Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The clear blue sky, the low sun on the tall hotel, the crowds. You go there to get the best possible view, squeeze between people behind the provisional barriers and the rope to keep them at a safe distance. Bodies push against you, all with heads back, tilted to one side, eyes trained on the top of the building. Bluish-black smoke seeps out and rises, follows the unpredictable currents of wind, disappears. More and more black smoke is belched out into the clear air. A fire engine ladder glides upwards, you can hear the faint hum mixed with the crowd’s murmured expressions of awe. One of the hotel occupants had jumped. The rime frost on the tarmac in front of you and the blue sky. It is clean, it is clinical, the world is precise. But the smoke continues to belch out, thick and black. You can’t see any flames, only smoke. This disaster is soundless in the same way that pain is soundless. Behind you people are shoving. Another ambulance weaves its way in, two men get out, lean against the side of the vehicle and stare up as well. The hotel is empty now. Only firemen with breathing apparatus and astronaut costumes move through the corridors and search the rooms in case there are any more guests who hadn’t managed to get out before being suffocated and lie in heaps where they fell, their bodies unable to absorb any more smoke. It must be like drowning, you think, but much worse because there is plenty of air nearby, they have hope, they die in hope. This is your death day. You eat in the hotel restaurant, have an early night, flick through the TV channels, maybe find an old film, you fall asleep. A few hours later you wake up, snow on the screen, a blind channel, you switch off the television, get undressed, crawl under the duvet and go back to sleep. When you wake up now it is for the last time. To screams and slamming doors, to the roar of flames, this is how you will die, in the smoke seeping into and filling your room, visibility is zero, you are disorientated out of your wits, and so you die, sitting on the bathroom floor with a wet cloth over your face. And now it’s over, you think, the dead are carried out, the survivors are evacuated. But the fire rages on. The flames switch directions blindly, frighteningly, spring up in more and more places, it is out of control.

‘Hi, Henrik.’

You turn when you hear your name and see Kent waving, he comes towards you wearing his long grey coat and carrying a white helmet in one hand.

‘You’re skiving too, eh?’

‘Heard the news early this morning. Seems to be over though.’

‘It’s still burning,’ he says, looking up.

‘But they got everyone out, they said.’

‘It’s terrible,’ Kent says, smiling.

‘The worst is all the people who come here to rubberneck. That’s terrible,’ you say and smile as well because you feel a sudden happiness standing here and talking to Kent, as only a seventeen-year-old can. The sudden happiness a seventeen-year-old can feel at even the most mundane humdrum things, such as talking about everyday matters with someone his own age, a happiness that, if it continues, threatens to take control, his voice can fill with emotion or laughter, he can laugh and laugh at trivia, he becomes intoxicated by it, it grows until he is so overcome that he has to start avoiding these situations. He has to look down instead of into people’s eyes, withhold a comment instead of blurting it out to all-round hilarity and acknowledgement. You can’t trust yourself any more, you think, something is happening to you. There is also the opposite, this sudden urge to cry that comes over you in the strangest situations, your eyes go moist, you can’t cope and have to look down, hold back. Like now, in front of the hotel, you can feel the happiness bubbling away, but you force yourself to focus on the smoke as if you are extremely interested in it and what it attests: a hotel fire. Later that evening footage of the conflagration is broadcast around the world, Germans sit in front of the screen and see pictures of the hotel, this is where it happened, Swedes, the British and the French, in this town, Danes and the Swiss, in this hotel.

Fourteen people lost their lives.

From there the text moves to Bergen, where the main protagonist lives, an incident describing him sleeping outdoors, and when he crosses Torgalmenningen on his way home, I had a ridiculous idea, he stops at a telephone box, dials the number his family had during his childhood, and he himself is at the other end, ten years of age, talking about how he is right now.

What would Geir Gulliksen think?

He had got himself involved with an immature person who not only unabashedly sent him the most hair-raisingly stupid stories, but also imagined, in all seriousness, they would be published and someone apart from himself would be interested in reading them.

How was that possible?

How could I be so crass?

So conceited?

The telephone call came.

‘Hi, Geir Gulliksen here.’

‘Hi.’

‘Hi! What a fantastic piece of writing!’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I certainly do. It’s very, very good. Especially the bit where the protagonist rings himself, you know … He’s crossing the square. Do you know which bit I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve really got something there.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You have to continue. Write more. This is going to be good, you know. I mean really good. If you want me to read anything along the way, just send it. I can also read the whole book when you’ve finished if that suits you better.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

‘There was one tiny thing I was wondering. At the end of the sequence, you write, in the world, out of the world, in the world, out of the world. Do you remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s fantastic. I was thinking, is there a title in that? A potential title? Out of the World. Give it some thought anyway.’

Tremendously encouraged, I wrote two hundred more pages, also a long passage about dad, and I cried as I wrote it, I could scarcely see the screen for tears, and I knew it was good, it was quite different from anything I had done before.

That spring there was a family gathering in Kristiansand, one of Gunnar’s sons was being confirmed. I travelled down again and arrived at grandma’s house in the early morning. Dad was sitting in the kitchen, fat and heavy, his hands trembling and his face shiny with sweat. He was wearing a suit, shirt, tie. In the sitting room behind us were his brother Erling and his family, with grandma.

For the first time in my life I felt stronger than him, for the first time in my life I didn’t feel a trace of fear in me when I was in the same room as him.

He was harmless.

I asked him whether he was still with the woman he had met, whose name I didn’t even know.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘She told me where to put my shoes. That’s no good.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Can you decide where you put your shoes?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘That’s good. You mustn’t lose your freedom. You must never do that, Karl Ove!’

‘No,’ I said.

He looked down at the newspaper on the table in front of him. He was heavy and slow, but his manner wasn’t — that was nervous and jumpy.

‘You’ll have to help me with my tie before we go,’ I said. ‘I still haven’t learned how to do it.’

‘Who does it then?’

‘Usually Yngve.’

‘Does he know how to do it?’

‘Yes.’

He struggled to his feet.

‘Let’s do it straight away. Where’s your tie?’

‘Here,’ I said, taking it from my jacket pocket.

He put it around my neck. His breathing was laboured. He crossed the ends, folded over and through, watching carefully as he did so, then tightened.