On our way out, I stopped by the black pillars and looked back. I surveyed the Central Lending and Reference Department, ran an eye over the walls, the books ranged side by side all around that vast chamber. It looked enormously impressive and complicated, but still I knew it was too simple. It was – I thought of Karen Mohr’s own words – not worthy. This room, this arrangement of books, did not reflect the way people thought. I knew it: this room spoke of too much order. The whole library was an illusion, what my teacher in junior high would call māyā. I would go so far as to say that even at this early juncture, and even though I did not consider myself fully evolved, I understood that a voyage of discovery, one of Magellanic proportions, lay waiting for me here. My life’s project. A unique opportunity to work in depth.
On the bus home I asked Karen if it wasn’t a bit boring being a librarian. She looked at me and winked. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘Casanova worked as a librarian in later life, and he was a great seducer.’
The seeds of my Project X were sown there in the Central Lending and Reference Department of the Deichman Library and would shoot and grow into a jungle which I would manage to hack my way out of only with great difficulty. When I met Margrete again, I had just been dealt the deathblow by Silapulapu, and was about to abandon the whole enterprise. My whole body was smarting from this defeat, but just being with her made the pain go away. She gave me a different perspective on things. Or, as she replied once when I asked her whether she thought there was life on Mars: ‘Is there life on Earth?’
The first year was taken up with making love. Every time she lowered herself onto me I had to laugh at the thought of my over-ambitious Project X. No man could ask for anything more than to lie as I did now, enfolded by such a woman. Because Margrete showed me that what I had always hoped for was true, she showed me that the human act of love allowed room for expansion, that it did not consist solely of urges and irrational emotions, of slobbering and grunting, with the possible little addition of tricks picked up from hordes of superficial manuals. Margrete showed me that there ran a path from sex life to life. It may sound strange, but when having sex with her I had a constant sense of being a worker in depth. Making love to Margrete was like being part of an infinitely ramified network. I would never reach higher or deeper in life.
Sometimes, when I was lying, spent, on top of the white sheets, she would get out her stethoscope with a grin and sound me. ‘I do believe you are suffering from a very bad case of love, Mr Wergeland,’ she would say. I thought she was listening to my pounding, sex-satiated heart. But no. She told me that she was listening to my lungs. ‘The lungs, not the heart, are the organ of love,’ she said.
The months after we were reunited were full of surprises, but nothing surprised me as much as the riches contained in those silent caresses, that fact that those lips on lips, that pleasure, contained so much insight. She could run her finger tenderly and inquisitively over the double scar above my eyebrow and the world would open up before my eyes. It struck me that I, whose aim all my life, or half of it at least, had been to think an original thought, should perhaps have striven instead to experience an original feeling. That feeling and thinking were perhaps comparable. For as I lay beside her, snuggled in to her, holding and being held, I realised that these caresses were every bit as rich and meaningful – and profound – as the thoughts put forward by Plato in his dialogue on love. In that white room, in bed, with Margrete’s arms around me, I glimpsed a corrective to the great goal of my life. Then I pushed it from me.
Sometimes when I came home in the evening she would be sitting there in my dressing gown. When I asked her why, she would reply: ‘Because I miss you.’
When we were not making love – although this, too, was a part of the lovemaking – we lay cuddled up together, with our hair sticking in sweat-soaked curls to the backs of our necks. We could lie in bed all day, coiled up together in a sort of circle, playing the second movements of our favourite symphonies and telling each other things. After I had told her about the advent calendars from my childhood that I remembered best, the three-dimensional ones particularly; and about skimming downhill so fast in a toboggan with a steering wheel that sparks flew from the runners, and about the entrance exam for the School of Architecture, she told me about the songs on the red, blue and yellow Donald Duck records, which she knew by heart; about the taste of her first strip of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and about the year when she picked oranges on a kibbutz in Israel. While there, she had also visited the Roman ruins at Baalbek in the Lebanon. She described this as the greatest trip she had ever made. Baalbek was akin to other such complexes at Angkor Wat and Karnak, Borobodur and Persepolis – all of them structures which seemed to have been built by a race other than mankind. In passing she happened to mention when she had been there, and I realised that at that exact same point I had been sitting in Samarkand. I lay on the bed, gazing at the golden statuette in the corner of the white bedroom and thought of a stone I had once thrown into Badedammen, of the rings that had spread out and, at an unforgettable moment, ran into other rings.
