Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I was often on suicide watch, many of these patients were more communicative than those in the difficult wards for chronic patients, many had drug problems, some of them were seriously psychotic or paranoid, others manic or depressed, most were young.

In the ward where I worked normally I got to know the other staff well and gradually began to go out with them. Some lived close by or next to Åsane Shopping Centre, there would often be pre-drinks on a Friday or Saturday night, I went, got drunk with all of them, these women, who were between twenty-five and forty, and later caught the bus into town to go out. Whereas students went to places south of the centre, near Høyden, the hospital crowd went to places in the north, around Bryggen, where students, at least the arts students, never set foot unless they were being ironic. There were piano bars, sing-a-long bars, Bergensians and Striler — people from the coastal region north of Bergen — of all shades and hues. They liked me, I didn’t shirk on my shifts, and the fact that I didn’t say much was interpreted charitably by them, from what I gathered. They were friendly and nice, and I was too when I drank, I met them halfway, once I carried one of them up the stairs to shouting and cheering and laughter, another time I expressed my admiration for them and said exactly what I thought, my eyes moist and shining with affection. I got on especially well with one called Vibeke, she and I could sit and chat for a whole morning if the ward was quiet, and she often confided in me, for some reason she trusted me. Then there were others who were more challenging. Åge in particular was wearing. He was a student who had abandoned his studies and now worked at Sandviken full time. He tried to get close to me, clung to me like a rash, he got involved in countless arguments, now he wanted me, first, to listen to his complaints and backbiting and, second, to support him, and I nodded and said yes, you’re right, to this, and, you don’t say, oh really, to that, in a way that made him think he was actually my friend. We were often out with patients, when he moaned and groaned and stared at me with those insanely intense eyes of his, he was also bearded and pale, a wimp, a poor wretch, a loser, who in his own mind was a student, someone far better than the housewifely assistant nurses in the hospital or the superior psychiatric nurses, who were after him, always after him, and then all of a sudden he wanted me to visit him, we were supposed to go out together, and then, for the first time since I was a boy, I answered someone who wanted something from me with a clear and resounding no.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said.

He withdrew and began to avoid me.

Then he turned and began to accuse me of betraying him.

What sort of a creep was this?

A terrible thought occurred to me as I was on my way home that night: was he actually me? Would I become like him? An ex-student drifting around for years taking shifts until it is too late, all the options are gone and this becomes life ?

Would I be stuck there, forty years old, telling the young students who came and went on temping contracts, actually I was going to be a writer? Would you like to read a short story? It was rejected, but that’s only because the publishers are so damned conventional and daren’t take a chance on someone who takes risks. They wouldn’t recognise a genius if they had one stuffed up their jacksies. Look, by pure chance, I happen to have a copy in my bag. Yes, it’s about my life and you’ll probably recognise the odd detail about the institution I describe, but it’s not this one, actually. What was it you were studying again? Philosophy? Yes, I had a sniff at that too. But then I went for literature. I wrote about Joyce, you know. A bit about intertextuality and the like. I was told it was brilliant. But I don’t know. Feels a bit dated in some ways, yet there’s something universal about literature which … well, shines through its epoch. But take it and tell me what you think during the shift tomorrow. OK?

