The fourteen years I lived in Bergen, from 1988 to 2002, are long gone, no traces of them are left other than as incidents a few people might remember, a flash of recollection here, a flash of recollection there, and of course whatever exists in my own memory of that time. But there is surprisingly little. All that is left of the thousands of days I spent in that small, narrow-streeted, rain-shimmering Vestland town is a few events and lots of sentiments. I kept a diary, which I have since burned. I took some photos, of which twelve remain; they are in a little pile on the floor beside the desk with all the letters I received during those days. I have flicked through them, read bits and pieces, and this has always depressed me, it was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions and achieved nothing. But what spirits I was in before I went! I had hitchhiked to Florence with Lars that summer, we stayed there for a few days, caught the train down to Brindisi, the weather was so hot it felt as though your head was on fire when you poked it through the open train window. Night in Brindisi, dark sky, white houses, heat as in a dream, big crowds in the parks, young people on mopeds everywhere, shouting and noise. We queued by the gangway for the big ship going to Piraeus with lots of others, almost all young and carrying rucksacks like us. It was forty-nine degrees in Rhodes. One day in Athens, the most chaotic place I have ever been and so insanely hot, then the boat to Paros and Antiparos, where we lay on the beach every day and got drunk every night. One evening we met some Norwegian girls, and while I was in the toilet Lars told them he was a writer and had been accepted to start at the Writing Academy in the autumn. They were discussing this when I returned. Lars just smiled at me. What was he up to? I knew he was prone to telling little fibs, but while I was standing there? I said nothing, decided to give him a wide berth in the future. We went to Athens together, I had run out of money, Lars was still rolling in it, he decided to fly back home the day after. We were sitting in a terrace restaurant, he was eating chicken, his chin glistening with fat, I was drinking a glass of water. The last thing I wanted to do was ask him for money, the only way I could get any out of him was if he asked me whether I wanted to borrow some. But he didn’t, so I went hungry. The next day he left for the airport, and I took a bus to the suburbs, got off near a motorway slip road and started hitchhiking. After no more than a few minutes a police car stopped, the officers couldn’t speak a word of English, but I got the message that hitchhiking wasn’t allowed there, so I caught a bus back to the city centre, and with the last of my money bought a train ticket to Vienna, a loaf of bread, a big bottle of Coke and a carton of cigarettes.

I thought the trip would take a few hours and was shocked to learn it would be more like two full days. In the compartment were a Swedish boy of my age and two English girls who turned out to be a couple of years older. We were well into Yugoslavia before they twigged that I had no money, nor any food, and they offered to share theirs with me. The countryside outside the window was so beautiful it hurt. Valleys and rivers, farms and villages, people dressed in ways I associated with the nineteenth century and obviously worked the land the way they did then, with horses and hay carts, scythes and ploughs. Part of the train was Russian, I walked through the carriages in the evening, spellbound by the foreign letters, the foreign smells, the foreign interior, the foreign faces. When we arrived in Vienna one of the two girls, Maria, wanted to exchange addresses, she was attractive and normally it would have gone through my mind that I could visit her in Norfolk some day, perhaps start a relationship and live there, but on this day, wandering through the streets on the outskirts of Vienna, the idea meant nothing to me, I was still consumed by Ingvild, whom I had met only once, at Easter that year, but to whom I later wrote. Everyone else paled into insignificance compared with her. I got a lift with a stern-looking blonde woman in her thirties to a petrol station on the motorway, where I asked some lorry drivers if they had any room for me, one of them nodded, he must have been in his late forties, dark-complexioned and thin with deeply glowing eyes, first though he had to have something to eat.

I waited outside in the warm dusk smoking and watching the lights along the road, which were beginning to become more and more distinct as evening fell, surrounded by the drone of traffic, occasionally interrupted by the brief but heavy slamming of doors, the sudden voices of people crossing the car park on their way to or from the service station. Inside, people sat silently eating on their own except for a few families who swamped the tables they sat around. I was filled with an inner exultation, this was precisely what I loved best, the familiar, the known – the motorway, the petrol station, the cafeteria, which weren’t familiar at all actually, everywhere I looked details differed from the places I knew. The driver came out, nodded to me, I followed him, clambered up into the enormous vehicle, put my rucksack in the back and settled in. He started the engine, everything rumbled and shook, lights were switched on, we set off slowly, gradually speeded up, but were still lumbering until we were safely coasting on the inside lane of the motorway, at which point he glanced at me for the first time. Schweden? he said. Norwegen, I said. Ah, Norwegen! he said.

Throughout the night and well into the next day I sat at his side. We had exchanged the names of some football players – Rune Bratseth in particular had excited him – but since he couldn’t speak a word of English that was as far as we got.

I was in Germany, and I was very hungry, but without a krone in my pockets all I could do was smoke and hitch and hope for the best. A young man in a red Golf stopped, his name was Björn, he said, and he was going a long way, he was affable, and in the evening when he had gone as far as he was going to go, he invited me into his house and gave me some muesli and milk, I ate three portions, he showed me some pictures of his holidays with his brother in Norway and Sweden when he was young, their father was crazy about Scandinavia, he told me, hence the name Björn. His brother’s name was Tor, he said, shaking his head. He drove me to the motorway, I gave him my cassette of The Clash’s triple album, he shook my hand, we wished each other good luck, and I took up a position on one of the slip roads again. After three hours a tousled bearded man in a red 2CV stopped, he was going to Denmark, I could have a lift all the way. He asked me questions, was interested when I said that I wrote, I wondered if he might have been a professor of some kind, he bought me food at a cafeteria, I slept for a few hours, we reached Denmark, he bought me more food, and when I finally left him I was in the middle of Jutland, only a few hours away from Hirtshals, so I would soon be home. But the last part of the journey was more difficult, I got lifts of thirty-odd kilometres at a time, by eleven in the evening I had advanced no further than Løkken, and I decided to sleep on the beach. I wandered along a narrow road through a low forest, here and there the tarmac was covered with sand, and soon dunes rose before me, I walked up them, cast my eyes over the shiny grey sea lying in front of me in the light of the Scandinavian summer night. From a campsite or a cluster of seaside cabins a few hundred metres away came the sound of voices and car engines.

It was good being by the sea. Breathing in the faint aroma of salt and the raw breeze off the water. This was my sea. I was nearly home.

I found a dip in the sand and unrolled my sleeping bag, crept inside, pulled up the zip and closed my eyes. It was unpleasant, anyone could stumble across me out here, that was how it felt, but I was so tired after the last few days that in an instant I was gone, as if someone had blown out a candle.

I woke to rain. Cold and stiff, I struggled out of the sleeping bag, pulled on my trousers, packed everything and set off for the town. It was six o’clock. The sky was grey, there was a light, almost imperceptible drizzle, I was freezing cold and walked fast to generate some heat. I’d had a dream and the images were still tormenting me. Dad’s brother Gunnar had been in it, or his anger, that was because I had drunk so much and done so many bad things, I realised now as I hurried through the same low forest I had walked through the previous evening. All the trees were motionless, leaden, beneath the dense cloud cover, more dead than alive. The sand lay in mounds between them, swept up in their changing and unpredictable yet always distinctive patterns, like a river of fine sand grains traversing the coarser tarmac.

I came onto a bigger road, continued along it for some distance, put down my rucksack by a crossing and started thumbing. It wasn’t many kilometres to Hirtshals. Though what would happen there, I had no idea. I had no money so it wouldn’t be that easy to get onto the Kristiansand ferry. Perhaps I could arrange to have a bill sent on to me? If I came across a kindly soul who appreciated the predicament I was in?

Oh no. Now the raindrops were getting bigger as well.

Fortunately it wasn’t cold though.

I lit a cigarette, ran a hand through my hair. The rain had made my hair gel sticky, I dried my hand on my thigh, leaned forward and took the Walkman from my rucksack, rummaged through the few cassettes I had with me, chose Skylarking by XTC, put it in and straightened up.

Had there been an amputated leg in the dream as well? Yes. It had been sawn off just below the knee.

I smiled, and then, when the music began to flow out of the tiny speakers I was taken back to the time the record came out. It would have been the second class at gymnas. Mostly, though, I was filled with recollections of the house in Tveit: sitting in a wicker chair drinking tea and smoking and listening to Skylarking, head over heels in love with Hanne; Yngve, who was there with Kristin; all the conversations with mum.

A vehicle came down the road. It was a pickup truck with a company name on the bonnet in red, probably a builder on his way to work, as he raced past he didn’t even look at me, and then the second song seemed to rise out of the first, I loved this segue, something rose in me as well, and I punched the air several times as I slowly danced round and round.

Another vehicle hove into view. I stretched out my thumb. Once again the driver was sleepy and didn’t acknowledge my presence with so much as a glance. I was obviously hitching on a road with a lot of local traffic. But couldn’t they stop anyway? Take me to a main road?

Only after a couple of hours did someone take pity on me. A German in his mid-twenties with round glasses and a severe expression pulled over in a tiny Opel, I ran towards him, threw my rucksack onto the back seat, which was already full of baggage, and got in beside him. He had come from Norway, he said, and was on his way south, could drop me off by the motorway, it wasn’t far, but it might help. I said, yes, yes, very good. The windows misted up badly, he leaned forward as he drove and wiped the windscreen with a rag. Maybe that’s my fault, I said. What? he said. The mist on the window, I said. Of course it is, he hissed. OK, I thought, if that’s how you want it, and leaned back in my seat.

He dropped me off twenty minutes later, by a big petrol station, I walked back and forth outside asking everyone I saw if they were going to Hirtshals and whether they would take me with them. I was wet and hungry, my appearance was a mess after all the days on the road, and everyone shook their heads until, a long time later, a man driving a van I could see was full of bread and bakery products smiled and said, come on, jump in, I’m going to Hirtshals. The whole way I kept thinking I should ask him if I could have something to eat, but I didn’t dare, the closest I came was to say that I was hungry, but he didn’t take the hint.

As I was saying goodbye to him in Hirtshals a ferry was just about to leave. I ran over to the ticket office with my rucksack heavy on my back, breathlessly explained my situation to the clerk, I had no money, would it be possible to have a ticket anyway and have the bill sent on to me? I had a passport, so could produce ID and I was a reliable payer. She smiled nicely and shook her head, she was unable to help, I had to pay cash. But I have to get across! I said. I live there! And I haven’t got any money! She shook her head again. Sorry, she said, and turned away.

I sat down on a kerb in the harbour area with my rucksack between my legs and watched the big ferry slip its moorings, glide away and vanish from view.

What was I going to do?

One possibility was to hitchhike south again, to Sweden and then go up that way. But wasn’t there some water that had to be crossed as well?

I tried to visualise the map, wondering if there was a land connection between Denmark and Sweden somewhere, I didn’t think there was, was there? So you would have to go right down to Poland and then up through Russia to Finland and from there into Norway, was that right? A couple of weeks’ hitchhiking then. And you would probably need a visa or something for the Eastern Bloc countries. Of course I could go to Copenhagen, that was only a few hours away, and then do whatever it took to get some money for the ferry to Sweden. Beg on the streets if necessary.

Another way would be to get mum to transfer some money to a bank here. That wouldn’t be a problem, but it might take a couple of days. And I didn’t have any coins to phone home.

I opened another packet of Camels and looked across at the vehicles that were quietly rolling in and joining the new queue as I smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. Lots of Norwegian families who had been to Legoland or the beach in Løkken. Some Germans heading north. Lots of camper vans, lots of motorbikes and, furthest away, the juggernauts.

With a dry mouth I took out my Walkman again. This time I inserted a Roxy Music cassette. But after only the second song the sound became distorted and the battery light came on. I put the Walkman away and stood up, swung my rucksack over my shoulder and set off for the town centre, through the few dreary Hirtshals streets. Now and then hunger gnawed at my guts. I considered going to the bakery and asking if they could spare me some bread, but of course they wouldn’t give me any. I couldn’t bear the thought of such a humiliating rejection and decided to save my efforts until I was in serious discomfort, and wandered back towards the harbour. I stopped in front of a kind of café-cum-snack-bar, where it would surely be possible to get a glass of water at least.

The girl nodded and filled a glass from the tap behind her. I sat down by the window. The place was nearly full. Outside, it had started raining again. I drank the water and smoked. After a while two boys of my age came in the door, wearing full rain gear. They undid their hoods and looked around. One of them came over to me. Were the seats free? Of course, I said. We got into conversation, it turned out they were from Holland, on their way to Norway and they had cycled up. They laughed in disbelief when I told them I had hitchhiked from Vienna without any money and now I was trying to get on the ferry. Is that why you’re drinking water? one asked, I nodded, he asked if I would like a cup of coffee, that would be nice, I answered, he stood up and went off to get me one.

I left with them, they said they hoped we would meet again on board, took their bikes and were gone, I plodded over to the lorry queue and began to ask the drivers if they would take me along, I had no money for the boat. No, no one was interested, needless to say. One by one they started their engines and trundled on board while I walked back to the café and sat watching the ferry, which, once again, glided slowly away from the quay and became smaller and smaller until, half an hour later, it had disappeared.

The last ferry left in the evening. If I didn’t get on it I would have to hitch down to Copenhagen. That would have to be the plan. While waiting I took the manuscript from my rucksack and read. I had written a whole chapter in Greece, on two mornings I had waded out to a little island and from there to another island with my shoes, T-shirt, writing pad, pen, cigarettes and a paperback copy of Jack in Swedish in a little bundle on my head. There, in a hollow in the mountainside I had sat all on my own writing. It felt as if I had arrived at where I wanted to go. I was sitting on a Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean writing my first novel. At the same time I was restless, there was nothing there, only me, and it wasn’t until that was all there was that I experienced the emptiness it entailed. That was how it was there, my own emptiness was everything, and even when I became immersed in Jack or was bent over my pad writing about Gabriel, my protagonist, what I noticed was the emptiness.

Sometimes I dived into the water, dark azure and wonderful, but I had hardly swum a few strokes before it occurred to me there might be sharks around. I knew there were no sharks in the Mediterranean, but I still had these thoughts as I scrambled up onto the shore dripping wet and cursing myself, it was idiotic, scared of sharks here, what was this, was I seven years old? But I was alone beneath the sun, alone by the sea and utterly empty. It felt as if I was the last human on earth. It rendered both my reading and writing meaningless.

Yet when I read the chapter about what I thought was a seamen’s pub in the harbour quarter of Hirtshals I thought it was good. The fact that I had been accepted at the Writing Academy proved I had talent. Now all I had to do was demonstrate it on paper. My plan was to write a novel during the coming year, and then have it published next autumn, depending on how long it took to print and that kind of thing.

Water Above/Water Below it was called.

A few hours later, in the falling dusk, I walked along the queue of lorries again. Some of the drivers were dozing in their cabs, I knocked on the side windows and saw them give a jolt, then either open the door or roll down the window to hear what I wanted. No, I couldn’t have a lift. No, that wasn’t on. No, of course not, were they supposed to pay for my ticket or what?

The ferry was moored at the quayside with its lights blazing. Everywhere around me people began to start up their engines. One line of cars moved slowly forward, the first ones disappeared through the open jaws into the bowels of the ship. I was desperate but told myself everything would be fine in the end. Had there ever been any stories of young Norwegians starving to death on their holidays or being stranded in Denmark, unable to get home?

Outside one of the last lorries, three men stood chatting. I walked over to them.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Could any of you take me on board? I haven’t got any money for the ticket, you see. And I have to get home. I haven’t eaten for two days, either.’

