Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Rounding off the week at either Wesselstuen or Henrik had started to become a habit. I hadn’t gone along the first two Fridays, but that afternoon I decided I couldn’t sit at home waiting every single weekend and, if Ingvild were to come this evening of all evenings, she would probably leave a note to say she had been.

During the month we had been at the Academy we had got to know the teachers better and better, they weren’t stiff and uncomfortable any more even though I had a suspicion the awkwardness would never quite go, it was in their characters and nature, especially in Fosse, who had less of the outgoing spirit that Hovland revealed with his repartee and the constant, though slightly evasive, glint in his eye. No such repartee with Fosse, no such glint. But he still got close to us, expressed his opinions about what we were discussing, at first in a serious tone, but that often dissipated into laughter, in his rather sniffling, semi-giggling way, and sometimes he told us anecdotes about experiences he’d had, which, taken as a whole, gave us a picture of who he was. Not a complete one though because he was a very private person, like Hovland, who hardly ever spoke about anything to do with his private life, but with what they revealed of themselves in class there was enough for me to have a sense of who they were. Fosse was shy but also self-assured, to a very high degree he knew who he was and what he was good at, the shyness was more like a cloak he had wrapped around himself. With Hovland it was the opposite, I established: with him the shyness was protected by his quick tongue and ironic sense of humour. It was obvious that Hovland and Fosse liked and respected each other, although what they wrote was like night and day. Twice they had sung a children’s song — ‘Blåmann, blåmann bukken min’ — at the end of the evening.

We walked up the gentle slope from Nøstet, put down our umbrellas, shook them and closed them, went up to the first floor at Henrik, found a table, ordered beers and chatted. It was several days since the immaturity comment had been made, and I had come up with a new idea for a novel, inspired somewhat by the handful of novels I had read by Borges and Cortázar that week, also any thoughts about Ingvild had been entirely lost in all the tensions at the Academy so I was in a relatively good mood. After maybe an hour most of us had drunk enough for the limits on what could be said and what could not, which everyone felt to varying degrees, started to loosen. Jon Fosse was describing his childhood and he said that at a certain point he could have ended up on the streets. Petra laughed in derision. You could not, she declared. You’re just mythologising your own past. On the streets indeed! Ha ha ha. No, no, Fosse insisted in his quiet way, looking down at the table, that was precisely how it had been. He could have been on the streets. Who’s ever heard of a street urchin in a village? Petra countered. No, this was Bergen, Fosse replied. Everyone listening to this exchange was ill at ease. Fortunately Petra dropped the topic. The evening continued, more beer was drunk, the atmosphere was good until Jon Fosse got up to go to the bar. The street urchin wants some beer, Petra said. Jon Fosse didn’t respond, got his beer, came back, sat down. Petra taunted him with another gibe a little later, in the same way, calling him a street urchin. In the end he rose to his feet.

‘Well, I can’t be bothered with this,’ he said, put on his jacket and went down the stairs.

Petra laughed as she looked down at the table.

‘Why did you do that? You made him leave,’ Trude said.

‘Argh, he’s so pompous and self-important. On the streets …’

‘But you didn’t have to bully him. What good could that do?’ I said. ‘ We wanted him here. We thought it was fun drinking with him.’

‘Since when have you been our rep?’

‘Come on. You behaved very badly,’ Knut said.

‘Jon’s a nice friendly man. There’s no reason to treat him like that,’ Else Karin said.

‘Now all of you just pack it in,’ Petra said. ‘You’re a bunch of hypocrites. Everyone thought what he said about ending up on the streets was ridiculous.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said.

‘No, because you’re another one who’d like to be a street urchin. Street urchin! Have you ever heard anything so stupid!’

‘Now let’s drop this,’ Knut said. ‘You apologise on Monday if you dare.’

‘I certainly will not,’ Petra said. ‘But we can drop it. I agree. It’s a trivial matter.’

Everything was different after Fosse had gone, people packed up and left one by one soon after, apart from Petra and me, and we went to Café Opera. She asked if she could doss at my place, I said, of course, and we found ourselves a table and carried on drinking. I told her about my new idea for a novel. Firstly, it would consist of a variety of dialogues, people talking in various contexts, in cafés, on buses, in parks and so on, all the conversations would be about central themes in these people’s lives, so they spoke about something important, one said he had just been told he had cancer, for example, or a son had been sent to prison, perhaps for a murder, but then, I told Petra — who was listening, though not looking at me apart from the odd fleeting glance followed by one of her equally fleeting smiles — but then, the context for these conversations is slowly revealed. There was a man recording them on tape. Why did he do that? I said to Petra, well, come on, tell me, she answered, I smiled, she smiled, well, that’s what I’m working on, I said. He belongs to, or is employed by, an organisation, you see. In all towns of a certain size there are people who work for this organisation, they all go round recording conversations, which are written down and filed away somewhere, and this isn’t something that started this year, it’s been going on since time immemorial. I think there are conversations in existence from the Middle Ages, and from antiquity, thousands upon thousands of them, all in some way important to the respective individuals.

‘And?’ Petra said.

‘And? Nothing else. That’s it. Do you believe it?’

‘I think it’s a fun idea. But why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why do they collect conversations? What do they do with them?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I suppose they just document them.’

‘Now I’ve remembered what this reminds me of. Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Have you seen it? There are some angels going round and listening to people’s thoughts.’

‘But this is conversations. And they’re not angels.’

‘Yes, yes, but have you seen it?’

‘A long time ago. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of. Not at all, in fact.’

And it was true, I hadn’t had that film in my mind for one second, although I understood what she meant, there was a similarity.

‘Do you want another beer?’ I said, getting up.

‘Please,’ she said.

In the queue I scanned the room to see if Ingvild might have come, which I had been doing ever since I set foot in Café Opera, but she was nowhere to be seen. I raised two fingers in the air and, not without a mild sense of pride, saw the almost imperceptible twitch in the barman’s eye that told me he had registered the order, I was a dab hand at this game now.

What if they were angels?’

That would solve everything! They were collecting material for a Bible in reverse, one about humans they couldn’t understand. For them humanity was incomprehensible! So they analysed these conversations!

I placed the two large beers on the table and sat down.

‘I’ve heard you shouldn’t talk about what you’re planning to write,’ I said.