Not all the versions referred to here — both in the dark room and in broad daylight — occurred in Singer’s life as actual events, and thus they didn’t necessarily pop up in his consciousness afterward in the way described. Truth be told, it was all based on a single actual event, a single version, and that was what popped into Singer’s mind, over and over again. But all of these versions, and countless others, existed as possibilities.

  This did not torment him on a daily basis. Ordinarily, Singer, as seen from the outside, was an affable person, well liked by those around him, though a bit reserved; he tried not to stand out in any way, but those who knew him liked him because he was both open and had a quiet sense of humor, which at times could seem astonishingly pithy, at times downright biting, though that was rare, and afterward he had a peculiar habit of taking off his glasses to polish the lenses. Perhaps he did this, because it was his way of trying to take the sting out of his biting remark, which — if you looked closely at him as he took off his glasses and polished the lenses — he personally seemed to enjoy; it was visible in his pleased expression, if you happened to look at his face instead of his hands polishing his glasses, or directly into his eyes, which now squinted nearsightedly without the wall of glass in front of them. He also seemed open, in the sense that he appeared to be without illusions, especially on his own behalf. He accepted his own weaknesses, calmly and without making a fuss about them, meaning without sentimentalizing his own nature. He accepted, as a fact, that he was not particularly brave, not particularly elegant, not particularly good at sports or other youthful exploits, and that he was not an eloquent speaker if he had to make a speech before a large audience, which for the most part he was able to avoid. Nor did he participate in group singing because he claimed, in a casual way, that he didn’t have a good singing voice and so he didn’t want to ruin the joy other people had when they sang ballads together in the late hours of the night. He managed to make both himself and others understand that his place was to be found in total anonymity; that was where he thrived, and that was also where he could meet others on an equal footing. He wasn’t afraid to admit that he was no dance fiend; in fact, he wasn’t any kind of fiend at all. And for this he was well liked. So we might say that Singer, based on these conditions he had chosen for his life, was a sociable person. And for that reason these shame-infested images that popped into his consciousness tormented him, both because of their mysterious nature and because he actually couldn’t deny that he felt rigid with embarrassment at having to relive them.

  At the time when this book opens, he had seriously begun to brood over what this meant for his life. When this book starts, Singer is in the process of moving permanently to Not­odden. He is thirty-four years old and about to take a job at the Not­odden library. His youth is over, and he has survived it. But these shame-infested images are now threatening to tear apart the whole mythology of his life. If they are true — which they are in the sense that they keep popping up in his consciousness, a fact that makes them seem sharply accurate — they must have a certain meaning for his life; he realizes this now, at the age of thirty-four, having embarked on remarkably late training as a librarian.

  Before he turned thirty he was able to shrug his shoulders at the peculiar shame he suffered on his own behalf, in brief glimpses, and he didn’t need to view these incidents in the context of his life as a whole. So they hadn’t tormented him beyond those stubborn moments, or seconds, when they arose. Now they became part of his brooding about life. What did it all mean? That they had significance was something he couldn’t deny. He was forced to see that the shame he felt once again reliving it meant that it was real, it was a shame he couldn’t get rid of. It was his, in a strange and inexplicable way. But how much had it marked him? He had to assume that, in its incongruous way, the shame must have corresponded to the general pattern of his life, perhaps even determining the pattern. Could the fact that he experienced this as so unpleasant, so unbearably embarrassing, have made him devote so much of his time, in some sort of unconscious twilight landscape, to acting instinctively, almost with an automatic pilot in his blood, in order to avoid landing in new, embarrassing situations, which later, as we have seen, would constantly pop up in his consciousness? The threat of danger is always there, as we have seen. The possibility of being observed, unintentionally laughing too loud, or making himself guilty of misunderstandings or mortifying mistakes in identity is ever-present, especially because chance acquaintances — whom he was constantly running into because of his sociable nature, even though he is a reserved person — played such an important role in triggering these embarrassing incidents, and that means that at any time and anywhere he might be at a point where the next step he took was linked to the greatest danger of being exposed, stripped bare. Each step carried the germ of an embarrassing moment, infested with a shame that could never be erased from his consciousness. A person like Singer was in danger wherever he went; and he had to be on guard at all times. A glance, an astonished look, a brief, searching stare, a so-called observation, was enough for Singer to collapse completely inside. Wouldn’t such a person use all the instincts of his being to defend himself against the occurrence of these types of incidents, and not only against the incidents themselves, but against any possibility that such incidents might occur? The loneliness of a person who has to be on guard like this at all times, wary of the demeaning feeling of shame potentially inherent in ordinary incidents, as is the case for Singer, must be elemental. It must be profound. He can’t seek solace from others. Not at all. He can’t confide in a friend. He cannot subject friends to his own terrible, internal collapse, he can’t even subject himself to that. And peripheral acquaintances are directly threatening. Was that the state of things? Was that how his youth had been? The suspicion that it had indeed been like that made Singer inexpressibly sad.

