Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

When I returned mum rang, Borghild was dead. She had passed away, she hadn’t been ill, hadn’t had any pain, she died in her sleep. It was a year since I had last seen her, I had cycled up to hers from mum’s, sat on her veranda and asked her questions about farm life in the old days. I wrote down what she said in a notebook; what were memories for her was history for me. It was incomprehensible how different that world was from this. Borghild belonged in both, but now she was dead, and I could hear how upset mum was. We arranged that I would go to the funeral. Tonje was working and couldn’t make it, but I packed my suitcase the night before, had breakfast and was about to go down to the bus station when the telephone rang. It was Yngve. He said dad was dead.

Four days later I left the chapel in Kristiansand after seeing dad, or what had once been him and was now a corpse with his features, for the second time. The sky was bright but hazy. A stream of vehicles drove past on the road in front of me. Seeing him had been terrible, especially as in the days that had passed since I first saw him he had changed. His skin had gone yellower, it seemed more sunken. He was on his way to the earth, something was drawing him there, with great force. I went over the pedestrian bridge, beneath me cars swept past, the drone of engines seemed to resound inside me, I lit a cigarette and looked up at the tops of the houses in front of me. They said something, just by the way they stood there, what they said wasn’t human, it wasn’t living, but it was a statement. The house across the road, which might have been from the 1930s, said something else, and so it was with the houses all over town, in all towns. A blank expression beneath the sky, people entering and leaving.

Where the hell had all the blood come from?

When we went to see him for the first time the undertaker warned us — there had been a lot of blood, he had said, it might be a bit distressing. Naturally they had washed him, but they hadn’t managed to remove it all, the blood seemed to have sunk into his pores. And his nose had been broken. However, in the sitting room where he had been found there had been no blood. Had the pain been so great that he had risen, fallen against the wall by the fire, for example, broken his nose, dragged himself up into the chair, died and been found there? Or had he broken his nose the day before, on a walk into town? Or had the fracture and the blood been what had caused his heart to stop?

But where was the blood?

I would have to ring the doctor tomorrow and ask him what had actually happened the day he was found.

Grandma was sitting at the kitchen table when I returned. She brightened up for an instant, she didn’t want to be alone, not for one second: whenever Yngve and I left the house she followed us.

I put on a jug of coffee, went into the sitting room and phoned Yngve, after closing the kitchen door first.

‘Have you spoken to the doctor?’ he said.

‘No, not yet. I was planning to do it tomorrow.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘How’s it going down there in Kristiansand?’

‘I’ve cut almost all the grass in the garden today. Or hay or whatever you like to call it. I was thinking of cleaning tomorrow.’

‘The priest?’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right! I’ll sort that out. I’ll ring him after this. But I think the undertakers have contacted him.’

‘Yes, they have. But you have to go through the ceremony with him. He’ll probably say a few words about dad as well, so you’ll have to put him in the picture.’

‘What should I tell him?’

‘Well, just give him an idea of his life. Teacher on Tromøya, active in local politics, philately. Two children from first marriage, one from second. Interested in … erm, what was he actually interested in?’

I let out a soundless sob.

‘Fishing,’ I said. ‘He liked that.’

There was a pause.

‘But … do you think I should say something about the end?’ I said. ‘His last years?’

‘Perhaps not in so many words.’

‘Say it had been difficult for him?’

‘Yes, that’ll do.’

‘I’d like it to be dignified.’

‘I know. Me too.’

‘When are you coming down?’

‘The day of the funeral, I expect. Or the night before.’

‘OK. I’ll ring you tomorrow whatever happens.’

‘OK.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

In the evening the clouds opened and the low sun cast its orange light across the town as dusk slowly settled over the fields and soon it would begin to rise and fill the space all the way up to the sky, which was light’s last bastion, it hung there, deep and blue, and then, almost imperceptibly, the light from a star came into view, as fragile as a newborn child, but it grew stronger, was surrounded by other stars, and soon the still-light summer sky was full of them.

While grandma sat in the sitting room watching TV, I stood on the veranda alternately studying the sky and gazing across the town and the sea. I thought about the 1950s book dad had given me. He had read it here. Dreamed about space the way children do, wondered what the future might bring in terms of rockets and robots, inventions and discoveries. What would that have been like for him?

How had he felt?

The summer he met mum, when they had been seventeen years old, that is in 1961, he had told her he had testicular cancer and might not be able to have children.

It was a lie, of course, as it had been a lie when he told me he had cancer and was going to die.

But it wasn’t a lie that he was going to die.

Perhaps it wasn’t a lie that he couldn’t have children either? In the sense that he didn’t want them, he knew it wasn’t a good idea.

Good God, they had been twenty then. If they had been as immature as I was when I was twenty, it was quite a feat they had pulled off.

I stubbed out my cigarette and went into the house.

The telephone rang.

‘You answer it,’ grandma said without looking at me. Again it was as though she was talking to someone else, using a different tone, and this other person could have been no one else but dad.

I went into the dining room and lifted the receiver.

‘Hi, Gunnar here. How are you two doing?’

‘Not bad under the circumstances,’ I said.

‘Yes, this is an awful business, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘But we were thinking of taking you to the mountain cabin tomorrow. So you get a change of air. The forecast is good. What do you say?’

‘Sounds brilliant.’

‘So let’s do it. We’ll be round early tomorrow morning to pick you up. Make sure you’re ready! It’s best to leave early so we get something from the day, don’t you agree?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s best.’

We went to bed at the same time, I followed her down the stairs, she turned in the hall and said goodnight and disappeared into her room, I opened the door to my room, sat down on the bed, put my face in my hands and cried for a long time. Actually I had wanted to go to sleep fully clothed, but Gunnar was coming tomorrow and I didn’t want to give him the impression I was scruffy or untidy, so I summoned the last strength I had, went into the bathroom and cleaned my teeth, washed my face, folded my clothes and placed them on a chair before going to bed. I had dreaded this, the worst moment was when I closed my eyes and lay there without being able to see anything in the house, it was as if all my terrible thoughts, finally liberated, launched themselves at me, tonight as well, as I sank slowly, dangled as it were, into sleep, not unlike a hook on the end of a line, I caught myself thinking, which the weight drags down, then darkness fell at a stroke and I disappeared from the world.

When I woke at eight grandma was already up. She was wearing the same filthy dress she’d had on every day so far, she smelled and was sunk deep inside herself.