Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (28 page)

‘I understand
that
,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand why he walked on the edge of heaven for that.’

‘Are you meant to understand?’

‘Why should I read it if I don’t understand?’

‘Perhaps you should ask Kjartan the next time you meet him.’

‘About what it means?’

‘Yes, why not?’

‘No, I can’t talk to Kjartan. He’s always so angry. Or maybe not angry but grumpy. Or peculiar.’

‘Yes, he is, but he’s not dangerous, if that’s what you were thinking.’

‘No, no,’ I said.

There was a silence.

I racked my brain for something else to say because it was late and I knew the silence would make mum wonder about going to bed, and I didn’t want that, I wanted to continue talking. On the other hand, I had a review to write, and the longer I sat here doing nothing, the later into the night I would have to work.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s late again now.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Are you going to stay up and work?’

I nodded.

‘Don’t stay up too long.’

‘It’ll take the time it takes,’ I said.

‘I suppose it will,’ she said, getting up. ‘Goodnight then.’

‘Goodnight.’

As she walked through the living room the cat stood next to the sofa and stretched. Stared up at me.

‘Oh no, Mefisto,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I’ve got to work, you know.’

With the record I was reviewing playing on the turntable I sat writing draft after draft, scrunched up the rejects and threw them into the growing heap on the floor. It was a little after two before I was happy, scrolled the paper out of the typewriter, pushed back my chair and read through what I had written for the final time.

Tuxedomoon

Holy Wars
(Cramboy)

reviewed by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Tuxedomoon hail from San Francisco, but are now based in Brussels. The band is scheduled to play in Norway this winter; they will be playing Den Norske Opera in Oslo on 1 December.

Blaine Reininger, Tuxedomoon’s front man, has left the band to pursue a very promising solo career and
Holy Wars
is their first LP without Reininger. It never scales the dizzy heights of
Desires
, but is not a bad LP for all that.

The members of Tuxedomoon are classically trained and have grown up with rock music. The result is impossible to classify, but avant-garde rock, futurism and modernism are handy cues.

The band explores uncharted territory and discovers new musical paths.
Holy Wars
is a beautiful, atmospheric album, although at times I do find it rather inaccessible. It embraces diffuse moods of the past mixed with the future, synthesiser instruments mixed with acoustic. One of the songs on the LP is a medieval poem translated from the French. In my opinion, this track, ‘St John’, is the strongest offering with an infectious organ intro and an equally infectious melody. Along with ‘In a Manner of Speaking’ it displays the band’s lighter side. Other tracks I would pick out for special mention are ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ and the instrumental ‘The Waltz’.

Before I went to bed I wrote a note for mum to say I had worked till late and she shouldn’t wake me. Usually she got up an hour before me, had breakfast, drank coffee and smoked a cigarette while listening to the radio. Then she woke me and on the days when our timetables coincided gave me a lift to school. Her school was only a kilometre further down the road. We wouldn’t say much during the half-hour the journey took, and it often struck me how different the lull in conversation was from the one I endured with dad, when the silence burned like a fever inside me. With mum the silence was painless.

This morning I woke up half an hour late for the bus, saw that I’d had a nocturnal emission, took off my sticky underpants and walked naked to the wardrobes room, where to my horror I discovered that there were no clean underpants.

Why hadn’t she washed them? She’d had the whole bloody weekend to do it!

As I entered the bathroom I saw the laundry rack in the middle of the floor covered in clothes, but they were wet. I realised she had washed them the previous evening but had forgotten to hang them up, so she had done it at top speed in the morning.

Oh, how absent-minded she was!

This meant I had a choice between finding a pair of dirty underpants in the laundry basket or wearing wet ones off the rack.

I hummed and hawed. It was quite cold out and it would be no fun walking the kilometre down to the bus wearing wet underpants.

On the other hand, you never knew how close you might be to people in the course of the day. Not that I imagined I smelled, but if I suspected I did it would make me behave in an even stiffer and more unnatural manner than usual.

