18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to a tiny fisherman’s village far north of the polar circle to work as a school teacher. He has no interest in the job itself – or in any other job for that matter. His intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine: He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls.
But then, as the darkness of the long polar nights start to cover the beautiful landscape, Karl Ove’s life also takes a darker turn. The stories he writes tend to repeat themselves, his drinking escalates and causes some disturbing blackouts, his repeated attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and to his own distress he also develops romantic feelings towards one of his 13-year-old students. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his high school years and the roots of his current problems. And then there is the shadow of his father, whose sharply increasing alcohol consumption serves as an ominous backdrop to Karl Ove’s own lifestyle.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1
A Man in Love: My Struggle Book 2
Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3
SLOWLY MY TWO suitcases glided round on the carousel in the arrivals hall. They were old, from the end of the 1960s, I had found them among mum’s things in the barn when we were about to move house, the day before the removal van came, and I immediately commandeered them, they suited me and my style, the not-quite-contemporary, the not-quite-streamlined, which was what I favoured.
I stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray stand by the wall, lifted the cases off the carousel and carried them to the forecourt.
It was five minutes to seven.
I lit another cigarette. There was no hurry, there was nothing I had to do, no one I had to meet.
The sky was overcast, but the air was still sharp and clear. There was something alpine about the landscape even though the airport I was standing outside was only a few metres above sea level. The few trees I could see were stunted and misshapen. The mountain peaks on the horizon were white with snow.
Just in front of me an airport bus was quickly filling up with people.
Should I catch it?
The money dad had so reluctantly lent me for the journey would tide me over until I got my first wage in a month’s time. On the other hand, I didn’t know where the youth hostel was, and wandering blindly around an unfamiliar town with two suitcases and a rucksack would not be a good start to my new life.
No, better take a taxi.
Apart from a short walk to a nearby snack bar stand, where I consumed two sausages with mashed potato in a cardboard tray, I stayed in the youth hostel room all evening, lying with the duvet over my back and listening to music on my Walkman while writing letters to Hilde, Eirik and Lars. I started one to Line as well, the girl I had spent all summer with, but set it aside after one page, undressed and switched off the light, for all the difference that made, it was a light summer night, the orange curtain glowed in the room like an eye.
Usually I would fall asleep at once wherever I was, but on this night I lay awake. In only four days’ time I would be starting my first job. In only four days’ time I would be entering a classroom in a small village on the coast of Northern Norway, a place I had never been and knew nothing about, I hadn’t even seen any pictures.
Me!
An eighteen-year-old Kristiansander, who had just finished gymnas, who had just moved away from home, with no experience of working other than a few evenings and weekends at a parquet flooring factory, a bit of journalism on a local paper and a month at a psychiatric hospital this summer, I was about to become a form teacher at Håfjord School.
No, I couldn’t sleep.
What would the pupils think of me?
When I went into the classroom for the first lesson and they were sitting there on their chairs in front of me, what would I say to them?
And the other teachers, what on earth would they make of me?
A door was opened in the corridor, releasing the sound of music and voices. Someone walked along quietly singing. There was a shout: ‘Hey, shut the door.’ Afterwards all the noise was enclosed again. I rolled over onto my other side. The strangeness of lying in bed under a light sky must have played a part in my not being able to fall asleep. And once the thought was established that it was difficult to sleep, it became impossible.
I got up, pulled on my clothes, sat in the chair by the window and began to read. Dead Heat by Erling Gjelsvik.
All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Agayev, Colossus by Finn Alnæs, Lasso round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer and Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life’s Great Passion or writing the Great Novel.
Everything they wanted I wanted too.
The great longing, which was ever-present in my breast, was dispelled when I read these books, only to return with tenfold strength the moment I put them down. It had been like that all the way through my latter years at school. I hated all authority, was an opponent of the whole bloody streamlined society I had grown up in, with its bourgeois values and materialistic view of humanity. I despised what I had learned at gymnas, even the stuff about literature; all I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to. I wasn’t interested in money or status symbols; I knew that the essential value in life lay elsewhere. I didn’t want to study, had no wish to receive an education at a conventional institution like a university, I wanted to travel down through Europe, sleep on beaches, in cheap hotels, or at the homes of friends I made on the way. Take odd jobs to survive, wash plates at hotels, load or unload boats, pick oranges . . . That spring I had bought a book containing lists of every conceivable, and inconceivable, kind of job you could get in various European countries. But all of this was to culminate in a novel. I would sit writing in a Spanish village, go to Pamplona and run the bulls, continue on down to Greece and sit writing on one of the islands and then, after a year or two, return to Norway with a novel in my rucksack.
That was the plan. That was why I didn’t do my military service when gymnas was over, like so many of my school friends had done, nor did I enrol at university, as the rest had done, instead I went to the employment office in Kristiansand and asked for a list of all the teaching vacancies in Northern Norway.
