Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (46 page)

No, I played Led Zeppelin at full volume, summoned all the concentration I had and tried to race ahead with a new short story. When darkness fell I let it enter the flat too, apart from on the desk, where a small lamp shone like an island in the night. There was me and my writing, an island of light in the darkness, that was how I imagined it. And then I went to bed and slept until the alarm clock woke me and another Monday at Håfjord School began.

The first thing the pupils did when I entered the classroom was to tease me about Irene.

I let them run on, then fixed them with a stare, said, now that’s enough of that nonsense, we have to start work if anything is to become of you. They took out their books and started work, I walked around and helped them, I liked the way they went from being a small chatty giggly class to falling into step and just being themselves.

Sitting like this, without speaking, without looking at each other, fully occupied with their own work, it was as though their ages melted away. Not that I no longer saw them as children, it wasn’t being children that defined them but their personalities, who they were in themselves and probably always would be.

I didn’t think about Irene much at school, these thoughts came afterwards, alone in my flat, like an adrenaline rush through my body. And then the despair. Never one without the other. She saw a purpose in us, she wanted something from me, and although I liked her I wasn’t in love, to start with we had nothing to talk about. I wanted to have her, but that was all I wanted.

Was she in love with me?

I doubted it. It was probably more that I was different, not one of her classmates but a teacher, not a thirty-or a forty-year-old but still her age, not from here but from the south.

In a year I would be gone, and she would still be here in her last year at
gymnas
. That wasn’t the best basis for a relationship, was it? Besides, I was going to write and I couldn’t tie up all my weekends, which I would have to do if this became serious.

In my head the arguments raged to and fro. On Tuesday we had a football match, it took us an hour to get to the pitch, which was made of shale and became so dusty that the players looked like Bedouin shadows. We lost narrowly, but I scored a goal in the melee after a corner. On Wednesday I received my first copy of
Vinduet
, the new journal I had subscribed to, in the post. The theme was literature’s relationship with other art forms, I couldn’t grasp any of it, but the mere fact that I had a literary journal on my desk was good enough. In the evening Hege came by, she had gone up to the school to do some work and on her way back she had decided on an impulse to see how I was. On Thursday I went to Finnsnes with Nils Erik, we went to the Vinmonopol and the library, I bought a bottle of vodka and took out two novels by Thomas Mann,
The Confessions of Felix Krull
and
Doctor Faustus
. On Friday I went to school to ring Irene. There was no one in the staffroom and I took my time, brewed up a jug of coffee, watched some TV, paced to and fro a good deal. In the end I went into the cubicle, put the note on which I had written her number on the machine, dialled the number and put the receiver to my ear.

Her mother answered. I introduced myself, she called, ‘Irene, it’s Karl Ove,’ I heard footsteps and some thumping.

‘Hi!’ she said.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘How are you? Has something happened? You sound so serious.’

Her slightly husky voice was more obvious on the phone, where there was nothing to distract your attention. It made her sound incredibly sexy.

‘I don’t know . . .’ I said.

There was so much that created doubt as far as she was concerned. Wasn’t I just the first best person to come along? We had seen each other on the
bus
, for God’s sake. And she hadn’t offered me any resistance at all, she had just got into bed, ready for anything.

‘Tell me now,’ she said.

What was I doing? Should I finish it over the phone? That was cowardly, it had to be done face to face.

‘No, there’s nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s just . . . well, I’m not in the best frame of mind right now. But it’s nothing serious. Bit silly, that’s all.’

‘Why? Has something happened? Are you homesick?’

‘Maybe a bit,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. It’ll be fine. Tomorrow it’ll be gone.’

‘Oh, I wish I could be there to comfort you,’ she said. ‘I miss you!’

‘I miss you too,’ I said.

‘Can we meet tomorrow?’

If she was being picked up at twelve, as on the previous occasion, it would be nigh on impossible to finish the relationship. Because it would have to be done straight away, you couldn’t stay together with someone for four hours, as before, perhaps end up in bed together again and then go your separate ways. If I did it at once, what would she do in the meantime, before her lift arrived?

‘That’s no good,’ I said. ‘I’m busy then. What about Sunday?’

‘I have to go to Finnsnes again.’

‘Come here first! You can catch the bus from Håfjord. That would work.’

‘Maybe. Yes, I can do that.’

‘Good!’ I said. ‘See you then.’

‘See you then. Take care!’

‘Take care, Irene.’

The next morning I was stopped by a group of boys standing outside the shop, they asked how I was getting on, fine, I said, did I want to go to a party later that day, they asked, where, I said, it’s no big deal, they said, we’ll just be sitting around drinking up at Edvald’s, come up if you fancy it, no need to bring any booze, we’ve got enough.

