The Discoverer

Saturn

Is there anybody going to listen to my story … I sing to myself. Humming it as an intro to what may prove to be my own story. Or an attempt at it, at any rate. I have been inspired by the unlikely fact that once more I find myself here, on board the Voyager, surrounded by stories, layer upon layer of scents, the switches to huge mechanisms in my memory. I kept my mouth shut when Hanna said that the boat had once belonged to ‘a legendary actor’. She was well aware, of course, that I had known Gabriel Sand. Much has changed, though. For one thing, they have installed a four-cylinder Volvo Penta diesel engine. A wise move. Here, among such high mountains, the winds can be everything from insidiously capricious to absolutely non-existent. Voyager is also a grander name than the old one, the Norge. It befits a boat which, by their way of it, is going on a voyage of discovery. Into a new millennium. The Norge was more apt for a vessel which lies safe in harbour and never sets sail.

I had a strange experience out at the point north of Mannheller. I was on deck, sitting on the hatch of the forepeak, taking in the view all around me. I felt a surge of excitement. I could see into three or four fjords at the same time: into Lustrafjord, into Årdalsfjord, into the mouth of Lærdalsfjord and down Sognefjord itself. It was an awesome sight. And yet strangely familiar. I came to the conclusion that I must have come here as a small boy, on the ferry that used to run between Revsnes and Naddvik. That time when we drove all the way to Årdal, a real safari. I realised that this sight must have stayed with me, left its imprint on me. Like the belief that it was possible to look down several channels of possibility at once. I have been to Tokyo, I have visited Timbuktu, I have — speaking of safaris — scratched the backs of rhinos and held crocodiles in my hands, and yet — this short trip up a Norwegian fjord must have made a greater impression. Deeper. It had branched out into me.

While we were moored at Skjolden I had the chance to take a run down to Urnes with Carl. We drove along the narrow road past Feigumfossen and Kroken, out to the bare green hilltop on which the stave church sits. It was morning and the light slanted down from the sun hanging over Tausasva. The wooden walls of the church had recently been oiled, it smelled of boats. We strolled round to the north wall and studied the most famous wood carvings in Norway, one of the reasons why Urnes church is on the UNESCO list of those buildings in the world most worthy of protection and preservation. ‘That is pretty much what we have in mind,’ Carl said. ‘That is what I call software.’ I stared for some time at the sinuous figures. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is what I call a fjord.’ Carl eyed me quizzically: ‘So what’s the difference?’

I have to laugh — they are so keen. They hare about, talking to all and sundry, trying to track down people with access to archives, hunt up local contacts. Not surprisingly, here in Lærdal they are mainly regaled with stories about salmon, tales of the English salmon lords of the nineteenth century, the best ‘pools’, the fierce competition for fishing rights, the problem of parasites and the poison tipped into the river to combat them, thus putting the river out of action for years. None of them know much about salmon — apart from Martin possibly — but a visit to the Wild Salmon Centre has left them a lot wiser. They have already decided that fly fishing has to form one of the cornerstones in their presentation of the place. They buy books, collect brochures, take photographs, shoot video film. They delve and probe. They look, to me, as though they are investigating a serious crime, trying to unravel the threads of a massive conspiracy. They inspect the houses that have been preserved in the old part of Lærdal. They drive up to Borgund Stave Church. I go with them. I spend most of my time on the boat, but occasionally I go with them. I am, by profession, a secretary, I am used to tagging along. We walk the age-old, overgrown paths: Sverrestigen, Vindhellavegen. They are constantly discussing things. Making notes. Doing sketches. Drawing up charts, diagrams of which I cannot make head nor tail: they look like trees. Or fjords with lots of arms. They hear rumours of a French painter who is a regular visitor to Lærdal and usually stays at the home of a wealthy Norwegian family. Someone shows them reproductions of his work, abstract paintings inspired by the fjord, the mountains. Or by the colours and the patterns of salmon flies. They are familiar with the much-loved piece of music said to have been conceived at Lærdal. They pore over the plaque fixed to the rock face next to the jetty where we are moored, on it the first four bars of ‘The Ballad of Giants’ and the composer’s signature: Harald Sæverud. They have a tape with them, play the first bars of this protest against the occupation as they take in their surroundings. On the hillside on the other side of the lake they can just make out the ruins of a German bunker. They listen, they think. It seems so comical and yet so serious. But I have to admire their get-up-and-go. It is not enough for them simply to collect facts, catalogue information. They also need to come up with an outer framework, a story to bind the whole lot together.

