Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Title Page
Some Rain Must Fall
Copyright
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1
A Man in Love: My Struggle Book 2
Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3
Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4
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.
I found a dip in the sand and unrolled my sleeping bag, crept inside, pulled up the zip and closed my eyes. It was unpleasant, anyone could stumble across me out here, that was how it felt, but I was so tired after the last few days that in an instant I was gone, as if someone had blown out a candle.
I woke to rain. Cold and stiff, I struggled out of the sleeping bag, pulled on my trousers, packed everything and set off for the town. It was six o’clock. The sky was grey, there was a light, almost imperceptible drizzle, I was freezing cold and walked fast to generate some heat. I’d had a dream and the images were still tormenting me. Dad’s brother Gunnar had been in it, or his anger, that was because I had drunk so much and done so many bad things, I realised now as I hurried through the same low forest I had walked through the previous evening. All the trees were motionless, leaden, beneath the dense cloud cover, more dead than alive. The sand lay in mounds between them, swept up in their changing and unpredictable yet always distinctive patterns, like a river of fine sand grains traversing the coarser tarmac.
I came onto a bigger road, continued along it for some distance, put down my rucksack by a crossing and started thumbing. It wasn’t many kilometres to Hirtshals. Though what would happen there, I had no idea. I had no money so it wouldn’t be that easy to get onto the Kristiansand ferry. Perhaps I could arrange to have a bill sent on to me? If I came across a kindly soul who appreciated the predicament I was in?
Oh no. Now the raindrops were getting bigger as well.
Fortunately it wasn’t cold though.
I lit a cigarette, ran a hand through my hair. The rain had made my hair gel sticky, I dried my hand on my thigh, leaned forward and took the Walkman from my rucksack, rummaged through the few cassettes I had with me, chose Skylarking by XTC, put it in and straightened up.
Had there been an amputated leg in the dream as well? Yes. It had been sawn off just below the knee.
I smiled, and then, when the music began to flow out of the tiny speakers I was taken back to the time the record came out. It would have been the second class at gymnas. Mostly, though, I was filled with recollections of the house in Tveit: sitting in a wicker chair drinking tea and smoking and listening to Skylarking, head over heels in love with Hanne; Yngve, who was there with Kristin; all the conversations with mum.
A vehicle came down the road. It was a pickup truck with a company name on the bonnet in red, probably a builder on his way to work, as he raced past he didn’t even look at me, and then the second song seemed to rise out of the first, I loved this segue, something rose in me as well, and I punched the air several times as I slowly danced round and round.
Another vehicle hove into view. I stretched out my thumb. Once again the driver was sleepy and didn’t acknowledge my presence with so much as a glance. I was obviously hitching on a road with a lot of local traffic. But couldn’t they stop anyway? Take me to a main road?
Only after a couple of hours did someone take pity on me. A German in his mid-twenties with round glasses and a severe expression pulled over in a tiny Opel, I ran towards him, threw my rucksack onto the back seat, which was already full of baggage, and got in beside him. He had come from Norway, he said, and was on his way south, could drop me off by the motorway, it wasn’t far, but it might help. I said, yes, yes, very good. The windows misted up badly, he leaned forward as he drove and wiped the windscreen with a rag. Maybe that’s my fault, I said. What? he said. The mist on the window, I said. Of course it is, he hissed. OK, I thought, if that’s how you want it, and leaned back in my seat.
He dropped me off twenty minutes later, by a big petrol station, I walked back and forth outside asking everyone I saw if they were going to Hirtshals and whether they would take me with them. I was wet and hungry, my appearance was a mess after all the days on the road, and everyone shook their heads until, a long time later, a man driving a van I could see was full of bread and bakery products smiled and said, come on, jump in, I’m going to Hirtshals. The whole way I kept thinking I should ask him if I could have something to eat, but I didn’t dare, the closest I came was to say that I was hungry, but he didn’t take the hint.