‘Hear you’re going to be a teacher, Karl Ove,’ people I met at the end of the summer said.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I’m going to be a writer. But I have to have something to live off in the meantime. I’ll work up there for a year, put some money aside and then travel down through Europe.’
This was no longer an idea in my head but the reality I was in: tomorrow I would go to the harbour in Tromsø, catch the express boat to Finnsnes and then the bus south to the tiny village of Håfjord, where the school caretaker would be waiting to welcome me.
No, I couldn’t sleep.
I took the half-bottle of whisky from my suitcase, fetched a glass from the bathroom, poured, drew the curtain aside and took a first shivering sip as I gazed at the strangely light housing estate outside.
When I woke at ten-ish the following morning my nerves were gone. I packed my things, rang for a taxi from the payphone in reception, stood outside with my suitcases at my feet and smoked as I waited. This was the first time in my life I had travelled anywhere without having to return. There was no ‘home’ to return to. Mum had sold our house and moved to Førde. Dad lived with his new wife further north, in Northern Norway. Yngve lived in Bergen. And, as for me, I was on my way to a first flat of my own. There I would have my own job and earn my own money. For the very first time I had control of all the elements in my life.
Oh, how bloody fantastic it felt!
The taxi came up the hill, I threw the cigarette end to the ground, trod on it and placed the cases in the boot, which the driver – a plump elderly man with white hair and a gold necklace – had opened for me.
‘The harbour, please,’ I said, getting in at the back.
‘Harbour’s big,’ he said, turning to me.
‘I’m going to Finnsnes. On the express boat.’
‘We can fix that for you, no problem.’
He set off downhill.
‘Are you going to the gymnas there?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going on to Håfjord.’
‘Oh yes? Fishing? You don’t look like a fisherman, I must say!’
‘Actually, I’m going there to teach.’
‘Oh, right. Right. There are so many southerners who do that. But aren’t you terribly young to have a job like that? You have to be eighteen, don’t you?’
He laughed and looked at me in the mirror.
I gave a short laugh too.
‘I left school in the summer. I reckon that’s better than nothing.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ he said. ‘But think of the kids growing up there. Teachers straight from gymnas. New ones every year. No wonder they pack school in after the ninth class and go fishing!’
‘Yes, I suppose it isn’t very surprising,’ I said. ‘But it’s hardly my fault.’
‘No, not at all. And fault? Who’s talking about blame! Fishing’s a much better life than studying, you know! Far better than sitting and studying until you’re thirty.’
‘Yes. I’m not going to study.’
‘But you’re going to be a teacher!’
He looked at me in the mirror again.
‘Yes,’ I said.
There was silence for a few minutes. Then he took his hand off the gear stick and pointed.
‘Down there, that’s your express boat.’
He stopped outside the terminal, set my cases on the ground and closed the boot again. I gave him the money, not knowing what to do about a tip, I had been dreading this the whole journey and solved the problem by saying that he could keep the change.
‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘And good luck!’
Bye bye, fifty kroner.
As he rejoined the road I stood counting the money I had left. I didn’t have much, but I could probably get an advance, surely they would understand that I wouldn’t have any money before the job started?
With its one main street, numerous plain concrete buildings, probably hastily erected, and its barren environs girdled by mountain ranges in the distance, Finnsnes, it struck me a few hours later, sitting in a patisserie with a cup of coffee in front of me and waiting for the bus to leave, looked more like a tiny village in Alaska or Canada than Norway. There wasn’t much of a centre, the town was so small that everything had to be considered the centre. The atmosphere was quite different here from in the towns I was used to, because Finnsnes was so much smaller, of course, but also because no effort had been made anywhere to make the place look attractive or homely. Most towns had a front and a back, but here everything looked pretty much the same.
I leafed through the two books I had bought in the nearby shop. One was called The New Water by a writer unfamiliar to me, Roy Jacobsen; the other was The Mustard Legion by Morten Jørgensen, who had played in a couple of the bands I had followed a few years ago. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to spend my money on them, but after all I was going to be a writer, it was important to read, if only to see how high the bar was set. Could I write like that? This was the question that kept running through my brain as I sat there flicking through the pages.
Then I ambled over to the bus, had a last smoke outside, put my cases in the luggage compartment, paid the driver and asked him to tell me when we were in Håfjord, walked down the aisle and sat on the penultimate seat on the left, which had been my favourite for as long as I could remember.
Across from me sat a lovely fair-haired girl, perhaps one or two years younger than me, she had her satchel on the seat, and I imagined she went to the gymnas in Finnsnes and was on her way home. She had looked at me when I got onto the bus, and now, as the driver shifted into first gear and pulled away from the stop with a jerk, she turned to look at me again. Not lingeringly, no more than a glance, and barely a fleeting one at that, but still it was enough to give me a stiffie.