She has chosen her team carefully. Hanna was born in Korea. Carl has an American mother, a Norwegian father. Between them, like two wings, they extend Norway to east and west. Martin provides the local credibility: he hails from Nordkjosbotn — ‘a crossroads in Troms,’ as he said. With pride. I remember what Kamala, who was seriously discriminated against until she became famous, said in one television debate: ‘Civilised society consists not of fortresses, but of crossroads.’ Martin is cook, ruling over the galley down below according to the principles of ‘enlightened absolutism’, dishing up everything from couscous to sushi. I have no idea how he came by such skills. He is the type to have long since drunk snake’s blood, with the snake’s beating heart and all. Himself, he claims to have picked it all up in Nordkjosbotn: ‘What did I tell you — it’s a crossroads.’

She has called her company the OAK Quartet. The OAK stands for Oslo Art Kitchen. They have shown me their website, laid out like an inviting kitchen — an appetising work of art in itself. I can see why people would spend time there, avail themselves of their services. This tempting cyberspace reminds me, of all things, of Aunt Laura’s seductive, limitless flat.

They often play string quartets on the CD player in the saloon, as if wishing to learn, to be stimulated. The music is pure and powerful, it is easy to hear how everything has been pared to the bone. The four young people on board truly are like a quartet. They each have their own strength, their own ‘instrument’. They are like one of those pop groups in which no individual member stands out, but where the combined effect is mind-blowing.

I sit on deck, scanning the sheer cliff face on the opposite side of the fjord. At its foot, where the land begins, is a little beach. It is growing chilly. Martin came up just a moment ago with some piping hot soup, a bowl of soba, Japanese noodles, and some chopsticks. ‘You slurp it down,’ he told me. The clouds are hanging low today. Rays of sunlight break through here and there, dancing like spotlight beams over the landscape. I cannot get enough of this sight, the play of light and shade on the mountainsides. I was in China once, in Xi’an, with Margrete, and simply by showing me a few sights she made me well, cured me of my all-consuming jealousy. I have sometimes thought that she stuck tiny, imperceptible needles into me, treated me to a sort of mental acupuncture. In the watchtower at the north gate in the old city wall we found a shop selling prints, those long, rectangular pictures that can be rolled up. I was particularly taken with these paintings, with their depictions of tiny, solitary individuals in the wilds of the countryside, and their complete lack of any fixed focal point — the perspective altering every time you moved your eye. These were living, breathing pictures, in which the emptiness, the unpainted areas, formed an indispensable part of the composition. Margrete bought one for me. ‘Every time you look at it, think of me,’ she said. I misunderstood. Did not see what she meant until it was too late. I had it hanging in my cell. I looked at it often. I travelled around in that picture often, a little person in a vast, rugged landscape containing any number of focal points. I have something of the same feeling here, in a narrow fjord running between plunging cliffs. When I see Sognefjord on the map, it looks to me like a dragon winding its way into the country. A dragon as they are drawn in China, long and sinuous. This too is a journey through a dragon.

I had been wrestling for ages with a big project. I was always wrestling with some big project. I kept having to redefine it, and almost as often had to rename it. Not until late on, too late on, did I see what my real project in life should have been.

One time on Hvaler — I must have been seven or eight — I found a cork bobbing about in the sea. I was out in my grandfather’s smallest rowboat, a craft which even I could handle. As the boat drifted past the cork curiosity got the better of me. I backed the oars. Pulled them in. I leaned out and fished it up. I noticed that there was a rope attached to it. This made me even more curious. I started to haul on the rope, pulling it into the boat. It turned out, of course, that I had got my hands on a net; although — it should be said in my defence — it was of an unusual make, and with an illegally fine mesh. No one could see me from the shore. Very carefully I pulled it in. Some flounders were caught in the top of the net, but I spotted something intriguing glinting further down. I pulled harder. I saw the pale, gleaming surface turn into something huge — and hideous, like a great maw lunging up at me. I got a fright. Dropped the lot. I do not know what it was, possibly a small Greenland shark or the underbelly of a giant crab. I have thought about it a lot since then. That experience reminds me of Margrete. You’re sailing through life when you spy a cork in the sea, you lift it out and there is this huge net, a skein full of things of which you could never have dreamed. You know, impossible though it is, that if you went on pulling long enough, if you put your back into it, kept at it, you would eventually haul the whole world up into the boat, including yourself and the boat.

