Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I put the book to the side and gazed down at Torgalmenningen. I realised of course this wasn’t about me, yet I was shaken, it was impossible to read my name with complete neutrality, and it certainly wasn’t neutral either, because she had chosen it, the name of someone she had attended a course with last year, and not another name, one that wouldn’t have been a problem, there was no shortage of names.

On the other hand, I thought, this was a good story, one I could tell people. I went to the Writing Academy and although I might not have made my debut afterwards at least I became a character in a book. Karl Ove has tossed and turned and been afraid. It’s beautiful outside — Karl Ove knows — and he grabs the pole and closes the blinds tight, so tight, and the sun and the spruce trees are gone. Today he won’t touch a drop of alcohol.

That evening we practised with Hans. The first thing he did was to translate my lyrics into Nynorsk. They sounded good, better than before. He also had a couple of songs with him, we began to work on one of them, ‘Home Father Nation’. Afterwards we went into the hall at the back of the factory where there was a stage and a couple of local bands were going to play. As the lights were lowered and the first band was about to start, to my astonishment, I saw Morten walk across the stage and take the mike.

Morten!

Thin and dressed in black, he stood there holding the microphone stand with both hands as he sang. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The last time I saw him, when we were living in the same house only six months ago, he had been a conventional, though unusually open and sensitive, Østlander; now there he was singing on the stage, his body language not unlike Michael Krohn’s, full of devil-may-care assurance. He sang like Michael Krohn as well, and the band played like the Raga Rockers, so that wasn’t good, they had no originality of their own, but from where I was standing that wasn’t the point, it was the metamorphosis Morten had undergone.

He was studying history, he said when I met him afterwards. Though mostly he was playing with his band. And you? he said. Have you made your debut yet? No, I said, I can’t say I have, everything went to pot. But now I’m playing in a band too. Kafkatrakterne.

He laughed at that and disappeared into the enormous space that had arisen between us now that we were no longer neighbours.

At the beginning of January I finally managed to find someone to move into the second bedsit which I had been paying for until then. His name was Jone, he came from Stavanger and was the ex of Kari, Asbjørn’s new girlfriend. He worked for an oil company, had his own little record enterprise on the side, organised record fairs, now he had been given a leave of absence to study at the Business School and was more than happy to live with me. I was pleased about that, didn’t give the poor state of the flat a thought until the evening when he parked a white van outside and I went down to help him carry up the furniture.

‘Hi, Karl Ove!’ he said, although we had never seen each other before, and I realised he was the extrovert type.

Red hair, pale skin, somewhat torpid movements.

‘Hi,’ I mumbled back. I wouldn’t have dreamed of using his first name until I knew him properly.

‘What sort of a hovel is this?’ he said, looking up at the filthy decaying brick facade.

‘Cheap,’ I said.

‘I’m only teasing,’ he laughed. ‘Come on. Can you give me a hand with the heavier stuff?’

He opened the doors, put on some gloves and climbed into the back of the van. Everything was top quality, I could see. A decent waterbed, a decent sitting-room table, a decent sofa, a large TV and a fantastic stereo. We started with the bed. After we had manoeuvred it upstairs and into his room I had such a bad conscience I could barely look him in the eye. The two draughty rooms with the old kitchen and the old bathroom would be no good for him, I should have spelled out what sort of flat it was he was moving into, but now it was too late, now he was here and looking around. But he said nothing, we carried up one piece of furniture after the other, one box after the other, he joked and laughed, which it soon became clear was how he was, and he didn’t appear to be bothered by the poor standard of the accommodation, which was all I could think about. By the next day he had unpacked and organised everything, and what his part of the flat said was, there is something out of kilter here: an elderly man in a spanking new discotheque, an old biddy dressed and made up like a young woman, a rotten tooth with a new white cap.

But he liked where he was. And I liked him, knowing he was there on the other side of the hall was good, and bumping into him in the morning and evening was good too, I was never alone somehow, although we had little to do with each other beyond that.

A few weeks later I discovered that the flat beneath mine was free. I told Espen, with whom I had spent more and more time that winter, and suggested he ring the landlord, the bank, that is, and ask them if he could move in. They said yes and only a few days later we were neighbours. He was the frugal type, he wandered around town searching for skips full of old furniture, used whatever he found to furnish his whole flat, which was identical to mine except that it was totally separate from the adjacent one and his toilet was in the hall and as cold and draughty as all the other student toilets in this town, where not one flat or bedsit could have been done up since the early 1940s. His coffee table consisted of aircrete blocks with a board across, the rest of the furniture was old but fully functional, and the overall impression when you entered was brilliant, what with all the books he had accumulated.

This was my life now. I was twenty-one years old, doing the first year of a literature course, I had a stranger living next door to me, I had a friend I still didn’t really know on the floor beneath and a girlfriend. I knew nothing, but I was getting better and better at pretending I did. I had a brother who allowed me into his world. In addition, there were Jon Olav and Ann Kristin, whom I met occasionally, and Kjartan, who had moved to Bergen and started studying when grandma died. I saw him now and then in the canteen at the Student Centre, where he stuck out, forty years old and grey-haired as he was, alone at a table, surrounded by youth on all sides. I also saw him in the canteen at Sydneshaugen, he was often sitting with others from his course, all young, and the glint he’d had in his eyes when he pontificated on all his philosophers at home in Sørbøvåg was gone. It was still Heidegger and Nietzsche, the Pre-Socratics and Hölderlin, at least when he talked to me, but for him they were no longer the future, as they had been when everything in his life gathered around this burning point.

I had no future either, not because it existed somewhere else but because I couldn’t imagine it. That I might control my future and try to make it turn out the way I wanted was completely beyond my horizon. Everything was of the moment, I took everything as it came and acted on the basis of premises I didn’t even know myself, without realising this is what I did. I tried to write, but it was no good, everything went to pieces after a few sentences, I didn’t have it in me. Espen, however, was a poet to the very core of his soul. There was no doubt that he would be accepted onto the course at the Writing Academy, and rightly so, there was nothing false about what he did, I saw nothing other than entirely pure and genuine motives as far as literature was concerned.

After he moved in below we spent a lot of time together. If he wanted company or if he had made something he considered I ought to taste, which he often did, he was as experimental and ingredient-conscious in the kitchen as he was in poetry, he banged a broomstick on the ceiling and I went down. We played chess, listened sometimes to jazz and sometimes to bands I introduced him to because, as regards pop and rock, our preferences were relatively similar, both influenced by having lived our early teenage years in the mid-1980s, which included a lot of post-punk but also more rhythmical stuff like Happy Mondays, Talking Heads, Beastie Boys. He liked dancing, which was not entirely apparent at first glance, however there was little that excited him as much as driving music, and most of all, and above all else, we talked. We both read a lot, each in our own area, and that was what we discussed or took as a springboard for discussion because our own experiences were also woven into the conversations, which were endless, we could sit late into the night and continue in the afternoon of the next day, there was nothing forced or constrained about it, both he and I were hungry for knowledge, beating in our hearts we both had a desire to learn, we both felt the pleasure of moving forward, for this was what was happening, we were pushing each other forward, one leading the other, suddenly I could hear myself talking about something I had never thought of before, and where did that come from?