my arguments solid and interesting and that I obviously had a talent for non-fiction. The praise was two-edged: did it mean that my future lay in literature about literature and not in literature itself?

Øystein Lønn dropped by on various occasions, the idea being that we should hand in our texts to him, but I didn’t want to, I couldn’t face any more humiliation in the classroom, and instead went to see him privately, at his hotel, with my text in my hand. At the beginning of the course he had said he was at our disposal from dawn till dusk, and all we had to do was go and see him if there was anything we wanted to discuss. So, one evening at seven, I trudged down the hills below my bedsit, the street lamps above me swinging in the wind, the rain beating on the walls and roofs. The heavens were inexhaustible, it had rained every day since the beginning of September and except for a couple of hours I hadn’t seen the sun for what would soon be eight months. The streets were deserted apart from a few people who rushed past hugging the walls, in Bergen it was vital to get from A to B as fast as you could. The water in Vågen glittered in the reflection from the buildings along the quay, an express ferry drifted in and docked. As I passed the terminal it lowered its gangplank and passengers began disembarking, mostly into waiting taxis.

Lønn was staying at Hotel Neptun around the corner, I went in, was given his room number at reception, went up and knocked on the door.

Lønn, a sturdy fellow with big hands and a broad face, stared at me in surprise.

‘You said we could come and see you if we had something to discuss,’ I said. ‘So I brought a text with me. I wonder if you would mind having a look at it.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Come in!’

The room was dark, he had only the two bedside lamps switched on, and the carpet, which was red and stretched from wall to wall, seemed to absorb all the light.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted me to look at? I can do it for tomorrow if you like.’

‘It’s short,’ I said. ‘Just over a page.’

‘I’d better have a look at it then,’ he said. I passed him the text, he perched a pair of glasses on his nose and began to read.

I glanced around cautiously. It was a story about some young boys who had climbed up the steel cables of a bridge, it was snowing hard, they disappeared in the whirl of falling snow, one of them jumped. It transpired that this happened regularly, that a boy jumped to his death. The novella, or short prose text, was inspired by Julio Cortázar.

‘Ye-es,’ Lønn said, removed his glasses, folded them and put them in his shirt pocket. ‘A nice little story. Concise and pithily told. There’s not much more to say about it, is there?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Did you like it?’

‘Yes, I liked it a lot.’

He got up. I got up too. He handed me the text.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He closed the door behind me, I walked down the corridor and felt like screaming at my stupidity. What had I been trying to achieve? What had I expected? That he would say actually I was brilliant? That he would tip the wink to his publisher about me?

No, not that I was brilliant, I didn’t believe that, but that he would take an interest in me and perhaps tell someone at his publishing house, that would have been a possibility, I had thought. Publishing houses did sometimes take an interest in Writing Academy students, that was well known. So why not in me?

When Lønn finished his course he did it with a few well-chosen sentences about each and every student and the various literary projects that he had been allowed to share. Praise for everyone apart from me, whom he failed to mention.

I left, furious and bitter.

It was true I hadn’t handed in any work to him like the others, but he had read one of my texts. Why would he make a secret of that? If he thought it was so awful, surely he could at least have said?

After that I stayed away from the Academy for several weeks. I had already done some skiving in the autumn, and I stepped it up after Christmas, there was no obligation to attend classes, we were free to decide, and for as long as it felt as if I was having my head shoved down the toilet whenever I was there, I had no reason to attend everything, I argued, it was better to sit at home and write, after all that was what I had said when I applied, that the course would give me the opportunity to write full time for a year.

So during the spring I was more often at home than at the Academy, and after the Lønn business I almost gave up attending classes. I didn’t write either, everything felt meaningless apart from going out, which had continued, I did everything I wanted to do, the decadent bohemian city lifestyle, the writer going to rack and ruin with his eyes open wide and a bottle on the table. I broke one of my rules, I went out drinking on my own one evening, I sat in Fekterloftet with a carafe of white wine. Fekterloftet’s speciality was that all the girls who worked there were stunning. That was why I had chosen this particular place to go, thinking I might be able to start a conversation with one of them, but it didn’t happen, they were interested in serving and little else, so once I had finished the second carafe I got up and went to Café Opera, where I hung out in the bar until they closed without seeing one familiar face, then I walked home. I woke up to someone shaking me, opened my eyes, I was lying in the hall, on the floor, sat up, it was Jon Olav. I had crashed out next to his door. The pockets in my waterproof bulged with small stones. I realised I must have collected them to throw at his window. Then someone living there must have come along and I followed them in. Jon Olav laughed at me, and I went back home, my body aching for more sleep. A couple of days later I went to Café Opera in the morning, I couldn’t be bothered to go to the Academy and didn’t fancy sitting at home, so I decided to wander down and buy myself a bottle of wine and see what happened. Getting drunk in the middle of the day was a good feeling, there was a lot of freedom in it, suddenly the day opened and offered quite different opportunities now that I didn’t care about anything. Just walking down the street to buy some newspapers at a kiosk was an experience when you were drunk. It was as though a hole into the world had been opened, all the usual stuff — shelves of chewing gum, pastilles, chocolate — had an unpleasant air when you saw it through drunken eyes in the middle of the day. Not to mention the newspaper articles I read, back at a window table a few minutes later. Something raw and terrible attached itself to them while I viewed them with vivid, almost triumphant, feelings. Jesus, man, I was somebody, I could see something no one else could see, I could see into the depths of the world.

I drank all day, at around five I ate there, then I went down to a bookshop and bought a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, which I tried to read for the next few hours with limited success, I could no longer concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, every sentence I read made me swell with emotion. I can do that too, I thought. No, I can do better than that. Much, much better.

I started to doze off, closed my eyes and went absent for odd moments, came to with a jerk, how long had I been gone? Around me Café Opera was slowly filling up. Suddenly Per Roger was standing in front of me.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘Are you out on your own?’

I saw no point in denying it and nodded.

‘Come over and join us then!’ he said. ‘We’re sitting over there.’

I stared at him. What was that he said?

‘How much have you actually had to drink?’ Per laughed. ‘Are you coming? We’ve got girls there too!’