‘Where are you from?’ one asked in a broad Arendal dialect.

‘Arendal,’ I said, in as thick an accent as I could muster. ‘Or, to be precise, Tromøya.’

‘You don’t say!’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m from!’

‘Which town?’

‘Færvik,’ he said. ‘And you?’

‘Tybakken,’ I said. ‘Could you take me then?’

He nodded.

‘Jump in. Squat down as we drive on board. It’ll be a cinch.’

And that was what I did. As we drove on board I sat huddled up on the floor with my back to the windscreen. He parked, switched off the ignition, I grabbed my rucksack and jumped down to the deck. My eyes were moist as I thanked him. He shouted after me as I left, hey, hang about! I turned, he handed me a Danish fifty-krone note, said he didn’t need it, perhaps I did?

I sat down in the cafeteria and ate a large portion of meatballs. The boat began to move off. The air around me was full of animated conversation, it was evening, we were under way. I thought about my driver. Usually I had no time for his type, they had wasted their lives sitting behind a wheel, they had no education, were fat and full of prejudices about all manner of things, and he was no different, I saw that straight away, but what the hell, he had got me on board!

After the cars, lorries and motorbikes had – amid much revving and banging – driven off the ferry and onto the roads in Kristiansand next morning, the town lay still behind them. I sat on the steps of the bus station. The sun was shining, the sky was high, the air already warm. I had saved some of the money I had been given by the lorry driver so I could ring dad and say I was coming. His pet hate was surprise visitors. They had bought a house thirty kilometres or so away, which they rented out in the winter and lived in themselves throughout the summer until they had to start back at work in northern Norway. My plan was to stay there a few days and then borrow some money for a ticket to Bergen, perhaps catch a train there, whatever was cheapest.

But it was too early to ring.

I took out the small travel diary I had been keeping for the last month and entered everything that had happened from Austria onwards. I spent a few pages on the dream I had in Løkken, it had made such an impression on me, it was deeply entrenched in my body, like a barrier or a boundary I mustn’t cross, it seemed important.

Around me the frequency of the buses began to increase, until at one point barely a minute passed without a bus stopping and disgorging its passengers. They were going to work, I could see it in their eyes, they had that vacant wage-earner look.

I stood up and went for a walk around town. The pedestrian street, Markens, was almost completely deserted, only a lone figure dashing up or down. Seagulls were pecking and snatching at the rubbish under a litter bin with no bottom. I ended up at the library. It was habit that drove me there, some of the same sensation of panic I’d had when I walked around there during my years at gymnas had me in its grip now, I had nowhere to go and everyone could see that, I had always solved this by seeking refuge there, the place where you could hang about without anyone questioning what you were doing.

Before me lay the market square and the grey stone church with the verdigris roof. Everything was small and dismal, Kristiansand was a minor town, I could see that very clearly now after having been in southern Europe and experiencing how things were there.

Against the wall on the other side of the street sat a tramp, asleep. With his long beard and hair and his ragged clothes he looked like a wild man.

I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. Just suppose he was the one who had the best life! He was doing exactly what he liked. If he wanted to break in somewhere, he did. If he wanted to drink himself senseless, he did. If he wanted to hassle passers-by, he did. If he was hungry he stole some food. Fine, people treated him like shit or as though he didn’t exist. But as long as he didn’t care about anyone else, it was water off a duck’s back.

This must have been how the first humans lived before they established communities and started farming, when they just wandered around eating whatever they could find, sleeping wherever seemed appropriate, and every day was like the first or the last. The tramp had no house to return to, no house to tie him down, he had no job to attend to, no schedules to keep, if he was tired, well, then he lay down wherever he was. The town was his forest. He was outdoors all the time, his skin was tanned and wrinkled, his hair and clothes filthy.

Even if I wanted to, I could never end up the way he was, I knew that. I could never go mad and become a tramp, it was inconceivable.

An old VW camper van stopped by the market square. A plump, lightly clad man jumped out on one side, a plump, lightly clad woman jumped out on the other. They opened the rear door and started unloading boxes of flowers. I threw my cigarette down on the dry tarmac, slipped on my rucksack and walked back to the bus station, where I rang dad. He was bad-tempered and annoyed and told me I had arrived at an inconvenient time, they had a little child now, they couldn’t receive visitors at such short notice. I should have rung before, that would have been OK. As it was now, grandma was coming, and a colleague too. I said I understood, apologised for not calling before and rang off.

I stood with the receiver in my hand for a while thinking, and then I dialled Hilde’s number. She said I could stay there and she would come and pick me up now.

Half an hour later I was sitting beside her in her old Golf, on our way out of town, with the window open and the sun in my eyes. She laughed and said I smelled terrible, I would have to have a bath when we arrived. Then we could sit in the garden behind the house, in the shade, and she could serve me breakfast, I looked like I needed it.

I stayed at Hilde’s for three days, long enough for mum to transfer some money into my account, and then I caught the train to Bergen. I left in the afternoon, the sun flooded the heavily forested countryside in Indre Agder, which received it in its manifold ways: the water in the lakes and rivers glittered, the dense conifers shone, the forest floor blushed, the leaves on the deciduous trees flashed on the few occasions a gust of wind caught them. Amid this interplay of light and colour the shadows slowly lengthened and thickened. I stood by the window in the last carriage for a long time watching features of the countryside that kept disappearing, cast aside as it were, to be replaced by new ones, which always made their appearance in quick succession, a river of stumps and roots, cliffs and uprooted trees, streams and fences, unexpected cultivated hillsides with farmhouses and tractors. The only features that didn’t change were the rails we followed and two shimmering dots on which the sun was reflected all the way. It was a strange phenomenon. They looked like two balls of light, which seemed to be standing still while the train was travelling at more than a hundred kilometres an hour, and the balls of light remained at the same distance from me.

Several times during the journey I went back to see the balls of light again. They lifted my spirits, made me somehow happy, as though there was hope in them.

Otherwise I sat in my seat smoking and drinking coffee, reading newspapers but no books, on the basis that it might affect my prose, that I might lose whatever it was that had got me into the Writing Academy. After a while I took out the letters from Ingvild. I had carried them with me all summer, the folds were wearing thin and I knew them nearly off by heart, but a radiance emanated from them, something good, something pleasurable, which touched me whenever I read them. It was her, both what I remembered of her the one time we had met and the her that arose from what she wrote, but it was also the her of the future, the unknown her that awaited me. She was different, something else, and the odd thing was that I also became different and something else when thinking about her. I liked myself better when I thought about her. It was as though thinking about her erased something in me, and that gave me a fresh start or moved me on.

I knew she was the right one, I had seen that straight away, but perhaps I hadn’t thought, only felt, that what she had in her and what she was, and which in glimpses her eyes revealed, was something I wanted to be close to or embrace.

What was it?

Oh, her self-awareness and insight into the situation, which laughter suspended for an instant, but which returned the very next second. Something evaluative and sceptical even, in her nature, that wanted to be won over but was afraid of being duped. In it resided vulnerability but not weakness.

I had enjoyed talking to her so much, and I had liked writing to her so much. The fact that she was the first thought in my mind the day after we had met didn’t necessarily mean anything, it was often like that, but it hadn’t stopped there, I had thought about her every day since, and now four months had passed.

I didn’t know if she felt the same way about me. Presumably she didn’t, but something in the tone of her writing told me there was some excitement and appeal in this for her too.

Mum had moved from a flat with a terrace to a basement in a house in Angedalen, in Førde municipality, ten minutes from the centre. It was a wonderful location with a forest on one side, a field ending in a river on the other, but the flat was small and studenty – one big room with a kitchen and bathroom, that was it. She was planning to stay there until she found something better to rent or perhaps even buy. I had intended to do some writing while I stayed with her, during the two weeks before I would finally move to Bergen, and she suggested I use Uncle Steinar’s cabin, which was up by the old house in the forest pasture above the farm grandma came from. She drove me there, we had a coffee outside the house, then she made her way back and I went into the cabin. Pine walls, pine floor, pine ceiling and pine furniture. A woven rug here and there, a few plain paintings. A pile of magazines in a basket, a fireplace, a kitchenette.

I placed the dining table by a wall without a window, put my pile of papers on one side, a pile of cassettes on the other, and sat down. But I couldn’t write. The emptiness I had first felt on the island off Antiparos returned, I could feel it again, exactly as it had been before. The world was empty, or nothing, an image, and I was empty.

I went to bed and slept for two hours. When I woke dusk was falling. The bluish-grey twilight lay like a veil over the forest. The thought of writing still repelled me, so instead I put on my shoes and went outside.

I could hear the roar of the waterfall in the forest above, otherwise everything was still.

No, it wasn’t, I could hear bells ringing somewhere.

I walked down to the path by the stream and followed it up into the forest. The spruces were tall and dark, the rock face beneath was covered in moss, here and there roots lay bare on the surface. In places small thin deciduous trees tried to force their way up into the light, elsewhere little clearings had formed around fallen trees. And alongside the stream the forest was open, of course, where it swirled and crashed, threw itself over rock and stone on its way down. Otherwise everything was dense and dark green from the spruce needles. I could hear my own breathing, could feel my pulse beating in my chest, throat and temples as I walked up. The noise from the waterfall became louder, and soon I was standing on a crag above a deep pool, looking at the steep bare rock face where the water plummeted downwards.

It was beautiful, but it was of no use to me, and I walked up through the trees beside the waterfall, climbed to the exposed rock, which I wanted to follow right to the top, a few hundred metres above me.

The sky was grey, the water that cascaded down beside me shiny and clear, like glass. The moss I was walking on was drenched and often gave way; my foot slipped and the dark rock beneath was revealed.

Suddenly something jumped out just in front of my feet.

Paralysed by fear, I stood stock still. My heart seemed to have stopped too.

A small grey creature darted off. It was a mouse or a small rat.

I laughed nervously to myself. Continued upwards, but the little scare had a hold on me. Now I peered into the dark forest with a sense of unease, and the constant blanket of sound from the waterfall which I had hitherto regarded as agreeable became threatening, prevented me from hearing anything else except my own breathing, so a few minutes later I about-turned and made my way back down.

I sat by the brick grill outside the farmhouse and lit a cigarette. It might have been eleven o’clock or maybe half past. The farmhouse looked the way it must have done when grandma worked here, in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, everything looked more or less the same as it did then. Yet everything was different. It was August 1988, I was an 80s person, contemporaneous with Duran Duran and The Cure, not that fiddle and accordion music grandad listened to in the days when he trudged up the hill in the dusk with a friend to court grandma and her sisters. I didn’t belong here, with all of my heart I felt that. It didn’t help that I knew the forest was actually an 80s forest and the mountains actually 80s mountains.

So what was I doing here?

My plan had been to write. But I couldn’t, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.

When the week was over and mum drove up the narrow gravel road, I was sitting on the steps waiting with my rucksack packed and ready between my legs, not having written a single word.

‘Have you had a nice time?’ she said.

‘Yes, great,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get much done though.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, looking at me. ‘But perhaps the rest did you good.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it did,’ I said, buckling my seat belt, and then we drove back to Førde, where we parked and had lunch at Sunnfjord Hotel. We chose a window table, mum hung her bag over her chair, then we went over to the buffet in the middle of the dining room to serve ourselves. The place was quite empty. When we sat down, each with a plate, a waiter came over, I asked for a Coke, mum wanted a Farris mineral water, and after he had gone she began to talk about her plans – which now looked as if they were going to materialise – to establish a further training course in psychiatric patient care at the school. She had located some suitable premises herself, a wonderful old school, according to her, which wasn’t that far from the School of Nursing. It had soul, she said, it was an old timber building, with big rooms, high ceilings, quite different from the cramped brick bunker she was teaching in now.

‘That sounds good,’ I said, my gaze wandering to the car park, where a handful of vehicles glinted in the sunlight. The mountainside across the river was completely green apart from one plot that had been blasted out with dynamite, where a house had been built which vibrated with all of its many different colours.

The waiter returned and I drank the glass of Coke in one long draught. Mum began to talk about my relationship with Gunnar. She said I seemed to have internalised him and turned him into my super-ego, the one that told me what I could and couldn’t do, what was wrong and what wasn’t.

I put down my knife and fork and looked at her.

‘Have you been reading my diary?’ I said.

‘No, not your diary,’ she said. ‘But you left a book you’d been writing in on your holiday. You’re usually so open and tell me everything.’

‘But, Mum, that was a diary,’ I said. ‘You don’t read other people’s diaries.’

‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘I know that. But if you leave it on the sitting-room table there’s hardly anything secret about it, is there?’

‘But you could see it was a diary, couldn’t you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a travelogue.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘That was my mistake. I shouldn’t have left it lying around. But what was it you said about Gunnar? That I’d internalised him? What did you mean by that?’

‘That’s how it seemed from the dream you described and your subsequent thoughts.’

‘Really?’

‘Your father was very strict with you when you were growing up, as you know. But then he was suddenly gone, and perhaps you had a sense that you could do whatever you liked. So you’ve got two sets of norms, but both derive from the outside. What’s important is that you set your own limits. That has to come from the inside, from you yourself. Your father didn’t do that, and that’s maybe why he was so confused.’

‘Is,’ I said. ‘He’s still alive to my knowledge. At any rate, I spoke to him on the phone a week ago.’

‘But now it appears you’ve installed Gunnar in your father’s place,’ she continued, flashing me a look. ‘This has nothing to do with Gunnar. We’re talking about setting your limits. But you’re old enough now. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do in my diary,’ I said. ‘Then all sorts of people read it, and it becomes impossible to work it out for myself.’

‘I apologise,’ mum said. ‘I really didn’t think you regarded it as a diary. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have read it.’

‘I’ve told you it’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘Shall we have a sweet as well?’

We sat in her flat chatting until late, then I went into the hall, closed the door behind me, fetched the lilo, which was leaning against the wall in the little bathroom, laid it on the floor, covered it with a sheet, undressed, switched off the light and lay down. Faintly, I could hear her moving about and the occasional car passing outside. The smell of plastic from the lilo reminded me of my childhood, camping trips and the open countryside. Times were different now, but the feeling of anticipation was the same. The next day I was off to Bergen, the big university town, I would be living in my own digs and attending the Writing Academy. In the evenings and at night I would sit in Café Opera or go to gigs with great bands at Hulen. It was fantastic. But the most fantastic thing of all was that Ingvild would be moving to the same town. We had arranged to meet, I had her phone number, I would ring her when I arrived.

It was too good to be true, I thought, lying there on the airbed, filled with a restlessness and a joy that this was about to begin. I lay on one side, then on the other, listening to mum talking in her sleep in the sitting room. Yes, she said. Then there was a long pause. Yes, she said again. That’s true. Long pause. Yes. Yes. Mhm. Yes.

The following day mum took me to Handelshuset, where she wanted to buy me a jacket and some trousers. I chose a fur-lined denim jacket, which looked pretty cool, and a pair of green military-style trousers, as well as some black shoes. Then she drove me to the bus station, gave me the money for the ticket, stood by the car waving as the bus moved off and into the road.

After a few hours of forests, lakes, vertiginously steep mountains and narrow fjords, farms and fields, a ferry and a long valley where the bus was high up a mountainside one minute and right down by the water’s edge the next, and an endless succession of tunnels, the frequency of houses and signs began to increase, there were more and more populated areas, industrial buildings appeared, fences, petrol stations, shopping centres and estates on both sides of the road. I saw a sign for the Business School and it struck me, that was where Agnar Mykle went forty years ago. On one side I saw Sandviken Psychiatric Hospital rise like a fortress at the foot of the mountains, while on the other the water glittered in the afternoon sun, with yachts and boats whose outlines seemed to blur in the haze against a backdrop of islands and mountains and the low sky over Bergen.