Why did she do it?

I do not know when I first understood it. Or no, now I’m being coy — I never did understand it. But very early on in our relationship, something occurred, an incident which I made light of at the time, but which gradually came to seem important. Like a choice. It was one of those moments when I was able to look into several arms of a fjord at one time.

It was a normal afternoon. We were still living in her parents’ museum of a flat in Ullevål Garden City. Margrete was a doctor, doing her specialist training in dermato-venereology at the University Hospital. I was in the process of putting my architecture studies, which is to say Project X, behind me. We were both head over heels in love, by which I mean that we were still at the stage in a love affair when you have been caught up in a warm wave and are just letting yourself be swept along. We showed face at all the timeless places, at Herregårdskroa where the service was so appalling, Frognerseteren with its overrated apple cake, Theatercafeen, where we were so wrapped up in one another that we did not even hear how badly off-key the old dinner orchestra was. We went to the cinema merely in order to sit with our eyes closed and hold hands; we went to the theatre solely so that we could smooch openly at the bar during the interval; we went to exhibitions for the sole purpose of gazing adoringly at one another amid the crowds of art-goers. We rediscovered the city: the shrimp boats, the chestnut trees, the glove shops, seeing everything for the first time, because we were together. But above all else: we made love, for hours at a time; laid each other down and sailed over and around each other’s bodies; we were Captain Cook circumnavigating the globe, or Bartholomeo Diaz bound for the Cape of Good Hope. We might start by exploring one another’s toes or foreheads, eventually to reach the middle where she always ended up running her ship aground on my lighthouse.

It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon. Margrete was lying in bed. We had made love. We had made long and glorious love. So it cannot have been that. The bedroom was white. Even the pine floorboards had a whitish sheen in the bright afternoon light which streamed through the fine veil of the curtains now that the blinds had been pulled up. The only objects in the room were a double bed with white bed linen and a brass headrail, and a gleaming gold statuette from the East. It was just how a bedroom, a place for lovemaking, should look. Love was, and always will be, a white patch, an undiscovered continent, watched over by an alien god with half-shut eyes.

This room and the kitchen were the ones I liked best in that otherwise unreal flat. The other apartments were chock-full of all manner of souvenirs from the Boeck family’s hectic diplomatic life in distant lands. Buddhas of jade and stone, Japanese garden lanterns of cast-iron, floral patterned china plates, camphor-wood chests, marble torsos, bronze temple lions. They may have been mementoes, but they did nothing for me. At times I had the feeling that I was wandering around inside other people’s memories. At others I thought: the first time I set foot in this house I knew that marriage would be the greatest journey of my life.

Buenos Aires, the white, stucco-like façades on the Avenido de Mayo. Moscow, the dull gold of the domes on the Kremlin. The Victoria Falls, the glistening black of the snake that crossed my path. Shanghai, the noxious brown river. Samarkand, the sweet, yellow melons. Margrete, the blue veins at her temples, a tiny fjord with a multiplicity of arms.

She was lying in bed in the bedroom. Or rather: I thought she was lying in bed. I had gone out to fetch a jug of iced tea from the fridge — iced tea was a habit, or a vice, she had acquired in other climes. When I walked into the white bedroom, which still smelled of sex, she was kneeling on the bed, on the pillow, banging her head against the wall. Not all that hard, perhaps, but it was a brick wall. She was naked. She was quite oblivious to me. I stood there holding the jug. Two slices of lemon twirled slowly round, two small, unconnected wheels. She went on beating her head against the wall with trance-like regularity. I noticed the way the light refracted and formed a rainbow around her. I heard a sound like the tinkling of wind-chimes, possibly from the empty glasses on the floor. Or from her brittle skull. I remembered the first time I saw her. Through a teardrop.

My maternal grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, was not like other grandparents, or any other old people for that matter. Granny’s house did not smell of Pan Drops or 4711 eau-de-cologne, instead there was a pronounced aroma of cigars. She can best be described as an activator: she made things happen wherever she went. I always looked forward to visiting her flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. The memory of one occasion in particular has stayed with me. ‘You’d better come over,’ she said on the phone, in a voice befitting her statesmanlike countenance. ‘It’s time to dismantle the Crystal Palace.’

