Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

These practice assignments on Dante and Fløgstad I called essays when I talked about them. I’ve just written an essay about Fløgstad, by the way. In the essay about Dante, you know, I wrote about …

One day I was standing smoking under the Arts Block roof with Espen as the rain poured down from the leaden sky, there was something about him, a kind of heightened wariness, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him directly what it was when he suddenly glanced at me.

‘I was thinking of applying to the Writing Academy,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘That’s great! I didn’t even know you wrote. Though I did have a suspicion. Heh heh.’

‘I was wondering if you would mind casting an eye over something I’ve written. I’m not quite sure what I should send in. Or if there’s any point.’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

‘I’ve got some texts with me today actually. You can have them afterwards if you want.’

When he gave me the texts later that day it was with the utmost discretion. We were like spies and the texts were secret documents concerning not only the security of our own country but all the countries in the NATO pact. A plastic folder came out of his bag, it was passed behind our backs, half hidden, we were standing next to each other, then popped into my carrier bag with the same fleetness of hand. Once the transfer was complete we talked about something else.

Being a writer was no great disgrace, quite the opposite, in literature it represented the supreme, the highest pinnacle of achievement, but it was shameful to boast about it because almost everyone wrote and until your writing had appeared in a journal or, oh bliss, had been published, it was basically nothing, non-existent, and if you needlessly revealed this fact you lost face, you showed you didn’t want to be here but somewhere else, that you had a dream which, and this was the crux of the matter, probably wouldn’t come to fruition. Until there was any evidence to the contrary, what literature students wrote was for the desk drawer. The situation was a little different for me, I had been to the Writing Academy and had a ‘right to write’, but if I displayed my work, and it was poor, I would immediately lose all credibility.

So it was important to be cautious. What Espen gave me in deepest secrecy was, on the one hand, ‘nothing’, that is, invisible and had to be treated as such; on the other hand, for Espen it was probably more important, indeed, much more important than a document regarding the security of NATO pact countries.

I treated it with the respect and dignity it warranted. I didn’t open the folder until I got home and was completely alone. After I had read the texts, which were poems, I regretted not having said to Espen that I was no good even if I had attended the Writing Academy course, actually I was a fraud because I could immediately see that the poems were good, I recognised the mark of quality from the first line, but I was incapable of saying a word about them. About why they were good, about how they could be better. I could only say they were good.

But he didn’t notice, didn’t ask for further comment, he was happy I had liked them.

One weekend I took Gunvor home to meet mum, who had moved to a house in Jølster, fifteen kilometres outside Førde. It was old and nice, situated on a small plain below some big farms on slopes leading up to high mountains. On the other side of the road was the River Jølstra. We caught a bus which stopped only a hundred metres from mum’s house, freezing mist hung over the river as we walked up, mum was waiting with a hot meal, she came into the hall as we tramped in, they shook hands and smiled, I was a little tense but not as tense as Gunvor, she had been dreading this meeting for ages and talked a lot about it on the journey there. She was the first girlfriend I had brought home since I was sixteen, the first real girlfriend since I had grown up and, for all we knew, the last. It was important that mum liked her for both Gunvor and me.

She did, of course. There were no signs of tension or nervousness to be seen in Gunvor, she was herself, as always, and they soon warmed to each other. I noticed their mutual regard and was happy about that and about being able to show Gunvor the easy relationship mum and I had, and always had had. Gunvor witnessed me having long conversations, and in this way, in this context — in which I was also somehow closer to Gunvor — she saw the person I was when mum and I were together, more real, less ambivalent.

The fire crackled, we sat around the table chatting. Outside, in the freezing-cold river landscape, cars rushed past in the distance.

‘What a fantastic mother you have,’ she said when we went to bed.

‘She likes you,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, it’s easy to see.’

The following day we all went up to see Borghild, grandma’s sister. She had curly white hair, a plump body with big upper arms and wore thick glasses which made her eyes look frighteningly large. A long-time widow, she had a mind as sharp as a razor, latched onto the most surprising stories from all over the world and was always quick to condemn whatever she didn’t like.

She stared shamelessly at Gunvor for a few seconds when they met.

‘So this is a visit from the young students!’ she said. We sat down in her little sitting room, there were piles of magazines on the table with a large magnifying glass on top, she went into the kitchen and saw to some pancakes and coffee, which were served five minutes later with a long list of apologies for the paucity of the offering.

‘Borghild’s responsible for the catering at weddings in this district,’ mum told Gunvor.

‘Well, I was once,’ she said.

‘The last time was no more than six months ago, wasn’t it?’ mum said with a smile.

‘Yes, but that was nothing,’ she said. ‘Weddings now are not what they used to be. They used to last three days!’

Mum asked about various relatives and Borghild replied.

‘Grandma came from the farm down there,’ I said to Gunvor, and she stood up to see. I stood behind her. I controlled the impulse to cup my hands around her breasts, which always announced itself when I was standing behind her, and placed my hand on her shoulder instead.

‘When I was growing up we still had sixteenth-century buildings there,’ Borghild said.

I glanced at her and my spine froze.

The sixteenth century, that wasn’t long after Dante.

‘But they were demolished, all of them.’

‘Has the same family lived there all that time?’ I said.

‘Yes, I rather think they have,’ she said.

I hadn’t been there often and I didn’t even know the names of all grandma’s sisters, knew nothing about their parents except that he, my great-grandfather that is, had been an avid Bible reader and had not only worked long hard hours but also enjoyed toil more than anything else. My great-grandmother, Borghild’s mother and mum’s grandmother, I knew nothing about. She had given birth to eleven children, she had lived down below, that was the extent of my knowledge. I had a bad conscience about knowing so little, it felt as if it was my responsibility, if I was so ignorant I didn’t deserve to be called a relative.

I determined that one day I would go up to see Borghild on my own and write down whatever she told me, not just for my sake, to get to know more about my family, but because all the knowledge she possessed was interesting in itself.

We drove home alongside the big silent deep lake where Borghild told us fishermen used to sweep the waters with cocks; wherever the cocks crowed they got out their fishing tackle. Outside, it was pitch black. Apart from the road and the trees or the water beside them, which all lay beneath the yellow light of the street lamps, only the snow-clad mountain peaks were visible. It was a starry sky, everything felt open and spacious.