‘Coffee’s ready if you want any,’ Richard said, heading for the vestibule with a cup in his hand, probably on the way to his office.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said.
When the bell rang half an hour later, I was standing by the window in the classroom watching the pupils coming up the hill. Tiredness lay in me like stagnant water. We had maths for the first two lessons, incomparably the most boring subject. It was February, incomparably the most boring month.
‘Open your books and make a start,’ I said after they had trickled into the room and found their places. In maths we were joined by the fifth and sixth years, so there were eight pupils in all.
‘Same as always then. You do the sums, and if you run into any problems, I’ll come and help. Then we’ll go through the new material on the board at the beginning of the next lesson.’
No one objected, they slipped acquiescently from the state they arrived in at school to the state the solving of the mathematical problems demanded. Live put her hand up before she had even glanced at the book.
I went over to her and leaned forward.
‘Try on your own first,’ I said. ‘Have a go.’
‘But I can’t do this, I know. It’s so difficult.’
‘Maybe it’ll be easy. You don’t know until you’ve tried. Give it ten minutes, then I’ll come back and see how you’re doing. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said.
Jørn, the sharp little sixth year, waved me over.
‘I did some of the exercises at home,’ he said when I was by his desk. ‘But then I got stuck. Can you help me?’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘I’m not that great at maths myself.’
He looked up at me and smiled. He thought I was joking, but I wasn’t; after the syllabus for the seventh class I started having problems. I could even get into difficulties before then too, suddenly forgetting how to divide two big numbers, and I had to wriggle my way out by asking pupils how to do it. Not that I didn’t know of course, it was just that I couldn’t remember.
‘But this one doesn’t look too bad,’ I said.
He followed carefully while I explained it to him. Then he took over, I left him and went to the window.
He was a determined character, but his attitude to school was either/or, on or off. Maths he liked, so there was no problem. In some subjects though he switched off completely.
Live put up her hand again.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘And I mean it.’
I showed her. She nodded, but her eyes were vacant.
‘Can you do the rest yourself now?’ I said.
She nodded.
I felt sorry for her, almost every lesson held a humiliation of some kind, but what could I do?
I sat down behind my desk, scanned the class and looked up at the clock, which had barely moved. After a while Andrea put up her hand. I met her eyes, smiled and stood up.
‘Karl Ove’s in love with Andrea!’ Jørn said loud enough for everyone to hear.
I gave a start. Red-faced, I pretended I hadn’t heard, leaned over her desk and tried to concentrate on the little maths problem.
‘Karl Ove’s in love with Andrea!’ Jørn repeated.
Some of the pupils giggled.
I straightened up and eyed him. ‘Do you know what that’s called?’ I said.
‘What what’s called?’ he said with a grin.
‘When you say that other people feel what you feel? It’s called transference. For example, if you, a sixth year, were in love with one of the girls in the seventh class. Instead of admitting it you say your teacher is.’
‘I’m not in love with anyone,’ he said.
‘Nor me,’ I said. ‘So shall we do some problem-solving now?’
I leaned forward again. Andrea whisked her hair away from her forehead with one hand.
‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ she whispered.
I ignored her remark, stared at the column of figures she had written and pointed to where she had slipped up.
‘There,’ I said. ‘That’s wrong. Can you see?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what’s it supposed to be?’
‘I can’t tell you that!’ I said. ‘You have to do the sum. Try again. I’ll be at my desk if you can’t do it.’
‘OK,’ she said, looked up at me and gave a fleeting smile.
My insides trembled.
Was I in love with Andrea?
Was I in love?
No, no, no.
But I was drawn to her in my thoughts. I was.
When I was at the school during the night, when I stood by the dark motionless water in the swimming pool I imagined she was in the changing room, alone, and that soon I would go in. She covered herself, looked up, I knelt down in front of her, she looked at me, at first with apprehension, then tenderness and openness.
I imagined this and at the same time thought the opposite, that she wasn’t in the changing room, how could I think like that, no one must find out how my mind worked.
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 whence they had come, 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 years to the seventh years, 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 us being so very different.
The writing on the other hand was going badly, I had reached a point where I kept repeating myself, all of a sudden I was unsure why I was writing at all.
Aschehoug Publishing House had put an advert in Dagbladet, announcing a short-story competition, my enthusiasm was rekindled and I sent in two of my best stories: the one about the refuse dump and the one about the funeral pyres on the plain.
Various community centres on the island took it in turns to organise parties, and at the beginning of March it was Håfjord’s turn. We had pre-drinks in our house, almost all the temporary teachers were there, and after only a few drinks I was floating on air, they made me so happy, these people, and I told them so too, on the way up to the community centre, swinging the bag with the bottle of vodka and the extra pouch of tobacco.
What was special about these parties was that they weren’t restricted to or arranged for particular age groups — desperate twenty-year-olds here, resigned forty-year-olds there — no, everyone came to these community centre parties. Seventy-year-olds sat at the same table as teenagers, fish-processing workers at the same table as school inspectors, and the fact that they had known one another all their lives did not prevent them from letting their hair down, normal social relationships were set aside, you could see a thirteen-year-old smooching with a twenty-year-old, a juiced-up old lady dancing and shaking her dress cancan style while grinning a toothless grin. I loved it, couldn’t help myself, there was a freedom in this I had never encountered anywhere else. Yet you could only love it if you were there, part of the untrammelled euphoria, for with even the tiniest hint of criticism or good taste everything would collapse and become a wild parody or perhaps even a travesty of the human condition. The youths who heated their coffee on a low blue gas flame, the very elderly women who looked at you with mischievous flirty eyes, the bald men dressed in formal suits and ties who one minute were making passes at fifteen-year-olds and the next were hunched over a ditch beneath the glittering community centre spewing, women staggering and men crying, all wrapped up as it were, in a long stream of badly performed 1960s and 70s hits by bands that no one but people up here cared about any longer, and a cloud of smoke that was so dense that if you hadn’t known better you might have assumed came from a blaze in the cellar.