She cannot take one step off the boat without people stopping to stare, whisper. She has lived only a couple of decades, but already she is an idol. For a long time I thought she would be a writer. You sometimes hear of kids reading Anna Karenina at the age of thirteen. Kristin tried to write Anna Karenina when she was thirteen. One time, just before she died, Margrete came across something that Kristin had written. ‘She’s so good it’s uncanny,’ Margrete said to me. ‘It almost scares me. She’s barely in her teens, but she writes like an adult.’
I knew she was special. As a little girl she happily lumped together alphabet blocks, Barbie dolls, old Matchbox cars, train sets and bits from Airfix construction kits. The way she saw it, they were all part of the same world, so there was no reason why they could not be used in combination, rather than separately. She was already practising what would later be referred to as ‘sampling’. One winter night when we were gazing up at the stars and I had dusted off my old knowledge of astronomy, on the spur of the moment she dubbed Orion ‘the Hourglass’ and changed Leo’s name, right then and there, to ‘the Question Mark’. She had a head like a pinball machine. Her thoughts were forever zooming this way and that; you could positively hear them go ping, see the lights flashing behind her brow.
I sit on the mizzen shroud, as if wishing to be close to the lifebuoy. The coffee is exceptionally good, it reminds me of Margrete’s, although Martin bemoaned its quality. ‘Not exactly what you’d get at Caffé Sant’Eustachio in Rome, where they roast their beans in a wood-burning stove,’ as he said. Martin hails from Nordkjosbotn in the far north, but with his rawboned, weatherbeaten features he might just as easily have come from Marrakesh. He also tends to wear stripy, loose-fitting clothes, not unlike the sort of thing worn in North Africa.
As far as I can gather, the OAK Quartet has been commissioned to devise a product, a good or a service which I find impossible to define – the term ‘multimedia’ seems too tame, already old hat. Nor do I understand the language they use, all those words flying through the air: ‘information architecture’, ‘navigation design’, ‘hierarchy of levels’. What I do understand, however, is that this is a large-scale undertaking with solid financial backing from the most diverse institutions, not least from the business sector. This trip is just a first foray, a kind of reconnaissance mission; I am not certain who their target group are, whether the product will be geared towards the travel industry or is also designed for educational or entertainment purposes. Nor am I clear on whether the end-result will be sold in CD form or put out on the Internet – or be presented in one of the many other media spawned by the digital revolution. The OAK Quartet are forever discussing the question of what’s next for television. Everything changes so fast these days. Their main concern appears to be that the actual concept, its sum and substance, the thinking behind it, should be applicable to lots of forms, including some yet to come. And they must remember to allow for the possibility for continual updating. ‘We have to try to envisage all sorts of media, forms of communication of which we haven’t even begun to dream,’ Hanna said one evening. Hanna is almost thirty and the eldest of the group. Her Asian looks sometimes put me in mind of a geisha – not due to any promiscuous tendencies on her part, but because of her air of refinement. Hanna is in charge of finance and marketing, she works out plans of action with clients, acts as producer and coordinator. She is also the vessel’s skipper, keeps the logbook, coils ropes east to west and can put out a spring line and make fast in a way that would make Colin Archer proud of her.
Who are these young people, I have asked myself. Are there such things as short cuts to getting to know a person? One day I was talking to Carl. He is the OAK Quartet’s graphic designer as well as being something of a film buff, an expert on dramaturgy and cinematography. I have already had one argument with him about Orson Welles’s masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. Possibly because Carl, with his close-cropped head and his tall, broad build, reminds me of a nightclub bouncer or a bodyguard, I was surprised when he told me that I only needed to know one thing in order to understand everything about him: ‘In my pocket I have a little brass figure,’ he said. ‘It represents Ganesh, an Indian god with the head of an elephant. I’ve carried it in my pocket for the past fifteen years.’ Was it really true? Could one detail reveal almost everything there was to know about a person? I pondered this nugget of information about Carl the webmaster and the figure of Ganesh in his pocket. It certainly fired the imagination, made me think of a giant with a mouse as a pet.
Which detail would say most about me? It would have to be the fact that there is nothing I do not know about the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album. I could tell you that Ringo played finger cymbals on ‘Norwegian Wood’; that ‘I’m Looking Through You’ was inspired by Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher; that John Lennon stole a line from an Elvis song for ‘Run For Your Life’; that the lyrics to ‘The Word’ were written in coloured pencils; that what one heard on ‘In My Life’ was not a cembalo solo but a speeded up recording of George Martin on electric piano.
I think Carl is right. Such a detail would say just about everything about me.
After some years in a cell, for the first time in my life – if I discount my work on ‘the golden notebook’ – I felt the need to write. I got it into my head that I could survive by trying to tell my own story. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story, as someone once said. But which story? That was the problem.