As I was saying goodbye to him in Hirtshals a ferry was just about to leave. I ran over to the ticket office with my rucksack heavy on my back, breathlessly explained my situation to the clerk, I had no money, would it be possible to have a ticket anyway and have the bill sent on to me? I had a passport, so could produce ID and I was a reliable payer. She smiled nicely and shook her head, she was unable to help, I had to pay cash. But I have to get across! I said. I live there! And I haven’t got any money! She shook her head again. Sorry, she said, and turned away.
I sat down on a kerb in the harbour area with my rucksack between my legs and watched the big ferry slip its moorings, glide away and vanish from view.
What was I going to do?
One possibility was to hitchhike south again, to Sweden and then go up that way. But wasn’t there some water that had to be crossed as well?
I tried to visualise the map, wondering if there was a land connection between Denmark and Sweden somewhere, I didn’t think there was, was there? So you would have to go right down to Poland and then up through Russia to Finland and from there into Norway, was that right? A couple of weeks’ hitchhiking then. And you would probably need a visa or something for the Eastern Bloc countries. Of course I could go to Copenhagen, that was only a few hours away, and then do whatever it took to get some money for the ferry to Sweden. Beg on the streets if necessary.
Another way would be to get mum to transfer some money to a bank here. That wouldn’t be a problem, but it might take a couple of days. And I didn’t have any coins to phone home.
I opened another packet of Camels and looked across at the vehicles that were quietly rolling in and joining the new queue as I smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. Lots of Norwegian families who had been to Legoland or the beach in Løkken. Some Germans heading north. Lots of camper vans, lots of motorbikes and, furthest away, the juggernauts.
With a dry mouth I took out my Walkman again. This time I inserted a Roxy Music cassette. But after only the second song the sound became distorted and the battery light came on. I put the Walkman away and stood up, swung my rucksack over my shoulder and set off for the town centre, through the few dreary Hirtshals streets. Now and then hunger gnawed at my guts. I considered going to the bakery and asking if they could spare me some bread, but of course they wouldn’t give me any. I couldn’t bear the thought of such a humiliating rejection and decided to save my efforts until I was in serious discomfort, and wandered back towards the harbour. I stopped in front of a kind of café-cum-snack-bar, where it would surely be possible to get a glass of water at least.
The girl nodded and filled a glass from the tap behind her. I sat down by the window. The place was nearly full. Outside, it had started raining again. I drank the water and smoked. After a while two boys of my age came in the door, wearing full rain gear. They undid their hoods and looked around. One of them came over to me. Were the seats free? Of course, I said. We got into conversation, it turned out they were from Holland, on their way to Norway and they had cycled up. They laughed in disbelief when I told them I had hitchhiked from Vienna without any money and now I was trying to get on the ferry. Is that why you’re drinking water? one asked, I nodded, he asked if I would like a cup of coffee, that would be nice, I answered, he stood up and went off to get me one.
I left with them, they said they hoped we would meet again on board, took their bikes and were gone, I plodded over to the lorry queue and began to ask the drivers if they would take me along, I had no money for the boat. No, no one was interested, needless to say. One by one they started their engines and trundled on board while I walked back to the café and sat watching the ferry, which, once again, glided slowly away from the quay and became smaller and smaller until, half an hour later, it had disappeared.
The last ferry left in the evening. If I didn’t get on it I would have to hitch down to Copenhagen. That would have to be the plan. While waiting I took the manuscript from my rucksack and read. I had written a whole chapter in Greece, on two mornings I had waded out to a little island and from there to another island with my shoes, T-shirt, writing pad, pen, cigarettes and a paperback copy of Jack in Swedish in a little bundle on my head. There, in a hollow in the mountainside I had sat all on my own writing. It felt as if I had arrived at where I wanted to go. I was sitting on a Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean writing my first novel. At the same time I was restless, there was nothing there, only me, and it wasn’t until that was all there was that I experienced the emptiness it entailed. That was how it was there, my own emptiness was everything, and even when I became immersed in Jack or was bent over my pad writing about Gabriel, my protagonist, what I noticed was the emptiness.
