Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Yes, those were his precise words. I don’t know if I believe him. It sounds a bit arch. I stopped painting because I was scared of going mad. At the same time it didn’t seem completely unbelievable when you met him. It’s like you know where he’s coming from.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he’s not exactly the student type. University isn’t where it starts for him, as it does for us. It’s more like the end of something, a place of calm after the storm.’

‘It’s funny with you and Robert, how we’ve ended up with you two. You have something in common, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. I’m a boy, he’s a man.’

‘He’s older than you, that’s all.’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

Robert was proud of the girl he was with, Gunvor’s sister, and he knew what he was doing with her. He was always respectful towards her and seemed to cultivate the differences between them. I wasn’t proud of Gunvor, not in that way, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing with her, and I didn’t always behave respectfully towards her. He was clear in his language, in an unambiguous plain masculine way; I was unclear, vague, cowardly in mine. Not when it was just us two, but as soon as others joined us. Then it was a question of listening to where they were going and playing up to their collective will.

We looked at each other and smiled.

‘Shall we put the washing machine on?’ I said. ‘You brought some dirty laundry with you, didn’t you?’

She nodded and got up.

‘I can do it,’ I said.

She shook her head and smiled.

‘No way. I have to do it.’

‘I see,’ I said.

I searched until I found a shop that stocked rat traps. I bought a few, as well as rat poison, and wandered home with everything in a little bag. There was only a couple of hundred kroner in my account, so I worried about it as I walked, the problem returned every autumn and spring, the study loan was spent, it would be several months before the next, in spring sometimes six months. The first spring I worked for Kjartan, the next one I sold all my records while in the autumn I borrowed money from people here and there or went home to mum and lived off her. But in the long term that was no good, it was an endemic problem, ad hoc solutions only postponed finding a real solution. In other words, I had to get a job. Which you did either through contacts or qualifications. I had neither. That is, I had worked for a year as a teacher, which might conceivably make temping at an early-years school a possibility, but not in the town centre, I doubted that very much, applications would be flooding in there, so it would have to be out of town. Another option was the health service. I had no desire to do what I had done before, but if needs must, needs must. There were two big institutions in town, one for the nutters, Sandviken Hospital, and one for the mentally handicapped, Vestlandsheim, and both had a high turnover of untrained staff, I had heard. If I had to choose it would be Sandviken: better mentally ill than mentally handicapped.

I rang when I got home. I started with the schools, was given some phone numbers by a woman at the local council, most had supply staff already in place, and I was a bit too young, as someone said, but a couple of them did take my name and telephone number without promising anything, their list of temps was long. At Sandviken they probably needed someone, but they wanted to talk to me first, could I drop by during the week and bring my qualifications with me?

Yes, of course I could.

Was Thursday convenient?

Thursday was fine.

Before I went to bed I put two rat traps in the cabinet under the sink, knocked on Jone’s door, he went to bed late, and told him what I had done so that he wouldn’t touch anything. He laughed in his cheery way and said he thought the rats were in my head and nowhere else. But he would keep away from the cabinet.

I couldn’t take responsibility for the rats on Jone’s behalf, I thought, lying in bed trying to sleep, my pulse thumping in my ears, but I did anyway, I thought about them all the time, I couldn’t help myself, that was just how I was made.

Rats, we had rats.

I put off checking the traps the following morning, made some coffee first and drank it in the sitting room while smoking a cigarette and flicking through a collection of Swedish essays about Jacques Lacan, gazed out of the window, the queue of cars that formed so quickly after the lights had turned red, dwindled and re-formed. The cars were in constant flux, and the people in them, but the patterns they were part of remained the same. Death also made patterns. The raindrops running down windscreens, the sand blown into heaps, the waves beating against the shore and retreating. If you took a closer look, inside a grain of sand for example, patterns were there too. Electrons moving round atomic nuclei. If you went outside there were planets orbiting round suns. Everything was in flux, everything was inside and outside everything. What we didn’t know, and never would, was what size really was. Think of the universe, how we considered the universe, infinity, imagine if it were small. Teeny weeny. Imagine if, in fact, it was inside a grain of sand in another world. And that this world was also small and inside another grain of sand.

This was my great idea. And actually it could be right, at least there was nothing to disprove it. But if it was, then everything was meaningless. We were completely dependent on there not being another world, on this being the only one, for what we were doing here to be meaningful. So it was important therefore to keep making literature. But if there was another world, a greater context, literature was simply rubbish, babble in the universe.

I went into the kitchen, put down my cup and opened the cabinet door, crouched and looked straight at a rat caught in one of the traps. The metal bar had hit it in the back. I felt sick. I pulled out the lowest drawer, took a plastic bag and gingerly pulled the trap towards me holding the little wooden base between my thumb and first finger. The plan was to put it in the plastic bag and chuck out the whole lot, rat and trap and everything, instead of fiddling around trying to release the rat.

Its rear part twitched.

I dropped the trap and withdrew my arm like a shot. Stood up.

Was it alive?

No, it had to be a convulsion. A muscle spasm.

I crouched down again, nudged the trap with my finger so that it was facing me.

It was as though the rat was looking at me with its little black eyes.

Another spasm went through one bare leg.

Was it alive?

Oh, no.

It was.

I slammed the door and paced up and down the kitchen floor.

It was important to act quickly, get rid of it, not to think any more about it.

I opened the door, grabbed the trap, slung it into the plastic bag, dashed downstairs, hurried over to the dustbins, opened one and threw the bag in, jogged back up, washed my hands in the bathroom, sat down in the sitting room and smoked a cigarette.

Job done.

At around seven mum phoned, she reminded me that grandad was coming to town on Monday, he was going to hospital and would be there a few weeks. Mum asked if I would mind meeting him off the ferry and taking a taxi up to the hospital with him. I said that was fine. Then we, the grandchildren in Bergen, would have to agree visiting times so that we could spread the load as far as possible. She might come over herself too, in which case it would be the last weekend he was there.

I had hardly got off the phone and turned to go into the sitting room when there was a knock at the door. It was Espen.

‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Like some coffee?’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got any on the go.’