I put on my headset and inserted a cassette into the Walkman. The Smiths, The Queen is Dead. So as not to appear intrusive, I concentrated on staring out of the window on my side for the first few kilometres and resisted all impulses to look in her direction.
After passing through a built-up area, which began as soon as we left the centre and extended for quite a distance, where around half the passengers got off, we came to a long deserted straight stretch. Whereas the sky above Finnsnes had been pale, covering the town beneath with its vapid light, here the shade of blue was stronger and deeper, and the sun hanging over the mountains to the south-west – whose low but steep sides obscured a view of the sea that had to be there – caused the red-flecked, in places almost purple, heather which grew densely on either side of the road to glow. The trees here were for the most part deformed pines and dwarf birches. On my side the green-clad mountains the valley rose up to meet were gentle, hills almost, while those on the other were steep and wild and alpine, although of no great height.
Not a person, not a house, was to be seen.
But I hadn’t come here to meet new people; I had come to find the peace I needed to write.
The thought sent a flash of pleasure through me.
I was on my way, I was on my way.
A couple of hours later, still engrossed in music, I saw a signpost up ahead. From the length of the name I concluded it had to be Håfjord. The road it pointed to led straight into the mountainside. It was not so much a tunnel, more a hole, the walls seemed to have been blasted out, and there was no light in there either. Water streamed down from the roof of the tunnel in such quantities that the driver had to turn on the windscreen wipers. When we emerged on the other side, I gasped. Between two long rugged chains of mountains, perilously steep and treeless, lay a narrow fjord, and beyond it, like a vast blue plain, the sea.
Ohhh.
The road the bus followed hugged the mountainside. To see as much of the landscape as I could I stood up and crossed to the other row of seats. From the corner of my eye I noticed the fair-haired girl turn towards me and smile when she saw me standing there with my face pressed against the window. Below the mountains opposite there was a small island, densely packed with houses on its inner landward side, completely deserted on the outer side, at least that was how it looked from this distance. There were some fishing boats moored inside a harbour with a mole around. The mountains continued for perhaps a kilometre. Closest to us, the slopes were clad in green, but further away they were completely bare and grey and fell away with a sheer drop into the sea.
The bus passed through another grotto-like tunnel. At the other end, on a relatively gentle mountain slope, in a shallow bowl, lay the village where I would be spending the next year.
Wow.
This was just brilliant!
Most of the houses huddled around a road that wound its way through the village like a U. Beneath the road at the bottom was what looked like a factory building in front of a quay, it must have been the fish-processing plant, beyond it there were lots of boats. At the end of the U stood a chapel. Above the road at the top was a line of houses, behind them there were dwarf birches, heather and scrub up to the point where the valley stopped and a large mountain rose on either side.
That was it.
Well, not quite: above the point where the top road met the lower one, right by the tunnel, there were two large buildings, which had to be the school.
‘Håfjord!’ said the bus driver. I stuffed my headset into my pocket and walked up the aisle, he followed me down the steps and opened the door to the luggage compartment, I thanked him, he said no problem without a smile and clambered back up, whereupon the bus turned in the square and re-entered the tunnel.
With a suitcase in each hand and a seaman’s kitbag on my back, I first looked up, then down the road for the caretaker while drawing the fresh, salty air deep into my lungs.
A door in the house right opposite the bus stop opened. Out came a small man dressed in only a T-shirt and jogging pants. From the direction he was heading I could see this was my man.
Apart from a little wreath of hair around his ears, he was completely bald. His face was gentle, his features were pronounced, as happens when you are in your fifties, but the eyes behind the glasses were small and piercing, and it struck me as he approached that in a way they didn’t quite match the rest.
‘Knausgaard?´he said, proffering his hand but without looking me in the eye.
‘Yes,’ I said, and took it. Small and dry and paw-like. ‘And you must be Korneliussen?’
‘That’s right,’ he said with a smile, his arms down by his sides, taking in the view. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘About Håfjord?’ I asked.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Fantastic,’ I said.
He turned, looked up and pointed.
‘You’ll be living there,’ he said. ‘So we’ll be neighbours. I live just there, you see. Shall we go up and have a look?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know if my things have arrived?’
He shook his head.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he said.
‘They’ll be here on Monday then,’ I said and set off up the road beside him.
‘You’ll have my youngest son at school, from what I’ve heard,’ he said. ‘Stig. He’s in the fourth class.’
‘Have you got many children?’ I said.
‘Four,’ he said. ‘Two live at home. Johannes and Stig. Tone, my daughter, and Ruben live in Tromsø.’
I scanned the village as we walked. Some people were standing outside what must have been a shop, where a couple of cars were also parked. And outside a snack bar stand on the top road there were a few people with bikes.
Far out in the fjord a boat was coming in.
Seagulls were screeching down by the harbour.
Otherwise all was still.
‘How many people live here actually?’ I said.
