I had thought a lot about this. Which is why I felt such eagerness now, as I tramped up the gravel driveway to the house, drinking in air suffused with spring. Margrete had asked me not to go. She had seemed somehow listless when I left. ‘I need you to hold me,’ she had said. But I had to go. She would forget, forgive me, when I came home inspired – inspirited – my head full of great plans. I had not, as she said, degenerated as a programme-maker. In this buoyant frame of mind, with a sense of being on the threshold of something totally new, I opened the living-room door and found her dead. And the world turned upside down.
I sit on deck, writing, as the Voyager glides along the peaceful green fjord. We pass few other craft. Mainly ferries and shuttle boats, the odd cruise ship, its loudspeakers blaring tinny facts across the water in three languages. Carl is sitting across from me. Just at this minute he is showing his brass figure of Ganesh to Kamala. It’s such a comical sight: this crop-headed, broad-shouldered bodyguard type holding out, tenderly almost, an object which is all but lost in his huge hand. It is shiny where his fingers have been rubbing at it in his pocket. I cannot hear what they are saying, but I think Kamala is telling him a story about the elephant-headed god, possibly something from The Mahabharata. Carl is all ears. Captivated. Everyone is captivated by Kamala. At one planning session the OAK Quartet were discussing the possibility of setting up ‘sites’ for users to visit like so-called ‘avatars’. With a little smile, and almost as a digression, Kamala treated them to a brief lecture on avatars in Hindu philosophy. That gave them food for thought.
Rakel is up aft with skipper Hanna. Benjamin is in the well, manning the tiller. He is wearing Kristin’s black beret and an expression worthy of Ghengis Khan himself.
A little while ago I experienced again that sensation of everything being turned upside down. We had just cast off, Fjærland was slipping away to stern. I was lying on the foredeck, peering over the bow. The smooth surface of the water reflected the surrounding scenery as perfectly as a mirror: the steep mountainsides bounding the narrow fjord, the snow on their tops, the sky and the clouds. I had an uncannily strong sense of being on an interface, of balancing on a knife-edge between two worlds, one real and one reversed. I thought: this feeling is the perfect encapsulation of my view of life. An existence characterised as much by artificiality as by reality. Then, all of a sudden, everything spun around. I had an utterly lifelike sensation of the world revolving. The next moment I had no idea where I was, in the real or in the reflected world. I had to shut my eyes, lay there just listening to the rush of the bow cutting through the water. When I opened my eyes I was once more lying safely in between, right on the interface.
Through the skylight I can see Kristin and Martin, still hard at work in the saloon. Their project keeps putting out new shoots. I have to smile at their almost ferocious zeal. And at the contrast in their appearances: it is like seeing a guerrilla leader deep in conversation with a Silicon Valley hacker disguised as a thief from Marrakesh. I can tell that she is in love with him.
Who is she? I have picked up snatches of locker-room stories that made my hair stand on end with worry. She has had her dark times, I think. But she has come through them. I do not know how.
The hardest part about being in prison was to know that I was missing out on the last stages of Kristin’s adolescence, the fact of not being there to experience her hundred and one ways of slamming a door. Her experiments with black nail polish. There was not much of that sort of thing when she came to see me. In short, I missed being able to take an active daily part in her upbringing.
Otherwise it soon became quite easy to keep up with her doings on the outside. I could read all about them in the newspapers. I am not thinking here of her television career. When she was only fifteen and still living with her grandmother, my mother, she won the Golden Mouse award for the best Norwegian homepage on the Internet, but it was through her music that the media first latched on to her. She became the lead singer with a band playing advanced techno. I could never make anything of it; let’s just say her music was a far cry from Rubber Soul. After her spell as a talk-show host and the whole TV circus thing, she joined a new young advertising agency and had a hand in several landmark campaigns, including one in which she painted a red nose on Che Guevara, thus inflaming the ulcers of the old ’68 generation – not to mention the Hitler moustache she stuck on the face of the peace-loving Mahatma Ghandi.
And it may well be the same people who are now fighting to give her work, competing for the unique expertise possessed by the OAK Quartet, a company working on the borderline between the multinational software and hardware corporations and Norwegian culture. One of the big television channels has already tried to buy the company. It doesn’t surprise me. Anyone can see that the OAK Quartet is on its way up, that it is starting to make its mark on the international scene. Which is actually no more surprising than the fact of a Norwegian firm of architects designing the new library in Alexandria.
More and more I can see what a clever idea it was to do their research for the Sognefjord project from a boat. This compels them to think of navigation on all levels, and not merely in an electronic space. I note the assurance with which they work their way along the fjord. How confidently, but unassumingly, they gain their bearings in the world. I believe this is how they envisage the product which they are developing – as a navigational tool for people who are curious. Not only about Sognefjord, but about things in general. They are working on a kind of astrolabe or a sextant which could, in principle, be employed within any sphere of existence.
