One day, one autumn day, I asked her if she would like to come to the church with me. I asked her on the spur of the moment. We could listen to my dad playing the organ, I said, and she could see the new stained-glass windows, how lovely they were when the light shone through them. Once inside the church, however, I realised that I had lured her there under false pretences. I pointed hastily at the coloured panes of glass, like larger versions of the windows around her veranda at home. We all but sidled round the walls of the church and I drew her into the sacristy. I think she knew what was going to happen. Or what I was expecting that she would permit to happen.
We were in a room reserved for ‘sacred objects’. The church silver was kept in a big safe in the corner. Even in here the organ music could be heard quite clearly. I do not know whether I had actually planned it, but now that we were alone, seeing her standing right there in front of me, I was seized with a powerful urge to see her naked. Or, to see it. My head felt light, my breathing was weak. It was like an attack of some sort. Maybe she really was feeble-minded, and now her feebleness had been transmitted to my brain, my lungs. Something took control of me, something that spoke, asked her brusquely to take off her clothes. ‘Only if you promise not to touch,’ she said, did not seem frightened, did not seem unwilling. I nodded. Something inside me nodded. ‘Just look,’ she repeated. I nodded. My whole body was one throbbing pulse. ‘Hurry up,’ I heard a husky, unrecognisable voice say. She hurried up and suddenly there she stood, stark naked. I asked her to position herself up against the door leading to the pulpit, with her arms outstretched. It sounded like a command. She had hair under her arms, masses of hair under her arms – along with the black frizz between her legs these tufts of hair formed a triangle. Next to the door hung a crucifix. On the other wall hung pictures of former vicars. The thought that somebody might walk in, unlikely though it was, rendered the situation even more titillating.
She slid down onto the floor, as if she were a bit embarrassed. I was surprised by how much hair there was around her crotch, a real bush. I asked her to spread her legs. No, she said. Gone was her usual saucy air. Please, I said. Or did it come out as a command? Husky-voiced. She complied, but with her eyes lowered. So it was here, in a church sacristy, that I saw a cunt, for the first time. I say cunt, because I was thinking of Uncle Melankton. Until now the closest I had come to this mystery had been when Daniel showed me something which he claimed was a wisp of Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pubic hair. But here I was, looking at the female genitals in all their glory and prosaic majesty. And despite the fact that we boys had discussed all the ins and outs of this subject, and despite all the relatively innocent ‘dirty pictures’ which we had pored over, I was quite taken aback by the sight that met my eyes when Laila spread her legs for me, opening a safe, so to speak, and presenting the sacred objects.
Later I learned that John Ruskin, the famous aesthete, recoiled in horror when he discovered that the female pudenda were covered in hair, something for which the statues of antiquity had not prepared him. I was not that naive. But still I had to swallow, almost gagging, not because of the luxuriant growth of hair, rather like a swatch of shag pile, but at what lay underneath. Daniel, who had once seen a Swedish porn mag with pictures of a woman showing ‘the lot’, called it the Inlying Valleys. That triangle of hair was simply there to distract the attention from something far more interesting. And startling. The thought that came into my mind was of something raw. Raw meat. It looked as though she had a hundred grams of rare roast beef stuffed up inside that crack. I was filled with the same warring emotions as a squeamish medical student before his first dissection. It looked both enticing and repulsive. I had not expected there to be such long fissures. A great gorge with lots of side crevasses. I was panting with impatience, desperate to explore it. I firmly believe that for a few seconds there I saw before me a Samarkand, a place I had always dreamt of going.
I had promised not to touch her, but I could not control myself. My body felt swollen with desire. My head swam, as if this crack I beheld truly was the mouth of an abyss. I heard organ music playing in the church, but it seemed to fade away as I stuck my finger inside her, tried to stick a finger in, forced it in; she did not stop me, my body was numb, my mouth dry, I began to slide my finger, my hand, back and forth, unrestrainedly, knew I was hurting her but could not stop myself. Everything went black. I was brought to my senses by her stopping me. Firmly. I did not get it. According to the rumours, she had done it with everything from smoked sausages to gearsticks.
She sat before me, her back against the door to the pulpit. Still staring at the floor. I could hear the organ music again. And that she was crying.
A couple of days later the awful news reached my ears: someone had broken the stained-glass windows in the church. Thrown stones at them. It is hard to describe the shock and horror aroused by this. In local terms it was like the crime of the century. Who had done it? Who could have done such a despicable thing? By Grorud standards this was an act of vandalism on a par with that committed in Rome some years later, when a man knocked the arm off the Madonna in Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer. Ivan, who was for a long time a suspect, had an alibi. No one knew who had done it. But I knew. You might even say I did it myself.
Over the following weeks I tried everything to get Laila to talk to me again. None of it did any good. Sorry, I whispered, every time I came within earshot of her. But Laila would have nothing to do with me. Not only that, but she looked so woebegone, dejected. People remarked on it. What’s wrong with Laila, they said. Laila who was always so blithe and cheery. If I tried walking alongside her, she would stop, turn her back on me, or run away. That was the worst part: the way she turned her face away. That she would no longer look at me. Look at me as no one else looked at me.
