Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘He is. He’s talking about his own syphilitic dick.’ Pål laughed.

‘What about Mao?’ I said. ‘I was toying with that. Short and sweet.’

‘Troubled Waters,’ Pål said. ‘That’s good too. Now we have to pour oil on troubled waters! Either of you know what troubled waters are actually?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Beside me in the reading room is someone with a great name. I wondered about this. He’s called Finn Iunker. We could just use the name of someone we don’t know, couldn’t we? Finn Iunker and something or other. Finn Iunker and the Seaplanes, for example?’

‘Not bad,’ Yngve said. ‘I wondered about Smith and the Smudgers.’

‘Or what about Ethnic Cleansing Cream?’ said Pål.

Yngve laughed so much he had to walk around the room to recover.

‘Or Holocaustic Soda?’ I said.

‘Kafkatrakterne?’ Pål said, wriggling his shoulders to get the bass strap to sit better. ‘Kafkatrakterne!’

‘Mm,’ Yngve said. ‘Not Coffee Machines but Kafka Machines. Yes, I like it.’

‘Kafkatrakterne it is,’ I said. ‘It’s great!’

The last two bedsits I’d had were at street level and all I had seen from them was passing heads and umbrellas. The new flat was quite different. It was at the top of an old brick building, and from the sitting room there was a view of the big flyover in Danmarksplass, the offices behind, the big old cinema, the new REMA 1000 supermarket and on the opposite side of the road the bookshop where I had in my, now incomprehensible, naïvety and immaturity bought Hunger. A crowd of alkies used to sit on the benches by the little car park outside the supermarket, there was a taxi rank — it took me a couple of nights to realise that was where the low ringing sound I heard came from, the phone was going almost all the time — and the road was one everyone used to get in and out of the town centre, so there was always something happening. In addition, the hospital was close by, and a regular stream of ambulances, with and without sirens and blue lights, weaved through the traffic day and night. For me this was a rewarding sight, I often stood looking out of the windows, like a cow out of a stall, because I was empty inside then, I registered movements and followed what was happening, that was all. Look, a pickup carrying a long plank on the back with a white neckerchief tied around the end! A lorry full of braying sheep, what on earth was this, was I in Yugoslavia all of a sudden? A lady with a fox stole around her neck, the kind where the head is intact, obviously insane, her stiff, rigid movements were unmistakable, she strode first down one side of the street, then back up the other. A group of at first three, then four and five, men gathering by the end of the hill up from the subway at half past three in the morning, what skulduggery were they up to? Woman gives man an earbashing, man gives woman an earbashing, countless variations on that theme. I also saw quite a number of swaying figures, sometimes in such a dire state that I couldn’t believe my own eyes, people staggering along the middle of the three-lane motorway, people losing their balance and running to one side, stopping when they regained it, running to the other side, just like we had done when we were children pretending to be drunks, copying what we had seen in silent films we were shown at parties.

Another improvement on my previous accommodation was the telephone that had been installed. I had the line connected and now had my very own number.

Gunvor was the first to ring.

‘Will you be at home tomorrow?’ she asked after we had been chatting for a while.

‘If you come I will be.’

We agreed she would come at twelve-ish. At twelve sharp she rang the bell. She had a carrier bag in her hand.

‘I’ve bought some shrimps,’ she said. ‘They didn’t have any fresh ones, I’m afraid, so these are frozen.’

She took them out, a plastic bag of frozen Greenland shrimps, which I put on a dish so that they would thaw faster. She had also bought some butter, mayonnaise, a loaf and a lemon.

‘Is this a special day or what?’ I said.

She smiled and looked down, and I suddenly twigged. Today was the day. We hugged, went into the bedroom, I slowly undressed her, we lay down on the mattress by the wall. One leg kept trembling. The light from the overcast sky filled the room, fell over our white bodies, her face, her eyes constantly watching me.

Afterwards we showered together and then we went to see how the shrimps were doing, we were strangely shy with each other, as though we had suddenly become two strangers. But this didn’t last long, the gap closed, soon we were chatting as if nothing had happened, until our eyes met and once again the atmosphere became charged with seriousness. It was as though we were seeing each other for the first time. We were the same, but the noncommittal nature of our relationship had become committal in a way that changed everything. We gazed at each other in an intense serious way, then her face dissolved into a smile, shall we eat your shrimps now?

This was the first time a glimpse of the future had shown itself in our relationship. Now it really was us, and what did that mean?

