Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Poor you,’ she said. ‘But let’s walk down and rent a film, shall we? I can make pizza.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Good!’ she said.

She left, I sat up in bed, still drunk. I took my clothes with me into the bathroom, put them in the washing machine with some other clothes and switched it on. Then I had a shower. I was in hell, this was hell. But I would cope. If I could get through today, and the next day and the one after, I would be fine.

I should go in and tell her, I thought. This was too much for me to bear. Her feelings were genuine and pure, she was honest in what she did, and then she was with me, who was so bad and did the worst things. If I told her what I had done she would leave me. I couldn’t risk that. Better to lie for all eternity. Lying was something I was really bad at, but now I would have to. I would have to lie every single day for the rest of my life, but I would cope, I would.

It was good we were going out, the telephone was here, and it was conceivable that both Tomas and the woman might ring.

We set off downhill to Danmarksplass, where the big video shop was.

‘Was it fun last night?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘No, not really. Pretty run-of-the-mill. But there were lots of people I knew there.’

She asked who and I told her.

‘You didn’t get involved in anything, did you?’ she said.

I flushed with shame and horror, my face was scarlet, but I forced myself to continue walking at my usual speed and held my head still, it was dark, she couldn’t see.

‘No, no,’ I said.

‘But why did you come back so late? It was eight when you came in.’

‘I went back to Tomas’s place after the party, me and a friend of his. We drank whisky and discussed literature. That, in fact, was pretty good.’

We rented two films and bought the ingredients for a pizza. When we returned the light on the answerphone was flashing. I hadn’t considered that. It was worse because it would be played through the speakers, into the room, so if the message was about what happened she would hear.

She went into the kitchen, organised things, started frying the minced meat, and I pressed the button on the answerphone, hoping she would be too busy to notice.

It was Tomas. He said nothing specific, only that we could talk if I wanted.

‘Who was it?’ Tonje said, standing in the doorway with the spatula in her hand.

‘Tomas,’ I said. ‘He just wanted to catch up.’

I deleted the message and went in and sat down on the sofa.

The next day she went to work as usual. I rang Ole, I had to talk to someone, I couldn’t deal with this on my own. We arranged to go to the film club at Verftet, where they were showing a David Lean film.

Most of our friends in Bergen were shared, I couldn’t tell any of them about this. But Ole, who had got divorced and moved back from Norwich, was outside the circle. Yes, he knew Tonje, they liked each other, but primarily his relationship was with me. He was still translating Samuel Johnson, mostly for his own and for interest’s sake, he had dropped out of university and was training as a nurse instead. Once he had taken me down through all the subterranean corridors beneath the hospital, I was going to write about them, and I was far more fascinated by them than I anticipated. It was its own little world down there under the ground. Ole and I went to see the Lean film. It was about infidelity, I sat in my seat in agony, I was in hell. Afterwards we went for a beer at Wesselstuen and I told him everything. What I wanted to know, what I needed his advice about, was whether I should confess and tell and trust she would forgive me or keep mum, pretend everything was hunky-dory and let it pass of its own accord, I hoped it would.

‘Don’t even think about saying anything,’ Ole said. ‘What purpose would it serve? Then she would have the burden as well. You would be putting the responsibility on her. But it’s yours. You did it. You can’t undo anything, you did it. In this sense, it doesn’t matter whether she knows or not.’

‘But then I would be deceiving her. I would be lying to her.’

‘You have deceived her. Words and actions are not the same thing.’

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘But this is just the worst experience of my life. I have never hurt so much. It’s absolutely indescribable. It’s so painful it feels as if it would be better to shoot myself.’

‘Have you got a gun then?’

‘Ha ha. It’s all I can think about. It’s always there, from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to sleep. There’s nothing in my head except what I did. And then Tonje …’

‘It’ll go. It sounds cynical, but it will go.’

‘I hope so,’ I said.

But it didn’t. Whenever the telephone rang, fear flared up in me. I took out the plug as often as I could without arousing suspicion, at least in that way I could have some kind of peace, knowing no one could ring. When we chose films in the video shop I always read the blurb to see whether there was anything about infidelity, if there was, I made up some excuse for not wanting to see it. I carefully scrutinised the TV listings so I knew what I could see and what I couldn’t. If there was any infidelity I watched something else. But despite this sometimes the topic cropped up, people were talking about it, and then my head burned with shame and I tried to distract attention by changing the subject. I was stiff and unnatural, it was strange she didn’t notice, but I presumed the idea that I might do something like this was so far from her perceptual world that it never occurred to her. My bad conscience was a constant, my sense of guilt towards her a constant, whatever we did I was false and a liar, a cheat, a bad person, and the more affectionate she was to me, the closer she came, the worse I felt. I acted cool, but everything had been destroyed, everything had become a game.

We bought some property. Someone at Tonje’s workplace wanted to sell, we got it cheap, it was in Minde, near NRK. It was a three-storey detached house built in the early 1900s, we bought the top two floors, one measuring a hundred and ten square metres, where we lived, and a smaller flat in the loft, which we rented out. I polished the floors and oiled them; Tonje painted and wallpapered. We took the doors off their hinges and stripped them, we started to get quotes for the bathroom, which we wanted renovated. Afterwards we would tackle the kitchen. We liked the flat, it was a bargain. I had a spacious office, there were also two sitting rooms and a bedroom, a balcony and a large garden. Life was normal, the future was ours, we began to talk about children. I couldn’t write, four years had now gone by since my debut, I had nothing to show for them and probably never would have. But I carried on trying, lowered my head and typed away. Every time the telephone rang a chill went through me. It would never disappear. Whenever I laid eyes on Tonje or she smiled at me I was overcome by pangs of conscience. But they passed, I coped, days passed, perhaps in the end they would go. Hans and Sigrid had come back to Bergen, we spent a lot of time with them, took a flight to London together, had meals at each other’s places, and with their friends, this was a social circle, this was a life. Hans and Sigrid moved into a house high above Sandviken, I went there one day to give Hans a hand with painting, it was September, the sky was clear and blue, in the fjord a lifeboat was practising a manoeuvre, an enormous shower of spray shot up skywards and glistened in the sun. It was one of those days when everything was open and the town lies there, in the middle of the world, beneath a vast sky, and you think life is worth living. Suddenly Tonje rang, she said we had to turn on the radio, there had been an attack on the World Trade Center, a plane had flown into one tower. We did, we stood there painting in the sunshine as reporters tried to describe what was happening and what had happened. I couldn’t visualise anything, it was all so unclear, Hans said it was probably bin Laden, which was the first time I had heard his name. I went home, Tonje sat watching TV, they showed images of the plane flying into the tower again and again and then the building collapsed. We watched all evening. The next day we flew to Paros, where we would be for a week. We buzzed around on a moped, Tonje on the pillion with her arms around me, we swam and read, made love and ate out in the evenings, wandered around the wonderful streets, one day we went to Antiparos, where I had been thirteen years before and I remembered everything and laughed. On that island out there I had sat writing a novel on my pad, I read Ulf Lundell and had ambitions of being a writer. All on my own out there, and when I went for a swim I was overcome by a sudden fear of sharks. Here, in the Mediterranean!