‘Two hundred and fifty or so,’ he said. ‘It depends on whether you include the kids who go to school.’
We stopped in front of a black 1970s timber house, by the porch.
‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Step inside. The door should be open. But you might as well have the key straight away.’
I opened the door and went inside the hall, put down my suitcases and took the key he handed me. It smelled as houses do when they haven’t been inhabited for a while. A faint, vaguely outdoor, whiff of damp and mould.
I pushed a half-open door and went into the sitting room. The floor was fitted with an orange wall-to-wall carpet. A dark brown desk, a dark brown coffee table and a suite upholstered in brown and orange, also dark wood.Two large panoramic windows facing north.
‘This is great,’ I said.
‘The kitchen’s in there,’ he said, pointing to a door at the end of the tiny room. He turned. ‘And the bedroom’s in there.’
The wallpaper in the kitchen was a familiar 1970s pattern: gold, brown and white. There was a little table under the window. A fridge with a small freezer compartment at the top. A sink set in a short laminate worktop. The floor grey lino.
‘And, last of all, the bedroom,’ he said, standing in the doorway while I went in. The carpet on the floor was darker than the one in the sitting room, the wallpaper light and the room empty except for an enormously wide low bed made of the same wood as the other furniture. Teak or imitation teak.
‘Perfect!’ I said.
‘Have you got any bed linen with you?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s being sent.’
‘You can borrow some of ours if you like.’
‘That would be great,’ I said.
‘I’ll drop it off then,’ he said. ‘And if you’ve got any questions, anything at all, come down and see us. Visitors are welcome here!’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
From the sitting-room window I watched him walking towards his house, which was perhaps twenty metres down the road from mine.
Mine!
Bloody hell, I had my own flat.
I walked to and fro inside, opened a few drawers and glanced into some cupboards until the caretaker returned carrying a pile of bed linen in his arms. After he had left I started unpacking the little I had brought with me: my clothes, a towel, the typewriter, some books and a wad of typing paper. I placed the desk beneath the sitting-room window, put the typewriter on top, moved the standard lamp, arranged the books on the windowsill, as well as a literary magazine, Vinduet, which I had bought in Oslo and decided I would subscribe to. Next to them I stacked the fifteen, maybe twenty, cassettes I had brought along, and beside the pile of paper on the table I laid the Walkman and the spare batteries I had for it.
When my writing alcove was finished I put my clothes in the bedroom wardrobes, shoved the empty cases onto the top shelf and stood in the centre of the room for a while, unsure what to do next.
I felt an urge to ring someone and tell them what it was like here, but there was no telephone. Should I go out perhaps and look for a phone box?
I was hungry as well.
What about the snack bar stand? Should I go over there?
There was nothing to do here anyway.
In front of the mirror in the little bathroom that led off the hall I put on my black beret. On the doorstep I stood for a few seconds looking down. In one sweeping gaze you could scan the whole village and everyone who lived in it. There was nowhere to hide, as it were. Walking down the road, the surface of which was gravel underneath tarmac, I felt utterly transparent.
Some teenage boys were hanging around outside the snack bar. Their conversation froze as I approached. I walked past without looking at them, went up the steps to the veranda and over to the serving hatch, which shone bright yellow in the wan late-summer evening light that seemed to hang over the landscape.The window was smeared with grease. A boy of around the same age as those behind me appeared at the hatch. A couple of long black hairs grew from his cheek. His eyes were brown, his hair was black.
‘Hamburger with salad, fries and a Coke,’ I said. Listened intently to hear if any of the mumbling behind was about me. But it wasn’t. I lit a cigarette and paced up and down the veranda while I waited. The boy lowered a landing-net-style receptacle full of thin potato sticks into the boiling fat. Slapped a hamburger down on the hotplate. Apart from the low sizzle of the meat and the by now excited voices behind me there was no sound. The houses on the island across the fjord were illuminated. The sky, which hung low there, higher by contrast above the mouth of the fjord, was a bluish-grey and rather heavy, though far from dark.
The silence was not oppressive; it was open.
But not to us, I thought for some reason. The silence had always been like this here, long before people existed and would remain so long after they had disappeared. Lying here in this mountain bowl, with the sea spread out before it.
Where did it end actually? America? Canada?
Yes, that had to be it. Newfoundland.
‘Here’s your burger,’ the boy said, placing a styrofoam tray containing a hamburger, a few strips of lettuce, a quarter of a tomato and a pile of chips on the shelf outside the serving hatch. I paid, grabbed the tray and turned to go.
‘Are you the new teacher?’ asked one of the boys, hanging over the handlebars of his bike.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re going to have us,’ he said, spat and pushed his cap further up his forehead. ‘We’re in the ninth class. And him, he’s in the eighth.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re from the south?’
‘Yes, from Sørland,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he said, nodding, as though indicating the audience was over now and I was free to go.
‘What are your names?’ I said.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ he said.
