Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard Page A

cassettes on the street in Arendal. I went back to hers one night.’
    ‘Icelandic!’ Espen said. ‘Sounds great.’
    ‘Yes, it was as well,’ I said. ‘And then there were two one-night stands in town. I don’t even know their names.’
    We drove down the last hill. The deciduous trees were as compact as a wall along the river. At the bottom the countryside opened out and I looked across the field to the small football pitch, where three tiny figures were shooting at a fourth in goal.
    ‘And yours?’ I said.
    ‘There’s no time for that now. We’re here.’
    ‘Come on,’ I said.
    He laughed and stopped the car.
    ‘See you tomorrow!’ he said.
    ‘You bastard,’ I said, opened the door and walked up to the house. As I listened to the sound of his car hammering down the hill and soon disappearing, I reflected that I had given him too much information, it would have been better if I had just said it was none of his business. That is what he would have said.
    How come he could do it and I couldn’t?
    He didn’t rate girls as highly as I did, that was one thing. Not that he liked them any less than me, far from it, but perhaps he didn’t consider them
better
than him, put them on such a high pedestal that you couldn’t chat to them or do normal things with them; for him they were on the same level or perhaps he was even higher than them, for if there was one thing he had it was self-confidence. That meant he didn’t care, and when they saw that, he was someone they wanted to conquer. I looked upon them as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but for ever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a water spout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.
    But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing.
    I stuffed Bassen’s letter in my pocket and hurried up the hill. Nils Erik was supposed to be picking me up in half an hour and before that I had to have something to eat.
    A couple of hours later we were driving along the main street of Finnsnes. Coming here from Oslo and Tromsø, I had regarded Finnsnes as a crummy little hole, but now, only five days later, coming from Håfjord it seemed like a large, complex, almost sophisticated place, rich with possibilities.
    Nils Erik parked in the supermarket car park and then we walked off to find a Vinmonopol. I bought a bottle of Koskenkorva vodka for the party, four bottles of white wine and half a bottle of whisky to take home with me; Nils Erik bought three bottles of red wine, which came as no surprise, he was the red-wine type, not a beer and spirits man. After we had stowed the bottles in the boot I took him along to an electrical goods shop that also sold stereos. Mine wasn’t good enough, I had thought that for quite a while, and now that I had a steady job I decided to do something about it.
    In the shop they had only racks, they weren’t the best, but I could buy a decent stereo later, I reckoned, and looked around for an assistant.
    A man was standing behind the counter with his back to us, opening a large cardboard box with a