Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Beside the common-core subjects we also had some electives, such as film or music or advanced courses on a variety of theoretical areas, and when we were offered the chance to make suggestions I put up my hand and asked if they could arrange a writing course for us. A literary writing course? The proposal was received with enthusiasm; if there was any interest they would certainly arrange it. I became a kind of leader of the little writing group, and the first thing I said was that we couldn’t get up at seven like the others, because if you were writing you might have sat up all night, that was often when the inspiration came, and the crazy thing was that the teacher responsible for our group bought that lock, stock and barrel, no, of course you can’t get up at seven then, I’ll see what I can do. He arranged it, the writing group could sleep in. I felt guilty, he was nice and well meaning and allowed himself to be used, but on the other hand I hadn’t asked to come up here and it wasn’t my fault they were so hugely well disposed towards us.

He even organised a writer’s visit for us. Arild Nyquist was flown up from Oslo to teach us for a day. He sat there with his sorrowful eyes and asked how many of us wrote seriously, who wanted to become a writer. No one raised a hand. We’re doing this to make life easier for ourselves here, someone said. I see, said Nyquist, that may not be the soundest criterion, but we’ll have to make the best of it. I felt even guiltier then, for all I knew he had left his family to come up here and teach the ardent young conscientious objectors at Hustad Camp, he had once been ardent himself, and then he came face to face with us. But they probably paid him well, so it didn’t matter.

One day we had a role-play session in the gym. We were given different world identities: someone represented America, someone Russia, someone China, someone India, someone the EU, someone the Scandinavian countries, someone Africa, and then we were handed booklets describing our roles. The teacher in charge suggested I should be the general secretary of the UN and lead the international conference. Why her choice fell on me I had no idea, but such things happened, people did sometimes pick me out and credit me with certain qualities. When I was a literature student one of the lecturers had made a mental note of me and in his lessons he would suddenly point to me and say, what does Karl Ove think about this?

So there I sat in the gymnasium trying to prevent a world war from breaking out, organising meetings with various parties, mediating and suggesting compromises. The only person I knew in Hustad from before, Johs, represented Russia. Johs was what grandad would have called a wizard, he had studied sociology and got the best grades they had given for many years, well, perhaps ever, it was said; he had studied in Paris and was at a level other students could only dream about. However, he carried this talent very lightly, he was a modest man, sometimes bordering on self-effacing, he was genuinely good and friendly, no one had a bad word to say about him, considerate and empathetic, and therefore also vulnerable, it had struck me many times. He also had good friends, they seemed to form a protective ring around him, they were his guardians. His parents were farmers in Jølster, only a few kilometres down from where mum lived. He was strong, but strength was in a way secondary with him, something you hardly noticed. What you did notice was his sensitivity. In his own eyes he was perhaps a very ordinary guy — what did I know — but he wasn’t, I had never met anyone with precisely the mix of qualities he had.

He represented Russia in our role play, and he outmanoeuvred everyone, not least me, so that he, that is Russia, by the end of the day had made huge territorial gains in Europe and Asia and become the dominant major power, on the brink of total world control.

He had a good laugh at that.

In the evening, in the homely lounge where music blared and people sat around playing games or reading magazines, smoking and drinking beer, one of the semi-criminal layabouts from Bergen came over to me, I was leaning against the banister to the floor below and he stood so close it felt threatening.

‘You think you’re someone, don’t you,’ he said. ‘Like the UN general secretary. Sitting there with your books. But you’re nothing.’

‘I’ve never said I’m someone,’ I said.

‘Shut your mouth,’ he said and left.

Stories about him were circulating, one was that he had shouted Fuck you and your family! in the camp director’s office, and the way he had added the family was funny. There were two or three of his kind there, they were hard nuts and could easily have beaten me to pulp if they’d had a mind to, but they were also completely off their trolleys and ignorant, an immense ignorance that could have quite bizarre effects on the teaching when they attended classes, which was seldom.

It was of course ironic that such violent types should be here of all places, in a camp where the peace and pacifist flag flew aloft, but it was also typical because in some way or other they were the ‘alternatives’, they lived half inside, half outside the bounds of society, and it was there that the most important part of the 70s alternative movement could be found. If you took away their ideology, all that was left was their outsider status and drugs.

There was another gang from Bergen and they were musicians. They came from Loddefjord, Fyllingsdalen and Åsane, and hung around together all the time, slumped on the sofas reading comics or watching TV, but when they jammed together they went through a total transformation, they stood there like demons and conjured up complex soundscapes from nothing, they had mastered their instruments to perfection, but then, after these explosions, they reverted to type, chewing the cud, slumped somewhere. The exception was Calle, one of Bergen’s stars, his band had released records, gone on tour and now he was playing with Lasse Myrvold, the legend from The Aller Værste! in a band he called Kong Klang. He was different from the other musicians, his curiosity stretched beyond the sphere of music, he was open, very much so, and basically brilliant, but when he touched on areas I knew something about, such as literature, he was also naïve, and I found that moving somehow, as I did all chinks in the armour of others.

As far as possible I stayed in the background in Hustad, spent all of the time on my own, did some reading, importantly The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, which I had bought in Danish as the Norwegian edition was abridged. It was the best novel I had read in many years, there was something about the relationship between sickness and health that was appealing. It made its first appearance when Hans Castorp left the sanatorium to go for a walk up the beautiful mountainsides, and suddenly his nose began to bleed uncontrollably, and he continued his infatuations with women, in whom it is the illness Mann focuses on, the feverishness, the shining eyes, the coughing, the bent backs and poor physiques, all framed by green valleys and gleaming alpine peaks. The long ensuing discussions between the Jesuit and the humanist, which could almost be considered life-and-death duels, where everything really was at stake, were also captivating. They were bound up with descriptions of life at the sanatorium, I assumed, it was part of the same, although I couldn’t explain it, I was unfamiliar with the frames of reference within which the discussions unfolded.

I had read Doctor Faustus when I was eighteen. All I could remember from it was Adrian Leverkühn’s breakdown, when his greatest achievements in art coincided with his reduction to an infantile state, and the magnificent opening, when Zeitblom and Leverkühn are children and the composer’s father performs simple experiments for them, he manipulates dead material in such a way that it behaves as if it were alive. And then I had read Death in Venice, the old man at death’s door who makes himself up and dyes his hair to impress the beautiful youth.