‘Why do you want to be with me?’ I asked one day when she was lying with her arms around me, hooting with laughter. It was dusk and the light was fading outside the windows. She grew serious: ‘Because you need someone to hold you.’
‘Oh, and why so?’ I teased.
Her face remained serious. ‘Because otherwise you would fall apart,’ she said, with eyes which, in the twilight, revealed a depth, a glow which almost made me feel uneasy.
She did not ask me. Maybe she simply took it for granted that I would have said the same.
I do not know about other people, but to me this was both confusing and shocking. To encounter someone, a woman, who claimed that to put your arms round someone could be purpose enough in life. Not to hold your breath, but to hold a person.
I said: ‘Okay. You have my permission to hold me.’
It was on this evening, in my twenty-sixth year, in a white bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, that I fought shy of my life’s epiphany.
As luck would have it, I had just joined NRK TV as an announcer. The way I saw it, I was done with all projects. My ambitions had been shipwrecked and I took the unexpected response from viewers as a sign that they could see this; they showed the same sympathy towards me as they would have done to a castaway. But something was brewing. New processes had been set in motion and – strangely enough, considering that she was the catalyst – my attention was drawn away from her.
When did I receive the first hint that something was wrong?
We’re talking hindsight, I know, but I remember one time when we went to a Beethoven recital by a famous string quartet in the University Assembly Hall in Oslo. In the brief pause that followed the Cavatina in Opus 130, that extremely emotional adagio movement which wavers between tristesse and hope, as the audience held its breath, waiting for the ‘Grosse Fugue’ to begin, Margrete suddenly leapt to her feet and started clapping wildly and enthusiastically and shouting ‘Bravo!’ There she stood, under Munch’s sun, all alone and clapping, heedless of the sore breach of etiquette she was committing and the scandalised looks levelled at this person who dared to applaud in the middle of a piece, in front of such world-renowned and no doubt blasé musicians.
After the recital the ensemble’s cellist came over to us. Without a word he handed her the bouquet of roses which had been presented to him.
One afternoon, after we had been making love for what seemed like three days in a row, Margrete lay stroking my chest. One of her long fingers traced intricate patterns on the skin over my ribs. We all had a glowing spot inside is, she told me; and this glowing spot was a weaver. It wove into being a small, imperceptible lung. When we departed this life, this alone would remain, and go on breathing for us, saving us from death, even after we were dead. And this lung was our story. It has since occurred to me that Margrete’s secret organ must, in that case, contain the following image: that of a woman stand
ing up in a packed assembly hall, under Munch’s sun, applauding all alone.
Why did she do it?
On that fateful, maelstrom-like April evening, as I sat looking at her body and put the muzzle of the pistol to my temple, I noticed that one hand, her fingers, seemed to be pointing to her lungs. Was that it? Was this, the Assembly Hall incident, Margrete’s story? Did it also tell why she had done it? For what if that misplaced applause was related to this sight before me, a shot in the heart. What if her shouts of ‘Bravo’ were as much a cry of protest as an impulsive, barefaced show of enthusiasm. She simply could not bear to hear the ‘Grosse Fugue’. I bent over the dead body and touched a fingertip with one of my own. I seem to recall feeling the pain in my chest already then, the nasty twinge of discomfort which would plague me for a long time, also in prison.