I jumped off the bus at the far end of Bryggen, the old wharf. Yngve was working the evening shift at the Orion Hotel and I had arranged to pick up the key to his flat there. The town around me was sunk in the stupor that only late-summer afternoons can evoke. Now and then a figure sauntered past in shorts and a T-shirt, followed by a long flickering shadow. House walls shimmering in the sun, motionless leaves on trees, a yacht chugging out of the harbour, masts bare.

The reception area at the hotel was packed with people. Yngve, busy behind his desk, looked up at me and said a coachload of Americans had just arrived, look, here’s the key, see you later, OK?

I caught the bus to Danmarksplass and walked the three hundred metres up to his flat, unlocked the door, put down my rucksack in the hall, stood still for a while and wondered what to do. The windows faced north and the sun was in the west, setting over the sea, so the rooms were dark and chilly. They smelled of Yngve. I went into the sitting room and looked around, then into the bedroom. There was a new poster on the wall, an eerie photograph of a naked woman with Munch og fotografi written at the bottom. Photos he had taken himself were there too, a selection from Tibet, the ground was a gleaming red, a group of ragged boys and girls posing for him, their eyes dark and foreign. In one corner, beside the sliding door, his guitar was leaning against an amplifier. On top of it a large echo box. A plain white Ikea blanket and two cushions converted the bed into a sofa.

I had visited Yngve several times while I was at gymnas, and to me there was something almost sacred about his rooms, they represented who he was and who I wanted to become. Something that existed outside my life and something that one day I would move into.

Now I was here, I thought, and went into the kitchen to make some sandwiches, which I ate standing in front of the window, with a view of the terraces of old workers’ houses going down to Fjøsangerveien at the bottom. On the other side, the mast on Mount Ulrich flashed in the sunshine.

It occurred to me that I had been on my own a lot recently. Apart from the few days with first Hilde and then mum, I hadn’t spent time with anyone since I said goodbye to Lars in Athens. I could hardly wait for Yngve to come home.

I put on a Stranglers’ record and settled down on the sofa with one of Yngve’s photo albums. My stomach ached and I didn’t know why. It felt like hunger, not for food but for everything else.

Perhaps Ingvild was also in town? Perhaps she was sitting in one of the hundred thousand bedsits around me?

One of the first questions Yngve asked me when he arrived was how it was going with Ingvild. I hadn’t told him much, a few words when we were sitting on the steps earlier that summer, that was all, but it had been enough for him to realise it was serious. Maybe also that it had huge significance for me.

I told him she was coming to Bergen around now and would live in Fantoft, and I would be ringing her to arrange the first meeting.

‘Might turn out to be your year,’ he said. ‘New girlfriend, Writing Academy …’

‘We’re not there yet.’

‘No, but from what you’ve said, she’s interested, isn’t she?’

‘A little maybe. But I doubt it means as much to her as it does to me.’

‘But it could do. If you play your cards right.’

‘For once, you mean?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, eyeing me. ‘Fancy some wine?’

‘Certainly do.’

He got up and disappeared into the kitchen, reappeared with a carafe in his hand and went to the bathroom. I heard some snorting and gurgling noises, then a steady glug until he emerged holding a full carafe.

‘Vintage 1988,’ he said. ‘But it’s pretty good. And there’s quite a lot of it as well.’

I took a swig. It was so sour it made me wince.

Yngve smiled.

‘Pretty good?’ I said.

‘Taste is relative, as you know,’ he said. ‘You have to compare it with other home-made wine.’

We drank for a while without speaking. Yngve stood up and went towards the guitar and amplifier.

‘I’ve written a couple of songs since you were last here,’ he said. ‘Want to hear them?’

‘Yes, love to,’ I said.

‘Well, they’re not really songs,’ he said, fastening the strap over his shoulder. ‘Just a few riffs really.’

I felt a sudden tenderness as I watched him.

He switched on the amplifier, stood with his back to me and tuned the guitar, adjusted the echo box and began to play.

The tenderness vanished, this was good, what he was playing, the guitar sound was big and majestic, the riffs melodious and catchy, it sounded like a cross between the Smiths and the Chameleons. I couldn’t understand where he had got it from. Both his musicality and the dexterity were way beyond my capacities. He simply had the gift, from the moment he started, as though it had always been there.

He turned towards me only after he had finished and put down the guitar.

‘That was really good,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’ he said, sitting down on the sofa. ‘It’s just a couple of little ideas. I could do with some lyrics so that I could finish them off.’

‘I don’t understand why you don’t play in a band.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I jam a little with Pål now and then. Otherwise I don’t know anyone who plays. You’re here now though.’

‘I can’t play.’

‘You can start by writing a few lyrics, can’t you? And you can play the drums as well.’

‘No, I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m not good enough. But perhaps I could write something. That’d be fun.’

‘You do that,’ he said.

Autumn was on its way, I thought, as we stood in the road outside the long line of low brick terraced houses waiting for the taxi. There was a kind of heaviness in the light summer night, impossible to localise yet unmistakable. An augury of something damp and dark and gloomy.

The taxi arrived a few minutes later, we got in, it raced recklessly down to Danmarksplass, past the big cinema and over a bridge, along Nygårds Park and into the centre, where I lost my bearings, streets were just streets, houses just houses, I disappeared into the large town, was swallowed up by it, and I liked that because I became visible to myself, the young man on his way into a metropolis filled with glass and concrete and tarmac and strangers caught in the light from street lamps and windows and signs. A shiver ran down my spine as we drove into the centre. The engine hummed, the traffic lights changed from green to red, we stopped outside what must have been the bus station.

‘Isn’t that where we went that time?’ I said, nodding towards the building across the road.

‘That’s right,’ Yngve said.

I had been sixteen, visiting him for the first time; I had held the hand of one of the girls we were with in order to get in. I had borrowed Yngve’s deodorant, and in the minutes before we left his place he had stood in front of me, rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, passed me his hair gel, watched me rubbing it in and said, good, now let’s go.

Now I was nineteen and all this was mine.

I caught a glimpse of the lake in the middle of the town, and then we turned left, past a large concrete building.

‘That’s the Grieg Hall,’ Yngve said.

‘So that’s where it is,’ I said.

‘And there’s Mekka,’ he said straight afterwards, nodding towards a supermarket. ‘That’s the cheapest in town.’

‘Is that where you shop?’ I said.

‘If I’ve got any money,’ he said. ‘Anyway, this is Nygårdsgaten. Do you remember The Aller Værste! song? “We ran down Nygårdsgata as though we were in the Wild West.” ’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about “Disken” then? “I went into Disken and the place was bloody heaving”?’

‘That was the disco in Hotel Norge. Right behind that building there. But it’s called something else now.’

The taxi pulled into the kerb and stopped.

‘Here we are,’ the driver said. Yngve passed him a hundred-krone note, I got out, looked up at the sign on the building where we we had stopped. CAFÉ OPERA it said in pink and black letters on a white background. Inside the big windows the place was full of people, shadowy figures among the small clear flames of candles. Yngve got out on the other side of the taxi, said goodbye to the driver and slammed the door shut. ‘Right, in we go,’ he said.

He stopped inside the entrance and scanned the crowd. Looked at me.

‘No one I know. Let’s go upstairs.’

I followed him up, past some tables, which were laid out in exactly the same pattern as downstairs, and over to the bar. I had been there before, but only fleetingly and in the daytime; this was different. Everywhere people were drinking beer. The room looked a lot like an apartment, I reflected, with chairs and tables and a curved bar in the middle.

‘There’s Ola!’ Yngve exclaimed. I followed the direction of his nod. Ola, whom I had met once earlier this summer, was sitting at a table with three others. He smiled and waved. We walked over.

‘Find yourself a chair and let’s sit here, Karl Ove,’ Yngve said.

There was a chair beside a piano by the other wall, I went and took it, feeling quite naked as I lifted it into the air, was that how I should do it? Could I carry it through the room like this? People looked at me, the place was full of students, regulars who were on their home ground, and I blushed, but saw no alternative and carried the chair to the table where Yngve was already sitting.

‘This is my little brother, Karl Ove,’ Yngve said. ‘He’s about to start at the Writing Academy.’

He smiled as he said that. I briefly met the eyes of the three people I hadn’t seen before: two girls and a boy.

‘So you’re the famous little brother,’ said one of the girls. She had fair hair and narrow eyes, which almost vanished when she smiled.

‘Kjersti,’ she said.

‘Karl Ove,’ I said.

The other girl had black hair in a page-boy cut, bright red lipstick and a black outfit, she told me her name, and the boy next to her, a shy figure with reddish-blond hair and pale skin, followed suit with a broad smile. I forgot their names the very next second.

‘Do you want a beer?’ Yngve said.

Was he going to leave me here, all on my own?

‘Please,’ I said.

He stood. I looked down at the table. Suddenly remembered I could smoke here, took out my tobacco pouch and began to make a roll-up.

‘Were you at R-Roskilde?’ Ola said.

He was the first person I had met since junior school who stammered. You wouldn’t believe it to look at him. He had Buddy Holly glasses, dark hair, regular facial features and even though he didn’t dress flashily at all there was still something about him that had made me think he was in a band the first time I saw him. Nothing had changed. He was wearing a white shirt, black jeans and a pair of black pointed shoes.

‘Yes, I was,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t get to see many bands.’

‘Why n-not?’

‘There was so much else going on,’ I said.

‘Yes, I c-can imagine.’ He smiled.

You didn’t have to be with him for long to know that he had a warm heart. I was glad he was Yngve’s friend, and the stammering, which had made me ill at ease the previous time – did Yngve have friends who stammered? – didn’t feel as disconcerting now that I could see that at least he had three more friends. None of them reacted to the stammer, either with forbearance or condescension, and what I myself felt when he said anything – that the situation I found myself in, he is stammering now and I mustn’t show that I’ve noticed, was so obvious and awkward, because couldn’t he see that was what I was thinking while he was talking? – wasn’t apparent on their faces.

Yngve placed the beer on the table in front of me and sat down.

‘What do you write then?’ said the dark-haired girl, looking at me. ‘Poetry or prose?’ Her eyes were also dark. There was something unmistakably aloof about her manner.

I took a long swig of beer.

‘I’m writing a novel at the moment,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure we’ll be doing some poetry as well. I haven’t done much of that, but perhaps I’ll have to … heh heh!’

‘Wasn’t it you who had your own radio programme and stuff?’ Kjersti said.

‘Plus a review column in the local paper,’ Yngve added.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But that’s a while ago now.’

‘What’s your novel about then?’ said the dark-haired girl.

I shrugged.

‘Variety of things. It’s a mixture between Hamsun and Bukowski, I suppose. Have you read any Bukowski?’

She nodded and slowly turned her head to watch the people coming up the stairs.

Kjersti laughed.

‘You’ll have Hovland as your teacher, did Yngve tell you? He’s fantastic!’

‘Right,’ I said.

There was a little pause, the focus of conversation moved away from me, and I leaned back as the others chatted. They knew one another as they were in the same department, Media Studies, and that was what they were talking about. Names of lecturers and theorists, titles of books, records and films ping-ponged across the table. While they were talking Yngve took out a cigarette holder, stuck a cigarette in it and started smoking with gestures that the holder made seem affected. I tried not to look at him, not to show I had noticed, which is what the others did too.

‘Another beer?’ I said as a distraction, he nodded and I walked over to the bar. One of the barmen was standing by the beer taps on the opposite side while the other was putting a tray of glasses through a hatch which turned out to be a dumb waiter.

How wonderful, a little lift going up and down between floors with food and drink!

The barman by the taps turned lethargically, I raised two fingers in the air, but he said nothing and turned back. The second barman faced me, and I leaned over the bar to signal that I wanted to order.

‘Yes?’ he said.

He had a white towel slung over his shoulder, a black apron over a white shirt and long mutton chops, and what looked like a tattoo was visible on his neck. Even the barmen looked cool in this town.

‘Two beers,’ I said.

He held the glasses in one hand under the two taps while scanning the room.

A familiar face appeared at the back, it was Yngve’s friend Arvid, he was with two others, they made a beeline for the table where Yngve was sitting.

The first barman put two half-litre glasses on the bar.

‘Seventy-four kroner,’ he said.

‘But I’ve just ordered them from the other barman!’ I said, nodding towards the second man.

‘You just ordered two from me. If you’ve ordered two from him as well, you’ll have to pay for four.’

‘But I haven’t got enough money.’

‘Are you expecting me to tip the beer away? You have to be clearer with your orders. One hundred and forty-eight kroner, please.’

‘Just a moment,’ I said, and went over to Yngve.

‘Have you got any money?’ I said. ‘You’ll get it back when I have my study loan.’

‘Weren’t you supposed to be paying for this round?’

‘Yes …’

‘Here you are,’ he said, handing me a hundred-krone note.

Arvid looked at me.

‘Ah, it’s you, is it?’

‘Yes,’ I said with a quick smile, not knowing quite what to do, and ended up pointing towards the bar and saying, ‘Just gotta …’ and going to pay.

When I returned they had sat down at another table.

‘Did you get four beers?’ Yngve said. ‘Why?’

‘Just the way it went,’ I said. ‘Some mix-up with the order.’

The following morning it was raining, and I stayed in the flat all day while Yngve was at work. Perhaps it was meeting his friends that had done it, perhaps it was just term fast approaching, at any rate I suddenly panicked: I was no good and soon I would be sitting alongside the other students, who were probably much more experienced and gifted than me, writing texts, reading them out and being judged.

I took an umbrella from the hat shelf, opened it and trotted down the hill in the rain. There was a bookshop in Danmarksplass, as far as I remembered. Yes, there it was. I opened the door and went in, it was completely empty and sold predominantly office equipment, it seemed, but they had some shelves of books, which I ran my eye along with the dripping umbrella in my hand. I had very little money, so I decided to buy a paperback. Hunger by Hamsun. It cost 39.50, which left me with twelve kroner – I spent it on a nice loaf at the baker’s in the little market square just behind. I plodded back uphill in the pouring rain which, along with the dark heavy clouds, cast a thick shroud over the landscape and changed its whole appearance. The water ran down windows and over car bonnets, trickled out of gutters and down the hills, where it made plough-shaped wavelets. The water gushed past me as I trudged upwards, rain beating down on my umbrella and the bag containing the loaf and the book slapping against my thigh with every step I took.

I let myself into the flat. The inside was dimly lit, in the corners furthest from the windows it was dark, but all the furniture and objects in it quietly made their presence felt. It was impossible to be there without sensing Yngve, his personality seemed to permeate the rooms, and while I was slicing the fresh bread on the worktop and taking out margarine and brown cheese, I wondered what atmosphere my place would exude and whether there was anyone in existence who would care. Yngve had organised a bedsit for me, he knew a girl who was going to Latin America for a year, she lived up on the Sandviken side of Bergen, in Absalon Beyers gate, and I could have it until next summer. I was lucky, most new students lived in one of the halls of residence at first, either Fantoft, where dad had rented a room during his studies when I was small, or Alrek, where Yngve had stayed for his first six months. Living in a student hall had low status, I knew that, the cool option was to live in the centre, preferably near Torgalmenningen, but Sandviken was good too.