Sometimes I dived into the water, dark azure and wonderful, but I had hardly swum a few strokes before it occurred to me there might be sharks around. I knew there were no sharks in the Mediterranean, but I still had these thoughts as I scrambled up onto the shore dripping wet and cursing myself, it was idiotic, scared of sharks here, what was this, was I seven years old? But I was alone beneath the sun, alone by the sea and utterly empty. It felt as if I was the last human on earth. It rendered both my reading and writing meaningless.
Yet when I read the chapter about what I thought was a seamen’s pub in the harbour quarter of Hirtshals I thought it was good. The fact that I had been accepted at the Writing Academy proved I had talent. Now all I had to do was demonstrate it on paper. My plan was to write a novel during the coming year, and then have it published next autumn, depending on how long it took to print and that kind of thing.
Water Above/Water Below it was called.
A few hours later, in the falling dusk, I walked along the queue of lorries again. Some of the drivers were dozing in their cabs, I knocked on the side windows and saw them give a jolt, then either open the door or roll down the window to hear what I wanted. No, I couldn’t have a lift. No, that wasn’t on. No, of course not, were they supposed to pay for my ticket or what?
The ferry was moored at the quayside with its lights blazing. Everywhere around me people began to start up their engines. One line of cars moved slowly forward, the first ones disappeared through the open jaws into the bowels of the ship. I was desperate but told myself everything would be fine in the end. Had there ever been any stories of young Norwegians starving to death on their holidays or being stranded in Denmark, unable to get home?
Outside one of the last lorries, three men stood chatting. I walked over to them.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Could any of you take me on board? I haven’t got any money for the ticket, you see. And I have to get home. I haven’t eaten for two days, either.’
‘Where are you from?’ one asked in a broad Arendal dialect.
‘Arendal,’ I said, in as thick an accent as I could muster. ‘Or, to be precise, Tromøya.’
‘You don’t say!’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m from!’
‘Which town?’
‘Færvik,’ he said. ‘And you?’
‘Tybakken,’ I said. ‘Could you take me then?’
He nodded.
‘Jump in. Squat down as we drive on board. It’ll be a cinch.’
And that was what I did. As we drove on board I sat huddled up on the floor with my back to the windscreen. He parked, switched off the ignition, I grabbed my rucksack and jumped down to the deck. My eyes were moist as I thanked him. He shouted after me as I left, hey, hang about! I turned, he handed me a Danish fifty-krone note, said he didn’t need it, perhaps I did?
I sat down in the cafeteria and ate a large portion of meatballs. The boat began to move off. The air around me was full of animated conversation, it was evening, we were under way. I thought about my driver. Usually I had no time for his type, they had wasted their lives sitting behind a wheel, they had no education, were fat and full of prejudices about all manner of things, and he was no different, I saw that straight away, but what the hell, he had got me on board!
After the cars, lorries and motorbikes had – amid much revving and banging – driven off the ferry and onto the roads in Kristiansand next morning, the town lay still behind them. I sat on the steps of the bus station. The sun was shining, the sky was high, the air already warm. I had saved some of the money I had been given by the lorry driver so I could ring dad and say I was coming. His pet hate was surprise visitors. They had bought a house thirty kilometres or so away, which they rented out in the winter and lived in themselves throughout the summer until they had to start back at work in northern Norway. My plan was to stay there a few days and then borrow some money for a ticket to Bergen, perhaps catch a train there, whatever was cheapest.
But it was too early to ring.
I took out the small travel diary I had been keeping for the last month and entered everything that had happened from Austria onwards. I spent a few pages on the dream I had in Løkken, it had made such an impression on me, it was deeply entrenched in my body, like a barrier or a boundary I mustn’t cross, it seemed important.
Around me the frequency of the buses began to increase, until at one point barely a minute passed without a bus stopping and disgorging its passengers. They were going to work, I could see it in their eyes, they had that vacant wage-earner look.
I stood up and went for a walk around town. The pedestrian street, Markens, was almost completely deserted, only a lone figure dashing up or down. Seagulls were pecking and snatching at the rubbish under a litter bin with no bottom. I ended up at the library. It was habit that drove me there, some of the same sensation of panic I’d had when I walked around there during my years at gymnas had me in its grip now, I had nowhere to go and everyone could see that, I had always solved this by seeking refuge there, the place where you could hang about without anyone questioning what you were doing.