This is a story about seeing the love of one’s life. Not about the first meeting, but about seeing one’s beloved. Afterwards I said to her: ‘Now I’ve really seen you. Seen you as you are.’ I did not know how true that was.

The Crystal Palace was not a place in England. It was a huge, rare and precious crystal chandelier which hung over the dining table in Granny’s sitting room, a room lofty enough to accommodate it. Once a year, usually on a day like this, a bright, sunny Saturday in August, Granny and I would lift the big mahogany table out of the way and set up the stepladder preparatory to cleaning the chandelier, removing dust and dirt and, not least, the film of nicotine from Granny’s cigars which had built up in the holes bored in the crystals. It was a big job, a combination of chemistry and physics lessons, of window-cleaning and jigsaw puzzle. I had the task of climbing the stepladder and ‘tearing down the castle in the air’ as Granny put it. The chandelier had been restored and altered slightly. So the spikes on the base, hundreds of them, were no longer fixed to the rings, but had to be unhooked, one by one. The festoons, the chains of prisms running from the top to the hoop were easier to remove.

I carefully detached each piece and handed it to Granny. They were then dipped in basins filled with warm water and soft soap and rinsed, dipped in soapy water again and rinsed, then laid on soft cotton cloths by Granny to dry. It was a job which called for patience. And precision. Just as I had reached the stage of building complicated Lego constructions without having to follow the accompanying, step-by-step instructions, so my grandmother knew the position of every piece by heart, even though there must have been over a thousand of them. Fortunately, many of them were joined together. She sorted through them, separated them into groups. I could spend ages just marvelling at the assurance with which she arranged crystals of different shapes and sizes on the cloths. When I saw all those prisms glittering and twinkling on the dining table I felt like Aladdin in the cave, surrounded by clusters of precious gems.

At a certain point we changed places. Granny mounted the stepladder — not unlike a young seaman on the Christian Radich — and cleaned the gilded bronze stem and light sockets while I dried all the crystals with a dishcloth, polishing them until they shone. It was a solemn undertaking. I remember every detail of it to this day. The feel of sharp edges against my fingers. The sunlight streaming through the windows. The smell of soft soap. The sound of tinkling glass, like sleigh bells. Old crystal is not white, there is a touch of grey in it, of pink and violet, and when I turned the prisms to check that they were clean, patterns of light danced across the walls. It was quite a spectacle: tiny, vibrant spectrums at every turn. That is how I remember Granny: encircled by rainbows.

On the day she came, the day on which I was to see my beloved, I was up the stepladder, taking the single prisms and the chains handed to me by Granny and hooking them back into place. It was all going very smoothly. Crystals hung thicker and thicker on the chandelier. Only once did Granny have to give me instructions: ‘No, no, that Empire spike should go further out!’ I was glad to see her in such good form. For over six months, according to my mother, she had done nothing but lie in the bath, smoking cigars and listening to the BBC World Service. She had been suffering from depression following the death in January of her idol Winston Churchill, in bed with his cat beside him.

Reassembling the chandelier took time, but the end result was commensurate with the work involved. The chandelier had a spiked base, an inverted pyramid consisting of three circles of long, slender prisms. I could get almost the whole of my head inside that cone of glass before hanging the nethermost pendants on their hooks. As far as I was concerned there was nothing quite as wonderful as being encircled by a close-knit network of crystals. To stand amid those glittering prisms and hear them chinking against one another. For many years, the lighting of those sixteen candles was, for me, the very definition of beauty. Not even Mr Iversen’s extravagant New Year’s Eve firework display could come close.

It had not always been so easy. I remembered the first time. I was seven. I was to be staying at Oscars gate for a couple of days. Without any warning, Granny had started carrying one cardboard box after another into the sitting room, finishing up with what, although I did not know it, were the stem, rings and arms of a chandelier. ‘The spoils of war,’ she remarked mysteriously.

She proceeded to unpack the boxes. I thought at first they were full of bits of cloth and tissue paper, but concealed inside the cloth and the paper were diamonds, prisms of Bohemian crystal. It seemed to me as though Granny were unravelling an enormous crystal chandelier from paper, from a pile of small boxes. She spread the whole lot out on the dining table. It was years since she had packed it away; she tried to remember what bit went where. The whole scenario reminded me of a Christmas Eve when I was given a jigsaw puzzle with over a thousand pieces.