I stood up and followed him to his table, sat down on one of the chairs, nodded to the others. There were five of them. The nearest one had shoulder-length fair hair and glasses, sideburns and a T-shirt with a skull, a snake and a dagger on underneath a grayish-white goatskin jacket. The guy beside him had long dark hair and sluggish eyes. Then there was a girl, perhaps a couple of years older than me, whom the last member of the group, a short-haired dark handsome guy with a crafty expression, clearly fancied.

‘This is Karl Ove,’ Per Roger said.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ said the fair-haired guy. ‘You a student?’

‘I’m at the Writing Academy,’ I said.

‘You don’t say,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong man then. If there’s one thing I haven’t got, it’s culture! My name’s Gaute by the way.’

He was from Bergen, his pal was from Bergen too, while the sly dark-haired guy was from Odda. The girl was an Østlander. Gaute and Per Roger talked and laughed a lot, the others didn’t say that much, laughed now and then at what Gaute said, but seemed to be somewhere else. I drank and looked out of the window, at the dry tarmac reflecting the street lamps. A little guy, around twenty-five, wearing a white shirt, sat down at the table. His eyes were blue, cold and bored.

Gaute looked at me.

‘Do you know what the skin round a cunt is called?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘A woman.’

He laughed, I did too, and then we skål-ed. Slowly I entered a new phase of intoxication, I rose higher and higher, it was wonderful, I didn’t care about anything any more. Laughed a bit, made the odd comment, went to the bar and got more beer as the glasses emptied.

You didn’t have to be with Gaute for long to know that he disliked everything that smacked of power and the Establishment with the whole of his heart, in fact he hated it. I had met a lot of people with anti-bourgeois attitudes, but they were students and a part of the system, this guy seemed to have acted on his convictions, he was completely on the outside, joking and laughing at everything, quips about Jews and blacks came thick and fast, and I laughed at them so much I could hardly stop. When Café Opera closed he suggested we go back to his place and play a few records and smoke a bit, we shambled out, flagged down a taxi and went to his flat, which it turned out was on the Nordnes peninsula.

When we got out of the taxi and into the stairwell Per Roger said they had been drinking for six months now and were planning to continue. I said I could imagine doing that. Just stick with us, he said, and then we went into Gaute’s flat.

‘It’s my mother’s,’ he said. ‘That’s why it’s so nice here. Sorry. Ha ha ha! But I don’t want any shouting, OK. There are neighbours here too.’

‘Come on, Gaute,’ Per Roger said. ‘If I want to shout I will.’

Gaute didn’t answer, took out a record, I sat down at the table. The music he played was sombre and loud. The other long-haired guy, whose name I couldn’t remember, got an enormous carrot from the fridge and started carving it, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, engrossed in his task.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

He didn’t answer.

‘He’s making a pipe,’ Gaute said. ‘He comes from Åsane. Full of tossers there, and that’s what they do. But you’re not a Lords of the New Church man, are you.’

I shook my head.

‘Pop and indie,’ I said.

‘Pop and indie,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Can we be bothered to wait for the pipe? You’ve got tobacco, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What would you say if I put a bit of horse on the table?’ he said, with his cold eyes.

‘A horse on the table?’ Gaute said, laughing. ‘What the hell are we going to do with that?’

‘Have you got anything to drink?’ I said.

‘There might be a drop left somewhere. I don’t know. You’d better have a look. If you want,’ he said, nodding towards the kitchen. ‘I fancy a smoke myself.’

He looked at the guy from Odda.

‘Did you say you had some on you?’ he said.

The Odda guy nodded, took out a clump of hash wrapped in silver paper and a packet of large Rizla papers and passed them to Gaute. He heated up the clump, I put the tobacco in the paper, picked out the longest threads and ran the lighter over it a few times, the way I had seen others do, gave it to him, he mixed the hash into the tobacco, rolled up the cigarette, licked it and passed the whole salami to me.

We smoked half of it, I got up and went to the toilet, I felt as though my head had been blitzed, all my thoughts were scattered, one bit here, one bit there, mumbling to myself as I peed.

When I went back in, Gaute and Per Roger were talking loudly, almost shouting, a wild hotchpotch of Jew jokes, wordplay and brutality. The guy with the eyes wasn’t to be seen anywhere. The guy from Odda was sitting with the girl on his lap and snogging. The long-haired tosser was filling the carrot pipe with tobacco. I slid down the wall to the floor. Across the table they began to discuss the most brutal ways you could kill yourself. Gaute leaned forward and passed me the joint. I took a deep drag.

‘Give it here,’ Gaute said with a snigger. I passed him the joint, he took a drag and his cheeks were hollow for ages before he exhaled the smoke and passed the joint on to Per Roger.

‘You’ve landed in a suicidal viper’s nest,’ he said and laughed. ‘We’ll drink for as long as we can, and then we’ll kill ourselves. That’s the plan. And you’re in, Per Roger says.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For the drinking bit at any rate.’

‘Can’t have one without the other,’ Gaute said and laughed again. ‘But we have to do it in turn. So those who are left can sell the hair and the gold teeth and keep going for a few more days. Ha ha ha!’

Per Roger laughed as he stared at me.

Then he said:

wriggle with the snake

slither and slide

whither the viper wills

‘What was that?’ I said. ‘Hávamál or what?’

‘No, it’s a poem I wrote.’

‘Did you? That’s fantastic.’

‘We all know which snake you’re thinking about!’ Gaute said. ‘We also know where it’s going! “Slither and slide”, that’s you!’

Per Roger laughed at what Gaute said, but he stared at me with serious wide-open eyes. I looked down.

The Odda guy and the girl got up and were gone. I couldn’t be bothered to look where. I disappeared, when I opened my eyes again the room was empty apart from the guy with the carrot, who was sleeping on the floor. I stood up and went out. The darkness was dense, the streets were deserted. I had no idea what the time was, just walked towards town, barely present inside myself. A car raced up behind me, it was a taxi, I raised my hand in the air, it stopped, I got in, mumbled my address and when it accelerated down the cobbled street it was as though I was taking off, I was floating on the back seat, like a balloon under the car roof. Oh, I had to control this feeling, I couldn’t fly inside the taxi, but it was no good, I couldn’t hold myself down, I floated like a balloon under the roof the whole way home. Once there, I undressed, went to bed and slept like a log. When I woke it was pitch black outside. I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock.

