Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Bergen, the town of swishing windscreen wipers.

Bergen, the town of draughty toiletless bedsits.

Bergen, the town of human fish. See their gaping mouths.

This is where grandad came after selling books in the outlying districts, going from door to door, offering his little library, and with the money he bought himself a new suit. This is where he bought the ring to marry grandma. Bergen, this was the town for them. He dressed up when he came here, put on his best clothes and his finest hat, presumably he had always done that.

Across Danmarksplass, to the right under the signs by the little wooden shed where they sold tyres, to the left again straight afterwards, and uphill between the workers’ houses.

Everything was normal, I thought as I rang the bell and waited for him to open up. Everything was as it had been.

And it was.

Yngve had bought chocolate toffees, just like those dad used to give us while we watched the televised English football matches on a Saturday afternoon when we were growing up, he had brewed up a pot of coffee, which we drank before moving on to beer and crisps at the start of the second half. We kept track of the scores in the other eleven matches, he had ten right so far, but it all went haywire towards the end, I had seven correct results, which was more or less what I got whenever I did the pools.

After the match Asbjørn and Ola came up, we sat drinking and chatting for a while, then we caught a taxi into town and went to Café Opera. Ingvild’s name wasn’t mentioned once. I kept a fairly low profile for the first few hours, I had nothing to say, nothing to contribute, but I got drunker and drunker and then there I was, aglow at the centre of the world, babbling away about anything that came into my head. I told them I was going to move to Istanbul to write next year, I said I wrote better than Brett Easton Ellis, he had a cold heart and I didn’t, I said that Jan Kjærstad had read what I had written and liked it. We can’t go home now, I groaned, when they flashed the lights and fortunately no one had any plans to, almost everyone who had been in Café Opera was now in the streets chatting and waiting to hear about a party. Erling and Arvid were there, they lived in a big house up in Villaveien, right behind the Student Centre, in a collective, we could go there, apparently there wasn’t that much to drink, but that wasn’t a problem because someone immediately jumped into a taxi to get what booze they had from home while we slowly made our way uphill, Erling and Arvid first, then the rest of us dragging behind like the tail of a comet.

Both Erling and Arvid came from Tromøya. I remembered Erling as the goalkeeper in the team above us when I was growing up. He was always gentle, he always smiled, but he was not averse to making the odd acerbic comment. Although he was not especially tall there was something ungainly and sometimes almost limp about him, I had noticed that even in the days when he kept goal. Arvid was big and sturdy and always occupied a lot of space wherever he was. The two of them formed a focal point. If they gave a thumbs up or a thumbs down it was significant. But I was safe, apparently, as I was Yngve’s brother. At any rate, I had been when I arrived in Bergen.

The rooms in the old wooden house were spacious and almost entirely unfurnished, I wandered around, the booze came, I drank, someone was staring at me, I went over to him, asked him what he was staring at, he said he hadn’t seen me before and was just wondering who I was, I shook his hand and then I bent his fingers back until he screamed and I let go. What are you doing?! he hissed, Something wrong with you, is there? I left him and went into the adjacent room, where there was a whole crowd sitting on the floor, among them one of Yngve’s fellow students, the one who had been sitting at the table the first time we went to Café Opera. You’re the spitting image of Jan Kjærstad! I shouted, pointing at him. You look just the same! I do not, he said, I don’t look anything like him. He doesn’t, Karl Ove, said Asbjørn, who was also there. And you look like Tarjei Vesaas! I said, pointing at Arvid. Is that a compliment or what? He laughed. No, in fact it isn’t, I said, and turned away because Yngve was standing behind me. Just take it easy, will you, he said. I heard you almost broke someone’s fingers in there. That’s not on. You can’t do that here. Everyone knows everyone, right? Take it easy. I am taking it easy, I said. I’m having a good time. We’re talking about literature. Kjærstad and Vesaas. I left him and went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, the alcohol had made me so damned hungry, and I saw half a chicken, which I grabbed and sank my teeth into, sitting on the worktop and occasionally washing it down with whisky. That moment, which was wonderful, sitting on the worktop in a student flat eating chicken and drinking whisky was the last I remembered. Afterwards everything was black, apart from an image of me hauling rocks into the sitting room and putting them on the floor, running in and out and continuing until someone stopped me and then everything disappeared again.

This was the pattern for the end of autumn, I tagged along with Yngve and his friends, was silent and shy but polite and affable for the first few hours until alcohol had me in its grip and then anything could pass my lips, anything could happen with my hands, until I woke up in an internal darkness the next day, when image after image of what I had done and said was hurled back at me, and I could only get myself going with a huge effort of will, drag myself back to normality, which then slowly took over. Normality was where I belonged, I realised that more and more, the longer the semester went on, I didn’t have the depth or the originality you needed to become a writer, on the other hand I didn’t want to sit there with the others without saying a word, inhibited and silent, because that wasn’t me either, and so the only thing that helped, the only thing that could raise and transport me into something else, something freer, much closer to myself was: drinking. Sometimes it went well, sometimes the evening finished at the right moment, before anything of consequence had happened, except that I had been happy, but then there were the times it didn’t go well and I went off my head, the way I had gone off my head in northern Norway the year before, I was completely out of control. One habit I had developed was to feel car door handles as I walked past, if one was open I would get into the driver’s seat and try to start the engine, I knew you had to connect some wires but I wasn’t sure which, and I never succeeded in starting a car, but the following day just the fact that I had tried was terrible. I released the handbrake inside a car which was open and parked on the hill near where I lived, causing it to roll back down a metre or two and hit the car behind. I ran off chortling inside with amusement. Not only that, I also tried to make off with lots of bikes, I entered backyards and searched for ones that were unlocked, if I found one, well, then I would cycle home on it. Once there was a bike beside the bed in my room when I woke up. I had to wait until it was dark before I could take it out and leave it in a neighbouring street, scared all the while that someone would see me and the police would come. Another time I saw some people sitting behind a window on the second floor somewhere, I went up the stairs, knocked on the door and went in, they shook their heads, I turned round and went back out. There was no evil in me, I just wanted to destroy things, not people, but as long as my sense of judgement was so clouded anything at all could happen, I realised that, and presumably that was why my fears grew so inordinately in the days afterwards. Yngve, with whom I was now spending as much time as I had done before, told me I shouldn’t drink and suggested I smoke hash instead, maybe that would be better. He said I had begun to acquire a bad reputation and it was affecting him too. But he didn’t stop inviting me out, probably because he saw more of the person I was normally than the person I could become when we were on the town.