Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘They’ve got coffee over there if you want some,’ Ellen said.

‘Thanks,’ I said and went to the table with the Thermos, pumped myself a cup, watched the happy Down’s syndrome patients, who must have been in their forties. It was hard to watch them, their faces were always young, had a youthful shape, didn’t seem to get older, except for the wrinkles that spread across them and made them look like children suffering from progeria.

I sat back down with the residents from my ward, lit a cigarette, glanced at Hans Olav, who had now started ripping down the curtains.

Alf looked up and stared into my eyes. My spine froze. It was as though he knew all about me, he knew my innermost thoughts and hated me from the bottom of his heart.

‘Hans Olav!’ Ellen shouted and stood up. Alf stared back down at the table. Ellen stopped in front of Hans Olav, he lowered his eyes to the floor as she spoke to him. Suddenly he glanced to the side and walked off as though he hadn’t noticed Ellen at all or that they were in the middle of a conversation. Kåre, bent beneath his hump, which it was difficult to believe was part of him, moved to another table. The carers there welcomed him, he ignored them, lowered his head and shook his hand close to his ear, the way you do with a tin to hear if there is anything inside. Irene and Ørnulf came in through the door. I was relieved when I saw her, in some way or other she had an effect on me. We had chatted in the breaks during the last few days, she had asked me what had made me apply for a job here as I neither came from the area nor lived here, I had said my girlfriend lived nearby, she asked what her name was, I told her. Gunvor! she said. We went to gymnas together! This information made me feel uncomfortable, I had been looking at her and thinking about her — nothing she noticed, I hoped, but you never knew with such matters. It made me feel I had been unfaithful. I had betrayed Gunvor. I had glanced at her when she was putting on a clean sheet and a duvet cover in one of the rooms, the old ones were in a pile in the corridor, outside each and every door, all the way down. A fleeting glance was no crime, after all we worked on the same ward, but the thoughts were there, I liked her a little too much. Or when she pushed the food trolley to the tables and began to set them and met my gaze and sent me an ingenuous professional smile, absolutely uninterested in me as anything except a colleague. That was also humiliating. So there I was, caught between two minor humiliations: on the one hand, I liked her too much given the fact that I was going out with Gunvor and, on the other, she was completely uninterested in me or who I was. Of course, I kept all this hidden, I did nothing, said nothing, behaved appropriately in all ways, indeed I was discouraging rather than encouraging, whatever took place was unseen to anyone except myself, and so it didn’t really exist, did it?

She went to get a soft drink and hot dog for Ørnulf, who immediately leaned over and sucked at the yellow straw. When he thought there wasn’t enough coming he pulled it out and threw it on the floor, put the bottle to his mouth and drained it in one long swig.

She looked at me and smiled sweetly.

‘What are you doing this weekend?’ she said.

‘I’m going to Gunvor’s, I imagine. She’s picking me up after work.’

‘Say hi from me.’

‘I will. And you?’

‘Well, I’ll probably go to Stavanger. Or I’ll stay here. Depends on the weather.’

‘Doesn’t look too good,’ I said, because it was raining and had been doing so all day.

‘No,’ she said.

The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ came on. The Down’s syndrome residents waggled from side to side, some with a smile on their faces, others in deep concentration. Roars and groans from all sides. Ellen wiped Are’s dribble, he sat with his mouth agape staring at the ceiling.

‘Lovely summer music,’ Irene said.

‘Mm,’ I said.

The mist hung over the trees, the rain was heavy and pummelled the ground, which glinted in the light from windows and lamps. I stood outside the admin block waiting for Gunvor, who was coming to pick me up. The evening sky was grey and shambling, seeming to sink into the countryside. It was beautiful. The tarmac was damp, the grass was damp, the trees were damp and their greenery muted the grey, but was still strong and bright. The forest of twisted limbs and disordered minds. With the lights from the windows and the silence among the trees it was as disturbing a place as it was appealing. Everything aroused ambivalence, nothing was clear-cut: if all the routines and the slow rhythm in which everything happened occasionally caused me to collapse into a semi-apathetic tedium it was still always mentally agonising to be there as well. It was as though I was running and sitting still at the same time, my breathing was accelerated and my heart hammered wildly while the rest of my body was motionless. I wanted to be a good person, full of empathy for those worse off than me, but if they came too close, what I felt for them was contempt or anger, as if their deficiencies touched something deeper inside me.

When Gunvor and I stepped out onto the drive in front of their house after the long car journey I still had the institution in my body, standing in me like stagnant marsh water. Any feelings I had were coloured by it, even when I filled my lungs with pure clean air. Her parents had gone to bed, we had supper alone in the kitchen, she made some tea, we sat in the sitting room and chatted for ages, kissed each other goodnight and went to bed in separate rooms, though not without a few quips about it. I felt like I was in a fin de siècle novel when I was there, the young couple living in a morality different from their own, surrounded by prohibition, denial, non-living, while we were in the midst of pulsating life, full of repressed desires which occasionally forced their way to the surface. I liked that feeling, it was the most romantic feeling I could imagine.

The next morning I borrowed some boots and waterproofs, went down to the slippery quay with Gunvor and her brother, got into a boat, which measured fourteen, perhaps sixteen, feet and sat on the front thwart while Gunvor’s brother pulled the starter rope of the outboard motor and slowly reversed until he could turn and accelerate. The rain was pelting down. The forest on the shore stood like a green wall behind the completely flat light grey surface of the water, the prow ploughed through it, converting it into swirls of white, with some almost transparent, almost glasslike layers below, and I had a distinct sense of depth, of being on the surface of an immense depth, which was reinforced when we stopped by the fishing net and the boat was rolling on its own waves and the net was drawn closer and closer together, then the spine of a fish appeared far below. It swam round and round, came higher and higher, and it was enormous. It was as big as a child and as shiny as silver. It came higher and higher, and when at last it lay in the boat and Gunvor’s brother hit it repeatedly on the head with a wooden mallet the resistance it put up was so great he had to sit astride it while we did what we could to hold it down. The power in its slender body was frightening.

On the way home, as it lay still between our feet, with only the occasional twitch running through it, inside my head I had the image of it rising through the water. It was as though it came from an era other than ours, up and up it came from the depths of time, a beast, a monster, an ur force, yet there was something so clear and simple about it. Just water, the glint of silver in the depths, the immense power it possessed, surging through it in its dying throes.

The rain beating down now on the dead fish and coursing over its scales and perfectly white belly.