To begin with I just wrote, without any thought for what the end product would be, who would read it. I wrote with a pleasure which surprised me, I wrote with a delight at finally understanding Margrete’s mania for writing. And I make no secret of the fact that I also had in mind the offers made to me by a number of publishers. ‘Now we’ll have Marco Polo himself putting pen to paper, not his cellmate Rustichello,’ as one editor put it to me cajolingly. I toyed with various titles: Twenty-three Fragments From a Killer’s Hand, Eight Planets I have Visited and the like. For a long time I was tempted to call it The Confession of a Fool, not knowing that that title had already been taken.
Rumours that I was writing were reported in the press. I think people were looking for a public confession or something of the sort. But the more I wrote, the less interested I became in the idea of others reading what I wrote. People were expecting The Truth. Either that or some sort of act of revenge. An exposé of everything and everybody, not least of life inside NRK, the escapades of the celebrities, who was sleeping with whom. But the content of the piece changed character. For a while it seemed to me that this was something between me and a higher power. In the end, though, I came to regard it as an honest-to-goodness Book of the Dead, equivalent to the papyrus scrolls buried with the dead in Ancient Egypt. It was a pile of paper, a scroll which I would take with me to the grave, so to speak. A password, a token I could present, so that I, or my spirit, could gain admission to the hereafter.
It was a confusing manuscript. It developed into a long, incoherent narrative. All the nouns seemed to be there, but none of the verbs. I could see only one solution: I destroyed it. For one very simple reason: no one – with one or two exceptions – would have been able to make head or tail of it. I burned my ‘confession’ with a light heart. Despite the fabulous sums offered to me, during those first years of my imprisonment at least, by a lot of publishers.
It is a relief to be on board the Voyager, to be with the members of the OAK Quartet. It is not that I believe them to have fewer worrying traits than previous generations of young people, but they seem different. Broader. They are just as interested in each single person as they are in society as a whole. They aspire to stronger individuals and a greater spirit of community. And none of them feels bound to stick only to their own specialist area. Martin, with his Marrakesh-style appearance, is a typical computer freak, a whole college on his own when it comes to his technological know-how, but I have long suspected him of being able to turn his hand to just about anything – an
d not only exotic cookery and mountain climbing. The other day, as we were rounding the point at Fornes he picked up his guitar and sang ‘In My Life’ with such feeling – I have never heard anything like it. The other three gradually joined in, singing in harmony, and it seemed only natural that they should know all the words. I had to take a walk around the deck to save anyone seeing the tears in my eyes. In any case, they could never know what a ridiculously sentimental appeal that song holds for me.
It is amazing, really, that Kristin should have wound up in such company, on board an old lifeboat. When she was offered the chance to work in television I strongly advised her to turn it down. She went against my wishes – it may be that in this particular instance she had to go against me. Kristin, this young girl, was given the job of hosting a prime-time, Friday evening programme, a talk show on which it did not really matter who the guests were: it was the presenter who was the star. And she was a star. Pert and saucy and smart in a way that Norway was ready for. As the papers said, she had star quality. Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding her my name rarely came up, and then only as a by-the-way, and only at the start.
Then, when she was right at the top, she bowed out. After a couple of interim stages – high-profile pursuits – she set up her own company, one that in many ways involved all the things with which she had worked: music, software development, television, advertising, journalism. Her business card gives her occupation as ‘association artist’. According to Hanna she is a genius when it comes to spotting, forging, connections, inserting ‘links’ as they say. She has become something of a guru within IT circles. At an age when I had barely begun to figure out what my first project should be, she already has a whole lifetime behind her.
When I asked her about this one evening – Martin had served margueritas up on deck – about all the things she had done and whether there was any common denominator between them, she had looked at me in surprise, glared almost. ‘I’m a storyteller,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it obvious? The future belongs to the storytellers. I’ve always known that. And that’s the challenge with what we’re doing here. To find the underlying story.’
I sit here in a fjord, surrounded by steep hillsides, and think of fly tying. The questions are always more important than the answers. In Lærdal the salmon flies are the question and the fish is the answer. I am fascinated by the craftsmanship involved. Many salmon flies are real works of art. The patterns, and the poetry of the names, make me think of cocktails, or butterflies. Golden Butterfly, Yellow Eagle, Evening Star, Jock Scott. A Victorian salmon fly might consist of more than forty materials, some of them taken from exotic birds and animals; they looked like magical ornaments. If I were part of the OAK Quartet I would weave in lots of information on salmon flies. They keep talking about ‘teasers’, items designed to catch the browser’s interest. Could not the whole story of Lærdal be encapsulated within those flies? They are the perfect bait for the eye.
In the evenings I tend to sit off to one side and listen to them discussing things in the warm light of the paraffin lamp in the saloon. The conversation is fast and furious, almost as if they were bouncing rubber balls to one another, or playing a variation on ‘My ship is loaded with …’. A thought which is not so far out, at that. The Voyager is a cargo ship. They are loading it with information.
