Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘I was twenty-two when I ate a steak for the first time,’ Yngve said as we sat on a terrazza, each with an espresso, which we knew we should drink standing, but drank sitting anyway. Being Norwegian, we might just as well have drunk it standing on our heads as standing at the bar.

‘I thought steaks and chops were the same thing,’ he said.

‘Aren’t they?’ I said.

He laughed, thinking I was jesting.

‘In which case I’ve never eaten a steak,’ I said. ‘But then I’m only twenty.’

‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘We’ll definitely have a steak tonight then.’

While autumn had arrived in Bergen it was still hot and summery in Florence. In the middle of the day the sun was boiling even when it was behind a veil of clouds, and the only yellow in the vegetation was caused by the aridity. We went to the Uffizi Gallery, wandered through the endless corridors looking at the paintings, all identical, we saw Michelangelo’s statue of David and some of his unfinished works, the figures looked as if they were trying to break out of the marble blocks that entombed them. We strolled around the large cathedral, went up the stairs and stood right under the roof, continued along a narrow corridor and emerged at the top with the whole of Florence beneath us, we drank coffee in small cafés, ate ice cream and took pictures of each other, Yngve was especially keen, I posed in front of every conceivable kind of wall in my black Ray-Bans, wearing black baggy pants and shirts with a variety of patterns. Now it was all happening in Manchester, and if this had gone unremarked in Italy, it hadn’t in Bergen. First of all I had read about the Stone Roses, then I had gone to listen to them in a record shop, but the sound had been a bit weird, I had thought, I wasn’t sure it was good, but Yngve had bought it, he said it was great, and I bought it too and agreed. It grew and grew on you. The strange thing was that exactly the same had happened with the Smiths, I had heard their debut record in Kristiansand after reading about them in the NME, thought it was too odd, but then the hype reached Norway and it no longer sounded odd but right.

And so we wandered around the town, as beautiful as it was lively, full of people and small scenes, mopeds and palaces; in the evening we walked home and got dressed and went to a restaurant. It was a more refined eatery, I was ill at ease, didn’t like to talk to the waiters, didn’t like being served, didn’t like being seen, didn’t know what to do in the situations that arose, from how to taste wine to what to do with the serviette on the plate, but fortunately Yngve handled everything and soon we were eating our steaks and drinking red wine.

Afterwards we smoked, drank grappa, which tasted like poor-quality moonshine, and talked about dad. We often did this, told each other about minor incidents we remembered with him and discussed recent events, his life in northern Norway, which wasn’t distant to us even though we met him only a couple of times a year and perhaps talked to him on the phone once a month, because he loomed large in our consciousnesses. Yngve hated him or at least was completely unreconciled, didn’t want to hear about how he had changed and wanted a different relationship with us, that wasn’t true, he was the same person, he didn’t lift a finger for us, he wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in us, if he showed a different face it was because he had convinced himself that was how it should be, not that it actually was. I agreed with Yngve, but I was much weaker; if I spoke to dad on the phone I ingratiated myself with him and I had sent him a letter with photos of the Writing Academy although really I wished he didn’t exist, indeed that he was dead.

Weak, that was the word.

I was also weak with respect to Yngve. If there was a silence it was my fault and my responsibility. I knew Yngve didn’t think like that, didn’t care about silences, didn’t feel the need to fill them at all costs, he was sure of himself. This was for the same reason that he had friends and I didn’t. He was relaxed, didn’t give any importance to what he said or did, went out with Asbjørn one Saturday morning, for example, and just mooched around town, perhaps sitting in a café for a few hours, it was no big deal, whereas if I did the same the whole time was so enormously significant that any jarring tone, any discordance, was potentially fatal, and therefore I was forced into, or I forced myself into, a kind of unnatural silence. So was it that silence that distinguished this situation and who would want it around them? Who could stand such stiff and forced behaviour? And I didn’t mean any harm to anyone, so it was better to keep my distance or stay under Yngve’s wing, under his cloak of affability.

The same lack of ease characterised my behaviour with him, but here there was a decisive difference, to wit, the link between us was not dependent on fluctuating situations; however stupidly I behaved I was his brother, he could never get past that and might never want to. The glass-throwing incident gave him a hold over me, it meant that I would always be beneath him, which I basically considered reasonable and felt I deserved.

We paid and went out into the Italian night, I was a bit merry, we looked for a suitable bar, found one, it was new and completely empty, but they played good music and we didn’t know a soul in Florence anyway. We had envisaged having one drink there, but the bar staff were effusive, wanted to talk and hear about Norway and Bergen, asked what kind of music we liked and immediately afterwards the Stone Roses was throbbing through the building. We sat there, getting more and more drunk, and all my inhibitions, all the ties, all the silence and all the forcedness in me dissolved, I was sitting with my brother and we talked about whatever occurred to us and laughed and were happy.

‘None of the people you know do anything themselves, ’ I said. ‘But you can. You can play the guitar and write music. I don’t understand why you don’t start a band and play seriously. You make great songs.’

‘Do you think so?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The others talk about music and bands. Surely that’s not enough for you?’

‘No, I want to play of course. But you have to find people to play with.’

‘Pål’s good, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he is. That’s two. If you play the drums, that’s three. Then we need a vocalist.’

‘There are twenty thousand students in Bergen. One of them must be able to sing.’

‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’

We didn’t need to go to the bar any more to order, they came to us with more drinks the moment we had finished the last, joked with us and asked what other records they should play. When we got up to go it was with a lurch. But we managed to get out and home, talked more about the new band, switched off the light and slept through till late the next day.

In the evening we went back to this fantastic bar. But this time it was crowded and the staff didn’t recognise us. It was impossible to believe that they actually didn’t remember us because no one else had been there and it was only the previous night, so they must have been putting on an act. But why? We ordered a beer each, drank up and left, headed for a discotheque recommended in a travel guide, it was by the river, which we followed, along a broad avenue, with less and less traffic the further we went. It started raining, the streets shone in the light, beside us the river flowed slowly in the darkness, not a soul in sight. We should have seen it ages ago, Yngve said. Perhaps we’ve walked past it, I said. We must have been walking for three-quarters of an hour, and so we turned back. The effect of the beer was long gone. The rain was falling thick and fast. The lights from the hills across the river seemed to be hovering in the air. We didn’t talk any more, walking was enough. After half an hour Yngve stopped. Below us lay a kind of wooden platform, above it hung cables bedecked with light bulbs, unlit, chairs stacked around the edge. Is it here? Yngve said. Here? I repeated. Well, we have come in the off season. Come on, let’s go back and go to bed.