From the graze on her brow and the smear of blood on the door jamb I guessed that she must have hit her head off the wall, that she might even have spent a long time kneeling there, banging her head against the brick wall before going to get the gun. I had never understood: the molten gold in Margrete’s eyes was the result of the darkness within her. It was a light which had been constantly on the point of going out, which fought against a blackness. That was why they had been so beautiful. I had only seen the glow, not the darkness surrounding it.
A lot happened during those hours. I was confused, I was devastated by grief, but my mind was also uncannily clear, almost as if I had taken some sort of thought stimulant. I put on gloves and wiped the weapon clean. I also wiped the powder residue off her wrist. I was bewildered, I was shattered, but I was alert and businesslike when it came to removing all signs which could point to Margrete having shot herself. And when it came to leaving clues which would, in due course, point to me. I took the Luger’s old wrappings, the oilcloth and ammunition box from the cupboard in my workshop and hid them so well that it would take the police a long time to find them. I also took into account my older brother’s possible qualms of conscience – he knew about the gun. I was distraught, but at the same time so dazzlingly clear-sighted that the police investigators found only what I wanted them to find, and only at the stages at which I wished them to find them. My own version of what had happened, why I had done it – and it would be a long time before I told it – also took form, almost without my being aware of it, during those hours. It was watertight. Utterly consistent. Perfect, on both the emotional and the rational plane. Just so you know: getting convicted of murder is not as easy as people think.
It is morning at Balestrand. Kamala is asleep. I sit on the balcony of the hotel room looking out on the broad expanse of the fjord. I savour the light, I cannot recall seeing light like this anywhere else in the world. On the lawn below, Benjamin is lying outside his tent gazing up at the drifting clouds, when, that is, he is not shooting glances at the dragons on the spire of the English Church. It is a grand sight: the big, round tent, like a Mongolian ger, and him lying there with a blade of grass in his mouth. The other guests must be quite taken aback when they look out of their windows and see this: Benjamin, in Karakorum, Ghengis Khan’s old capital, an utterly content individual on a boundless plain. I remember when Dad came home from the hospital and told us that we had a brother who was Mongoloid. I thought he was talking about Globoids, the aspirins. Dad certainly looked as if he had a headache. He told us all about the chromosomes, and how Benjamin had one x too many, as it were. In my universe, Benjamin stands as the first representative of the so-called Generation X. He may not be capable of appreciating irony, nonetheless he has lived his life inside inverted commas.
I think about our expeditions into Lillomarka together. All the camping out. All the stories. I have wondered: could I have been trying to hide him. And myself. He found me, though. Benjamin was the first person to show me that I had imagination, that I could do something with the worlds I dreamed up, outside of my own head. Together we established a position on the sideline, an Outer Mongolia which was also an Outer Norway, an outside left. Thinking back to Harastølen and the refugees: I know why I am so obsessed with this fear of foreigners. It is because of Benjamin. If Benjamin has taught me anything it is tolerance. He broadened my view – the first, possibly, to do so – of what a human being is, and can be.
Rakel comes walking towards him. Benjamin points eagerly at something in the sky. Rakel sits down, puts an arm round him. She is another one – a hugger, a holder. They sit for a while, peering up at the clouds, chatting, then they start to pack up. They are going to catch a boat back to Fjærland then drive home in the truck. With a stop at a riding camp along the way. Benjamin is very happy with Rakel and her husband. Rakel tells me they are going to write a book together, the three of them. About trailer-trucks, long-distance lorry driving. Benjamin has already come up with a title: The Golden Horde.