Before me lay the market square and the grey stone church with the verdigris roof. Everything was small and dismal, Kristiansand was a minor town, I could see that very clearly now after having been in southern Europe and experiencing how things were there.
Against the wall on the other side of the street sat a tramp, asleep. With his long beard and hair and his ragged clothes he looked like a wild man.
I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. Just suppose he was the one who had the best life! He was doing exactly what he liked. If he wanted to break in somewhere, he did. If he wanted to drink himself senseless, he did. If he wanted to hassle passers-by, he did. If he was hungry he stole some food. Fine, people treated him like shit or as though he didn’t exist. But as long as he didn’t care about anyone else, it was water off a duck’s back.
This must have been how the first humans lived before they established communities and started farming, when they just wandered around eating whatever they could find, sleeping wherever seemed appropriate, and every day was like the first or the last. The tramp had no house to return to, no house to tie him down, he had no job to attend to, no schedules to keep, if he was tired, well, then he lay down wherever he was. The town was his forest. He was outdoors all the time, his skin was tanned and wrinkled, his hair and clothes filthy.
Even if I wanted to, I could never end up the way he was, I knew that. I could never go mad and become a tramp, it was inconceivable.
An old VW camper van stopped by the market square. A plump, lightly clad man jumped out on one side, a plump, lightly clad woman jumped out on the other. They opened the rear door and started unloading boxes of flowers. I threw my cigarette down on the dry tarmac, slipped on my rucksack and walked back to the bus station, where I rang dad. He was bad-tempered and annoyed and told me I had arrived at an inconvenient time, they had a little child now, they couldn’t receive visitors at such short notice. I should have rung before, that would have been OK. As it was now, grandma was coming, and a colleague too. I said I understood, apologised for not calling before and rang off.
I stood with the receiver in my hand for a while thinking, and then I dialled Hilde’s number. She said I could stay there and she would come and pick me up now.
Half an hour later I was sitting beside her in her old Golf, on our way out of town, with the window open and the sun in my eyes. She laughed and said I smelled terrible, I would have to have a bath when we arrived. Then we could sit in the garden behind the house, in the shade, and she could serve me breakfast, I looked like I needed it.
I stayed at Hilde’s for three days, long enough for mum to transfer some money into my account, and then I caught the train to Bergen. I left in the afternoon, the sun flooded the heavily forested countryside in Indre Agder, which received it in its manifold ways: the water in the lakes and rivers glittered, the dense conifers shone, the forest floor blushed, the leaves on the deciduous trees flashed on the few occasions a gust of wind caught them. Amid this interplay of light and colour the shadows slowly lengthened and thickened. I stood by the window in the last carriage for a long time watching features of the countryside that kept disappearing, cast aside as it were, to be replaced by new ones, which always made their appearance in quick succession, a river of stumps and roots, cliffs and uprooted trees, streams and fences, unexpected cultivated hillsides with farmhouses and tractors. The only features that didn’t change were the rails we followed and two shimmering dots on which the sun was reflected all the way. It was a strange phenomenon. They looked like two balls of light, which seemed to be standing still while the train was travelling at more than a hundred kilometres an hour, and the balls of light remained at the same distance from me.
Several times during the journey I went back to see the balls of light again. They lifted my spirits, made me somehow happy, as though there was hope in them.
Otherwise I sat in my seat smoking and drinking coffee, reading newspapers but no books, on the basis that it might affect my prose, that I might lose whatever it was that had got me into the Writing Academy. After a while I took out the letters from Ingvild. I had carried them with me all summer, the folds were wearing thin and I knew them nearly off by heart, but a radiance emanated from them, something good, something pleasurable, which touched me whenever I read them. It was her, both what I remembered of her the one time we had met and the her that arose from what she wrote, but it was also the her of the future, the unknown her that awaited me. She was different, something else, and the odd thing was that I also became different and something else when thinking about her. I liked myself better when I thought about her. It was as though thinking about her erased something in me, and that gave me a fresh start or moved me on.