Only one thing could help me. Or, why not: save me. So I waited. Waited to be forgiven, although I did not deserve it. I waited, hoping she would be magnanimous. That she would look at me again.
And at long last it happened, just before Christmas, but only after I had had a foretaste of it in the church, on my knees in that chamber next door to the sacristy, as I said a word out loud. When I embraced Laila in the snow outside the ironmonger’s, it was like an echo of an embrace I myself had felt.
As I knelt at the altar rail, in the minutes preceding my decision to utter that word, I thought of a milestone in my life, an incident which had occurred at Solhaug some years earlier. We had been playing rounders, a simplified version of baseball, on the flag green. One of the boys on the estate, Rikard, was a brilliant hitter. It was the same story again and again: when everybody else had struck out and desperation was setting in, Rikard would step up and save the day with a real cracker of a hit, one which allowed them all to run right round before the other team could get to the ball.
One Saturday afternoon something quite remarkable happened. I was fielding, standing ready by the flagpole, from which the handsome estate pennant fluttered lazily in the breeze, so I had a front-row seat, as it were, for the events that unfolded. The whole batting team was hopping up and down on the line as usual, waiting for Rikard, the last man in, to hit a sixer and get them out of trouble. Rikard strode up to the wicket armed with his dreaded bat. In woodwork, while the rest of us were toiling over stupid herons with beaks that were forever snapping off, Rikard was surehandedly turning a baseball bat that would have elicited appreciative nods from any craftsman. It was a particularly long, heavy bat, perfect for getting some extra spin on the ball. Rikard hit the ball, gave it such a phenomenal whack that it let out a deep sigh – a tennis-ball orgasm, a gasp at being hit so perfectly, at being launched into such a ballistic dream of a trajectory. It was the sort of strike known in baseball as a ‘home run’, the sort of strike that sent the ball flying right out of the park, or smashing into floodlights in a shower of sparks, the sort of strike that brought the crowd leaping to their feet with a roar.
There was only one thing wrong with this hit.
It went too far. Because, down at the garages – where he spent pretty much all of his free time – Major Otto Ness was polishing his pride and joy, a black Opel Captain purchased the year before. The care which Major Ness lavished on his car foreshadowed, in fact, the worship of material possessions which the whole of Norwegian society was moving towards, a development which, in just a couple of decades, would take them from tree-planting and community parties to each man polishing his own car and scowling enviously at his neighbours. The Major had just completed the day’s beauty treatment, and was surveying his car with the same look of satisfaction he would have given a gleaming army boot. Major Ness – known to us, despite his spit-and-polish exterior, as Major Mess – was on the short side, to say the least of it: a right little runt. It was so funny to see him driving home with his head, or at least his uniform cap, barely visible, and his hands clutching, not to say straining at, the steering wheel, like a major trying with great difficulty to control his captain. No less comical was the sight of him walking alongside his wife, who was a head taller than her officer. But his vehicle, the Opel, was most definitely among the top brass of Solhaug’s relatively modest fleet of cars – in the Major’s own eyes it raised him to the rank of estate general; it made up for an outsize nag of a wife and a disappointing career in which he had ended up behind a desk, and not behind the guns. That car was his battleship, his tank, his command centre, from which he could rule the world. So, as far as he was concerned it was an open insult, a pure act of aggression, when a tennis ball, hit by Rikard, bounced defiantly on the ground once before thumping, not all that hard, but quite audibly, off the bonnet of Major Ness’s Opel Captain. With a magnifying glass one might have been able to spot a tiny mark. But in the Major’s world this was tantamount to vandalism of the worst sort, a downright declaration of war, in fact.
Major Ness reacted as he was wont to do. In a voice which was surprisingly loud and clear for such a puny little body he demanded to know who had hit that ball. And since he made it sound like a command, Rikard trailed all the long way across the green and down to the garages, where Major Ness pointed first at the ball, then at the car and thereafter, as if it were the natural conclusion, gave Rikard a belt round the ear, smack, which I heard all the way up by the flagpole – a ‘home run’ of a slap, you might say.
The Major had, however, committed one tactical error. His indignation had blinded him to everything else around him. But he had been seen. From above. From one of the second-floor balconies in the block of flats overlooking the flag green Rikard’s father, Mr Bastesen, had been a spectator – or perhaps one should say acted as umpire – to the whole thing. In a remarkably short space of time Rikard’s dad was out of the house and heading across the green towards the garages, and he did not come alone: on his way he picked up his son’s legendary baseball bat, decorated in time-honoured fashion with a branding iron in the Grorud School woodwork room. On his face, one of the blackest looks I can ever recall seeing. I would not call it anger. I would call it wrath.
