Karl Knausgaard: Some Rain Must Fall

I sat by the brick grill outside the farmhouse and lit a cigarette. It might have been eleven o’clock or maybe half past. The farmhouse looked the way it must have done when grandma worked here, in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, everything looked more or less the same as it did then. Yet everything was different. It was August 1988, I was an 80s person, contemporaneous with Duran Duran and The Cure, not that fiddle and accordion music grandad listened to in the days when he trudged up the hill in the dusk with a friend to court grandma and her sisters. I didn’t belong here, with all of my heart I felt that. It didn’t help that I knew the forest was actually an 80s forest and the mountains actually 80s mountains.

So what was I doing here?

My plan had been to write. But I couldn’t, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.

When the week was over and mum drove up the narrow gravel road, I was sitting on the steps waiting with my rucksack packed and ready between my legs, not having written a single word.

‘Have you had a nice time?’ she said.

‘Yes, great,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get much done though.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, looking at me. ‘But perhaps the rest did you good.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it did,’ I said, buckling my seat belt, and then we drove back to Førde, where we parked and had lunch at Sunnfjord Hotel. We chose a window table, mum hung her bag over her chair, then we went over to the buffet in the middle of the dining room to serve ourselves. The place was quite empty. When we sat down, each with a plate, a waiter came over, I asked for a Coke, mum wanted a Farris mineral water, and after he had gone she began to talk about her plans — which now looked as if they were going to materialise — to establish a further training course in psychiatric patient care at the school. She had located some suitable premises herself, a wonderful old school, according to her, which wasn’t that far from the School of Nursing. It had soul, she said, it was an old timber building, with big rooms, high ceilings, quite different from the cramped brick bunker she was teaching in now.

‘That sounds good,’ I said, my gaze wandering to the car park, where a handful of vehicles glinted in the sunlight. The mountainside across the river was completely green apart from one plot that had been blasted out with dynamite, where a house had been built which vibrated with all of its many different colours.

The waiter returned and I drank the glass of Coke in one long draught. Mum began to talk about my relationship with Gunnar. She said I seemed to have internalised him and turned him into my super-ego, the one that told me what I could and couldn’t do, what was wrong and what wasn’t.

I put down my knife and fork and looked at her.

‘Have you been reading my diary?’ I said.

‘No, not your diary,’ she said. ‘But you left a book you’d been writing in on your holiday. You’re usually so open and tell me everything.’

‘But, Mum, that was a diary,’ I said. ‘You don’t read other people’s diaries.’

‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘I know that. But if you leave it on the sitting-room table there’s hardly anything secret about it, is there?’

‘But you could see it was a diary, couldn’t you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a travelogue.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘That was my mistake. I shouldn’t have left it lying around. But what was it you said about Gunnar? That I’d internalised him? What did you mean by that?’

‘That’s how it seemed from the dream you described and your subsequent thoughts.’

‘Really?’

‘Your father was very strict with you when you were growing up, as you know. But then he was suddenly gone, and perhaps you had a sense that you could do whatever you liked. So you’ve got two sets of norms, but both derive from the outside. What’s important is that you set your own limits. That has to come from the inside, from you yourself. Your father didn’t do that, and that’s maybe why he was so confused.’

‘Is,’ I said. ‘He’s still alive to my knowledge. At any rate, I spoke to him on the phone a week ago.’

‘But now it appears you’ve installed Gunnar in your father’s place,’ she continued, flashing me a look. ‘This has nothing to do with Gunnar. We’re talking about setting your limits. But you’re old enough now. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do in my diary,’ I said. ‘Then all sorts of people read it, and it becomes impossible to work it out for myself.’

‘I apologise,’ mum said. ‘I really didn’t think you regarded it as a diary. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have read it.’

‘I’ve told you it’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘Shall we have a sweet as well?’

We sat in her flat chatting until late, then I went into the hall, closed the door behind me, fetched the lilo, which was leaning against the wall in the little bathroom, laid it on the floor, covered it with a sheet, undressed, switched off the light and lay down. Faintly, I could hear her moving about and the occasional car passing outside. The smell of plastic from the lilo reminded me of my childhood, camping trips and the open countryside. Times were different now, but the feeling of anticipation was the same. The next day I was off to Bergen, the big university town, I would be living in my own digs and attending the Writing Academy. In the evenings and at night I would sit in Café Opera or go to gigs with great bands at Hulen. It was fantastic. But the most fantastic thing of all was that Ingvild would be moving to the same town. We had arranged to meet, I had her phone number, I would ring her when I arrived.

It was too good to be true, I thought, lying there on the airbed, filled with a restlessness and a joy that this was about to begin. I lay on one side, then on the other, listening to mum talking in her sleep in the sitting room. Yes, she said. Then there was a long pause. Yes, she said again. That’s true. Long pause. Yes. Yes. Mhm. Yes.

The following day mum took me to Handelshuset, where she wanted to buy me a jacket and some trousers. I chose a fur-lined denim jacket, which looked pretty cool, and a pair of green military-style trousers, as well as some black shoes. Then she drove me to the bus station, gave me the money for the ticket, stood by the car waving as the bus moved off and into the road.

After a few hours of forests, lakes, vertiginously steep mountains and narrow fjords, farms and fields, a ferry and a long valley where the bus was high up a mountainside one minute and right down by the water’s edge the next, and an endless succession of tunnels, the frequency of houses and signs began to increase, there were more and more populated areas, industrial buildings appeared, fences, petrol stations, shopping centres and estates on both sides of the road. I saw a sign for the Business School and it struck me, that was where Agnar Mykle went forty years ago. On one side I saw Sandviken Psychiatric Hospital rise like a fortress at the foot of the mountains, while on the other the water glittered in the afternoon sun, with yachts and boats whose outlines seemed to blur in the haze against a backdrop of islands and mountains and the low sky over Bergen.

I jumped off the bus at the far end of Bryggen, the old wharf. Yngve was working the evening shift at the Orion Hotel and I had arranged to pick up the key to his flat there. The town around me was sunk in the stupor that only late-summer afternoons can evoke. Now and then a figure sauntered past in shorts and a T-shirt, followed by a long flickering shadow. House walls shimmering in the sun, motionless leaves on trees, a yacht chugging out of the harbour, masts bare.

The reception area at the hotel was packed with people. Yngve, busy behind his desk, looked up at me and said a coachload of Americans had just arrived, look, here’s the key, see you later, OK?