  Because what did that signify? That he had mythologized his youth out of fear for his own shame-infested being. What had given his youth value was not the outcome of free choice but a necessary precaution to protect himself from being exposed in embarrassing situations of mysterious origin. He had believed that he’d freely chosen his youthful attitude as an ironic observer of life. That was how he was seen by others and how he saw himself. And that had pleased him because it’s expected of young men that they should be anything but observers of life. It does seem a jarring denial of life; because if you can’t be a participant in life when you’re in the full bloom of youth, when can you be? If someone refuses to make use of the gifts that youth grants him, that will provoke distress in someone who has the pleasure of observing the youth of the next generation. The passive young man is and will always be a repellent sight, and it was just such a sight that Singer, with eyes wide open, sought to become. He didn’t give a shit. He didn’t give a shit about anything. He squandered his life by observing it, and all the while time passed and his youth did too, and Singer didn’t lift a finger to hold on to or enjoy youth’s enviable state. He was a spineless brooder, a denier of life lacking all identity, a purely negative spirit, who observed everything in an almost self-effacing manner. He allowed himself to be carried along with such tremendous indifference that it might have given him a liberating sense of freedom or independence. He was an anonymous and impractical wanderer on life’s highway, walking stooped forward and staring at the ground, in the midst of the springtime of his youth, year after year.

  He hadn’t managed to decide what he would be, and he’d displayed a certain joy in this indecisiveness of his. Indecisive both in appearance and when it came to creating a future. Not until he turned thirty-one did he feel it was time to make a decision. That was when he enrolled in the Oslo College of Library Science of all things. The time of his youth was irrevocably over, and with each day Singer distanced himself more and more from his own attitude as a young man, and as each day passed he was another day older; he’d even noticed when he looked at his own face in the mirror that a thin streak of gray had shown up in his beard, and so it was time to make some sort of decision, and he applied to library school, where he was admitted based on gender quotas. Before then he’d drifted from one thing to another. Officially he’d been a student. From the time he’d come to Oslo at the age of twenty, after completing his obligatory military service as a NATO soldier in northern Norway, he’d been enrolled at the university as a student. He took his entrance exams that same autumn and then cheerfully began studying social anthropology. That was in the spring of 1971. The reason that he ended up being such a late bloomer was not because he was vehemently and passionately immersed in his own time, the so-called seventies era. He wasn’t. He didn’t get caught up in the political conflicts; he had friends in all camps and didn’t take sides, because he wasn’t sufficiently interested. The reason he let things go so late was because he didn’t want to bind himself financially, meaning take on student loans. He knew that he, with his peculiar attitude toward life, shouldn’t take on that sort of obligation, because then he would lose his independence. Besides, there was no specific goal for his studies, and that’s something you need if you are going to enter into a financially binding contract with the nation itself. So he had to take jobs once in a while, to pay for his goalless studies. He did all sorts of jobs. He worked the night shift at a hotel, then as a daytime desk clerk at the same hotel. He was a proofreader for the newspaper Dagbladet. He supported himself for long periods as a translator of Western romances. He was even a sales clerk in a state liquor store, and on two afternoons each week, from the age of twenty-three until he turned thirty-four, he worked as a totalizer at the Bjerke Racetrack. He found these jobs through other students who introduced him to their employers. All of these side jobs were in high demand among the students, so the fact that Singer got others to recommend him says a lot about the friendly — meaning self-effacing — manner that Singer presented to those around him.

