Karl Ove Knausgård: Moj boj, četrtič
Dancing in the Dark, četrta iz serije Moj boj, knjiga o prvi službi, zgodnji odraslosti in še čem, mi je bila od vseh doslej pravzaprav še najmanj všeč. Ne, ker bi bila slabo napisana, ne, Knausgård je tudi tokrat fenomenalen, zajec tukaj tiči v povsem drugem grmu: obdobje, ki ga opisuje v knjigi, mi enostavno ni blizu, tuja sta mi njegov način razmišljanja in njegovo spopadanje z vsakodnevnimi situacijami. Med neskončnim popivanjem, nerodnimi semi-erotičnimi pripetljaji in (ne)sposobnostjo vklapljanja v maloštevilno skupnost obrobne norveške vasice se nekje v ozadju, v manjšem obsegu, a nič manj intenzivno, še vedno pojavlja oče. Veliko večjo vlogo pa tokrat igra mama.
Kaj govorim, knjiga je bistvu fantastična. Tule je le nekaj iztočnic:
“The pre-party, as they called it here, pre-loading, excluded discussion. Issues regarding politics, women, music or football were not on the agenda. What they did was tell stories. One story gave way to the next, laughter billowed across the table, and the tales they came up with, they being the trolls they were, all had their origins in the village and the people who lived there, which despite its modest proportions appeared to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of stories. There was the fisherman in his sixties who had been seasick all his life and who only needed to jump on board his trawler to start feeling ill. There was the gang of fishermen who after a good season had hired the suite at the SAS hotel in Tromsø and spent vertiginous sums of money in the course of a few intense days of abandon there. One man called Frank, with the fleshy face of a child, was said to have burned his way through twenty thousand kroner, and it took me a while to realise that ‘burned’ meant exactly that, he had set fire to it. Then someone had been drunk shitless in a lift, they said, and again it took me a while to twig that this had to be interpreted literally: he had been so drunk that he had shat himself. Judging by the conversation it had indeed happened in the lift. Frank in particular got so drunk that waking up in his own shit was not an unusual occurrence, from what I could glean. His mother, who was the older teacher at the school, had a hard time, it seemed, because he still lived at home. Hege’s stories were different, but no less bizarre, such as the one about the girlfriend who had been terrified before an exam and whom she had taken into the forest and hit on the head with a bat so that she would have a justifiable reason for being absent. I stared at her. Was she pulling our legs? It didn’t seem like it. She met my gaze and grinned, and then narrowed her eyes to a slit and frowned, opened them again, smiled and looked away. What did that mean? Was it the equivalent of a wink? Or did it mean that I shouldn’t believe everything I heard?
They not only knew one another well, they knew one another inside out.
…
There was nothing more deceptive in existence. Walking around, knowing that I was approximately thirty seconds away from all I ever wanted, separated only by a chasm, was driving me insane. Quite often I caught myself wishing we were still in the Stone Age, then all I needed to do was go out with a club, hit the nearest woman on the head and drag her home to do whatever I wanted. But it was no good, there were no short cuts, the thirty seconds were an illusion, as almost everything concerning women was an illusion. Oh what a mockery that they were accessible to the eye but in no other way. That everywhere you turned there were women and girls. That everywhere you turned there were breasts under blouses, thighs and hips under trousers, beautiful smiling faces, hair blowing in the wind. Pendulous breasts, firm breasts, round breasts, bouncing breasts, white breasts, tanned breasts . . . a naked wrist, a naked elbow, a naked cheek, a naked eye looking around. A naked thigh in shorts or a short summer dress. A naked palm, a naked nose, a naked neck. I saw all this around me constantly, there were girls everywhere, the supply was infinite, a well, no, I was drifting in an ocean of women, I saw several hundred of them every day, all with their own individual ways of moving, standing, turning, walking, holding and twisting their heads, blinking, looking — take for example a feature such as their eyes, which expressed their utter uniqueness, everything that lived and breathed was here in this one person, was revealed, regardless of whether the gaze was meant for me or not. Oh, those sparkling eyes! Oh, those dark eyes! Oh, that glint of happiness! The alluring darkness! Or, for that matter, the unintelligent, the stupid eyes! For in them too there was an appeal, and no small appeal either: the stupid vacant eyes, the open mouth in that perfect beautiful body.
All this was never far from my mind, and all of them were thirty seconds away from the only thing I wanted — but on the other side of a chasm.
…
Then it was as though a dam had burst. Everything suddenly flowed into the same channel, into the same valley, which was soon full of something that excluded everything else.
Yngve began to talk about himself, and it wasn’t long before we were going through one incident after the other. Yngve told us about the time the B-Max supermarket opened and he was sent off with a shopping list and some money, under strict instructions to bring back a receipt. He had done that, but the sum in his hand hadn’t tallied with the till receipt and dad had marched him into the cellar and given him a beating. He told us about the time his bike had had a puncture and dad had walloped him. I, for my part, had never been beaten; for some reason dad had always treated Yngve worse. But I talked about the times he had slapped me and the times he had locked me in the cellar, and the point of these stories was always the same: his fury was always triggered by some petty detail, some utter triviality, and as such was actually comical. At any rate we laughed when we told the stories. Once I had left a pair of gloves on the bus and he slapped me in the face when he found out. I had leaned against the wobbly table in the hall and sent it flying and he came over and hit me. It was absolutely absurd! I lived in fear of him, I said, and Yngve said dad controlled him and his thoughts, even now.
Mum said nothing. She sat listening, looking at me then Yngve. Sometimes her eyes seemed to go blank. She had heard about most of these incidents before, but now there was such a plethora of them she might well have been overwhelmed.
…
Before I went to bed I wrote a note for mum to say I had worked till late and she shouldn’t wake me. Usually she got up an hour before me, had breakfast, drank coffee and smoked a cigarette while listening to the radio. Then she woke me and on the days when our timetables coincided gave me a lift to school. Her school was only a kilometre further down the road. We wouldn’t say much during the half-hour the journey took, and it often struck me how different the lull in conversation was from the one I endured with dad, when the silence burned like a fever inside me. With mum the silence was painless.
…
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.
For me this was alien and exotic. I had grown up where almost no one drank or at least was ever visibly the worse for wear. There was a neighbour who drank himself silly once or twice every six months, this was a sensation and caused quite a stir. There was an old alcoholic who cycled to the shop every day to buy his brown bottles of beer. And that was it. Mum and dad never drank, apart from a couple of bottles of beer or a glass of red wine with their food. Grandma and grandad in Sørbøvåg didn’t drink, grandma and grandad in Kristiansand didn’t drink, none of my uncles and aunts drank, and if they did, never in front of me. It was only two and a half years ago that I had seen my father drunk for the first time.
Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person is rendered attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgement are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”
Povezave do prvih treh delov:
Karl Ove Knausgård: Moj boj, prvič