Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

There was no space inside me for anything else. I kept everything else at arm’s length. One night Tonje shouted at me in her frustration.

‘I don’t want this! I’m only twenty-six! I want to live, Karl Ove! Do you understand?’

I tried to calm her down, this had nothing to do with her, I had to write, and I didn’t have any space for anything else, but it would soon be over and I loved her, I always would. It helped to talk, above all it helped her, she poured her heart out that night, we became closer to each other, it was as though we were starting anew.

Some days later I wrote a passage about northern Norway, with Henrik Møller-Stray, the name of the main character, working there as a teacher. I had him sitting in the staffroom, talking to the other teachers, then going into the classroom with the pupils, he was their form teacher, and in that instant I knew I had the solution to all my problems.

He fell in love with one of the pupils, slept with her in the end, she was only thirteen, he had to flee and had nowhere else to go but Kristiansand.

It fitted perfectly, but I couldn’t do it, couldn’t have him falling in love with a thirteen-year-old and definitely couldn’t have him sleeping with her. That was immoral, and it would be exploitative because the justification for using it was novelistic technique. I needed a plot with the most powerful fulcrum I could find. He could kill someone, but I wasn’t interested in that kind of conflict. Steal something? No, no. It had to be a positive force that drove him, something fine and beautiful, falling in love, nothing else fitted.

But I couldn’t do that.

If I did, that is what would be discussed, the morality of the novel, and I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in that.

Another consideration was the unease I would feel if I wrote myself into the novel, for some of this was indeed true, which no one should ever find out, and if I wrote it, it would exist in the world, not only inside me, however much of it was fictional.

Tonje went to Molde, I stayed to meet Tore, we were going to one of the mountain cabins my family owned to finish writing a film manuscript. It was about an apartment block, several stories were played out there, the most important of which concerned a woman who heard strange noises in the ventilation shaft. Towards the end of the manuscript, after many misfortunes, it emerges these noises come from an apartment belonging to two brothers, where they are holding their father prisoner and abusing him.

One night, after we had finished working, I explained my dilemma to him.

‘Do it, for Christ’s sake, don’t even think about it. Go for it! It’ll go down a bomb!’

We were there for four days, several times I expressed my doubts and uncertainties, he remained rock-solid, go for it, do it. We strolled down the narrow gravel path through the forest to the lake, where we went into the little shop, I took him to see Borghild, who laughed at us and our shaven heads, you two look like convicts, you do. She made us coffee and I asked her about her childhood, she told me she’d had TB and spent many months in a sanatorium high above a fjord, the cure had been to get as much sun as possible, so the women had sat in chairs on the first-floor veranda, and the men on the ground-floor veranda, because we were topless, as they say today, she said with a laugh, then she went on to tell us what it was like when she returned home, there was a stigma attached to the illness and the tan you got at sanatoriums. Tore was fascinated by her and she liked Tore. Everyone liked Tore. We went back up and carried on with our work, a horse stuck its muzzle through the window while we were sitting there, we gave it some sugar cubes and an apple, in the evening we sat outside drinking beer and smoking surrounded by the roar of the waterfall from the forest, with the snow on the mountain tops on the other side shining in the glow from the setting sun.

In the middle of August I travelled up to Volda. Tonje met me at the bus stop, we walked uphill to the house where we would rent the whole of the first floor, it was old and not in great shape, but there were three rooms and it was only us two living there. She had shared it with another student all last year, now it was ours. We were husband and wife, the thought of this still sent tingling sensations through me. We were going to share our lives together, and now we were here, in a little village full of students between the mountains.

From the room I used as a study there was a view of the fjord and the ferry that plied to and fro almost round the clock, glittering in the night darkness, and the instant I put my computer on the desk I knew I was going to be able to work here.

Tonje was enjoying her course, she had a lot of friends on it, sometimes they came back to see us, but usually she met them away from home. I joined her now and then but not so often. I was there to write, this was my last chance, in only two years I would be thirty, I had to give it everything I had. Unlike in all the other places I had stayed, I had almost no relationship with Volda at all. I got up in the evening, wrote through the night, went to bed in the morning, longing for the evening when I could write again. Occasionally I would cycle down to the little town centre to buy CDs or books, but even the short time that took felt like a huge sacrifice, something I really shouldn’t allow myself. What I discovered during these months was the great power of routine and repetition. I did exactly the same every day so that I didn’t have to waste any energy and could put it all into my writing. Which also derived energy from the same source, three pages in one day became three hundred pages in a hundred days, and in a year more than a thousand. From the cigarettes I rolled in the course of a night, twenty or so, I always spilt some of the tobacco, which after six months built up into quite a pile beside the chair leg. The letters on the keyboard slowly became worn according to a system that remained a secret to me, some shone bright and intact after six months, others were as good as erased. But the routine had a further function: it protected me from seeing what I wrote from the outside. Routine had the effect of keeping me inside my writing day after day. If I upset the pattern — visited someone or perhaps had a few beers out with Tonje — everything was dislocated, I lost my rhythm, saw the routines and what I wrote, which was ridiculously poor, what was I thinking, that anyone would have any interest in my childish immature thoughts? Then this idea found reinforcement and the stronger it became the more difficult it was to get back into routine’s exclusion and tranquillity. As soon I was back in the groove, I decided not to make the same mistake again, not to meet anyone, not to go out drinking with Tonje. Then the decision also vanished, because that was how it was inside writing, everything on the outside vanished. During working hours I often stood by the hot radiator on the bathroom wall staring out of the window, not dissimilar to a cat, I would watch everything that moved outside, would stand there for half an hour, an hour, then went back in and carried on working. It was a way of having a break and resting without losing my rhythm.

The feeling I had was fantastic. I had spent ten years writing without achieving anything, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it was just flowing. And what I wrote was of such quality, compared with what I had produced earlier, that I was surprised every evening when I read through what I had written the night before. It was like having a head rush or walking in your sleep, a state in which you are out of yourself, and what was curious about this particular experience was that it continued unabated.

Tonje knew it was important for me, and she was independent, lived her own life, had her own ambitions, but sometimes I noticed she wanted more of me, of us, that this wasn’t enough for her, and then I tried to give it to her, not for my sake, I needed no more than I already had, but for hers.