Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Once when I went there they were in the process of frying a smoked mackerel for dinner.

Another time, sitting on the sofa, I happened to comment that I needed a haircut, Tore, never short of brainwaves, suggested Inger could do it. She cuts my hair, you know, he said. Or shaves my head with an electric razor.

‘Hey, Inger. Can you cut Karl Ove’s hair?’

She came out and tilted her head, a little embarrassed.

‘Yes, I could do,’ she said.

‘There you are then!’ Tore said. ‘Now it’s done!’

I was sceptical, but he was so determined that I got up and went with Inger to the bathroom. She pulled out a chair, I sat down, she wrapped a towel around my shoulders, ran a comb a couple of times through my hair.

Our eyes met in the mirror.

She smiled and looked down.

‘How do you want it?’ she said.

‘Cut it all off,’ I said.

‘OK,’ she said.

She placed a hand on my head and our eyes met again.

This time it was my turn to blush.

Slowly the shaver began to buzz its way across my head, from the back of my neck all the way over. She moved around me, leaned against my side with her thigh, stretched to complete the run of the shaver and pressed a breast against my shoulder. She tried to hide her embarrassment behind a closed professional expression, but an occasional flush flitted across her cheeks, and I could feel her enormous relief when she had finally finished and was able to take the towel off my shoulders.

‘There we go,’ she said. ‘Is that OK for you?’

‘It’s great. Thank you very much!’

‘I should produce a little mirror now so that you can see the back of your neck, but I’m afraid I haven’t got one.’

‘I’m sure there isn’t any hair there anyway,’ I said and got up, running my hand through my centimetre-short hair.

I had a feeling she would give Tore the benefit of her opinion as soon as I had gone, how could he have put her in such a difficult spot? Why on earth should she cut his friend’s hair?

In the middle of September I met Gunvor for the first time since I had finished with her. We bumped into each other in Nøstet, very close to my bedsit, she was going to Verftet to meet someone in a café, it was Sunday morning, the weather was fantastic.

I asked her how things were, she said fine.

‘How about you?’ she said.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘That’s good!’ she said. ‘We’ll bump into each other again, I’m sure. Bye!’

‘Bye,’ I said and walked down the hill while she carried straight on. When I went into my room, pitch black after all the light outside, I cried. Lay down on the bed and tried to sleep, in vain, the fount of slumber had dried up. Hardly any wonder, the previous night I had slept fourteen hours. So I just had to lie there and read until it became possible again.

A few weeks later Tore and I began to play music together. Yngve had at last finished his studies and was looking for a job, he was on the dole and more than willing to come along. We got a room in a derelict factory, there was a ravaged drum kit, a PA system and some Peavey guitar amps, the corners were heaped with rubbish, the concrete walls were cracked and dark with damp, it was freezing there during the autumn — all this notwithstanding, we met once a week and did our best.

I visited Espen in Oslo, I tried to do that as often as possible, I could live for weeks off the train trip across the mountains, sitting in the restaurant car and alternately reading and gazing at the countryside, which was absolutely stunning in its autumn colours, and the stay itself, in his elegant spacious flat. When we talked I would sometimes say things I had never even thought before, galvanised by the situation and Espen’s enthusiasm, suddenly something in the room burst into being, it became a focus, not for me and my self-absorption, my constant sensitivity to what others thought about me, no, what we talked about detached itself from all that, the I disappeared until the moment was over and we were back sitting on opposite sides of the table, which, as it were, became visible again. Travelling back home after these weekends, which were invariably eventful, whether we went out in the evening or he invited people for dinner, I usually had a rucksack full of books I had bought and which I read on the journey across the mountains. Once Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction was among them, it was shocking, as cold as it was clear, constantly circling around death, the parents and sister of the protagonist die in a car accident, he goes home to bury them, filled with hatred, which all Bernhard’s characters are, but in this book there was an objectivity which I hadn’t seen before in him, it was as though the hard facts of life came to the fore, as though they were so overriding and powerful that they took over the angry hate-filled monologues, that death crushed even the greatest hatred and fury, in a way it took residence in him, and it was so cold and so hard and pitiless, though also beautiful, everything came into existence through the insistent elaborate rhythm of Bernhard’s language, which flowed into me as I read and continued even when I had put the book aside and looked out of the window, at the snow that had just fallen on the heath, the wild stream that hurtled over the ravine, and I thought, I have to write like this, I can write like this, go for it, it is not an art, and I began to formulate the start of a novel in my head, in Bernhard’s rhythm, and it went well, a new sentence came, and another, and the train jerked into movement again, and I thought up sentence upon sentence, which, when I sat down in front of the computer that afternoon, had completely disappeared. The sentences I’d had in my head were full of life and energy, those I saw on the screen were lifeless and hollow.

