Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

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.