Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I wrote a short story about a man who died, I told it in the first-person singular, he was stretchered into the ambulance just below the underpass by Danmarksplass, his heart had stopped but his story went on, to the pathologist, in the coffin, in the cemetery, in the ground. Three months’ work, two and a half pages, meaningless, deleted. One evening the police raided the flat next door, their kitchen window faced my wall, two metres away, the following day it was in Bergensavisen, they had found a stash of weapons and fifty thousand kroner in cash. I took the newspaper down to Espen, we laughed in shock; only a few nights ago we had come home drunk, gone into my kitchen to get a cup of coffee, shadows were moving behind the curtain on the other side, I opened the window and threw a liver-paste can in their direction, it hit the glass pane with a clatter, we shrank out of sight, nothing happened except that the curtain was pulled aside and a guy peered out. So they were bank robbers!

Mostly though I worked at Sandviken Hospital. Sometimes it felt as if my whole life was being lived there. The people I worked with were low status, I needed that. The money I earned, I needed. And perhaps doing something else, something practical, something outside the university, gave me a different self-image, which I needed to keep myself going: the real purpose of what I was doing was writing. Everything converged on that fact, or was supposed to.

One Saturday evening I was alone at work, Mary phoned not long before the night shift was about to begin.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m here all alone and I thought you might like to pop by after work. We could share a bottle of wine or something.’

I could feel the heat rising. What was she saying?

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I have to go home.’

‘I’ll be frank with you, Karl Ove,’ she said. ‘I want to sleep with you. I know you have a girlfriend. But no one will find out. It’s absolutely safe. I promise. Once. Then never again.’

‘But I can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s no good. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re absolutely sure? This is absolutely definite?’

Oh, how I wanted to shout YES, PLEASE! and run down to her.

‘Yes, I can’t. It’s no good.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m stupid for asking so directly. I don’t want you to think I’m stupid.’

‘No, no, no, are you crazy?’ I said. ‘That’s the last thing I would think.’

‘You promise me?’

‘Yes.’

‘See you tomorrow then. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

The morning came, I was nervous about meeting her again, but there wasn’t any indication in her behaviour that anything special had happened, she was exactly as she had always been, perhaps a touch more reserved towards me, that was all.

I thought about her offer every single day for several weeks. In a way I was glad I hadn’t succumbed to temptation, I didn’t want to cheat on Gunvor and, provided I was sober, that wasn’t difficult. In another way, when I thought about it, I burned with regret, because if I had been totally free I would have taken her up on it. But I couldn’t. Next year I would be moving to Iceland with Gunvor, she would take her history exam at the university there, I would write full time. Until then I worked as much as I could at Sandviken. Wiped excrement off the walls, restrained residents with psychotic fits, was hit in the face by one, went for endless walks inside the hospital grounds or just outside, unless we were driving around the district in one of their minibuses.

Hans, who had become the editor of Studvest, asked if I was interested in reviewing books for him. I was, and I did. I slaughtered Atle Næss’s novel about Dante and wrote a whole page about American Psycho, which also had a connection with Dante in that the protagonist reads some graffiti on a wall travelling through town in a taxi: LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE. The gates of hell here, now, Jesus, that was good. What a novel it was. What a novel. Hans asked if I would like to write a Christmas short story for them. I said yes, but I didn’t manage it, I got no further than a few lines about a guy on his way home in a bus for Christmas. I had been planning a kidnapping, someone being bound and tortured on Christmas Eve, but it was just rubbish, like everything else I did. I read Paul Auster, the New York trilogy, and thought, I could never do that. I made pizza for the patients one Saturday evening, it felt as though I was demeaning them as I did so. I went home to mum’s for Christmas, sorted out a tenant for my flat while I was away in Iceland, one of Yngve’s Arendal friends, went into Bergen and packed two full suitcases, said bye to Espen, caught the plane to Fornebu, then to Kastrup and from there to Keflavik, where the plane landed in the late evening. The darkness was dense and impenetrable, I saw nothing of the countryside I passed through an hour later in the airport bus, and I got no impression of the city I entered, which was Rekyavik. I jumped into a taxi, showed the driver the note Gunvor had given me with the street name on, Gardastræti, it was, we went past a lake, up a hill, the houses were big, like monuments, we stopped in front of one of them.

So this was where we were going to live. In an elegant townhouse in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

I paid, he took out the cases and passed them to me, I walked through the gates and up the path to the house. The door to the basement flat opened, there was Gunvor, beaming. We embraced, I could feel how I had missed her. She had been here a week and showed me round our flat, it was large and impersonally furnished but it was ours, this is where we would live for the next six months. We went to bed and afterwards we wanted to take a shower, but the water smelled like rotten eggs, I couldn’t stand it, she said all the water smelled like this, it came from the volcanic sub-surface, the terrible smell was sulphur.

A few weeks later I loved the smell, as I loved everything about Rekyavik and our life there. After she had gone to university in the morning I had a long breakfast alone before either walking into town and sitting in a café with my notebook or a novel, struck every day by the beauty of the people there, the girls were unbelievably beautiful, I had never seen girls like them, or I took my swimming things and walked up to the local outdoor pool, where I swam a thousand metres under the open sky, in rain as well as snow or sleet, before slowly lowering myself into a heitapottur, as it was called, the Icelanders’ small hot pools. Afterwards I went home to write. In the evenings we watched TV, I loved that too, the language was so similar to Norwegian, it was so close in tone and sound, but completely incomprehensible. Gunvor made friends at the university, mostly other foreign students, and she acquired an Icelandic ‘family’ friend, Einar, who was not only at our service twenty-four hours a day but also popped in at least four evenings a week. He had big black bags under his eyes, an incipient paunch, he worked and drank too much, but not so much that he didn’t have time to drop by and ask if there was anything he could do to help. I never understood what he wanted, he never got anything back for all his efforts, at least not as far as I could see, and I wasn’t too happy about that, he was like a leech, yet he was the only person I could drink with, beggars can’t be choosers, I thought, and hung out in Icelandic bars with him, drunk and silent.

Through one of Gunvor’s foreign friends I got to know an American of my age, he was interested in music, said he penned his own songs, was enthusiastic and naïve, we talked about forming a band, he knew an Icelander who played, one evening we went out to see him, he lived in a damp cellar, there was something nineteenth century about it, he coughed like a miner and was just as thin, and his wife smoked and carried around a baby and shouted at him, he just shrugged and took us into an even smaller room, crammed with all sorts of useless junk, where we could play, but first of all, he said in English, first we have to smoke. The joint did the rounds, he took out his guitar, Eric, as my American friend was called, took out his and I was given a bucket to use as drums. It was a very ordinary bucket, red with a white handle, I turned it upside down, put it between my legs and started tapping and thumping on the bucket while the other two picked out a bluesy tune on their guitars and the baby screamed its lungs out next door.