Unless of course this fiasco had its roots in my inability or unwillingness to understand. My fatal defect. I possessed none of the patient resolve shown by Skrefsrud. Because Skrefsrud understood the full enormity of the task. In order to understand a man’s language you had to understand everything about his society. Her society. Skrefsrud taught himself the Santals’ songs. He, a Christian, participated in their rites, danced with them – danced naked some say. He, a missionary eager to communicate, realised how vital it was for him to acquaint himself with their sayings and ideas, their tunes and their customs, their knowledge of medicinal plants, their tales and legends. Consequently, Lars Skrefsrud also took an interest in the Santals as people and pled their cause with the authorities. Lars Skrefsrud was nothing less than one of the most significant figures in the history of the Santals.
I am not sure, but I have always felt that I should have spent more time on Skrefsrud. Had I done so, I might have gained more courage, and not have recoiled in such fear and cowardice when confronted with the greatest foreign culture I would ever know: a woman. I cannot rid myself of the thought: maybe Margrete would have been alive today.
To understand another human being. A Grammar of the Language of Love. I stood in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched Margrete beating her head off the wall and I thought to myself: I don’t understand her. This is another culture. With a different god. An unfathomable language. From my viewpoint, in my universe, this was a woman beating her head against a brick wall. In her world, it might be an attempt to shed a skin, emerge from a chrysalis. If, that is, she was not trying to show me something. A chamber of which I knew nothing – of which I was not qualified to know anything. A wordless chamber. One which no words could describe. All at once I felt afraid. Or lost heart. The realisation crept over me: even if I were to intervene, or she were to stop, I would never know why she did it.
In prison I gave a lot of thought to the question of how much two people need to have in common in order for a relationship to work, for them to be able to talk to one another and not past one another. How great would the lowest common denominator have to be? The mission service has a similar problem. A missionary has to try to find areas of common ground. After all, how are you supposed to translate concepts such as conscience and absolution into a language which has never heard of such things? You meet a strange woman and you wonder whether she has something, some sort of mechanism, which enables her to understand your words. Do the two of you have – pretty essential, this – the same word for love? As far as the missionary is concerned, there is, for example, the question of whether he can use the tribe’s name for god as the name for God. The Santals’ highest deity was known as Thakur-Jiu. Elsewhere in India, missionaries used the name Ishwara for God – Ishwara being the Sanskrit word for Lord. Lars Skrefsrud was of the opinion that in Santali God should be called Thakur, but he had to give way on this point: the word finally decided upon was Isor, a Santali version of Ishwara. Could that God ever be the same as Skrefsrud’s God?
The night Margrete died, before I called the police, I spent a long time in the office we shared at Villa Wergeland. In among all her medical textbooks and journals I found some books that I had never noticed – although it could be that she had only recently put them there, having brought them from somewhere else. Many of these books were in Sanskrit, and it looked as though she knew the language – going, at least, by all the underlinings and the remarks in her handwriting. I discovered that these were copies of the Vedas, the Hindus’ oldest sacred texts. A number of the other works proved to be religio-historical commentaries on the Vedas. Why had she not told me about this? I leafed through a treatise on the Rig-Veda. She had made lots of notes in the margins. Particularly in the chapters dealing with the tenth book. I read a little of it. But it was too involved, especially considering my frame of mind. I did, however, absorb the name of one of the hymns with which, to judge by all the underlining, she had been most taken: Purusasukta. Now and then, in prison, I would murmur this word to myself, like a mantra.
Those books in Sanskrit – was that her Project X?
This discovery got me thinking. I remembered that during the carnival fever which had gripped a normally so phlegmatic Oslo in the early eighties, when it seemed that everyone had had a sudden urge to transport the Norwegian capital to another, warmer, more temperamental latitude, Margrete always wore saris. She had a number of these. At the age of nineteen she had lived in New Delhi, when her father was the ambassador there. She had looked fabulous in those colourful garments; she could almost have passed for an Asian thanks to her black hair and her ‘Persian’ beauty. ‘You didn’t know you’d married a woman from the ksatriya caste, did you?’ she said.
