Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Yes,’ I said.

For some reason I was close to tears and went into the hall, put on my boots and stood under the overhang by the front door to have a smoke.

A bus stopped down by the road outside the school. A few minutes later Kjartan walked up over the hill, dark-eyed and white-skinned, carrying a bag in one hand, some letters and a newspaper in the other. It was Klassekampen. He had read it for as long as I could remember.

‘Hello there,’ he said.

‘Hi, Kjartan,’ I said.

‘Did you arrive yesterday?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘We’ll have a chat later,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mum’s making pancakes. They’ll probably be ready in a quarter of an hour or so.’

He continued towards his door, stopped and looked across.

‘There’s that one-legged crow!’ he said.

I took a few steps towards him and stared in the direction he was pointing, up to the pole carrying the electricity cable to the barn. Sure enough, on the top, there was a crow with one leg.

‘Johannes shot its other leg off. It’s stayed here ever since.’

He chuckled and closed the door behind him, I stubbed out my cigarette in the soft gravel and took it with me to put in the waste bin under the sink.

‘Yngve rang, by the way,’ mum said. ‘He had to do an extra shift this evening and won’t be here until tomorrow morning. He’s driving up, he said.’

‘What a shame,’ I said. ‘Shall I set the table?’

‘That’d be nice, she said.’

After we had eaten at the table in the TV lounge, since grandma and grandad had moved their bedroom to the sitting room because of the trouble grandma had with stairs now, Kjartan looked at me and asked if I felt like a chat at his place. I nodded, we went up to the large, open and light top floor where he lived, he put on some coffee, I settled down on the sofa and flicked through the pile of books on the table.

Bobrowski. Hölderlin. Finn Alnæs, Musica, the first volume in his major oeuvre Ildfesten, which, according to mum, he had broken the back of now, only two of the promised five novels had come out anyway. Kjartan had been passionate about these books for several years, there was something about the presence of the cosmos that appealed to him, I inferred from the way he talked about them.

‘Are you learning anything at the Writing Academy?’ he said from the kitchen.

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘I’ve met Sagen,’ he said. ‘He’s run lots of the writing courses for Sogn Skrivarlag.’

‘We haven’t met him yet,’ I said. ‘We’ve only met Fosse and Hovland.’

‘I don’t know them,’ he said, and came in with two cups. They were wet, he had just rinsed them, in mine there were still coffee grains at the bottom, half-dissolved in the water.

‘We’ve finished the poetry course now,’ I said.

‘So you’ve been writing poems?’

‘Yes, we had to. But it didn’t go well.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he said. ‘You’re only nineteen. When I was nineteen I barely knew what a poem was. You’re lucky to be there.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have you written anything recently?’

‘A couple of poems.’

He got up and went over to the dining-room table where his typewriter was, grabbed a pile of sheets, flipped through them, came back and handed them to me.

‘You can have a browse if you like.’

‘Yes, I’d love to!’ I said, suddenly touched that he regarded me as his peer.

dwindling beck

skegges nibble

at the green rock

weave through the swaying grass

the shade cools

a brother of the sun

lashes its tail

‘What’s a skegge?’ I said, looking up at him.

‘Skegge? A trout. What do you think?’

‘It’s very good,’ I said. ‘I particularly like the start. It seems to elevate it somehow.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s the trout in the mere, you know.’

I read on.

with a mouth of lush church grass

I stand at the crossroads

drinking the light of faith

on the shores of eternity

I lead my body, on

like a dun horse in the dusk

towards the forest somewhere

I had tears in my eyes again, this time because of the poem, the image of the body which he leads towards the forest like a horse in the dusk.

I seemed to be full of tears, they had accumulated inside me, waiting for an opportunity to be released.

‘This poem is fantastic,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘Which one is it?’

I passed it to him.

He skimmed through it for a few seconds and snorted.

‘ “On the shores of eternity”,’ he recited. ‘I was being a bit ironic there, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless.’

He got up and fetched the jug of coffee, poured and placed it on a newspaper.

A door went downstairs; from the way it was closed I realised it was mum.

‘So this is where you are!’ she said.

‘We’re reading some poems,’ Kjartan said. ‘Have a look if you like.’

‘I’d love to,’ she said.

I got up and walked with the cup in my hand to the other end of the room, where there were bookshelves, an armchair and a stereo. I took out a few books and thumbed through them.

When they started talking I stood by the window and gazed out at Mount Lihesten, which had just become visible through the mist, a black wall rising where the sea began and falling at the end where the fjord finished.

Was that where Ingvild’s family cabin was?

When I entered the sitting room, grandma was asleep in her chair, her head lolled back, her mouth wide open. She’d had Parkinson’s disease for as long as I could remember, I had barely a memory in which she wasn’t shaking. But when I was a boy the illness wasn’t as far advanced, it didn’t prevent her from working on the smallholding she had moved to at the end of the 1930s, when she married grandad and where she had lived ever since. According to Borghild, she had been surprised how small it was and how small people were out here. It might have been simply that conditions were tougher here than in the inland region she came from, there was less food and therefore the people were also smaller. Mum told me she had always emphasised that they should be impeccable in the clothing they wore and the way they behaved and for that reason grandma had the reputation of wanting to be better than others. Grandad worked as a driver, he drove buses; grandma was in charge of nearly everything that was done on the farm. This was the 1950s, but from what mum had told me about her childhood it sounded more like tales from the previous century. A man came here in the autumn and did their slaughtering for them, she told me, grandad never did it himself. Nearly every single part of the animal found a use. Grandma rinsed the intestines in the stream to use them for sausages. The blood was boiled in big pots in the kitchen. I had no idea what else she did, apart from what mum told me. There were only two generations between us, yet I knew nothing of how she had spent her life, not really, not essentially, I knew nothing of her relationship with objects and animals, life and death. When grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm. For her, family was the central point in her life, in other words, her family, the one that came from the farm where she grew up, and then her children. I had the impression that grandad’s family, which had moved inland from the islands a generation earlier, was not important. Her family was the centre of her existence, and the soil. Kjartan would sometimes say that the soil was her religion, that they were soil-worshippers in Jølster, where she came from, a kind of ancient heathendom they had clad in the language and rites of Christianity. Look at Astrup’s pictures, he would say, all the fires they lit on Midsummer Eve, that’s Jølster folk for you, they dance around the flames as though they were their gods. Kjartan would laugh when he said such things, and it was not without disdain, yet there was always some ambivalence because Kjartan had a lot of her in him: the serious attitude to life and the deep sense of duty were in Kjartan too, and if she worshipped and cultivated the soil, Kjartan worshipped and cultivated nature, the presence of the universe in the form of birds and animals, mountains and skies. He would deny that any such connection existed between him and his mother, after all he was a communist, an atheist, a ship’s pipefitter. However, all you had to do was look them in the eye to banish any lingering doubts. They had the same brown eyes, the same wary gaze.