Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

After a while she got up to go for a shower, and after she had gone I took out the song I had written for Yngve. He cast a quick eye over it. It’s great, he said and stuffed it in his back pocket.

Ingvild walked through the room wrapped in a large towel.

I looked away.

‘We have to go soon,’ Yngve said. ‘You’ll have to hurry.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Ingvild said.

We had another beer, then he stood up and started to get dressed. Opened the door to the room where Ingvild was standing and drying her hair.

‘Let’s go. Come on,’ he said.

‘I just have to finish drying my hair,’ she said from inside the room.

‘Couldn’t you have done it a bit earlier?’ Yngve said. ‘You knew we had to go soon, didn’t you.’

He closed the door.

‘Good job I didn’t book a taxi anyway,’ he said without looking at me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There was a silence. The girl who lived there went into the sitting room and switched on the television.

At the party, which consisted mainly of media students plus a crowd of music types, I was as usual the younger brother of Yngve and nothing else. Girls thought it amusing that we were so alike, I said next to nothing, apart from when someone put on a classical record and asked what it was and none of the media students could answer, and I said, my face half-averted and embarrassed at myself, that it was Tchaikovsky. It was. Yngve eyed me with surprise. How did you know? he said. Lucky break, I said, and it was too, I had one record by Tchaikovsky and that was the one.

Ingvild took an early taxi home, Yngve stayed and it was painful to see that he didn’t appreciate her more, that he was happy to see her go. If it had been me I would have flung my arms around her. I had worshipped her. I had given her everything I had. Yngve didn’t do that. Did he care about her at all?

He must do. But he was older, more experienced, a different light burned in him to my stupid naïve one. And what I also saw was that he gave Ingvild space, a larger space than she occupied, which I couldn’t have done, never in this world, because we were in the same space, she and I, the space of uncertainty and hesitation, half-groping and half-clutching. She needed him as much as I did.

After we had run through various dramatists and various drama traditions at the Academy, the idea was that we should write something in the genre ourselves, as usual. I put off doing this until the evening before it was due, then I plodded off to Verftet to sit there all night. We had a standing offer of a desk there if we needed an undisturbed place to write in the afternoon and evening, I had borrowed the keys and done it a couple of times, there was something about being alone in a common room that I liked, perhaps because there was nothing in it that reminded me of myself, I wasn’t quite sure why, that was just how it was, this evening too, when I let myself in and walked through the empty hallway, up the empty stairs and into the empty rooms at the top.

The others had already handed in their contributions, photocopies of their work lay in piles on the table in the adjacent room. I fetched a typewriter, put on some coffee, stared at the reflection of the room in the black windows, looking as though it had been pulled out of the drifting waters of Vågen. It was nine o’clock, I had decided I would sit here until I had finished, even if it took all night.

I had no idea what to write.

The coffee was ready, I drank a cup, smoked a cigarette, stared at the image of myself in the window. Turned and looked at the bookshelves. They wouldn’t have a photography book of scantily clad or naked women here, would …?

But they did have a book about the history of art. I reached it down and leafed through. Some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings were of naked women. Perhaps there was something I could use there?

It was too big for me to fit into my trousers. And I didn’t want to carry it under my arm because even though the chance of someone appearing at this time was minimal it wasn’t impossible, and how would I explain lugging an art book down to the toilet?

I put it in a plastic bag and went down the spiral staircase and into the toilet. A picture by Rafael stood out at once, two women in front of a well, one naked, the other dressed, the naked one was strikingly beautiful, she was looking enigmatically to the side, her small breasts were pert, a strip of cloth covered her nether regions, but her thighs were visible and I got a hard-on, I flicked through, stared at a picture by Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), one of the two naked women was the red-haired pale freckly type with a small chin and a full body, then there was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485), where one breast was bared, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in which the woman in the foreground had one hand resting between her legs while she gazed straight at the observer with a provocative self-assured expression on her face. I studied her naked breasts for a long time, her broad hips and small feet, but there was more to see of course, and I went on to Bartholomeus Spranger’s Vulcan and Maia (1590), in which the woman, with her hands on a strong bearded man, thrusts her hips forward with a lustful glint in her eye. Her breasts were supple, her skin was all white, her face almost childish. She was good. The next was Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), the woman in the foreground had her back to us, one breast was revealed, thrust right forward, because she had a sword to her throat, and the whole of her bottom was visible, perfectly formed. During this time, as I flicked backwards and forwards, trying to decide which picture to go for, I wanked slowly, holding myself back. Maybe Delacroix? No, it had to be Ingres! Odalisque with Slave (1842). She’s lying full length with her arms behind her head and is all wonderful curves, or, oh, of course The Turkish Bath (1862). Only women in this one and they were all naked. They sat and stood in every conceivable pose and every possible type was represented: cool, passionate, half-concealed, fully exposed. All skin and flesh and female forms as far as the eye could see. But which one, oh, which one? The one with the chubby face and the open lips? I loved faces in which the mouths were slightly open and the teeth always visible. Or the blonde just behind with the haughty gaze? The one with the small breasts staring at her hand? Or the one, oh yes, sitting behind her, leaning back, arms outstretched, eyes closed in ecstasy, it had to be her!

Afterwards I stood still for a moment to make sure there was no one in the corridor outside, then I went back up, returned the book to its place on the shelf, poured myself a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and sat staring at the blank page.

Nothing. I had no idea what to write.

I went for a little walk, browsed through the books, went into the photocopy room, skimmed through the others’ work. They were what you would expect, each and every one of them had written in complete keeping with their own particular style. Most I just cast a quick glance at, but I took Petra’s into the classroom and read it carefully. It was a kind of absurd, almost surreal, comedy where people did totally unmotivated and pretty crazy things, it was high tempo, devoid of meaning, my main impression was: chaos and randomness.

Surely I could do that too?

I began to write, and I wrote quickly, one scene after the other appeared on the paper as a kind of extension of what I had read. There might have been some slight similarities in the characterisation, what they got up to was also unmotivated and unexpected, but it was not a carbon copy of Petra’s, ultimately the characters did do different things, and I was very pleased when I had a first draft at around three. I touched it up, went through the whole drama one more time and by eight in the morning I had got so far that I was able to photocopy the text ten times and put the copies in a pile beside the others. When the first student arrived, at a quarter to ten, I was asleep in my chair.