Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The house was in a working-class district. A long row of identical brick buildings on either side up a gentle incline. He unlocked the door, I followed him in. First there was a staircase, carpeted, leading up to two rooms, of which I would have one. A bed, a wardrobe, a chair and a desk, that was it.

He asked me what I thought.

‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it.’

We went back down, into the sitting room. It was full of objects from floor to ceiling. All sorts of junk, from old car parts to stuffed birds. He said he was a collector.

This was not the only surprise. In a huge aquarium on the part of the floor that wasn’t yet occupied was a boa constrictor.

He said that usually he would have let me hold it, but it was too hungry now.

I checked his expression to see if he was joking.

He was utterly serious.

Behind the sitting room there was a little kitchen, and behind that a little bathroom with a tub.

‘It’s brilliant,’ I repeated, paid him two months’ rent as a deposit, he showed me how the gas oven worked, said I could use anything there and he would pop by in the next few days to feed the snake.

Then he went, and I was left with the boa constrictor. It slowly coiled round the aquarium and nestled up to the glass. I was trembling as I watched and felt more and more nauseous. Even while I was unpacking upstairs in my room my body trembled with unease, the thought of it downstairs preoccupied my mind to the exclusion of everything else, also when I was asleep, I had nightmare after nightmare about snakes of all shapes and sizes.

Ole had written to say he would be in Norway when I arrived, so my immediate world during the first few days was the small carpeted room, which I left in the morning, to wander around town, and returned to in the afternoon. The noises outside were unfamiliar, children playing, shouting and screaming in English, and I never really got used to the long row of dirty terraced houses I faced, it was as though I was in an English TV series, meanwhile the snake downstairs was getting hungrier and hungrier. Sometimes it reared up and banged its head hard on the glass. A chill ran though me. But I was also fascinated, I would sit on the floor by the aquarium and closely scrutinise this outlandish creature with which I shared my house.

At the end of the week the landlord returned. He shouted for me to come, this I had to see.

He took out some mice he had in a freezer box. On the same shelf that I had put my sausages, I noticed. He warmed the mice lightly in the oven, lying on their backs with their legs sticking up. When finally they had thawed — meanwhile he had been sitting and smoking his pipe and showing me a Norwegian tobacco blend, Eventyr, from the 70s he had in his heap of junk, which my dad had smoked when I was a boy — he took one mouse by the tail, pushed the top of the aquarium to the side, tapped on the glass a few times to wake the sleeping snake and then dangled the mouse to and fro. The snake, sleepy and lethargic, slowly raised its head and then, so quickly I recoiled, launched itself at the mouse. It was given four mice. For the next four days it lay still in the aquarium with four large bulges in its otherwise slim body.

Once the world consisted of creatures like this one, deeply primitive, they slithered across the ground or thundered along on their huge-clawed feet. What was life like when that was all there was? When we knew that once there had been nothing else, and actually it was still like that? Just a body and food and light and death?

One thing I had learned when I was working at the first institution: life wasn’t modern. All the variants, all the deformities, all the freaks of nature, all the mental disabilities, all the insanity, all the injuries, all the illnesses, they still existed, they were as present now as they had been in the Middle Ages, but we had hidden them, we had put them in enormous buildings in the forest, created special camps for them, consistently kept them out of sight so as to give the impression the world was hale and hearty, that that was how the world and life were, but they weren’t, life was also grotesque and distorted, sick and crooked, undignified and humiliated. The human race was full of fools, idiots and freaks, either they were born like this or they became like this, but they were no longer on the streets, they no longer ran around frightening the wits out of people, they were in civilisation’s shadow or night.

That was the truth.

The snake’s life in the aquarium was another truth.

Once upon a time there were no creatures on earth with eyes. Then eyes developed.

After a few days in the house I realised I could forget about writing. I tried but to no avail, what could I write about? Who did I think I was, believing I could create something which would interest anyone apart from my mother and my girlfriend?

Instead I wrote letters. To Espen, to Tore, to Yngve, to mum, to Tonje. I described my days in detail, from the postman whistling the Internationale as he walked past in the morning, everything I saw on my many long walks through the town to the strange experiences I had at the Job Centre, all the poverty and misery revealed there, the seriousness of life that contrasted so starkly with my own, since nothing was at stake for me, the unemployment benefit I received was probably ten times higher than theirs, and actually just a nonsense, something I had applied for in order to create time to write. The welfare officer I was assigned to must have been suspicious, at any rate he raised his voice with me now and again and threatened to withdraw all payments if I couldn’t provide evidence soon that I was actually looking for work in Norwich.

Ole returned from Norway, I visited him and his wife in their flat. It was tiny and she very English. Ole was exactly as I remembered him, self-effacingly nice yet intense. He was still studying his subjects but never took any exams, he was paralysed by fear; however much he knew, however brilliant he was, he couldn’t make himself sit an exam. We did the rounds of all the second-hand bookshops, his favourite writer was Samuel Johnson, whom he occasionally translated on his own, for fun, and Boswell, and still Beckett, as five years ago.

I liked him a lot. But that didn’t justify my stay here. I had to write. But what? Five days in succession could pass without me saying a word to anyone. Everything was unfamiliar, the houses, the people, the shops, the countryside, no one needed me, no one cared about me, and that was perfect, that was exactly how I wanted it, just walking around and looking, and looking at everything in existence without it looking back.

But to what end? And with what justification? What was the point of looking if you couldn’t write about what you saw? What was the point of experiencing anything at all if you couldn’t write about what you had experienced?

I got drunk with Ole a few times, he always went back home when the pubs closed, I didn’t want to, and he would accompany me to one of the nightclubs, say bye outside, and I would go in and continue drinking on my own, without talking to a soul. At four I would stagger home and to bed. Sleep in the next day, full of angst, listen to Radio 1, read all the major newspapers, that took all day, and then I would go back to bed.

Supergrass’s debut single was played around the clock. I bought it. Elastica were in Norwich, I went to see them, drunk and on my own. With the money I received from Norway I bought second-hand 70s tracksuit jackets, shoes, jeans, records and books. Caught the bus to London in the morning, trudged around the Tottenham Court Road area all day and came back in the evening.

After I had lived like this for two and a half months, Tonje came to visit me. We went to London, bought tickets to Johannesburg and Maputo and caught the plane home together to Bergen.