Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (5 page)

Some exercises, then, that they could do at home?

No. There was so much time to fill in every lesson that it would be best to give them the exercises at school. I could work on them tomorrow.

I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, finished the two books I had bought, and once that was done started on the articles in the literary magazine I had picked up in Oslo, although I didn’t understand much. I was familiar with most of the words, but what they described seemed to be constantly beyond my reach, as though they were writing about an unknown world which the language of the old world was not equipped to approach. But one thing did emerge from these pages with greater force than anything else, and that was the description of a book,
Ulysses
, which in its singularity sounded absolutely fantastic. Before me I saw an enormous tower, glinting with moisture as it were, surrounded by mist and a pallid light from the overcast sun. It was regarded as the major work of modernism, by which I imagined low-slung racing cars, pilots with leather helmets and jackets, Zeppelins floating above skyscrapers in glittering but dark metropolises, computers, electronic music. Names such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Arnold Schönberg. Elements of earlier, long-gone cultures were assimilated into this world, in my mind’s eye, such as Broch’s
Virgil
and Joyce’s
Ulysses
.

At the shop the day before I had forgotten today was Sunday, so I was eating bread with liver paste and mayonnaise when there was another ring at the door. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and hurried into the hall.

There were two girls standing outside. I recognised one of them at once. She was the girl sitting across the aisle from me on the bus coming here.

She smiled.

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Do you recognise me?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You’re the girl on the bus.’

She laughed.

‘And you’re the new teacher at Håfjord! I thought you were when I saw you, but I wasn’t sure. Then someone at the party last night told me you were.’

She stuck out a hand.

‘My name’s Irene,’ she said.

‘Karl Ove,’ I said with a smile.

‘This is Hilde,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the other girl, whose hand I then shook. ‘We’re cousins,’ Irene said. ‘I dropped in on her today. But actually that was just an excuse to come and say hello to you.’ She chuckled. ‘No, it wasn’t. I was just joking.’

‘Would you like to come in?’ I said.

They looked at each other.

‘Love to,’ Irene said.

She was wearing jeans, a blue denim jacket and, beneath it, a white lace blouse. She was chubby, her breasts under the blouse were full and her hips broad. Her hair was blonde, shoulder-length, her skin pale with some freckles around her nose. Eyes large, blue and teasing. Standing next to her in the hall, smelling the fragrance of her perfume, which was also full, as she passed me her jacket – there were no hooks in the hall – with a slightly searching look, I got another stiffy.

‘I can take yours too while I’m at it,’ I said to Hilde, who had nowhere near the same presence as her cousin, and who passed me her jacket with a shy, bashful smile. I hung them over the back of the desk chair and slid a hand into my trouser pocket so that the bulge was not visible. The two girls went somewhat hesitantly into the sitting room.

‘My things haven’t arrived yet,’ I said. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

‘Yes, it is a bit drab in here,’ Irene said, smiling.

They sat down on the sofa, both with their knees tightly together. I sat on the chair opposite them, with my legs crossed to hide the bulge, which had not become any smaller. She was sitting only a metre away from me.

‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Eighteen,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Sixteen,’ Irene said.

‘Seventeen,’ Hilde said.

‘So you’ve just finished
gymnas
?’ Irene said.

I nodded.

‘I’m in the second class,’ Irene said. ‘At the
gymnas
in Finnsnes. It’s a boarding school. So I’ve got a room there. You can come and visit me if you like. No doubt you’ll soon be coming to Finnsnes quite a bit.’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ I said.

Our eyes met.

She smiled. I smiled back.

‘But I’m really from Hellevika. That’s the next village. Across the mountain. It’s just a few kilometres away. Have you got a driving licence?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Shame,’ she said.

There were a few moments of silence. I got up, went for an ashtray and my pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette.

‘Can I have one?’ she said. ‘Mine are in my jacket.’

I threw the pouch over to her.

‘I had to laugh when we were on the bus yesterday,’ she said as she was making her roll-up. ‘You looked as if you were trying to climb out of the window.’

They grinned. She licked the gum, folded the paper over with her forefingers against her thumbs, put it in her mouth and lit up.

