Read Online Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard - Free Book Online
Authors: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Tags: Biographical, Literary, Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Family Life, Genre Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction
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she looked at and didn’t look at me. And with absolute justification, for what was I doing here actually? What did I want from this job?
When I came in after the English lesson she glanced up at me and I think she knew what feelings were coursing through me.
Of course that was impossible, but it was what I thought anyway.
In the lunch break I went down to the post office at the other end of the village. The mountainsides were bright green in the sunshine. The sea was deep blue. Something about the light or perhaps the cool draught I felt in the air, somehow
beneath
what the sun heated up, so typical of August, evoked the atmospheres I recognised from when I started school after the holidays: the excitement, the anticipation, the perhaps-something-fantastic-is-going-to-happen-this-year?
On the slope behind the last row of houses there was already a hint of yellow in the green. Of course autumn came earlier here. I nodded to a car driving past. The driver, who looked like a mother, nodded back, and I walked down the gravelled incline to the post office, which was housed in the basement of a block of flats. In the hall were the PO boxes, inside was the office with counters, posters on the walls, stands of postcards and envelopes.
The woman behind the counter was probably about fifty. Permed thinning reddish hair, glasses, a delicate gold necklace. A man with a rollator stood by the small table under the window scraping a scratch card with a coin.
‘Hello,’ I said to the assistant and placed the envelopes on the counter. ‘I just wanted to post these.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘By the way, there’s some mail for you already.’
‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Not bad!’
While she weighed the letters and selected the appropriate stamps I unlocked my box. It was a letter from Line.
I went in and paid, opened the letter and started to read while walking up the gravel road.
She wrote that she was in her room and thinking about me. She liked me a lot, she said, we’d had so much fun together, but she had never actually been in love with me, so now, with us living in two different places, she thought the best and most honest thing to do would be to finish it. She hoped everything would go well for me in my life, urged me to take writing seriously, as she would with her drawing, and also hoped that I would not be angry with her, for our new lives were starting now, we were far apart, tomorrow she would be travelling to the folk high school and by now I had probably arrived in the village where I was going to work, and as long as this felt the way it did and she didn’t love me, anything else but finishing the relationship would be a betrayal of herself. But I was a wonderful person, I should know that, that was not the reason, you can’t control feelings, they are how they are.
I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket.
I hadn’t been in love with Line either, everything she said about me I could have said about her, yet still I felt sad and also a bit angry with her when I read what she had written. I wanted
her
to love
me
! And even though I didn’t want to be with her, and was glad it was over, it should have been me who finished it. Now it was her who had the high ground, who said no to me and who would also probably go through life convinced that I had loved her and had been crushed by her letter.
Oh well.
There was great activity down at the fish-processing plant. Several boats had docked, forklift trucks were plying back and forth across the concrete and into what looked like a dark hall. Men in high rubber boots bustled hither and thither, a group of women wearing open white coats and white caps stood smoking outside the end of the hall, and the air above them was full of flapping, screaming seagulls. I went into the shop and bought some rolls, some mild cheese, a packet of margarine and a litre of milk, said hello to the assistant, who asked whether I had settled in all right, fine, I said,
When I came in after the English lesson she glanced up at me and I think she knew what feelings were coursing through me.
Of course that was impossible, but it was what I thought anyway.
In the lunch break I went down to the post office at the other end of the village. The mountainsides were bright green in the sunshine. The sea was deep blue. Something about the light or perhaps the cool draught I felt in the air, somehow
beneath
what the sun heated up, so typical of August, evoked the atmospheres I recognised from when I started school after the holidays: the excitement, the anticipation, the perhaps-something-fantastic-is-going-to-happen-this-year?
On the slope behind the last row of houses there was already a hint of yellow in the green. Of course autumn came earlier here. I nodded to a car driving past. The driver, who looked like a mother, nodded back, and I walked down the gravelled incline to the post office, which was housed in the basement of a block of flats. In the hall were the PO boxes, inside was the office with counters, posters on the walls, stands of postcards and envelopes.
The woman behind the counter was probably about fifty. Permed thinning reddish hair, glasses, a delicate gold necklace. A man with a rollator stood by the small table under the window scraping a scratch card with a coin.
‘Hello,’ I said to the assistant and placed the envelopes on the counter. ‘I just wanted to post these.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘By the way, there’s some mail for you already.’
‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Not bad!’
While she weighed the letters and selected the appropriate stamps I unlocked my box. It was a letter from Line.
I went in and paid, opened the letter and started to read while walking up the gravel road.
She wrote that she was in her room and thinking about me. She liked me a lot, she said, we’d had so much fun together, but she had never actually been in love with me, so now, with us living in two different places, she thought the best and most honest thing to do would be to finish it. She hoped everything would go well for me in my life, urged me to take writing seriously, as she would with her drawing, and also hoped that I would not be angry with her, for our new lives were starting now, we were far apart, tomorrow she would be travelling to the folk high school and by now I had probably arrived in the village where I was going to work, and as long as this felt the way it did and she didn’t love me, anything else but finishing the relationship would be a betrayal of herself. But I was a wonderful person, I should know that, that was not the reason, you can’t control feelings, they are how they are.
I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket.
I hadn’t been in love with Line either, everything she said about me I could have said about her, yet still I felt sad and also a bit angry with her when I read what she had written. I wanted
her
to love
me
! And even though I didn’t want to be with her, and was glad it was over, it should have been me who finished it. Now it was her who had the high ground, who said no to me and who would also probably go through life convinced that I had loved her and had been crushed by her letter.
Oh well.
There was great activity down at the fish-processing plant. Several boats had docked, forklift trucks were plying back and forth across the concrete and into what looked like a dark hall. Men in high rubber boots bustled hither and thither, a group of women wearing open white coats and white caps stood smoking outside the end of the hall, and the air above them was full of flapping, screaming seagulls. I went into the shop and bought some rolls, some mild cheese, a packet of margarine and a litre of milk, said hello to the assistant, who asked whether I had settled in all right, fine, I said,
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