Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I drank all day, at around five I ate there, then I went down to a bookshop and bought a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, which I tried to read for the next few hours with limited success, I could no longer concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, every sentence I read made me swell with emotion. I can do that too, I thought. No, I can do better than that. Much, much better.

I started to doze off, closed my eyes and went absent for odd moments, came to with a jerk, how long had I been gone? Around me Café Opera was slowly filling up. Suddenly Per Roger was standing in front of me.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said. ‘Are you out on your own?’

I saw no point in denying it and nodded.

‘Come over and join us then!’ he said. ‘We’re sitting over there.’

I stared at him. What was that he said?

‘How much have you actually had to drink?’ Per laughed. ‘Are you coming? We’ve got girls there too!’

I stood up and followed him to his table, sat down on one of the chairs, nodded to the others. There were five of them. The nearest one had shoulder-length fair hair and glasses, sideburns and a T-shirt with a skull, a snake and a dagger on underneath a grayish-white goatskin jacket. The guy beside him had long dark hair and sluggish eyes. Then there was a girl, perhaps a couple of years older than me, whom the last member of the group, a short-haired dark handsome guy with a crafty expression, clearly fancied.

‘This is Karl Ove,’ Per Roger said.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ said the fair-haired guy. ‘You a student?’

‘I’m at the Writing Academy,’ I said.

‘You don’t say,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong man then. If there’s one thing I haven’t got, it’s culture! My name’s Gaute by the way.’

He was from Bergen, his pal was from Bergen too, while the sly dark-haired guy was from Odda. The girl was an Østlander. Gaute and Per Roger talked and laughed a lot, the others didn’t say that much, laughed now and then at what Gaute said, but seemed to be somewhere else. I drank and looked out of the window, at the dry tarmac reflecting the street lamps. A little guy, around twenty-five, wearing a white shirt, sat down at the table. His eyes were blue, cold and bored.

Gaute looked at me.

‘Do you know what the skin round a cunt is called?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘A woman.’

He laughed, I did too, and then we skål -ed. Slowly I entered a new phase of intoxication, I rose higher and higher, it was wonderful, I didn’t care about anything any more. Laughed a bit, made the odd comment, went to the bar and got more beer as the glasses emptied.

You didn’t have to be with Gaute for long to know that he disliked everything that smacked of power and the Establishment with the whole of his heart, in fact he hated it. I had met a lot of people with anti-bourgeois attitudes, but they were students and a part of the system, this guy seemed to have acted on his convictions, he was completely on the outside, joking and laughing at everything, quips about Jews and blacks came thick and fast, and I laughed at them so much I could hardly stop. When Café Opera closed he suggested we go back to his place and play a few records and smoke a bit, we shambled out, flagged down a taxi and went to his flat, which it turned out was on the Nordnes peninsula.

When we got out of the taxi and into the stairwell Per Roger said they had been drinking for six months now and were planning to continue. I said I could imagine doing that. Just stick with us, he said, and then we went into Gaute’s flat.

‘It’s my mother’s,’ he said. ‘That’s why it’s so nice here. Sorry. Ha ha ha! But I don’t want any shouting, OK. There are neighbours here too.’

‘Come on, Gaute,’ Per Roger said. ‘If I want to shout I will.’

Gaute didn’t answer, took out a record, I sat down at the table. The music he played was sombre and loud. The other long-haired guy, whose name I couldn’t remember, got an enormous carrot from the fridge and started carving it, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, engrossed in his task.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

He didn’t answer.

‘He’s making a pipe,’ Gaute said. ‘He comes from Åsane. Full of tossers there, and that’s what they do. But you’re not a Lords of the New Church man, are you.’

I shook my head.

‘Pop and indie,’ I said.

‘Pop and indie,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Can we be bothered to wait for the pipe? You’ve got tobacco, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What would you say if I put a bit of horse on the table?’ he said, with his cold eyes.

‘A horse on the table?’ Gaute said, laughing. ‘What the hell are we going to do with that?’

‘Have you got anything to drink?’ I said.

‘There might be a drop left somewhere. I don’t know. You’d better have a look. If you want,’ he said, nodding towards the kitchen. ‘I fancy a smoke myself.’

He looked at the guy from Odda.

‘Did you say you had some on you?’ he said.

The Odda guy nodded, took out a clump of hash wrapped in silver paper and a packet of large Rizla papers and passed them to Gaute. He heated up the clump, I put the tobacco in the paper, picked out the longest threads and ran the lighter over it a few times, the way I had seen others do, gave it to him, he mixed the hash into the tobacco, rolled up the cigarette, licked it and passed the whole salami to me.

We smoked half of it, I got up and went to the toilet, I felt as though my head had been blitzed, all my thoughts were scattered, one bit here, one bit there, mumbling to myself as I peed.

When I went back in, Gaute and Per Roger were talking loudly, almost shouting, a wild hotchpotch of Jew jokes, wordplay and brutality. The guy with the eyes wasn’t to be seen anywhere. The guy from Odda was sitting with the girl on his lap and snogging. The long-haired tosser was filling the carrot pipe with tobacco. I slid down the wall to the floor. Across the table they began to discuss the most brutal ways you could kill yourself. Gaute leaned forward and passed me the joint. I took a deep drag.

‘Give it here,’ Gaute said with a snigger. I passed him the joint, he took a drag and his cheeks were hollow for ages before he exhaled the smoke and passed the joint on to Per Roger.

‘You’ve landed in a suicidal viper’s nest,’ he said and laughed. ‘We’ll drink for as long as we can, and then we’ll kill ourselves. That’s the plan. And you’re in, Per Roger says.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For the drinking bit at any rate.’

‘Can’t have one without the other,’ Gaute said and laughed again. ‘But we have to do it in turn. So those who are left can sell the hair and the gold teeth and keep going for a few more days. Ha ha ha!’

Per Roger laughed as he stared at me.

Then he said:

wriggle with the snake

slither and slide

whither the viper wills

‘What was that?’ I said. ‘Hávamál or what?’

‘No, it’s a poem I wrote.’

‘Did you? That’s fantastic.’

‘We all know which snake you’re thinking about!’ Gaute said. ‘We also know where it’s going! “Slither and slide”, that’s you!’

Per Roger laughed at what Gaute said, but he stared at me with serious wide-open eyes. I looked down.

The Odda guy and the girl got up and were gone. I couldn’t be bothered to look where. I disappeared, when I opened my eyes again the room was empty apart from the guy with the carrot, who was sleeping on the floor. I stood up and went out. The darkness was dense, the streets were deserted. I had no idea what the time was, just walked towards town, barely present inside myself. A car raced up behind me, it was a taxi, I raised my hand in the air, it stopped, I got in, mumbled my address and when it accelerated down the cobbled street it was as though I was taking off, I was floating on the back seat, like a balloon under the car roof. Oh, I had to control this feeling, I couldn’t fly inside the taxi, but it was no good, I couldn’t hold myself down, I floated like a balloon under the roof the whole way home. Once there, I undressed, went to bed and slept like a log. When I woke it was pitch black outside. I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock.