Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

This is what I had. Two years’ work. I knew the sentences off by heart. The slog it had been was unbelievable. And the happiness at finding a phrase: head bowed into the wind, swish, swish in the rain. But this wasn’t something I could take any further, everything in these sentences stopped there.

What should I write about?

I switched off the computer, got dressed, went out to the bus stop by the main road and caught the bus to town. It was smaller than I remembered and closer to the countryside, especially the sea beyond the streets, heavy, brooding. I walked up and down Markens a few times, there weren’t many people out and about, but the atmosphere felt congenial, people greeted one another or stopped and chatted. The sky was grey, and what I saw, I thought, was everyday Kristiansand, one of an endless number of days that came and went. The people walking past were in the middle of their lives, in the middle of the depth of their existence. It was as though I was on the outside, I didn’t belong here, for me this was just a place and my relationship to it a mystery. What was belonging, really? It wasn’t the place itself, for that was only houses and a few rocks by a sea, rather it was what they had made the place, the meaning they had infused into it.

Everything is woven into memories, everything coloured by the mind. Then time flows through the cocoon that is our life. Once we were seventeen, once we were thirty-five, once we were fifty-four. Did we remember that day? 9 January 1997, when we went into REMA 1000 to do our shopping and came out again with a bag in each hand and walked down to the car, put the bags on the ground and unlocked the door, placed the bags on the back seat and got in? Beneath the darkening sky, by the sea, the forest behind, black and bare?

I bought a few CDs and a whole stack of books which were on offer and I thought I might need for my writing.

I ought to go and visit grandma, I couldn’t stay in the town without doing that, I might bump into Gunnar at any moment, for example, and he would think it was strange and perhaps also impolite to be here without telling them.

But it could wait a few days, I was here to work primarily, they would understand that. Instead, I went to the library café, bought myself a cup of coffee and sat flicking through the books with an occasional glance through the window. I recognised the girl working behind the counter from ungdomskole, but I didn’t know her well enough to say hello and she evinced no signs of recognition. The town was full of such faces which once had formed the context of my life but no longer meant anything except for precisely this.

A girl parked her bike outside, performed all the necessary movements with consummate ease, in with the wheel, out with the lock, click it into position, straighten up, look around, head for the door and remove the hood of her rain jacket.

She greeted a girl at the table behind mine, ordered a cup of tea, sat down and started chatting. She talked about Jesus Christ, she’d had a religious experience.

I wrote down exactly what she said.

This is where the novel should start. Right here, in this town by the sea, in this library café, with this conversation about Jesus Christ.

Excited, I made notes. A young man arrives in his hometown, Kristiansand, overhears a conversation in the library café, meets an old gymnas friend, Kent, and is transported back in time.

In my room a few hours later I began to write. At around ten in the evening I rang Tonje and read her what I had written. She said it was good. I continued through the night. Whenever I dried up or I thought it wasn’t good enough I leafed through one of the books I had with me, particularly Proust, and, invigorated by the atmospheres of that fantastic world and the clear language, I went on. There was no plot, I wanted to entwine the internal with the external, the neural pathways in the brain with the fishing smacks in the harbour, and so that the protagonist should not be me I made the language conservative, I no longer used the Norwegian ‘a’ endings, I rewrote everything, it came to half a page, and I went to bed.

By the weekend I had eight pages.

I rang grandma. Is that you? she said. I told her I was in Kristiansand, would it be convenient if I dropped round? She replied that dad was there and it would be nice if I did.

I hadn’t seen dad for almost two years. I had no wish to see him either, but now he knew I was here so I couldn’t not go.

I walked all the way from the bus station, over Lund Bridge and the final kilometre up to the house, nervous and tense the whole while, frightened for brief instants as well, he was going to haul me over the coals, why hadn’t I kept in touch?

I rang the bell, minutes passed, grandma opened the door.

She had changed. She was thin, her dress was stained and in a mess. But her eyes were the same. Radiant one moment, distant the next.

‘He’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘It’s good you’ve come.’

I followed her up the stairs.

He was in the sitting room watching TV. He turned his head when I entered the room. His face was damp with sweat.

‘I’m going to die,’ he said. ‘I’ve got cancer.’

I looked down. He lied about everything, even this, but I couldn’t show I knew, I had to pretend I believed him.

‘How awful,’ I said, glancing at him.

‘I’ve just been to the hospital. They cut my back open. You can see the scars if you want.’

I said nothing. He looked at me.

‘Your father’s going to die,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘But it could turn out OK, couldn’t it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s out of the question.’

He watched TV, I sat down on the footstool. Grandma came in and sat on the other chair, which faced the TV. We watched for a while.

‘Everything going well here, Grandma?’ I said.

‘Yes, it certainly is,’ she said. A cloud of smoke hovered above her head. Dad struggled to his feet, lumbered across the floor to the kitchen, returned with a bottle of beer.

They were sitting in what had once been the parlour, used only on special occasions.

‘I’m in Andøya Manor, writing,’ I said.

‘That’s good, Karl Ove,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

All three of us watched the big TV. A girl was playing the flute.

‘They say Erling’s youngest girl is very musical,’ grandma said.

Dad looked at her.

‘Why are you always talking about her?’ he said. ‘I’m also very musical.’

I went cold inside. He had claimed that in all seriousness.

After half an hour in front of the television I got up and said I had to be off.

‘Let’s go to the restaurant one night while you’re here,’ dad said. ‘My treat.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring. Take care.’

No one went down with me. Distraught, I left, caught the bus to Andøya, where the mist lay thick and heavy between the houses on the estate, unlocked the door and went in, fried myself three eggs, put them on three pieces of bread, ate them standing by the window, sat down and began to write again.

Back in Bergen three months later, I had sixty pages, which I posted to Geir Gulliksen. In the two weeks that passed before he phoned me, I was beset by dreadful bouts of shame and terror. At first I tried to repress what I had written, pretend it didn’t exist, but to no avail, and so to gain control over these overwhelming feelings of humiliation I sat down one morning and tried to read my text through his eyes. I switched on the computer, opened the file and the title page shone up at me.

A TIME FOR ALL

Novel, 1997

By Karl Ove Knausgård

FIRST PART

TIME’S PIONEER

The town is there, a place in the world, with its houses and shops, its streets, its harbour, its uplands. Geography, architecture, materiality. A place. Now and then I think about this town just before I fall asleep, follow one of the streets downwards, pass house after house, block after block, I might stop in front of a façade and allow my eyes to wander over a myriad details. The sun always shines on the dirty white wall, glints on a half-open veranda door, in front of it a terracotta flower box, two empty bottles, a plastic bag the wind has wrapped around the bars of the balcony balustrades. A hand grips the door, a face is glimpsed for a few seconds, the door slides shut. There is someone inside, I think, in this dark room, and that is how it is all over this town. An elderly woman draws the curtain to the side and stares out, her attention attracted by a sound. It is the neighbour opening his garage door; as so often before she watches him getting into the car, reversing down the drive, and she lets go of the curtain and lowers her head to concentrate on the crossword on the worktop in front of her. Sometimes she lights one of the many half-smoked cigarettes in the ashtray, pencils in a word. A student sits gaping at the television, exhausted, with the sound off and the picture unclear in the glare from the morning sun. A woman bends her head and strokes her neck, a boy, ill in bed, watches the car he is operating race around the track again and again, another is in front of a computer shooting at anything that moves. There is no one to see them and they act without thinking; she crosses the kitchen floor to open a cupboard while the onions sizzle in the pan on the stove and the radio blares. A cat wakes up and stretches before slinking over to see if there is any food in the dish, a baby screams. This is how it is around me, I think, and see the shadow of the squat row of houses casting a sharp dividing line roughly where the patches of ice and remnants of snow lie between the pavement and the street. The traffic lights emit their shrill squeals to help blind pedestrians cross the road. Cars idle waiting, shiny, beautiful; it is cold and I inhale a mixture of chill air and mild car fumes as I walk across the road to go down Dronningens gate, today with the sun shining on me, as I have done so often before, the streets of this town I sometimes traverse in my mind’s eye. In the bedroom of my flat in Bergen, in the guest room of my grandparents’ farm in Sogn, even in a hotel room one night at the southern end of Africa, in the Transvaal, I can visualise them, the streets, even as I walk along the stunning Cromer beach it hits me: the light, the sea; I have it in me, I carry it inside me, in the darkness of my brain.