One day Yngve came up to the radio station to ask me if I wanted to go to Grillen with him for a cup of coffee. He still had no job and was bored, he was ready to move on as so many of his friends had done, but nothing was happening, he was still drawing unemployment benefit and living alone in a bedsit in Møhlenpris, no longer a student, nor anything else.

I said yes, of course, and walked beside him down the stairs.

‘Who’s the girl behind us?’ he said. ‘Don’t turn round.’

I didn’t need to, I had seen them as we left the office.

‘That’s Tonje and Therese,’ I said.

‘Who’s the one on the left?’

‘Left as we’re walking or left if we turn round?’

‘Left as we’re walking.’

‘That’s Tonje.’

‘She’s unbelievably good-looking!’

‘Yes, Tonje’s nice.’

‘What does she do?’

‘Studies media. Works as a social correspondent.’

We went up the stairs on the other side and into Grillen.

‘She’ll probably be going to the media party before Christmas then,’ he said.

‘She probably will,’ I said. ‘But you won’t.’

‘I will. And so will you.’

‘Me? What’s that got to do with me?’

‘You’re playing the drums. I’m playing a few songs in a band with Dag and Tine, you see, and we need a drummer. I said you wouldn’t mind. You don’t, do you?’

‘No, not at all. Provided we practise a bit first.’

‘There are only six songs. And for your information, our name is Di Derrida-da.’

‘OK.’

Tonje was one of the girls I had noticed during the interviews a year earlier. Her face was both open and secretive, she dressed elegantly, often braided her long hair into a thick plait, but it was also loose sometimes. Her mouth, which was what I had noticed first, was beautiful, though also a little lopsided, and her eyes were dark, though not in any sombre way, nor melancholic, there was something else, I didn’t know quite what, but I noticed it. She had started working as a social correspondent, was serious and ambitious, but moved outside the circles I frequented, had her own friends in radio, Therese in particular seemed to be close, and my interest in her waned. My days were filled with work and little infatuations, a hand gesture here, a curvaceous thigh there, a dark eyebrow here or a turn of the body there. A girl with long blonde hair and black mascaraed eyes, tall and slim with full breasts, I stood talking with her at Landmark one evening, she was shy, I kept my distance, but then she got drunk and came back, wanting to provoke me, I accompanied her uphill to near the Student Centre, she pulled off the ring I wore in my ear, ran away with it in her hand, I caught her up and put my arms around her, we kissed, she lived nearby, when we arrived at her place she put Motorpsycho on full blast, cleared everything off the table with a sweep of her arm while I stood by the wall watching, she really was stunningly beautiful, and I was drawn to her, but she only wanted to smash things and cry, there would only be a little smooching then I had to go, she said, but I also had to promise to return, tomorrow at five, everything would be fine again, but of course it wasn’t, when I rang the doorbell the next day after work, as horny as a billy goat, no one answered, and the next time I met her she was drunk again and claimed she had been at home but hadn’t dared to open the door. If I called again she would. OK, I said, she went onto the dance floor, I was at the bar, immediately afterwards the band stopped playing, someone had thrown beer at the synth, I had seen it all, it was her.