They laughed at that. I gave an unabashed smile but felt stupid as I walked past them. He had outmanoeuvred me.
‘What’s your name then?’ he called out after me.
‘Mickey,’ I said. ‘Mickey Mouse.’
‘He’s a comedian as well!’ he shouted.
After I had eaten the hamburger I got undressed and went to bed. It was still only around nine o’clock, the room was as light as if it were the middle of a grey day, and the silence that was everywhere magnified the sounds of every movement I made, so even though I was tired it took me a few hours to fall asleep on this evening too.
I woke in the middle of the night to a door banging somewhere. Immediately afterwards I heard footsteps on the floor above. Half awake, I imagined I was sleeping in dad’s office in Tybakken and it was him walking above me. How on earth had I ended up here, I found myself thinking, before I sank back into the darkness. The next time I woke I was in a state of panic.
Where was I?
In the house in Tybakken? The house in Tveit? Yngve’s bedsit? The youth hostel in Tromsø?
I sat up in bed.
The glances I cast around the room didn’t find anything to hold them; nothing of what I saw gave any meaning. It was as though my whole being were sliding down a slippery wall.
Then I remembered.
Håfjord. I was in Håfjord.
In my own flat in Håfjord.
I lay back in bed and mentally retraced my journey here. Then I imagined the village as it was outside the windows, all the people in all the houses whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Something that could have been expectation, but could also have been fear or insecurity, erupted inside me. I got up and went into the tiny bathroom, showered and put on a green silky shirt, baggy black cotton trousers, stood in front of the window for a while looking down towards the shop, I would have to go there to buy food for breakfast, but not right now.
There were several vehicles in the car park. A little cluster of people was gathered between them. Now and then someone came out of the door carrying shopping bags.
Well, might as well dive right in.
I went into the hall and put on my coat, beret and white basketball boots, glanced at myself in the mirror, straightened my beret, lit a cigarette and went out.
The sky was as serene and grey as yesterday. The mountains plunged into the water on the other side of the fjord. There was something brutal about them, I saw that in a flash, they didn’t care, anything could happen around them, it meant nothing, it was as though they were somewhere else at the same time as being here.
There were five people gathered outside the shop now. Two were old, at least fifty, the other three looked a few years older than me.
They had seen me from way off, I knew, it was inevitable, it wasn’t every day a stranger in a long black coat came down the hill, I imagined.
I raised the cigarette to my mouth and inhaled so deeply that the filter became hot.
Either side of the door hung a white plastic flag advertising the newspaper Verdens Gang. The window was full of green and orange paper plates emblazoned with a variety of special offers, written by hand.
I was fifteen metres away from them now.
Should I say hello? A chirpy, easy-going ‘Hi’?
Stop and talk to them?
Say I was the new teacher? Make a little joke about it?
One of them looked at me. I gave a slight nod.
He didn’t nod back.
Hadn’t he seen it? Had my nod been so slight that it had been perceived as an adjustment of the way I held my head, or a twitch?
Their presence felt like daggers in me. A metre away from the door I threw the cigarette to the ground, stopped and trod on it.
Could I leave it there? Litter the pavement? Or should I pick it up?
No, that would look just a bit too pedantic, wouldn’t it?
To hell with it, I’ll leave it, they’re fishermen, I’m sure they chuck their bloody cigarette ends away when they’ve finished with them!
I placed my hand on the door and pushed, took one of the red shopping baskets and began to move down the aisle between the various shelves. A rotund lady in her mid-thirties was holding a packet of sausages in her hand and saying something to a girl who must have been her daughter. Thin and gangly, she stood there with a sullen, obstinate expression on her face. On the other side of the woman there was a boy of around ten leaning over a rack and rummaging. I put a wholewheat loaf in the basket, a packet of Ali coffee and a box of Earl Grey tea bags. The woman glanced at me, put the sausages in her basket and continued to the other end of the shop with the boy and girl in tow. I took my time, wandered around looking at all the food items, added a brown goat’s cheese from a cabinet, a tin of liver paste and a tube of mayonnaise. Then I picked up a carton of milk and a packet of margarine and went over to the counter, where the woman was now packing her items into a bag while her daughter stood reading a noticeboard by the door.
The assistant nodded to me.
‘Hello,’ I said and started to empty the basket in front of him.
He was small and stocky, his face was broad, his nose curved and his powerful chin covered with a mass of grizzled bristles.
‘Are you the new teacher?’ he said as he was entering the prices on the till beside him. Over by the noticeboard, the girl had turned to look at me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Arrived yesterday.’
The boy was tugging at her arm; she yanked it free and went out of the door. The boy followed her, and a moment later so did the mother.
I needed oranges. And apples.
I hurried over to the modest fruit counter, filled a bag with some oranges, grabbed a couple of apples and went back to the till, where the assistant was cashing up the last item.
