Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

In the middle of November I was broke, but basically that suited me fine, we had a month-long writing period and so I went to mum’s, stayed in her tiny bedsit and wrote at night while she lay asleep at the far end of the same room, then slept in the hall during the day while she was at work. In the evenings we ate together, chatted or watched TV until she went to bed and my night shift started. After two weeks she drove me to Sørbøvåg, where there was more space, and I immersed myself in the life that went on there, so infinitely far from the life I lived in Bergen, but I was not without a guilty conscience, for what I was doing, the abjectness of it, became so clear when I was surrounded by frailty and disease, but also vitality and warmth.

After Christmas Yngve moved into a collective in Fjellsiden, the flat he had occupied until then was due to be sold. The collective was in a splendid large detached house, I often went there, it was one of the few places I could go. He lived with three others, one of whom, Per Roger, I talked to, he was interested in literature and was a writer himself, but as he was in Yngve’s circle I felt so inferior to him that I barely answered when he asked me something and nothing came of the relationship.

An essay course started at the Academy, I wrote about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of the books I was really passionate about, alongside Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and even though they didn’t fall into the category of literature the teachers favoured and taught, I still received some praise from Fosse, he said my language was tight and precise, my arguments solid and interesting and that I obviously had a talent for non-fiction. The praise was two-edged: did it mean that my future lay in literature about literature and not in literature itself?

Øystein Lønn dropped by on various occasions, the idea being that we should hand in our texts to him, but I didn’t want to, I couldn’t face any more humiliation in the classroom, and instead went to see him privately, at his hotel, with my text in my hand. At the beginning of the course he had said he was at our disposal from dawn till dusk, and all we had to do was go and see him if there was anything we wanted to discuss. So, one evening at seven, I trudged down the hills below my bedsit, the street lamps above me swinging in the wind, the rain beating on the walls and roofs. The heavens were inexhaustible, it had rained every day since the beginning of September and except for a couple of hours I hadn’t seen the sun for what would soon be eight months. The streets were deserted apart from a few people who rushed past hugging the walls, in Bergen it was vital to get from A to B as fast as you could. The water in Vågen glittered in the reflection from the buildings along the quay, an express ferry drifted in and docked. As I passed the terminal it lowered its gangplank and passengers began disembarking, mostly into waiting taxis.

Lønn was staying at Hotel Neptun around the corner, I went in, was given his room number at reception, went up and knocked on the door.

Lønn, a sturdy fellow with big hands and a broad face, stared at me in surprise.

‘You said we could come and see you if we had something to discuss,’ I said. ‘So I brought a text with me. I wonder if you would mind having a look at it.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Come in!’

The room was dark, he had only the two bedside lamps switched on, and the carpet, which was red and stretched from wall to wall, seemed to absorb all the light.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted me to look at? I can do it for tomorrow if you like.’

‘It’s short,’ I said. ‘Just over a page.’

‘I’d better have a look at it then,’ he said. I passed him the text, he perched a pair of glasses on his nose and began to read.

I glanced around cautiously. It was a story about some young boys who had climbed up the steel cables of a bridge, it was snowing hard, they disappeared in the whirl of falling snow, one of them jumped. It transpired that this happened regularly, that a boy jumped to his death. The novella, or short prose text, was inspired by Julio Cortázar.

‘Ye-es,’ Lønn said, removed his glasses, folded them and put them in his shirt pocket. ‘A nice little story. Concise and pithily told. There’s not much more to say about it, is there?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Did you like it?’

‘Yes, I liked it a lot.’

He got up. I got up too. He handed me the text.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He closed the door behind me, I walked down the corridor and felt like screaming at my stupidity. What had I been trying to achieve? What had I expected? That he would say actually I was brilliant? That he would tip the wink to his publisher about me?

No, not that I was brilliant, I didn’t believe that, but that he would take an interest in me and perhaps tell someone at his publishing house, that would have been a possibility, I had thought. Publishing houses did sometimes take an interest in Writing Academy students, that was well known. So why not in me?

When Lønn finished his course he did it with a few well-chosen sentences about each and every student and the various literary projects that he had been allowed to share. Praise for everyone apart from me, whom he failed to mention.

I left, furious and bitter.

It was true I hadn’t handed in any work to him like the others, but he had read one of my texts. Why would he make a secret of that? If he thought it was so awful, surely he could at least have said?

After that I stayed away from the Academy for several weeks. I had already done some skiving in the autumn, and I stepped it up after Christmas, there was no obligation to attend classes, we were free to decide, and for as long as it felt as if I was having my head shoved down the toilet whenever I was there, I had no reason to attend everything, I argued, it was better to sit at home and write, after all that was what I had said when I applied, that the course would give me the opportunity to write full time for a year.

So during the spring I was more often at home than at the Academy, and after the Lønn business I almost gave up attending classes. I didn’t write either, everything felt meaningless apart from going out, which had continued, I did everything I wanted to do, the decadent bohemian city lifestyle, the writer going to rack and ruin with his eyes open wide and a bottle on the table. I broke one of my rules, I went out drinking on my own one evening, I sat in Fekterloftet with a carafe of white wine. Fekterloftet’s speciality was that all the girls who worked there were stunning. That was why I had chosen this particular place to go, thinking I might be able to start a conversation with one of them, but it didn’t happen, they were interested in serving and little else, so once I had finished the second carafe I got up and went to Café Opera, where I hung out in the bar until they closed without seeing one familiar face, then I walked home. I woke up to someone shaking me, opened my eyes, I was lying in the hall, on the floor, sat up, it was Jon Olav. I had crashed out next to his door. The pockets in my waterproof bulged with small stones. I realised I must have collected them to throw at his window. Then someone living there must have come along and I followed them in. Jon Olav laughed at me, and I went back home, my body aching for more sleep. A couple of days later I went to Café Opera in the morning, I couldn’t be bothered to go to the Academy and didn’t fancy sitting at home, so I decided to wander down and buy myself a bottle of wine and see what happened. Getting drunk in the middle of the day was a good feeling, there was a lot of freedom in it, suddenly the day opened and offered quite different opportunities now that I didn’t care about anything. Just walking down the street to buy some newspapers at a kiosk was an experience when you were drunk. It was as though a hole into the world had been opened, all the usual stuff — shelves of chewing gum, pastilles, chocolate — had an unpleasant air when you saw it through drunken eyes in the middle of the day. Not to mention the newspaper articles I read, back at a window table a few minutes later. Something raw and terrible attached itself to them while I viewed them with vivid, almost triumphant, feelings. Jesus, man, I was somebody, I could see something no one else could see, I could see into the depths of the world.