I ate, cleared away the food and settled down to read in the sitting room with a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Usually I read quickly, raced through the pages without taking much notice of how it was written, what devices or style of language the writer used, all I was interested in was the plot, which sucked me in. This time I tried to read slowly, take it sentence by sentence, notice what went on in them, and if a passage seemed significant to me, to underline it with the pen I held at the ready.

I discovered something on the very first page. There was a tense shift. First of all Hamsun wrote in the past, then he suddenly switched to the present, and then back again. I underlined it, put the book down and fetched a sheet of paper from the desk in my bedroom. Back on the sofa, I wrote:

Hamsun, Hunger. Notes, 14/8/1988

Starts in general terms, about the town. Perspective from a distance. Then main protagonist wakes up. Switches from past to present. Why? To create more intensity, presumably.

Outside, the rain was tipping down. The roar of the traffic in Fjøsangerveien sounded like an ocean. I carried on reading. It was striking how simple the storyline was. He wakes up in his room, walks noiselessly downstairs as he hasn’t paid his rent for a while and then into the town. Nothing particular happens there, he just walks around and is hungry and thinks about it. I could write about exactly the same topic. Someone waking up in their bedsit and going outside. But he had to have something about him, something special, like being hungry for example. That was what it was all about. But what could it be?

Writing wasn’t black magic. You just had to come up with an idea, as Hamsun had done.

Some of my fears and anxieties subsided after I had formulated that thought.

When Yngve came home I was asleep on the sofa. I got up the moment I heard the door go, rubbed my face a couple of times, for some reason not wishing to show that I had been sleeping in the middle of the day.

I heard him put his rucksack down on the floor in the hall, he hung his jacket on the hook and said a brief hi to me on his way to the kitchen.

I recognised the closed face. He didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone, least of all me.

‘Karl Ove?’ he shouted after a while.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Come here.’

I did as he said and stopped in the doorway.

‘Just look at the brown cheese? You mustn’t cut such thick slices. Shall I show you how to do it?’

He placed the slicer on the cheese and shaved off a sliver.

‘Like this,’ he said. ‘Do you see how easy it is to cut a thin slice?’

‘Yes,’ I said and turned away.

‘And another thing,’ he said.

I turned back.

‘If you eat here clear away the crumbs. I don’t want to have to go round cleaning up after you.’

‘Right,’ I said and went into the bathroom. There were tears in my eyes, and I rinsed my face a couple of times with cold water, dried it, went into the sitting room, sat down, started reading Hunger while listening to him eat in the kitchen, clean up and go into the bedroom. Soon there was total silence and I realised he must have fallen asleep.

A similar incident took place the next day, this time what annoyed him was that I hadn’t dried the bathroom floor after having a shower. He ordered me about this time as well, as though he were on a higher level than me. I said nothing, bowed my head, did as he commanded, but inside I was furious. Later that day, as we were returning from a shopping trip, I closed the car door in a way which he considered was too hard – do you have to slam the door so bloody hard, can’t you just be a little bit careful, this is not my car – and I exploded.

‘Stop telling me what to do, all right!’ I yelled. ‘I can’t take any more of this! You treat me like a bloody kid! Always telling me off!’

He looked at me for a moment with the car key in his hand.

‘Have you got that?’ I said, my eyes shiny.

‘I’ll never do it again,’ he said.

And he never did, either.

We went out often that week, and every time the same thing happened, Yngve met people he knew, introduced me to them, said I was his brother and I was about to start at the Writing Academy. That gave me an advantage, I was somebody already, didn’t have to prove myself, although it also made things more difficult since I had to live up to the billing. Had to say something a writer-to-be might conceivably say which they hadn’t considered before. It didn’t work like that though. They had considered everything, they all knew more than me, indeed to such a degree that I gradually realised that what I said and thought was what they had said and thought a good while ago and had now put behind them.

But it was good drinking with Yngve. Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day – the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest even though there were so many – all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were. Walked through the town half-drunk and uphill to the flat without a care in the world, not even the silences troubled us, street lights shone on the smooth tarmac, taxis raced past in dark haste, lonely men or women came towards us, or other young people who had been out on the town, and I could look at Yngve, who was walking bent double, just as I was, and ask: how is it with Kristin, have you got over her? And he could look at me and answer no, I’ll never get over her. No one is a patch on her.

The drizzle, the clouds above scurrying past, illuminated from below by the lights, Yngve’s serious face. The strong odour of car fumes, which I had realised always hung over Danmarksplass. The moped carrying two teenagers, which stopped at the traffic lights: the boy at the front who put his feet down on the road, the girl at the back with her arms wrapped tightly around him.

‘Do you remember when Stina finished with me?’ I said.

‘Vaguely,’ he said.

‘You played The Aller Værste! for me. “All things pass, all things must decay.” ’

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Did I?’

I nodded.

‘The same holds true for you now. It’ll pass. Then you’ll fall for another girl just the same.’

‘How old were you then? Twelve? It’s not quite the same. Kristin was the love of my life. And I only have one.’

I said nothing in response. We walked up the hill on the other side of Verftet, the old docklands complex, turned left beneath the massive red-brick building I knew was a school.

‘But one good thing has come out of it,’ he said. ‘Showing no interest in other girls has meant they’ve suddenly started taking an interest in me. I don’t give a damn, and as a result I can have them.’

‘I know that’s how it works,’ I said. ‘My problem is that I can’t not give a damn. Take Ingvild, for example. I get so bloody nervous before we meet that I can’t say a word. So she thinks that’s the way I am, and then it’s no good.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Yngve said. ‘It’ll be fine. She knows who you are. You’ve been writing to each other all spring and summer after all.’

‘But that’s the point, then I’m writing,’ I said. ‘Then I can be anyone I want to be. I can take my time, right, think things through. But I can’t when I meet her face to face.’

Yngve snorted.

‘Don’t think about it so much and it’ll be fine. She’ll be feeling the same as you.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, of course! Have a few beers with her and relax. It’ll be fine.’

He took the key from his pocket, lowered his umbrella and went in through the gate, up the little steps, which were dark and slippery from the rain. I stood behind him waiting for him to open the door.

‘Do you want a glass of wine before going to bed?’ he said.

I nodded.

My impatience grew throughout the week, I became more and more restless, a feeling I had otherwise never experienced. It must have been because I wanted life to get moving, to turn serious. And to do my own thing, not to be dependent on Yngve for whatever I did. I had already borrowed a couple of hundred kroner from him and probably needed a couple more to tide me over until my student loan arrived. When I moved from Håfjord I had been stupid enough to tell the Post Office that I was changing address to c/o Yngve, so when I arrived, a debt recovery letter from the northern Norwegian electricity company and the shop where I had bought the stereo were waiting for me. The latter was the more serious: if I didn’t pay this time they would take legal action to recover the money.

If it had been a good sound system I wouldn’t have minded so much. But what I had bought was such crap. Yngve had a NAD amplifier and two small but good JBL speakers, and Ola also had a good system made up of components he had bought individually – that was what you should have, not a fucking Hitachi rack system.

Soon I would receive twenty thousand kroner.

I was also wondering whether to buy myself a porn magazine. I was living in a big town now, I knew no one, all I had to do was take one down from the shelf, place it on the counter, pay, put it in a bag and go home. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, I was in a nearby tobacconist’s a couple of times, and my eyes roamed down to the women’s blonde hair and their big breasts, and the mere sight of their skin, printed on glossy paper, made my throat tighten. But it was always a newspaper that I placed on the counter, and a pouch of tobacco, never any of the magazines. Mostly because I was living with Yngve, it didn’t feel right to have to hide things in his place, but also because I didn’t have the courage to meet the assistant’s eyes as I laid the magazine on the counter.

I would have to wait.

The day of the move came, with Yngve I carried my Håfjord possessions up from the cellar into the car, there were eight boxes in all and they completely blocked the rear view when Yngve, more cautiously than usual, pulled away from the kerb and set off down into Bergen.

‘If you brake sharply now my neck’s a goner,’ I said because the boxes reached right up to the car roof.

‘I’ll try not to,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise anything.’

For the first time in several days it was nice weather. The dense cloud cover over the town was greyish-white, and the light in the streets around us was gentle, though not such that it veiled or enhanced, it was more that it allowed whatever there was to appear in its own right. Tarmac grey and speckled black, walls green and yellow, dulled by car fumes and street dust, trees grey and green, the water in the bay by Verftet grey and shiny. The colours became more vivid as we began to climb the hills on the Sandviken side of town, most of the houses there were timber constructions, and the shiny paint shimmered through the neutral light.

Yngve pulled into the kerb by a little park, in front of a telephone box. On the wall across the road there was a sign saying Absalon Beyers gate.

‘Is it here?’ I asked.

‘It’s the corner house,’ Yngve said, getting out. He raised his hand in a brief greeting, I followed his gaze, there was a girl with a cloth in her hand watching us from behind the window in the ground-floor bedsit.

We crossed the street, she came to the door, I shook her hand. She said it was good timing, she had just finished cleaning the place up.

‘Come on in!’

The bedsit consisted of a small room furnished in the simplest fashion: beneath the window there was a sofa, in front of it a coffee table, and against the wall on the opposite side a desk. There was also a sofa that could be turned into a bed. Adjoining the little room, separated by a door, was a tiny kitchenette. That was all. The walls were a dark, brownish colour, and would have been drab but for the fire wall beside the kitchen door, on which a landscape had been painted: a tree on a cliff above the sea, not dissimilar to the picture on the front of matchboxes, the one Kjartan Fløgstad had used as the cover for Fire and Flame.

She noticed me staring at it and smiled.

‘Yes, isn’t it nice!’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Here are the keys,’ she said, passing me a little bunch of them. ‘This one’s for the front door, this is for this door and that’s for a storage room in the loft.’

‘Where’s the toilet?’ I said.

‘Downstairs. There’s a shared shower and toilet. It’s a bit impractical, but it reduces the rent by quite a bit. Shall we go down and have a look?’

The staircase was steep, the corridor downstairs narrow, with a small basement bedsit on one side, where someone called Morten lived, a shower and a toilet on the other. I liked the unrefinedness of it and the old walls that vaguely smelled of mould, it had a Dostoevsky feel, the impoverished young student in the metropolis.

Back upstairs, she gave me a wad of rental forms, already filled in, grabbed her empty bucket in one hand, the broom in the other and turned to us in the doorway.

‘I hope you’ll have a nice time here! I’ve spent some happy hours here anyway.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Have a good trip and see you next summer!’

She disappeared round the corner with the broom slung over her shoulder and we set about bringing in the boxes. When that was done, Yngve got in his car and drove down to the hotel, where he had an afternoon shift, while I put my feet on the table and smoked a cigarette before starting to unpack.

The bedsit was at street level, the pavement went by the windows, and if there wasn’t a constant stream of people passing there was a regular bobbing of heads, and so enticing was the sight of a curtainless bedsit that almost everyone succumbed to the temptation to peer in. I was bending over my record collection when I turned and met the gaze of a woman in her forties, who despite immediately looking away still left an impression on me. I hung up my poster of John Lennon, turned and met the eyes of two twelve-year-old boys. I assembled the coffee machine, inserted the plug in the socket beside the cupboard, turned and found myself looking straight into the eyes of a bearded man in his late twenties. To put an end to this, I pinned a bedsheet over one window, a tablecloth over the other, and then I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.

I played a few records, brewed some tea and read some pages of Hunger. Outside, it was beginning to rain. In the short pauses between the LP tracks I heard raindrops pitter-pattering against the window just behind my head. Now and then I heard noises from the floor above as dusk fell and the room slowly darkened. The stairs creaked, loud voices came from above, music was turned on, it was a pre-loading session.

I wondered whether to ring Ingvild, she was the only person I knew in town, but dismissed the idea, I couldn’t meet her unprepared, I had only one chance and I mustn’t waste it.

Strange what an impression she had made. I had sat at the same table as her for half an hour.

Could you fall in love within half an hour?

Oh yes, you certainly could.

Could someone you didn’t know, you barely knew about, captivate your senses entirely?

Oh yes.

I got up to find her letters. The longest one had arrived in the middle of the summer, she told me she was on her way across America with her ex-host family, they stopped at all the sights worthy of the name, there were many, according to her, nearly every single town had something it prided itself on and was famous for. She used the stops to sneak off and have a quiet cigarette, she wrote, otherwise she lay on her bed in the mobile home staring out at the countryside, which at times was sensationally beautiful and dramatic, at others monotonous and boring, though always exotic.

I could visualise her, but it was more than that, I also identified with her, that is, I knew exactly what she thought, how she felt, there was something about the tone in which she wrote, or the glimpses she gave of herself, which I recognised from myself, and I hadn’t experienced that before, another person reaching the point where I was. Light, happiness, ease, excitement, somehow balancing on the edge of nausea, constantly on the verge of despair, because I wanted it so much, it was all I wanted, but what if it didn’t work out? What if she didn’t want me? What if I wasn’t good enough?

I put down the letters, slipped on my jacket and shoes and went out, considered walking down to see Yngve, he didn’t finish his shift until eleven, but if I was lucky he wouldn’t have much to do, so we could exchange a few words or have a smoke or something.

First I crossed the street to have a look up at the floor above mine, but all I could see were the backs of some heads in the window. It was raining quite heavily, I didn’t have an umbrella and I didn’t want to wear my raincoat, so even though it was unpleasant and hair gel was beginning to run down my forehead, I hunched my shoulders and began to tramp downhill.

In the district closest to me, the houses were white and made of wood, all the angles skew-whiff, the roofs of varying heights, some had stone steps down to the pavement, others none. In the district below, the buildings were made of brick, long relatively tall blocks of flats that might have been built at the beginning of the twentieth century, probably for workers, judging by their plain unadorned walls.

Rising above the town, visible from even the deepest and darkest alleyway, were the mountains. And below, in glimpses between houses and trees, was the sea. The mountains here were higher than those in Håfjord, and the sea was just as deep, but they didn’t affect your consciousness to the same degree; the main weight here lay in the town, in the cobblestones, the tarmac, the solid blocks of flats and timbered houses, in the windows and lights, cars and buses, the mass of faces and bodies in the streets, against which the sea and mountains were insubstantial, almost weightless, something that merely caught your eye, a backdrop.

If I had lived here all on my own, I thought, in a little cabin in the mountains, for example, without a house nearby, but set in exactly the same landscape, then I would have felt the weight of the mountains and the depth of the sea, then I would have heard the winds sweeping across the peaks, the waves beating against the shore, and although I would hardly have been afraid I would definitely have been vigilant. I would have taken my leave of the landscape every night and woken up to it every morning. Now that wasn’t the case, I could feel it with every fibre of my being, now it was faces that counted.

I walked by the long red timber shed where the rope makers used to ply their trade, up the road on the other side, past the supermarket, down to the wider main road and turned right at the bottom, past quiet grey St Mary’s Church, which I had noticed when I visited Yngve and mum here three years ago, as it was so unpretentious and merged so unobtrusively into its surroundings, it had stood there since the twelfth century, past it and down to Bryggen.

Cars drove by with their lights on. The water, gently billowing in the harbour, was pitch black. A few yachts were moored to the quay, their shiny hulls dully reflecting the light from the street lamps along the road. On board one of them some people sat drinking under a canopy, voices low, faces barely illuminated. From over in Vågsbunnen came the strident sounds of cars, music, shouting, which had already become distant.

Yngve was standing behind the reception desk next to a colleague. He turned his head towards me as I entered.

‘Are you bored already?’ he said. Glanced at his colleague. ‘This is my brother, Karl Ove. He moved here a week ago.’

‘Hi,’ said the other person.

‘Hi,’ I said.

