Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I didn’t want to go back to the flat, but I couldn’t sit here for ever either, particularly not in my present state of torment. The best option would be to go to the reading room, take the bull by the horns, meet Gunvor and get it over with. If the first few minutes went well, if she didn’t notice anything, the rest would go well too, I knew that. I just had to take the plunge.

I went out, put on my sunglasses and set off on the heavy road up to Høyden.

She was reading, one arm resting on the desk by the book, the other supporting her head.

I came to a halt in front of her.

She looked up and smiled, beamed with her whole body.

‘Hi!’ she said.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Coming for a coffee?’

She nodded, stood up and followed me.

‘Let’s sit outside, shall we?’ she said. ‘It’s such fantastic weather!’

‘Can do,’ I said. ‘I need a coffee anyway. Shall I get you one too? Will you be sitting here?’

‘Yes, please,’ she said, and sat down on the brick wall, her eyes squinting into the sun.

‘I went out last night, you know,’ I said when I returned, passed her a coffee and took off my sunglasses so that she wouldn’t get the impression I was hiding.

‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘You look a bit the worse for wear.’

‘Yes, we stayed out late.’

‘Who was we?’

‘Yngve and me.’

I sat down beside her. I hated myself for it, but the danger had passed, she didn’t suspect anything.

‘You don’t feel like taking the rest of the day off, do you?’ I said. ‘We can walk into town. I feel like an ice cream!’

‘Yes, what the heck, let’s do that.’

Three days later we caught the bus to the hospital together to visit grandad. We got off at the little flower shop, which was in a kind of shack by the road just below the hospital, and was so macabre, it sold funeral wreaths as well as the bunches of flowers many hospital visitors probably bought. It was raining and the wind was blowing, we walked up the hill hand in hand, I was black inside, the thought of my hypocrisy was like an abyss, but I had no choice, she mustn’t find out, and sooner or later the memory of the dreadful deed I had committed would pale and become like all other memories, something that had happened in another world.

Grandad was in the TV lounge when we arrived. He brightened up, struggled to his feet and shook hands with Gunvor, said we could go to his room, where he had chairs and a table. He sat up on his bed. In the bed beside him lay an emaciated sallow old man with his eyes closed.

Grandad stared at us.

‘You two should be in a movie,’ he said. ‘You’re so attractive you should be in a film. That’s where your future lies.’

Gunvor smiled and looked at me. Her eyes were gleaming.

‘It was nice of you to come all this way to visit me,’ he said.

‘Our pleasure,’ I said.

In the nearby bed the thin man sat up and coughed, at first a bark, then a clearing of the throat, finally a rattle.

He can’t have long left, I thought.

Against the darkness and the window he looked like someone from a horror film. At length he lay down and closed his eyes.

‘He keeps me awake at night,’ grandad said in a low voice. ‘He wants to talk. He’s sure he’s going to die. But I don’t want to be drawn in.’

He chuckled. Then he told us a string of stories. One after the other, and both Gunvor and I were spellbound, there was something about the surroundings that endowed what he said with a special intensity or else it was just that his storytelling was better than it used to be. But it was hypnotic. He talked about pioneers in the USA who had been close to Indians and had also lived through a raid by them. He talked about his youth, when he had travelled around to dances in the district and when he had met grandma, on a farm in Dike, not far from Sørbøvåg, where she worked with her sister Johanna. He went there with a friend one night. Grandma and Johanna slept in a loft, grandad climbed up the ladder, felt something pulling at his trousers, it was his friend, he had got the heebie-jeebies and wanted to go home. The following night he had gone on his own and climbed to the top. His friend had become an organist, he told us. He wasn’t too good at playing, to put it mildly, and remained a bachelor. Grandad laughed at the memory, tears rolled down his cheeks. But it was also as though he had forgotten his own situation, as though he no longer knew where he was or who he was talking to but had disappeared into his stories, because out of the blue he said he didn’t get her at first, then it had just been a no, but the second time he had got her, he said, and can’t have realised he was telling this to their grandchild and his girlfriend. Or perhaps he did. At any rate, I didn’t want to know about any of this and asked him a question about something quite different to get his mind on another track. He listened to what I said and answered with a new story. And it wasn’t just him who was forgetting his present situation, I was too, everything was beginning to merge, what I had done a few nights ago unknown to Gunvor, her sitting there now, attentive, rapt, there was the darkness and the wind, there was the thin man with the wild eyes and his death-rattle coughs, there was grandad telling us about house-building in the 1920s when he travelled around with his father erecting houses for people, about the time he wandered around with a rucksack full of books which he sold in the district, about herring fishing in the 1930s, when they had lain off the Bulandet archipelago the whole winter, about building roads in the mountains in the 1940s, when he had been a blaster, about the war, about the plane crash on Mount Lihesten, about his brother’s life in America. Back and forth in his life, he went, and it felt like an event, as if we were listening to something unique. Happy and excited, we left the hospital, passed the cemetery and through the residential area, down to Danmarksplass, into the house and up to my flat, where all the horrors returned, but I didn’t let them affect me, nothing had happened that evening, I had been out with Yngve and caught a taxi home, alone, if anyone said anything to the contrary they were a liar.

When I woke up next morning Gunvor had gone to her lectures. I started work on my assignment, there were just a few weeks left to the deadline and I had only written a couple of pages. What was worse was that I had no idea how to do it. Everything grew and expanded but not in a coherent way, the threads ran in all directions and the certain knowledge that I not only had to keep a perspective on them but also gather them into one single strand panicked me. At twelve the phone rang, it was Sandviken, they wondered whether I could do an extra shift that night. I said yes, I needed the money and getting away from everything to do with intertextuality seemed like a good idea. I had a nap in the early evening and caught the bus there at half past ten. The shift was in a different ward from the one I had worked on at the weekend, but although the building may have been different, the atmosphere was the same. A man of around fifty received me and told me what I had to do. It was simple, I was to ‘mark’ (in football parlance) a patient, he was suicidal and had to be kept under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Now he was asleep, heavily medicated, and would probably continue sleeping all night.

He was lying on his back in bed, by the wall. The only light came from a wall lamp at the other end of the room. The carer closed the door behind him and I sat down on a chair a couple of metres from the bed. The patient was young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. He lay there motionless and it was impossible to see from his face that he was so tormented he wanted to take his own life. His complexion was wan, his features delicate. There was a little stubble on his chin.