Yesterday I went for a stroll along the road by the beach, past Belehaugene, the two ancient barrows, to take a look at the storybook villas built here a century ago by the artists: half stabbur, half stave church. Then I raised my eyes, only – and again: why was I surprised – to find myself still more entranced by the fjord, the mountains. I almost caught myself humming ‘Beauteous is the Land’. And once more I had to ask myself: Is this really Norway? If any Norwegian should become too blasé, start to hate their country, then they should take a trip to Balestrand, or sail between the unbelievably high mountains around the green fjord running up to Fjærland, expose themselves to the silver threads of the waterfalls and glimpses of wild side valleys. I know opinions differ on this – I know it took the Romantic movement to change people’s ideas about the countryside and what it had to offer – but if you ask me, there is no doubt: Norway’s great asset is its scenery. I have made caustic remarks about it, I have scoffed at it, but on reflection it seems perfectly understandable that it should have been Song of Norway, that regular holiday brochure of a film, which prompted Kamala to come to this country. In other words, I have the splendour of the Norwegian fjords to thank for the fact that, in a roundabout way, she eventually found me.
Its scenery is Norway’s most valuable commodity. Sognefjord is our Grand Canyon, our Guilin and our Machu Picchu all rolled into one. That is why the product, the service which the OAK Quartet is designing is so important. Often it crosses my mind that this could be Norway’s only hope: to translate what Sognefjord represents, our greatest natural asset, into form, into thought, into software.
One afternoon Kamala and I took part in one of the planning sessions on board the Voyager. Before the meeting, Martin, that never-resting wizard with copper pans and spices, served up a whole rijsttafel of delicious little dishes. They had put up the boom tent to give a bit of shade; it was hot, not a cloud in the sky. The way they talked, their enthusiasm, reminded me of the fun I used to have as a small boy, walking along the beach and popping whatever took my fancy into a bucket: shells, stones, feathers, bits of metal. They do the same thing with information.
Each day they gather on deck to discuss new possibilities arising from what they have seen, explored, studied, heard. And tasted. They are mapping out this part of Norway in a way I would never have believed possible. At each new stop along Sognefjord they search for what Carl who, having an American mother does not baulk at using English terms, calls the place’s ‘webness’, its ability to interconnect with other places, through its hidden ‘links’. They mix together all manner of subjects: history, folklore, economics, geography, language, geology. Sometimes I find this work touchingly reminiscent of the television series I once made, but it reminds me even more of my Titanic Project X. They are in the process of doing what I could not: creating a network in which every point of intersection is the centre.
At this particular meeting I surprised them all by suggesting that their main entry on Balestrand should focus on its tourist industry, this place having been one of the main travel hubs in Norway ever since the nineteenth century. They could present an outline of its colourful history, with the Ge
rman Kaiser and all; I tried to make them see how great it would look with a little cavalcade of the town’s more exotic and somewhat eccentric visitors, from King Chulalongkorn of Siam and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to Egyptian princes and Indian maharajahs. I got quite carried away, suggested that they might also weave in an item on the many old and atmospheric wooden hotels along Sognefjord. They could even insert a link to a page on souvenirs, on which they could show how the rugs and baskets of the old days had evolved into glass polar bears, wooden trolls and pewter Viking ships. And whatever they did – my voice almost cracked with excitement – they must not forget the cruise ships, those ‘floating hotels’ which were such a common sight on the fjord, in the first half of the twentieth century particularly. I launched into a rapturous and detailed description of the Stella Polaris, sang the praises of the picture of the Stella Polaris on Esefjord. Could anyone conceive of a prouder, more evocative sight for a Norwegian – that scenery, coupled with what was arguably the loveliest, the most elegant Norwegian cruise ship of all time, a vessel which might have been designed by Jules Verne for use as a spaceship? I went on talking long into the lovely May night. The others gaped at me – staggered, but also to some degree hooked. Kamala glanced across at me, smiling, as if she were asking: Who are you?
That same evening, still on the subject of travel mementoes, I told them about the disc which the Voyager probes carried with them into space and which could, to some extent, be regarded as a collection of souvenirs from Earth. This disc held, for instance, photographs of the Taj Mahal, the UN building, the Great Wall of China and Monument Valley. Its project was really not that different from the one on which Kristin and her friends were working. Only on a larger scale. While the OAK Quartet was presenting Sognefjord, the Voyager disc was designed to present Tellus herself, including the species which goes under the name Homo sapiens.
The Discoverer Page 45