‘It was so very beautiful,’ I said. ‘I had no idea what it would be like up here. Håfjord was just a name to me. In fact, it wasn’t even that.’

‘Why did you apply to come here then?’

I shrugged.

‘I was given a list of names by the employment office, and so I chose this one.’

Someone crossed the floor above.

We all looked up at the ceiling.

‘Have you met Torill yet?’ Irene said.

‘Yes, briefly,’ I said. ‘Do you know her?’

‘Of course we do. Everyone knows everyone here. Well, in Hellevika and Håfjord.’

‘And on Fugleøya,’ Hilde said.

Silence.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I asked them, half getting up from the chair.

Irene shook her head. ‘No, I think we should be going. What do you reckon, Hilde?’

‘Yes, I think so too,’ her cousin said.

We got up, I took the jackets from the chair, went closer to Irene than strictly speaking I had to as I handed her the jacket. I was filled with a sense of her hips, covered by her tight jeans, and of her thighs and legs and surprisingly small feet, of her neck and her full breasts, her short nose and blue eyes, at once innocent and cheeky, I closed the door behind the girls. The whole visit had lasted ten, maybe fifteen, minutes.

I was on my way to the kitchen to put on some coffee when there was another knock at the door.

It was her, alone this time.

‘There’s a party in Hellevika next weekend,’ she said. ‘In fact, that was why I came, to tell you. Do you fancy coming? It’s a good way to meet people from round here.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If I can make it I will.’

‘If?’ she said. ‘You just have to get in a car. Everyone’s going. See you there!’

She winked. Then she turned and walked down the hill to where Hilde was chipping away at the edge of the tarmac with the tip of her shoe.

A little after eight the following morning I left the flat for the first time in more than a day. The sun that hung above the mountains to the east shone directly on the door, and the air that met my face when I closed it behind me was mild and summery. But only a few metres away, where the countryside lay in shadow behind the mountains, it was colder, and the impression I had of small pools existing in the air, like currents and eddies, rapids and waterfalls, seemed strangely uplifting. Ahead of me, atop a small plateau, was the school, and if I wasn’t absolutely dreading going in, I was certainly nervous enough for tiny flashes of apprehension to shoot through me as I approached.

It looked like any other school, a long single-storey edifice on one side, connected to a tunnel-like corridor with a larger newer and taller block housing a woodwork room, gymnasium and small swimming pool. Between the two buildings was the playground, which extended behind them to a full-sized football pitch. On a mound above it, taking pride of place, was what I guessed was the community centre.

Two cars were parked in front of the entrance. A big white jeep and a low black Citroën. The sun gleamed on the row of windows. The door was open. I went into the hall, the yellow lino floor was almost white in the sunshine, which fell in long stripes through the glass door panels. I rounded one corner, there were three doors on the right, two on the left and at the end the hall opened into a large space. A man stopped and looked at me. He had a full beard and a bald patch. Probably in his early thirties.

‘Hello!’ he said.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘And you are . . . Karl Ove?’

‘That’s me,’ I said, stopping in front of him.

‘Sture,’ he said.

We shook hands.

‘Karl Ove was a pure guess,’ he said with a smile. ‘But you didn’t look like a Nils Erik.’

‘Nils Erik?’ I said.

‘Yes, we have two teachers from the south this year. You and Nils Erik. The rest of the untrained staff are local people, so I know them.’

‘Are you local?’

‘I certainly am!’

He looked me straight in the eye for a few seconds. I found it unpleasant, what was this, some kind of test, but I didn’t want to be the first to look away and held his gaze.

‘You’re very young,’ he said at length, and looked away towards the door we were standing next to. ‘But we knew that of course. It’ll all be fine! Come on, you have to meet the others.’

He stretched out an arm towards the door. I opened it and entered. It was the staffroom. A kitchenette, armchairs and a sofa, a small room full of papers and a photocopier, an adjacent rectangular room with workstations on both sides.

‘Hi!’ I said.

Six people were sitting around the table. All eyes turned to me.