Five o’clock in the afternoon or the morning?

Surely it had to be the afternoon?

I leaned forward and peered through the window. Two kids in waterproofs were kicking a ball to each other in the park on the other side of the street. Afternoon then. I went down to the basement and had a shower, and then, absolutely ravenous, I fried all the eggs I had and put them on six slices of bread, which I bolted down. Followed by a litre of milk with Nesquik.

It felt as though I had seen hell’s gates open.

I wrote all night with the rain beating against the window and drunken night-owls sporadically walking past in the otherwise empty street. In the morning the house filled with the noise of people starting the day, I went back to bed, and when I woke, at around one, it was from a dream in which I had died. I was doing this more and more often, and I was more frightened in these dreams than I had ever been awake. Usually I fell from a great height, but sometimes I drowned. It was as if I was absolutely clear-headed and conscious, as if what happened was real. Now I am going to die, I thought.

I got dressed, ate a few slices of bread and butter and went to Yngve’s.

I rang the bell. One of the girls opened the door.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Yngve’s out. Would you like to come in and wait?

‘Could do,’ I said. ‘Is Per Roger in?’

‘No. He’s been away for several days. Think he’s on a binge.’

I said nothing about having been drinking with him that night, I didn’t want any conversation.

‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’ she said, and when I nodded she disappeared into her room. I slumped on the sofa, took one of the magazines on the table and flicked through.

After a while I went over to the window and looked out at the grey ocean that was the sky and the red rooftops and white walls that ran down cheek by jowl towards the town centre. For all I knew he might be out until the following day.

The girl came back, she slipped into the kitchen, poked her head out and asked if I wanted a cup of tea.

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘Incidentally, you don’t know where Yngve is, do you?’

‘No idea. I think he was going to see Ingvild.’

‘Oh yes. Well, that might be a while then,’ I said. The natural consequence of what she said was that I should go. But I didn’t want to. I’ll give him another half an hour, I thought, and went into his room. It was a part of the collective and not as private as it would have been had it been his bedroom in a normal flat, but I still felt a little uneasy at being there. It smelled the same as the flat in Solheimsviken, and the possessions were the same, right down to the white Ikea bedspread. I flicked through his record collection, wondering if I should play some music while I was waiting, but decided that would be taking a liberty, sitting in his room and playing his records when he came home, that wouldn’t look good.

Perhaps it would be best to go home.

I got up and went into the hall. As I bent down to tie my shoelaces the door opened and Yngve stood in front of me with a dripping umbrella in one hand and a Mekka bag in the other.

‘Are you off?’ he said.

‘No, not now,’ I said. ‘Didn’t think you’d be here for a bit.’

He took his purchases into the kitchen, I sat down in the sitting room.

‘I’m going to make an omelette,’ he shouted from inside. ‘Want one?’

‘OK,’ I shouted back.

We ate without speaking, he sat with the remote control in front of him zapping through the sports pages on teletext. Afterwards he made some coffee, the girl came down, Yngve cracked a joke, she laughed, I lit a cigarette and thought I’d better go now, however it was still better sitting here than at home.

‘I’ve finished the music for your lyrics by the way,’ he said. ‘Would you like to hear it?’

I followed him into his room. He hung the guitar strap over his shoulder, switched on the amplifier, adjusted the echo box and strummed a few chords.

‘Ready?’ he said.

I nodded and he began to play, slightly embarrassed. He didn’t sing very well, but that wasn’t the point, I only had to hear how the tune went, nevertheless I still couldn’t watch him as he stood there with his head lowered and the guitar hanging over his hips, singing. But it was catchy, a nice simple pop song.

I told him. He lifted the guitar over his head and put it on the stand.

‘I need some more songs,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you just dash off a few?’

‘I’ll try.’

We went back into the sitting room. He said he was going to a party tomorrow, someone in his department was giving it, a little out of town.

‘Do you feel like coming?’

‘Could do,’ I said. ‘Will Ingvild be going?’

‘Think so, yes.’

I had met them together two or three times. It had been strange, but it had gone well, all three of us pretended nothing had happened, and now that I no longer believed there was a chance of going out with her, I didn’t have any problem talking to her either. Once we had been alone at the same table in Café Opera, the conversation had flowed easily and naturally, she talked about her father and her relationship with him, I listened, she talked about her time at gymnas, and I told her a little about mine, she laughed in the fantastic way she did, when her eyes seemed to burst into laughter. All my feelings for her were intact, she was still the one I wanted, still the one I yearned for, but now that it was impossible, now that there was a definitive obstacle in the way, I was no longer afraid of talking to her. And while at the beginning of their relationship I had avoided them like the plague, I hadn’t wanted to see them at all, yet had started meeting Yngve, though still not her, everything had been turned on its head: now I wanted her to be there or come along when I was with Yngve. I just wanted to see her, just be in the same room as her, be filled with her presence.

I sat up all night penning lyrics for Yngve. It was fun, it was quite different from writing texts to read out at the Academy, this was about thinking up some phrases that sounded good and then finding something that would rhyme. This wasn’t about anything in particular, didn’t have a theme, didn’t go anywhere and it was liberating. It was like doing a crossword.

By three in the morning I had one song ready.

Over My Head

I die in dreams

Nights in blue

Cannot forget

Know we’re through

Howl at the moon

There we lie

Know no bounds

Off we fly

Know it’s all right

Take it as read

Know you can do it

Tho’ it’s over my head

You’re moving on

Why, oh why

You know no bounds

Off you fly

I die in dreams

Nights in blue

No way, it seems

Gone like the dew

Know it’s all right

Take it as read

Know you can do it

Tho’ it’s over my head

When I went to see Yngve the next evening Ingvild was there and I left the lyrics in my jacket pocket, sat down with a beer in my hand instead and casually asked how she was doing. She was wearing the white jumper with the blue stripes and blue jeans. She was both at home and not at home with her surroundings, and I wondered whether she was always like that, split somehow, always with one eye on herself, or was it just here at Yngve’s? They sat beside each other on the sofa but apart. They hadn’t touched each other since I arrived either. Was that because of me? Were they being considerate to me? Or was that how they behaved with each other?

She said everything was going well and she loved being in the collective in Nygårdsgaten. The history of the collective went back to the 1960s, she said, actually Kjartan Fløgstad had lived there once. Now some of Yngve’s friends lived there: Frank from Arendal, an odd character, according to her, and Atle from Kristiansand, as well as two other girls.