He went into the back room. Yngve tapped a pen on the desk in front of him.

‘Just had to get a breath of air,’ I said. ‘I thought I would pop by so my walk had some purpose.’

‘Well, there’s nothing going on here,’ he said.

‘So I see,’ I said. ‘Are you going home afterwards?’

He nodded.

‘But Asbjørn’s in town. Perhaps we can drop in on you tomorrow and see how you’re getting on?’

‘Yes, you do that,’ I said. ‘Could you bring an umbrella with you? You’ve got two, haven’t you? Then I can borrow it until I get my study loan.’

‘I’ll try and remember.’

‘See you then.’

He nodded, and I went back out. I still didn’t want to sit around in my bedsit, so I went for a walk through the rain-wet streets, up past Café Opera, which as predicted was packed with people, but I didn’t dare venture in alone, down to the sea on the northern side of Vågen, past some run-down warehouse buildings, up a hill, on the crest of which I stopped because now, lo and behold, Bryggen and Sandviken were below me, on the far side of the bay, glittering in the damp grey-black air.

I strolled down to the broad open square on the southern side, passed a hotel of brick and glass called Neptun, an apt name, it struck me, in this town where water was constantly trickling and dripping, and then I thought I had better remember it so that I could write it down when I got home, looked behind me and saw a large stone gatehouse at the end of a pedestrian street, and knew this was one of the old town gates because mum had shown me an identical one at the other end of the city centre. I crossed the street, passed a large office block that towered up from the water like a rock face, rounded the corner and in front of me stood Strandkai Terminal, where the Sognefjord ferry departed, and behind it, once again, Vågsbunnen.

A rush of happiness surged through me. It was the rain, it was the lights, it was the city. It was me, I was going to be a writer, a star, a beacon for others.

I ran a hand through my hair, greasy with gel, wiped it on my trouser leg and stepped up my pace in the hope that this feeling of happiness would last all the way home and deep into the time awaiting me in the bedsit until I felt able to go to bed.

While asleep that night I imagined my bed was in the street. That wasn’t so strange, I thought as I woke up, presumably because of the distant pealing of church bells – the bed was against the wall under the windows, and not only could you clearly hear every footfall on the pavement outside, but the house was also situated next to a junction where people going in their various directions stopped to have a chat on their way home from town, and across the street was a telephone box, which it turned out was in constant use, also at night, people trying to book taxis, crowds of them, people wanting to deliver a few home truths to a partner or a friend or whoever it was they imagined had let them down and now needed to be put in their place or begged for forgiveness.

I lay still for a while to gather my thoughts, then dressed and went down to the basement with a towel in one hand and shampoo in the other. The corridor was full of steam, I placed my hand on the shower door, it was locked, a girl’s voice from inside shouted, I won’t be long! OK, I said, and leaned against the wall to await my turn.

The door beside me opened and a boy of my age with tousled hair stuck his head out.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Thought I heard someone. My name’s Morten. Have you moved into the bedsit on the ground floor?’

‘Yes,’ I said, shaking hands.

He chuckled. He was standing there in no more than his underpants.

‘What do you do?’ he said. ‘Are you a student?’

‘I’ve just come to town,’ I said. ‘I’m about to start a kind of writing course.’

‘Interesting!’ he said.

At that moment the shower door opened. A girl I reckoned was in her mid-twenties came out. She had a large towel wrapped around her body and a smaller one around her head. A cloud of steam followed.

‘Hi,’ she said with a smile. ‘We’d better do proper introductions later. Anyway, the shower’s free now!’

She went down the corridor.

Heh heh heh, Morten chuckled.

‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘Are you a student?’

‘Let’s save that for later! You have a shower, and we’ll come back to it!’

The shower-room floor was made of concrete and freezing cold where the hot water hadn’t been. The drain was full of tangled hair which glistened in the foam from her shampoo. The foot of one wall panel was warped, and the otherwise white door was black and discoloured at the bottom and a good way up. But the water was hot, and soon I was massaging shampoo into my hair and for some strange reason humming ‘Ghostbusters’.

Returning upstairs, I didn’t dare go out as Yngve hadn’t said when they would come, but that didn’t matter, my body felt much calmer than the day before, and I spent my time putting the kitchen utensils in their places, arranging clothes in the wardrobe, hanging up the last posters, making a list of what I needed to buy when the study loan arrived. That done, I stood by the door and tried to see the room through Yngve’s and Asbjørn’s eyes. The typewriter on the desk, that looked good. The poster of the barn and bright yellow corn under the dramatic black American sky, that was good, a source of inspiration. The poster of John Lennon, the most rebellious of the four Beatles, that was also good. And my record collection on the floor against the wall, it was large and impressive, even for Asbjørn, who I was told knew what he was talking about. On the downside, the book collection was limited, comprising only seventeen volumes, and I didn’t have enough experience of other collections to determine what impression the various titles made. Beatles and The Snails by Saabye Christensen couldn’t be too far wide of the mark though. The same was true for Ingvar Ambjørnsen. I had three of his books: The 23rd Row, The Last Fox Hunt and White Niggers.

I left Novel with Cocaine open on the table and placed a couple of issues of Vinduet next to it, one open, one closed. Three books open seemed a bit much, it looked arranged, but no one would be suspicious of two open and one closed, that was perfect.

An hour later, while I was trying to write at the desk, there was a ring at the door. Yngve and Asbjørn were standing on the steps. There was a restlessness about them, I felt, they couldn’t wait to move on.

‘Bit of a turn-up you coming to Bergen, Karl Ove,’ Asbjørn said with a smile.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come in!’

I closed the door behind us. They stood in the middle of the floor looking around.

‘You’ve done a nice job here,’ Yngve said.

‘Mm,’ Asbjørn said. ‘Great place to have a bedsit. Hang on though.’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘The Lennon poster has to come down. That’s no good.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘That’s what you have at gymnas. John Lennon. Bloody hell.’

He smiled as he spoke.

‘Do you agree?’ I said, looking at Yngve.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘What should I put up instead?’

‘Anything,’ Asbjørn said. ‘Norwegian C & W would be better. Bjøro Håland.’

‘Actually I like the Beatles,’ I said.

‘You don’t say,’ Asbjørn said. ‘Not the Beatles surely.’

He turned to Yngve and smiled again.

‘I thought you said your brother had great taste in music. And his own radio programme.’

‘No one’s perfect,’ Yngve said.

‘Take a seat,’ I said. Even though I had been wrong-footed by the Lennon-poster discussion, and my head was still buzzing, since I had understood exactly why it was wrong the moment Asbjørn said – it was schoolboy-ish of course – I was still proud to have them both here, in my bedsit, surrounded by my possessions.

‘We were thinking of going into town and having a café au lait or something,’ Yngve said. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Can’t we have a coffee here?’ I said.

‘It’s better in Café Opera, isn’t it?’ Yngve said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Just a moment. I’ll put on some clothes.’

When we emerged onto the steps, both Yngve and Asbjørn donned shades. Mine were indoors, but it would have been too embarrassing to go back to fetch them, so I rejected the idea, set off down the hill with them, along the wet streets gleaming with the reflected sunbeams breaking through the holes in the clouds above us.

I had met Asbjørn only a couple of times, had never chatted with him at any length, but I knew he was important to Yngve, so he was important to me too. He laughed a lot and always went very quiet afterwards, I had noticed. He had short hair, a hint of sideburns, a slightly plump face and warm observant eyes. With a not infrequent glint in them. Today, like Yngve, he was dressed all in black. Black Levi’s, black leather jacket, black Doc Martens with yellow seams.

‘Getting into the Writing Academy is pretty cool,’ he said. ‘And of course Ragnar Hovland’s bloody great. Have you read anything by him?’

‘No, actually I haven’t,’ I said.

‘You must do. Sveve over Vatna, that’s the definitive Norwegian student novel.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Or the definitive Bergen novel. It’s completely over the top. Oh yes, he’s good, he is. He likes the Cramps. Enough said!’

Over the top was an expression they used a lot, I had noticed.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’ve heard of the Cramps, I take it.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You’re starting tomorrow, aren’t you?’ Yngve said.

I nodded.

‘I’m a bit nervous, I must admit.’

‘You got in,’ Yngve said. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said.

Café Opera during the day was quite different from Café Opera in the evening. Now it was no longer packed with students drinking beer, now there were all sorts of people, even ladies in their fifties, each with a cup of coffee and a piece of cake in front of them. We found a window table on the ground floor, hung our jackets over the backs of our chairs and went to order. I was flat broke, so Yngve bought me a café au lait while Asbjørn ordered an espresso. When I saw him being handed a little cup I recognised it, it was like the ones Lars and I had been served at the first motorway café after the Italian border, we had asked for coffee and were given those tiny cups with coffee that was so concentrated and strong it was completely undrinkable. I had spat it back into the cup and looked at the waiter, who ignored me, nothing wrong with this coffee, ragazzi.

But Asbjørn seemed to like it. He blew on the black-brown surface and took a sip, put the cup down on the saucer and looked out of the window.

‘Have you read anything by Jon Fosse?’ I said, looking at him.

‘No, is he good?’

‘No idea. He’s one of the teachers too.’

‘He writes novels, I know,’ Asbjørn said. ‘He’s a modernist. A Vestland modernist.’

‘Why don’t you ask me if I’ve read anything by Jon Fosse?’ Yngve said. ‘I read books too, you know.’

‘I haven’t heard you mention him, so I concluded you hadn’t,’ I said. ‘But you have?’

‘No,’ Yngve said. ‘But I might have done.’

Asbjørn laughed.

‘You two are brothers and no mistake!’

Yngve took out his cigarette holder and lit up.

‘You haven’t given up on the David Sylvian poses yet, I see,’ Asbjørn said.

Yngve just shook his head and slowly blew smoke across the table.

‘I was looking for some Sylvian glasses, but my frame of mind changed when I heard the price.’

‘Dear God, Yngve,’ Asbjørn said. ‘That’s the worst joke yet. And that’s saying something.’

‘Yes, I hold up my hands.’ Yngve laughed. ‘But out of ten puns maybe one or two work well. The problem is you have to go through all the bad ones to get to the really good ones.’

Asbjørn turned to me.

‘You should’ve seen Yngve when he joked the tiny rural airstrip in Jølster would have to be called Astrup International Airport. After our famous local artist. He laughed so much he had to leave the room!’

‘Well, it was a good ’un,’ Yngve said, starting to laugh. Asbjørn laughed as well. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he stopped and for a moment sat completely still. Took out his pack of cigarettes, he smoked Winston, I noticed, lit one and emptied his cup of espresso with his second sip.

‘Is Ola in town, do you know?’ he said.

‘Yes, he’s been here some time,’ Yngve said.

They began to talk shop. I had never heard of most of the names they mentioned, I knew nothing about media studies, so I couldn’t join in, not even when they touched on films and bands I knew. It almost developed into an argument. Yngve thought there was nothing that was genuine per se, everything was in some way a pose, even Bruce Springsteen’s image, which he used as an example. His naturalness was as affected and carefully studied as the eccentricity and posturing of David Sylvian or David Bowie. Of course, Asbjørn said, you’re absolutely right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there can be no genuine expression, does it? Who then? Give me an example, Yngve said. Hank Williams, Asbjørn suggested. Hank Williams! Yngve snorted. He’s surrounded by myths, that’s all there is to him. What sort of myths? Country music myths, Yngve protested. Oh my God, Yngve, Asbjørn said.

Yngve glanced over at me.

‘It’s the same in literature. There’s no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that’s determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There’s no such thing as “the book itself”.’

I hadn’t thought about any of this before, and I said nothing.

‘What about comic books then?’ Asbjørn said. ‘Is Donald Duck just as good as James Joyce?’

‘In principle, yes.’

Asbjørn laughed and Yngve smiled.

‘But in all honesty,’ Yngve said ‘it’s the reception that defines a work or an artist, and that’s what artists play on of course. Irrespective of whether they enjoy high or low status, everything is a pose.’

‘You work as a receptionist, so you ought to know about reception,’ Asbjørn said.

‘And the seams on your Doc Martens, by the way, they aren’t real, they just seem to be,’ Yngve said.

They laughed again, and then there was silence. Yngve got up for a newspaper, I did the same, and while we flicked through the pages I was so exhilarated by this scenario, by me sitting with two worldly-wise students in a café in Bergen on a Sunday afternoon and the fact that this wasn’t an exception, wasn’t a visit, I was part of this scenario and belonged here, that I could hardly take in what I was reading.

Half an hour later we left, they were going to see Ola, he lived in one of the streets behind the Grieg Hall, and Yngve asked me if I wanted to string along, but I said no, I had to try and prepare for the following day, while the real reason was that I was so happy it was too much for me and I had to be on my own.

We parted at the end of Torgalmenningen, outside a restaurant called Dickens, they wished me luck, Yngve told me to ring and say how everything had gone, I asked if he could lend me some money, the very last time, he nodded and dug up a fifty-krone note, and then I hurried across the large open square in the middle of the town as the rain gusted down, for even though the sun was still shining on the houses along the mountainside, the sky directly above me was heavy and black.

Back home in my bedsit, I didn’t just take down the poster of John Lennon, I tore it into small pieces and threw them into the waste-paper basket. Then I decided to ring Ingvild and ask if we could meet at the weekend, it was a good opportunity, I was in such a cheerful mood, and it was as though my cheerfulness opened a path to her, because it was her I had been thinking about all the way up the long hills, as though my inner being knew no better way to cope with the excitement after the hour with Yngve and Asbjørn than to counter it with more excitement, of a very different kind it was true, for while the unbearable excitement generated by Yngve and Asbjørn resided in the moment itself, what was happening there and then, the tension and excitement I felt with regard to Ingvild was about what was going to happen at some point in the future, when the tension could actually be released and she would be mine.

Her and me.

The thought that this was indeed a possibility, and not just an illusory dream, exploded inside me.

Outside, the sky was clouding over, the sun could no longer be glimpsed, rain spattered on the road. I ran over to the telephone kiosk, placed the slip of paper with the Fantoft number on top of the coin box, inserted a five-krone piece in the slot, dialled the number and waited. A young man’s voice answered, I asked to speak to Ingvild, he said no one by that name lived there, I said she was moving in soon, maybe she hadn’t done so yet, he said, oh yes, that’s right, one of the rooms is still unoccupied, I apologised for the disturbance, he said it was no problem, and I cradled the receiver.

At around seven the doorbell rang. I went out into the hallway and opened up; it was Jon Olav.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I rang Yngve. Can I come in?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

I hadn’t seen him since Easter when we had been out in Førde and met Ingvild. He was studying law in Bergen, but I understood from what he said over the next half an hour that he spent most of his time and energy on Young Friends of the Earth. He was the idealistic type, always had been: one summer when we had been staying with grandma and grandad in Sørbøvåg, twelve or thirteen we must have been at the time, I had been leaning over the handlebars of a bike and talking about various girls who lived nearby, one of whom I had described as yukky, quick as a flash he had riposted, think you’re a great catch, do you, eh?

I had cycled back and forth in my embarrassment, and I have always remembered that moment, his consideration for others and willingness to spring to their defence.

We chatted and drank a cup of tea, he asked if I wanted to see his bedsit, it was nearby, of course I did, and off we went, down the hills.

‘Have you seen anything of Ingvild this summer?’ I said.

‘Yes, a bit, a couple of times. How’s it going with her? You were writing letters, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, we’ve been writing ever since. She’s coming to Bergen now, so I was thinking of meeting her.’

‘Are you interested?’