Leaving them and walking up to my flat, I thought about how open people were here, inviting me to all sorts of events although I was not one of them, and I pondered why. What did they want from a Kristiansander with a black coat, a beret and progressive musical tastes, why take him in tow in the evening? At home going out demanded planning, lots of obstacles had to be overcome, you didn’t just turn up at someone’s house or sit down at a table in a bar with someone you vaguely knew. Everyone had their own circle, and if you didn’t, you were on the margins. Here there may have been similar circles, but if so they were open. In the few weeks I had lived here the most striking discovery was that everyone was accepted. Not necessarily liked, but always accepted. They didn’t have to wave to me and invite me out, but they did, and not just a few people but everyone.

Perhaps the answer was they had to, it was as simple as that. There were so few of them that they couldn’t afford to leave anyone out. Or else it was their attitude to life that was different, rawer, more casual. If you lived your life on a boat deck, if you did hard physical work every day and drank as soon as you were on shore, there was no reason to bother with petty clockwork-like social etiquette and distinctions. A more natural course of action was to proffer the hand of friendship, say join us, have a drink, have you heard about the time . . .?

Vivian, Live and Andrea came racing down the hill on their bikes. They waved and shouted to me as they passed, their hair flapping and their eyes scrunched up to meet the oncoming wind. I was smiling to myself long after they had passed. They were so funny, the way the immense seriousness they possessed was shattered internally by their equally immense childish glee.

I worked for a few hours on a short story about some boys who nailed a cat to a tree, then I heated a ready meal in the microwave for dinner, lay down on the sofa and read
Doctor Faustus
until it began to grow dark outside and I had to get ready to go out.

I hadn’t read Thomas Mann before. I liked the elaborate old-fashioned formal style, and the scenes at the beginning when the protagonists are children and the father of one of them, Adrian, shows them experiments with dead material which he brings to life, were fantastic, there was something eerie about them that at first forced itself to the front of your consciousness and then seemed to sink to the bottom. I was reminded of the open heart I had once seen on TV as a child, how it had throbbed in all that blood, like a small blind animal. It was alive and belonged to a different category from Adrian’s father’s experiments, but the blindness was the same and also the way it was subject to laws, moving according to them, not independently.

I was unable to grasp the bit about music and musical theory, but I was used to that in this kind of novel, there were always great expanses I just skimmed without understanding, more or less like the French dialogue that could suddenly crop up in some books.

I showered, changed, put a bottle of vodka in a bag and walked up to Edvald’s house, he was a fisherman, older than the others, around thirty-five, single, glad of a drop, and I stayed there until five in the morning, when I strolled back through the village with a head as empty and desolate as an unfrequented tunnel. On waking up at two the next day I remembered nothing apart from standing on the quay watching the sea birds bobbing on the water, wondering if they were asleep, and pissing against the shop wall. Everything else was gone. All the details and individual moments were lost. I had drunk a whole bottle of spirits, that was what you did here, and I was still drunk when I woke up. Writing was out of the question. Instead I lay on my bed reading, but that didn’t go very well either, my brain seemed to be soaking in a kind of yellow liquid, which I watched. If I stopped reading the feeling went away, it was as though it was me in the liquid.

At a few minutes to five there was a ring at the door. I had been asleep and jumped off the bed, it was Irene.

I opened the door.

‘Hi!’ she said with a smile. There was a bag on the ground beside her. I took two big steps back so that she couldn’t hug me.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come in?’

Her eyes questioned me.

‘What is it, Karl Ove?
Is
there something up?’

‘Yes, actually there is,’ I said. ‘We have to talk.’

She stared at me.

‘I haven’t told you,’ I said. ‘But I was in a relationship before I came here. I received a letter from her after a few days. She finished it with me. I haven’t really got over that yet, you see. And now it’s begun to get serious with us . . . But I don’t have the mental space, it’s too early, do you understand? I like you so much, but . . .’

‘Are you finishing this?’ she said. ‘Before it’s even begun?’

I nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘Just when I was starting to like you so much.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. But it’s no good. It doesn’t feel right.’

‘Then perhaps it’s better we drop it,’ she said. ‘I wish you all the best for your life.’

She came over and hugged me. Then she grabbed her bag, turned and went to go.

‘Are you going?’ I said.

She turned her head.

‘Yes, we can’t sit here, can we. What’s the point of that?’

‘But the bus won’t be here for ages yet, will it?’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I can get on the bus whenever it turns up.’

Watching her walk down the hill, with the bag in her hand, towards the road that ran alongside the fjord, I was full of regret. An enormous opportunity had gone begging. At the same time I was relieved that it had been so painless. Now it was over. Now there was nothing to think about.

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

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

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

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