After a while she got up to go for a shower, and after she had gone I took out the song I had written for Yngve. He cast a quick eye over it. It’s great, he said and stuffed it in his back pocket.

Ingvild walked through the room wrapped in a large towel.

I looked away.

‘We have to go soon,’ Yngve said. ‘You’ll have to hurry.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Ingvild said.

We had another beer, then he stood up and started to get dressed. Opened the door to the room where Ingvild was standing and drying her hair.

‘Let’s go. Come on,’ he said.

‘I just have to finish drying my hair,’ she said from inside the room.

‘Couldn’t you have done it a bit earlier?’ Yngve said. ‘You knew we had to go soon, didn’t you.’

He closed the door.

‘Good job I didn’t book a taxi anyway,’ he said without looking at me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There was a silence. The girl who lived there went into the sitting room and switched on the television.

At the party, which consisted mainly of media students plus a crowd of music types, I was as usual the younger brother of Yngve and nothing else. Girls thought it amusing that we were so alike, I said next to nothing, apart from when someone put on a classical record and asked what it was and none of the media students could answer, and I said, my face half-averted and embarrassed at myself, that it was Tchaikovsky. It was. Yngve eyed me with surprise. How did you know? he said. Lucky break, I said, and it was too, I had one record by Tchaikovsky and that was the one.

Ingvild took an early taxi home, Yngve stayed and it was painful to see that he didn’t appreciate her more, that he was happy to see her go. If it had been me I would have flung my arms around her. I had worshipped her. I had given her everything I had. Yngve didn’t do that. Did he care about her at all?

He must do. But he was older, more experienced, a different light burned in him to my stupid naïve one. And what I also saw was that he gave Ingvild space, a larger space than she occupied, which I couldn’t have done, never in this world, because we were in the same space, she and I, the space of uncertainty and hesitation, half-groping and half-clutching. She needed him as much as I did.

After we had run through various dramatists and various drama traditions at the Academy, the idea was that we should write something in the genre ourselves, as usual. I put off doing this until the evening before it was due, then I plodded off to Verftet to sit there all night. We had a standing offer of a desk there if we needed an undisturbed place to write in the afternoon and evening, I had borrowed the keys and done it a couple of times, there was something about being alone in a common room that I liked, perhaps because there was nothing in it that reminded me of myself, I wasn’t quite sure why, that was just how it was, this evening too, when I let myself in and walked through the empty hallway, up the empty stairs and into the empty rooms at the top.

The others had already handed in their contributions, photocopies of their work lay in piles on the table in the adjacent room. I fetched a typewriter, put on some coffee, stared at the reflection of the room in the black windows, looking as though it had been pulled out of the drifting waters of Vågen. It was nine o’clock, I had decided I would sit here until I had finished, even if it took all night.

I had no idea what to write.

The coffee was ready, I drank a cup, smoked a cigarette, stared at the image of myself in the window. Turned and looked at the bookshelves. They wouldn’t have a photography book of scantily clad or naked women here, would …?

But they did have a book about the history of art. I reached it down and leafed through. Some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings were of naked women. Perhaps there was something I could use there?

It was too big for me to fit into my trousers. And I didn’t want to carry it under my arm because even though the chance of someone appearing at this time was minimal it wasn’t impossible, and how would I explain lugging an art book down to the toilet?

I put it in a plastic bag and went down the spiral staircase and into the toilet. A picture by Rafael stood out at once, two women in front of a well, one naked, the other dressed, the naked one was strikingly beautiful, she was looking enigmatically to the side, her small breasts were pert, a strip of cloth covered her nether regions, but her thighs were visible and I got a hard-on, I flicked through, stared at a picture by Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), one of the two naked women was the red-haired pale freckly type with a small chin and a full body, then there was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485), where one breast was bared, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in which the woman in the foreground had one hand resting between her legs while she gazed straight at the observer with a provocative self-assured expression on her face. I studied her naked breasts for a long time, her broad hips and small feet, but there was more to see of course, and I went on to Bartholomeus Spranger’s Vulcan and Maia (1590), in which the woman, with her hands on a strong bearded man, thrusts her hips forward with a lustful glint in her eye. Her breasts were supple, her skin was all white, her face almost childish. She was good. The next was Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), the woman in the foreground had her back to us, one breast was revealed, thrust right forward, because she had a sword to her throat, and the whole of her bottom was visible, perfectly formed. During this time, as I flicked backwards and forwards, trying to decide which picture to go for, I wanked slowly, holding myself back. Maybe Delacroix? No, it had to be Ingres! Odalisque with Slave (1842). She’s lying full length with her arms behind her head and is all wonderful curves, or, oh, of course The Turkish Bath (1862). Only women in this one and they were all naked. They sat and stood in every conceivable pose and every possible type was represented: cool, passionate, half-concealed, fully exposed. All skin and flesh and female forms as far as the eye could see. But which one, oh, which one? The one with the chubby face and the open lips? I loved faces in which the mouths were slightly open and the teeth always visible. Or the blonde just behind with the haughty gaze? The one with the small breasts staring at her hand? Or the one, oh yes, sitting behind her, leaning back, arms outstretched, eyes closed in ecstasy, it had to be her!

Afterwards I stood still for a moment to make sure there was no one in the corridor outside, then I went back up, returned the book to its place on the shelf, poured myself a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and sat staring at the blank page.

Nothing. I had no idea what to write.

I went for a little walk, browsed through the books, went into the photocopy room, skimmed through the others’ work. They were what you would expect, each and every one of them had written in complete keeping with their own particular style. Most I just cast a quick glance at, but I took Petra’s into the classroom and read it carefully. It was a kind of absurd, almost surreal, comedy where people did totally unmotivated and pretty crazy things, it was high tempo, devoid of meaning, my main impression was: chaos and randomness.

Surely I could do that too?

I began to write, and I wrote quickly, one scene after the other appeared on the paper as a kind of extension of what I had read. There might have been some slight similarities in the characterisation, what they got up to was also unmotivated and unexpected, but it was not a carbon copy of Petra’s, ultimately the characters did do different things, and I was very pleased when I had a first draft at around three. I touched it up, went through the whole drama one more time and by eight in the morning I had got so far that I was able to photocopy the text ten times and put the copies in a pile beside the others. When the first student arrived, at a quarter to ten, I was asleep in my chair.