They nodded and mumbled ‘Hi’ in return. From the kitchenette appeared a small but powerful and energetic man with a red beard.

‘Karl Ove?’ He beamed. After I had nodded and he had shaken my hand, he addressed the others.

‘This is Karl Ove Knausgaard, the young man who has come all the way from Kristiansand to work with us!’ And then he said the names of all those seated, which I had forgotten an instant later. They all had a cup of coffee in their hands or on the table in front of them, and everyone, apart from one elderly lady, was young. In their early twenties or so it seemed.

‘Take a seat, Karl Ove. Coffee?’

‘Please,’ I said and squeezed down at the end of the sofa.

For the next few hours the head teacher, who was called Richard and must have been in his late thirties, told us, the two temporary teachers, about the school. We were shown around the rooms, given keys, allocated workstations and then we went through the timetables and various routines. It was a small school with so few pupils that classes were grouped together for many of the lessons. Torill would be the form teacher for the first and second years, Hege for the third and fourth, me for the fifth, sixth and seventh, Sture for the eighth and ninth. Why precisely I had been made a form teacher I had no idea, and it felt a little uncomfortable, not least because the other temp from Sørland, Nils Erik, was considerably older than me, twenty-four, and planning to embark on teacher training after this year. He was serious about it, this was his future, while I had no such plans: becoming a teacher was the last thing I wanted to do in this life. The other temps came from the local area, knew the ins and outs and ought to have been better suited than me to taking responsibility for a class. Presumably the head teacher had based his decision on my application, and that made me uneasy because I had laid it on in spades.

The head teacher showed us where the syllabuses were and demonstrated the range of teaching aids we had at our disposal. At one o’clock we were finished, and I walked down to the post office, which was at the other end of the village, arranged a PO box number, sent a few letters, did some food shopping, made dinner at home, lay on my bed listening to music for an hour or so, jotted down some key words regarding the ideas I’d had for my classes, but they looked stupid, a bit too obvious, so I screwed up the paper and threw it away.

I had everything under control, everything.

Early that evening I went back up to the school. It was a strange feeling to unlock the door of the main building and walk along the corridors. Everything was empty and still, filled with the grey light that seeped in through the windows. All the shelves and cupboards were empty, the classrooms somehow untouched.

In the staffroom there was a telephone in a small cubicle, I went in and rang mum, she’d also had her first day at a new school today. She was busy unpacking in the new place she was renting, a terraced house some way outside Førde town centre. I told her a bit about what it was like here and how nervous I was about teaching the next day. She said she knew I would make out just fine, and even though her character reference didn’t count for a lot – after all she was my mother – it did help.

When I had finished the call, I went into the photocopier room and made ten copies of the short story I had written. The idea was to send it to people I knew the following day. Then I wandered around all the rooms in the school. In the gymnasium I swung open the panel door to the little equipment room, threw a ball out, had a few kicks at the handball goal at the far end. Switched off the light, went into the swimming pool. The water lay dark and still in the pool. I went up to the woodwork room and on to the natural science room. From the windows you could see across the village lying beneath the mountains, lots of small houses in a variety of colours which appeared to vibrate, and beyond, across the sea, the endless sea, and the sky that rose from it, in the far distance, full of elongated, smoke-like clouds.

Early tomorrow morning the pupils would come, then it was down to business.

I switched the lights off after me, locked the door and walked down the hill with the large key ring jangling in my hand.

On waking next morning I was so nervous I was on the point of throwing up. A cup of coffee was all I could get down me. I walked up to the school half an hour before the first lesson was due to begin, sat in my place flicking through the books we were going to use. The mood among the other teachers walking to and fro between the photocopier, classrooms, kitchenette and sofa suite was light-hearted and cheery. Outside the window the students were beginning to appear in dribs and drabs, coming up the hill. My chest was frozen with terror. My heart was beating as if it was being strangulated. I saw the letters on the page I had opened but couldn’t make any sense of them. After a while I stood up and went into the kitchenette to get myself a cup of coffee. When I turned I met the eyes of Nils Erik. He looked relaxed, leaning back against the sofa, his legs wide apart.