Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I knew nothing about him, not even his name.

But there I sat and I was his guard.

At long last that night passed too and I was able to walk downhill to the bus in the black morning murk, sit with all the others going to work in town, get off at Danmarksplass, trudge through the dripping underpass, down past the dilapidated brick houses, in through the crooked grotto-like passage and up to the flat. It felt wrong to go to bed now the darkness was lifting and the day beginning, but I slept like a log and didn’t wake until four in the afternoon, when the light had almost gone.

I fried some fishcakes and ate them with onions and slices of bread. Studied the assignment, decided to open with a description of Ulysses and then introduce the concept of intertextuality and discuss that, and not vice versa, which had been my plan. Pleased that I was beginning to shape my material, I got dressed and went up to the hospital again. Grandad was all alone there and, being the sociable person he was, he would probably welcome a little visit.

As I approached the brow of the hill and could see the hospital ahead of me, a helicopter slowly descended and landed on one of the roofs. I saw a team standing at the ready, waiting, perhaps for an organ in a box, a heart that had just been removed from a body in another town, perhaps someone who’d had a stroke or been seriously injured in a car accident, and it would now be inserted into a waiting chest.

In the spacious entrance, where there was a Narvesen kiosk as well as a bank and a hairdresser’s, the reception area had none of the frenetic activity on the roof or in the garage, where ambulances were continually arriving with the sick, open to all to see, nor any of the activity there had to be in the large operating theatres on the floors above, but the knowledge of it left its mark on these spaces nevertheless. The atmosphere in them was curiously sombre.

I took the lift up to the floor where his ward was, walked through the gleaming corridor, past metal beds where patients, half-hidden behind temporary screens, still subject to prying gazes, lay staring at the ceiling and at the door, where I stopped and rang the bell. A nurse opened, I said who I was visiting, she said this wasn’t visiting time but I could have a word anyway now that I had made it this far.

He was sitting in the TV lounge.

‘Hi, Grandad,’ I said.

The state of mind he had been in was still on his face a moment after he turned to me, and what I saw then, a hard, almost hostile, expression, made me think he actually despised me. Then he brightened up and I dismissed the thought.

‘We can go into my room,’ he said. ‘Feel like a cup of coffee? I can order it, you know. They’re nice to me here.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said and followed him in.

The thin man was lying in bed as on the previous occasion, darkness pressed against the windows as on the previous occasion, and grandad’s face was as rosy and childlike as it had been when Gunvor and I were here two days ago, but the atmosphere had changed: I was alone, I felt uncomfortable, I asked a few mechanical questions and actually just wanted to get out.

I stayed for half an hour before leaving. He spoke about the millennium, and from the way he was talking I had the impression he thought there would come a time when humans would live for a thousand years. Medical science was advancing so fast, people were living for longer, nearly all the illnesses people died from when he was young there were cures for now. His optimism about progress was immense, but not without reason; once I had gone with mum and him up to Ålesund to visit Ingunn, his youngest daughter, and he had told us what it had been like when he was young. There had been enormous poverty, living conditions were tough, but look now, he said, extending his arms, it’s incomprehensible how affluence has spread. Then I saw it through his eyes, everyone had a car, a big showy house, a nice garden, and the shopping centres outside the towns and villages we passed were crammed to bursting with goods and wealth.

With his talk of people living for a thousand years, it was hard to imagine anything else than that he was afraid to die. I decided to visit him again in the not too distant future, it was important he had something else to think about. He thanked me for coming, struggled up and shuffled into the TV lounge while I took the lift back down. I bought some Stimorol gum at the kiosk, glanced at the headlines in Verdens Gang and Dagbladet, stopped in the middle of the floor to open the packet of chewing gum, put two pieces into my mouth, and the sharp fresh taste gave me a sort of relief.

Some men in taxi-driver uniforms were sitting in chairs below the line of windows at the other end. TV monitors behind the reception desk flickered. Beside it there was a stand with a sign. CLINICAL BIOCHEMISTRY LABORATORY, NEUROSURGERY WARD, PATHOLOGY WARD, I read. The words filled me with unease, there was something unpleasant about all of this. Everything I saw reminded me of one thing, my own body and how little power I had over it. Perhaps it was as simple as that. The network of veins spread so delicately across my body, those tiny vessels, if the pressure of the blood surging through them became too high one day, would a wall burst and blood seep into the brain fluid? The beating heart, would it just stop?

I left the car park. Exhaust fumes floated on the air under the protruding roof. Heavy rain was falling in the glow of the street lamps, like tiny flashes of light. The black trees beyond extended like fingers, the darkness above them was dense. I walked down the hill, crossed the heavy traffic, passed the cemetery and came into the residential area, the rain a constant patter on the hood of my raincoat.

Hospitals were strange. It was first and foremost a strange idea: why collect all physical suffering in one place? Not just for a few years, as an experiment, no, here there were no time limits, the gathering of the sick and ill was a continuous process. If someone was cured and discharged, or they died and were buried, the ambulance was sent out to bring in another patient. They had called grandad right from the mouth of the fjord, and it was like that throughout the region, patients were brought in from islands and small communities, from towns and villages, as part of a system that had already lasted three generations. Hospitals existed to make us well, that was how it seemed from an individual’s standpoint, but if you flipped the coin and looked at it from the hospital’s angle, it was as though they were feeding on us. Take, for example, the idea that they had allocated the floors according to organs. Lungs on the sixth, hearts on the fifth, heads on the fourth, legs and arms on the third, ears, nose and throat on the second. There was some criticism of this, those who said that specialisation meant that the whole person was forgotten and it was only as a whole person that we could be cured. They hadn’t understood that hospitals were organised on the same principle as a body. Did the kidney know its neighbour, the spleen? Did the heart know in whose chest it was beating? Did the blood know in whose veins it flowed? Oh, no, no. For the blood we were just a system of channels. And for us blood was just something that appeared the few times there was an accident and the body was cut open. The call goes out, a helicopter takes off and thwumps above the town to pick you up, it lands like a bird of prey on the road by the scene of the accident, you are taken on board and whisked away, placed on an operating table and anaesthetised, to wake up several hours later to the thought that those gloved fingers have been inside you, those eyes have shamelessly stared at your naked organs glittering under the surgical lights without once thinking they belonged to you.