The whole day was spent analysing the texts. I was praised for mine, although Hovland had some criticisms regarding its dramatic quality, in other words the link between the characters and the scenes, I defended myself by saying there wasn’t supposed to be a link, that was the whole point, and he nodded and said yes, but even incoherence requires coherence; the rule of thumb for all writing is that you can write about boredom, but it mustn’t be boring.

Petra had watched me during the analysis, but she said nothing, even when Hovland asked her directly for her opinion she said she had no comment to make. It was only when the lesson was over and people were tidying up and putting on coats that it came.

‘You copied my text,’ she said.

‘I did not,’ I said.

‘You were here last night, you read my text and then you wrote yours. That’s copying pure and simple.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t read yours at all. How can I copy it if I haven’t read it?’

‘Do you think I’m stupid or what? You sat here, read it and wrote a variation on a theme. You might as well admit it.’

‘Well, I would admit it if there was anything in your claim,’ I said. ‘But there isn’t. I didn’t read your text. And I didn’t copy it. If there’s any similarity at all it’s pure chance.’

‘Ha!’ she said, and got up, put her papers and books in her black bag. ‘It makes no difference to me, it’s all right if you copy what I do, but lying about it is not bloody all right.’

‘I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘I knew nothing until you read it out.’

She rolled her eyes, put on her jacket and walked towards the exit. I waited a few minutes for my head to cool down and for Petra to be so far away that I couldn’t catch her up, then I made my way home. I recognised this situation, it was the same as the one I had been in at school when I had voted for myself as class rep and received only one vote, and someone found out by asking everyone in the class who they had voted for. I denied it, they couldn’t prove anything, I just said no, it wasn’t true. In this case, it wasn’t possible to prove anything, no one else but me knew that I had read her piece, I just had to keep denying it, she was the one making a fool of herself. But I had no great desire to show my face there again, for if no one else knew for certain, I did. The night before it had seemed natural, a matter of course, I had only borrowed a little from her, surely that was justified, but during the analysis and in our subsequent exchange it took on a different aspect, I had plagiarised her work and what did that make me? How had I become so desperate that I not only plagiarised a fellow student’s work but on top of that deluded myself into thinking I had made up everything myself?

Once I had copied a poem into my diary and pretended it was me who had written it. I had been twelve at the time, and strange as it might seem that I could so openly dupe myself, you wrote this Karl Ove, you did, while I had copied it from a book, age was a mitigating circumstance. Now I was twenty though, an adult man, how could I have knowingly done anything so base?

For the next few weeks I stayed at home. I wrote my novel, it was hopeless, but I was nearing the end, and it was important I had something concrete and tangible to show for my work this year.

I had sent a text, the one Øystein Lønn had read, to the Cappelen magazine Signaler, and one day it came back. I nurtured wild hopes of an acceptance as I opened the envelope, but guessed which way the wind was blowing, so it was no surprise when I read:

Dear Karl Ove Knausgård,

Thank you for sending me your contribution. I read it with interest, but I am afraid I cannot use it in SIGNALER 89.

Best regards,

Lars Saabye Christensen

It gave me a little frisson of excitement to see Saabye Christensen’s signature, it meant he had read what I had written. For a few minutes at any rate I had filled his mind with what existed in mine!

XTC brought out Oranges and Lemons, I played it again and again, right until deLillos released their Hjernen er alene, The Brain Is Alone, then that was what was on my stereo day and night. Outside, the skies were lighter and the rain fell less often. The feelings of spring, which had been so strong when I was a boy, which had filled all my senses and somehow raised body and soul after the winter’s heaviness and darkness, overcame me again. I stuck at my novel, I wouldn’t finish it until the semester was over, but I planned to hand in what I had done as my final assignment at the Academy. It was the same novel that I had been accepted on the course for, and there was no development evident in it, I wrote in exactly the same style now as I had done then, the whole year had been wasted, the sole difference was that when they accepted me I thought I was a writer, while now, on the verge of finishing, I knew I wasn’t.

One evening Yngve and Asbjørn appeared on the steps.

‘Are you coming out?’ Asbjørn said.

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have any money.’

‘You can borrow some if you want,’ Asbjørn said. ‘Yngve has a broken heart, so we have to drink him through it.’

‘It’s over with Ingvild,’ Yngve said and smiled.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Count me in. Hang on a moment.’

I fetched my jacket and tobacco and walked to town with them. The next three days were a blur, we drank day and night, slept at Asbjørn’s, got drunk in the morning, ate in town, continued drinking in his bedsit, went out in the evening to all sorts of weird places such as Uglen or the bar at Rica, and it was wonderful, nothing could beat the feeling of walking across Torgalmenningen and Fisketorget in the middle of the day, drunk, it was as though I was right and everyone else was wrong, as though I was free and everyone else tied and bound to everyday life, and with Yngve and Asbjørn it didn’t seem wrong or excessive, just fun. On the last night — we didn’t know it would be the last — we took cans of spray paint with us. At Hulen, where we ended up, the place wasn’t very full, when I went to the toilet I spray-painted a slogan inside the cubicle, soon afterwards a member of the staff came with a cloth and bucket to clean it off, once he had left I did it again, we laughed and decided to go the whole hog, spray-paint some buildings in town, and we went to Møhlenpris, I wrote U2 STOPS ROCK ‘N’ ROLL along a big brick wall in letters as high as myself, they had just played on a rooftop, it hadn’t been good, and Bono had formulated the slogan U2 Stops Traffic, which was even less good, while Asbjørn wrote RICKY NELSON RULES OK over the tram depot wall, and Yngve wrote CAT, WE NEED YOU TO RAP on another wall, we continued like this towards his collective, where we stopped to have more to drink. An hour later we had all crashed out. When we woke up it was to the fear of what we had done, because the trail led to us: the graffiti started outside Hulen and continued all the way here, to the wall beside the door, where you could read YNGVE IS A BLOODY … It wouldn’t take much of an investigation to work out where the vandals who had spray-painted the whole of Møhlenpris lived. Asbjørn was especially jittery, but I wasn’t immune, and that was strange because all I wanted to do was to keep on drinking, live life, not give a toss, yet I hit a wall whenever I did that, a wall of petite bourgeoisie and middle-class manners, which could not be broken down without enormous anguish and fear. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Deep down I was decent and proper, a goody-goody, and, I thought, perhaps that was also why I couldn’t write. I wasn’t wild enough, not artistic enough, in short, much too normal for my writing to take off. What had made me believe anything else? Oh, but this was the life-lie.