Oh, the bliss of unwrapping her from those exquisite lengths of fabric when we rolled home drunk from the madcap dancing in the streets. The luminous silks seemed to make her bubble with joie de vivre. ‘Come here and I’ll show you a position I saw carved into the stone in one of the temples at Khajuraho,’ she would say, pulling me down onto the bed.
I thought I understood her. Lars Skrefsrud wrote about missionaries who claimed to be able to speak the Santals’ language. One of them lost his temper and warned the Santals that he would give them a hare if they did not listen to him. The Santals told him that they would be happy to take the hare, but not his words. He had meant to say that he would punish them, but instead he said he would give them a hare. Nor were the Santals all that impressed with the Christian God when another missionary announced that: ‘God sends his Holy Spirit to laugh at us.’ He meant ‘to comfort us’.
I was still standing in the middle of the white bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, there was no help to be had from the statuette in the corner, a golden god with half-shut eyes. She was still kneeling on the bed, banging her head against the wall. If I said something – would she construe it as comfort or ridicule? Was she aware of me at all? I sensed a distance akin to that I was to feel when Kristin was born the following year. That through the haze of pain she both knew and did not know that I was there.
The pounding seemed to intensify. She was gripping the rails of the bed-head as if they were the bars of a prison, as if she were locked up and was making a desperate attempt to break out. In any case it was not healthy. That much I could tell from the sight of her brow, from which the relatively rough brick wall had now drawn blood.
And then, without any warning, she stopped. She simply slid down onto the sheet with her eyes shut and pulled the duvet over herself. ‘Margrete,’ I said again. She had her back to me. She put out a hand to me, that was all – but it was something. I set down the mug of iced tea, lay on the bed, took her hand in mine. I saw, I felt, how small it was.
She fell asleep. I lay there thinking. A new tension had been introduced into my image of Margrete. If I were to describe it I might say that it was similar to the tension between a painting by Vermeer and one by Munch. The tranquil and the hysterical. A combination of Woman Pouring Milk, a person absorbed in an everyday chore, and The Scream, a person ridden with angst. Two such pictures laid one on top of the other. She was many. It was like being with the triplets again, all three at once.
I am no stranger to the thought that this day marked the beginning of my work on the television series Thinking Big, even though it would be another seven years before I had the idea for it. As soon as I saw Margrete banging her head against the wall I started looking for an excuse. I had the feeling that I would never be able to cope with her vulnerability, that I needed to have something I could blame, some demanding, all-consuming project, so that at some point – when the accusations started flying – I would be able to say: But I was so busy.
That evening, when we were sitting in the living room, I asked her about it, why had she been beating her head against the wall? ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything,’ she said. ‘Don’t give it a thought,’ she said.
And I accepted that. I wanted to accept it. To look upon it
as an isolated incident. Anyone can lose their balance, even in a flat field. But underneath an immediate sense of relief churned the certainty: I had been sent a clear signal. I could shut my eyes to it, but from that day onwards I bore a responsibility which I would much rather not have had to bear. She was not as strong as I had thought. She might survive a concentration camp, but I realised – or at least, after that incident, I suspected – that the slightest thing could be enough to break her, and I mean forever.
As a boy I had rescued a child. It had been easy – light work, you might say, in more ways than one. I had been almost annoyed by how easy it was to save a life. Sitting in that living room in Ullevål Garden City, surrounded by cast-iron Japanese lanterns and silver crosses from Ethiopia, as Margrete’s fingers felt for mine again, clutching at my hand, as it were, I felt an icy pang of fear: I would not be capable of dealing with the real weightiness of life.
