Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

A short story like Joyce’s The Dead, I wrote in my notebook. A family gathering in which all the characters represent stages of life, childhood, adolescence, middle age, the declining years, but are at the same time themselves, idiosyncratic people, in the middle of life. Such a gathering, with all its conflicts, when the 1940s are present, the 1960s are present, like pockets in the here and now, the complexity, without any history, then the gathering disperses and the little nuclear family is on its way home. In the back of the car the two children, the elder one is asleep, the younger awake with closed eyes listening to his parents chatting about something dreadful. Either from the past, something important, or something that is going to happen. It is snowing. They arrive, the house is dark and still, they go in … and then? What’s going to happen now? What is big enough to build on everything that has gone before?

I closed my notebook and immersed myself in Ulverton by Adam Thorpe. It had been translated by Svein Jarvoll and was about a fictional place in rural England, every chapter recreated a different epoch, the first the 1600s, the last our century. The chapters were written in a variety of forms and dialects. Jarvoll had chosen the Skjåk dialect for one, and it was strange how well it fitted: the gates in the fences that were opened for riders to pass through, the fields and the trees, the low crumbling houses, it all fitted the Skjåk dialect. Perhaps in a way because dialects grew from the countryside around them, the style of speaking originated just there, in that particular valley, where the pronunciation of one word, for example, had come into existence with the great oak tree which was now almost a thousand years old, the pronunciation of another with the terrain being cleared and the ancient stone wall built. In other areas there were other words and other oak trees, fields and stone walls.

Time flowed through this novel, whirled through human lives. The appeal was enormous.

Perhaps I was attracted towards it so much because I had grown up in a place where there was only the present day and the past was in books?

I bought a beer, wrote 1600s in my notebook, looked at my watch, it would soon be twelve, drank up and went to bed.

The cabin was deep in the bowels of the boat, just under the engine room. This made me think about grandad, he always used to book a cabin above the waterline. If he couldn’t, he would sleep in a recliner. I wasn’t bothered by such concerns, the ship could sink while I was asleep for all I cared.

I undressed, read a few pages of Ulverton, turned off the light and fell asleep. I awoke in the darkness a few hours later from the most fantastic dream I’d ever had.

I sat up and laughed to myself.

I had been walking down the road outside our house in Tybakken. Suddenly there was a roar from above the earth. The noise was deafening, I knew there had never been such a roar before, it rolled across the sky like thunder, though infinitely louder.

It was God’s voice.

I stopped and looked at the sky.

And then I was raised up!

I was raised up to the sky!

What a feeling it was. The roar, the majesty of God’s presence and then the incredible moment when I was raised up. It was a moment of peace and perfection, joy and happiness.

I lay down again.

OK, so it was only a dream. But the feeling, that was real. I had really felt it. What a shame I had been asleep when I felt it, but now I knew it existed anyway, I thought, closed my eyes and dived into sleep, hoping something even more fantastic was in store for me.

When I was seven we went to England on holiday, my memories of it were the best I had of my childhood, and they all returned when, next afternoon, I stood holding the railing and gazing at the strip of land that had appeared in the distance. It was England. We passed some fishing boats on our way in, seagulls circled in the air above them, before us the land seemed to sink as we approached, I saw more and more of it until we entered what was like a canal and actually found ourselves in its middle. Run-down warehouses and factory buildings on either side with large areas of rubbish-filled wasteland between them.

The grass was yellow, the sky grey, and if anything at all glowed it was the brickwork of the buildings, but it was with rust, the colour of perishability and decay. Oh, that filled my soul, this was England; the buildings we saw probably originated from the first period of industrialisation, I loved the empire that had declined but was still proud, and those who grew up in this dismal greyness captivated us all, first the 60s generation, pop, the Beatles and the Kinks, then the 70s heavy rock, all the evil bands from the metal-working towns in the Midlands, filthy rich in their twenties, then punk in the mountains of uncollected rubbish in 1976, then post-punk and goth rock, the enormous seriousness they brought to their music, and then, now, Madchester, raves, colours and beat. England, I loved England, everything about England. The football, what more could you want than a tired old stadium from the beginning of the twentieth century filled with ten to twelve thousand grim-faced fiery working-class men, the mist over the heavy muddy pitch and tackles so hard they echoed between the advertising hoardings? The dark houses with wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, even on the stairs and in pubs.

When the boat docked I got on one of the double-decker buses going to the town centre. The cries of newspaper vendors met me first as I alighted. The air was noticeably much warmer than it had been in Bergen, I was in another country again, everything was slightly unfamiliar. I walked to the train station and bought a ticket to Norwich, waited in a café there for a couple of hours and boarded the train.

In Norwich I took a taxi to the University of East Anglia, Ole had said they rented rooms there before term started, which was correct, I was allocated one, I dropped off my luggage and walked down to the student bar I had noticed when I arrived. I sat alone for a couple of hours drinking and watching the students and trying to pretend I belonged there. The following day I went into town. It was small, surrounded by the remnants of a medieval wall, full of small churches used now for a multitude of purposes, in one I saw a pub and in another a sports shop. There were rivers with houseboats moored to the banks and there was a beautiful towering medieval cathedral. I bought a loaf of bread and some salami slices and sat down in a field nearby. Some boys were playing rugby in front of me, schoolboys, I assumed. The sight of their kit and the exotic game evoked strange melancholy feelings in me, I was reminded of Victorian times, the empire, boarding schools, factories, the colonies, of which these young boys were a part. It was their history and could not be mine.

I bought two local newspapers and sat in a pub beside the river, ordered a cider and read through the accommodation ads, circled three which might be possibilities.

The first only rented to students, I was stupid enough to say I was unemployed and she just put down the phone. The second was more promising. She had a room in town, she said, but they lived somewhere else, could I go there?

Yes, I could. I jotted down the address, bought some chewing gum so I didn’t smell of alcohol and got into a taxi.

A man in ragged clothes with a beard and earrings opened the door, shook my hand, said his name was Jim, called his wife, who came out and said hello. You come with me, he said, passing me a pisspot-type helmet. His motorbike was in the garden. It had a sidecar, which I was supposed to get into. The sidecar was a bathtub, which he had welded on. He pushed the vehicle forward, gestured, take a seat. I clambered in and reluctantly sat down. He started up and we moved into the road and headed for the city centre. People on the pavements and in cars stared at me. A Norwegian measuring almost two metres was sitting in a bathtub wearing a pisspot and weaving through the streets of Norwich.