I knew she was the right one, I had seen that straight away, but perhaps I hadn’t thought, only felt, that what she had in her and what she was, and which in glimpses her eyes revealed, was something I wanted to be close to or embrace.
What was it?
Oh, her self-awareness and insight into the situation, which laughter suspended for an instant, but which returned the very next second. Something evaluative and sceptical even, in her nature, that wanted to be won over but was afraid of being duped. In it resided vulnerability but not weakness.
I had enjoyed talking to her so much, and I had liked writing to her so much. The fact that she was the first thought in my mind the day after we had met didn’t necessarily mean anything, it was often like that, but it hadn’t stopped there, I had thought about her every day since, and now four months had passed.
I didn’t know if she felt the same way about me. Presumably she didn’t, but something in the tone of her writing told me there was some excitement and appeal in this for her too.
Mum had moved from a flat with a terrace to a basement in a house in Angedalen, in Førde municipality, ten minutes from the centre. It was a wonderful location with a forest on one side, a field ending in a river on the other, but the flat was small and studenty – one big room with a kitchen and bathroom, that was it. She was planning to stay there until she found something better to rent or perhaps even buy. I had intended to do some writing while I stayed with her, during the two weeks before I would finally move to Bergen, and she suggested I use Uncle Steinar’s cabin, which was up by the old house in the forest pasture above the farm grandma came from. She drove me there, we had a coffee outside the house, then she made her way back and I went into the cabin. Pine walls, pine floor, pine ceiling and pine furniture. A woven rug here and there, a few plain paintings. A pile of magazines in a basket, a fireplace, a kitchenette.
I placed the dining table by a wall without a window, put my pile of papers on one side, a pile of cassettes on the other, and sat down. But I couldn’t write. The emptiness I had first felt on the island off Antiparos returned, I could feel it again, exactly as it had been before. The world was empty, or nothing, an image, and I was empty.
I went to bed and slept for two hours. When I woke dusk was falling. The bluish-grey twilight lay like a veil over the forest. The thought of writing still repelled me, so instead I put on my shoes and went outside.
I could hear the roar of the waterfall in the forest above, otherwise everything was still.
No, it wasn’t, I could hear bells ringing somewhere.
I walked down to the path by the stream and followed it up into the forest. The spruces were tall and dark, the rock face beneath was covered in moss, here and there roots lay bare on the surface. In places small thin deciduous trees tried to force their way up into the light, elsewhere little clearings had formed around fallen trees. And alongside the stream the forest was open, of course, where it swirled and crashed, threw itself over rock and stone on its way down. Otherwise everything was dense and dark green from the spruce needles. I could hear my own breathing, could feel my pulse beating in my chest, throat and temples as I walked up. The noise from the waterfall became louder, and soon I was standing on a crag above a deep pool, looking at the steep bare rock face where the water plummeted downwards.
It was beautiful, but it was of no use to me, and I walked up through the trees beside the waterfall, climbed to the exposed rock, which I wanted to follow right to the top, a few hundred metres above me.
The sky was grey, the water that cascaded down beside me shiny and clear, like glass. The moss I was walking on was drenched and often gave way; my foot slipped and the dark rock beneath was revealed.
Suddenly something jumped out just in front of my feet.
Paralysed by fear, I stood stock still. My heart seemed to have stopped too.
A small grey creature darted off. It was a mouse or a small rat.
I laughed nervously to myself. Continued upwards, but the little scare had a hold on me. Now I peered into the dark forest with a sense of unease, and the constant blanket of sound from the waterfall which I had hitherto regarded as agreeable became threatening, prevented me from hearing anything else except my own breathing, so a few minutes later I about-turned and made my way back down.
I sat by the brick grill outside the farmhouse and lit a cigarette. It might have been eleven o’clock or maybe half past. The farmhouse looked the way it must have done when grandma worked here, in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, everything looked more or less the same as it did then. Yet everything was different. It was August 1988, I was an 80s person, contemporaneous with Duran Duran and The Cure, not that fiddle and accordion music grandad listened to in the days when he trudged up the hill in the dusk with a friend to court grandma and her sisters. I didn’t belong here, with all of my heart I felt that. It didn’t help that I knew the forest was actually an 80s forest and the mountains actually 80s mountains.
