Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The despair in her sobs was so great I cried.

But I couldn’t console her, couldn’t help her. They never rang again. I never heard any more from them. But our relationship was ruined anyway, and perhaps it had been from the night I did what I did, nevertheless we decided I should go away for some time. I rang the people I had rented the house from on Bulandet the year before, it was empty, I could move in straight away, and I did, caught the boat to Askvoll, then to Bulandet, the westernmost point in the country, far into the sea, that was where I was going to be.

I didn’t write, I fished, slept and read. I was distraught, not temporarily but deeply, that was how it felt, it didn’t get better, it didn’t change, every day I woke to bottomless despair. It was purely a matter of endurance. That was all I focused on. I had to endure. I read Olav H. Hauge’s diaries and that was an enormous solace, I had no idea why, but they were, for the few hours I read them I had peace. Every time the ferry docked I stood by the window and watched to see if anyone got off — perhaps Tonje will come, I thought. We hadn’t arranged anything, all we had agreed on was that we needed time to ourselves, each in our own place, and I came here. I didn’t know if our relationship was over, if she wanted to separate or if she was yearning for me and wanted us to carry on. I bore all the guilt, I didn’t want to burden her, I kept away, she would have to work out what she wanted to do herself. I watched the ferry and hoped. But she didn’t come. Once I was convinced it was her getting off, I jumped into my boots and dashed over to meet her, but I immediately saw it wasn’t and walked back.

Espen rang, he was going to Bergen, I longed for someone to talk to, caught the ferry, met him, we had a few beers, I slept in his hotel room. While we were out we met one of Tonje’s friends. She looked as if she had seen a ghost when she spotted me. The following day I returned, and in a strange way it felt like home, this tiny little island far out in the sea, the yellow 1950s house on the promontory where I was staying. I loved the sky there, it was so vast and dramatic, and I loved the few days when there was sun and tranquillity. I loved standing on the quay and looking down into the compelling fresh clear green water, where long strips of seaweed stood vertically and fish swam past and crabs moved sideways. Starfish, mussels, the whole rich sub-aquatic world. A plastic bag could drift out, deep in the water. I also loved to gaze at the quay, the small warehouses, all the equipment, all the yarn and all the buckets and boxes and cans. But most of all I loved the sky, the way the clouds slid through the darkness at night, like ships on their way to land or towered up before a storm, which always came from the west and made the entire house shake and quiver and gasp and throb.

On all my fishing trips I saw things, once an otter that was resident in the vicinity; it had made a little slide in the snow and would dive down it every so often. Sometimes I saw it swimming towards me, a little black head just above the surface of the water. One night it ran at full speed across the veranda outside my house. I liked the otter, I was happy when I saw it, it was like a friend.

One morning the whole island was covered with birds. They made an unparalleled commotion. Then they took off, there were several hundred of them, a cloud rising into the air, they circled the island a few times then slowly landed, like a carpet. At night they stood still in the darkness. I thought about them before I went to sleep, the silence of the living is quite different from the silence of the dead, and woke to their din early next morning.

Winter turned to spring. I didn’t have a television, didn’t have any newspapers, ate nothing but fish, crackers and oranges, and all I thought about, when I wasn’t thinking about Tonje, was that I had to be a good person. I had to be a good person. I had to do everything I could to be a good person. I mustn’t be a coward any more, I mustn’t be evasive and vague, I had to be honest, upright, clear, sincere. I had to look people in the eye, I had to stand up for who I was, what I thought and what I did. I had to treat Tonje better, if we were still together. I mustn’t be grumpy, mustn’t be ironic, mustn’t be sarcastic, but rise above it and always keep the bigger picture in mind. She was an exceptional person, absolutely unique, and I mustn’t take her for granted.

Most of all I wanted action. To do something. But what?

I considered committing suicide, simply swimming off into the sea, it gave me a fine tingling feeling, it had an appeal, but I would never do it, giving up wasn’t in my nature. I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn’t become a better person through endurance.

I wrote letters to Tonje but didn’t send them. I didn’t receive any, didn’t hear anything and in the end I returned.

We hadn’t seen each other for three months. I rang her from the hill below the house.

‘Karl Ove, have you come back?’ she said in that voice of hers which was so intimate.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m outside.’

‘Are you here?’

I unlocked the door, went up the stairs, she came into the hall, behind her was a colleague. Oh, fucking hell, I thought, has he moved in? Are they an item?

They weren’t. He had come by to fix the sliding door in the bathroom for her. She was thin and seemed sad. I was also thin, and there was no joy to be found in me.

We talked for days. She wanted to carry on, I wanted to carry on, and we carried on. House, friends, family, Bergen. I wrote during the day, she worked for NRK. Everything was as before. The summer came and went, Christmas came and went, we talked about having children but didn’t take the final step. One evening I received a phone call from a stranger. He said he had been married to the woman I had been unfaithful with. They had children together. Now he wanted sole responsibility for the children. There was going to be a lawsuit. He wondered whether I would like to testify. He said that she and her boyfriend had done the same to a priest: she’d had sex with him, he had rung the family and told them about it. The priest had been forced to resign, this man said, I didn’t know what to believe, at first I thought it was some kind of trap, someone was recording the conversation, but he seemed genuine. In the end I said I couldn’t help him. When I told Tonje about this she said it would have come out straight away, all the media checked events in the courts, if I had said yes, as I had considered doing, the papers would have run the headline FAMOUS NORWEGIAN WRITER (32) ACCUSED OF RAPE with enough information for readers to know who was meant.

I clung to my writing, sat in my study from morning till night, nothing. Journalists had stopped calling ages ago, on the rare occasion one did, it was to ask whether I would be interested in contributing to an article about writers’ block or one-book writers. But in February 2002 something happened. I had started another short text, located it in the nineteenth century but let everything that exists now exist then, and the scene was Tromøya yet it wasn’t, a completely different story emerged, and in this parallel world, which resembled ours but wasn’t, I had Yngve, dad and me taking a boat to Torungen one summer’s night. I described the night as I remembered it with one exception: the seagull dad shone his torch on had a pair of small thin arm-like growths beneath its wings. They had once been angels, I had him say, and then I knew: this is a novel. Finally, a novel.

I was so excited. Suddenly I had bags of energy, went shopping and made food and chatted about everything under the sun, full of initiative with regard to Tonje: we could go there, do this, everything was possible again.