Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The car stopped outside. Straight afterwards the door went, I heard him in the hall and turned to him as he came in.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘The Norwegian population is growing, I can see,’ grandad said.

Yngve smiled. His eyes brushed mine.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Good trip?’

‘Absolutely fine,’ he said and passed me a pile of newspapers. ‘Brought these along for you.’

Mum came in.

‘There’s some food ready if you’re hungry.’

We went into the kitchen and sat down. Mum had made a big pot of stew. I guessed the plan was to freeze it so that grandad only had to heat it when they were alone again.

‘Was the drive OK?’ mum said, placing the pot on the table, where there were already crispbreads and butter and a jug of water.

‘Yep,’ Yngve said.

It was as though he had a membrane around him which prevented me from getting into proper contact. But that didn’t have to mean anything, sometimes that was how it was, and he had been driving for several hours, sitting alone in the car and thinking his own thoughts, it was a change coming here, where we had been all day and a very different atmosphere of familiarity and naturalness had been established.

Yngve filled his deep dish with stew, positioned the ladle on my side of the pot, I helped myself. Steam rose from the dish, I took a crispbread and bit off a piece, poured water into a glass, raised a spoonful of stew to my mouth, blew on it.

‘Ann Kristin says hello, by the way,’ Yngve said. ‘I met her yesterday and said I was coming up here.’

‘Thanks,’ mum said.

‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked as casually as I could. He had said he was staying in town to work, not to go out, and if he had gone out and met Ann Kristin, then he was lying and why would he lie?

‘In the canteen at Sydneshaugen,’ he said.

‘Oh, right,’ I said.

After the meal we drank coffee in the sitting room, grandad chatted, we listened. Kjartan came in wearing the same clothes he had worn for the last two days, his hair a mess, eyes flashing behind his glasses. Yngve didn’t respond to Kjartan’s monologic conversation as he usually did, there was something submissive and withdrawn about him, as though he were looking inwards and not outwards. Could be anything, I thought, he was just a bit reticent.

Outside, the rain was tipping down.

Kjartan went back to his flat, I read the newspapers, mum washed up in the kitchen, Yngve took his bags up to his room and was gone for a while. When he returned he sat in the chair by the fireplace with a book.

I lowered the newspaper and stared out of the window. Dusk was falling. The light from the lamp outside the neighbours’ house, a stone’s throw below us, was striped with rain.

Grandma was asleep in her chair. Grandad had also fallen asleep. Mum, on the sofa beside him, was reading. Yngve was reading too. I watched him and knew he had noticed, because you do when someone watches you in a silent room, you notice. Nevertheless, he didn’t look up, he kept his eyes firmly on the book.

There was something wrong.

Or was I being paranoid?

He was reading, for Christ’s sake, I couldn’t make that into a sign something was wrong.

I lifted the newspaper and continued reading. Then it was his turn to watch me. I concentrated on not looking up.

Why was he watching me?

He got up and went out. Grandad woke as the door was closed, blinked a few times, struggled to his feet and wandered over to the wood burner, opened it and threw in two logs. The wooden floor above creaked.

Then it went quiet.

Had he gone to bed?

Now?

Because he had been out last night? And hadn’t been working at the hotel as he said?

I took my cup to the kitchen and poured myself a refill. The fjord lay a somewhat lighter shade of dark in the growing murk. The rain drummed on the roof and walls. I went back to the sitting room, grabbed my pouch of tobacco and made myself a roll-up. Grandad was cleaning his pipe, he tapped it on the glass ashtray a few times, poked at some black clumps and flakes with a white pipe cleaner. Grandma had woken up, she tried to sit upright, leaned forward but fell back again. Then she moved her hand to the two buttons on the armrest, succeeded in pressing one, and the chair began to rise with a low hum as she was lifted up, or pushed forward, and a moment later was able to grasp her walking frame. But her back was too bent for her to walk, and mum got up and asked where she wanted to go. I couldn’t hear the answer that issued from her trembling lips, but it must have been the kitchen, because that was where mum steered her steps. While all this was going on, grandad was engrossed in his pipe activities.

The floorboards above creaked, and then the staircase. The door opened and Yngve fixed me with a look.

‘Coming for a walk, Karl Ove?’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to discuss.’

The hope that had held me aloft melted and my insides crumbled. Everything collapsed.

Yngve was going out with Ingvild.

I got to my feet and went into the hall. He had his back to me as he donned his waterproof jacket. He said nothing. I slipped my feet into my shoes, bent over and tied them, then rose and put on my jacket. He stood still, waiting. After I had zipped up, he opened the door. Fresh air streamed into the house. I pulled the hood over my head and tied it under my chin, Yngve walked over to the car, opened the door and took out his umbrella. The rain was a regular drumbeat on the gravel and the house, more of a soft patter beyond in the vast darkness, where it fell on grass and moss, trees and bushes.

Yngve opened the umbrella, I closed the door behind me, we set off down the hill. I stared at him, he had his eyes on the path ahead. My legs were trembling jelly, my insides in disarray, but there was also something hard in the centre. I wasn’t going to give him anything. He would get nothing from me.

We walked through the gate, past the neighbours’ house and down onto the tarmac road.

‘Shall we walk down?’ Yngve said.

‘OK,’ I said.

The junction, where three roads met, was illuminated by street lamps, but as soon as we had passed it and reached the road leading into the valley the night was all around us. Trees stood like a wall on either side. There was a faint rushing sound from the river and the rain falling in the forest. Otherwise all we heard was our own footsteps. I stared at him. He glanced at me.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.

‘Yes, so you mentioned,’ I replied. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

He looked straight ahead again.

‘Ingvild and I are going out together,’ he said.

I said nothing, just glared at him.

‘It’s only—’ he began.

‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ I said.

He went quiet, we carried on walking.

The falling rain, our footsteps, the wall of trees in the darkness. The smell of wet spruce, the smell of wet moss, the smell of wet tarmac.

‘I have to explain what happened,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘But, Karl Ove—’

‘I don’t want to hear about it, I told you.’

We reached the firing range, a shed in front of a long narrow piece of open ground to the right of the road.

In the distance was the drone of traffic. It came down the slope from the mountain at the end of the valley.

‘It wasn’t something I planned,’ he said.

‘I DON’T want to hear!’ I said. ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t want to hear anything!’

We walked on in silence. He glanced at me once, was about to say something, changed his mind, looked down, stopped.

‘I’m going back then,’ he said.

‘You do that,’ I said and carried on walking, listening to the sound of his fading footsteps behind me. The next moment a car came round the bend and transformed the darkness into an inferno of light, which lingered on the retina for several seconds after the car had passed, and I walked on blindly until my eyes had got used to the night again, and the road and the trees reappeared.