Mr Bastesen was definitely not a man to be meddled with. Not only was he the caretaker at Solhaug, a person with whom it was best to stay on good terms, he was also a big, burly character who – we knew – lifted weights in the shed where the estate’s communal tools and equipment were kept. To us kids he was a fearsome figure, especially when marching back and forth across the greens behind a roaring lawnmower with tractor wheels. Or in the spring when he put out signs saying ‘Do not walk on the grass!’ On the other hand, like a beneficent god he was also quite liable to let us play in the sprinklers on hot summer days. There was some talk of a background in petty crime, whispers of jail sentences and a dodgy past as a bouncer at one of Oslo’s shadiest nightspots. And now here he was, large and menacing, descending – on tractor wheels, you might say – upon the garages, with one hand curled around a sturdy baseball bat which could beat the living daylights out of anything, no question, and everybody could see that he was positively seething with wrath over a crime of a far more serious nature than walking on the grass. I could not help thinking that Major Ness really was in a major mess now.
We who witnessed this episode, the boys at least, knew what was going to happen next. Justice, it was called. You could say that our hearts sang in our breasts when we saw Mr Bastesen striding purposefully across the green with the heavy baseball bat, duly decorated, already half raised. Justice was to be done and no one could say a thing against it, because such was the law, among boys at any rate, and despite all our Sunday School lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Simple and straightforward. When Roar pinched Guggen’s bike, crashed it and smashed his new wing mirror, Guggen’s big brother went straight over and smashed the headlight on Roar’s bike. That was how it worked.
But everybody also knew that, for all the rumours, Mr Bastesen would never dream of hurting anyone, and certainly not a little runt like Major Ness, who was now basically shaking in his shoes; in the hand he held out, a wisp of cotton waste, like a gift, an olive branch. Or was he perhaps offering Mr Bastesen the divine pleasure of polishing an Opel Captain for a few minutes? He seemed to me to cave in on himself, to shrink still further. But Mr Bastesen was making straight for the car, the Major’s pride and joy, his black pearl, and Major Ness must have realised that Bastesen, a man of no education – and quite possibly no cultivation – would not think twice about bashing in the bodywork of this status symbol, this car which, to the Major, was proof that he was not, after all, a complete failure.
The Major, who must have been envisaging the worst of all possible nightmares, a wrecked Captain, did the only thing he could think of, thus going totally against the grain of everything he had striven for in his profession: he went down on his knees – a rare sight for a child, that: a grown man kneeling in the dirt. And as if that wasn’t enough, way up beside the flagpole I heard the Major stammer: ‘Mercy.’ That was all, just one little word, and yet so hard for him to spit out: ‘Mercy.’
And it worked. Mr Bastesen stopped short, with the baseball bat already hovering in mid-air, so to speak, ready to deliver the first devastating blow to the Opel’s bonnet, a car-wrecker’s ‘home run’. He stopped, lowered the baseball bat, eyed both the Major and the car, the car again, and the Major again, and then he said, as he flicked a speck of dust off the hood: ‘Okay. But don’t you ever hit a kid again. I’m just telling you.’
I knew that I was witnessing something momentous. It took some time to penetrate with me. You could get out of being punished for doing something bad, a punishment which you fully deserved, if someone showed you mercy. This was a new and abhorrent concept. That such a thing was possible. That the laws of cause and effect could be broken. That what everyone expected to happen, did not.
And it was this word – bright, clear, lone – which kept rising to the surface, amid all the other chaotic thoughts in my head as I stood over Margrete on the evening when I found her dead. And I remember that I knelt on the floor, right next to her body and muttered it. Or tried to, vainly at first. The word seemed to offer physical resistance. I had to clear my throat again and again, brace myself before, finally, bringing myself to say it: ‘Mercy,’ I murmured. Again and again: ‘Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.’ And as soon as I said it I felt an ache in my chest again, as if the word were puncturing something inside me. To begin with I thought this pain might have been caused by the label which I had swallowed, the piece of paper with her name on it, but it felt more like a sort of pressure, as if something were growing inside me. I looked at the four butterflies which Margrete had caught as a child and which she had brought with her from Ullevål Garden City and hung in their frame on our living-room wall. I think – no, I know, that it was here, on my knees beside a dead wife, that my full potential began to unfold. Only then, during those seconds, did I begin to transcend my own boundaries.
The only right thing to do was to go to prison. There are few things of which I have been more certain. I was guilty. Had I had eyes, been able t
o talk, to listen, Margrete would not be dead.
You have no say in things in prison. You suffer a lot of indignities in prison. But none of this could compare with my overriding problem: myself. My own thoughts. In the early days I was also troubled by this discomfort in my chest. Like powerful growing pains. I thought it was my heart. That I was going to die. It took a while for it to dawn on me that it was my lungs.
What did I do in prison? I skipped. Occasionally I juggled with oranges. And I felt shame. Year after year, I felt shame. To me, prison was like being made to go and stand in the corner.
Sometimes I also think of those years behind bars as one long swim across dark, dark deeps, and I have the distinct impression that at one point I died. On the day that I walked out of prison I felt the way I had when I woke up on that beach in Sweden, after drowning in Sekken.
I assume that Kristin is writing, and will soon be finished, a book about me. She has asked me a lot of questions during this trip. I’ve noticed that after one of our conversations she settles herself in the saloon with her computer, reads through something, makes changes, inserts details. I have been happy to answer her questions. I have tried to tell the truth. But I know it will be as much of a lie as all the rest.
The Discoverer Page 51