Although I do not see the connection I am suddenly reminded of how I met Leo, my best friend when I was in my early teens, my sparring partner in the Red Room. We had actually been in the same class for four years, but this was the first time I had really noticed him, felt like getting to know him. It happened one spring day when two of the bigger boys, a pair of notorious hooligans, had tricked some little kids into setting light to a huge stretch of tinder-dry grass at the bottom end of the estate. When the fire got out of control and began to spread towards the wood the big lads made themselves scarce and the little kids were left standing with their shoe soles scorched, watching and blubbering. Some of the mothers alerted the fire brigade. The fire was put out. One of the firemen – I can still recall those commanding bass tones – asked: ‘Who started the fire?’ Everybody pointed to a little lad who was still standing numbly with the matchbox clenched in his fist. I could tell just by looking at him that this boy would go under if the grown-ups believed that he was to blame, that this was the event which would change his life for ever. Then up stepped Leonard Knutzen, or maybe he had been there among the group of bystanders for some time; Leo in a spanking new pair of black Beatles boots with pointed toes – murder on the feet, but they won you bags of prestige. ‘I did,’ he said. One of the mothers was so angry – she had also laddered her stockings – that she promptly gave him a searing clout round the ear. Leo merely shot her a forbearing glance before he was led away by the grown-ups. It had all happened so fast and been so unexpected that none of us who knew what had really happened managed to get a word in. In any case, there was something about Leo, the black boots, his manner, the ghost of a smile on his lips, which prevented anyone from objecting. You could tell that he was tough enough to take it.
I was right in the midst of my life-saving career and felt obliged therefore to give a lot of thought to this incident. This, too, was a form of life-saving. How far would someone go in order to save a life? I found such an idea shocking. To save a life – not by some heroic deed, but by playing the bad guy almost. Or to be made to suffer even when you were innocent.
Once when we were flopped in bed after a strenuous sexual workout, between gasps for breath I told Margrete about my fear that my heart might give out. As my father’s and my grandfather’s had. ‘I need to be careful, I’ve got a weak heart,’ I joked. I thought she would laugh, but instead she said: ‘Yes, that’s what’s wrong with you.’
Maybe she would be alive today if I had not had such a weak heart.
I am on board an old lifeboat once called the Norway, now renamed Voyager. I have long had the feeling that I am on a journey, making my way out of something. I say this because for so many years I was motionless, shut off. I cannot shake off the memory of Harastølen at Luster, that ludicrous one-time refugee centre halfway up a mountainside. For some days I have had the suspicion that this may also say something about me personally. That this problem: Festung Norwegen, the fear, and my own problem, the one which has dogged me all my life, are one and the same: an unwillingness to open oneself to one’s full potential. I sometimes think of myself as a fertile egg which has put up an effective barrier against all the spermatozoa that have sought me out, that I have, metaphorically speaking, inserted a coil into the womb of my thoughts. I have been aware of my exceptional gifts, known that I might even be a wonder, but I have baulked at using these gifts. So too with love: I never dared to accept it. Like Norway I suffered from the Midas syndrome. I was a gold-plated celebrity, but I could not embrace other people, I could not return the affections of the woman who loved me.
We are out sailing again. I find myself far up the longest fjord in the world. Dead ahead looms Haukåsen, covered with a white cape of snow. Gulls hover motionless on the wind, level with the boat, almost as if they were tame.
I feel a bit like an apprentice with the OAK Quartet. I am particularly interested in the way they communicate. Initially I was surprised to find how little of their work involved computers. The boat is of course packed to the gunnels with the latest digital aids – it is like a Noah’s Ark for our technological society – but they seem to prefer large notepads and coloured pencils. Either that or they just talk and jot down key words. Dialogue, that is the key. Occasionally, through the skylight, I can observe them down in the saloon, deep in discussion, making obscure squiggles on whiteboards. And yet – much of what they do and say reminds me of my own efforts to simulate, to make believe when I was small. Is this what it all comes down to: rediscovering the realms of imagination, the childhood belief in the impossible?
