Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

When it came to my turn, I said who I was, told them I was nineteen and wrote prose, somewhere between Hamsun and Bukowski, and was working on a novel at the moment.

‘Petra, twenty-four, prose,’ Petra said.

We were given a syllabus, and then Sagen fetched a pile of books, they were for us, a gift from a publishing house, we could choose: either Gravgaver by Tor Ulven or Fra by Merete Morken Andersen. I hadn’t heard of either of them, but chose Ulven because of his name, the wolf.

Everyone drifted out of the rooms at the same time, and up the hill above Verftet I found myself walking alongside Petra.

‘What do you reckon?’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘The course!’

She shrugged.

‘The lecturers were full of themselves and vain. But they might be able to teach us something all the same.’

‘They weren’t vain, were they?’

She snorted and tossed her head, ran her hand over her fringe, looked at me and a little smile flitted across her lips.

‘Did you see all the jewellery on Hovland? He was wearing a necklace and rings and even a bracelet. Looked like some kind of pimp!’

I didn’t say anything, although I thought she was being hard.

‘And Fosse was so nervous he didn’t even dare look at us.’

‘They’re writers, aren’t they,’ I said.

‘So? Is that supposed to give them a dispensation? They only sit somewhere and write. That’s all there is to it.’

Kjetil sidled up alongside us.

‘I wasn’t actually accepted,’ he said. ‘I was on the waiting list and someone cried off at the last minute.’

‘That was lucky for you,’ Petra said.

‘Yes, it wasn’t a big issue. I already live here, so all I had to do was turn up.’

He spoke the Bergen dialect. Petra spoke the Oslo dialect, the others did too, apart from Nina, who came from Bergen, and Else Karin, who came from somewhere in southern Vestland. I was the only Sørlander, and now I thought about it, had there been any writers from Sørland at all? Vilhelm Krag, yes, but that was around the turn of the last century. Gabriel Scott? Same. Bjørneboe, of course, but then he had almost tried to erase all traces of his origins from his personality, at least that was how it seemed, judging by the TV interviews I had seen, in which he had spoken a refined form of riksmål, and, as far as the books he wrote were concerned, there weren’t many characteristic Sørland features such as sea-smoothed rocks or double-ended boats in them.

Else Karin came up behind us all in a flurry. She seemed to be one of those women who surrounded themselves with a cloud of gestures and objects, bags and clothes and cigarettes and arms.

‘Hi,’ she said, planting her eyes on me. ‘I’ve worked out that I’m exactly twice your age. You’re nineteen and I’m thirty-eight. You’re really young!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Fantastic that you got on the course.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Petra turned away, Kjetil watched us with his good-natured eyes. Then we caught up with the others, they were standing at a junction and waiting for the lights to go green. The houses opposite were run-down, the walls grey with traffic fumes and dust from the road, the windows completely opaque. The sun was still shining, but over the mountains to the north the sky was very black.

We crossed the road, walked up a gentle hill, past a second-hand bookshop of the grubby kind, from what I could see in the windows: various comics were hanging at the back and some cheap paperbacks were laid out on a green felt cloth, all badly faded by the sun, which shone on the shopfront during the afternoon. A bit further, on the other side of the road, was the indoor swimming pool. I decided I would go there some day soon.

Up at Café Opera, we dispersed, I said goodbye and hurried homewards. I would have liked to buy some books, preferably a couple of collections of poetry because I had barely read a poem, except for those we’d had at school, which had mostly been by Wergeland and Wildenvey, and the stuff I encountered during the weeks when we put on a kind of cabaret in Norwegian at gymnas, with Lars and me reading texts by Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Sylvia Plath on stage. Those six poems were the only real poems I had read in my life, and firstly I didn’t remember any of them and secondly I had an inkling the kind of poems we would be analysing at the Writing Academy would be different. However, books would have to wait until my loan arrived.

In the post box at home there were nothing but advertising leaflets, but among them was a little catalogue for an English book club based in Grimstad, of all places, which I perused carefully as you didn’t need to have cash to get books there. I put a cross by Shakespeare’s Collected Works, Oscar Wilde’s Collected Works, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and Plays, all in English, and on one of the last pages there was a photography book, which I ordered, with pictures of scantily clad and naked women, it wasn’t porn though, it was art, or at least serious photography, but for me it was all the same, and pins and needles ran down my spine at the thought that I could soon be sitting here and poring over them and … yes, wanking. I still hadn’t done it, but now I sensed that it would be unnatural not to do it, everyone probably did it, and then up came this opportunity, this book, and I put a cross next to it, wrote the number and title on the back, my name and address underneath, and tore out the order form. It was free, the receiver also paid the postage.

While I was posting it I could send some change-of-address cards, I thought, and strolled off to the Post Office with the form and my little red and black address book in hand.

On the way back it began to rain. And it wasn’t just the odd drop or two gradually increasing in intensity, which I was used to, no, here it went from zero to a hundred in one second flat: one moment it wasn’t raining, the next, billions of drops were falling to the ground at once, and from the road around me came a spattering, almost a clattering sound. I jogged downhill, laughing inside, what a fantastic town this was! And as always when I saw or experienced something wonderful I thought of Ingvild. She was a living person who existed in the world with her own way of perceiving it, her own memories and experiences, she had her mother and father, her sister and her friends, the countryside she had grown up and walked in, all this resided within her, this immense complexity that is another person and of which we see so little when we are with them, yet it is enough to like them, to love them, for it takes nothing for this to happen, two serious eyes that suddenly beam with happiness, two playful teasing eyes that suddenly become unsure or introspective, that falter, a person faltering, is there anything more beautiful than that? With all their inner richness, yet faltering all the same? You see it, you fall in love with it, and it is not much, perhaps you will say it is not much, but the heart is always right. It never errs.

The heart never errs.

The heart never ever errs.

For the next few hours it was all pounding rain, bobbing umbrellas, furious windscreen wipers, car headlights piercing the rain and murk. I sat on the sofa occasionally looking out to see what was happening, occasionally looking down at my book, Ulven’s Gravgaver, of which I understood not one word. Even when I really concentrated and read as slowly as I could, several pages at a time, I didn’t understand. I understood as good as all the words, that wasn’t the problem, and I also understood the sentences, as such, but I didn’t understand what they meant. I had no idea. And that took the wind out of my sails because I knew of course that there was a reason we had been given these two particular books. They were regarded as good literature, as having importance, and I didn’t understand them.