  He also had other, less attractive jobs, as a telemarketer and interviewer for marketing research companies. That was how he financed his university studies, though he frequently took long breaks from the classroom. He might be away from the university for an entire semester. And occasionally he would interrupt his studies halfway through in order to take a job. Other times he would show up in the classroom long after the semester had started, and then leave again before the semester was over. Only when he got so far as to prepare to take exams did he follow the semester’s regimen to the letter, except for one time when he withdrew from the exam altogether. But eventually he passed his exams in both history and comparative literature. When, at the age of thirty-one, he broke off his university studies for good, he was in the process of preparing for another exam in comparative literature. If he had taken that exam in the autumn when he started at the College of Library Science, he would have needed only one more course, for example in social anthropology, before he could call himself a graduate with a university degree and thus be qualified to take a teaching position, after an additional six-month pedagogy course, most likely a whole year before he graduated from the library school.

  But Singer abandoned his studies. He regarded himself as an eternal student, which no longer amused him. He wanted to find something permanent; he was no longer a young man who could waste the precious time of his young life. Time had passed, he had squandered his youth on an anonymous pleasure that had no purpose. During all those years he’d had only one constant point in his life, one goal: he wanted to write, he wanted to be an author. But even that cannot actually be described as a point in his life. Maybe the only real point, though a vague point. Yet this vague point in his life was his secret calling, though it was too vague for him to mention it to anyone, even to Inge­mann, his best friend. None of Singer’s shifting friends and acquaintances, including his childhood friend Inge­mann (who has been given the initial A to identify him in the first pages of this book), had any idea that this was what preoccupied the reserved and rootless man. Yet that was indeed what preoccupied Singer. Steadily and regularly, making no progress whatsoever. Because he never really got started. The young Singer never got started. And so, approaching his thirty-first birthday, he had to admit there was no secret calling in his life. He had to admit defeat, and so he enrolled in the College of Library Science, where the eternal student was admitted because of gender quotas.

  When it came right down to it, all his attempts to become an author consisted in fine-tuning a single sentence: “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight.” That was how the sentence was formulated when he was twenty, and over the next years — at the height of all his years as a young man — he brooded over and revised that single sentence. “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight.” Why one fine day? Did it have to be a fine day? Couldn’t it be an awful day, a day with a snowstorm, for example? “One fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight in a snowstorm.” Yes, a memorable sight in a snowstorm. What kind of snowstorm? What did he see? What was it he stood eye to eye with? “One awful day, while the snowstorm lashed his face, he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight.” Wasn’t that too dramatic? Surely it was possible to stand eye to eye with a memorable sight without having a snowstorm lashing your face. Also, “lashing his face!” No, it could be a fine day, the important thing was the memorable sight; it was completely irrelevant whether there was snow or rain, sunshine or not. So, one fine day . . . but that was a cliché, a completely bland way of speaking. He couldn’t start off his writing career in such an ordinary way. No, it had to be more specific. “One fine day as the sun blazed yellow in the clear blue sky.” That wasn’t it either. It was better than one fine day, but still not something he could use. Yet what was it he saw, a fine day or no fine day? What was he standing “eye to eye” with? “Eye to eye?” Could he stand “eye to eye” with a memorable sight? What did that mean? That the memorable sight was staring back at him? That there was an eye in the memorable sight staring back at him, just as he was staring at it? Apparently. But was that right? He didn’t know. “One fine day he stood before a memorable sight.” “One fine day when the wind was howling, he stood before a memorable sight.” “One fine day in a snowstorm he fell headlong, and as he fell he was overwhelmed by a memorable sight.”

  Maybe that was it. He was overwhelmed by a memorable sight. As he fell. But why did he have to fall? Was the memorable sight linked to his own fall, which was a “headlong” fall? Why was that? Couldn’t he witness a memorable sight from a standing position? He would at least have to try. And he did try. He liked the association of the fall with the memorable sight, but he couldn’t vouch for it. It included a snowstorm he couldn’t vouch for either. Because he hadn’t forgotten the phrase “one fine day.” “One fine day he stood before a memorable sight that overwhelmed him.” Here he stood. He would be overwhelmed by a memorable sight from a standing position. “One fine day he stood before a memorable sight. It knocked him flat.” Here he managed to get in both the fall and the opening with a fine day, that cliché he couldn’t let go of.