Most of their talk has to do with the task in hand, here in Sognefjord, but they keep straying onto other subjects. They may start out talking about Lærdal fly tier Olaf Olsen, and from there the conversation will turn to Loki, who took the shape of a salmon, before winding up with a discussion of all the Hollywood films they have seen in which fishing plays a key part – particularly those in which someone spends their whole life trying to catch the king salmon itself, only to let it go again when they finally succeed. The other day they spent over an hour debating Martin’s assertion that Sisyphus was the happiest man in the world. Hanna maintained that only Job – poor, tormented Job, mark you – was happier. In the middle of all this Carl proceeded to hold forth on his fascination with those blue pellets or cubes that used to be found in urinals. As far as I could gather, he believed these could be employed as a form of narcotic. The OAK Quartet have an almost shocking ability to hop, for example, from the question of whether jam should be put on cornflakes before or after the milk, to thoughts on the undulating lines of Alvar Aalto’s architecture, and finish up with an exchange on whether or not Mother Teresa was an egoist – as if all of these issues were of equal importance. It reminds me of the talk show which Kristin presented, Container it was called: it was in many ways epoch-making television, a real lucky dip of a programme filled with all sorts of rubbish out of which she forged meaning. She had people talking about empty trivia one minute and deeply serious matters the next. So too on board the Voyager. They take the same burning interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language as they do in the design of a complex motorway intersection or the lyrics of the Swedish Hoola Bandoola Band’s protest songs from the seventies. I have also remarked that they keep branching off into stories. Maybe it’s the boat that inspires them, maybe that is what comes of sitting in the glow of an old paraffin lamp.
I am instilled with their sense for detail. I understand how fraught with meaning ostensibly dry, neutral objects can be. What bearing has the old, black Bakelite telephone had on my life. All of the different watch-straps I have owned, the appearance and feel of which I can recall with a clarity that astonishes me?
Is there some detail which could explain why she did it?
I have been given the whole of the for’ard cabin to myself – Hanna and Carl occupy the bunks in the saloon, Kristin and Martin share the big bunk in the aft corridor. Every evening I lie here thinking. The creaking of the rigging, the smell of paraffin and tar conjure up memories not only of an old actor, but also of Margrete. Before I go to sleep, my thoughts often go to those two other Voyager ships, small vessels sailing along, way out there in space, beyond the rings of Saturn, packed to the gunnels with answers to Bo Wang Lee’s question: What should we take with us?
I am writing again, something which comes almost as a surprise to me. Not that I don’t do a lot of writing now anyway, I am a secretary. What I mean is: writing about myself. I have been stimulated. By her. I know she is writing something. She has always been a great one for writing. I think she means to have it published. I have nothing against that.
My motives in writing are somewhat different this time around. I feel as if I am suffering from amnesia. I want to try to remember. And more than anything I want to try to remember the middle part.
In Grorud, when I was a boy, there were some old stonemasons who were real hard drinkers. We did not know what to make of them: these drunks – grown men lying senseless on the edge of the wood in the middle of the day – never moved us to feel critical of society or of our home town. But we were not scared of them either. They wouldn’t have hurt a fly. On one occasion we crept up on one of them to pinch the empty bottles that lay scattered around him on the grass. Suddenly the old drunk came to and started telling us a story, as if we were a longed-for audience. He stank of beer and piss, his crotch area was all wet and disgusting. We stayed and listened for a while; I thought it was very interesting, it was all about the cutting of the stone, about the huge, unwieldy blocks, but the others were itching to get away, to cash in the empties, buy gumballs from the new vending machine from which a lucky turn of the handle might deliver a ring as well. I went back later. The drunk man was still sprawled on the grass and I was able to catch the end of the story; and a pretty powerful ending it was, something to do with meeting a nursing sister, a future wife, in a hospital – not even the stench of beer and piss could spoil it. I ventured, from a safe distance, to ask why he had told this story. The drunk answered that it was a good story. He just had to tell it, even if no one was listening. This taught me something about stories. About telling stories to no one. Even more importantly, though, I was filled with curiosity. I had heard the
beginning and the end, but not the middle bit. And what I wondered was: what had occurred between what I knew of the beginning, the part about the stone cutting, and the wonderful ending? An accident?
A tale told by a drunken man. I think of what I wrote in my cell, the lengthy manuscript which I destroyed. I know a lot about my childhood and youth and I know a lot about the time since I went to prison. But what happened in between? What is the midpoint of my life?
Margrete.
And at the centre of this story?
Margrete on her knees on the bed, banging her head against the wall. Margrete in a white bedroom, in the light streaming through gauzy curtains. And me looking at her, standing there paralyzed, watching.
In retrospect it is alarming – and vexing – to think how clear it was to me that this would be the most significant moment of my life. In personal terms, as moments go this was the equivalent of the Big Bang, the mystery of what happened during those first seconds in the history of the universe. If I could understand what was going on here I would understand everything. I stood at a crucial fork in the road.
So why hang back so?
The Discoverer Page 21