Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

A few weeks later he was readmitted.

At the end of April I went to Prague with Espen. His debut book had been well received and he had joined the editorial team at Vagant in Oslo. He discussed literature with Henning Hagerup and Bjørn Aagenæs, Arve Kleiva and Pål Nordheim, went with them for a beer after meetings and had got to know many authors, among them the novelist Jonny Berg and the poet Rune Christiansen. Even though Espen was Espen and I had known him for more than three years, I felt so inferior to him for the entire trip. He was a writer; I wasn’t. If he looked left, I looked left, to see what he found so interesting. I was so puppy-like I was destroying our friendship. In Berlin we had a few hours free before the train left, Espen bought a newspaper and discovered that a Romanian poet was going to be at the Romanian embassy, his poems had just been translated into German. Although I knew no German, and a reading would therefore have been utterly meaningless to me, I didn’t say no, can we do something else, as I didn’t want to obstruct his need for poetry.

We found the embassy and went in. A waiter stood there wearing white gloves and holding a tray of aperitifs, men in suits and women in elegant costumes mingled. Espen and I, who were not sweet-scented after a night on the train and a day in the streets, nor especially spruce, to put it mildly, caused a stir when we appeared. People sent us sidelong glances, and I thought, thank God Espen is a poet, at least we could say that, if anyone were to enquire what we were doing here. A Norwegian poet, which would explain our clothes and the somewhat sharp odour we exuded.

We stood in the middle of the floor without saying a word to anyone.

‘At least I can get a sense of the language,’ I said. ‘The tone and the timbre and the rhythm.’

‘Yes,’ Espen said.

The doors opened and we entered an auditorium full of chairs with a stage at one end, on which stood a table with three microphones.

Espen walked along the front row, I followed, we sat down in the middle, taking the best seats. The audience was small, numbering perhaps twenty. Three people, two men and a woman, took seats behind the microphones. The woman talked. People laughed and chuckled every now and then. I didn’t understand a word. Then the man I assumed was the poet began to read, while the man next to him sat with his arms crossed and his eyes half-closed, listening.

The poet peered down at the book lying on the table and then he looked straight at me. Not just the once, though, no, he kept his eyes fixed on me. Accordingly I had to nod as if I were deriving enormous benefit from his reading, and to flash the occasional smile. Why he had picked on me was impossible to say, it might have been because of my central position, it might have been because we looked so different from the others.

To my horror, Espen let out a snore. I glanced at him. He was sitting with his arms crossed, his head at a slight angle and his eyes closed. His chest rose and sank at regular intervals.

I nudged him discreetly and he sat up with a start.

The reciter of the poem eyed us as one German word tumbled from his mouth after another.

I smiled and nodded.

Espen went back to sleep.

I nudged him again. This time he didn’t move, just opened his eyes, blinked and was gone again.

So all the responsibility rested on me. If he was asleep I would have to appear doubly interested. I opened my eyes wide, studied the ceiling pensively, narrowed my eyes, that was interesting, nodded to myself, stared straight at the poet with a look of acknowledgement.

All to a stream of unintelligible words and sounds.

At last he stopped. The woman presenter thanked him, that much I understood, and added something, then everyone stood up. I looked at Espen, who was conscious now.

‘What did she say?’ I said.

‘It’s the interval,’ Espen said. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’

‘Yes,’ I said and headed for the exit with a determined step because the poet looked like he was interested in a chat. I turned my head, nodded and hurried out. On the other side of the door the waiters were standing ready with their trays, which we nearly bumped into as at last we made our getaway.

I had lost all sense of proportion, that was what had happened, for the inferiority I felt became only stronger when we arrived in Prague and wandered around its beautiful streets. We didn’t see the same things, we didn’t even look for the same things, I was just your standard stupid guy who didn’t notice anything and wasn’t interested in anything. Espen wanted to see the Jewish cemetery; I didn’t know there was one. We went there, strolled around, afterwards he asked me if I had seen all the slips of paper on the gravestones, I shook my head, I hadn’t, how could you not have seen them? he riposted, I don’t know, I answered. He wanted to see houses some famous architects had designed in the 1920s, we went there, I just saw houses. We went into a church, he looked left, I looked left, he looked right, I looked right. He sat down on a bench and bowed his head. Why did he bow his head? I wondered, panic-stricken. Is he meditating? Why is he meditating? Is it the atmosphere here? Can he feel the presence of something hallowed or sacred? Is there anything special about this church? Has Kafka been here perhaps? No, he was a Jew. It must be the atmosphere. The sanctity. Some existential force on this very spot.

After a while Espen looked up again and we left. On the way I asked, as casually as possible, what he had been doing inside the church.

‘Were you meditating or what?’

‘No, I was asleep. Obviously I haven’t had enough sleep over the last few days.’

On our return to Oslo I stayed with him for two nights, we went out both times, on the second we went to Barbeint, I went with a girl back to her place, we made love in her bedsit, it was just sad, I came straight away, I wasn’t there for much more than half an hour. The day afterwards I couldn’t remember her name or what she looked like, only that she’d had a poetry book by Øyvind Berg on her bedside table. On the train the following afternoon I decided to finish it with Gunvor. It was no good any more, nothing was any good any more, I called her from a phone box at the train station, said I had done something I shouldn’t have and we had to talk. I went to her place. Fortunately no one else was there. She made some tea, we went to the sitting room. I cried when I said we had grown apart, what we had belonged to the past, not the future. She cried too, four years of our lives were over. Afterwards we laughed. For the first time in ages we were open with each other and chatted for several hours. I felt guilty about my behaviour, as I was actually relieved the relationship was over and I was therefore crying crocodile tears. Yet they weren’t, the situation itself, the intimacy of it, wasn’t insincere, and that was what had made me cry. Gunvor couldn’t have been aware of the distinction, couldn’t have known the tears were masking something, and in her eyes it must have looked as if I really was sad it was over.

Late that night I got up to go. We embraced, stood in the hall holding each other tight, and then I went down the stairs, my eyes blind with tears. I had betrayed her, but now it was over and the guilt I felt was easier to bear as it only affected myself.

In the summer nothing much happened at Student Radio, there were very few students in town, and Yngve was in Arendal, so I was mostly alone, spending my time either at the radio station or at home, I tried to write, but it didn’t amount to much, a short story entitled Zoom about a man who met a woman, she went back to his place, her poses became more and more pornographic, and that was it, she went home, he heard her footsteps fade in the street. Oh, it was nothing, an idea, a piece of stupidity. I showed it to Tore when he came back to Bergen, he said it was good, I had created a good character, but perhaps I should develop him further and also the plot? I couldn’t, I had stretched myself to the limit, it wouldn’t get any better. Every sentence was meticulously constructed, which meant every word was important but only within the internal system that constituted the story, because for the reader, in this case Tore, it didn’t matter whether I wrote ‘clutching claw-like fingers’ or ‘scratching cloaca finger movements’ or any of the sentences I had shaped with such care.