My Struggle: Book 5: Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345815569
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

We cleaned our teeth together in the bathroom, kissed each other goodnight and went to our separate rooms. Outside, it had begun to rain. I lay listening to the light pitter-patter, which ceased whenever the wind gusted through the forest. From inside the sitting room a clock ticked, every hour a mechanism was activated and its delicate chime sounded. This was a house where, from my perspective, everything functioned as it should and where lives were lived in an orderly manner. I understood more about Gunvor when I saw her at home. She was a student, lived her life in Bergen, but was also a part of this, she was loyal to her parents, to whom she was both close and distant. I assumed the feeling I had while I was there, that I was false and bad, that I was duping them, was alien to her nature.

The clock chimed twelve. Someone was up and in the corridor, a door was opened and closed, the toilet flushed. I liked being in other people’s homes so much, I thought, I always had done, although what I saw there could seem unbearable to me, perhaps because I saw things I wasn’t intended to see. The personal life that was peculiar to them. The love, the helplessness that resided in that, which was usually hidden from others’ eyes. Oh, trifles, trivialities, a family’s habits, their exchanged glances. The vulnerability in this was so immense. Not for them, they lived inside it, and then there was no vulnerability, but when it was seen by someone who didn’t live there. When I saw it I felt like an intruder, I had no right to be there. At the same time I was filled with tenderness for them.

The clock readied itself to chime again. I opened my eyes, there was no question of me being able to sleep straight away. The trees outside the window were black, the darkness between them pale. It wasn’t raining any more, but the wind was still rising and falling in the forest like billowing breakers of the air.

One o’clock.

I thought about the one time I had been to hospital in my childhood. I had broken my collarbone, it hurt so much I was crying but didn’t realise anything was wrong until I complained to mum in the evening and she drove me to see the doctor in Kokkeplassen, where she worked, a red-haired freckled young man, who said the bone was probably broken and we would have to go to hospital to have an X-ray. After it had been done the doctor there said I could sleep in the hospital that night. There was nothing I would rather have done, it was an adventure, something to tell the others, but if I said yes perhaps mum might think I preferred to sleep in the hospital than at home, she would be sad about that, and so I shook my head to the doctor’s suggestion, said I wanted to sleep at home if that was all right.

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