Karl Knausgaard: Some Rain Must Fall

‘I know that’s how it works,’ I said. ‘My problem is that I can’t not give a damn. Take Ingvild, for example. I get so bloody nervous before we meet that I can’t say a word. So she thinks that’s the way I am, and then it’s no good.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Yngve said. ‘It’ll be fine. She knows who you are. You’ve been writing to each other all spring and summer after all.’

‘But that’s the point, then I’m writing, ’ I said. ‘Then I can be anyone I want to be. I can take my time, right, think things through. But I can’t when I meet her face to face.’

Yngve snorted.

‘Don’t think about it so much and it’ll be fine. She’ll be feeling the same as you.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, of course! Have a few beers with her and relax. It’ll be fine.’

He took the key from his pocket, lowered his umbrella and went in through the gate, up the little steps, which were dark and slippery from the rain. I stood behind him waiting for him to open the door.

‘Do you want a glass of wine before going to bed?’ he said.

I nodded.

My impatience grew throughout the week, I became more and more restless, a feeling I had otherwise never experienced. It must have been because I wanted life to get moving, to turn serious. And to do my own thing, not to be dependent on Yngve for whatever I did. I had already borrowed a couple of hundred kroner from him and probably needed a couple more to tide me over until my student loan arrived. When I moved from Håfjord I had been stupid enough to tell the Post Office that I was changing address to c/o Yngve, so when I arrived, a debt recovery letter from the northern Norwegian electricity company and the shop where I had bought the stereo were waiting for me. The latter was the more serious: if I didn’t pay this time they would take legal action to recover the money.

If it had been a good sound system I wouldn’t have minded so much. But what I had bought was such crap. Yngve had a NAD amplifier and two small but good JBL speakers, and Ola also had a good system made up of components he had bought individually — that was what you should have, not a fucking Hitachi rack system.

Soon I would receive twenty thousand kroner.

I was also wondering whether to buy myself a porn magazine. I was living in a big town now, I knew no one, all I had to do was take one down from the shelf, place it on the counter, pay, put it in a bag and go home. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, I was in a nearby tobacconist’s a couple of times, and my eyes roamed down to the women’s blonde hair and their big breasts, and the mere sight of their skin, printed on glossy paper, made my throat tighten. But it was always a newspaper that I placed on the counter, and a pouch of tobacco, never any of the magazines. Mostly because I was living with Yngve, it didn’t feel right to have to hide things in his place, but also because I didn’t have the courage to meet the assistant’s eyes as I laid the magazine on the counter.

I would have to wait.

The day of the move came, with Yngve I carried my Håfjord possessions up from the cellar into the car, there were eight boxes in all and they completely blocked the rear view when Yngve, more cautiously than usual, pulled away from the kerb and set off down into Bergen.

‘If you brake sharply now my neck’s a goner,’ I said because the boxes reached right up to the car roof.

‘I’ll try not to,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise anything.’

For the first time in several days it was nice weather. The dense cloud cover over the town was greyish-white, and the light in the streets around us was gentle, though not such that it veiled or enhanced, it was more that it allowed whatever there was to appear in its own right. Tarmac grey and speckled black, walls green and yellow, dulled by car fumes and street dust, trees grey and green, the water in the bay by Verftet grey and shiny. The colours became more vivid as we began to climb the hills on the Sandviken side of town, most of the houses there were timber constructions, and the shiny paint shimmered through the neutral light.

Yngve pulled into the kerb by a little park, in front of a telephone box. On the wall across the road there was a sign saying Absalon Beyers gate.

‘Is it here?’ I asked.

‘It’s the corner house,’ Yngve said, getting out. He raised his hand in a brief greeting, I followed his gaze, there was a girl with a cloth in her hand watching us from behind the window in the ground-floor bedsit.

We crossed the street, she came to the door, I shook her hand. She said it was good timing, she had just finished cleaning the place up.

‘Come on in!’

The bedsit consisted of a small room furnished in the simplest fashion: beneath the window there was a sofa, in front of it a coffee table, and against the wall on the opposite side a desk. There was also a sofa that could be turned into a bed. Adjoining the little room, separated by a door, was a tiny kitchenette. That was all. The walls were a dark, brownish colour, and would have been drab but for the fire wall beside the kitchen door, on which a landscape had been painted: a tree on a cliff above the sea, not dissimilar to the picture on the front of matchboxes, the one Kjartan Fløgstad had used as the cover for Fire and Flame.

She noticed me staring at it and smiled.

‘Yes, isn’t it nice!’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Here are the keys,’ she said, passing me a little bunch of them. ‘This one’s for the front door, this is for this door and that’s for a storage room in the loft.’

‘Where’s the toilet?’ I said.

‘Downstairs. There’s a shared shower and toilet. It’s a bit impractical, but it reduces the rent by quite a bit. Shall we go down and have a look?’

The staircase was steep, the corridor downstairs narrow, with a small basement bedsit on one side, where someone called Morten lived, a shower and a toilet on the other. I liked the unrefinedness of it and the old walls that vaguely smelled of mould, it had a Dostoevsky feel, the impoverished young student in the metropolis.

Back upstairs, she gave me a wad of rental forms, already filled in, grabbed her empty bucket in one hand, the broom in the other and turned to us in the doorway.

‘I hope you’ll have a nice time here! I’ve spent some happy hours here anyway.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Have a good trip and see you next summer!’

She disappeared round the corner with the broom slung over her shoulder and we set about bringing in the boxes. When that was done, Yngve got in his car and drove down to the hotel, where he had an afternoon shift, while I put my feet on the table and smoked a cigarette before starting to unpack.

The bedsit was at street level, the pavement went by the windows, and if there wasn’t a constant stream of people passing there was a regular bobbing of heads, and so enticing was the sight of a curtainless bedsit that almost everyone succumbed to the temptation to peer in. I was bending over my record collection when I turned and met the gaze of a woman in her forties, who despite immediately looking away still left an impression on me. I hung up my poster of John Lennon, turned and met the eyes of two twelve-year-old boys. I assembled the coffee machine, inserted the plug in the socket beside the cupboard, turned and found myself looking straight into the eyes of a bearded man in his late twenties. To put an end to this, I pinned a bedsheet over one window, a tablecloth over the other, and then I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.

I played a few records, brewed some tea and read some pages of Hunger. Outside, it was beginning to rain. In the short pauses between the LP tracks I heard raindrops pitter-pattering against the window just behind my head. Now and then I heard noises from the floor above as dusk fell and the room slowly darkened. The stairs creaked, loud voices came from above, music was turned on, it was a pre-loading session.