I was twenty years old, she was twenty-two, of course we would just continue as before. There was nothing to plan, everything came of its own accord. So far we had spent almost all of our time together, we were discovering each other, there was so much we had to tell each other about our lives, as well as everything else going on around us, while also doing things. We weren’t conscious of what we were doing or why, at least I wasn’t, hardly any of the others I knew were either. Everyone went to the cinema now and then, and to the Film Club, everyone went to Café Opera or Hulen, everyone went around visiting everyone else, everyone bought records and everyone went to the odd gig. Everyone slept with everyone else, or wanted to, either casually after a night out or on a regular basis, like those in a relationship. Occasionally a child was born, but that was an absolute rarity, a peculiarity, becoming a parent in our twenties as so many of our parents’ generation had done was a no-no. Many students went up Mount Fløyen or Mount Ulriken at the weekend, I didn’t, I drew the line there, I would never be one for the outdoor life, and Gunvor wasn’t either, or at least she restricted that part of her life to a minimum. Not much more than that happened, yet I experienced it as rich and meaningful in the sense that I never questioned it, there were no alternatives, in more or less the same way that people never questioned a horse and cart in the centuries before the car was invented. And somehow it was rich too, and full of significance, because every one of the tiny arenas of interest contained an unending wealth of nuances and distinctions, a band was not just a band, for example, it carried with it a multitude of other details, and there were thousands of them. A literature student was not only a literature student, although it probably looked like that from a distance, once you got closer to one, as I did with Espen, each and every one of them was their own complete world, there were hundreds of them, and of students, thousands. Then there were all the books that existed and all the knowledge they contained, as well as their interconnections. There were millions of them. Bergen was a tract of land and it wasn’t just rain that fell onto it, there was also everything that was thought and done throughout the world that found its way here, to the foundations of this town in whose streets we walked. 808 State released 808:90, the Pixies Doolittle, Neneh Cherry Raw Like Sushi, the Golden Palominos A Dead Horse, Raga Rockers Blaff. People were beginning to buy their own computers. There was talk of a new Norwegian commercial TV channel which might be based in Bergen. Raga Rockers played at Maxine, Arvid shouted ‘Hey, that’s Yngve’ as a guy ran onto the stage and threw himself into the audience. It was so unlike him and everyone laughed. I read The Divine Comedy in the Nynorsk translation, wrote an assignment on it, which I presented on Buvik’s course, gave a forty-five-minute talk, which I had been dreading for several weeks, but it went well, at least according to Espen. Buvik said that I used Lagercrantz as a crutch, but that was allowed, and after that he would sometimes pick on me during lectures, apparently keen to hear my opinion on this or that. I blushed and mumbled and was so uncomfortable it must have been glaringly obvious, but I was also proud it was me he had asked. I liked Buvik, I liked his style, the easily kindled enthusiasm, despite the fact that he had been a lecturer for many years and we were on the bottom rung of the hierarchy. He had short fair hair, round glasses, always dressed elegantly, was a good-looking man with a tinge of effeminacy about his gestures and body language, but he had obtained his doctorate in France, as far as I was led to believe, and I suspected it was predominantly an expression of his refinement, manners that were so perfect they were reflected in his body language. Linneberg was his opposite in so many ways: he spoke a kind of self-constructed working-class Oslo dialect, made a great point of it, had a ring in his ear, a great big head, his smile was often sardonic, and he liked to wear guises, such as the time he gave a lecture wearing a clown’s red nose or when he held forth wearing a monkey mask. If he had to talk about Brecht he did it puffing on a huge cigar. Both of them had immense power over us, they were important figures and if they went to one of the first-year parties they could pick up any girl they wanted, I often thought about that, there was always an energy in the room when they lectured and it wasn’t just intellectual curiosity and a thirst for knowledge from the students’ side. They had such high status it was as if the gods had descended from Mount Olympus to sit among us in the canteen. Which, of course, they never did. That Buvik had asked me a question twice during a lecture was a sign of favour from the Sun God in my eyes. I didn’t know what the others thought, with them I exchanged very few words, apart from Espen and Ole. But I was beginning to get a hold on the subject, I wrote another assignment, about Fløgstad’s aesthetics, and reckoned in fact I had cracked the code. Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn’t know. There was a language, a technique, and I had mastered it. In everything there were gaps which language could cover over as long as you had acquired the know-how. I had, for instance, never read Adorno, knew practically nothing about the Frankfurt School, just the snippets I had picked up here and there, but in an assignment I could manoeuvre the little knowledge I actually had in such a way as to make it appear greater and more comprehensive. Another technique that was held in high regard was the ability to transfer knowledge from one field to another, preferably in a surprising way, this too was simple, all you had to do was build a bridge between them and then your work seemed to have a new original element, even though actually there was nothing new or original in it. It didn’t have to be brilliant, nor even particularly good, because all it was intended to do was provide evidence that you thought for yourself, had your own opinions, besides of course showing that you had knowledge of the topic.