What I had learned over the course of the year at the Writing Academy was that there was a literature that was real literature, the true lofty variety, which stretched from Homer’s epics and the Greek dramas through the course of history up to the present day with writers such as Ole Robert Sunde, Tor Ulven, Eldrid Lunden, Kjartan Fløgstad, Georg Johannesen, Liv Lundberg, Anne Bøe, Ellen Einan, Steinar Løding, Jon Fosse, Terje Dragseth, Hans Herbjørnsrud, Jan Kjærstad, Øystein Lønn, Svein Jarvoll, Finn Øgeland, the Danes Søren Ulrik Thomsen and Michael Strunge, the Swedes Katarina Frostenson and Stig Larsson. I knew that the great Scandinavian poet of this century was Gunnar Ekelöf, and the great Finnish — Swedish modernist Gunnar Björling, I knew that our own Rolf Jacobsen wasn’t fit to tie their shoelaces and Olav H. Hauge was rooted in tradition to a far greater degree than they were. I knew the last great innovation in the novel took place in France in the 1960s, and that it was ongoing, especially in the novels of Claude Simon. I also knew that I couldn’t reinvent the novel, I couldn’t even copy those who were being innovative as I didn’t understand where the novel’s essence lay. I was blind, I couldn’t read; if I read Stig Larsson’s Introduction, for example, I couldn’t say what was new about it or what the essence was, I read all novels the way I had once read crime fiction and thrillers, the endless series of books I had read as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, about the Black September group and the Jackal, about spies during the Second World War and randy elephant-hunters in Africa. What had changed during this year was that now I definitely knew that there were differences. But this hadn’t had any impact on my own writing. To solve this problem, I had made a sub-genre of the modern novel my own, this was the one I marketed as my ideal, American novels and short stories written by Bret Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jay McInerny, Barry Gifford. This was how I excused what I wrote.

I had gained an insight. At great expense, but it was real and important: I was not a writer. What writers had, I did not have. I fought against this insight, I told myself I might be able to have what writers had, it might be attainable provided I persisted for long enough, while knowing in fact this was only a consolation. Probably Jon Fosse had been right: probably my talent did consist in writing about literature and not writing literature itself.

This was my final assessment, some days after going on a bender with Yngve and Asbjørn, walking home from the Academy after handing in my manuscript. The novel wasn’t finished, and I had decided to spend the rest of the spring and summer on it. When it was completed I would send it to a publisher. I had decided on Cappelen, to whom I felt some loyalty after the personal rejection by Lars Saabye Christensen. I assumed I would get another rejection, but I wasn’t entirely sure, they might see something in my writing that Jon Fosse and Ragnar Hovland hadn’t, after all they too had seen something inasmuch as they had accepted me onto the course — this was a small hope, but it was there and would be there right until a letter from Cappelen landed in my post box. It wasn’t over until then.

The light in the town had been changing character during the spring. The dampness and the gloom of the autumn and winter hues were gone. Now the colours were dry and light and, with the white houses reflecting the light, even the indirect light when the sun was behind the clouds, shimmering and bright, it was as though the whole town had risen. In the autumn and winter Bergen was like a bowl, it lay still and took whatever came its way; in the spring and summer it was as though the mountains folded back like the petals of a flower, and the town burst forth in its own right, humming and quivering.

You couldn’t sit inside in the evenings then.

I knocked on Morten’s door, asked if he wanted to go with me to Christian and if so could he lend me some money, he could, and we perched at a table staring at all the beautiful girls out walking, not the black-clad, intellectual kind, but the nicely dressed blonde conventional kind, while we discussed how difficult everything was and we slowly got drunk and the evening dissolved into the usual darkness. I woke up under a bush by Lille Lungegård Lake with someone tugging at me, it was a policeman, he said I couldn’t sleep there, I got up sleepily and went home.

I knocked on Ingvild’s door in her new collective, she was surprised to see me but also happy, I sensed, and I was happy too. It was a big collective with a corner window facing Nygårdsgaten and the Grieg Hall, I said hello to the others living there, faces I had seen but not spoken to, all in some way or other connected with Yngve. Ingvild was fully integrated into student life, that was good to see, at the same time it made her harder to reach, I was on the outside, she said twice she wanted me as a friend and I assumed that probably meant she didn’t want me as a boyfriend.

We sat there on the big sofa, she had made some tea, seemed happy, I looked at her, tried not to show how depressed I was, how sorry I was that we weren’t together and never would be, then I smiled and talked about more pleasurable matters, and when I left she must have thought it was all over as far as I was concerned and now we were actually only friends.

Before leaving I asked her if she could lend me a hundred kroner or two. I was flat broke, didn’t even have enough money for a smoke.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But I want it back!’

‘Goes without saying,’ I said. ‘Have you got two hundred?’

I owed both Yngve and Asbjørn so much that I couldn’t borrow any more. I also owed Morten quite a bit, and Jon Olav and Anne. I had also begged a hundred here and a hundred there when I had been out, off Yngve’s friends, no one was that careful when they were out drinking, and I didn’t have to pay everyone back.

Ingvild had two hundred. I stuffed the money in my pocket and went downstairs as she returned to her room.

Strange, I thought as I emerged and felt the warm air on my face and saw the row of trees that had begun to burst into leaf behind the Grieg Hall. The moment she was out of sight, I missed her. I had seen her only a few minutes earlier, she had been sitting a metre away from me, her knees together and her upper body leaning over the table, and now I was both excited and sad at the thought that she might be sitting alone in her room at this minute, at the mere knowledge that she existed.

At the end of May Yngve had exams and I joined him and his friends in the evenings when they were out celebrating. The town was awash with people, they were everywhere, the air was warm, the trees were an explosion of green, and as I walked around in the evening beneath the light sky, in the dusk-grey streets that never really became dark, all of this gave me strength, all of this lifted my mood, I had such a strong feeling of being alive and, not least, that I wanted to live more.

