Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Gunvor laughed so much she cried when I told her.

We visited the farm where she had worked, they received her warmly, were shy with me, they spoke very little English, they said, but later that evening, driving to the community centre to take part in a big do with all the others in the district, they thawed. I ate ram’s testicles, buried shark and other oddities, all washed down with their schnapps, and their reticence and shyness, which I had found so liberating as I was the same myself, disappeared in a heartbeat, suddenly, on all sides, the atmosphere soared to the rafters, soon I was sitting there arm in arm with my neighbours swinging from side to side belting out something similar to what they were singing. Everyone was drunk, everyone was happy, it was like me a hundred times over, and when the party was over, in the early hours, everyone drove home drunk. In our case, the cows had to be seen to, so after a whisky in the kitchen with the farmer I followed him into the cowshed. While he staggered around with the muck rake groping for the cow fodder and straw bales he told me to clean their teeth, a suggestion he found so amusing that he had to sit down so as not to topple over with laughter.

The wind was blowing outside. In Iceland the wind always blew, it gusted off the sea day and night. Once I was on my way to Nordens Hus to read some Norwegian newspapers when I saw an old lady blown over. I wrote three short stories and filled a whole notebook with comments on them and what I wanted to achieve in my writing. At night I dreamed about dad, more frightened asleep than ever I was awake. Gunvor’s girlfriends were boring, I avoided them as often as I could. A Swedish student, maybe ten years older than Gunvor and me, invited Einar and us to dinner, he was friendly, shy, had a big heart, lived in a fantastic flat and served a gourmet dinner he must have spent all day preparing. We invited him back to ours, I found a recipe for lamb which looked delicious, Gunvor’s farm had given us a bag of lamb and a bag of horsemeat. They looked the same, I took a risk, I made a mistake, and I didn’t even get close to the picture of the meal the recipe showed with the joint of meat elegantly arranged with mushrooms, onions and carrots, the meat slid off the bones, so what they got, our guests that Saturday evening, gathered around the table in our little kitchen, was horsemeat soup. Oh, it tasted absolutely dreadful, salty and horrible. But the Swede, Carl, nodded and smiled and said what I had made was very good. Einar, who was Icelandic enough to know this was horsemeat, said nothing, just smiled his inscrutable though not unfriendly smile. I began to get the picture, he had no friends. We were his friends.

We got drunk and went out. I had wondered about Carl all evening, there was something refined about him, even though he looked like a farmer, refined and perhaps a little feminine, and then there was the way he referred to his partner back home in Sweden, never by name, nevertheless something about the way he did this made me think the partner might have been a man.

I explained this to Gunvor and Einar, we were standing in a packed bar, the music was loud, I had to raise my voice to be heard.

‘I think Carl might be a homo!’ I shouted.

Einar stared at me with frenetic eyes. Then past me.

I turned. Oh my God, there was Carl.

He was crying.

And then he dashed out.

‘Karl Ove,’ Gunvor said. ‘Run after him and apologise.’

I did as she said. Out into the street into the hellish wind, a look up, nothing, a look down, there was Carl hurrying home.

I ran after him and caught him up.

‘Listen, Carl. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But that was what was on my mind and it just came out. I’m pretty drunk, you see. But I didn’t mean to hurt you. I think you’re a great guy anyway. I like you a lot. Gunvor also likes you a lot.’

He looked at me and sniffled.

‘I wanted to keep it a secret here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want anyone to know.’

‘But what does it matter!’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go back to the others. We won’t ever need to talk about it again. Come on. Let’s have another G and T!’

He dried his tears and joined me. This was the first gay man I had known. Afterwards he began to mention his partner by name, who some weeks later came to Rekyavik, they invited us to dinner and it turned out he was fully informed about us and our lives there. Carl had bigged us up, in his partner’s eyes we were people of importance and I — so I understood — was a bit of an enigma. I had never said what I was doing in Iceland, not even when Einar or Carl had asked me directly. I lazed around, swam, read and at night, I had said once, I sat in front of the oven watching the bread I was baking slowly go golden brown and crispy. For me it was the other way around: for me Carl and his partner were the enigma, in their similarity, because how was it possible to look for the same? To want the same? To love the same?

For some reason, not long after, I ended up in a gay club. I had been boozing with Einar and, as so often, I wandered around town after we had said goodbye searching for places that were still open, wanting something to happen, anything actually, and that night I came across a cellar club, I went down, at first I didn’t notice anything unusual, bought a drink and scanned the room, they were playing Bronski Beat, lots of people were dancing, I went to the toilet for a pee, and there, on the cubicle wall was a poster of an enormous dick. I was so drunk it felt as if I was in the middle of a dream, I went out, and yes, there were only men. Back on the street, my head bowed into the wind, someone called to me. I turned. A man of around thirty came running towards me.

‘Sean!’ he said. ‘Is it really you?’

‘My name’s not Sean,’ I said.

‘Stop messing around,’ he said. ‘Where have you been? I never thought I’d see you again!’

‘My name’s Karl,’ I said.

‘Why do you say that?’ he said.

‘Look,’ I said, taking my passport from my inside pocket. ‘Karl. Do you see?’

‘You’re Sean,’ he said. ‘You’re Sean. You’re Sean.’

He took a few steps back as he scrutinised me, then turned on his heel and disappeared down a side street.

I shook my head, continued through the lifeless wind-blown streets, let myself in, got into bed beside Gunvor, who would soon have to get up, and crashed out as if I had been shot in the head.

From the first moment we decided to move to Iceland I had thought about writing articles there and selling them to newspapers. When it transpired that Einar knew Bragi, the bass player in the Sugar Cubes, I didn’t hesitate, I managed to get an interview arranged and went to his house. He’d just had a child, whom he showed me, we sat down at the kitchen table, I asked my questions, he answered, and as they had just released a new record, which perhaps wasn’t as good as their debut album, although better than the follow-up, and with an incredibly catchy song as the opener, ‘Hit’, there was no problem getting a newspaper to buy it. Bragi smiled when I told him which newspaper: Klassekampen. It must have sounded absolutely crazy to a foreigner’s ears. As I was about to leave he said they were going to be playing in Rekyavik soon and I absolutely had to come backstage and see them afterwards.

Gunvor was at the farm then, so I went alone, got so drunk on schnapps that before the gig I was rocking to and fro on one of the enormous lighting stands, it was highly dangerous, but I didn’t give it a thought. A guard ran over and told me to stop, yes, sir, I said and left. If it had been Norway I would have been manhandled and slung onto the street, but here people were used to all sorts; because of an earlier ban on beer almost everyone drank schnapps and when beer was finally introduced the habit was so established that beer was almost exotic. What was more, half a litre cost a small fortune. Schnapps was what they drank, so it wasn’t just me staggering around town. At night the lower part of the main street was packed with young people. The first time I saw it I wondered what on earth was going on, Gunvor told me it was always like this here. They stood elbow to elbow and were drunk. Iceland was full of such idiosyncrasies, which I saw but didn’t understand.