Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

So should I be writing short texts?

For lack of anything better, I started there.

I wrote one about dad. Yes, almost everything I did was about him, in one form or another, countless were the variants I had of two brothers, Klaus and Henrik, who travelled back to their hometown to bury him and went around cleaning the dreadful house where he had died. But this one came to nothing. I didn’t believe in it.

Days passed, months passed, it was two years since I had made my debut, I had produced nothing, one night I was in the sitting room, drunk, and decided to fly to Kristiansand as soon as it was morning, I had received some emails from a girl who lived in the skerries off Kristiansand, in one she had written that she wasn’t wearing anything, when I was drunk that was enough for me, and I was capable of this kind of stunt, even if I was broke, you just paid with a credit card. But the closer the morning came, the more sober I became, it was a crazy idea, typical of how I thought when I was drunk and I went to bed, where Tonje had been asleep all this time while I had been going la-la in the sitting room.

Darkness descended.

I had everything I wanted. I was a writer and lived off writing, at least until my stipend ran out, I was married to a beautiful woman whom I loved and who let me do as I pleased. She didn’t object when I said I was going to be away for two months, she said nothing when I went out at night and came home plastered at five in the morning, and she never threatened to leave me even though I had been depressed for two years and obviously hated myself.

How could that be?

It wasn’t the whole picture. I was good for her too, she needed me, and we had a good life together in Bergen, both when we were alone and when we were together with others, the circle of family and friends around us, so if I was filled with inner despair it had nothing to do with life as it unfolded around me, with the trivial incidents that make up all lives and can suddenly shine bright in the dusk of meaninglessness: the door goes, she comes home, bends over and takes off her shoes, looks at me and smiles, her face is magical and childlike. She pours paint from a five-litre can into a small receptacle, clambers up on a chair and starts painting the moulding over the window wearing a workman’s overalls stained with paint. She snuggles up to me on the sofa, we watch a film, tears run down her cheeks, I laugh at her and she laughs through her tears. There are thousands of such moments, lost the second they occur yet still present because they are what form a relationship, the particular way we stayed together, which was the same as everyone’s, though different, it was her and me, no one else, it was us, we dealt with everything that came at us as well as we could, but the darkness in me thickened, the joy in me evaporated, I no longer knew what I wanted or what to do, only that I was standing still, I was stuck, this was how it felt, as though I wasn’t formed on the inside, I was only a mould shaped by everything on the outside. I walked around like a kind of imprint, a multitude of incidents and activities pressed tight against a mould, completely hollow on the inside. At night, when I was out, the longing for something else was all that existed, I could do anything and in the end I did. I was at Café Opera, there were lots of people I knew, there was a party afterwards, I drank steadily and was completely out of it, but it helped to drink, I got into the mood, sat chatting with Tomas, whom I had met some years earlier and immediately liked but didn’t often chat with, we just exchanged the odd word every once in a while in one of Bergen’s bars. At five we decided o take a taxi to his and carry on drinking there, him, a friend and me. While I was waiting for the taxi a woman from the party came down to the front door, she must have been in her mid-thirties, she had looked at me several times during the course of the evening, I had been evasive, I hadn’t looked at her, hadn’t spoken to her, but now this was different, I went over and asked if she would like to come too, she said yes, the taxi arrived, we got in, she sat close to me, I had my hand on her thigh but sat still otherwise, the other two didn’t notice what was going on, in the town centre we tumbled out of the taxi and went up to Tomas’s flat, at the top of a large block, I had been there several times, always at night, always drunk. There was a balcony outside where once, with many others, we had watched two people fucking in the backyard, she had been lying over the bonnet of a car, he had stoked away from behind, I had gone in to chat with someone, had a bit more to drink, gone back, they were still at it. When at last they finished we applauded. He had bowed to us while she had grabbed her clothes and sped off. Tomas was a writer, his face was handsome and sensitive and very distinctive, as soon as you saw him you realised he wasn’t like anyone else, he was an exception, boundlessly generous and kind, deeply serious and passionate about what he was doing, independent in that rare way, you only find a handful of such people in every generation. He had done some boxing and fencing, he surrounded himself with women in an enthusiastic boyish fashion, and he was the only person apart from Tore I knew who had read À la recherche du temps perdu. His style was elegant, he sought perfection and beauty, and in that, as in almost everything else, he was my antithesis. He led tonight, he opened the door and let us in, put on music, produced some whisky, we were going to discuss Proust, and I did but not for long, I was beyond everything, all I had in my head was her, who was also there, sitting on a chair, some distance away, I wanted her, so I went over to her, she sat on my lap, we smooched, my hands were all over her, I didn’t care that all this was going on in front of Tomas and his friend, this was everything now, she was everything, I lifted her and stood up, took her hand and went into the bedroom, Tomas’s bedroom, I closed the door and tore off her clothes, pulled the two sides of her jacket apart without bothering about the buttons, kissed her, undid her skirt and flung it off, pulled down her tights, she was nearly naked now, I unbuttoned my trousers and let them fall, threw myself on top of her, out of my mind with desire, without a thought for anything else, no, somewhere I was thinking I want this and I’m doing it, this is me who wants it, why shouldn’t I do it? She groaned and I shouted, I came, I got up to go, she lay there watching me and said I mustn’t go, she wanted more, I thought OK, lay down on her again, but it was no good and I got dressed, went into the sitting room without a second look, grabbed my jacket and went down into the street, flagged a taxi, gave our address, paid him five minutes later, unlocked the door, let myself in, undressed and got into bed beside Tonje.

When I woke I was in hell. It was completely dark outside. Tonje was in the sitting room watching TV, I could hear it. My clothes, which lay in a pile beside the bed, smelled of perfume. I smelled of sex. The thought of what I had done, the guilt and the shame and the angst, were so great there was nothing else. It was bottomless. I was paralysed, I couldn’t move, I lay there in the darkness knowing the only way out of this was death. I hadn’t moved since I woke up, it was as though the darkness was pressing down on me, it hurt so much I wanted to scream, but I lay there, motionless, perfectly still, from the sitting room came the sound of the TV, and then she walked through and stopped in the open doorway.

I lay with my eyes closed, breathing heavily.

‘You still asleep?’ she said. ‘It’s almost six. Can’t you get up so we can enjoy some of the day?’

‘I’m very worried,’ I said. ‘I was so drunk.’