‘That’s an understatement,’ I said. ‘I’ve never felt so strongly about anyone.’

‘Wow,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Here we are, by the way.’

He stopped by one of the doors to a long tall brick building opposite the rope makers’ shed. The hall and stairs were made of wood, making it seem bare, almost primitive. The bedsit consisted of two small rooms with a toilet in the corridor, no shower. His record collection, which I flicked through while he was in the loo, was small and random, there were as many good records as there were bad, some everyone bought when they came out, a couple of really good ones, like the Waterboys, a couple of less good ones like The Alarm. It was the kind of collection that belonged to someone who wasn’t particularly interested in records and who mostly followed the herd. But he had been in a band once, he could play the saxophone and he had taught me the basic beat on the drums when we were young, and how to coordinate the hi-hat, the snare and the bass drum.

‘We’ll have to go out one evening,’ he said when he returned. ‘Then you can meet my friends.’

‘Are they the same ones as before?’

‘Yes. They always will be, I hope. Idar and Terje, they’re the two I see most.’

I got up.

‘Let’s talk about it. I’d better be off. First day of the course tomorrow.’

‘Congratulations on getting in, by the way!’ he said.

‘Thank you, it’s a nice feeling,’ I said. ‘But I’m a bit nervous too. I’ve got no idea what the level is.’

‘Just do your thing. What I read was good anyway.’

‘Let’s hope it goes all right,’ I said. ‘Catch you later!’

I came in the middle of the night, it woke me up and I lay for a few seconds in the darkness wondering whether to get up and put on clean underpants, but fell asleep immediately afterwards. At ten to six I opened my eyes again. As soon as I became conscious and knew where I was, my stomach churned with nerves. I closed my eyes in an attempt to go back to sleep, but the tension inside me was too strong, so I got up, wrapped a towel around my waist, walked down the cold stairs, along the cold corridor and into the equally cold shower room. After half an hour under the boiling-hot water I went back upstairs and dressed, carefully and methodically. A black shirt and the black waistcoat with the grey back. The black Levi’s, the studded belt, the black shoes. Not a drop of gel spared to make my hair stand up as it should. I had also saved a plastic bag Yngve had given me, from Virgin, and in it I put my notebook and a pen, as well as Hunger, to give it a bit more weight.

I tidied the bed to make it into a sofa again, had a cup of tea with a generous helping of sugar as I didn’t feel like any breakfast, sat looking out of the window at the shiny telephone box sparkling in the sunshine, the sunless grass in the park behind, the trees at the back and then the mountain that rose steeply, with the row of brick houses above, also in shadow, then got up and put on a record, flicked through a few issues of Vinduet, all to pass the time until it was nine and I could leave. Lessons didn’t start until eleven, but I had planned to walk around town first, perhaps find a café and read a little.

A chimney sweep came down the street with his long brush wound into a circle over one shoulder. A cat strolled across the grass. An ambulance drove down the road along the mountainside, behind the brick houses, visible between them as it passed, it moved slowly, no siren blaring, no lights flashing.

Right there, at that precise moment, I felt as if I would be able to meet whatever challenges came my way, as if there were no limits to what I could do. This wasn’t about writing, this was something else, a boundlessness, as if I could get up and go now, this very minute, and then just walk and walk to the end of the earth.

This feeling lasted for thirty seconds perhaps. Then it was gone, and even though I tried to summon it back it refused to return, a bit like a dream that goes, slips from your grasp as you struggle to recall it after waking.

When, a couple of hours later, I wandered down to the centre it was with a gentle, not unpleasant, nervousness in my body, indeed I felt light and at ease as I walked, there was something about the sun shining and the life in the streets around me. On my way up the hill to the square known as Klosteret I saw that long stalks of grass were growing through the tarmac and that in some places there were small bare boulders between the houses, they linked the town to the wild mountains around, and to the sea below, everything that had not been wrought by human hand, and the fact that the town was part of the landscape, not separate, somehow closed in around itself, as I had felt during the first two days there, sent a fresh wave of good feeling through me. Rain fell everywhere, the sun shone everywhere, everything was connected with everything.

Yngve had explained the route to me in detail and I had no problem finding my way, I walked down a narrow path, passed some strange crooked cottages and there, at the bottom of a hill, lay Verftet at the water’s edge. Made of brick, and built in the nineteenth century, it even had a tall factory chimney. I walked round to the entrance, touched the door, it was open, went in. An empty corridor with some doors, no signs. I continued along it. A man came out of one door, in his thirties or thereabouts, wearing big black glasses, a stained T-shirt, an artist.

‘I’m looking for the Writing Academy,’ I said. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘It’s not here anyway.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘If I wasn’t I wouldn’t have said what I did.’

‘No, right,’ I said.

‘But try upstairs on the other side. There are some offices and stuff there.’

I did as he said. Went upstairs and through the door. A corridor with some pictures of Verftet in its heyday on the walls, a spiral staircase at the end.

I opened a door and walked along a corridor, one of the many doors was ajar and I peeped in, a workshop, I turned round and went back, stopped at the entrance hall, where a woman, probably in her early thirties with a light blue coat and a plump face, big eyes and slightly crooked teeth, was just coming in.

‘Do you know where the Writing Academy is?’ I said.

‘I think it’s up there,’ she said. ‘Are you on the course?’

I nodded.

‘Me too,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m Nina.’

‘Karl Ove.’

I followed her up the stairs. She carried a big bag over her shoulder, and the conventionality of her appearance, which resided not just in her coat, bag and the small lady-like boots she wore but also in the way her hair was pinned up, how little girls used to have it in the nineteenth century, disappointed me, I had expected something rougher, wilder, darker. Not the norm at any rate. If they let in the norm, maybe I was also there because I was the norm.

She opened the door at the top of the stairs, and we stepped into a large room with slanting walls and three big windows on one side, two doors with a bookshelf between them on the other. In the middle were some desks arranged in a horseshoe shape. Three people sat there. Two men were standing in front of them. One, tall and slim, wearing a suit jacket with the sleeves rolled up, looked straight at us and smiled. He wore a gold chain around his neck, I noticed, and had several rings on his fingers. The other man, shorter in stature, also wearing a suit jacket, with a slight paunch which the much-too-tight jacket emphasised, sent us a hasty glance and looked down. Both had moustaches. The former may have been pushing thirty-five; the latter, who stood with his arms crossed, was around thirty.

They appeared nervous in the sense that they both radiated a feeling that they would rather not be right here, right now. But in diametrically opposed ways.

‘Welcome to the Writing Academy,’ the tall one said. ‘Ragnar Hovland.’

I shook his hand, said my name.

‘Jon Fosse,’ said the other one, and he said it quickly, in fact, he almost spat it out.

‘Take a seat while we’re waiting,’ Ragnar Hovland said. ‘There’s coffee in the pot, and water in there, if you want it.’

As he said this he alternated his gaze between Nina and me, but once he had finished he looked away. His voice trembled slightly as though he really had to make an effort to say what he did. At the same time he gave an impression of wiliness, as though he knew something no one else knew and then looked away to laugh at us inside.

‘I haven’t read any of your books yet,’ I said, looking at him. ‘But I’ve just been working as a teacher and at the school we used one of your textbooks.’

‘Well, that’s strange,’ he said. ‘I’ve never published any textbooks.’

‘But I saw your name on it,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely certain. Ragnar Hovland, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is. But, as I said, I haven’t written any textbooks.’

‘But I saw it,’ I said.

He smiled.

‘You can’t have done. Unless of course I have a doppelgänger somewhere.’

‘I’m absolutely positive,’ I said, but realised I wouldn’t get any further with this and put my bag down on a chair, went to the coffee machine, pulled a plastic cup off the low stack and filled it with coffee. I had seen his name, I was pretty sure. Why wouldn’t he admit it? Surely there was no shame in publishing a textbook for schoolchildren? Or was that precisely what it was?

I took a seat, lit a cigarette and pulled over an ashtray. Across the table a dark-haired middle-aged woman sat looking at me. She smiled when I met her eyes.

‘Else Karin,’ she said.

‘Karl Ove,’ I said.

Beside her a girl was reading. She was probably about twenty-five, had long fair hair in a ponytail, it seemed to tauten her face and along with her small straight lips gave her a stern appearance, which the fleeting glance she sent me – in which I sensed a good deal of scepticism – reinforced.

On her other side there was a man of the same age, tall and thin, he had a small head and a big Adam’s apple, and a conspicuously drooping mouth, there was something distinctly formal about him, and conventional.

‘I’m Knut,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

At the door two more appeared, one had a beard and glasses, a red lumberjack shirt, a light blue windcheater and a pair of brown corduroy trousers. He reminded me of the kind of temp who worked in shops selling second-hand comics or something like that. The other was a girl, quite short, wearing a large black leather jacket, black trousers and a pair of robust black shoes. Her hair was also black, and she tossed her head and stroked back her fringe twice in the short time I was watching them. But her mouth was sensitive, and her eyes were as black as two lumps of coal.

‘Petra,’ she said and pulled a chair back.

‘And my name’s Kjetil,’ he said, and smiled slyly down at the desk.

She blinked twice in quick succession, and her lips drew back over her teeth as though she were snarling.

I didn’t want to gape, so I stared through the large roof windows onto the fjord, there was a dock on the other side containing a great rusting hull of a boat.

The door opened again, a woman of thirty to thirty-five came in, thin with a grey dull appearance, apart from her eyes, which were happy and alive.

I took a sip of coffee and glanced at the dark-haired girl again.

Her face was so attractive, but her aura was hard, almost brutal.

She looked at me, I smiled, she didn’t smile back, and I blushed, stubbed my cigarette out firmly in the ashtray, took my pad and placed it on the desk in front of me.

‘I imagine that’s everyone,’ Ragnar Hovland said, walking to the other end of the room with Jon Fosse, where there was a board on the wall. They sat down.

‘Shall we wait for Sagen?’ Fosse said.

‘We’ll give him a few more minutes,’ Hovland said.

I was definitely the youngest person there, by a fair margin. The average debut age for writers in Norway was a little over thirty, I had read somewhere. I would be a little over twenty. But several of the others were also younger than the average. Petra, the stern girl, Knut, Kjetil. They were all around twenty-five. The dark-haired one might be forty. She dressed like a forty-year-old anyway, wide sleeves and big earrings. But tight trousers. Meticulously drawn eyebrows. And thick lipstick on her narrow lips. What the hell could she write?

And then there was the other one: Nina. There was something nebulous about her face, pale, a lot of skin, dark shadows under her eyes, cascading fair hair. She was probably better at writing; however, how good could she be?

In through the door came a short man who must have been Sagen. He was wearing a blue fur trapper hat, a brown leather jacket, blue shirt and dark brown corduroy trousers. Dark curly hair, a slight paunch.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, opened the door to the right, rummaged around in the room there, re-emerged minus his jacket and hat. Sat down. A little bald patch.

‘Shall we start then?’ he said, looking at the other two. Hovland holding the edge of the chair, Fosse sitting with his arms crossed and looking down with his head turned to the side. Both nodded, and Sagen welcomed us to the course. He told us a little about how the school had come about, it had been his idea, how it had been established, this was the second year, and how it was a privilege to be here, we had been selected from more than seventy applicants, and the lecturers were among the best writers in the country. He handed over to Fosse and Hovland, who told us a bit about the teaching programme. This week we would go through the texts that we had sent in with our applications. Then there would be a section devoted to poetry, followed by one on prose, drama and essays. In between there would be writing periods and guest lecturers. One of them would be here for several of the periods, his name was Øystein Lønn and he would be a kind of main teacher, as well as Hovland and Fosse, that is. In spring there would be a longish period for writing, after which we would submit an extended piece before the end and we would be assessed on that. As regards teaching, the two lecturers would deal with the theory first, and this would be followed by written activities and textual analysis. There would be no history of literature, Jon Fosse said, this was the first time he had spoken, the texts they would go through and discuss would be predominantly recent ones, therefore modernist and postmodernist.

Øystein Lønn, another unknown writer.

I put up my hand.

‘Yes?’ Hovland said.

‘Do you know anything about who the other guest lecturers are?’

‘Yes. Not all the names have been confirmed yet. But Jan Kjærstad and Kjartan Fløgstad are two definites.’

‘Great!’ I said.

‘No women?’ Else Karin said.

‘Yes, of course,’ Hovland said.

‘Perhaps we should do a round of introductions?’ Sagen said. ‘If you say who you are, how old you are and what you write, that sort of thing.’

Else Karin, who started, took her time and looked at everyone around her individually as she spoke. She was thirty-eight, she said, and had published two novels, but she had never had any form of training, this year she hoped to take a step forward. Bjørg, as the dull woman with the lively eyes was called, had also published a novel. None of the others had made their debut yet.

When it came to my turn, I said who I was, told them I was nineteen and wrote prose, somewhere between Hamsun and Bukowski, and was working on a novel at the moment.

‘Petra, twenty-four, prose,’ Petra said.

We were given a syllabus, and then Sagen fetched a pile of books, they were for us, a gift from a publishing house, we could choose: either Gravgaver by Tor Ulven or Fra by Merete Morken Andersen. I hadn’t heard of either of them, but chose Ulven because of his name, the wolf.

Everyone drifted out of the rooms at the same time, and up the hill above Verftet I found myself walking alongside Petra.

‘What do you reckon?’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘The course!’

She shrugged.

‘The lecturers were full of themselves and vain. But they might be able to teach us something all the same.’

‘They weren’t vain, were they?’

She snorted and tossed her head, ran her hand over her fringe, looked at me and a little smile flitted across her lips.

‘Did you see all the jewellery on Hovland? He was wearing a necklace and rings and even a bracelet. Looked like some kind of pimp!’

I didn’t say anything, although I thought she was being hard.

‘And Fosse was so nervous he didn’t even dare look at us.’

‘They’re writers, aren’t they,’ I said.

‘So? Is that supposed to give them a dispensation? They only sit somewhere and write. That’s all there is to it.’

Kjetil sidled up alongside us.

‘I wasn’t actually accepted,’ he said. ‘I was on the waiting list and someone cried off at the last minute.’

‘That was lucky for you,’ Petra said.

‘Yes, it wasn’t a big issue. I already live here, so all I had to do was turn up.’

He spoke the Bergen dialect. Petra spoke the Oslo dialect, the others did too, apart from Nina, who came from Bergen, and Else Karin, who came from somewhere in southern Vestland. I was the only Sørlander, and now I thought about it, had there been any writers from Sørland at all? Vilhelm Krag, yes, but that was around the turn of the last century. Gabriel Scott? Same. Bjørneboe, of course, but then he had almost tried to erase all traces of his origins from his personality, at least that was how it seemed, judging by the TV interviews I had seen, in which he had spoken a refined form of riksmål, and, as far as the books he wrote were concerned, there weren’t many characteristic Sørland features such as sea-smoothed rocks or double-ended boats in them.

Else Karin came up behind us all in a flurry. She seemed to be one of those women who surrounded themselves with a cloud of gestures and objects, bags and clothes and cigarettes and arms.

‘Hi,’ she said, planting her eyes on me. ‘I’ve worked out that I’m exactly twice your age. You’re nineteen and I’m thirty-eight. You’re really young!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Fantastic that you got on the course.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Petra turned away, Kjetil watched us with his good-natured eyes. Then we caught up with the others, they were standing at a junction and waiting for the lights to go green. The houses opposite were run-down, the walls grey with traffic fumes and dust from the road, the windows completely opaque. The sun was still shining, but over the mountains to the north the sky was very black.