I wasn’t forty but twenty-two, otherwise the image fitted pretty well. I was working there for money to live on, and I lived to write, which I couldn’t do, I just talked about it. But if I couldn’t write at least I could read. For that reason I took quite a few night shifts, then I could read until four, usually undisturbed, and then clean the ward for the two last hours when I was so sleepy anyway that it was hard to concentrate. I read Stig Larsson’s The Autists and The Comedy 1, and admired the realism that was so natural, while there was always an underlying sense of menace. This menace was the capriciousness of futile existence. I read Flaubert, his Three Tales, they were by far the best thing I had read, the stories hit the bull’s eye, they touched on the essential core, particularly the one about bloodlust, the hunter who slaughters all the animals that cross his path, I understood it, it resonated with something I felt inside and knew was important, but not in a way that could be explained in rational terms, for there was nothing to explain, the narrative was everything. I read his historical novel Salammbô, it failed totally, though in a creditable way, he had invested everything into that book, used all his skill and the whole gamut of his talent, but to no avail, there was no life in it, everything was dead, the characters were wooden, the setting felt theatrical, although this artifice also had an appeal, it also brought something, not only in the way that the time it portrayed was in fact dead for ever, but also in the way the novel in its own right, as an artefact, as an artistic product, made its mark. And then I read his novel about stupidity, Bouvard and Pécuchet, which was brilliant because he didn’t find stupidity at the bottom of society, in the lower classes, but in the middle class, and showed it off in all its complacent splendour. I read Tor Ulven and relished every sentence he wrote, the unprecedented, almost inhuman, precision to them, the way he managed to make everything equally important. I talked a lot to Espen about it, about what it was that made Tor Ulven’s prose so good, what actually made it tick. There was a kind of parity between material and man, where psychology had no place, and that meant the existential drama was being played out the whole time, not only during a crisis, such as people separating or losing their father or mother or falling in love or having children, but all the time, while they drank a glass of water or cycled with a flickering light along a road in the darkness, or you simply weren’t even there, in the empty room he described with such mastery. And this wasn’t something that was said or written, it didn’t exist in the text, it was the text. The language brought it out, as we liked to say, through its modulation and figures of speech, not through direct expression but in its form. I read Jon Fosse, and it was as though a door had been opened into his books when The Boat House came out because of its simplicity, its dynamism. I read The Georgics by Claude Simon and, with Espen, admired the complexity of his style and the absence of any overriding perspective, everything was somehow at the same level, and chaotic, echoing the confusion which the world really was. But the best writing I read during this period was still Borges, I was attracted by both the adventure in it, which I knew from my childhood and didn’t know I had been longing for until I had read him, and the way the images, all simple, carried significances almost endless in their complexity.

I wrote next to nothing. I played around with a story about a man who was tied to a chair in a flat in Danmarksplass, he was tortured and in the end shot through the head, and when that happened I tried to slow time down to almost nothing, describe how the bullet penetrated the skin and bone, cartilage and fluid, into the brain and the various parts there because I loved the Latin terms, they sounded like names in the countryside, valleys and plains, but it was just nonsense, there was no point to any of it and I deleted it. Two pages, six months’ work. We went with the band to Gjøvik and recorded a demo, two of the songs were played on NRK, and we got a warm-up spot at Hulen during the Bergen International Festival. It went well, Studvest wrote that even though we weren’t on the poster we were the hit of the evening and we were given another gig there, this time a whole evening on our own. It was packed, we were too nervous, little or nothing went right, on our recording a voice from the crowd yelled, This is bloody awful! But Studvest gave us a nice write-up again. This time I wasn’t as flattered on the band’s behalf as before because the journalist who wrote it came from the same place as Hans and had even played in several bands with him. When we started talking about taking on another guitarist, his name was suggested, no one had any objections and so he turned up at a practice session, he was withdrawn but not unassuming, and immediately got into the songs. His name was Knut Olav, he had long reddish hair, an open face, a clearly defined austere almost connoisseur-like taste in music. He played the drums much better than me, probably the bass better than Pål and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he sang better than Hans. With him in the band we made a little more progress and I had someone new to test my mettle on. He said very little about himself, would never have dreamed of describing himself in rosy terms, not even indirectly, in the way that everyone pushes themselves forward without wishing to give the impression that that is what they are doing. His face was open, his eyes were open, and although he wasn’t considered introverted in social contexts, there was still something closed and secretive about him. He was one of the few who could drink through until day broke, one of those who would never go home if something was happening, a quality I shared with him, and so many was the time we were sitting in a flat somewhere in Bergen drinking coffee at eight o’clock in the morning, good and drunk, chatting about stuff we had both forgotten all about the next day. One of the conversations, however, did stick in my mind, I was rambling on about the universe, how it might open in the future, how we were getting to know more and more about it and hence about ourselves, we were made of stardust, I said, I was well into the shiny glittering festive mode the combination of alcohol and the sight of stars in the sky could transport me to when he said, it was quite the opposite, new discoveries would be inward, our future lay inwards. Nano-technology. Genetic engineering. Atomic power. All the power and all the explosiveness was to be found in the tiny, in the microscopic, not in the great, the macroscopic. I looked at him, of course he was right, we were on our way inwards. Inwards, that was the new outwards.