‘And a pouch of Eventyr tobacco and roll-up papers. And Dagbladet.’
‘You’re from the south?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Kristiansand.’
An elderly man wearing a cloth cap entered the shop.
‘Good morning, Bertil!’ he shouted.
‘Oh, it’s you, is it!’ the assistant said, giving me a wink. I squeezed a smile, paid, put my purchases in a bag and left. One of the people standing outside nodded, I nodded back and then I was out of their range.
Up the hill, I gazed at the mountain rising from the end of the village. It was completely green, all the way to the top, and that was perhaps the most surprising feature of the countryside here, I had expected something bleaker, with less colour, not this green which seemed to resonate everywhere, drowned out only by the greys and blues of the vast sea.
It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I had ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge. Admittedly, I had lived for a month in a small flat next to Eg Psychiatric Hospital earlier in the summer, that was where mum had driven me when I moved from the house we had occupied for the last five years, but it wasn’t a proper flat, only a room off a corridor with other rooms where in the old days the unmarried nurses had lived, hence its name the Henhouse, in the same way that the job I had there wasn’t a proper job either, just a short summer temping vacancy without any real responsibility. And then it was in Kristiansand. For me it was impossible to feel free in Kristiansand, there were too many ties with too many people, real and imagined, for me ever to do what I wanted in that town.
But here! I thought, lifting a slice of bread to my mouth while looking out of the window. The reflection of the mountains across the fjord was broken kaleidoscopically by the ripples in the water below. Here no one knew who I was, here there were no ties, no fixed patterns, here I could do as I liked. Hide away for a year and write, create something in secret. Or I could just take it easy and save up some money. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I was here.
I poured some milk into a glass and drank it in long swigs, placed the glass next to the plate and the knife on the worktop, returned the food to the fridge and went into the sitting room, plugged the typewriter in, put on my headset, turned the volume up full, inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter, centred it and typed a figure 1 at the top. Looked down at the caretaker’s house. A pair of green wellies stood on the doorstep. A broom with red bristles leaned against the wall. There were some toy cars lying in the mixture of gravel and sand covering the area in front of the door. Between the two houses grew moss, lichen, some grass and a few slender trees. I tapped my forefinger against the table edge to the rhythm of the music. I wrote one sentence: ‘Gabriel stood at the top of the hill looking over the housing estate with an expression of disapproval on his face.’
I smoked a cigarette, brewed a jug of coffee and looked out across the village and fjord and up at the mountains beyond. I wrote another sentence: ‘Gordon appeared behind him.’ Sang along to the chorus. Wrote. ‘He grinned like a wolf.’ Pushed back my chair, put my feet on the table and lit another cigarette.
That was pretty good, wasn’t it?
I picked up The Garden of Eden by Hemingway and browsed through it to get a feel for the language. I had been given it by Hilde as a leaving present two days before, at Kristiansand railway station when I was about to leave for Oslo to catch a plane to Tromsø. Lars was there too, and Eirik, who went out with Hilde. Not forgetting Line. She was going to travel with me to Oslo and say goodbye there.
It was only now that I saw there was a dedication on the copyright page. She had written that I meant something special to her.
I lit a cigarette and sat looking out of the window while I chewed that over.
What could I mean to her?
She saw something in me, I felt that, but I didn’t know what she saw. To be friends with her was to be taken care of. But the care that resides in understanding always makes the recipient smaller too. It wasn’t a problem, but I was aware of it.
I wasn’t worth it. I pretended I was, and the strange thing was that she rose to it, because there was nothing wrong with her intelligence in such matters. Hilde was the only person I knew who read decent books, and the only person I knew who herself wrote. We had been in the same class for two years and at once she caught my attention, she had an ironic, sometimes also rebellious, attitude to what was said in the classroom, which I had never seen in a girl before. She despised the other girls’ mania for make-up, the way they always did their best to be proper, their often affected childishness, but not in any aggressive or bitter manner, she was not like that, she was kind and caring, she had a fundamentally gentle nature, but there was a sharpness to it too, an unusual stubbornness, which made me look in her direction more and more often. She was pale, she had pale freckles on her cheeks, her hair was a reddish-blonde colour, she was thin and there was something physically fragile about her, fragile in the sense of the opposite of robust, which in another, less sharp, less independent soul would perhaps evoke a need in those she met to take her under their wing, but there was definitely no need for this, quite the contrary, it was Hilde who took whoever crossed her path under her wing. She often went around in a green military jacket and plain blue jeans, which signalled politically that she was on the left, but culturally she was on the right, because what she was against was materialism, while what she was for was the mind. In other words, the internal in preference to the external. That was why she scorned writers like Solstad and Faldbakken, or Phallusbakken as she called him, and liked Bjørneboe and Kaj Skagen and even André Bjerke.