One day, while we were sitting in the saloon eating curried pirogs, made by Martin and Kamala amid much hilarity, I told them, at Kristin’s request, about the Voyager mission, which is to say: the two space probes launched in 1977. I knew more about Voyager 2 which, having sailed past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – a tremendous navigational feat, this – had now left our solar system and was heading out into the far reaches of space. Although my astrophysics studies were only a blind, right from the start I had been fascinated by this project. In the primitive, but warm light of a paraffin lamp I told the crew on board their Norwegian sister ship some of the new things we had learned about the outer planets, thanks to the Voyager probes – like the fact that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, was volcanically active, or that Saturn had thousands of separate rings, the particles of which were held in place by ‘shepherd moons’. And then there was the unbelievably complex and varied surface of Miranda, one of Uranus’s moons. I could tell that my audience was astonished, although they had obviously heard of this before. Carl who, as well as Ganesh, always kept a little yellow notebook and a stub of pencil in his pocket, came over to me later, wanting to know more, particularly about the ‘message’ disc carried by both Voyager probes.
I told him what I knew. I never tire of thinking of this concept: a sort of gramophone record attached to each spaceship, containing greetings to any eventual extra-terrestrial civilisations. The people who made this had asked themselves the same questions as Bo Wang Lee had done: ‘What should we take with us?’ What should we present? And which of all the Earth’s sounds should we select? They had ended up with 118 pictures, all of which, in different ways, said something about mankind and its culture; these included diagrams of the DNA structure and of the human sex organs, but there too were photographs of fungi in a forest, a dancer in Bali and a classroom in Japan. Somewhere far beyond Pluto’s orbit there also drifted greetings in almost sixty different languages. ‘You could say that the Voyager disc is a World’s Fair shot into space,’ I said to Carl. ‘But first and foremost – obviously – it’s a message to mankind itself.’
The middle part. My homecoming from a World’s Fair. It is all there in those minutes. I remember how I paused outside the house. I stood there looking at, admiring, the bricks of the walls, the extension in Grorud granite; I feasted my eyes on the crocuses in the flower beds, the bare branches of the apple trees in the garden.
I positively revelled in my own good fortune. For a second I could not believe that this was my home, this welcoming house, the warmth of the light beyond the gauzy white curtains covering the living-room window – all that was lacking was for her shadow to go gliding past.
I knew how I would find Margrete when I entered the living room. She would be writing letters. She almost always wrote letters in the evening, when she was not reading. And when she had finished a book she wrote letters non-stop. For her these two things went hand in hand, reading and writing. She used expensive pens and the finest quality writing paper; when we were out travelling she was always on the lookout for pretty envelopes and unusual paper. I often watched her on the sly when she was writing. Her face took on a different expression then, as if she were doing something requiring deep concentration. ‘I’m weaving,’ she would say. She said the same thing when she was reading: ‘I’m weaving.’ I had no idea what she put in her letters, mostly everyday stuff I guessed: quotes from books she had read, a verse of a poem. And she wrote in a hand which must have given the receiver as much pleasure as the actual contents. ‘Attractive handwriting is as important for a woman as beauty,’ she said once. It must have been an honour to receive a letter from Margrete. She wrote to her friends abroad on tissue-thin paper. Sometimes, if I was there, she would hold the paper up in front of her eyes. And I saw her face as if through a veil of script.
There was one evening when she had hung lots of Chinese lanterns around the terrace. We had had guests, they had just left and she was stretching out in a mahogany chair. The coloured lanterns made the house, made Grorud, look as if it lay under other skies. I thought of something, fetched a thick sheet of paper which I kept at the back of a cupboard. It was a large Chinese character, written – or painted – by Bo Wang Lee as a farewell present. I showed it to Margrete. ‘This means friendship, right?’ She considered it for some time. ‘This is the character for love,’ she said, her face bathed in the glow of the paper lanterns. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘The person who wrote this said it was the sign for friendship.’ She looked up at me, with a smile in her eyes. ‘That’s as may be,’ she said, ‘but this says “love”.’ She explained the intricate character to me, even showed me how the Chinese word for heart – four exquisite strokes, like chambers – lay in the middle of it, like a word within the word. ‘Love without heart is no love at all,’ she murmured, more to herself. Then she looked at me again. ‘Maybe there was something about the person who wrote this that you didn’t understand,’ Margrete said. She was right, of course. There was a lot I had not understood about Bo Wang Lee.
I opened the gate at the bottom of the drive with my heart hammering – like a man in love, I thought. I walked slowly up to the front door, with waves of warmer air wafting towards me, caressing my brow. I knew Kristin was at her grandmother’s, that we, Margrete and I, had the weekend to ourselves. To this day I can recall the distinctive sound of gravel under my shoes, a sound I have always liked and which, on this fragrant spring evening, felt especially good, as if each little stone were scrunching expectantly, welcoming me home.
And then, I open the door, step inside, put down my suitcase, walk into the living room – and there she is, Margrete, this precious person, lying dead in the middle of the room, shot, and not just shot, but shot through the heart.
