Many years later, when I met her again and we started living together, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that she had switched on the light above the bed and was lying there considering me, as if trying to uncover a secret: ‘Who are you?’ she would whisper then. On more than one night I was woken in this way. It was as though she were studying me, thought she could discover more about me when I was asleep than when I was awake. ‘You look about seven years old,’ she told me. ‘I am seven years old,’ I said.
Now and then she would ask me about a dream I had just had. She might ask me why I had shot wide of the goal. And I would actually have been dreaming about football. She could read my dreams, or was so interested in me that she could guess what I was likely to be dreaming about. Or – this thought has occurred to me – maybe she gave me them, put these dreams into my head by lying there looking at me, considering me.
Even at night when we were making love, I would occasionally feel her fingers running over my face in the dark, as if my features were in Braille and she was trying to read me.
Her curiosity about me. And not the other way round.
Soon we were alone. Even Leo had left, pointedly, as though washing his hands of the whole business. I dived again. It was dark down there, the water was turbid. The bracelet could have fallen off at a spot so deep that I would not be able to reach it, even with all the training I had done – out at Hvaler, too, where I had made several dives to a depth of ten metres with flippers. Her black pupils followed me, stayed fixed on me, as if she were not only asking: Who are you?, but also: Where are you when you dive?
I would not give up, took another deep breath before gliding down into the depths. The pressure was getting to me. My ears were starting to hurt despite the fact that I pinched my nose shut with one hand. I could not give up. I felt the pressure, as much from within as from without. This was a situation which would work a change in me.
The pressure. And this might be a good point – here, with me in a submerged position before an expectant Margrete – at which to allude to what lay at the core of my image of myself, a view so complex – or so simple – that I am afraid it goes beyond words: in my life it has not so much been a case of developing as in growing, but rather of evolving.
When I went to my grandfather’s outdoor privy on Hvaler I always left the door wide open so I could gaze out to sea, at the boats sailing past. There was nothing quite like it. The quiet. The spider in the corner. The green moss outside. The smell of the beach, the sea. My eyes had often been drawn to a piece of cloth which had been rolled into a ball and wedged into the hole in the door jamb where once there had been a lock. One day, on impulse, or because I had a hunch about it, I winkled the bit of cloth out. And when I gently began to pull on the ends, opening out the clump of fabric which, over the years, had become almost totally gummed up, it proved to be an old tablecloth. Some scorch marks explained why it had been discarded. Printed on the cloth was a map of the world. And filthy though the fabric was, I could see how nice it was. The names of lots of countries were quite legible. I never forgot this experience. That I could unfold a disgusting-looking clump of fabric and reveal a hidden world.
I probably ought to keep quiet about this – especially considering the lowly part I now play – but there is something I have to confess, although I never dared to say it out loud: I was a child wonder. Or, no: that is not quite right. I was a wonder. As a very small boy I was sure that I could speak seven foreign languages and jump ten metres in the air, all I had to do was to figure out how. Sometimes I felt, with such swelling conviction that it scared me, that I could make objects shatter just by staring at them very hard, that I only needed to clench my fist in order to set great wheels in motion – if not within my own immediately perceptible surroundings then somewhere far out in space. At times I felt a pressure, almost a pain, inside my skull, often throughout my whole body, as if something was trying to unfold itself. As if I carried within me a seed containing a mighty tree.
One Sunday the whole family went for a drive after church. We stopped out on Ekeberg moor where some gypsies had made camp. They were something of an attraction. For ten øre some of the gypsy children would sing, one girl danced. But – and this was far more thrilling – you could also have your fortune told. Some curious onlookers stood in a semi-circle around a young woman seated on a chair outside a caravan. ‘Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a stunner,’ Daniel hissed, and then he shoved me through the circle of people and gave the woman a krone. ‘Now you can find out whether you’re going to end up dumping sewage or washing bodies,’ he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Or whether you’ll get off with Anne Beate Corneliussen.’ The woman smiled invitingly. She really was a stunner. Dark. Genuinely mysterious. She took my hand. She tilted it slightly. I felt her stiffen, almost jerking backwards in her seat. She raised her eyes and looked at me. I do not know how to describe it. As if she were afraid? Overwhelmed? She waved me away, said nothing, simply gave Daniel his krone back. She motioned to me to leave, as if she did not understand, had not been able to see anything.
I was a child. And yet. We have tens of billions of nerve cells in our brains and each of them capable of connecting with hundreds of thousands of other nerve cells. From time to time some expert can be heard to state that we are not even close to utilising the brain’s full capacity. A large proportion of our genetic material is also said to be a mystery: we have no idea what purpose it serves. What if I had detected talents which were in some way associated with those white patches in our knowledge, I would think at heady, almost uneasy moments when I was older. Should I regard this as a blessing or a curse?