Hilde had become my closest confidante. Actually she was my best friend. I was in and out of the house where she lived, I got to know her parents, sometimes I stayed the night and had dinner with them. What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. She was very serious about life, she was the only acquaintance of my age who was, and she probably saw the same in me, while at the same time she laughed a lot and irony was never far away. There was little I liked better than being there, in their house, with her and Eirik and sometimes Lars; however, there were other things happening in my life which were irreconcilable, and this caused me to have a permanent guilty conscience: if I was out drinking at discos and trying to chat up girls I felt bad about Hilde and what I stood for when I was with her; if I was at Hilde’s place and talked about freedom or beauty or the meaning of everything I could feel pangs of guilt towards those I went out with, or towards the person I was when I was with them, because the duplicity and hypocrisy that Hilde, Eirik and I talked so much about was also present in my own heart. Politically, I was way out on the left, bordering on anarchy, I hated conformity and conventionality, and like all the other alternative young people growing up in Kristiansand, including her, I despised Christianity and all the idiots who believed in it and went to meetings with their stupid charismatic priests.
But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgement of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least snog. How could I explain that to Hilde?
I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called, and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity’, separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.
Line was a Christian. Not ostentatiously so, but she was, and her presence at the railway station, close to me, somehow made me feel ill at ease.
She had curly black hair, pronounced eyebrows and clear blue eyes. She moved with grace and was independent in that rare way that does not impinge on others. She liked drawing and did it a lot, perhaps she was gifted in that direction; after she had said goodbye to me she was going to study creative arts at a folk high school. I wasn’t in love with her, but she was good-looking, I was incredibly fond of her, and occasionally, after we had shared some white wine, passionate feelings for her could rise inside me nonetheless. The problem was that she had clear boundaries as to how far she would go. During the weeks we had been together I had asked her twice, begged her, to let me as we lay there, semi-naked, smooching in bed at her house or in my room at the Henhouse. But no, it wasn’t me she was saving herself for.
‘Can’t I do it from behind then!’ I once burst out in my desperation, without quite knowing what that involved. Line snuggled up to me with her supple body and smothered me in kisses. Not many seconds later I felt the hated spasm from down below as my underpants filled with semen and I discreetly moved away from her; fired still by a driving passion, she didn’t realise that my mood had changed completely from one moment to the next.
On the station platform she stood beside me, hands in her rear pockets and a little rucksack on her back. There were six minutes to go before the train was due to leave. People were still getting on board.
‘I’m just going to nip over to the kiosk,’ she said, eyeing me. ‘Anything you need?’
I shook my head.
‘Oh, yes, a Coke.’
She dashed over to the Narvesen kiosk. Hilde looked at me and smiled. Lars’s eyes were wandering. Eirik was gazing in the direction of the harbour.
‘Now that you’re venturing out into the big wide world, I’ll give you a piece of advice,’ he said, turning to me.
‘Oh yes?’ I said.
‘Think before you act. Make sure you’re never caught with your pants down. And you’ll survive. If, for example, you want some of your pupils to suck you off, for God’s sake do it behind the teacher’s desk. Not in front. OK?’
‘Isn’t that double standards?’ I said.
He laughed.
‘And if, while you’re up north, you’ve got to slap a girlfriend around, do it so the bruises don’t show,’ Hilde said. ‘Never the face, however much you might feel like it.’
‘Do you think I should have two, then? One down here and one up there?’
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘One you hit and one you don’t,’ Eirik said. ‘Can’t get a better balance than that.’
‘Any more advice?’ I said.
‘I saw an interview with an old actor on TV once,’ Lars said. ‘He was asked whether there was anything he’d learned over the course of a long life he’d like to pass on to the viewers. He said yes, there was. The shower curtain. Make sure it was inside the bath, not outside. Otherwise when you turned the water on it would go all over the floor.’
We laughed. Lars, pleased with himself, looked around.
Behind him, Line came back empty-handed.
‘The queue was too long,’ she said. ‘But I suppose they’ll have a bar on board.’
‘They do,’ I said.
‘Shall we go?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thet was thet, as Fleksnes used to say. No more Kristiansand!’
They hugged me in turn. That was something I had started doing in the second class: whenever we met we hugged.
Then I slung my kitbag over my back, grabbed my case and followed Line onto the train. They waved a few times, the train set off and they strolled down to the car park.
It was unbelievable that was only two days ago.
I put down the book and, while rolling another cigarette and taking a swig of lukewarm coffee, read the three sentences I had written.
Down the hill the shop was less busy. I went for an apple from the kitchen and sat down at the typewriter again. In the course of the next hour I wrote three pages. About two boys on an estate, and it was good as far as I could judge. Perhaps three more pages and it would be finished. And that wasn’t bad, finishing a short story on the first whole day up here. At that rate I could have a collection ready by Christmas!