What was my first impulse? I know no one will believe me, but my first impulse was to get out, fast, and shut the door behind me. Fast. I thought I had come to the wrong place. Not the wrong house, but the wrong reality.
One autumn, when I was a student and working on my Titanic Project X, I accepted an invitation – a rare exception, this – to a party. I do not know whether it was because I was tired, had eaten too little or been working too much, but that evening I had a very weird experience, one which I interpreted nonetheless as a sign that I was on the right track, that there really was something lying behind, beyond, just waiting for me. I did not know the people who were holding the party, presumably medical students or pharmacy undergrads: the pure alcohol was flowing freely, mixed with everything imaginable, from juice to the most sickly-sweet essences. There seemed to be about a hundred rooms in the flat, all painted white and almost bare of furniture. And in the background, throughout, the lazy sound of Billie Holiday singing. At one point, pretty late on, I set off down one of the long corridors. I was looking for the guys I had come with. I opened a door and stepped inside. And – I swear to God – I found myself in the Forum Romanum; which is to say: I had entered it at the corner closest to the Temple of Vespasian, and not only that, but I was in Roman times, people walked past dressed in togas and everything, although it might not have been Roman times, because there were other things there too, ultra-modern looking objects which were strange to me, I had no idea what they were. I have always regretted that I did not attempt to speak to someone, to ask, but I got such a fright that, more or less on instinct, I fled back out of the door, slamming it shut behind me, and hurried off down the corridor. Once I had calmed down I went back and opened the door again. Behind it now was a large, white-painted room and a couple having it off on a mattress in the corner, next to a Ludwig drum kit. I opened the other doors round about, but found only white rooms, sparsely furnished, and partygoers with glasses in their hands, standing around, flirting or discussing Schopenhauer. I know it sounds crazy, but it was not a dream, nor was it a hallucination.
After having stood – for I don’t know how long – outside, I opened the living-room door again. So great was my belief, or my hope, or my horror, that I fully expected another sight to meet my eyes: she would be sitting there, pen in hand, she would turn to me, smiling. But she was still lying on the floor, shot through the heart, just as dead. In my dressing gown. For ages I stood there, looking down at her, as if there was a tissue-thin sheet of paper lying on her face, covered in the loveliest handwriting. A letter to me.
We have reached Balestrand. We are moored right alongside the aquarium, at the mouth of the little Esefjord, surrounded by towering peaks: Vindreken, Tjuatoten, and in the middle Keipen – the ‘Rowlock’ – with its characteristic notched peak, with Gulleplet Crag in front of it. It is a breathtaking sight, even for a Norwegian used to such landscapes. Fruit trees in bloom at the feet of these sculpted, snow-capped massifs. I can well understand why the artists of the nineteenth century reached frantically for their brushes the moment they set eyes on this scene.
There was a letter waiting for me at the hotel reception desk. From Viktor Harlem, a friend from high school, now a name known to all of Norway. He knew I was coming here. It was nothing really, just a hello and a line from The Cantos by Ezra Pound: ‘And then went down to the ship …’ The others collected the company’s mail, forwarded to the local post office. I had noticed that they received amusing – and creative, also in their outward appearance – missives from all over the world. Benjamin immediately started clamouring for the stamps. The OAK Quartet think nothing of being in close contact with individuals, groups, with similar interests, in other countries. Without even being aware of it, Kristin and her friends tend to think in terms of categories which transcend national boundaries. In sailing the fjord they are also sailing all over the world. I like to think that they are in the process of founding a county within a virtual space, populated by ‘Sogn folk’ from every corner of the globe.
Kamala and I had decided to book in to Kvikne’s Hotel for the days when we were docked at Balestrand. Kamala wanted to stay in the old house, a grand and graceful, wooden, Swiss-style building overlooking the fjord. The manager gave us one of his best rooms, high up and with its own balcony. I thought at first this was for my sake. Then I realised it was for Kamala’s.
The most obliging manager also allowed Benjamin to pitch his well-used, twelve-man army tent on the lawn next to the hotel, just across from the little islet of Lausholmen. We gave him a hand. Benjamin is a nomad. As soon as his tent is up he is home. Benjamin. There’s a whole book right there. I of
ten think about how mad I was when he was born. I was so upset that I spent years after that fuming with rage in a basement we called the Red Room. I pretended to be incensed by everything and everybody, when I was really only angry at myself. I abhorred my thoughtless act of sabotage, that imperceptible slit in a diaphragm. I was to blame for his birth. Sometimes it occurs to me that Benjamin is my deepest motivation. Once, when he visited me in prison he left behind a note. It said: ‘Thank you because I’m alive.’ It could be read in several different ways. Today that note forms the core of my being.
A group of Japanese tourists were taking pictures of Kristin. Someone at the hotel had told them she was a celebrity in Norway. No one recognises me any more. I am merely a secretary. And a name, a minor name on the title page of a love story.
When the Japanese caught sight of Kamala there was almost a riot. They were all shouting and screaming and pointing. They could not believe that it really was Kamala Varma, a world-famous personality, right here in their midst.
The Discoverer Page 41