I cannot deny it, however. For long periods this was my driving force, my strength and, at the same time, the source of the deepest misgivings: I felt unfinished as a human being. Which is not to say that I was unhappy with myself, with the person I was. But I knew – and this rankled me – that I harboured untapped potential. It lay coiled up inside me. Or packed away in little boxes, like Granny’s chandelier. I was, in other words, less interested in what I was than in what I could be. So one minute I was on the lookout for situations which would help this unknown quality to uncoil, enable me to excel myself. Or, more precisely: become the real me. The next minute I was filled with the need to hide, the wish that these latent gifts might leave me be. Sometimes, I confess, I even hoped they would never come to anything.
In my life, unlike many people, I have never been all that concerned about traumas or evil inclinations, all the things that drag me down. I have been more interested in whatever it is that lifts me up. I have felt something lifting me up. Of all the questions I have had to address, this is the one I hold to be the most crucial: is mankind descended, metaphorically speaking, from the animals or the angels? Or perhaps this is merely a variation on another question: should we let ourselves be ruled by the past or the future? By who we are or who we will become?
It was during a visit to Aunt Laura that I first received some intimation of how radical my potential was. Or at least, I believed that I was given a sign. I must have been about seven. My aunt was a goldsmith, specialising in avant-garde jewellery. In her flat in Tøyen all the walls of the living room and the rooms adjoining it were covered in rugs she had bought on her amazing and, as she told it, not entirely risk-free, travels in the Middle East and Central Asia. This home represented, for me, a source of stimulation that cannot be overrated. And although the name Tøyen actually stems from another word entirely, it always made me think of the word ‘tøye’, meaning to stretch and hence, for me, represented a place where I would be broadened, extended. A feeling which was enhanced by the flat itself; it seemed almost boundless. As if, by some magic, this average-sized dwelling consisted of hundreds of little nooks and chambers.
In the evenings, when my aunt was making dinner, I was allowed to shut the kitchen door and play in the living room. Aunt Laura bound a silk scarf around my head like a turban and lent me a torc
h. Then I switched off the living-room light and made believe I was a sultan going out in disguise to see how things stood in my realm – just like the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights. I was especially fond of pretending that I was walking around the bazaar, where I envisaged the most arcane occurrences taking place. The platter of oranges on the table was transformed with ease into a cornucopian fruit stall, the bowl of little pistachio cakes turned into an aromatic pastry shop and the coils of silver wire on the workbench in the corner became glimpses of palaces in a distant city. My imagination was given added wing by the delicious smells issuing from the kitchen, often from my aunt’s speciality: Lebanese dishes, including my favourite, machawi, small chunks of meat threaded onto a skewer and grilled – the skewer was a treat in itself. When I shone the torch on the many different oriental rugs they altered character. As with the one in Karen Mohr’s home they, too, concealed doors of a sort leading to new and exciting chambers. Their labyrinthine patterns took on a fascinating depth and revealed an assortment of tableaux; took me on journeys of discovery to cities such as Baghdad and Basra and, if I was lucky: to far-off Samarkand.
One evening, when Aunt Laura spent longer than usual in the kitchen, I fell asleep among the soft cushions on the sofa. I was woken by my aunt shaking me gently. Other children might wake with a start and imagine that they had just grown in their sleep. I tended, instead, to wake with a shudder. As an adult it struck me that this was not unlike the spasms of an orgasm. On this occasion, too, that deep tremor ran through me from top to toe, as if all the molecules in my body were swapping places. I looked around me. Everything was different. The same, but altered. When I had switched out the light there had been a platter of oranges on the table. Now the dish was piled high with lemons, inflamingly yellow and with that little tip which, later in life, always made me think of a girl’s breast. When I had last seen Aunt Laura in the kitchen, she had been wearing a gold sea-horse on a chain around her neck, a piece of jewellery she claimed was made from the wedding rings of men with whom she had slept. But now a dolphin dangled before my eyes.
I said nothing. Not because I was not sure, but because I was scared. The Jonas I had now become had more to him than the Jonas who had fallen asleep – whatever had happened. There was much to suggest that whatever I had, until then, taken to be myself was only a fragment of a much larger whole. Amid all my fear and confusion, however, I also detected another, conflicting emotion: one of wild excitement.
It is tempting to dismiss all of this as no more than a fanciful childish or youthful daydream. Nevertheless, for years it coloured my life; I have no wish to deny it. The same went for my suspicion that the pressure I occasionally felt, that sense of being unfolded, was connected to something else. For, while my brother Daniel had a constant fixation with soul, I let myself be seduced, possibly as a protest, by a rival concept within those same hazy and exalted spheres. Spirit. I would not be surprised if that was why we ended up in such different walks of life, despite having one lowest common denominator: the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin’s impassioned rendering of ‘Spirit in the Dark’, more especially the live version, sung with Ray Charles – Aretha’s ecstatic scream of ‘Don’t do it to me!’ left us both with goosebumps on our inner thighs. This was soul and spirit in perfect harmony.