We spent the whole weekend figuring it out. And when, after much trial and error, the freshly washed chandelier was finally mounted and hanging from the ceiling over the mahogany table — sixteen tiny flames multiplied into a starry firmament — Granny put a record of Strauss waltzes on the gramophone, elbowed me in the ribs and announced proudly: ‘Welcome to the Queen’s Chambers!’ Which was not that far from the truth. Because there was a story attached to that chandelier.

I have been dogged all my life by my association with those hand-ground pieces of glass. Nothing could ever beat the sensations I experienced, the air of festivity with which I was filled, under that crinoline of crystals, bathed in a light which was both absorbed and emitted. The first time I heard of a network formed by computers I immediately thought of Granny’s chandelier. I had actually had a prism of my own since I was very young. I used to play with it a lot, regarded it as something lovely and perfect in itself. Not until my grandmother brought out her chandelier did I see that my prism was part of a greater whole. It would not surprise me if this realisation lay at the root of my Project X, the idea that all but broke me.

I had almost finished re-hanging all the droplets when it happened. I had my head stuck half inside the chandelier, was running my eyes over crystal after crystal, as if in a trance. It was not true what the grown-ups said: that they only reflected partial, splintered images. Here, inside the chandelier, I could see the whole picture, all the different sides of it at once.

I was standing inside a circle of light when it happened. Sometimes, in order to hang a crystal on another part of the chandelier I turned it round. All at once I found myself at the centre of a carousel of tinkling diamonds. I saw everything so clearly. Correlations, associations. The only right thing was, of course, to play, not Strauss, but Johann Sebastian Bach. Again, as always: Bach.

So there I was, with my head inside a shimmering wheel, when it happened. Suddenly, beyond the light, I discerned a figure in the doorway. It was Margrete. Or maybe I could tell from her voice: ‘Jonas?’ I did not see her, saw only the reflections, scintillating light. Often, since then, I have found myself wondering: was that why I fell so madly in love. Was it those prisms, that golden glow, which bound me to her for always?

How does a man meet his wife? I met mine several times. I met her for the first time — was quite literally bowled over by her in sixth grade, just before the summer holidays. We crashed into one another on our bikes right outside the school gate. I remember nothing from that collision except her eyes, her eyes staring at me. And not so much her eyes, as her pupils: it was the first time I had ever remarked on only the pupils of a pair of eyes; I had never seen anything so black, so — what’s the word — bottomless. That collision was like hearing that abrupt, resounding G7sus4th chord at the very beginning of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’: a false start, if you like, before things really got under way. Like a build-up of tension waiting for release.

It did not really come to anything, though, until later in the year, just after we started in seventh grade. One day after school I went swimming with Leo. A lot had happened over the summer holidays, we were older and maybe that is why we did not bike out to Badedammen, where we had always frolicked in the past — beginning our swimming careers there under the careful eyes of anxious mothers — but to Svarttjern, the Black Tarn, a very different class of swimming hole, and more of a challenge in terms of location, lying as it did right out in the wilds, as it were. Badedammen was for little kids. Svarttjern was for strong, experienced swimmers. We had to park our bikes at the foot of Ravnkollen and walk quite a way into the forest to get to the bewitching little tarn ringed by fir trees. Strange to think that today this isolated lake, or what is left of it, is hemmed in by the tower blocks of Romsås, one of the biggest satellite towns in Norway. Although maybe this was simply bound to happen: this was a tarn which had to be civilised, tamed. Rumour had it that many people had drowned there, and that it was the perfect pool for suicides who did not wish to be found. Let me put it this way: Svartjern was not a lake you swam in alone at night. Sometimes, on the way there, I would find myself thinking that anything could happen at Svarttjern.

I spotted her right away. How could anyone not notice her? She was gold among silver. She was much browner than the other girls. I did not know whether this was because she already had a good base tan from Thailand where she had been living before, owing to her father’s work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or whether she was just blessed with such fabulous skin. And yet it was possibly not her looks that impressed me so much as her bearing, her movements. The way she dried herself, the way she walked, almost danced over to the rock when she was going in for a swim. There are no words to describe the unique quality of Margrete’s beauty, but in my mind I called it ‘Persian’. She wore an orange bikini which accentuated the golden effect. And her figure, I might add, because she had the body of an eighth grader, a body which had just begun to reveal something of how it was going to look in four or five years’ time. I had to force myself not to stare, not to be caught with my eyes glued to that sexy bikini top.