So what was I doing here?
My plan had been to write. But I couldn’t, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.
When the week was over and mum drove up the narrow gravel road, I was sitting on the steps waiting with my rucksack packed and ready between my legs, not having written a single word.
‘Have you had a nice time?’ she said.
‘Yes, great,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get much done though.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, looking at me. ‘But perhaps the rest did you good.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it did,’ I said, buckling my seat belt, and then we drove back to Førde, where we parked and had lunch at Sunnfjord Hotel. We chose a window table, mum hung her bag over her chair, then we went over to the buffet in the middle of the dining room to serve ourselves. The place was quite empty. When we sat down, each with a plate, a waiter came over, I asked for a Coke, mum wanted a Farris mineral water, and after he had gone she began to talk about her plans – which now looked as if they were going to materialise – to establish a further training course in psychiatric patient care at the school. She had located some suitable premises herself, a wonderful old school, according to her, which wasn’t that far from the School of Nursing. It had soul, she said, it was an old timber building, with big rooms, high ceilings, quite different from the cramped brick bunker she was teaching in now.
‘That sounds good,’ I said, my gaze wandering to the car park, where a handful of vehicles glinted in the sunlight. The mountainside across the river was completely green apart from one plot that had been blasted out with dynamite, where a house had been built which vibrated with all of its many different colours.
The waiter returned and I drank the glass of Coke in one long draught. Mum began to talk about my relationship with Gunnar. She said I seemed to have internalised him and turned him into my super-ego, the one that told me what I could and couldn’t do, what was wrong and what wasn’t.
I put down my knife and fork and looked at her.
‘Have you been reading my diary?’ I said.
‘No, not your diary,’ she said. ‘But you left a book you’d been writing in on your holiday. You’re usually so open and tell me everything.’
‘But, Mum, that was a diary,’ I said. ‘You don’t read other people’s diaries.’
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘I know that. But if you leave it on the sitting-room table there’s hardly anything secret about it, is there?’
‘But you could see it was a diary, couldn’t you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a travelogue.’
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘That was my mistake. I shouldn’t have left it lying around. But what was it you said about Gunnar? That I’d internalised him? What did you mean by that?’
‘That’s how it seemed from the dream you described and your subsequent thoughts.’
‘Really?’
‘Your father was very strict with you when you were growing up, as you know. But then he was suddenly gone, and perhaps you had a sense that you could do whatever you liked. So you’ve got two sets of norms, but both derive from the outside. What’s important is that you set your own limits. That has to come from the inside, from you yourself. Your father didn’t do that, and that’s maybe why he was so confused.’
‘Is,’ I said. ‘He’s still alive to my knowledge. At any rate, I spoke to him on the phone a week ago.’
‘But now it appears you’ve installed Gunnar in your father’s place,’ she continued, flashing me a look. ‘This has nothing to do with Gunnar. We’re talking about setting your limits. But you’re old enough now. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to do in my diary,’ I said. ‘Then all sorts of people read it, and it becomes impossible to work it out for myself.’
‘I apologise,’ mum said. ‘I really didn’t think you regarded it as a diary. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have read it.’
‘I’ve told you it’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘Shall we have a sweet as well?’
We sat in her flat chatting until late, then I went into the hall, closed the door behind me, fetched the lilo, which was leaning against the wall in the little bathroom, laid it on the floor, covered it with a sheet, undressed, switched off the light and lay down. Faintly, I could hear her moving about and the occasional car passing outside. The smell of plastic from the lilo reminded me of my childhood, camping trips and the open countryside. Times were different now, but the feeling of anticipation was the same. The next day I was off to Bergen, the big university town, I would be living in my own digs and attending the Writing Academy. In the evenings and at night I would sit in Café Opera or go to gigs with great bands at Hulen. It was fantastic. But the most fantastic thing of all was that Ingvild would be moving to the same town. We had arranged to meet, I had her phone number, I would ring her when I arrived.
