Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

The next day I woke to an empty house and caught the bus down to Kristiansand, filled with the old feeling of panic, it was such a fantastic day, not a cloud to be seen anywhere, and I didn’t leave town, I stayed in the hot narrow streets sweating while everyone else was sailing their boats around the islands and swimming and drinking beer and having a good time. I had never managed that, I had never been invited, and you don’t do that kind of thing on your own. What was a record shop on a baking-hot day in Kristiansand? What was the library, who was that sat there, gawping?

I visited grandma and grandad, they were surprised to see me, I told them a little about life in Bergen, that I had a girlfriend and I saw a lot of Yngve and he was doing very well. Nothing had changed with them, everything was as before, it was as though they had reached their final age, I thought, as I caught the bus back up to Jan Vidar’s, and from now on they wouldn’t be a day older.

I had no connection with Kristiansand, it was no longer my ‘home’. Bergen wasn’t either, the thought of returning there and starting a new semester was not a happy one, but what alternative did I have?

On the last day of my short Sørland holiday I visited dad and Unni. I was in a good mood as I left the bus stop on the E18 and walked through the streets of the estate where they lived, although a slight stab of fear of dad always made itself felt as I approached him. He was sitting on the sofa when I came up the stairs and I didn’t know where to look, he had become so fat. He sat there like a barrel, staring at me. As brown as a berry, wearing shorts and a voluminous shirt, his eyes black.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Thanks for your letter!’ Unni said. ‘How exciting to hear about Gunvor. We were kind of hoping you’d bring her with you!’

‘But what a name!’ dad said.

‘She’s working all summer,’ I said. ‘She’d like to meet you though, of course.’

‘Was it history she was studying?’ Unni said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And she rides horses, does she? Or was that any old horse you took the photo of?’

‘No, she’s a big horse-riding fan. She went to Iceland for a year just because of the ponies,’ I said.

Dad and Unni exchanged long glances.

‘Actually, we’re thinking of going there for a bit. Next year maybe.’

‘That sounds good, Karl Ove,’ Unni said.

I sat down on the chair across the table from him. He took a sip of the beer he had in front of him. Unni went into the kitchen. I said nothing, he said nothing.

‘How’s it going up north then?’ I said after a while and started to roll a cigarette.

‘It’s going pretty well,’ he said.

He looked at me.

‘Would you like a beer?’

‘Yes, maybe,’ I said.

‘You’ll find one in the kitchen.’

I got up, went in, Unni was sitting at the table and reading a newspaper. I opened the fridge and took out a beer. She smiled at me.

‘She’s attractive, Gunvor is,’ she said.

‘Yes, she is,’ I said, and smiled back, then rejoined dad.

‘There you go,’ he said.

‘Skål,’ I said.

He didn’t answer, though he raised his bottle and drank.

‘How’s your scribbling going?’ he said eventually.

‘It’s mostly my studies now,’ I said.

‘You should find yourself a course with better prospects than literature,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will eventually.’

‘What course is Yngve doing?’

‘Media studies.’

‘Well, that’s not such a stupid idea,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘A bit maybe.’

‘I’ll make some food soon. But it’s so hot. It’s not so good to eat now. I don’t have much of an appetite in the heat, you know. That’s why they eat so late in southern Europe.’

There was a confidentiality in his reasoning that made me happy. I finished the bottle, fetched another, felt the desire to get drunk creep up on me. It had been a long time.

And I did get drunk. Dad fried chops and boiled potatoes, we ate, Unni went to bed early, we sat drinking in the twilight. He couldn’t be bothered to turn on any lights and so I didn’t either. He said he and Unni were always together, they couldn’t be apart, after only a few hours they began to miss each other. That was what had happened that day he had been an external examiner in Kristiansand and we were supposed to visit him, he hadn’t been able to cope with being away from Unni and had drunk on his own and fallen asleep, do you remember that time, Karl Ove? The Hotel Caledonien had burned down two days later, that could have been me, I could have been there. Yes, I did remember, I had thought the same, I said.

He withdrew into himself, I fetched another beer, went for a pee, came back, he got up and went to the toilet, drank more. I told him grandma had died in the autumn, yes, he said, she had been ill. I finished my bottle, he finished his, I fetched two more, thinking this was fine, it was perfectly all right being together with him. I felt strong. If he had a go at me now I would be able to give as good as I got. But he didn’t have a go at me, why would he, he was too deep inside himself, and at length he stood up in front of me in the semi-darkness, the fat bearded drunken man who was my father and had once been the very symbol of correctness — well dressed, slim and good-looking, a young respected teacher and politician — and he said well, that’s me for tonight, there’ll be another day tomorrow, you know.

Unni had made a bed for me in the room downstairs, and with my head buzzing with thoughts and feelings I got into bed and enjoyed the feeling of cool clean linen and lying in an unfamiliar room, one which wasn’t mine but where I still belonged, at least in a way. The wind soughed in the trees, the floorboards creaked upstairs and, outside, the flaxen summer darkness became paler and paler as I lay in bed asleep, until the first blue patch in the sky slowly broke through and a new day dawned.

I spent the last weeks of the summer at mum’s. It was like my refuge, where everything I usually struggled with did not exist. Kjartan, whom mum had visited close on every day since he had been admitted, had finally been discharged and I met him at hers. He seemed tired and low on energy, a touch stiffer in his demeanour but otherwise healthy. He showed me some new poems, which were fantastic. He said he was going to move back to Bergen and resume his studies. I didn’t ask him any questions about what had happened, that belonged to those topics you couldn’t mention directly, but after some time had elapsed he told me unbidden. After he had trashed the flat he had shouted he was forty years old. I’m forty years old, he had shouted, and destroyed everything around him. By the time he arrived at the hospital in Førde he had deluded himself into thinking he was in Japan, that those receiving him were Japanese, and he made a deep bow to them, as was the custom in Japan. When he had psychosis he also heard voices, he received constant directives from a god, and to me it seemed as if there was some good in that, being taken care of by something else, while it was also extremely scary as this something else was him, a part of him.

Back home in Bergen I started a new novel. The plot took place in a fjord landscape, it was the 1920s, the main protagonist in the first chapter was playing cards in a cabin up in the mountains, he was about to get married and didn’t want to spend money he had won gambling on the wedding, so he put everything in the pot and leaned back in bed and watched with immense pleasure as the others got very excited about the large sum of money that might come their way. The main protagonist in the second chapter was a young man in Bergen, it was the 1980s, he stood browsing through the titles on his bookshelf waiting for his girlfriend, in the kitchen the espresso maker was chugging away, he thought about his grandparents on the farm by the fjord, they were old, she was ill, their lives would soon be over. That was as far as I got when the semester restarted because every sentence had been written and crossed out and rewritten countless times, everything had been laboriously worked through, it was a time-consuming process, and since I had to hand in an important assignment in only a few months I put it to one side.