Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Gunvor was on the evening shift that Sunday, so I caught the bus early in the afternoon and arrived at my accommodation block at about five. I had thought I might be able to do some writing in the hours before I went to bed, but gave up after thirty minutes, nothing new could be activated in such an alien place as this, it seemed to me. Instead I went for a walk down to the town centre, followed a whim and entered a Chinese restaurant, had a meal there, alone in a room full of families eating their Sunday dinner. Afterwards I lay on my bed reading a novel by V.S. Naipaul I had found on offer a few days earlier, it had been in a box outside the bookshop and was called The Enigma of Arrival. I liked it even though there was no plot, just a description of a man who has moved to a house in a remote village in England, everything is alien to him, but slowly he conquers the countryside, or the countryside conquers him. It struck me that you could find rest in the prose, the way you can rest under a tree or in a chair in the garden, and that had a value in itself. Why actually should you write about actions? X loves Y, Z kills W, F commits embezzlement and is caught by G … His son A is deeply ashamed and moves to another town, where he meets B, they live together have two children, C and D … What was the description of a father compared with that of a tree in a meadow? The description of a childhood compared with that of a forest seen from above?

If only I were able to describe a forest seen from above! The openness and freedom of deciduous trees, the way their crowns rippled as one, seen from a distance, green and magnificent and alive, though not alive in our way, no, alive in their own equally simple secretive way. The sheerness and verticality of spruces, the frugality and loftiness of pines, the paleness and greed of birches, and the aspen, the trembling of aspens as the wind whistles up the mountainside!

Green, grey, black. Forest lakes and fields, fallen trees and bogs, clearings and copses, stone walls so old they seem to have grown into the landscape. Meres with water lilies and muddy bottoms full of tree carcasses. Meadows and pastures, crevices and cliffs, pine moors and heaths, rivers and streams, waterfalls and deep pools. Ash, aspen, beech, oak, rowan, birch, willow, alder, elm, pine, spruce. All with their own characteristic individual shapes, yet representative of the same.

But I couldn’t write about that, it was completely beyond me, both because my language was insufficient — I didn’t know how to approach the subject, how to express it — and because I lacked the knowledge. The last time I found myself in the heart of a forest I was in the ninth class. I couldn’t tell the difference between an elder tree and an ash, barely knew the names of any flowers apart from a wood anemone and a blue anemone and what we called a buttercup, but it probably had a completely different name.

I couldn’t describe a forest, neither seen from above nor from within.

No, the composure he possessed I didn’t have in me, and the self-assurance and serenity, which all great prose writers have, I couldn’t even achieve as a pastiche.

Such was my experience of reading Naipaul, like reading almost all other good writers: enjoyment and jealousy, happiness and despair, in equal portions.

But it took my mind off the institution at any rate, and on the eve of a new working week, that was all I really wanted. The thought of the place, all the days that stood before me, was worse and more unbearable than the days themselves, which of course always passed in the end. Tramping around in there, back and forth between the kitchen and the duty room, the washroom and the ward, it was as though nothing else existed, the whole unit with its harsh light and linoleum floor, its rank odours and heaps of frustration and compulsions was an existence all of its own, which I descended into, it engulfed me, crossing the threshold to the corridor was like stepping into a zone. It wasn’t without its problems, but the problems were bound to the life there, the people there, both the carers and the residents. It had something to do with the fact that we were locked in, that we moved in such restricted space, where every little displacement in one direction or another had an immeasurable effect, while the slow advance of time and the lack of anything to distract us lulled life there into a kind of calm, a kind of standstill.

Most weekends I was at Gunvor’s, we went swimming and relaxed, walked in the forest, watched TV, drove somewhere in the car when she wanted to smoke, as she couldn’t do that at home. I loved her, but without life in Bergen, where there was so much happening, it became clear to me that this was not enough, that just her was not enough, and this was a painful thought, not least when we were having lunch with her parents, who loved her so much, or when we were watching TV or playing Trivial Pursuit in the evening, because if Gunvor couldn’t or didn’t want to see it, her mother did, of that I was very sure. So who was I?

One evening we went for a swim in the sea down by the rocks. The air was warm and full of insects, the blazing sun hung just above the treetops. Afterwards we sat next to each other gazing at the water. Gunvor got up, went behind me and covered my eyes with her hands.

‘What colour are my eyes?’ she said.

I went cold.

‘What is this? Are you testing me?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tell me. What colour?’

‘Stop that,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to test me. Of course I know what colour your eyes are!’

‘Tell me then!’

‘No. I won’t. I don’t want to be tested.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘Of course I know.’

‘Then tell me. It’s simple.’

‘No.’

She removed her hands and began to walk back up. I rose and followed her. I said I loved her, she told me to stop saying that, I said it was true, it came from the bottom of my heart. And added that I was self-centred and inattentive, distant and absent, but that had nothing to do with her.

The weekends I spent with her I took lots of photographs, which I had developed in a photo shop on the Mondays. I sent some of them in a letter to dad. Here is my new girlfriend, Gunvor, I wrote, and this is me standing beside her horse on the farm where she lives. As you can see, I haven’t changed much. I was thinking of visiting you this summer, if I do, I’ll ring first, take care, Karl Ove.

When the six weeks at the institution were over I caught the boat to Stavanger and the train from there to Kristiansand. For the first few days I stayed with Jan Vidar, who had moved into a terraced house on one of the estates outside town with his girlfriend, Ellen. We sat in the garden drinking beer and talking about the old days, about what we were all doing now. He had taken his diving certificate, my old dream, and he did a fair bit of diving, he told me, otherwise it was mostly work. It had always been like that with him, right from his time at vocational school, when he had got up in the middle of the night to start his work as a confectioner and baker. Going with him to the cinema had been hopeless, I remembered, after a couple of minutes in the darkness his eyelids closed irrespective of what was showing on the screen.

The house was on a hill, from his back garden there was a view of the fjord, the sky was blue and the wind whispered through the trees on the slope beneath us, as it always did in the afternoon. They had a cat and he told me about the time it had given birth to kittens. It had been much too small or there was something else wrong, because one afternoon Ellen had come home and the young mother had killed all her young. There had been nothing short of a bloodbath in the house. Jan Vidar laughed as he told me, I was shaken, I imagined how it must have been, all the squeaking and snarling and crawling on the carpet.