Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I rang the bell.

He opened the door and smiled at me.

‘Come in, Karl Ove!’ he said.

I took off my shoes, hung up my jacket and went into what turned out to be the sitting room. It was completely empty. Apart from three candles on the table, it was also completely dark.

‘Am I the first to arrive?’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ Tore said. ‘You’re the only guest.’

‘Am I?’ I said, looking around apprehensively. The table was set with a cloth, two plates and two wine glasses, which reflected the flickering candlelight.

He continued to look at me with a smile.

He was wearing a black shirt and a pair of black trousers.

Was he a homo?

Was that what this was about?

‘The food’s ready,’ he said. ‘We can eat straight away if you like.’

I nodded.

‘I brought you some red wine,’ I said and passed him the bottle. ‘Here you are.’

‘Any musical requests?’ he said.

I shook my head, glanced around discreetly to look for more signs.

‘Is David Sylvian OK? Secrets of the Beehive ?’

‘That’s a good one,’ I said and walked over to the wall. A large framed poster of XTC hung there.

‘It’s signed, see?’ Tore said from behind me. ‘I went to Swindon one summer and rang the bell at Andy Partridge’s house. He opened up and I said, hello, I’m from Norway and was wondering if you’d mind putting your signature on a few things.’

Tore laughed.

‘He said it had been quite a few years since a fan had last rung the bell. I think he thought it was amusing.’

‘Who’s that then?’ I said, pointing to a photograph of a beautiful blonde girl.

‘Her? That’s Inger, that is. My girlfriend.’

I was so relieved I laughed.

‘Isn’t she lovely?’ he said.

‘Yes, she is,’ I said. ‘Where is she now then?’

‘Out with some friends. I had to clean the house for you, you know. But let’s eat!’

We chatted all evening, presenting our lives to each other, the way you do when you are getting to know someone. We agreed we would make a series of programmes about the ten best pop albums of all time, one programme for each record, we would call the programme Popkarusellen, in the best spirit of the 60s, and try to spell out pop’s ten rules while we were at it. And we agreed we would start a band. Tore would sing and write songs, he already had several new ones lying around, I would play the drums, we could get Yngve on guitar, so all we needed was a bass player.

He kept moving between his chair and the stereo, playing new singles by bands he liked and wanted me to hear, drawing my attention to particular details, the way a melody was phrased, for example, or to an especially good line in the lyrics. Oh, that’s just great! he would say. Listen, oh shit, isn’t that fantastic? There! Did you hear?

He told me the guy who lived below them was a nutter, he stood at his window in the morning, just staring at them as they passed, and howled and roared at night. He told me he had gone to gymnas with Inger, she irritated him then, she was one of the self-righteous Young Friends of the Earth girls, but he fell head over heels in love with her afterwards. He told me he had an older brother, his parents were divorced, his mother was a wonderful person and he worshipped his grandmother, but his father was an alcoholic and off the rails. He was a teacher. I said my parents were divorced too and that my father was also a teacher and an alcoholic. We talked about them at great length. It was as if we were brothers. I felt huge warmth for him.

He got up and went into the bedroom and returned with a manuscript in his hands.

‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘The novel. I finished it yesterday. But I was wondering if you’d mind reading it before I send it in.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’d be more than happy to.’

He passed it to me. I glanced at the title page.

Takk’s Cube

Novel

Tore Renberg

At that moment the door opened and the girl from the photograph walked in. Her cheeks were red from the cold or perhaps it was the steep incline that had produced the flush.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She came in and shook my hand, settled down in the chair beside Tore and tucked her legs beneath her.

‘So I’ve finally got to meet this Karl Ove!’ she said. ‘How tall you are!’

‘It’s us who are so short,’ Tore said. ‘We come from short stock, we two do.’

They laughed.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry. Is there any food left?’

‘There’s a bit in the kitchen,’ Tore said.

She stood up and went in.

‘What’s the time actually?’ I said.

‘Half past twelve,’ Tore said.

‘Then it’s probably time I wended my way homewards,’ I said and got up. ‘Thanks for everything!’

‘My pleasure,’ Tore said, accompanying me to the hall. ‘How long do you reckon it’ll take you to read it?’

‘I’ll do it over the weekend. Drop by on Monday and we can talk about it.’

‘Great!’

Inger came to the hall, I said goodbye, closed the door behind me and set off downhill towards the town.

His novel was almost completely without action, it had no plot, everything revolved around the main character, called Takk, and his lonely humdrum life in a flat. It wasn’t bad but so influenced by Beckett that it seemed unoriginal. It had nothing to do with Tore, none of his charisma and temperament was evident in the manuscript. When we met to discuss his novel I said nothing of this directly, I didn’t want to offend or hurt him, but I implied it and he wasn’t unfamiliar with this reaction, it turned out. He still sent the manuscript in unchanged to the publisher and received positive feedback from the reader.

My first book review came out in Vinduet and not long after I was contacted by Morgenbladet, who asked if I would be interested in reviewing books for their newspaper. I was. This was not altogether positive, for the path this was indicating was that of a critic, not a writer, and I almost felt it would have been better to do something else because as a book reviewer I looked defeat in the face every time I wrote. I could write about literature, could see whether it was good or bad and describe in which ways, but I couldn’t move beyond that. There was a wall of glass between me and literature: I saw it, but I was separate.

Kjartan came up to Student Radio a couple of times to ask if I fancied a coffee, and there was something so slow about his movements, he could barely drag himself forward, that the others in the office asked who on earth that was. They were all young, apart from perhaps the caretakers, so this grey-haired tousled man with such a slow gait stood out. He had an exam in May but couldn’t study any more, he said. He was considering giving up. I said he mustn’t, he just had to hold on, even if he didn’t study he knew so much he would be fine. The exam was important, I said, and if he didn’t take it the whole year would have been wasted. He looked at me and said I might be right. He asked me if I would like to visit him at his flat one afternoon, he had some poems I could have a look at if I wanted. Of course I would, I answered, and one Saturday afternoon I went there with Gunvor. Although he didn’t live far from me I hadn’t been there before. The flat was on the ground floor, but there was something cellar-like about it. The curtains were drawn, we sat drinking coffee in the semi-darkness, Gunvor kept the conversation going and I saw how much Kjartan liked her and somehow became lighter in her company. But not by much, the heaviness in him was still palpable. As we left I wondered if gravitational force had a stronger effect on him or whether the earth had a stronger pull, and that was why his movements were so slow, he had to tug his foot free from the ground, yank the hand holding his coffee cup from the table. Kjartan, the man who wrote so much about air and skies, light and suns, the man who lived in the weightless realm of the spirit.