Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The whole day was spent analysing the texts. I was praised for mine, although Hovland had some criticisms regarding its dramatic quality, in other words the link between the characters and the scenes, I defended myself by saying there wasn’t supposed to be a link, that was the whole point, and he nodded and said yes, but even incoherence requires coherence; the rule of thumb for all writing is that you can write about boredom, but it mustn’t be boring.

Petra had watched me during the analysis, but she said nothing, even when Hovland asked her directly for her opinion she said she had no comment to make. It was only when the lesson was over and people were tidying up and putting on coats that it came.

‘You copied my text,’ she said.

‘I did not,’ I said.

‘You were here last night, you read my text and then you wrote yours. That’s copying pure and simple.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t read yours at all. How can I copy it if I haven’t read it?’

‘Do you think I’m stupid or what? You sat here, read it and wrote a variation on a theme. You might as well admit it.’

‘Well, I would admit it if there was anything in your claim,’ I said. ‘But there isn’t. I didn’t read your text. And I didn’t copy it. If there’s any similarity at all it’s pure chance.’

‘Ha!’ she said, and got up, put her papers and books in her black bag. ‘It makes no difference to me, it’s all right if you copy what I do, but lying about it is not bloody all right.’

‘I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘I knew nothing until you read it out.’

She rolled her eyes, put on her jacket and walked towards the exit. I waited a few minutes for my head to cool down and for Petra to be so far away that I couldn’t catch her up, then I made my way home. I recognised this situation, it was the same as the one I had been in at school when I had voted for myself as class rep and received only one vote, and someone found out by asking everyone in the class who they had voted for. I denied it, they couldn’t prove anything, I just said no, it wasn’t true. In this case, it wasn’t possible to prove anything, no one else but me knew that I had read her piece, I just had to keep denying it, she was the one making a fool of herself. But I had no great desire to show my face there again, for if no one else knew for certain, I did. The night before it had seemed natural, a matter of course, I had only borrowed a little from her, surely that was justified, but during the analysis and in our subsequent exchange it took on a different aspect, I had plagiarised her work and what did that make me? How had I become so desperate that I not only plagiarised a fellow student’s work but on top of that deluded myself into thinking I had made up everything myself?

Once I had copied a poem into my diary and pretended it was me who had written it. I had been twelve at the time, and strange as it might seem that I could so openly dupe myself, you wrote this Karl Ove, you did, while I had copied it from a book, age was a mitigating circumstance. Now I was twenty though, an adult man, how could I have knowingly done anything so base?

For the next few weeks I stayed at home. I wrote my novel, it was hopeless, but I was nearing the end, and it was important I had something concrete and tangible to show for my work this year.

I had sent a text, the one Øystein Lønn had read, to the Cappelen magazine Signaler, and one day it came back. I nurtured wild hopes of an acceptance as I opened the envelope, but guessed which way the wind was blowing, so it was no surprise when I read:

Dear Karl Ove Knausgård,

Thank you for sending me your contribution. I read it with interest, but I am afraid I cannot use it in SIGNALER 89.

Best regards,

Lars Saabye Christensen

It gave me a little frisson of excitement to see Saabye Christensen’s signature, it meant he had read what I had written. For a few minutes at any rate I had filled his mind with what existed in mine!

XTC brought out Oranges and Lemons, I played it again and again, right until deLillos released their Hjernen er alene, The Brain Is Alone, then that was what was on my stereo day and night. Outside, the skies were lighter and the rain fell less often. The feelings of spring, which had been so strong when I was a boy, which had filled all my senses and somehow raised body and soul after the winter’s heaviness and darkness, overcame me again. I stuck at my novel, I wouldn’t finish it until the semester was over, but I planned to hand in what I had done as my final assignment at the Academy. It was the same novel that I had been accepted on the course for, and there was no development evident in it, I wrote in exactly the same style now as I had done then, the whole year had been wasted, the sole difference was that when they accepted me I thought I was a writer, while now, on the verge of finishing, I knew I wasn’t.

One evening Yngve and Asbjørn appeared on the steps.

‘Are you coming out?’ Asbjørn said.

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have any money.’

‘You can borrow some if you want,’ Asbjørn said. ‘Yngve has a broken heart, so we have to drink him through it.’

‘It’s over with Ingvild,’ Yngve said and smiled.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Count me in. Hang on a moment.’

I fetched my jacket and tobacco and walked to town with them. The next three days were a blur, we drank day and night, slept at Asbjørn’s, got drunk in the morning, ate in town, continued drinking in his bedsit, went out in the evening to all sorts of weird places such as Uglen or the bar at Rica, and it was wonderful, nothing could beat the feeling of walking across Torgalmenningen and Fisketorget in the middle of the day, drunk, it was as though I was right and everyone else was wrong, as though I was free and everyone else tied and bound to everyday life, and with Yngve and Asbjørn it didn’t seem wrong or excessive, just fun. On the last night — we didn’t know it would be the last — we took cans of spray paint with us. At Hulen, where we ended up, the place wasn’t very full, when I went to the toilet I spray-painted a slogan inside the cubicle, soon afterwards a member of the staff came with a cloth and bucket to clean it off, once he had left I did it again, we laughed and decided to go the whole hog, spray-paint some buildings in town, and we went to Møhlenpris, I wrote U2 STOPS ROCK ‘N’ ROLL along a big brick wall in letters as high as myself, they had just played on a rooftop, it hadn’t been good, and Bono had formulated the slogan U2 Stops Traffic, which was even less good, while Asbjørn wrote RICKY NELSON RULES OK over the tram depot wall, and Yngve wrote CAT, WE NEED YOU TO RAP on another wall, we continued like this towards his collective, where we stopped to have more to drink. An hour later we had all crashed out. When we woke up it was to the fear of what we had done, because the trail led to us: the graffiti started outside Hulen and continued all the way here, to the wall beside the door, where you could read YNGVE IS A BLOODY … It wouldn’t take much of an investigation to work out where the vandals who had spray-painted the whole of Møhlenpris lived. Asbjørn was especially jittery, but I wasn’t immune, and that was strange because all I wanted to do was to keep on drinking, live life, not give a toss, yet I hit a wall whenever I did that, a wall of petite bourgeoisie and middle-class manners, which could not be broken down without enormous anguish and fear. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Deep down I was decent and proper, a goody-goody, and, I thought, perhaps that was also why I couldn’t write. I wasn’t wild enough, not artistic enough, in short, much too normal for my writing to take off. What had made me believe anything else? Oh, but this was the life-lie.