Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I went there. My hair plastered flat against my skull, jacket and trousers soaked, the streets empty, the only sound the squelch of my shoes.

I felt the front door. Locked.

She lived on the first floor, and I knelt down to gather some pebbles, threw them at the three windows of her bedsit.

No reaction.

I stood wondering what to do. Shout? That was no good, the whole neighbourhood would hear.

I grabbed the door frame, got a foot on it and swung myself up. There were narrow ledges and projections at various places on the wall, windows with protruding sills, and it should have been easy to do it, climb up to her floor and knock on the windows, or if I had the unimaginable good luck to find one of them unlocked, simply open it and step inside and give her a real surprise.

I was perhaps three metres up when I lost my grip and slipped down, fortunately in a relatively controlled manner, I didn’t hit myself very hard, just a bit on one knee, which throbbed with unabated pain as I began to climb back. But I fell once again, this time badly, I landed on my chest, and the fall knocked all the air out of me. It was as though I was drowning, I couldn’t breathe, and the pain radiated up into my brain from a thousand different places. The pain was incandescent, like a star.

OOOOOHHHHH I said.

OOOOOHHHHH

OOOOOHHHH

I lay still, breathing. Feeling the water in the puddle soaking into my clothes. My legs and arms and chest were freezing cold. Nevertheless it struck me that I could close my eyes and sleep there. Just for a moment …

The very next, Christ how it hurt!

I struggled into a kneeling position, lifted my head to the sky, from where all the rain was falling. I stood up straight and slowly began to walk, stiffly at first, then more and more easily. For some reason I walked uphill to Klosteret square, and on the way a police car glided alongside and stopped and the window slid down and a policeman asked me what I was doing.

‘I’ve been to a party,’ I said. ‘And I saw a guy down there as I was passing. He was trying to climb up the front of a house. Don’t know what the hell he was after, but it didn’t look good.’

I must have appeared lucid enough for them to let me continue, not only that, they turned down the hill to follow up my tip-off.

Ha ha ha, I laughed as I walked down to Torgalmenningen.

Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha.

I couldn’t go to Gunvor’s, not in all this mess, so I turned right and walked to the taxi rank instead. Five or six minutes later I got out of the car and went through my entrance, saw that the door to the immigrants’ place had been nailed up and sealed with a strip of plastic, rested my shoulder against the line of post boxes, struggled up the next two floors, unlocked the door and stopped.

There was a scratching noise coming from the cabinet in the kitchen.

Was I finally going to see them? I was sick of finding evidence of their activities but not them, and as nimbly as a cat I ran into the kitchen and tore open the cabinet door. Nothing. Empty.

But the plastic rubbish bag had bite marks on it and coffee grains and eggshells had spilled out.

It had to be rats, couldn’t be anything else, no mouse would behave like this, would it? The following day I would buy a rat trap or poison, I thought, and pulled off my clothes and a moment later I was asleep in bed.

I woke up to the telephone ringing. It’s Gunvor, I thought, I’d better not answer it, I’ll have to think of an excuse first, but the ringing wouldn’t stop and in the end I answered it, with a pounding heart in an aching body.

‘Yngve here.’

‘Hi.’

‘Heard you ran amok after the party.’

‘ Heard? Who from? Who said that?’

‘Bendik. They saw you from the window. You ran into the backyard looking for a bike. Then you came out and went straight into the next one. “He’s a bad ’un, your brother,” Bendik said. How was it? Did you do anything else?’

‘No. It was fine. I went home. But I’m a little worried.’

‘You can’t take your drink. That’s what’s wrong. It’s not good for you. You can’t take it.’

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t want to moralise. You have to live your own life.’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘You can come here if you like. It’s only us. Then we can watch TV or something.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I have to work. It’s only a short semester, isn’t it.’

‘OK. Talk later then.’

‘Yes, all right. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Usually it took a day or so for the fear to subside after a night out; if something special had happened, two, maybe three. But it always did. I didn’t understand why it came, why the shame and fear were so great, but they got worse and worse each time, and it wasn’t that I had killed someone or hurt anyone. Nor had I been unfaithful. I had felt like sex, and I had done some stupid things to get it, but nothing had happened, I had climbed up a wall, for Christ’s sake, should I be afraid for three days because of that? Should I pace the flat and start at every tiny noise, jump every time a siren sounded in the streets, my insides aching all the while with an intensity that was unbearable, except that I did, every time, all the time.

I was a cheat, a traitor, I was a bad person. And I could deal with that, it wasn’t a problem as long as it was only me involved. But now I was with Gunvor, and it affected her because she became someone who was going out with a cheat, a traitor, a bad person. She didn’t think that; on the contrary, in her eyes I was a lovely person, someone who meant well, who showed her consideration and love, but that was exactly where the pain lay because I wasn’t like that.

I switched on my computer and while I was waiting for it to warm up skimmed through what I had written so far. I didn’t give a shit about the assignment, I couldn’t read about proto-language in the state I was in, my priority was the novel, which was now approaching fifty pages and had spread in so many directions, some of them promising at the very least. But I couldn’t get a grip on the 1920s, which I wrote a good deal about, there was so much I didn’t know about the era, and this ignorance hindered me, I could barely write a sentence for fear it wouldn’t be accurate. Furthermore, the 1920s were much too far away for me to pump full with my own life, with what was coursing through my veins now. So the writing became wooden and lifeless, I could see that, but at the same time it was all I had, I was clutching at my last straw.

There was a thump on the sitting-room floor. I saved my work, put on my shoes and went down to Espen. He met me at the door, placed a finger on his lips and beckoned me to follow him into the kitchen. There was a stool in the middle of the floor, he pointed up at the ceiling, where there was a crack he wanted me to look through.

I clambered onto the stool, leaned back and peered in.

A big black rat met my gaze.

‘Can you see it? Is it still there?’ Espen said in a low voice.

‘Ugh, Jesus,’ I said, and got down. ‘How revolting!’

‘Now at least we know what it is,’ he said.

‘We’ll have to buy poison tomorrow then.’

‘Or traps. They can lie rotting between the walls, I’ve heard, impossible to get rid of.’

‘What I’ve heard,’ I said, ‘is that there’s something in the poison that makes them want water and so they run out of the house.’ I could hear how odd that sounded and smiled tentatively and shrugged. ‘The problem with traps is that the rats lie there and you have to physically throw them away. I don’t feel like doing that.’

‘Nor me,’ Espen said. ‘But if we have to, we have to.’

‘A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat is a rat,’ I said.