What if Merethe, in my class, who could be very flirty, what if she decided today of all days to clap her light blue eyes on me and perhaps come so close that she could stroke me fleetingly on the shoulder or even the chest with one of her exquisite hands?

No, it would have to be the wet ones then.

I showered, had breakfast, saw that I wouldn’t make the next bus without rushing, so I decided I might as well catch the one after.

Outside, the sky was blue, the sun hung low and in the shadow beneath the trees along the river bank the frozen mist drifted across the tranquil water.

When the bus pulled up at the stop by the school the third lesson was drawing to a close, and since there was no point going now I took the bus to town and went to
Nye Sørlandet
with the three reviews. Steinar was in his office.

‘Are you skiving off school?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Tut tut,’ he said and smiled. ‘Have you got something for me?’

I produced the sheets of paper from my bag.

‘Just leave them there,’ he said, pointing to the table.

‘Aren’t you going to look at them?’

He usually skimmed through them before I left.

‘No. I trust you. You’ve done a good job so far. Why should it be any different today? See you!’

‘See you,’ I said and left. My insides were glowing at what he had said, and to celebrate I went to buy a couple of records, sat down in Geheb and ate a cardamom and custard bun and drank a Coke while carefully scrutinising the covers. Once I had finished, it was so late it would have been senseless to go to school so I wandered around the streets for a while, then caught an early bus home. I stopped by the post box down at the crossing; apart from the newspaper there were three letters in it. Two for mum, window envelopes: bills. And an airmail letter for me!

I recognised the writing on the envelope and saw from the postmark that it was from Israel. Waited until I was sitting at the desk in my room to open it. Opened it, took out the letter, stood up, put on a record and sat down again. Began to read.

Tel Aviv, 9/10/1985

Hi Karl Ove,

I arrived in Tel Aviv a month ago. It’s great but also hard. I’ve never done so much cleaning in the whole of my life as in the last four weeks. It’s thirty degrees here and I’m lying on the terrace writing this letter. I’ve been to the Mediterranean twice and some Israeli boys have taught me how to play frisbee and surf. But it’s impossible to trust the boys here if you’ve got blonde hair. They assume you’re on holiday and so, aha, they think, she’ll be easy. But I can’t forget you. And I don’t understand myself. But I think it’s because you were/are the boy I’ve loved most in all my life. So, Karl Ove, no matter how many girls have come into your life don’t forget me, and come to Denmark next year. And if you are nice and write back quickly this time you are
très bien
.

I’m your fan,

Lisbeth

I got up, went over to the window, opened it, placed my forearms on the frame and leaned out. The air was cold and crisp, the heat of the sun shining on me barely evident.

She meant it. She was serious.

I stood up, went outside with the letter, sat down on the bench under the window and read it through once again. Put it down beside me and lit a cigarette.

I could go to Denmark in the summer. And I didn’t need to return.

I didn’t need to return.

The thought had never occurred to me before, and it changed everything.

With the cold sharp light in my face, beneath the dark blue autumnal sky, in the midst of the forest above the river, it was as though the future was opening itself to me. Not as what I was expected to do, what everyone did, military service in Northern Norway first, then university in Bergen or Oslo, stay there for six years, go home in the holidays, find a job, get married and have children who became your parents’ grandchildren.

But instead go out and disappear from sight. Vanish. Not even ‘in a few years’ but
now
. Say to mum in the summer: Listen, I’m off and I won’t ever be coming back. She wouldn’t be able to stop me. She couldn’t. I was a free spirit and she knew it. I was my own man. The future, like a door, was open.

The beech trees in Denmark. The low brick houses. Lisbeth.

No one would know who I was, I was just someone who appeared on the scene and who would soon leave again. I didn’t need to return! No one ever needed to know any more about me, I could go, vanish.

I really
could
.

A car came round the bend below the house and I recognised the sound of mum’s Golf. I stubbed out my cigarette, buried it under some grass and got to my feet as the car drew up on the gravel in front of the house.

