Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I let myself into the flat. The inside was dimly lit, in the corners furthest from the windows it was dark, but all the furniture and objects in it quietly made their presence felt. It was impossible to be there without sensing Yngve, his personality seemed to permeate the rooms, and while I was slicing the fresh bread on the worktop and taking out margarine and brown cheese, I wondered what atmosphere my place would exude and whether there was anyone in existence who would care. Yngve had organised a bedsit for me, he knew a girl who was going to Latin America for a year, she lived up on the Sandviken side of Bergen, in Absalon Beyers gate, and I could have it until next summer. I was lucky, most new students lived in one of the halls of residence at first, either Fantoft, where dad had rented a room during his studies when I was small, or Alrek, where Yngve had stayed for his first six months. Living in a student hall had low status, I knew that, the cool option was to live in the centre, preferably near Torgalmenningen, but Sandviken was good too.

I ate, cleared away the food and settled down to read in the sitting room with a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Usually I read quickly, raced through the pages without taking much notice of how it was written, what devices or style of language the writer used, all I was interested in was the plot, which sucked me in. This time I tried to read slowly, take it sentence by sentence, notice what went on in them, and if a passage seemed significant to me, to underline it with the pen I held at the ready.

I discovered something on the very first page. There was a tense shift. First of all Hamsun wrote in the past, then he suddenly switched to the present, and then back again. I underlined it, put the book down and fetched a sheet of paper from the desk in my bedroom. Back on the sofa, I wrote:

Hamsun, Hunger. Notes, 14/8/1988

Starts in general terms, about the town. Perspective from a distance. Then main protagonist wakes up. Switches from past to present. Why? To create more intensity, presumably.

Outside, the rain was tipping down. The roar of the traffic in Fjøsangerveien sounded like an ocean. I carried on reading. It was striking how simple the storyline was. He wakes up in his room, walks noiselessly downstairs as he hasn’t paid his rent for a while and then into the town. Nothing particular happens there, he just walks around and is hungry and thinks about it. I could write about exactly the same topic. Someone waking up in their bedsit and going outside. But he had to have something about him, something special, like being hungry for example. That was what it was all about. But what could it be?

Writing wasn’t black magic. You just had to come up with an idea, as Hamsun had done.

Some of my fears and anxieties subsided after I had formulated that thought.

When Yngve came home I was asleep on the sofa. I got up the moment I heard the door go, rubbed my face a couple of times, for some reason not wishing to show that I had been sleeping in the middle of the day.

I heard him put his rucksack down on the floor in the hall, he hung his jacket on the hook and said a brief hi to me on his way to the kitchen.

I recognised the closed face. He didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone, least of all me.

‘Karl Ove?’ he shouted after a while.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Come here.’

I did as he said and stopped in the doorway.

‘Just look at the brown cheese? You mustn’t cut such thick slices. Shall I show you how to do it?’

He placed the slicer on the cheese and shaved off a sliver.

‘Like this,’ he said. ‘Do you see how easy it is to cut a thin slice?’

‘Yes,’ I said and turned away.

‘And another thing,’ he said.

I turned back.

‘If you eat here clear away the crumbs. I don’t want to have to go round cleaning up after you.’

‘Right,’ I said and went into the bathroom. There were tears in my eyes, and I rinsed my face a couple of times with cold water, dried it, went into the sitting room, sat down, started reading Hunger while listening to him eat in the kitchen, clean up and go into the bedroom. Soon there was total silence and I realised he must have fallen asleep.

A similar incident took place the next day, this time what annoyed him was that I hadn’t dried the bathroom floor after having a shower. He ordered me about this time as well, as though he were on a higher level than me. I said nothing, bowed my head, did as he commanded, but inside I was furious. Later that day, as we were returning from a shopping trip, I closed the car door in a way which he considered was too hard — do you have to slam the door so bloody hard, can’t you just be a little bit careful, this is not my car — and I exploded.

‘Stop telling me what to do, all right!’ I yelled. ‘I can’t take any more of this! You treat me like a bloody kid! Always telling me off!’

He looked at me for a moment with the car key in his hand.

‘Have you got that?’ I said, my eyes shiny.

‘I’ll never do it again,’ he said.

And he never did, either.

We went out often that week, and every time the same thing happened, Yngve met people he knew, introduced me to them, said I was his brother and I was about to start at the Writing Academy. That gave me an advantage, I was somebody already, didn’t have to prove myself, although it also made things more difficult since I had to live up to the billing. Had to say something a writer-to-be might conceivably say which they hadn’t considered before. It didn’t work like that though. They had considered everything, they all knew more than me, indeed to such a degree that I gradually realised that what I said and thought was what they had said and thought a good while ago and had now put behind them.

But it was good drinking with Yngve. Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day — the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest even though there were so many — all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were. Walked through the town half-drunk and uphill to the flat without a care in the world, not even the silences troubled us, street lights shone on the smooth tarmac, taxis raced past in dark haste, lonely men or women came towards us, or other young people who had been out on the town, and I could look at Yngve, who was walking bent double, just as I was, and ask: how is it with Kristin, have you got over her? And he could look at me and answer no, I’ll never get over her. No one is a patch on her.

The drizzle, the clouds above scurrying past, illuminated from below by the lights, Yngve’s serious face. The strong odour of car fumes, which I had realised always hung over Danmarksplass. The moped carrying two teenagers, which stopped at the traffic lights: the boy at the front who put his feet down on the road, the girl at the back with her arms wrapped tightly around him.

‘Do you remember when Stina finished with me?’ I said.

‘Vaguely,’ he said.

‘You played The Aller Værste! for me. “All things pass, all things must decay.” ’

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Did I?’

I nodded.

‘The same holds true for you now. It’ll pass. Then you’ll fall for another girl just the same.’

‘How old were you then? Twelve? It’s not quite the same. Kristin was the love of my life. And I only have one.’

I said nothing in response. We walked up the hill on the other side of Verftet, the old docklands complex, turned left beneath the massive red-brick building I knew was a school.

‘But one good thing has come out of it,’ he said. ‘Showing no interest in other girls has meant they’ve suddenly started taking an interest in me. I don’t give a damn, and as a result I can have them.’