The year was over, the next day we would be having the end-of-year meal at the Academy and be given a certificate, or whatever it was, to prove we had attended the course. I would go, say goodbye to everyone and then I would turn my back. Never think about it again.

Among Yngve’s student friends spirits were high, beer after beer was brought to our table, and even though I didn’t say that much, even though I was temporarily my silent self, I was still there, I drank and smiled and looked at the others, who babbled away about this and that, Ola was the only person I knew, the others I had only seen, so I sat down beside him, he had always taken me under his wing in the sense that he took me seriously and listened to what I said, as though there was something sensible or interesting in it, although he himself was light years above it. He even laughed at my jokes. But I didn’t want to impose on him, or Yngve, who sat there with his head raised, clinking glasses and talking.

By the time the lights flashed and we drank up, then went downstairs to hang around outside until we were all gathered in a group as always, I was so drunk that I felt as if I were in a tunnel, the sides were all dark, the light was only ahead, wherever I was looking or thinking. I was free.

‘There’s our Kjærstad!’ I said.

‘Pack it in,’ he said. ‘It’s not funny, even if you think it is.’

‘It is quite funny,’ I said. ‘Shall we go now? What are we waiting for?’

Yngve came over to me.

‘Easy now,’ he said.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But let’s go, shall we?’

‘We’re waiting for someone.’

‘Aren’t you pleased it went well?’

‘Of course.’

He turned to the others. I rummaged through my pockets for cigarettes, couldn’t make my lighter work and threw it to the ground.

‘Got a light?’

I asked the guy who resembled Kjærstad, and he nodded, took out a lighter and lit my cigarette, cupping his hand to shield the flame.

I spat and took a drag, looking around me. The girls with us were four, five years older than me, but I was good-looking, surely this wasn’t the first time a twenty-year-old had fucked a twenty-five-year-old?

But I had nothing to say to them, even when I was as drunk as I was now, so there was no hope there. You had to say something first, that much I had learned.

Suddenly they started walking. I followed them, always staying in the middle of the crowd, I saw Yngve’s head bobbing up and down a few metres ahead of me, and the luminous May night with all the smells, the animated voices, all the other people on the streets, my brain was whirring with thoughts of how good this was. I was a student in Bergen, surrounded by other students, we were off to a party, walking through the streets of Høyden towards Nygård Park, which lay still, breathing quietly, in the darkness between all the roads and buildings, it was 1989, I was twenty years old, full of life and energy. And, watching the others walking with me, I thought they weren’t like that, only I was, I rose higher and higher, further and further, while they stayed where they were. Bloody media students. Bloody media twats. Bloody media theorists. What did they know about life? What did they know about what was really important?

Listen to my heart beating.

Listen to my heart beating, you dozy fucking little imbeciles. Listen to it beating!

Look at me. Look at the strength I’ve got!

I could crush every bloody one of them. And it wouldn’t be a problem either. I could just go on and on and on. They could belittle me, they could humiliate me, they always had, but I would never give up, it wasn’t in my make-up, while all the other idiots, who thought they were so bloody clever, they had nothing inside them, they were completely hollow.

The park.

Oh Jesus, the entrance to the park! Oh shit, how beautiful. The dense green foliage, nearly black in the gathering dusk, and the pond. The gravel and the benches.

I took it all in. It became me. I carried it within me.

They stopped, one of them pulled out a bunch of keys from a trouser pocket and opened a door to a detached house on the opposite side of the street from the park.

We went up an old battered staircase, entered an old battered flat. There was a high ceiling, a fireplace in one corner, rag rugs on the wooden floor, 50s furniture bought at the flea market or at Fretex, the Salvation Army shop, a poster of Madonna, a poster of Elvis with a gun that Warhol had done and a poster of the first Godfather film.

We sat down. Spirits and glasses appeared on the table. Yngve sat at the head of the table, I sat at the opposite end, I didn’t like having anyone close to me, as you had if you sat on the sofa.

I drank. More darkness. They discussed, I threw in comments, Yngve sent me occasional glances and I could see he didn’t like what I said or the way I said it. He thought I was showing him up. Let him think that, it wasn’t my problem.

I got up and went to the toilet. I pissed in the sink and laughed at the idea of them putting in the plug, filling the sink with water and washing their faces the following morning.

I went back, poured more whisky, almost everything was dark now.

‘Look at the park!’ I said.

‘What about it?’ someone said.

‘Easy now, Psycho,’ Yngve said.

I dragged myself to my feet, grabbed my glass and hurled it at him as hard as I could. It hit him in the face. He fell forward. Everyone got up screaming, rushed to his side. I stood still for a moment and watched the scene unfolding. Then I went into the hall, put on my shoes and jacket and staggered down the stairs, onto the street and into the park. The feeling of finally having acted was strong. I looked up at the sky, which was light and bright and wonderful, and stared into the green darkness of the park, and then I was gone, it was as though I had been switched off.

I woke up on a corridor floor.

It was light, the sun was streaming in through the windows.

I sat up. There were several doors along the corridor. An old lady stood eyeing me, behind her a younger woman, perhaps forty, she was eyeing me too. They didn’t say anything but they looked scared.

I struggled to my feet. I was still drunk, my body leaden. I understood nothing, it was like being in a dream, but I knew that I was conscious and staggered off down the corridor, a hand against the wall every now and then.

There was something about a fire engine. A fire and a fire engine. Wasn’t there?

At the end of the corridor there was a staircase, at the bottom a door with frosted glass in the top part. I went down the stairs, pushed open the door, stopped outside and squinted into the sun.

In front of me was the end wall of the Science Building. To the left was Lille Lungegård Lake.

I turned and looked at the building where I had slept. It was white and made of brick.

A big police car came down the road and turned into the gravel area in front of me as two women came out of the door behind me.

Two officers walked towards me and stopped.

‘I think there’s a fire,’ I said. ‘A fire engine went that way,’ I said, pointing across. ‘It’s not here. It’s further away. It must be.’

‘That’s him,’ said the woman behind me.

‘What are you doing here?’ one policeman said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I woke up here. But I think you should hurry.’

‘What’s your name?’

I looked at him. I teetered to the side, he put his hand on my shoulder to steady me.

