Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Eh?’ Espen said, looking at me. ‘A cup of coffee?’

I nodded.

‘I can hear you when you’re working upstairs. The noise comes right down here. For a while I thought you were drumming your fingers. Then I suddenly twigged, aha, he’s writing!’

‘I’ve done fifty pages now,’ I said. ‘So you’ll have to read it soon. If it’s dross I don’t want to waste a whole year on it.’

‘I’d love to read it right away,’ Espen said.

‘What? Now, do you mean?’

‘Why not?’

‘A cup of coffee first, then I’ll go and print it. OK?’

Espen nodded, and we went in and sat down in the sitting room.

‘I was sure it was rats,’ Espen said. ‘I could hear them scrabbling along the ceiling boards. And then there was your rubbish bag. It couldn’t have been anything else.’

‘In which case, they’re some smart rats. When Gunvor slept here a few days ago she made a packed lunch in the evening to avoid having to do it in the morning. She had to get up early—’

‘And?’ Espen said.

I looked at him. Was he getting impatient?

Seemed like it.

‘Well, she put her lunch in her bag. Then when she was about to eat it later in the day it was empty. But the greaseproof paper was intact. So they’d sneaked into her bag, unpacked the paper, taken the food and scampered off. Well, there were a few bites left, but nevertheless. Sounds to me more like a whole league of them had been at work. It must have required comprehensive planning. Perhaps the one we saw was the brains behind it? In the hole?’

‘The demiurge itself?’

‘Yes, what do I know? But anyway we’ve got to flush them out. Gunvor can’t stay here if the place is crawling with rats.’

‘Is she so pampered?’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Is that your phone ringing?’ he said.

I sat still for a few seconds, listening. Yes, it was.

‘I’ll run up and get it. And do the printing while I’m at it!’ I said, hurrying out and up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me,’ Gunvor said. ‘You are at home then? I was just about to give up.’

‘I was downstairs with Espen.’

‘I thought you were coming to my place last night?’

‘Yes, I was. But it got late and I was so drunk I thought I would spare you.’

‘I like you coming here. It doesn’t matter if you’re drunk.’

‘Sometimes it does,’ I said. ‘I’m really frightened now. That’s two nights in a row. Can’t you come here? Then we can make waffles or something? I’m dying for something ordinary and normal.’

‘OK. Now or what?’

‘Yes, that’d be good. Will you buy some milk on the way?’

‘Yes. See you. I’ll bring some dirty laundry as well. Is that all right?’

‘Of course.’

I attached the holes at the side of the roll of paper to the wheels on the printer, quickly read the last sentences I had written, I knew the first bit almost off by heart, checked the codes on the note I had stuck to the desk and pressed print. Immediately the printer head began to buzz back and forth, and I, still unused to this invention, watched with fascination as my words, sentences and pages appeared as if from a secret source somewhere inside the machine.

What the connection between the floppy disk and the screen was I had no idea; something had to ‘tell’ the machine that an ‘n’ on the keyboard would become an ‘n’ on the screen, but how do you get dead matter to ‘tell’ anything? Not to mention what went on when the same letters on the screen were saved onto the thin little disk and could be brought back to life with one tap of a finger, like the seeds that had been trapped in ice for hundreds of years and then, under certain conditions, could suddenly reveal what they had contained all this time, and germinate and blossom. Surely the letters I saved would be reawakened as easily in a hundred years’ time as they could be now?

I tore off the perforated edges, stacked the sheets in order and went down to Espen.

‘Gunvor’s coming,’ I said. ‘So I’ll be upstairs tonight. Here’s the manuscript. When do you think you can read it by?’

‘Day after tomorrow maybe? I’ll tell you when I’ve finished!’

I went back upstairs, and when Gunvor arrived I made the waffle mixture while she sat on the kitchen chair and watched, cooked them in the iron, brewed up some tea and took everything into the sitting room. Perhaps it was the homeliness of the waffle aroma that did it, but at any rate we started talking about having children. It was an outlandish notion for us and everyone we knew, but when I was in Kristiansand Jan Vidar had told me about a couple of the girls from the ungdomsskole where we went, they had children now, one didn’t even know who the father was.

The idea that we could have children and thus determine the whole of our futures was both a thrilling and a terrible thought.

‘It has such enormous repercussions,’ I said. ‘It moulds the whole of the rest of your life. It’s not the same with anything else we do. For example, whether you study history or social anthropology doesn’t really matter.’

‘No, that’s not true, is it?’

‘It is, given a little perspective. Whether we get a cum laude or not makes little difference. But, by Christ, how we strive for those little differences. There are so few things that are truly all-decisive, that make a difference.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘When I write, you know, for me it has to be life or death. But of course it isn’t! It’s just me sitting down and pottering around.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not everything can be like that. Not everything can be either-or. We’ve got to have fun as well.’

She laughed.

‘Can I quote you on that?’ I said.

‘Yes, but that’s how it is, isn’t it? Let’s say we had a child now. That would be a major event. It would determine the rest of our lives, as you said. But our lives would be much the same nevertheless. We’d have to change nappies and push a baby buggy and so on, and we’d do that, but that’s not exactly momentous, is it?’

‘No, you’re right there.’

She opened her mouth and bit off a piece of the waffle.

‘Is it good?’ I said.

She had her mouth full and nodded.

I sprinkled sugar over mine, folded it and took a big bite.

‘Yes, they’re pretty good,’ I said after swallowing.

‘Fantastic,’ she said. ‘Have you made tea as well?’

I poured some in her cup.

‘Tell me about yesterday!’ she said. ‘Who was there?’

I laid my head on her chest. She ran her hand through my hair, I could hear her heart beating. There was something so girlish about her, a huge innocence that moved me, while I, from the way I was lying, was as submissive as a dog, I seemed to be relinquishing something, not unknowingly, I both liked and disliked being comforted like this, it was nice and degrading at the same time.

After a while we got up and had a smoke in the sitting room, Gunvor with the duvet wrapped around her. We talked about Robert, her sister’s husband, he was five or six years older than me and exuded masculinity, at a party where I had met him a few weeks earlier he had told me about an incident when a whole gang of men had been after him. He had grabbed a pole and shouted and gone ballistic, in the end they had cleared off, he had dropped the pole and continued on his way. If you want something, he said, you’ve just got to go for it. There’s nothing to be scared of. You have to cross a kind of threshold where nothing matters, get into a zone where you’re not afraid. Then you can do whatever you want. He had been a painter before, but stopped, he said he had been frightened of going mad.

‘Did he say that to you?’ Gunvor said.