It was too good to be true, I thought, lying there on the airbed, filled with a restlessness and a joy that this was about to begin. I lay on one side, then on the other, listening to mum talking in her sleep in the sitting room. Yes, she said. Then there was a long pause. Yes, she said again. That’s true. Long pause. Yes. Yes. Mhm. Yes.
The following day mum took me to Handelshuset, where she wanted to buy me a jacket and some trousers. I chose a fur-lined denim jacket, which looked pretty cool, and a pair of green military-style trousers, as well as some black shoes. Then she drove me to the bus station, gave me the money for the ticket, stood by the car waving as the bus moved off and into the road.
After a few hours of forests, lakes, vertiginously steep mountains and narrow fjords, farms and fields, a ferry and a long valley where the bus was high up a mountainside one minute and right down by the water’s edge the next, and an endless succession of tunnels, the frequency of houses and signs began to increase, there were more and more populated areas, industrial buildings appeared, fences, petrol stations, shopping centres and estates on both sides of the road. I saw a sign for the Business School and it struck me, that was where Agnar Mykle went forty years ago. On one side I saw Sandviken Psychiatric Hospital rise like a fortress at the foot of the mountains, while on the other the water glittered in the afternoon sun, with yachts and boats whose outlines seemed to blur in the haze against a backdrop of islands and mountains and the low sky over Bergen.
I jumped off the bus at the far end of Bryggen, the old wharf. Yngve was working the evening shift at the Orion Hotel and I had arranged to pick up the key to his flat there. The town around me was sunk in the stupor that only late-summer afternoons can evoke. Now and then a figure sauntered past in shorts and a T-shirt, followed by a long flickering shadow. House walls shimmering in the sun, motionless leaves on trees, a yacht chugging out of the harbour, masts bare.
The reception area at the hotel was packed with people. Yngve, busy behind his desk, looked up at me and said a coachload of Americans had just arrived, look, here’s the key, see you later, OK?
I caught the bus to Danmarksplass and walked the three hundred metres up to his flat, unlocked the door, put down my rucksack in the hall, stood still for a while and wondered what to do. The windows faced north and the sun was in the west, setting over the sea, so the rooms were dark and chilly. They smelled of Yngve. I went into the sitting room and looked around, then into the bedroom. There was a new poster on the wall, an eerie photograph of a naked woman with Munch og fotografi written at the bottom. Photos he had taken himself were there too, a selection from Tibet, the ground was a gleaming red, a group of ragged boys and girls posing for him, their eyes dark and foreign. In one corner, beside the sliding door, his guitar was leaning against an amplifier. On top of it a large echo box. A plain white Ikea blanket and two cushions converted the bed into a sofa.
I had visited Yngve several times while I was at gymnas, and to me there was something almost sacred about his rooms, they represented who he was and who I wanted to become. Something that existed outside my life and something that one day I would move into.
Now I was here, I thought, and went into the kitchen to make some sandwiches, which I ate standing in front of the window, with a view of the terraces of old workers’ houses going down to Fjøsangerveien at the bottom. On the other side, the mast on Mount Ulrich flashed in the sunshine.
It occurred to me that I had been on my own a lot recently. Apart from the few days with first Hilde and then mum, I hadn’t spent time with anyone since I said goodbye to Lars in Athens. I could hardly wait for Yngve to come home.
I put on a Stranglers’ record and settled down on the sofa with one of Yngve’s photo albums. My stomach ached and I didn’t know why. It felt like hunger, not for food but for everything else.
Perhaps Ingvild was also in town? Perhaps she was sitting in one of the hundred thousand bedsits around me?
One of the first questions Yngve asked me when he arrived was how it was going with Ingvild. I hadn’t told him much, a few words when we were sitting on the steps earlier that summer, that was all, but it had been enough for him to realise it was serious. Maybe also that it had huge significance for me.
I told him she was coming to Bergen around now and would live in Fantoft, and I would be ringing her to arrange the first meeting.
‘Might turn out to be your year,’ he said. ‘New girlfriend, Writing Academy …’
‘We’re not there yet.’
‘No, but from what you’ve said, she’s interested, isn’t she?’
