At the first editorial meeting I attended at Fædrelandsvennen I suggested writing an article about the Sissel Kyrkjebø phenomenon. She was eulogised by all the newspapers, had sold an unimaginable number of records, but why actually? I asked.
‘Good idea. Go for it,’ Steinar said.
‘Why does Sissel sell?’ I called the article. ‘Savour the name,’ I wrote. ‘Sissel Kyrkjebø. .’ And then I made fun of all the associations you could make, with Christianity, the farming community and nationalism, she was even wearing national costume on the LP cover, wasn’t she? She stood for everything I disliked, it was false, manipulative, clichéd, a dreadful picture postcard of the world, who could bear the beauty of it, and on top of everything in such an undemanding form?
There were lots of letters to the editor over the following days. One opened with the words ‘Karl Ove Knausgaard. Savour the name,’ then feasted on its associations with the sterility of rocks (knaus) and the scant yield of a farm (gård). Fædrelandsvennen was a popular newspaper, it was loyal to its readers, the qualities that I preferred — innovation, the avant-garde, provocation — were not for the likes of them, and in the months that followed there was a conspicuously large number of glowing articles about Sissel Kyrkjebø.
I loved it, finally my name had been raised above the anonymous ranks of the crowd, not much, though not so little either.
The weekend after the article appeared Yngve came to visit, and as usual we dropped in on grandma and grandad. On this occasion Gunnar was there. He rose to his feet and stared straight at me as we entered the kitchen.
‘Well, here he is, the world champion,’ he said.
I smiled at him inanely.
‘Who do you think you are?’ he said. ‘Do you realise what an idiot you’ve made of yourself? No, you don’t, do you. You think you’re something special.’
‘What do you mean?’ I mumbled, even though I knew all too well what he was talking about.
‘What makes you think that you of all people are right and everybody else is wrong? You, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy! You don’t know anything. Yet you assume the lofty position of an arbiter of taste. Oh, it’s so pathetic!’
I said nothing, studied the floor. Yngve did the same.
‘Sissel Kyrkjebø is a popular artist loved by everyone. And she gets good reviews. Then you come along and say everyone’s wrong! You! No!’ he said, and shook his head. ‘No, no, no!’
I had never seen him so angry or het up before, and I was shaken.
‘Well, I was actually on my way,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you, Yngve. You’re still in Bergen, are you?’
‘Yes, for the time being,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to China in the autumn.’
‘There you go,’ Gunnar said. ‘Off to see the world!’
Then he left, and we turned to grandma and grandad, who had been sitting at the kitchen table minding their own business during this little interlude.
‘I agree with you anyway,’ Yngve said as we got into the car to go home. ‘I think what you wrote was perfectly reasonable.’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ I said, laughing, there was something exhilarating about all this.
Cecilie and I talked for hours on the telephone. She trained hard, was enormously disciplined and determined, things came to her easily and she was open to life. But there was also something closed inside her, or silent, I didn’t know quite what, but I noticed it. At the weekend I hitch-hiked to hers, unless she came to mine. I preferred to be there because I too was treated like a son of the house, though not with the same acceptance as Yngve, I sensed, we were younger and siblings of the other two, something to do with that meant we weren’t taken as seriously, I felt, as though we were imitations, as though we weren’t ourselves or people in our own right.
When we were alone, we were, of course. Autumn descended upon us, we walked into the deepening gloom, hand in hand or entwined, Cecilie both delicate yet strong-willed, open yet closed, full of platitudes yet passionately herself.
One evening we went to the primary school I had once attended, not so far from their house. I had been twelve when I left, now I was seventeen. The five years felt like an eternity, there was almost nothing that connected me with the person I had been, and I remembered next to nothing of what I had done then.
But when I saw the school before us, hovering in the mist and darkness, my memories exploded inside me. I let go of Cecilie’s hand, approached the building and pressed my hand against the black timbers. The school really existed, it wasn’t merely a place in my imagination. My eyes were moist with emotion, it was as though the whole bounteous world that had been my childhood had returned for an instant.
And then there was the mist. I loved mist and what it did to the world around us.
I remembered Geir and me running around with Anne Lisbet and Solveig in the mist, and the memory had such power that the thought was painful. It tore me to pieces. The soft gravel, the trees glinting with humidity, the lights shimmering, shimmering.
‘Strange to think that you actually went to this school,’ Cecilie said. ‘I don’t connect you with Sandnes at all.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said, gripping her hand again. We walked alongside the building, towards the annexe, which in my imagination was brand new. I craned my neck the whole way, running my gaze over everything I could, absorbing it all.
‘We must have been here at the same time, mustn’t we?’ I said as we clambered down the ‘steep’ slope to the football pitch.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When you were in the sixth class, I was in the fifth.’
‘And Kristin was in the eighth and Yngve the first at gymnas,’ I said.
‘And now I’m in the second at gymnas,’ she said.
‘Yep, it’s a small world,’ I said.
We laughed, walked across the empty field and followed the gravel path through the forest to Kongshavn. Only a few hundred metres further on, the sensation of coming home, of recognising, was gone, we were stepping into the outer zone of childhood, where I had been only a few times and where the scenery assumed a dreamlike quality which I both recognised and discovered anew.
Everything was so odd. It was so odd to be here, and it was odd to be with Cecilie, the sister of Yngve’s girlfriend. It was also odd to go home to mum and our life there, which differed so starkly from the life I lived away from home.
I had started at another local radio station, it was bigger, all the equipment was new, the rooms were fantastic, they had asked if I wanted to work for them and I did. I still played football, I still wrote for the newspaper, and I went out more and more often. When I wasn’t with Hilde, Eirik and Lars, I drank with Espen and his friends, or with colleagues from the radio station, unless I was hanging out with Jan Vidar. It was hard to take Cecilie into this world. She was something different for me. When I sat in Kjelleren drinking she was infinitely distant; when I was sitting next to her she was infinitely near.
One problem was her devotion to me, it placed me in a superior position, which I didn’t want. Yet I was inferior to her, indeed as low as anyone can be, that was where I was for the weeks that became months because what I was slowly realising, the terrible truth that my relationship with her had revealed, was that I couldn’t make love to anyone. I couldn’t do it. A naked breast or a hurried caress across the inside of a thigh was enough, I came long before anything had begun.
Every time!
So there I lay, beside her, this girl who was such a delight, and I was pressing my groin against the mattress in an attempt to hide my humiliating secret.