Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Have you seen anything of Ingvild this summer?’ I said.

‘Yes, a bit, a couple of times. How’s it going with her? You were writing letters, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, we’ve been writing ever since. She’s coming to Bergen now, so I was thinking of meeting her.’

‘Are you interested?’

‘That’s an understatement,’ I said. ‘I’ve never felt so strongly about anyone.’

‘Wow,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Here we are, by the way.’

He stopped by one of the doors to a long tall brick building opposite the rope makers’ shed. The hall and stairs were made of wood, making it seem bare, almost primitive. The bedsit consisted of two small rooms with a toilet in the corridor, no shower. His record collection, which I flicked through while he was in the loo, was small and random, there were as many good records as there were bad, some everyone bought when they came out, a couple of really good ones, like the Waterboys, a couple of less good ones like The Alarm. It was the kind of collection that belonged to someone who wasn’t particularly interested in records and who mostly followed the herd. But he had been in a band once, he could play the saxophone and he had taught me the basic beat on the drums when we were young, and how to coordinate the hi-hat, the snare and the bass drum.

‘We’ll have to go out one evening,’ he said when he returned. ‘Then you can meet my friends.’

‘Are they the same ones as before?’

‘Yes. They always will be, I hope. Idar and Terje, they’re the two I see most.’

I got up.

‘Let’s talk about it. I’d better be off. First day of the course tomorrow.’

‘Congratulations on getting in, by the way!’ he said.

‘Thank you, it’s a nice feeling,’ I said. ‘But I’m a bit nervous too. I’ve got no idea what the level is.’

‘Just do your thing. What I read was good anyway.’

‘Let’s hope it goes all right,’ I said. ‘Catch you later!’

I came in the middle of the night, it woke me up and I lay for a few seconds in the darkness wondering whether to get up and put on clean underpants, but fell asleep immediately afterwards. At ten to six I opened my eyes again. As soon as I became conscious and knew where I was, my stomach churned with nerves. I closed my eyes in an attempt to go back to sleep, but the tension inside me was too strong, so I got up, wrapped a towel around my waist, walked down the cold stairs, along the cold corridor and into the equally cold shower room. After half an hour under the boiling-hot water I went back upstairs and dressed, carefully and methodically. A black shirt and the black waistcoat with the grey back. The black Levi’s, the studded belt, the black shoes. Not a drop of gel spared to make my hair stand up as it should. I had also saved a plastic bag Yngve had given me, from Virgin, and in it I put my notebook and a pen, as well as Hunger, to give it a bit more weight.

I tidied the bed to make it into a sofa again, had a cup of tea with a generous helping of sugar as I didn’t feel like any breakfast, sat looking out of the window at the shiny telephone box sparkling in the sunshine, the sunless grass in the park behind, the trees at the back and then the mountain that rose steeply, with the row of brick houses above, also in shadow, then got up and put on a record, flicked through a few issues of Vinduet, all to pass the time until it was nine and I could leave. Lessons didn’t start until eleven, but I had planned to walk around town first, perhaps find a café and read a little.

A chimney sweep came down the street with his long brush wound into a circle over one shoulder. A cat strolled across the grass. An ambulance drove down the road along the mountainside, behind the brick houses, visible between them as it passed, it moved slowly, no siren blaring, no lights flashing.

Right there, at that precise moment, I felt as if I would be able to meet whatever challenges came my way, as if there were no limits to what I could do. This wasn’t about writing, this was something else, a boundlessness, as if I could get up and go now, this very minute, and then just walk and walk to the end of the earth.

This feeling lasted for thirty seconds perhaps. Then it was gone, and even though I tried to summon it back it refused to return, a bit like a dream that goes, slips from your grasp as you struggle to recall it after waking.

When, a couple of hours later, I wandered down to the centre it was with a gentle, not unpleasant, nervousness in my body, indeed I felt light and at ease as I walked, there was something about the sun shining and the life in the streets around me. On my way up the hill to the square known as Klosteret I saw that long stalks of grass were growing through the tarmac and that in some places there were small bare boulders between the houses, they linked the town to the wild mountains around, and to the sea below, everything that had not been wrought by human hand, and the fact that the town was part of the landscape, not separate, somehow closed in around itself, as I had felt during the first two days there, sent a fresh wave of good feeling through me. Rain fell everywhere, the sun shone everywhere, everything was connected with everything.

Yngve had explained the route to me in detail and I had no problem finding my way, I walked down a narrow path, passed some strange crooked cottages and there, at the bottom of a hill, lay Verftet at the water’s edge. Made of brick, and built in the nineteenth century, it even had a tall factory chimney. I walked round to the entrance, touched the door, it was open, went in. An empty corridor with some doors, no signs. I continued along it. A man came out of one door, in his thirties or thereabouts, wearing big black glasses, a stained T-shirt, an artist.

‘I’m looking for the Writing Academy,’ I said. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘It’s not here anyway.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘If I wasn’t I wouldn’t have said what I did.’

‘No, right,’ I said.

‘But try upstairs on the other side. There are some offices and stuff there.’

I did as he said. Went upstairs and through the door. A corridor with some pictures of Verftet in its heyday on the walls, a spiral staircase at the end.

I opened a door and walked along a corridor, one of the many doors was ajar and I peeped in, a workshop, I turned round and went back, stopped at the entrance hall, where a woman, probably in her early thirties with a light blue coat and a plump face, big eyes and slightly crooked teeth, was just coming in.

‘Do you know where the Writing Academy is?’ I said.

‘I think it’s up there,’ she said. ‘Are you on the course?’

I nodded.

‘Me too,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m Nina.’

‘Karl Ove.’

I followed her up the stairs. She carried a big bag over her shoulder, and the conventionality of her appearance, which resided not just in her coat, bag and the small lady-like boots she wore but also in the way her hair was pinned up, how little girls used to have it in the nineteenth century, disappointed me, I had expected something rougher, wilder, darker. Not the norm at any rate. If they let in the norm, maybe I was also there because I was the norm.

She opened the door at the top of the stairs, and we stepped into a large room with slanting walls and three big windows on one side, two doors with a bookshelf between them on the other. In the middle were some desks arranged in a horseshoe shape. Three people sat there. Two men were standing in front of them. One, tall and slim, wearing a suit jacket with the sleeves rolled up, looked straight at us and smiled. He wore a gold chain around his neck, I noticed, and had several rings on his fingers. The other man, shorter in stature, also wearing a suit jacket, with a slight paunch which the much-too-tight jacket emphasised, sent us a hasty glance and looked down. Both had moustaches. The former may have been pushing thirty-five; the latter, who stood with his arms crossed, was around thirty.