The smell of chicken korma drifts from the galley. A gimballed Primus stove with two burners is no hindrance to Martin. My thoughts turn to Kamala. She will be joining us at Fjærland. I miss her. My meeting Kamala was – how can I put it – an undeserved gift. Kamala saved me. She saved my life, it is as simple as that.
Sometimes I have the notion that I must have acquired a new identity in prison. No one recognises me. I have been forgotten. Not my name, but my appearance. I ought to be pleased, look upon this as cover of a sort. Because in people’s minds my name is linked as much with a crime as with my television celebrity. Everyone believes that I killed my wife. It was on the front page of every newspaper, it was proclaimed on the television and radio, and it was established by judge and jury in a court of law.
Why did she do it? I need to write more.
Titan
While there could, of course, be several explanations for Jonas Wergeland’s fantastic flair for picture-making, his success in television should come as no surprise to any of those who know that in his youth he associated with such greats as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many people can boast of having attended the French school in Oslo, but very few have, like Jonas Wergeland, belonged to the Italian school.
Jonas and Leo became chums towards the end of their time at elementary school, but did not become really close friends until both started at the local junior high school, Groruddalen Realskole, only a couple of stone throws from the railway station. Jonas’s new road to school took him past the church and down the steep slope of Teppaveien, and in one of the old villas on this road lived Leonard Knutzen. Leonard always stood and waited for Jonas, or rather: sat waiting on the satchel which they used in those days instead of a rucksack and which, in the winter, they would send skimming down the hill like a curling stone. At one point during the eighties, after Leonardo’s sensational activities became public knowledge, Jonas received a number of tempting offers from the tabloids to speak out on the subject of their boyhood friendship. He turned them all down. But he could just see the headlines, what a story, full of details which no one could have guessed at.
Leonard’s family belonged to the bastion of the district’s working-class; for generations they had walked at the head of the local 1st of May parade. Aptly enough, their house rested on a solid granite plinth, as if in tribute to the valley’s proud stonemason tradition. Not only that, but they also overlooked the area where the first mills had been built, beside the falls at Alna. Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father was a big, burly,
majestic-looking man with a backswept mane not unlike that of the writer and Nobel prize-winner Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It was quite obvious to Jonas that Leonard adored him. In the summer, father and son would go off on long walks in the hills together, and in the winter they would sleep out in snow holes. Leonard, too, was tall and well-built, and he had his father’s flashing eyes. Leonard liked to joke that he and Jonas were of royal blood, since both their fathers – Haakon and Olav – were called after kings. ‘We’re both princes,’ he declared, thumping Jonas on the back.
Jonas would later think of this time in his life as the Age of Wrath. Because what did they do? They sat in the Knutzens’ basement, whipping themselves up into a fury. I yell, therefore I am – that was their watchword. They joined the endless ranks of young men who are filled with pent-up rage in their late teens – a wrath which may simply stem from disgruntlement over the fact that there are no changes taking place in the world around them to match the revolutions that have suddenly broken out in their heads and bodies. But for Jonas there was more to it than that: these furious verbal outbursts also acted as a safety valve, a way of giving vent to his frustration at not being able to turn his parallel thoughts, his feeling of being in possession of exceptional gifts, into something concrete – some extraordinary deed, for example.
In fact, Jonas’s anger had actually burst into full flame on the day when he was brought down and hurt so badly by that Lyn player on the football pitch. He made a secret vow to stay way out on the sidelines for the rest of his life. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had founded their own republic, the Republic of the Outside Left, in Leonard’s basement. Jonas espied the glimmering of an alternative mission in life: to become the greatest Norwegian outsider of all time. He had not yet abandoned his dream of making a name for himself, but as yet he had come no closer to it than when, in eighth grade, he found himself in the headmaster’s office, standing stiffly to attention in front of HRH – His Royal Highness – himself, having to explain why he had committed an act of vandalism by carving his initials into his desk in large capital letters.
The Discoverer Page 24