Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

For hospitals all hearts are the same.

Towards the end of grandad’s time in hospital mum came to Bergen. She stayed one night with me, one night with Yngve, and the day after she had left, Gunvor came to the flat. We were sitting on the sofa, chatting about everything under the sun, when she suddenly got up and walked across the floor.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘What’s what?’ I said.

‘There’s a hair on the floor.’

She took it and lifted it up. I watched her, my cheeks getting warm.

‘This isn’t yours,’ she said. ‘And it’s definitely not mine.’

She eyed me.

‘Whose is it? Has anyone been here?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Are you insinuating I’ve been unfaithful or something?’

She didn’t say a word, just stared at me.

‘Let me have a look,’ I said, unusually conscious of my own movements.

She passed me the hair. It was grey. Of course. Oh, thank God!

‘That’s mum’s,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘She was brushing her hair here. It’s grey, see.’

‘Sorry,’ Gunvor said. ‘I thought it was someone else’s. I promise I won’t be so suspicious in future.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s the second time. You opened my letter in the autumn as well.’

‘I did apologise,’ she said.

She had come by one evening and confessed she had read a letter I received from Cecilie, my girlfriend in the second class at gymnas. She was so jealous, she had said.

Now she suspected that something had been going on, that was certain. If not, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that there could be anything suspicious about the hair. Mum had been here, that would have been her first reaction. But it wasn’t.

‘I’m sorry, Karl Ove,’ she repeated and put her arms around me. ‘Can you forgive me? I don’t mean to be so suspicious.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Just remember for another time.’

The night before the assignment was due to be handed in I was only halfway through. I had worked the entire weekend at Sandviken Hospital and when I sat down at my desk to start on it I was tempted to give up. Go to bed and sleep, not give a damn. But then I noticed how easily it flowed, it was as if the pressure was sharpening my focus, all I had to do was write, and I did, all night and into the morning, but then I touched a key by mistake and everything I had written was gone. I ran up to the university, explained my plight to Buvik, who accompanied me to a special computer data section, they took the diskette and would see if they could retrieve what I had lost. They asked me for the password, I hesitated, for some reason it was pineapple, and I found it unbearably embarrassing to have a smidgen of my private life revealed here, in front of what was presumably one of the country’s foremost computer experts, with one of the country’s leading literary academics at my side.

‘Pineapple,’ I said, feeling my cheeks flush.

‘Pineapple?’ he said.

I nodded, he opened the document but failed to find the missing pages, and I, weary with despair, this had been my last chance, now the whole semester had been spoiled, walked beside Buvik into the institute, where he asked me to take a seat, he would just have to discuss the matter with some colleagues. On his return he informed me I had been granted a twenty-four-hour extension. I thanked him with shiny eyes, hurried home, slept for a couple of hours and embarked on another hellish night with Joyce and intertextuality. Morning dawned, I hadn’t finished, everything in the assignment was leading up to a major discussion, which never came, I was forced to write a conclusion in two lines, run downstairs and knock on Espen’s door to borrow his bike, pedal like a maniac to the university and hand in my assignment on the dot of nine o’clock.

When the grades were pinned on the board outside the institute a few weeks later and I saw that once again I had a 2.4, I wasn’t disappointed, I had expected worse, and it was still possible to blag your way up two tenths at the oral exam. That is, if I had done the reading. But I hadn’t and was forced to improvise, in front of Kittang of all people. He was kind to me, whenever he noticed I was struggling he gave me a pointer, but not even he could extricate me from the mess I was in when he asked what Kittang wrote about this problem. There were several articles by him on the reading list, but I hadn’t read them, and with him present in the room it wasn’t possible to wriggle my way out, clear unambiguous answers were required, which I didn’t have.

But it didn’t matter. It had never been my intention to become an academic. I wanted to write, that was all I wanted, and I couldn’t understand those who didn’t, how they could be happy with an ordinary job, whatever it was, whether teacher, camera operator, bureaucrat, academic, farmer, TV host, journalist, designer, promoter, fisherman, lorry driver, gardener, nurse or astronomer. How could that be enough? I understood it was the norm, most people had ordinary jobs, some put all their energy into them, others didn’t, but to me they seemed pointless. If I were to take such a job my life would feel meaningless however good I was at it and however high I rose. It would never be enough. I mentioned this to Gunvor a couple of times, and she was in total agreement, only in reverse: she understood how I felt but was unable to identify with it herself.

What was this feeling?

I didn’t know. It was beyond investigation, beyond explanation or justification, there was no rationality in it at all, yet it was self-evident, all-eclipsing: anything other than writing was meaningless for me. Nothing else would be enough, would quench my thirst.

But thirst for what?

How could it be so strong? Writing a few words on paper? And yes, which wasn’t a dissertation, research, a report or any of writing’s inferior varieties but literary?

It was madness, for this was precisely what I couldn’t do. I was good at academic assignments, and I was good at articles, reviews and interviews. But as soon as I sat down to write literature, which was the only way I wanted to spend my life, the sole occupation I perceived as meaningful enough, then I fell short.

I wrote letters, they just flowed, sentence after sentence, page after page. Often they consisted of stories about my life, what I had experienced and what I had thought. Had I only been able to transfer that feeling, that state of mind, that flow into literary prose, everything would have been fine. But I couldn’t. I sat at my desk, wrote a line, then stopped. I wrote another line, stopped.

I wondered whether I should go to a hypnotist who could transport me into a state where sentences and words poured out of me, the same as when I wrote letters — that should work, I had heard about people who gave up smoking thanks to hypnosis, so why couldn’t you be hypnotised into writing light, flowing Norwegian?

I looked up hypnotists in the Yellow Pages, this professional category wasn’t there, and I didn’t dare ask anyone, it would spread like wildfire, Yngve’s brother wants to use hypnosis to become a writer, I dismissed the idea.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve we carried our instruments and amplifiers up to the music venue, which was the top floor of Rick’s. While the organisers were decorating and arranging the place we did our sound check. This wasn’t going to be a proper concert, we had no PA, the drums weren’t miked up and we had to perform on the floor, there was no stage, but I was still queasy with nerves.

Hans stood at the other end of the room and listened to us playing, he said it was good, we all went home to change.

Had I not been playing in the band, I would never have been invited to this. It was a fiftieth birthday party, in the sense that two twenty-fifth birthdays had been rolled into one, and everyone present had a connection with what I considered to be the Vestland mafia, students with links to the periodical Syn og Segn, the magazine Dag og Tid, Mållaget, an organisation to promote Nynorsk and the No to the EU organisation. Even though they were only a few years older than me they had already made it. Ragnar Hovland was also going to attend, it was rumoured, as the conclusive seal of approval, this is the place to be, these are the people to know.