Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘There we are,’ he said.

Our eyes met, mine were moist, he turned and sat down. Erling came in the door, holding a bunch of keys.

‘Let’s go, shall we?’ he said. ‘We don’t want to be late for church, do we.’

‘Doesn’t Karl Ove look smart today?’ dad said.

He actually said that.

‘Yes, he does,’ Erling said with a smile. ‘But let’s go now.’

The priest talked about prayer in his sermon. He said that God wasn’t like a Coke machine; you put money in and out came a bottle. I couldn’t believe my ears. He had six years of theology studies behind him and close on thirty years of experience, judging by his appearance, and he spoke about divinity in that way.

When the service was over I met an old acquaintance outside. I hadn’t seen her for many years. She gave me a hug, we chatted, she said she had fetched up in Kristiansand again somewhat apologetically, as though she had ceded control to greater powers than her own. While we stood there I watched dad make his way to the car. Perhaps it was because of all the people, perhaps because of our surroundings, where I wasn’t used to seeing him, but suddenly I could see him as he was now. All that usually drew my eyes in his direction, for the whole of our lives together, everything he had done, been and said, that which in total was ‘dad’ and was immanent in him or in my view of him whatever his appearance, all that was suddenly gone. He looked like a drunk who had put on a suit. He looked like an alcoholic his family had collected, smartened up and taken along.

In the car the conversation was about the best route to Gunnar’s. Dad maintained we should turn right. No one listened to him, he got angry, talked non-stop about the road to the right, said he knew and they would see. I watched him, chilled to the soul. His regression was massive. He was like a child. All the way to Gunnar’s house he sat whingeing that we should have gone the way he said. When we arrived he stepped out carefully onto the gravel and shambled to the door. During lunch he was on his own, completely outside the conversation; now and then, however, he did make a comment, which was always out of place. He was sweating profusely and his hand shook when he raised a glass of cider to his mouth. After the meal the children ran around and played, and soon they discovered a new game, namely yelling dad’s name, running over to him and touching him while shouting his name and laughing. He did nothing, reacted with surprise and stared at them. Erling had to tell them to stop. The rest of the time we were outside I had the children’s jeers ringing in my ears.

This was a man who had once had the strength and magnetism of a king.

There was nothing left of him.

And now, now everything was over, he turned to me. Only now could he say I looked smart. But I was twenty-eight, not eight, I no longer needed this and I no longer needed him.

We went back in two smaller cars, Erling’s family and grandma in one, dad and I on the rear seat of the other. I was in a hurry, I had a plane to catch and my bag containing my everyday clothes was in the hallway. Dad stood on the steps fumbling with the keys. He eventually found the right one and opened the door. The burglar alarm went off quietly. Dad stared at it.

‘Tap in the code,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know it.’

‘I’ve got to have my bag now,’ I said. ‘It’s just inside. Do you think I can nip in and get it? Double quick?’

‘Go on then,’ he said.

I dashed in. The alarm immediately emitted a shrill penetrating howl. I grabbed my bag and ran back out. I was sure he would read me the Riot Act, but he just stood there eyeing the code panel and fiddling with the keys. Grandma came walking up the hill.

‘Have you managed to set off the burglar alarm again!’ she shouted. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? You have to tap in the code before you go indoors!’

She walked past him, tapped in a number.

‘I couldn’t remember the code,’ he said.

‘But it’s so simple!’ grandma said in a loud voice. ‘You’re absolutely impossible! You can’t do anything!’

She glared up at dad with fury in her eyes. Dad stood with his arms at his sides, looking down the hill.

In Bergen I continued to work on my novel. By the middle of May it had grown to roughly three hundred pages, which I sent to Geir Gulliksen. He asked me to drop by so that we could talk about it properly, I went to Oslo, stayed with Espen, when I went into his office, my manuscript lay on his desk.

He spoke about it for perhaps ten minutes.

Then he said, ‘Would you like to sign a contract now? We can do that, you know. Or would you rather wait until you have a final version? If we hurry we could publish it in late autumn.’

‘Publish it?’ I said. I hadn’t even considered the possibility.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s as good as finished. If you were run over by a tram on your way out we’d have enough to publish.’

He laughed.

In the white spring light I threaded my way through the pedestrians on the pavement as if in a trance. What he had said reverberated in my brain; everything around me seemed to be so far away. A tram clattered past, a fat man got out of a taxi, two buses went up the hill one after the other. I couldn’t believe it was true, so I repeated it to myself again and again. I’m going to make my debut. My novel has been accepted. I am a writer. I seemed to be staggering under the weight of my elation. I was going to make my debut. The novel has been accepted. I am a writer.

Espen answered when I rang the doorbell, turned and went into the room at once, he was in the middle of something. I used his phone and rang Tonje. Of course she wasn’t at home. Then I rang Yngve at his office. I told him the novel had been accepted.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

I couldn’t understand the lack of interest in his intonation.

‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ I said.

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘But you must have known it was going to happen, didn’t you? I mean, you’ve been in contact with a publishing house for a long time.’

‘I didn’t know at all. In fact, I thought it was never going to happen.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘Have you been out yet in Oslo?’

After we had rung off I sat on the sofa waiting for Espen to finish so that I could tell him. But he didn’t show much enthusiasm either.

‘I heard you say on the phone,’ he said. ‘Congratulations.’

For him this might have been a matter of course, I thought. Nearly everyone he knew was a writer.

‘Did you believe I would make it? I said. ‘That I would ever make my debut?’

‘Yes, I did. But perhaps not in literature. I suppose I thought it would be a collection of essays or something.’

At the beginning of the summer we emptied our flat and put everything in storage outside town, where it would stay until the end of August, when we would move up to Volda. Tonje had applied for a summer job in NRK Hordaland, which she didn’t get, so to earn some money she was going to work at her father’s surgery in Molde. We went up to mum’s place in Jølster, where the plan was that I would finish the novel. While we were there Tonje rang NRK Sogn og Fjordane and, miraculously, was offered a job, she cancelled her secretarial work, and we stayed there all summer. She drove to NRK in the morning, I wrote, she buzzed around the county of Sogn og Fjordane in her white NRK car while I sweated in a room so full of light that I could barely see the letters on the screen in front of me, she came home in the afternoon, we went swimming or we had a barbecue in the garden or we watched TV. I wasn’t making any headway with the novel, I was stuck and becoming more and more desperate, I started working every hour there was, also at night. It was all I thought about. To publish it as it was now would have been a terrible mistake; the storyline lacked a motivating force. A young man returns to his hometown, rents a room, meets some old friends and his whole life takes a turn for the better, a series of protracted memories, in itself absolutely fine, but why tell them? There was no narrative engine. I had to make one. But how? Obviously he must have come from somewhere, and in that place something must have happened that was harrowing enough, severe enough, for him to flee and simultaneously cause him to relive his life, to search for a reason, to search for some coherence, to try and understand himself.