She jumped out, opened the boot and removed two bags of shopping.

‘Have you come into some money?’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s payday,’ she said.

‘What did you buy for dinner?’

‘Fish cakes.’

‘Great! I’m starving.’

Dad’s enquiry about Christmas had been a smokescreen, actually he hadn’t wanted us there, and he had booked a trip to Madeira for himself and Unni without waiting to hear what Yngve and I wanted to do.

We would go with mum to stay with her parents in Sørbøvåg. It was the first Christmas without dad, and I was looking forward to it: everything had been free and easy the few times all three of us had been together after the divorce.

The day school finished I ambled down to grandma and grandad’s to wish them Happy Christmas; mum and I would fly to Bergen the following day, meet Yngve there and catch the boat to Sørbøvåg together.

Grandma unlocked the front door as always.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ she said with a smile.

‘Yes, I was nearby and thought I would come and wish you Happy Christmas,’ I said, following her up the stairs without hugging her first. Grandad was sitting in his chair, and his eyes lit up for a brief instant when he saw me. At least that was what I imagined.

‘The meal’s not ready yet,’ grandma said. ‘But I can heat some rolls for you, if you’re hungry.’

‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I said and sat down, took my cigarettes from my shirt pocket and lit up.

‘You haven’t started inhaling, have you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘That’s good. It’s dangerous, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She put the little metal rack on the hotplate and switched on the stove, placed two rolls on top and took out some butter, a mild white cheese and brown goat’s cheese.

‘Dad left for Madeira this morning,’ I said.

‘Yes, we heard,’ grandma said.

‘I’m sure they’ll have a nice time,’ I said. ‘You’ve been there, haven’t you?’

‘No, we haven’t,’ grandma said. ‘No, we’ve never been to Madeira.’

‘Perhaps he’s thinking of Las Palmas,’ grandad said. ‘We’ve been there.’

‘Yes, we’ve been to Las Palmas,’ grandma said.

‘I can remember that,’ I said. ‘We each got a T-shirt from there. Light blue with dark blue letters. Las Palmas it said, and there were some coconut palms, I think.’

‘Can you remember that?’ grandma said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

Because I did. Some events stood out from that time and were etched in my consciousness. Others were more vague. I thought I remembered grandma once saying there had been a man downstairs in the hall, a stranger, perhaps someone who had broken in. Later I mentioned it to her and grandma stared at me in surprise, shaking her head. No, there had never been a man in the hall. So where had I got that idea from? Other stories I seemed to remember were similarly dismissed as soon as I mentioned them. A forefather or a forefather’s uncle, I thought I had been told,
emigrated to America and remarried there, although he hadn’t been legally divorced from his wife back home and was in other words a bigamist. I mentioned this during a meal we were having that autumn, sitting in the dining room one Sunday, grandma, grandad, dad, Unni and I. But no one had ever heard this story before, and grandma looked almost angry as she shook her head. There was also something about a stabbing, I seemed to remember. But if the story hadn’t happened and it was just something I believed had happened, how could it have formed in my mind? Had someone told me it in my dreams? Had it been in one of the countless novels I had read when I went to
ungdomskole
, which in some mysterious way I had superimposed on vague characters in the family and thus drawn myself into the heart of the narrative?

I didn’t know.

But it was no fun because in this way I gained a reputation for being unreliable, I was someone who lied and made things up; in other words, I was like dad. This was ironic because if there was one resolution I had made it was never to lie, precisely on account of him. Well, yes, I might resort to white lies if there was some matter I didn’t want others, mum more often than not, but dad as well, to know. But whatever I hid, I hid for their sake, not for mine. So that at least was not immoral.

‘It’s good to have a few days’ holiday now,’ I said.

‘I’ll say,’ grandma said.

‘Is Gunnar coming here with the others on Christmas Eve?’ I said.

‘No, they’re staying at home. But I imagine we’ll pop over.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘There we are. They’re done,’ grandma said, and placed two rolls on a plate she put on the table in front of me. Then she sat down.