My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

My insides trembled, but no one knew because my movements were controlled, what I said was thought through, nothing of what others saw could betray my inner thoughts. I hardly knew I had these thoughts, they lived in a kind of no-man’s-land, and when they came, in an explosion, I didn’t hold on to

them, I let them fall back to where they’d come from, and so it was as though they didn’t exist. But what Jørn had said, that changed everything, because that came from the outside. Everything that came from the outside was dangerous.

There was something almost morbid about writing alone at night while everyone else was asleep and then teaching the children with the dregs of my strength, and I was becoming more and more worn down, so at the end of February, I switched back as the tiny pulse of light in the middle of the day slowly began to widen. It was as if the world was returning. And living together with Nils Erik was good: when the pupils came visiting, from the fourth graders to the seventh graders, the meetings weren’t so charged – if I didn’t play such a dominant role, it didn’t make much difference. It was different with Hege, she invariably came when Nils Erik was out, how she knew I had no idea, nor why she did it. But she liked talking to me, and I liked talking to her, we could sit for hours in the evening despite our being so different.

The space beneath the ceiling, which as if underwater had pulsated in hues of red, green, and blue except when it had sparkled like a starry sky, was empty apart from a light rig with some light cannons and an idiotic cheap shiny disco ball hanging from the middle. The tables, where people had been sitting and enjoying themselves in what resembled a wall of human warmth, were strewn around, beneath them a sea of empty bottles and scrunched-up cigarette packets, here and there shards of broken glass, and the odd trail of toilet paper someone had unwittingly brought with them. The tabletops were stained with all sorts of sticky mess and covered with small burn marks from forgotten cigarettes, there were overflowing ashtrays, piles of cups and glasses, empty bottles of all descriptions, cheap thermos flasks with long rivulets of coffee under the spouts. The faces of those who had not yet gone home were tired and lifeless, bone structures covered with skin, white and creased, eyes two lumps of jelly, bodies either rippling with fat and folds of skin or so bony and lean that your thoughts were led to the skeletons beneath, which would soon be lying picked nice and clean under the ground in some windblown graveyard with saline soil somewhere by the sea.

Did terrible things happen there? Did I do something I shouldn’t have done? Something awful? I mean beyond staggering around drunk and out of control at night? I once wrote a novel that took place there. I wrote it without a second thought. I paid no regard to the relationship between fiction and reality, for a world opened up when I wrote, it meant everything to me for a while, and it consisted partly of descriptions of real buildings and people, for the school in the book is the school as it was when I worked there, and partly of fictional ones, and it was only when the novel had been written and published that I began to wonder how it would be received up there in the north, by those who knew the world I described and who could see what was reality and what wasn’t. I used to lie awake at night in fear. The story had not been

plucked out of the air. On the contrary, it had been in the air. I worked as a teacher for a year in the north, and when occasionally I was able to relish the thought of going to work in the morning, it was because she was there.

That was how it was during the months where day was night, and that was how it was when the light unveiled the room in the mornings, at first cold and shimmery, then, slowly and imperceptibly, full of warmth. The snow on the road disappeared, the enormous piles of snow dwindled,