Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The band started. They were good and playing in front of their home audience, the gig was amazing. After the performance I went backstage. I was stopped, I said I was from the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen and in fact had arranged to meet Bragi here. The guard came back, it was OK, I walked down the aisle, entered a crowded room, everyone was excited and in high spirits, the atmosphere was bordering on wild, Bragi was perched on the edge of a chair and waved me over. He introduced me to the drummer, said something to him in Icelandic, I heard the word Klassekampen and they both burst into laughter.

I had nothing to say, nevertheless I was happy, Bragi handed me a beer, I sat looking at the motley and outré selection of people around me, particularly at Björk of course, it was hard to take your eyes off her. The Sugar Cubes were one of the best bands in the world at the moment, right now the room I was in constituted the epicentre of rock music. I was already looking forward to telling Yngve.

Bragi got up.

‘We’re off to a party. Want to come?’

I nodded.

‘Just stick with me,’ he said.

I did. I stayed close to him amid the crowd of musicians and artists walking through the town down to the harbour, where Björk had her flat. It was on two floors with a broad staircase in the middle and was soon full. Björk herself sat on the floor by a ghetto blaster, surrounded by CDs, playing one song after the other. I was so tired that I could hardly stand. I slumped at the top of the staircase, leaned my head against the banisters and closed my eyes. But I didn’t sleep, something was rising from within, from my stomach and up through my chest, soon it would be in my throat, I jumped to my feet, took the last steps to the first floor, ran to the bathroom, opened the door, bent over the toilet bowl and spewed up a magnificent yellow and orange cascade that splashed everywhere.

Some weeks later mum visited us, we went to Gullfoss and Geysir and Thingvellir with her one day, another down to the south coast, where the sand was black and there were immense solitary rocks standing in the sea.

We went to an art museum together, the walls and floor were completely white, and with the sun flooding in through large roof windows the light inside was almost aflame. Through the windows I could see the sea, blue with white crests of waves and breakers, a large white-clad mountain rose in the distance. In these surroundings, in this bright white room on the edge of the world, the art was lost.

Was art only an inner phenomenon? Something that moved within us and between us, all that which we couldn’t see but marked us, indeed, which was us ? Was this the function of landscape painting, portraits, sculptures, to draw the external world, so essentially alien to us, into our inner world?

When she went home I accompanied her to Keflavik Airport and said my goodbyes there, on the way back I read Stephen Hero by James Joyce, the first book I had bought by him and quite evidently his weakest, it was also unfinished and not meant for publication, but there was something to learn from it too, how he slowly transformed the autobiographical element, which was obvious here, into something else in Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus was a strong young character, summoned home to Dublin by his father’s telegram, ‘Mother dying come home,’ but in the novel — Ulysses, that is — this arrogant brilliant young man was perhaps first and foremost a place where things happened. In Stephen Hero he was a person, distinct from the world around him, in Ulysses the world flowed through him and the story, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, everything moved through him and the same was true of the little Jew, Bloom, except that in him it wasn’t the highest and the best that was in motion, that flowed, but rather the town with its people and phenomena, advertising slogans and newspaper articles, he thought about what everyone else thought about, he was Everyman. There was, however, another level above them, namely the place whence they were observed, which was the language and all the insights and prejudices the various forms of language embraced, almost in secret.

But in Stephen Hero there was none of this, there was just the character, Stephen, in other words, Joyce, set apart from the world, which was described but never integrated. This development culminated, from what I could infer, in his final book, Finnegans Wake, which I had bought but hadn’t read, where the characters had disappeared into the language, which lived its own everyman life.

I jumped off the bus at the stop between the university and the landmark building Perlan and walked the last part home through the embassy district. It was raining and misty, I felt empty, like a nobody, as a consequence of saying goodbye perhaps. In the flat Gunvor was huddled up in the armchair reading with a cup of tea on the table beside her.

I hung up my coat and went in.

‘What are you reading?’ I said.

‘About the famine in Ireland,’ she said. ‘The Great Famine. Did she get off OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was nice having her here.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘What are you going to do this evening?’

I shrugged.

She was wearing a shirt with nothing underneath and tracksuit bottoms. I wanted her and leaned over her. It had been a long time, it had bothered me, not for my part because I just wanted to have some peace, but for hers, she might have thought there was something wrong, that I didn’t want her.

But there wasn’t. I just wanted space around me, and I had that here, walking alone around an unfamiliar town during the day, swimming and sitting in cafés, and during the night writing at my desk while she slept in the bedroom, but even this space was too small, even there she came too close.

I was happy therefore my desire was so great that everything else was swept away. Then I couldn’t understand why I had been abstaining, there was nothing I wanted more, and afterwards we were close again, as we had been when we first got together, then it had been only us two and not a word had to be said for it to be like this. Everything lay in the attraction and the pleasure, it looked after itself. But without it the distance had to be broken down or counteracted with words or actions, and if I didn’t want to or didn’t have enough strength to sustain my desire we were just two young people living together, sharing nothing more than age and culture.

She had never done anything bad to me. She had been good for me, always wanting the best for me. She had no defects, flaws or shortcomings. She wanted only good and she did good. The defects, flaws and shortcomings were all mine. I tried as hard as I could to hide them from her, and I was usually successful, but it was always there, inside me, a shadow I cast, and it gave me a bad conscience. I wanted to be out of this, I wanted to be alone, then it would disappear as it wouldn’t affect anyone else, I would be left with it. But to be alone I would have to leave her, finish what she had invested so much in and where, in a way, I too had invested so much. She often told me she loved me, and I didn’t want to hurt her, not for anything in the world, I didn’t want to turn away from her, from someone who loved me so much.

Everything was good again this evening though. I had a shower, walked barefoot over the wall-to-wall carpeting, a feeling I liked very much, she watched TV, I sat down beside her, laid my legs across hers, she did simultaneous translation whenever I asked, but it didn’t happen often, nearly all of the pictures on the Icelandic news programme were of fishing boats or fish auctions.

She went to bed, I switched on my computer and began to write. The telephone rang, I answered, there was silence at the other end.