‘What difference does it make what my name is?’ I said. ‘What’s a name?’

‘You’d better come with us,’ he said.

‘In the car?’

‘Yes, come now.’

He put his hand on my arm and led me to the car, pushed open the door, and I got in the back, a large space which I had all to myself.

Now I had experienced this as well. Being driven through the streets of Bergen in a police car.

Had they arrested me?

But it was the end-of-year meal today!

There were no sirens wailing or anything, they drove sedately and stopped at all the traffic lights. They arrived at the police station, grabbed my arm again and led me into the building.

‘I need to make a telephone call,’ I said. ‘It’s important. I should be at a meeting. They have to know I won’t be coming. I have the right to make a call, I know that.’

I was laughing inside, this was just like a film, me, flanked by two policemen, asking to make a telephone call!

And I got my way. They stopped by a phone at the end of the corridor.

I didn’t know the number of the Writing Academy. There was a telephone directory underneath, I tried to look it up and failed.

I turned to them.

‘I give up,’ I said.

‘OK,’ they said, and led me to a hatch where I had to empty my pockets and hand over my belt, and then they steered me down to the cellar, or whatever it was, at any rate there were iron doors on either side of the corridor and I had to go through one of them. The cell was completely bare except for a big blue mattress.

‘Sleep it off here. Someone will collect you for questioning when you wake up.’

‘Yes, sir!’ I said in English, standing in the middle of the cell until they had closed the door behind them, then I lay down on the blue mattress and laughed to myself for a long time before falling asleep.

The next time I woke up I was still drunk and everything that had happened out there and on the way here had something dreamlike about it. But the iron door and the concrete floor were tangible enough.

I knocked on the door.

I ought to have shouted, but I didn’t know quite what. Guard?

Yes.

‘Guard, I’ve woken up!’ I shouted. ‘Guard! Guard!’

‘Shut up!’ someone shouted.

That frightened me a bit and I sat down on the mattress. Some time later the door was unlocked and a policeman stared in at me.

‘Are you sober now?’ he said.

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not completely though. Better than before anyway.’

‘Come with me,’ he said.

We went up from the cellar, him first, me next, into a lift and through the floors. He knocked on a door, we went into an office, an older man, maybe fifty, maybe fifty-five, plain clothes, looked at me.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

I sat down on the chair in front of his desk.

‘You were found in Florida,’ he said. ‘You’d fallen asleep in the corridor of a nursing home. What were you doing there?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was so drunk. I don’t remember a thing. Just that I woke up there.’

‘Do you live in Bergen?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Karl Ove Knausgård.’

‘Have you any convictions?’

‘Convictions?’

‘Have you ever been convicted of anything? Drugs, breaking and entering?’

‘No, no, no.’

He looked over at a man standing in the doorway.

‘Will you check that?’

The man went into the office next door. While he was there the man who was questioning me sat, head down, filling in a form without saying a word. Blinds covered the windows; outside, between the slats, the sky was blue.

The second man came back.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘You don’t remember anything?’ said the man questioning me. ‘Earlier in the evening, you don’t remember anything? Where did you go?’

‘I was at a party. By the park.’

‘Who were you with?’

‘My brother, among others. And some of his friends.’

He looked at me.

‘We’d better call him in then.’

‘Who?’

‘Your brother.’

‘What’s he got to do with this? And what’s all this about? I slept in the corridor of a nursing home, that’s not good, I know, and you might consider it breaking and entering, but that’s all I did.’

‘You don’t remember anything?’ he said. ‘The home was burgled last night and in the immediate vicinity there was a car crash. So things were happening. Then we find you in the corridor of the same home. That’s what this is about. What’s your brother’s name?’

‘Yngve Knausgård.’

‘His address? And yours?’

I told him.

‘You’ll be hearing from us. You can go now.’

I was escorted down to the ground floor, given my few possessions and I went into the car park outside. I was so tired I could barely walk. I stopped several times to catch my breath, and before Steinkjellergaten I had to sit down on a step, I simply had no energy left. Up the hill, would I make it? But ten minutes later, after passers-by had stared at me, every single one, I got to my feet and lurched up the hill. The walk home from the police station took me close to an hour. In my room I lay down on the bed and fell asleep for the third time within twenty-four hours. Not for long. When I opened my eyes again it was still early afternoon. The heaviness had left my body, it felt normal now apart from a terrible hunger. I ate ten slices of bread and cheese, drank a litre of milk with Nesquik and went to the phone box to call the Academy. Fortunately Sagen was there. I told him I had been arrested and hadn’t been able to go to the dinner. Arrested? he said. Are you joking? No, I said, I spent the night in a cell. I’m still in a bad way, I’m afraid to say. Could you send me the certificate, do you think? Certainly, he said. Shame you weren’t here for the meal. Arrested, you say? Yes, I said. Thank you for everything this year anyway. I’m sure we’ll meet again.

I rang off and, with my last coins, caught the bus into town. The sky was dark blue, the sun red and above Askøy the clouds in the east looked as if they were on fire. I walked past the Student Centre and down to Møhlenpris, intending to visit Yngve, perhaps he could clarify what had happened.

The door was open, and I went up the stairs to the floor where the collective was and rang the bell.

Line, a nice blonde girl from Østland, a few years older than me, opened the door.

She looked at me with something akin to fear in her eyes.

‘Is Yngve in?’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘He’s in his room.’

I went in, took off my shoes, kept my jacket on, knocked softly on Yngve’s door and opened it.

He was standing by the stereo and turned when he heard me.

I stared at him in amazement.

Half of his face was covered with a bandage.

Suddenly it all came back to me.

I had hurled a glass at him with all the strength I possessed.

I had thrown it at his eye.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

‘Did I do that?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, now I do,’ I said. ‘Did I hit you in the eye? Are you blind?’

He sat down on the chair.

‘No, the eye is intact. You hit me just next to it. I had to have stitches. There’ll be a permanent scar.’

I began to cry.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t mean it. Can you forgive me? Oh Yngve, can you forgive me?’

He sat like an emperor on the chair in the room, his back erect, legs apart, one hand on his knee, looking at me.

I couldn’t meet his gaze, I couldn’t look at him.

I lowered my head and sobbed aloud.

¹Translated by Michael Hamburger.