As I was rinsing the dregs from the coffee pot I saw a car coming up the road from the shop. It stopped outside the caretaker’s house and two men, who looked to be in their mid-twenties, got out. Both were well built, one was tall, the other smaller and rounder. I held the pot under the tap until it was full and put it on the hotplate. The two men were walking up the hill. I stepped to the side so that they couldn’t see me through the window.
Their footsteps stopped outside the porch.
Were they coming to see me?
One of them said something to the other. The ring of the doorbell pierced the silence of the flat.
I wiped my hands on my thighs, went into the hall and opened the door.
The smaller of the two stretched out a hand. His face was square, his chin curved and jutting, his mouth small, his eyes were alert. He had a black moustache and stubble on his jaw. A heavy gold chain around his neck.
‘I’m Remi,’ he said.
Embarrassed, I shook his hand.
‘Karl Ove Knausgaard,’ I said.
’Frank,’ the tall guy said, reaching out a hand, which was enormous. His face was as round as the other man’s was square. Round and fleshy. His lips were thick, the skin was delicate, pink almost. Hair blond and thinning. He looked like an oversized child. His eyes were kind, also like a child’s.
‘Can we come in?’ the one called Remi said. ‘We heard you were on your own up here and thought you might like some company. I suppose you don’t know anyone in the village yet.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That was kind of you. Do come in!’
I took a step back. Kind! Do come in! Where the hell did that come from? Was I fifty?
They stopped in the sitting room and looked around. Remi nodded a few times.
‘Harrison lived here last year,’ he said.
I looked at him.
‘The previous temporary teacher,’ he said. ‘We often sat here. He was a great guy.’
‘A good guy,’ Frank said.
‘No wasn’t a word in his vocabulary,’ Remi said.
‘He’s already deeply missed,’ Frank said. ‘Can we sit down?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? I’ve got some on the go.’
‘Coffee? Yes, please.’
They took off their jackets, laid them across the arm of the sofa and sat down. Their bodies were like barrels. The upper arms of the one called Frank were as wide as my thighs. Even with my back to them, in front of the worktop, I could feel their presence, it filled the whole flat and made me feel weak and girly.
That was kind of you. Would you like a cup of coffee?
For Christ’s sake, I didn’t have any cups! Only the one I had brought with me.
I opened the cupboards above the worktop. Empty, of course. Then I opened the lower ones. And there, next to the downpipe from the sink, was a glass. I rinsed it, sprinkled some coffee in the jug, banged it on the tabletop a few times, carried it into the sitting room and looked around for something to put it on.
It had to be The Garden of Eden.
‘Well?’ Remi said. ‘What do you reckon, Karl Ove?’
I was uncomfortable at hearing my name used so familiarly by a man I had never seen before and felt my cheeks flush.
‘Don’t really know,’ I said.
‘We’re going to a party tonight,’ Frank said. ‘Over in Gryllefjord. Fancy coming along?’
‘There’s a place free in the car, and we know you won’t have had time to go to the Vinmonopol, so we’ve got some booze for you too. What do you think?’
‘Not sure,’ I said.
‘What? Would you rather mope around here in this empty flat?’
‘Let the man make his own mind up!’ Frank said.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I’d planned to do some work,’ I said.
‘Work? What on?’ Remi said. But his eyes were already fixed on the typewriter. ‘Do you write?’
I flushed again.
‘A bit,’ I said with a shrug.
‘Ah, a writer!’ Remi said. ‘Not bad.’
He laughed.
‘I’ve never read a book in my life. Not even when I went to school. I always got out of it. Have you?’ he said, looking at Frank.
‘Yes, lots. Cocktail.’
They both burst into laughter.
‘Does that count?’ Remi said, looking at me. ‘You’re a writer. Does porn count as literature?’
I gave a strained smile.
‘Fiction is fiction, I suppose,’ I said.
There was a silence.
‘You’re from Kristiansand, I hear,’ Frank said.
I nodded.
‘Have you got a girl down there?’
I mulled that one over.
‘Yes and no,’ I said.
‘Yes and no? That sounds interesting!’ Remi said.
‘Sounds like something for you,’ Frank said with a glance at Remi.
‘For me? No. I’m more the either-or type.’
There was another silence as they took a mouthful of coffee.
‘Have you got any children?’ Remi said.
‘Children?’ I said. ‘Bloody hell. I’m only eighteen!’
At last a comment from the heart.
‘It’s happened before in the history of the world,’ Remi said.
‘Have you two got children then?’ I said.
‘Frank hasn’t. But I have. A son of nine. He lives with his mother.’
‘He’s from the “or” time,’ Frank said.
They laughed. Then they both looked at me.
‘Well, we shouldn’t bother him any more on his first day here,’ Remi said and got up. Frank got up too. They took their jackets and went into the hall.
‘Think about the party tonight,’ Remi said. ‘We’ll be at Hege’s if you change your mind.’
‘He doesn’t know where Hege lives,’ Frank said.