Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard Read Free Book Online

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