‘A little maybe. But I doubt it means as much to her as it does to me.’
‘But it could do. If you play your cards right.’
‘For once, you mean?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, eyeing me. ‘Fancy some wine?’
‘Certainly do.’
He got up and disappeared into the kitchen, reappeared with a carafe in his hand and went to the bathroom. I heard some snorting and gurgling noises, then a steady glug until he emerged holding a full carafe.
‘Vintage 1988,’ he said. ‘But it’s pretty good. And there’s quite a lot of it as well.’
I took a swig. It was so sour it made me wince.
Yngve smiled.
‘Pretty good?’ I said.
‘Taste is relative, as you know,’ he said. ‘You have to compare it with other home-made wine.’
We drank for a while without speaking. Yngve stood up and went towards the guitar and amplifier.
‘I’ve written a couple of songs since you were last here,’ he said. ‘Want to hear them?’
‘Yes, love to,’ I said.
‘Well, they’re not really songs,’ he said, fastening the strap over his shoulder. ‘Just a few riffs really.’
I felt a sudden tenderness as I watched him.
He switched on the amplifier, stood with his back to me and tuned the guitar, adjusted the echo box and began to play.
The tenderness vanished, this was good, what he was playing, the guitar sound was big and majestic, the riffs melodious and catchy, it sounded like a cross between the Smiths and the Chameleons. I couldn’t understand where he had got it from. Both his musicality and the dexterity were way beyond my capacities. He simply had the gift, from the moment he started, as though it had always been there.
He turned towards me only after he had finished and put down the guitar.
‘That was really good,’ I said.
‘Do you think so?’ he said, sitting down on the sofa. ‘It’s just a couple of little ideas. I could do with some lyrics so that I could finish them off.’
‘I don’t understand why you don’t play in a band.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I jam a little with Pål now and then. Otherwise I don’t know anyone who plays. You’re here now though.’
‘I can’t play.’
‘You can start by writing a few lyrics, can’t you? And you can play the drums as well.’
‘No, I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m not good enough. But perhaps I could write something. That’d be fun.’
‘You do that,’ he said.
Autumn was on its way, I thought, as we stood in the road outside the long line of low brick terraced houses waiting for the taxi. There was a kind of heaviness in the light summer night, impossible to localise yet unmistakable. An augury of something damp and dark and gloomy.
The taxi arrived a few minutes later, we got in, it raced recklessly down to Danmarksplass, past the big cinema and over a bridge, along Nygårds Park and into the centre, where I lost my bearings, streets were just streets, houses just houses, I disappeared into the large town, was swallowed up by it, and I liked that because I became visible to myself, the young man on his way into a metropolis filled with glass and concrete and tarmac and strangers caught in the light from street lamps and windows and signs. A shiver ran down my spine as we drove into the centre. The engine hummed, the traffic lights changed from green to red, we stopped outside what must have been the bus station.
‘Isn’t that where we went that time?’ I said, nodding towards the building across the road.
‘That’s right,’ Yngve said.
I had been sixteen, visiting him for the first time; I had held the hand of one of the girls we were with in order to get in. I had borrowed Yngve’s deodorant, and in the minutes before we left his place he had stood in front of me, rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, passed me his hair gel, watched me rubbing it in and said, good, now let’s go.
Now I was nineteen and all this was mine.
I caught a glimpse of the lake in the middle of the town, and then we turned left, past a large concrete building.
‘That’s the Grieg Hall,’ Yngve said.
‘So that’s where it is,’ I said.
‘And there’s Mekka,’ he said straight afterwards, nodding towards a supermarket. ‘That’s the cheapest in town.’
‘Is that where you shop?’ I said.
‘If I’ve got any money,’ he said. ‘Anyway, this is Nygårdsgaten. Do you remember The Aller Værste! song? “We ran down Nygårdsgata as though we were in the Wild West.”’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about “Disken” then? “I went into Disken and the place was bloody heaving”?’
‘That was the disco in Hotel Norge. Right behind that building there. But it’s called something else now.’
The taxi pulled into the kerb and stopped.
CAFÉ OPERA