Karl Knausgaard: Some Rain Must Fall

The fourteen years I lived in Bergen, from 1988 to 2002, are long gone, no traces of them are left other than as incidents a few people might remember, a flash of recollection here, a flash of recollection there, and of course whatever exists in my own memory of that time. But there is surprisingly little. All that is left of the thousands of days I spent in that small, narrow-streeted, rain-shimmering Vestland town is a few events and lots of sentiments. I kept a diary, which I have since burned. I took some photos, of which twelve remain; they are in a little pile on the floor beside the desk with all the letters I received during those days. I have flicked through them, read bits and pieces, and this has always depressed me, it was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions and achieved nothing. But what spirits I was in before I went! I had hitchhiked to Florence with Lars that summer, we stayed there for a few days, caught the train down to Brindisi, the weather was so hot it felt as though your head was on fire when you poked it through the open train window. Night in Brindisi, dark sky, white houses, heat as in a dream, big crowds in the parks, young people on mopeds everywhere, shouting and noise. We queued by the gangway for the big ship going to Piraeus with lots of others, almost all young and carrying rucksacks like us. It was forty-nine degrees in Rhodes. One day in Athens, the most chaotic place I have ever been and so insanely hot, then the boat to Paros and Antiparos, where we lay on the beach every day and got drunk every night. One evening we met some Norwegian girls, and while I was in the toilet Lars told them he was a writer and had been accepted to start at the Writing Academy in the autumn. They were discussing this when I returned. Lars just smiled at me. What was he up to? I knew he was prone to telling little fibs, but while I was standing there? I said nothing, decided to give him a wide berth in the future. We went to Athens together, I had run out of money, Lars was still rolling in it, he decided to fly back home the day after. We were sitting in a terrace restaurant, he was eating chicken, his chin glistening with fat, I was drinking a glass of water. The last thing I wanted to do was ask him for money, the only way I could get any out of him was if he asked me whether I wanted to borrow some. But he didn’t, so I went hungry. The next day he left for the airport, and I took a bus to the suburbs, got off near a motorway slip road and started hitchhiking. After no more than a few minutes a police car stopped, the officers couldn’t speak a word of English, but I got the message that hitchhiking wasn’t allowed there, so I caught a bus back to the city centre, and with the last of my money bought a train ticket to Vienna, a loaf of bread, a big bottle of Coke and a carton of cigarettes.

I thought the trip would take a few hours and was shocked to learn it would be more like two full days. In the compartment were a Swedish boy of my age and two English girls who turned out to be a couple of years older. We were well into Yugoslavia before they twigged that I had no money, nor any food, and they offered to share theirs with me. The countryside outside the window was so beautiful it hurt. Valleys and rivers, farms and villages, people dressed in ways I associated with the nineteenth century and obviously worked the land the way they did then, with horses and hay carts, scythes and ploughs. Part of the train was Russian, I walked through the carriages in the evening, spellbound by the foreign letters, the foreign smells, the foreign interior, the foreign faces. When we arrived in Vienna one of the two girls, Maria, wanted to exchange addresses, she was attractive and normally it would have gone through my mind that I could visit her in Norfolk some day, perhaps start a relationship and live there, but on this day, wandering through the streets on the outskirts of Vienna, the idea meant nothing to me, I was still consumed by Ingvild, whom I had met only once, at Easter that year, but to whom I later wrote. Everyone else paled into insignificance compared with her. I got a lift with a stern-looking blonde woman in her thirties to a petrol station on the motorway, where I asked some lorry drivers if they had any room for me, one of them nodded, he must have been in his late forties, dark-complexioned and thin with deeply glowing eyes, first though he had to have something to eat.

I waited outside in the warm dusk smoking and watching the lights along the road, which were beginning to become more and more distinct as evening fell, surrounded by the drone of traffic, occasionally interrupted by the brief but heavy slamming of doors, the sudden voices of people crossing the car park on their way to or from the service station. Inside, people sat silently eating on their own except for a few families who swamped the tables they sat around. I was filled with an inner exultation, this was precisely what I loved best, the familiar, the known — the motorway, the petrol station, the cafeteria, which weren’t familiar at all actually, everywhere I looked details differed from the places I knew. The driver came out, nodded to me, I followed him, clambered up into the enormous vehicle, put my rucksack in the back and settled in. He started the engine, everything rumbled and shook, lights were switched on, we set off slowly, gradually speeded up, but were still lumbering until we were safely coasting on the inside lane of the motorway, at which point he glanced at me for the first time. Schweden? he said. Norwegen, I said. Ah, Norwegen! he said.

Throughout the night and well into the next day I sat at his side. We had exchanged the names of some football players — Rune Bratseth in particular had excited him — but since he couldn’t speak a word of English that was as far as we got.

I was in Germany, and I was very hungry, but without a krone in my pockets all I could do was smoke and hitch and hope for the best. A young man in a red Golf stopped, his name was Björn, he said, and he was going a long way, he was affable, and in the evening when he had gone as far as he was going to go, he invited me into his house and gave me some muesli and milk, I ate three portions, he showed me some pictures of his holidays with his brother in Norway and Sweden when he was young, their father was crazy about Scandinavia, he told me, hence the name Björn. His brother’s name was Tor, he said, shaking his head. He drove me to the motorway, I gave him my cassette of The Clash’s triple album, he shook my hand, we wished each other good luck, and I took up a position on one of the slip roads again. After three hours a tousled bearded man in a red 2CV stopped, he was going to Denmark, I could have a lift all the way. He asked me questions, was interested when I said that I wrote, I wondered if he might have been a professor of some kind, he bought me food at a cafeteria, I slept for a few hours, we reached Denmark, he bought me more food, and when I finally left him I was in the middle of Jutland, only a few hours away from Hirtshals, so I would soon be home. But the last part of the journey was more difficult, I got lifts of thirty-odd kilometres at a time, by eleven in the evening I had advanced no further than Løkken, and I decided to sleep on the beach. I wandered along a narrow road through a low forest, here and there the tarmac was covered with sand, and soon dunes rose before me, I walked up them, cast my eyes over the shiny grey sea lying in front of me in the light of the Scandinavian summer night. From a campsite or a cluster of seaside cabins a few hundred metres away came the sound of voices and car engines.

It was good being by the sea. Breathing in the faint aroma of salt and the raw breeze off the water. This was my sea. I was nearly home.