My Struggle, Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711153
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Out of the wet-weather shelter came a small, plump figure. I dashed over to the boys who had been wrestling in the snow and were now brushing it off their jeans. The denim material was almost black from where the snow had melted.

“Karl Ove!” he said from behind me, and tugged at my jacket.

He must have run after me.

I turned. “What’s up, Jo?” I said.

He smiled.

“Can I throw a snowball at you?”

Last week I had given them permission to throw snowballs at me. It had been a big mistake because they thought it was so much fun, especially when they hit my thighs with a couple of stingers, that they refused to stop when I asked them to. They had reached a kind of amnesty, what had not been allowed was suddenly allowed, and they had a sense of how difficult it would be to punish them if all of a sudden it wasn’t allowed any longer.

“No, not today,” I said. “Besides, the bell’s about to ring.”

The four boys scowled up at me from under dark woolen hats pulled down over their faces.

“Is everything all right out here?” I said.

“Of course,” Reidar said. “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”

“None of that,” I said. “You should show respect for adults.”

“You’re not an adult,” he said. “You don’t even have a driver’s license!”

“No, that’s true,” I said. “But at least I know my times tables. That’s more than you can say. And I’m big enough to paddle your bottom three times a day if I have to.”

“My dad would beat you up if you did,” he said.

“Karl Ove, come on,” Jo said, pulling at my jacket again.

“I’ve got a dad too, you know,” I said. “He’s much stronger and taller than me. And on top of that, he’s got a driver’s license.”

I looked down at Jo. “Where do you want to go?”

“There’s something I want to show you. It’s something I’ve made.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a secret. No one else must know.”

I looked across. The girls in the seventh grade were standing by the wall of the wet-weather shelter. Behind, on the fringes of the soccer field, a group of children were chasing after each other in the dark.

“The bell’s about to ring, you know,” I told him.

He took my hand. Didn’t he understand how this looked to his classmates?

“It’ll be quick,” he said.

He’d hardly uttered the words before the bell rang.

“Next break then,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

“OK,” I said. “Now get going.”

The kids on the soccer field had either not heard the bell or were ignoring it. I walked over to the field. Cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted that the bell had rung. They stopped and looked at me. The snow covering the field drew it into the surrounding terrain, it was a flat surface in the middle of a slope which, farther up, became a mountain, and in all this whiteness, which the sky’s all-pervasive darkness muted to a blue, the pupils resembled tiny animals,

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