I automatically pricked up my ears at any mention of the phenomenon. I cherished words such as ‘spirited’ and ‘inspirit’. I understood that life and spirit were inextricably bound up with one another. Always, without thinking about it, I would say inspire rather than inhale. I felt the same about breathing as other people did about the heart or the pulse. Even as a small child I would find myself taking big, deep breaths, in and out, as if performing an exercise of some sort; as if I instinctively knew that I had not mastered this vital function, nay, this art. Whenever I saw pictures of the lungs they reminded me of sails, two spinnakers designed to speed us along. I would eventually come to have great respect for the wise men of other cultures who called attention to the link between breathing and thinking, between breathing and our potential for reaching unknown areas of the mind.
One thing became clear to me very early on: in order to unfold as a person, I had to have spirit. Once, when I was in elementary school, I went into town with my father. We were strolling along the dockside at Pipervika – we had just bought a bag of shrimps from one of the boats tied up there – when we were witness to a demonstration down by Hønnørbrygga of a new type of life-raft. At first I could make nothing of it. The raft was just a small white egg, a glass-fibre pod with two halves to it. But when the container was thrown into the water and a man tugged on a cord a raft proceeded to swell out of the egg, truly to unfold, black and orange, like a brightly hued bird emerging from a conjuror’s hand. It must have been very closely packed, because it was big. Our curiosity aroused, we moved closer and heard a man saying that there was a gas cylinder inside the pod. The cord was attached to a trigger which punctured a membrane inside the cylinder, thus releasing air into the raft and inflating it. ‘Do we have a cylinder like that inside us,’ I asked my father. I think there was a hopeful note in my voice.
In ancient languages such as Hebrew and Greek, the word for spirit and wind is the same. I have the feeling that this may explain my weakness for the organ, an instrument which so perfectly combines these two words, converting wind into spirit. My father often said to me: ‘Playing the organ, Jonas, that’s truly inspired work.’
Not until long after my father’s funeral did my mother tell us what she had done when she got the urn back from the crematorium. She took some of the ashes and put them into five separate, airtight envelopes which she addressed to five organists in different parts of Norway, all of them good colleagues and friends of Haakon Hansen who had agreed to carry out the Grorud organist’s wishes and his plan. These five went to their respective organs and poured the ashes down into one of the large pipes producing the deepest pedal notes, and at a prearranged moment they began, simultaneously, to play the same Bach prelude. ‘That was your father’s real funeral,’ my mother told me. I saw it more as a resurrection. He had been assured of a kind of eternal life. The thought appealed to me: my father lying there in different parts of Norway, vibrating in the air from his favourite chords, hovering on that exquisite music. As spirit.
The aim was not, of course, to become spirit. The aim was to become more of a person. I often thought of that incident when I saved a little child from drowning and how, afterwards, completely disillusioned, I had felt that my mission in life had been accomplished, that my life had, as it were, been fulfilled. It took a while for me to realise that this, all the practising, had simply been a preparation, training for a more difficult task: that of being filled with spirit. In order to expand and grow. All of the diving, those many minutes under water, had simply been an excuse for learning to control my respiration. My diving was a testimony to my powerful lust for life.
I had this same feeling as I swam down into the depths of Svarttjern, frantically diving after Margrete’s gold bracelet. My ability to hold my breath was finally to come into its own. This was what I had been training for. I had been training to win Margrete. I had been training to save my own life.
Every time I surfaced her eyes met mine, questioningly. Even from a distance I saw those eyes only as pupils – like deep, black pools. I had the feeling that I was as much diving in them, after the gold in them; that this was also my first attempt to get to the bottom of her. Of Margrete’s ‘Persian beauty’. She sat perfectly still, said not a word, and yet, with her eyes she was saying: How long can you hold your breath for me?
I took a rest then dived again, determined to beat every record going. I slipped down into the darkness, pinched my nose and blew through my mouth, equalising the pressure. Five metres down the water was noticeably cooler. I could not see a thing. But it was as if I was being given a warning: this is what life with her will be like, a long dive into the darkness, hunting for gold.
I noticed that my thoughts ran along different lines when I was underwater. It may have had something to do with the pressure, the buoyancy, the lack of oxygen. I acquired second sight. Down in the darkness I saw images from a whole future drift past my eyes, as if the water was developing fluid. I saw a golden elephant, a long-playing record, a dangerous swim, two adults in soft spring rain, a doctor’s white coat, a flat full of things from all over the world, a woman banging her head against a wall, a child, a television studio. And finally I saw a gun.
I had to hunt for the bracelet with the hand that was not holding my nose. I felt about in the most likely spot, directly below the knoll she had jumped off several times. Despite the darkness I swam with my eyes open, as if I thought it must be possible to discern a smouldering glimmer of gold. A glimmer of love, I thought feverishly. I could not see a thing. I was reduced to groping with my fingers. My lungs were starting to ache. My ears hurt. I thought of van Gogh. I thought I saw tropical fish glide by, like the ones in the television Interlude. I would not be able to take it much longer. A shiver ran through me. What if she had taken off the bracelet on purpose? What if she had wanted to test the boys, find out which of them was most deserving of her. Which one was worthy. Was she liable to do something like that? Would she be willing to sacrifice her mother’s expensive bracelet even if she received no answer.
The Discoverer Page 18