Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

We sat there until the guy whose flat it was wanted to go to bed. Then she accompanied me home, we talked the whole way, outside my front door for maybe half an hour, then she asked if we could see each other again, and I said yes, I would like that.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes, great.’

‘Shall we go to the cinema?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

She left, I went to bed, strangely light-headed.

Two weeks later she turned round on the steps going up to her place.

‘We’re going out together now, aren’t we, Karl Ove?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am anyway!’

By then we had spent almost every evening since we met with each other. Her place, my place, Café Opera, Fekterloftet, long walks through Bergen’s streets. We talked and talked, one night we kissed, and then we spent the night together, but nothing happened, she wanted to wait, wanted to be certain about me. You can be certain about me, I said, because I was aching with desire, all the time, I was walking beside her doubled up, but no, time was on our side, time was a friend. An evil friend, I said, come on, how dangerous can it be? No, it wasn’t dangerous, but she wanted to wait, she didn’t know me. But I’ve shown you everything! There’s nothing left to see! I’m so small! She laughed, shook her head, I would have to wait. Lying next to her hot naked body!

These were hard conditions, but everything else was like a fever, like a dream, she came and went, the rest was like dozing, unimportant, she gave the world shape and gravity, she, Gunvor, my girlfriend.

Jon Olav had moved into a big flat down by the cinema, I had introduced her to him long ago, now he was going to be away for a few days, we could use his flat if we wanted? Oh yes. We were there for two days and nights, we only went out for food, we couldn’t be without each other, but still she wouldn’t, she still didn’t know me well enough.

Her youngest sister and boyfriend invited us to visit them in Hardanger, where they lived in a big old house. We caught the bus there, it was dark, the countryside was white with snow lit up by the moon, and above us, glittering in the sky, myriad stars. It was twenty degrees below zero, the snow creaked as we walked up the hills, the cold air burned in our lungs, the skin on our faces was rigid, and around us there was silence.

They had lit the fire, made dinner, we sat chatting and eating and drinking red wine, I was happy. We had a room up in the loft, it was freezing cold, even under the duvet, and my desire was so great that I didn’t know what to do, I snuggled up to her, kissed her beautiful breasts, her beautiful stomach, her beautiful feet, but no, I had to wait, she didn’t know me well enough, still didn’t know who I was.

‘I’m Karl Ove Knausgård and I want you!’ I said then.

She laughed and she hugged me, she was so soft and supple, and her eyes were gentle, and she was mine.

But not completely, not fully, it was still just her and me, and not us.

I didn’t read much during those weeks. It felt unimportant, but she went up to university every day, and so I did too, though mostly for appearance’s sake, the sentences didn’t make much sense to me, for everything was churning around, everything was open and undefined, until I saw her come and make the world secure and clear again. Her, Gunvor, my girlfriend.

Espen came over during a break, he asked if I had read the Mandelstam essay yet, I hadn’t, I was thinking of reading The Divine Comedy first, he thought that wise.

‘Which edition are you reading? The Nynorsk one? I started it, but it’s so archaic it’s pretty impossible. So I bought the Swedish version. It’s very good.’

‘I bought the Nynorsk edition,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to see how I get on.’

His gaze, which had been open and innocent, suddenly turned stern and introspective and he directed it at the field down in front of us.

I hurriedly revisited what had just been said. After a while, with neither of us saying anything, he glanced up at me.

‘Would you like to come to Alrek one afternoon? Then we can play chess or something. Do you play chess?’

‘I know the rules,’ I said. ‘But I can’t exactly say I play.’

‘You can have a refresher,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘But I’d like a trip over anyway.’

We arranged to meet the following afternoon. In the reading room I took out the translation of Divina Commedia, started reading without taking notes, whatever stuck would stick of its own accord. I knew a little of what it was about, I had read a third of Lagercrantz’s Dante book and formed a clear impression of what it was like. Still, however, I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of time I got from the first pages, for the book not being about the fourteenth century but actually dating from that century, it was a part of that century, and I was able to experience it now.

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

The gates of hell, Easter 1300. Dante, who has lost his way, in midlife, and who will find redemption by seeing all there is to see.

He will see everything and he will be redeemed.

But at the beginning of the first canto it wasn’t in life where he had lost his way but in a forest, and the animals that attacked him were not sins or treachery, they were beasts of flesh and blood, baring their teeth and snarling. Hell wasn’t an internal state, the entrance to it lay there, in the middle of the world, at the bottom of a precipice, surrounded by forest and wilderness on all sides.

I understood of course that the contents of the explanatory footnotes, about what the individual animals and places and occurrences represented, were real enough, but what was exceptional about the opening, which I felt in every cell of my body like a gnawing hunger, was the concrete physical and material nature of it, not the shadows cast into the world of ideas. Something was compared with the building of a ship in a yard in Venice, and suddenly, with immense force, I realised that Dante must have been sitting somewhere and writing this, perhaps peering into the air and pondering what comparison he could draw, and then he remembered a shipyard he had seen once, in Venice, which was still there as he wrote.

I was supposed to meet Gunvor in the afternoon, I packed up my things and walked through the corridors dangling a plastic bag from my hand and into the courtyard between the buildings, I had stopped to have a smoke when I saw her coming towards me. She smiled with her whole body, she stretched up onto her toes and kissed me on the lips. We walked hand in hand, down the hills and over to Nøstet, where her bedsit was. She shared it with a girlfriend called Arnhild. Her best friend was Karoline, and on paper, with their ponderous unfashionable names, they were an intimidating trio — Gunvor, Arnhild and Karoline — but in reality they were happy and cheerful and wonderfully normal. Arnhild was at the Business School and wore lambswool sweaters and a pearl necklace, Karoline studied at university and was a few notches tougher, she was closer to Gunvor, they had the same sense of humour, they followed in each other’s footsteps in the way that I gathered girlfriends did. Once she told us about the time a boy had tried to chat her up, he had come up to her and asked her if she wanted to go back to his place, she had asked why, he had said so that he could fuck her senseless. They laughed at that! They were dutiful and sensible, would never fritter away their lives, and the security of that meant that everything else around us had no effect on them. Going out on the town for them, for example, was enjoyable and there was absolutely nothing demonic about it.

Even though I lived alone in a relatively spacious bedsit we preferred to be at Gunvor’s; my place was dark and gloomy and there was almost no furniture, hers was light, it was in good condition and moreover there was something girly and feminine about the furnishings, all their soft frilly unfamiliarity that I liked to be surrounded by, it was so clear that she was my girlfriend then. Waking up there, more often than not with the rain pelting down in the street, so early that it was still dark, having breakfast with them and going off to the reading room with her, was something I hadn’t experienced before and I loved it with the whole of my black heart.