Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Do you recognise this?’ Gunnar said.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘I can remember being here when I was small,’ he said. ‘Your father was a young man then. He was studying in Oslo. I looked up to him in the way that only a younger brother can.’

‘Mhm,’ I said.

‘There was something special about him. He wasn’t like the rest of us. I remember he used to sit up late at night. No one else did that.’

‘Uhuh,’ I said.

‘He was so much older than me that we didn’t grow up together,’ he said. ‘When I was ten he already had a son of his own. He already had his own life.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘He didn’t have it easy at the end. It was sad that things turned out as they did. But when it comes down to it, perhaps it was for the best. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘There’s a little restaurant here in the summer now,’ he said, motioning with his head to a house we passed.

‘Looks nice,’ I said.

As we were walking I cried a soundless stream of tears. I no longer knew why I was crying, I no longer knew what I felt or where all this came from.

We stopped by the old skerry harbour, where all the sailors’ houses had been renovated and everything sparkled with affluence and prosperity. The horizon in the distance was razor-sharp. Blue sky, blue sea. White sails, laughter from somewhere, footsteps on a gravel path. A woman was watering a flower bed with a large green can. The drops from the rose on the spout glinted in the sunlight.

When Gunnar parked his car outside the house in town it was five o’clock and all the trees were rustling in the breeze wafting in off the sea.

‘We’ll pop by tomorrow,’ Gunnar said. ‘Then we can give you a hand here. I suppose there’ll still be a bit left to be done.’

He smiled.

I nodded, we went indoors. After all the light and air outside, the state of decline in the house, which in a way I had become used to, was evident again. As soon as we were upstairs I carried on cleaning. This time I turned my attention to the two sitting rooms beyond the kitchen. The bench, the dining-room table, the chairs, all in 1930s style with vaguely Viking carvings, the coffee table, the white wall panel that had been installed in the 80s, the windowsill, the veranda door, the staircase. Both rooms had wall-to-wall carpets on the floors and I hoovered them, but it didn’t make a great deal of difference; tomorrow I would have to buy detergent for them, I reflected, poured away the water and rang Tonje.

She had bought a plane ticket so she could join me and two for us to go back. I updated her on what was going on, I would be meeting the priest tomorrow, and there was so much left to do, but I would manage. I said I missed her and wished she were here. The former was true, the latter wasn’t. I had to be alone here or with Yngve. The funeral was another matter entirely, she had to be here. She said she thought about me all the time and she loved me.

After we had rung off I called Yngve. He wasn’t going to come to Kristiansand until the funeral, it was too complicated with his children, but he would do what he could from there. Phone relatives and invite them, keep in touch with the undertaker, all the things I found difficult.

Gunnar and Tove came the next day. Tove helped grandma take a bath, found her clean clothes and cooked while Gunnar and I washed and scrubbed and threw things out, me in as minor a role as I could manage, after all he had grown up in this house, grandma was his mother, I was the son of the man who had ruined everything. For grandma the spruce-up worked wonders, she seemed to come out of herself, suddenly I saw her going downstairs with a bowl of water in her hands and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Tove, who was cleaning the coat room, laughed and winked at me. She looked like a brewery worker, she said.

At two I went to the church office in Lund. Entered a long corridor, peeped through an open door, a woman was sitting behind a desk, she stood up and asked what I wanted, I told her, she showed me to the right door, I knocked and went in.

The priest, a middle-aged man with kind eyes, shook my hand and we sat down. I didn’t have much confidence in Norwegian priests, I remembered the Coke machine analogy from last spring, and the sole reason I wanted dad buried in a churchyard was tradition, the dignity of it. He was damn well going to have God’s words read to him. It was therefore with some scepticism that I started speaking to this priest. I wanted a traditional ceremony with psalms, a sermon, soil thrown on the coffin, as few personal details as possible, as much distance as possible. I wanted dad’s life to be seen in that perspective, not the close-up, not the man children feared and who later drank himself to death, but the broad view, a human who was born on earth, pure and innocent, as all are at birth, and who lived a life as all humans do and died his death.

But it didn’t go like that. After we had discussed the practicalities, we started talking about what the priest should include in his commemorative speech.

‘Who was your father?’ he said.

I said he had studied in Oslo, worked for many years as a qualified teacher at an ungdomskole in Arendal, married Sissel, had two children, Yngve and Karl Ove, divorced and remarried, lived and worked for some years in northern Norway, had a daughter, moved back down south and died, fifty-five years old.

‘Who was your father to you, Karl Ove?’ he said.

I didn’t like his attempt to achieve intimacy with the use of my name, yet I longed to succumb. It was a terrible technique, I knew that of course, because he didn’t know me from Adam, I met his gaze though, and in it I saw he was not an idiot, not a redeemed ignoramus, I saw warmth and understanding. He was no stranger to people drinking themselves to death, I recognised that, nor was he a stranger to people being bad, and he was no stranger to the notion that this was not the end of the world, actually it was the world.

‘I was afraid of him,’ I said. ‘I was always so bloody frightened of him. Well, in fact I’m frightened of him now too. I’ve seen him twice this week and I’m still not convinced he’s really dead, if you see what I mean. I’m frightened he’s going to come and … erm lose his temper with me. It’s as simple as that. He had a hold over me and he has never let go. I’m glad he’s dead. Actually that is what I feel. It’s a huge relief. And this weighs terribly on my conscience. He didn’t mean to do this or be like this.’

I looked at him.

‘What was your brother’s relationship with him like? Is it the same for him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think Yngve hates him. I don’t. But I don’t know. He was always much worse to Yngve. He could reach out to me, try to make amends, but Yngve didn’t want to know about that. He rejected him.’

‘You say he didn’t mean to do this. Why do you think he did it then?’

‘He was tormented. He was a tormented soul. I can see that now. He didn’t want to live the life we lived. He forced himself. Then he got divorced and wanted to do what he really wanted, and it was even worse, he started drinking and at some point he lost his grip. He simply didn’t give a damn then. At the end he was living with his mother. That was where he died. He drank. Actually it was suicide. He wanted to die, of that I’m sure.’

I started to cry. I didn’t care if it was in front of a stranger. I was beyond all such considerations. I cried and cried and I poured my heart out, and he listened. For an hour I sat there crying and talking about dad. When I was about to leave, he shook my hand and thanked me, looked at me with his gentle eyes, and I cried again and said it was me who should thank him, and as I left the place, along the corridor and down the stairs, through the housing estate to the main road, it was as though something had let go, as though I was no longer carrying this, what I had been carrying, myself. We had only talked about dad and me, but the fact that he had been there and listened, as he had to be there and listen to countless people who unburdened themselves to him, from the depths of their difficult lives, meant that it hadn’t only been dad and me we had talked about but life: this was how this life had turned out. Dad’s life, it had turned out like this.