Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Who was that?’ Gunvor shouted from the bedroom.

‘No one,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you going to sleep?’

‘Yes, but the phone woke me up.’

Now and then there were voices at the other end when we picked up the phone although no one had called or dialled a number. It was strange, but there were embassies everywhere and right below us, over the road, was the Russian embassy, and it seemed to me the telephone cables in the district were under such heavy surveillance that the Icelandic authorities had lost sight of which were which. The country had a population of only 250,000 people, it was impossible for them to be up to date in all the fields a modern state requires.

I switched off the lamps in the hall and the sitting room, making the desk with the computer a little island of light in the darkness, put on my headset and started to write.

One short story was about a man in a swimming hall, the prosthesis again made an appearance, propped up against the changing-room wall, but I was unable to develop it from there into something that wasn’t vacuous. The descriptions were good, I had spent several weeks on them, but they weren’t enough. One and a half pages, one and a half months. I looked at it, put it to one side, looked at the next, a man with a camera walking around town taking photos, at the margin of one picture he sees someone he knows but hasn’t seen in ten years or so and is reminded of the summer they had spent together when the man’s girlfriend had drowned. She had swum a few metres from the quay, at the bottom of the sea there were bits of masonry and reinforced steel from work on the quay two years before, and she had dived down, perhaps three metres below the surface, and tied her hands to the metal. That was how they found her, with her hands bound, her hair drifting to and fro in the currents, all as a storm loomed over the island, with the sky black and vast.

Three pages, two months’ work.

The problem with it was that I didn’t believe it, a woman drowning herself, how could you make that seem realistic?

I put it aside and opened a new file, took out my notebook and flipped through the ideas I had jotted down, decided on the following: man with a suitcase in a train compartment.

The next morning I had finished it. Ten pages. I was happy, not because it was good but because it was finished and because there were so many pages. Over the last two years I had written in all somewhere between fifteen and twenty pages. To write ten pages in a night was amazing. Perhaps there might be enough for a collection of short stories by summer after all?

The next weekend we went to the Vestmanna archipelago, caught the bus down to the south coast and from there a boat over the sea. We went on deck and took pictures of each other, Gunvor with the hood of her blue raincoat over her head and raindrops on her glasses, me with one hand on the railing, the other pointing to the endless ocean like Leiv Eiriksson.

Then the islands appeared, they came out of nowhere and were a powerful sight, tall steep rocks, clad on one side with mist-shimmering grass, where sheep were grazing, up there they hung like little clouds, on the other, steep and without any vegetation, the rocks plunged vertically to the sea and birds were perched everywhere, on all the ledges and crags.

The ferry glided slowly between two of the rocks, inside a natural harbour opened and we went ashore, left our things at the guest house and walked around the island, which was tiny. The houses nestled just beneath the volcano, the top ones were covered with lava after an eruption in the early 1970s. We walked up to the top of the volcano, where the ash was still hot.

‘I wouldn’t mind living here,’ I said as we strolled back down to the guest house. ‘That would be fantastic.’

‘What would you do?’

I shrugged. ‘Just be here. On an island in the middle of the sea. What more could you ask for?’

She laughed. ‘Quite a lot, basically.’

But I meant it. Renting a house here, in the middle of the sea, surrounded by shimmering grass, beneath a still-hot volcano. I could imagine that.

One evening Gunvor called Einar, he worked with computers, now we were having problems with ours, would he mind coming to have a look? He didn’t waste any time, an hour later he was sitting in front of the computer in our sitting room and working. Gunvor took him some tea, I asked him what the prognosis was, he said it wasn’t a big problem, he would soon have it cracked. He stayed a while, we chatted about this and that, he was interested in everything we did but never said much about himself. I knew he lived on his own, that he worked a lot, that he knew half of Rekyavik, at least judging by all the people he exchanged a few words with on a night out.

‘When’s your brother coming?’ he said, standing in the hall and putting on his jacket.

‘Next week,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you could take us out and show us the town?’

‘Consider it done,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it with pleasure. Just give me a ring.’

And then he was gone.

Yngve came with his friend Bendik and Åse, Bendik’s girlfriend. I met them at the airport, happy that they were actually coming to visit me, happy they were going to stay with us, and horrified at the same time, I had nothing to contribute, nothing to say, and they were going to be here for close on a week.

I made dinner, Bendik said it was really good, I looked down and blushed, everyone noticed. They rented a car, we drove to the Geysir district, Bendik had brought some eggs with him, which he boiled in a tiny pool of hot water. The geyser itself was dead, there were no more eruptions, but jets of water could still burst forth, if you poured in enough green soap they would spout up as in the old days. But that was something you only did on special occasions, as I was informed, during state visits and the like, so we had to make do with its smaller brother, Strokkur, which erupted every fifteen minutes or so. After the eruption the water lay still, it looked like any water, a shiny surface reflecting the greyish sky, but not long afterwards the ground beneath us began to roar and soon the water rose, formed a dome, which then suddenly exploded into an enormous pillar of water. Steam and water everywhere in the air around us. Everywhere on the ground there were small simmering bubbling springs. The terrain was a vegetationless wasteland.

I could have watched Strokkur all day, but soon we were off again, searching for a pool where we could swim. The idea of it appealed to everyone, bathing in scalding-hot steaming water outdoors in the middle of a wilderness. We saw some steam a few kilometres away, drove towards it, there was a pool, we made do with that, me silent, serious, tormented by the thought that I was silent and serious. Especially together with Bendik, who chatted and laughed non-stop and was the type to say whatever came into his mind. You’re so quiet, Karl Ove, what’s up, have you filled your pants or what? They were like beings possessed when they discovered how good the shops in Rekyavik were, bought trainers, jeans, old tracksuit tops, jackets and CDs of Icelandic bands, which were the new big thing. They also liked the bars, we went out every night, to the first one with Einar, who was much more passive and reticent if Yngve, Bendik and Åse were there than he usually was with us, when he tended to take the initiative. After a few hours we were propping up some bar drinking schnapps and Einar said he would have to leave us, he had to meet someone, have a good time anyway, see you soon, he said to me and slipped into the night. I felt a little sorry for him, Gunvor and I were, it seemed, his arena, a place where he could be important, however I couldn’t make this add up, he clearly knew lots of people in lots of places, how could he possibly need us ? But a few minutes after he had gone I had forgotten all about him, the alcohol was having an effect, I was thawing, started to chat, I was getting higher and higher as the night wore on, but at a certain point it turned, I felt a need to destroy something, hit someone, I hated everything, myself and my whole damned life, but I said nothing, did nothing, just stood there drinking, more and more out of my skull, and when I arrived home I got it into my head that I should tell Gunvor what I had been thinking for the last year, I was completely addle-brained, saw nothing of what I had around me, I was obsessed with one idea, suddenly and for no reason: to tell the truth.