Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn’t even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.

Mum helped grandma into bed, undressed her, brushed her hair and helped her on with her nightdress, all while I read Ceremonies, my latest favourite book, trying not to look. Not because grandma was being undressed necessarily, but because it was mum doing it, and it seemed so intimate and private, the daughter caring for her old mother, this wasn’t meant for my eyes, so I sat with my eyes trained on my book, attempting to let it absorb me.

It wasn’t difficult, all the spaces in it were so open and still connected with one another in quite sensational ways. Not just the spaces, incidentally, also the characters, which were usually closed off, could suddenly open and simply merge into one another. A man staring at an axolotl in an aquarium is mysteriously transformed into an axolotl staring out from an aquarium at a man. A fire in antiquity becomes a fire in the modern age. Then there were all the other peculiar things that went on. A man suddenly starts regurgitating rabbits, it becomes a problem, a minor catastrophe, the whole of the flat he has rented is full of small white rabbits.

Mum said goodnight to her parents, came out and closed the sliding door.

‘Would you like some coffee? Or is it too late for you?’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t mind a cup,’ I said.

I liked these short stories so much, but I couldn’t write like this, I didn’t have the imagination. I didn’t have any imagination at all. Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.

Yes, but not the new novel.

A wave of pleasure surged through me.

It was really fantastic. Some mysterious men, maybe angels, who collect people’s conversations and reflect on them.

But this pleasure didn’t come alone, it also brought with it some despair, for I knew I would never be able to carry this off. I couldn’t write the story, it would never work.

Mum came in with a pot of coffee and two cups, put them down and went to fetch a dish of thin squares of potato pancake.

‘Borghild made them,’ she said. ‘Do you want to try a bit?’

‘Please.’

Borghild was mum’s sister, a strong vivacious woman who lived alone in a little house above the farm where they grew up. She usually cooked for the weddings in the district, she knew all the old recipes and she knew everything about the family, those who had died and those who were still alive. Mum was close to her, even more now, as they didn’t live far from each other.

‘How are you, Karl Ove?’ mum said. ‘You’ve said so little since we’ve been here. That’s not like you.’

‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But I’m fine. The Writing Academy’s pretty hard going, that’s all.’

‘What’s hard going about it?’

‘It feels as if I’m not good enough to be there. I don’t write well enough, as simple as that.’

‘Remember you’re only twenty,’ mum said.

I took a whole pancake and ate it in two bites.

‘Nineteen,’ I said. ‘But I’m at the Academy now, you know. It doesn’t help me to think it might be better when I’m twenty-five.’

Mum poured coffee into the two cups.

‘And I’m in love,’ I said. ‘That might be why I don’t say much.’

‘Someone you’ve met this autumn?’ she said, and lifted her cup to her lips and drank while watching me.

‘I met her at Easter, when I was staying with you. Just once. Then we wrote to each other, and then we met in Bergen. She’s studying psychology. Comes from Kaupanger. Same age as me.’

‘But you’re not going steady?’

I shook my head.

‘That’s the point. I don’t know if she wants me. I made a fool of myself and then … well, nothing.’

A snore that sounded like a snarl came from the other room. Then someone coughing.

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ mum said.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ll see. Otherwise I’m OK. I love being in the bedsit and Bergen generally.’

‘I might come and see you both in a couple of weeks,’ mum said. ‘There are also a couple of student friends I’d like to visit. Gerd, do you remember her?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’ve been wondering whether to do another course, you know. I’d like to do a degree as well. But it’s a question of finance and I would also have to apply for a leave of absence.’

‘Yes,’ I said, taking another pancake.

Upstairs in the bedroom I lay in the darkness for ages before I fell asleep. The darkness linked the little space inside with the enormous space outside. The old wooden bed was like a little boat, or that was how it felt. Now and then a tree whooshed and the rain on the leaves pitter-pattered against the window. When it stopped, there would be a whoosh somewhere else, from some other trees nearby, as though tonight the wind had strategically deployed its energies and was riding across the countryside in several units.

The feeling I had when I arrived here was that life was over. Not in the sense that the house stood under the sign of death, more that what was going to happen had happened.

I lay on my other side, my head on my arm. The sound of my pulse beating reminded me of something grandad had once said, that you shouldn’t lie listening to your heartbeat if you wanted to sleep. It was an odd thing to say, I couldn’t remember what had occasioned the comment, but whenever I lay like this and my pulse beat against my ear I was reminded of it.

Only a few months ago mum had told me that grandad had suffered from anxiety for a long period at the beginning of the 1960s, it had been so bad that he didn’t go to work, he didn’t move from the sofa, so terrified was he of dying. Kjartan was the last child at home then, he had been young and wouldn’t have understood anything.

This information was unsettling, in a way, most of all because I hadn’t known anything about it and would never have guessed. Were there more such pockets of drama in the lives of my closest family? But the information in itself, what it said about grandad, I couldn’t get it to tally because if there was one characteristic I associated with grandad it was his joie de vivre. Then again I had never thought of him as an independent person with an independent life, he had always been simply ‘grandad’, in the same way that grandma had always been ‘grandma’.

A whoosh went through the old birch again, and a little cascade of droplets hit the wall as though the tree were a dog shaking off the rain.

Darkness. Silence. The beat of my pulse. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Unlike grandad it wasn’t death I heard but life. My heart was young and strong, it would beat away through my twenties, it would beat away through my thirties, it would beat away through my forties, it would beat away through my fifties. If I got to grandad’s age, and he was eighty, I had used only a quarter of my life so far. Almost everything lay before me, bathed in the hopeful light of uncertainty and opportunity, and my heart, this loyal muscle, would take me through it whole and unscathed, ever stronger, ever wiser, ever richer in life lived.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

I saw Yngve’s car from the sitting-room window, the windscreen wipers sweeping from side to side, the dark shadow in the driver’s seat that was him, and told mum, who was massaging grandma’s feet on her lap, that Yngve had arrived. She gently lifted grandma’s feet to the floor and got up. Grandma and grandad had eaten lunch at twelve, we had waited, now she went into the kitchen to prepare the meal.