We crossed the road, walked up a gentle hill, past a second-hand bookshop of the grubby kind, from what I could see in the windows: various comics were hanging at the back and some cheap paperbacks were laid out on a green felt cloth, all badly faded by the sun, which shone on the shopfront during the afternoon. A bit further, on the other side of the road, was the indoor swimming pool. I decided I would go there some day soon.

Up at Café Opera, we dispersed, I said goodbye and hurried homewards. I would have liked to buy some books, preferably a couple of collections of poetry because I had barely read a poem, except for those we’d had at school, which had mostly been by Wergeland and Wildenvey, and the stuff I encountered during the weeks when we put on a kind of cabaret in Norwegian at gymnas, with Lars and me reading texts by Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Sylvia Plath on stage. Those six poems were the only real poems I had read in my life, and firstly I didn’t remember any of them and secondly I had an inkling the kind of poems we would be analysing at the Writing Academy would be different. However, books would have to wait until my loan arrived.

In the post box at home there were nothing but advertising leaflets, but among them was a little catalogue for an English book club based in Grimstad, of all places, which I perused carefully as you didn’t need to have cash to get books there. I put a cross by Shakespeare’s Collected Works, Oscar Wilde’s Collected Works, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and Plays, all in English, and on one of the last pages there was a photography book, which I ordered, with pictures of scantily clad and naked women, it wasn’t porn though, it was art, or at least serious photography, but for me it was all the same, and pins and needles ran down my spine at the thought that I could soon be sitting here and poring over them and … yes, wanking. I still hadn’t done it, but now I sensed that it would be unnatural not to do it, everyone probably did it, and then up came this opportunity, this book, and I put a cross next to it, wrote the number and title on the back, my name and address underneath, and tore out the order form. It was free, the receiver also paid the postage.

While I was posting it I could send some change-of-address cards, I thought, and strolled off to the Post Office with the form and my little red and black address book in hand.

On the way back it began to rain. And it wasn’t just the odd drop or two gradually increasing in intensity, which I was used to, no, here it went from zero to a hundred in one second flat: one moment it wasn’t raining, the next, billions of drops were falling to the ground at once, and from the road around me came a spattering, almost a clattering sound. I jogged downhill, laughing inside, what a fantastic town this was! And as always when I saw or experienced something wonderful I thought of Ingvild. She was a living person who existed in the world with her own way of perceiving it, her own memories and experiences, she had her mother and father, her sister and her friends, the countryside she had grown up and walked in, all this resided within her, this immense complexity that is another person and of which we see so little when we are with them, yet it is enough to like them, to love them, for it takes nothing for this to happen, two serious eyes that suddenly beam with happiness, two playful teasing eyes that suddenly become unsure or introspective, that falter, a person faltering, is there anything more beautiful than that? With all their inner richness, yet faltering all the same? You see it, you fall in love with it, and it is not much, perhaps you will say it is not much, but the heart is always right. It never errs.

The heart never errs.

The heart never ever errs.

For the next few hours it was all pounding rain, bobbing umbrellas, furious windscreen wipers, car headlights piercing the rain and murk. I sat on the sofa occasionally looking out to see what was happening, occasionally looking down at my book, Ulven’s Gravgaver, of which I understood not one word. Even when I really concentrated and read as slowly as I could, several pages at a time, I didn’t understand. I understood as good as all the words, that wasn’t the problem, and I also understood the sentences, as such, but I didn’t understand what they meant. I had no idea. And that took the wind out of my sails because I knew of course that there was a reason we had been given these two particular books. They were regarded as good literature, as having importance, and I didn’t understand them.

I didn’t have a clue. There was something about someone coughing on an old gramophone recording, then there was a man who drove an unbelievably overheated car to a funeral, and then there was a couple who were at some kind of holiday resort. I understood that, but firstly there was no plot, and secondly there was no sequence of events, and no coherence, everything came at you higgledy-piggledy, and that was fine per se, but what was it that was higgledy-piggledy? It wasn’t thoughts, there was no one in particular thinking this. There were no lines of argument either, or descriptions, it was just a bit of everything all at the same time, but it was no use trying to understand this, as I couldn’t make sense of the bigger picture, what did it mean?

I hoped this was what we were going to learn.

I would have to follow closely, note down everything that was said, not waste a moment.

Modernism and postmodernism Fosse had said, that sounded good, it meant us and our time.

While I was eating lunch – because of my impecunious state, five slices of bread, butter and three soft-boiled eggs – there was a knock at the door. It was my neighbour from down below, Morten, holding a long black umbrella with a walking-stick handle and wearing a red leather jacket, blue Levi’s and boat shoes with white socks, and even though his hair wasn’t a mess this time, there was still something wild about him, perhaps especially the look he was giving me, but it was in his body language too, as if something powerful was stirring inside him and he was expending all his energy on that. And then there was his laughter, which burst forth in the strangest of places.

‘Hi again!’ he said. ‘Can I come in? For a chat? Bit brief last time, you might say, heh heh.’

‘Come in,’ I said.

He stopped inside the door and looked around.

‘Take a seat,’ I said, kneeling down by the stereo to put on a record.

‘Betty Blue, yep,’ he said. ‘I’ve actually seen that one.’

‘It’s a good film,’ I said and turned to face him. He hitched his trousers up over his knees before he sat down. There was something formal about him, which, along with the vague yet intense impression of wildness, filled the whole room.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nice, she is. Especially when she went nuts!’

‘Yes, she did go nuts,’ I said, sitting down on the chair across the table from him.

‘Have you lived here long?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘No, sir! I moved in two weeks ago.’

‘And you’re studying law?’

‘Exactly. Clauses and paragraphs. And you’re going to be a writer, didn’t you say?’

‘Yes. Started today.’

‘Shit, I wouldn’t mind doing that. Articulating everything you feel inside,’ he said, thumping his chest. ‘I get so sad sometimes. Maybe you do too?’

‘Yes, it happens.’

‘Great to get it out, is it?’

‘Yes. But that’s not why, you know.’

‘Why what?’

‘Why I write.’

He looked at me with a self-assured smile, slapped both palms against his thighs and prepared to stand up, or so it seemed, but he didn’t, instead he leaned back in the sofa.

‘Are you in love? Right now, I mean,’ he said.

I looked at him.

‘Are you? Since you’re the one asking.’

‘I’m fascinated by a girl. If I can put it like that. Fascinated.’

‘I am too,’ I said. ‘Incredibly so.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Ingvild.’

‘Ingvild!’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me you know her,’ I said.

‘No, no. Is she a student?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you a couple?’

‘No.’

‘Same age as you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Monica’s two years older than me. That’s perhaps not so good.’

He fiddled with the ribs of the umbrella, which was propped up against the sofa next to his calf. I took out my tobacco pouch and began to make a roll-up.

‘Have you met the others in the house yet?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Only you. And I caught a glimpse of the girl who was having a shower.’

‘Lillian,’ he said. ‘She lives behind the staircase on the same floor as you. An old lady lives above her. She sticks her nose into everything, but she’s not dangerous. Above you is Rune. A nice fellow from Sogndal. That’s it.’

‘I’ll get to know them in time,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘But now I won’t take any more of your time,’ he said, getting up. ‘See you. I have the feeling I’ll be hearing more about Ingvild soon enough.’

He went out, his steps grew fainter as he went downstairs, I continued eating.

The next morning I walked up to the university to find out whether my loan had come through, it hadn’t, and I went down a street alongside Høyden, as the university area was called, at the end was Mount Dragefjell, where the law students’ building was, there I turned right down one of the narrow alleyways and emerged unexpectedly by the swimming pool. As I passed I drew the air deep into my lungs because from a grille set in the pavement came the smell of chlorine, and with it all the pleasant memories of my childhood unfolded like flowers in the first rays of sun after a night of slumber.

Where I walked, however, there wasn’t much sun to speak of, the rain was pouring down, hard and unremitting, and between the buildings the water in the fjord was heavy and grey, beneath a sky that was so low and so full of moisture that the dividing line between it and the fjord appeared to have been erased. I had admitted defeat and put on a raincoat, a light, green affair that made me look like a bumpkin or a hick from the hills or something, but in this weather there was nothing else you could do, these weren’t showers over in half an hour; the cloud cover above me was thick and grey, bordering on black, and hung over the town like a tarpaulin bulging with water.

It affected the atmosphere in the classroom because with all the boots and umbrellas and wet coats, as well as the grey light outside, which caused the room to be reflected in the windows, it was vaguely reminiscent of how it had been in all the various classrooms I had sat in over the years, including those in northern Norway, which had already joined all the other good memories I had of rooms.

I sat down, took out my notebook, grabbed one of the stapled photocopies from a pile and started to read, as that was what all the others were doing. Under the blackboard sat Fosse and Hovland, doing the same. We were going through Trude’s – she was the stern one – texts first. They were poems, and they were beautiful, I could see that right away. There were dreamy landscapes, horses, wind and light, all concentrated into a few lines. I read them, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for, had no idea what was good or not, or what might make them better. And as I read the fear grew in my breast, for this was immeasurably better than what I had written, there was no comparison, this was art, that at least I did understand. And what would I say if Fosse or Hovland asked me to comment on them? Some horses standing under a tree and, in the next line, a knife sliding across skin – what did it mean? Horses galloping across a field with thundering hooves and an eye hanging above the horizon?

Minutes later, work started in earnest. Fosse asked Trude to read. She sat still for a few moments, concentrating, then she began. Her voice seemed to tone into her poems, it wasn’t as if the poems came out of her mouth, I felt rather that they were already there in advance and she used her voice to access them. At the same time there was no room for anything else, her voice could only contain the poems, the few words that made up a rounded whole, with nothing of her in it.

I liked her writing but also felt uncomfortable because it meant nothing to me, I didn’t know what she was trying to say or what the poems were about.

After she had finished Hovland took over. Now we had to comment on the texts, and we would do it in sequence so that everyone spoke and had a chance to say something. What we had to remember, he said, was that none of the texts we discussed in class was necessarily finished or complete, and we learned through criticism. But it wasn’t only criticism of our own texts that was important to us, it was equally important to be involved and discuss others’ texts, for what this course was based on primarily was reading, learning to read, improving our ability to read. For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won’t lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you’ll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.

The round of comments began. There was a lot of hesitation and groping for words, most people confined themselves to saying they liked this image or that sentence, but amid all this some concepts emerged which were carried on and slowly became the standard currency for everyone, such as ‘rhythm’, the rhythm was ‘good’ or ‘didn’t quite flow’, and then there was mention of ‘tone’ and ‘the opening’ and ‘the ending’ and ‘deleting’ and ‘cutting’. That was a nice opening, and the rhythm’s spot on, there’s something a little unclear in the middle section, I’m not quite sure what it is, but something jars there, well, maybe you could shorten it a bit, I don’t know, but then there’s that strong image at the end which elevates the whole poem. That was how it began to sound when poetry was under discussion. I liked this way of talking because it didn’t exclude me, I could understand openings and endings, I became particularly good at endings, the idea that something had to rise and resonate after the last line. I always looked for that, and if I found it I piped up. If I didn’t, I said so too. You sort of shut off the poem here, I would say then. Can you see? The last line? It’s a conclusion, it shuts itself off. Can’t you delete it? Then you open everything up. Do you see? Also the question of line breaks came up in these readings. It soon transpired that chopped-up prose, as it was called, whereby standard prose was divided up as if it were a poem, was the enemy, the nightmare in person. It looked like a poem, but it wasn’t, and this was the 1970s, something they did back then. In addition, we discussed all the literary devices, such as metaphors and alliteration, but not often because Fosse and the students who wrote poetry had an aversion to metaphors, I noticed, there was almost something ugly about metaphors, or old-fashioned, in the sense of passé or antiquated and useless for our purposes. It was bad taste, quite simply, naff. Alliteration was even worse. What was important was mostly rhythm, tone, line breaks, openings and endings. Jon Fosse, I noticed, when he made any comments, was always looking for whatever was unusual, different, out of the ordinary, as well.

This first session, however, was almost completely terminology-free, only Knut had a vocabulary fit to talk about poems, and his words also had the greatest impact. Trude sat in deep concentration, listening the whole of the time, making occasional notes and also asking direct questions, why this, why not that. I could see she was a writer and a poet, and she not only wanted to go far, she was already well ahead.

When my turn came I said the poems were full of atmosphere and they were profound but a bit difficult to talk about. In some places I didn’t quite understand what she was trying to achieve. I said I agreed with a lot of what Knut had said, I particularly liked this line while she might consider leaving out that line.

While I was speaking I could see she didn’t care. She didn’t take any notes, she wasn’t concentrated, and she watched me with a little smile at the corners of her mouth. I was upset and angry, but there was nothing I could do, other than sit back, push my papers away, say I had nothing more to add and sip my coffee.

After that Jon Fosse held forth. While both the way he moved his head – in jerks, like a bird, sometimes as if he had been startled by or remembered something – and the way he spoke – hesitantly, full of pauses, stutters, coughs, snorts, an unexpected deep breath here and there – suggested nervousness and unease, what he said was, by contrast, completely assured. He was utterly sure of himself, there was no room for doubt: what he was saying was right.

He went through all the poems, commented on their strengths and weaknesses and said that horses were a fine ancient motif in poetry and art. He cited the horses in the Iliad and the horses in the Parthenon Frieze, he cited the horses in Claude Simon, but these, he said, were more a kind of archetype, I don’t know, have you read Ellen Einan? Something here is reminiscent of her. Dream language.

I wrote everything down.

The Iliad, the Parthenon, Claude Simon, archetype, Ellen Einan, dream language.

On my way home that afternoon I nipped up the alleyway to the left after the hill by Verftet to avoid having to walk with the others. It was still raining, as persistently and heavily as when I arrived, and all the walls, all the roofs, all the lawns and all the cars were wet and shiny. I was elated, it had been a good day, and Trude’s total disregard for what I had to say, indeed her demonstration of this to the others, didn’t bother me at all any more because in the break, when we had been in the café opposite Klosteret, I had spoken to Ragnar Hovland and exchanged opinions about Jan Kjærstad. In fact, it had been me who brought up his name. Else Karin had asked me what I liked reading, apart from Hamsun and Bukowski, I had said my favourite author was Kjærstad, especially his last book The Big Adventure, but also Mirrors and Homo Falsus, yes, and also The Earth Turns Quietly was good. She said his books were a little cold and contrived. I said that was exactly the point, Kjærstad wanted to describe humanity in a different way, not from within but from without, and the notion that characters in books were warm was a delusion, that was a construct too, of course, we had just got used to it and thought of this mode as genuine or warm while other ways of writing were equally genuine. She said yes, I understand that, but I still think his characters are cold. And this ‘I think’ was a victory for me, it wasn’t an argument, just a feeling, empty words.

After the break it was Kjetil’s turn, and his texts, which were prose and bordered on fantasy and the grotesque, were talked about in quite a different way. This wasn’t about openings and endings or tone, we dealt more with the plot and individual sentences, and when someone said it was too exaggerated I said I had perceived this to be the whole point, that it was ‘over the top’. The discussion was much livelier, this was easier to talk about, and it was a relief, this was material I could get my head round.

Tomorrow my texts would be read and discussed. I was terrified yet looking forward to it too as I walked up Strandgaten, in some way what I had written had to be good, otherwise I wouldn’t have been accepted on the course.

Up the mountainside, from the station with the gleaming cobblestones, the bright red Fløybane glided smoothly into the green. FUNICULAR, it said in neon lights, and there was something alpine about this short ascent, a funicular railway rising from a town centre, a stone’s throw from the old German wooden houses. If you took away the water you could well imagine yourself in the German-Austrian Alps.

And oh the darkness that was a constant in Bergen! Not linked to night in any way, nor to shadow, nevertheless it was almost always here, this muted darkness suffused with falling rain. Objects and events became so concentrated when it was like this because the sun opened up airspace, and everything that was in it: a father putting shopping bags in a car boot outside Støletorget while the mother bundled their children onto the back seat, got in at the front, drew the safety belt across her chest and buckled it into place, watching this when the sun was shining and the sky was light and open was one thing, then all their movements seemed to flutter past and vanish the moment they were carried out; however, it was a very different matter watching the same family if it was raining, enveloped by the muted darkness, for then there was a leadenness about their movements, it was as if they were statues, these people, transfixed in this moment – which, the very next, they had left anyway. The dustbins outside the stairs, seeing them in strong sunlight was one thing, they were hardly there, as almost nothing was, but it was quite a different matter in rain-darkened daylight, then they stood like shining pillars of silver, some of them magnificent, others sadder and more wretched, but all there, just then, at that moment.

Yes, Bergen. The incredible power that lay in all the various house fronts squeezed together everywhere. The head rush you had as you slogged your way uphill and saw this, at your feet, could be wonderful.

But it was also good to lock yourself in your room after a walk through the town, it was like being in the eye of a storm, sheltered from prying eyes, the only place where I was totally at peace. This afternoon I had run out of tobacco, but I had known it would happen and had saved all my dog-ends from recent days. After putting on the coffee machine, I took the scissors from the drawer and set about snipping the ash off the stubs. When I had done that I opened them up and sprinkled the bone-dry tobacco into my pouch, which in the end was half full. My fingertips were black and reeked of smoke, I rinsed them under the tap, and then I cut a slice of raw potato and put it into the pouch; soon the tobacco would have absorbed the moisture and be like new again.

In the evening I went to the telephone box and rang Ingvild. Once again a man answered. Ingvild, yes, hold on a moment and I’ll see if she’s at home.

I was trembling as I waited.

Footsteps approached. I heard someone take the receiver.

‘Hello?’ she said.

Her voice was darker than I remembered.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Karl Ove here.’

‘Hi!’ she said.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How’s it going? Have you been in town long?’

‘No, I arrived on Monday.’

‘I’ve been here a couple of weeks already,’ I said.

Silence.

‘We were talking about meeting if you remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if you still want to, but what about Saturday?’

‘Yes, I’ve got nothing on the calendar then, no.’ She chuckled.

‘Café Opera maybe? Then we can go to Hulen afterwards. What about that?’

‘Just like real students do, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sounds fine. But I warn you: I’ll be a bundle of nerves.’

‘Why?’

‘I haven’t been a student before, that’s for starters. And second, I don’t know you.’

‘I’ll be a bundle of nerves too,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘So perhaps it doesn’t really matter if we don’t say much.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Quite the contrary. That sounds great.’

‘Now don’t exaggerate.’

‘It’s true!’ I said.

She chuckled again.

‘This is my first student date,’ she said. ‘Café Opera on Saturday. Shall we say … well, when do students actually go out?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. Seven?’

‘That sounds about right. Let’s say seven then.’

My stomach constricted as I crossed the street and went back into my bedsit. I felt as if I could throw up at any time. And that was after everything had gone well. However, a few words on the phone was not the same as sitting face to face with nothing to say and your guts on fire.

There were two things that particularly bothered me in those days. One was that I came too fast, often before anything had happened at all, and the other was that I never laughed. That is, it did happen once in a while, maybe once every six months, when I would be overcome by the hilarity of something and just laugh and laugh, but that was always unpleasant because then I completely lost control, I was unable to regain my composure, and I didn’t like showing that side of myself to others. So basically I was able to laugh, I had the capacity, but in my everyday life, in social situations, when I was with people around a table chatting, I never laughed. I had lost that ability. To make up for this, I smiled a lot, I might also emit some laughter-like sounds, so I don’t think anyone noticed or found it conspicuous. But I knew: I never laughed. As a result, I became especially conscious of laughter as such, as a phenomenon – I noticed how it occurred, how it sounded, what it was. People laughed almost all the time, they said something, laughed, others said something, everyone laughed. It lubricated conversations or gave them a shot of something else which didn’t have so much to do with what was being said as with being together with others. People meeting. In this situation everyone laughed, each in their own way, of course, and sometimes because of something genuinely funny, in which case the laughter lasted longer and could at times completely take over, but also for no apparent reason at all, just as a token of friendliness or openness. It could conceal insecurity, I knew that well, but it could also be strong and generous, a helping hand. When I was small I laughed a lot, but at some point it stopped, perhaps as early as the age of twelve, at any rate I remember there was a film with Rolv Wesenlund that filled me with horror, it was called The Man Who Could Not Laugh, and it was probably when I heard about it that I realised actually I didn’t laugh. From then on, all social situations were something I took part in and watched from the outside as I lacked what they were full of, the interpersonal link: laughter.

I wasn’t glum though. I wasn’t a wet blanket! I was no introverted brooder! I wasn’t even shy or diffident!

I just seemed to be.

Even though it was only the third time I had attended the Writing Academy it already felt familiar, almost homely, both the way there, first the steep hills down to Vågsbunnen, then along the row of office blocks and shops in Strandgaten, then up the hills by Klosteret and down the narrow alleyway opposite, all woven into the veil of rain that fell from the low sky, and even the room we occupied, with the bookshelf on one side, the board on another and the slanting wall with the windows on a third. I entered the room, said hi to those already present, took off my wet coat, retrieved my papers and book from my wet plastic bag, placed them on the table, poured myself some coffee and lit a cigarette.

‘What weather,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Welcome to Bergen,’ Kjetil said, looking up from a book.

‘What are you reading?’ I said.

‘All Fires the Fire. Short stories by Julio Cortázar.’

‘Are they good?’

‘Yes. But they’re perhaps a bit cold,’ he said, smiling. I smiled back. In the middle of the table was a pile of photocopies, I recognised them as mine from the typeface, the typewriter symbols and the few corrections I had made with a black felt pen, and took one.

Else Karin caught my eye.

She was sitting with one leg tucked underneath her on the chair, her left arm wrapped around her knee, her right hand holding a cigarette and my manuscript.

‘Are you nervous?’ she said.

‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘Bit maybe. Did you like it?’

‘You’ll have to wait and see!’ she said.

Bjørg, who was sitting next to her, glanced at us and smiled.

Through the door at the other end came Petra – with neither an umbrella nor rain gear – her black leather jacket glistening and her wet hair hanging over her forehead. Right behind her came Trude, wearing green waterproof trousers and jacket, the hood laced up tightly around her neck, on her feet high wellies, on her back a leather rucksack. I stood up, went to the kitchenette and poured myself another cup of coffee.

‘Anyone else want any?’ I said.

Petra shook her head, no one else looked in my direction. Trude was standing under the slanting window and pulling off her trousers, and even though she had jeans on underneath, just the movements, wriggling and squirming, gave me a hard-on. I put my hand in my pocket as I walked back to my place as nonchalantly as possible.

‘Is everyone here?’ Hovland said from his chair under the board. Fosse was sitting beside him with his arms crossed and his eyes downcast, as on the first two days.

‘We’re going to spend the first part of today on Karl Ove’s texts. Then we’ll go through Nina’s after the break. If you’re ready, Karl Ove, you can start reading yours.’

I read, the others followed attentively in their copies. When I had finished, the commentary round began. I jotted down key words. Else Karin thought the language fresh and alive, but the plot somewhat predictable, Kjetil said it was credible but slightly tedious, Knut thought it was reminiscent of Saaby Christensen, not that there was anything wrong with that per se, as he put it. Petra considered the names stupid. Come on, she said, Gabriel and Gordon and Billy. That’s intended to be cool, but it’s just childish and silly. Bjørg thought it was interesting, but she would like to know more about the relationship between the two boys. Trude said the writing had oomph, but there were many clichés and stereotypes, in fact, as far as she was concerned there were so many it bordered on being unreadable. Nina liked the radical use of ‘a’ endings in the Norwegian and the descriptions of nature.

Finally, Hovland gave his opinion. He said this was realistic prose, it was recognisable and good, in some places he had been reminded of Saaby Christensen as well, and of course there were some linguistic shortcomings here and there, but the writing had great power, and it was a story, which was an artistic achievement in itself.

He looked at me and asked if I wanted to add anything or if I had any questions. I said I was happy with the way we had gone through the text and I had got a lot out of it, but I was wondering what the clichés and stereotypes were, could Trude give me some examples?

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, and picked up her text. ‘ “Land where no white man has set foot” for example.’

‘But that’s supposed to be a cliché,’ I said. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s how they see the world.’

‘But even that’s a cliché, you know. And then you’ve got “the sun peeped through the foliage” and “the ominous black clouds that betokened thunder” – betokened, right? Then you have “the Colt nestling warmly in his hand” – nestling warmly. I ask you. And it’s like that throughout.’

‘It’s also quite affected and pseudo,’ Petra said. ‘When “Gordon”,’ she said, making finger quotes and smiling, ‘says “gir deg five seconds”, that’s so stupid because we understand the writer wants us to understand the characters have seen it on TV and, like, use English.’

‘Now I think you’re being unfair,’ Else Karin said. ‘This is not poetry we’re talking about. We can’t make such high demands of single sentences; it’s the totality that counts. And as Ragnar said, this is a story, and making it work is an art.’

‘Just keep at it,’ Bjørg said. ‘I think it’s interesting! And I’m sure there will be a lot of changes along the way.’

‘I agree,’ Petra said. ‘Just change the stupid names and I’m happy.’

After this discussion I was angry and ashamed, but also confused because although I assumed the positive words had been said to reassure me the fact still remained that I had been accepted on the course, which, for example, Kjetil had not, so there must have been something good in what I had written. Clichés though were the problem, and according to Trude my texts consisted of nothing else. Or was it just that she was so snobbish she thought she was someone, a poet, in some way better than everyone else? Else Karin had said that I wasn’t writing poetry, and Hovland had also emphasised that this was realistic prose.

This was how my mind was working as the others unpacked their lunches and Else Karin put on a new pot of coffee. But I realised I couldn’t turn introspective now, that would give the impression it had upset me, that they had scored a hit, which would be the same as admitting that what I wrote wasn’t as good as what they wrote.

‘That book you were reading, could I have a look at it?’ I said to Kjetil.

‘Of course,’ he said, and passed it to me. I skimmed through it.

‘Where’s he from?’

‘Argentina, I think. But he lived in Paris for a very long time.’

‘Is it magic realism?’ I said.

‘Yes, you might call it that.’

‘I really like Márquez,’ I said. ‘Have you read him?’

Kjetil smiled.

‘Yes, but he’s not quite my style. It’s a bit too high-flown for me.’

‘Mhm,’ I said, handing the book back and writing Julio Cortázar in my notebook.

After lessons I went to Høyden to pick up my student loan. I joined the queue at the Natural History Museum, it wasn’t very long, the day was almost over, I showed my ID, signed and was given an envelope with my name on, I shoved it into my plastic bag and set off towards the Student Centre, where among many other things there was a little bank. The grey concrete building on a gentle slope shimmered in the rain. Through the doors, one at the front and two at the sides, students came and went, individuals hurrying, groups walking slowly, some familiar with this world, others new like me – they weren’t difficult to spot, at least if my theory was correct: that those who seemed flustered and confused, with all their senses open, could not have been there more than a few days.

I went in the door, up the long stairs and entered the large open concourse full of columns and staircases, people at stands everywhere, there was Student Radio, Student Newspaper, Student Sports Association, Student Kayak Club, Student Christian Association, but I had been here before and headed at a determined pace towards the bank at the end, where once again I joined a queue, and after a few minutes I had transferred the money into my account and taken out three thousand kroner, which I stuffed into my trouser pocket before going down to Studia, the student bookshop, where I wandered among the shelves for the next half-hour, at first disorientated and irresolute, there were so many subjects that were interesting and I thought I might need when I was writing, such as psychology, philosophy, sociology or art history, but I concentrated on literature, that was the most important, I wanted something about how to read poetry, and perhaps a book about modernism, as well as some collections of poetry and novels. First I found a novel by Fosse called Blood. The Stone is, the cover was black with a picture of a semi-illuminated face, I turned the book over, on the back it said ‘Jon Fosse, 27 years old, cand. Philol. and lecturer at the Writing Academy in Hordaland, has this year published his fourth book’, and I was proud because I studied at the Writing Academy, it was almost as though this was about me. I had to have that one. In addition, there were several books by James Joyce, I chose the one with the most appealing title, Stephen Hero, and then I found one on textual analysis, it was Swedish and called From Text to Plot, I had a flick through, the chapters were entitled ‘What is a Text?’, ‘Explain or Understand?’, ‘The Text’, ‘The Plot’, ‘The Story’, and might have been a bit basic, I thought, yet there were terms in it I didn’t understand, such as ‘Towards Critical Hermeneutics’ or ‘Historical Time and Phenomenological Time’s Aporia’, but that just whetted my appetite, I wanted to learn, and I took the book with me. I found a collection of poems by Charles Olson, I knew nothing about him, but as I leafed through it I saw the same kind of poetry as Trude had written, and I took that as well. It was called Archeologist of the Morning. I added two books by Isaac Asimov to the pile, I had to have something light to read as well. Beside them was a novel, G, by someone called John Berger, on the flap inside it said it was an intellectual novel, and I took that too. I couldn’t find any Cortázar, but I did find a paperback entitled The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet, which I couldn’t resist either, and finally I decided I should have some philosophy as well and was lucky enough to lay my hand immediately on a book about philosophy and art: Introduction to Aesthetics, Hegel.

After paying for all these books I went up the stairs to the canteen. I had been there once before, with Yngve, but then I hadn’t needed to think, he had taken care of everything, now I was on my own, and my brain reeled at the sight of all the students sitting in the enormous room eating.

At one end was the counter, where you were either served lunch or you helped yourself to what there was in a glass cabinet, and then you paid at one of three cash desks and went to find somewhere to sit. The windows at the opposite end were misted up, the air, through which the buzz of voices rose and sank, was damp and clammy.

I looked across all the tables, but needless to say didn’t see anyone I knew. The thought of sitting there all alone was terrible, so I turned and went the other way, for there, on the side facing Nygård Park, was the grill where they served hot dishes and beer, a bit more expensive than the canteen, but what did that matter, my pockets were full of money and I didn’t need to scrimp and save.

I ordered a hamburger, chips and a large beer and carried it to an unoccupied window table. The students sitting here seemed older and more experienced than those in the canteen, and there were also some old men and women who, I guessed, were lecturers, unless they belonged to the group of eternal students I had heard about, men in their forties with tousled hair and beards and jumpers, who in the fifteenth year of their studies were still working on their majors in an attic somewhere as the world raced past.

As I ate I flicked through the books I had bought. On the inside flap of the Fosse book there was a 1986 quote from Kjærstad: ‘Why isn’t Bergens Tidende full of feature articles about Jon Fosse?’

So Fosse was a good writer, and not just that, he was one of the leading lights in the country, I thought, raising my gaze as I chewed the bread and meat into a tasty pulp. The bushes in Nygård Park stood like a green wall against the narrow wrought-iron fence, and in the grey air above them the rain angled down, caught by a sudden gust of wind which whistled along the street beneath me that very next moment and flapped at the umbrellas of two women who had just walked down the stairs.