Even when she was lying still, apparently deep in thought, Margrete was the centre of attraction. Everything revolved around her. I observed her out of the corner of my eye. I caught the flash of a bracelet. She took something from her rucksack and handed it round, it obviously was not a pack of Marie biscuits; judging by the exclamations from the others it had to be something fantastic — Chinese fortune cookies or suchlike.

Breakfasts with Margrete. Every one an occasion. Her face. The things she could come out with. Her body language. Her way of being quiet. Her expression when she was thinking. Her habits from an itinerant life abroad. Always linen napkins. Always fresh flowers on the table. Always toast. Always a particular brand of English marmalade. Always freshly ground coffee beans, her own blend. Always orange juice which she pressed herself.

We lay not far from one another. There was really only one spot where you could lie at Svarttjern, a couple of hillocks on the west side. It was also a good place to dive from, or rather: try to impress the girls with your latest, well-rehearsed dives. Margrete was not impressed by that sort of thing though, she never so much as glanced in the direction of the daredevil divers and their antics. I peeped at her on the sly. Peeped is the word. I felt like a Peeping Tom. It got to the point where I was staring quite blatantly. I couldn’t help it. I felt my heart swell with love. It had possibly been lying dormant during the summer holidays, but now it flared up. I thought of my grandfather lighting the primus stove in the outhouse, the moment when the flame turned blue. I knew it, I was a goner. This may sound a mite high-flown, but I lay there thinking of one of the words which Karen Mohr often used: fate. I am quite certain that the thought of marrying Margrete Boeck crossed my mind there, on the banks of Svarttjern, on an August day when we were in seventh grade. But how was I to catch her attention? Catch her? Or, more correctly: how was I to get her to discover me?

Why are salmon more given to biting at certain flies? Or is it only that we think they have a greater tendency to bite at certain patterns? It is a mystery. The salmon is not looking for food when it swims up river. As the spawning season approaches it reduces its food intake. In theory, it should not bite at a fly. And yet it does. Is it that it feels annoyed? Is it trying to defend its preserves? Might it simply be that the fly, this elaborately tied lure, is so irresistibly beautiful? Why do we fall in love? You are faced with three girls. Triplets. As good as identical. And yet you choose one of them. The one with the yellow scarf. You bump into a girl at the school gates and you lose your temper, you snap at her. Only afterwards do you realise that you are hooked. Why did I ‘bite’ at Margrete — like a salmon going for a Blue Charm?

There were many obstacles in the way. To begin with the most obvious one: she was lying next to Georg. It was so bloody predictable. You only had to say that there was a new girl starting at the school, from Bangkok, that she was like this and or like that and everybody would stick their hands in the air and say she was sure to end up going out with Georg. He was in the year above us and had always been the first at everything: the first to own a Phantom ring, the first with speedway handlebars and cross-country tyres, the first to wear a reefer jacket, the one whose voice broke first. He always had a match clenched between his lips, as if he were terrified that somebody might ruin his perfect teeth, his flawless looks.

I hated it. Looking at Georg was like staring at a poster that said ‘Forget it!’ I tried to tell myself that I was not in love. It was one thing to wrest Margrete out of another boy’s embrace. It was quite another to try to compete with Georg — Georg, who could blow three smoke-rings and get them to hang in the air while he stuck a finger through them, Georg who documented every new conquest with pictures of him French kissing the girl in question in the photo booth at Eastern station. They might not be going out together yet, but there were depressing rumours to the effect that Margrete ‘fancied’ him. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, in agony, noticing the way they were giggling together, suffering even greater agonies when Georg — all solicitude, so it seemed — straightened one of her straps at the back.

Something had to give. I lay there with a blue flame burning inside me, my hopes rising when the girls went in for a swim. I believe I prayed to God that something would happen, that I would be given a chance. Now. This minute. And not the way it happens in the movies, where the hero usually has to wait until the wedding, until only seconds before the bride says ‘I do’, before he can steal her out of the other man’s arms.

I have been thinking: there was something about Margrete’s glossy black hair, which was cut quite short, that reminded me of Bo Wang Lee. Was that why I fell for her the way I did?

My chance presented itself. Leo and I were sharing a bag of monkey nuts, absent-mindedly snapping shell after shell. The girls were in the water. Suddenly Margrete screamed so loudly that everybody turned to look. I thought she must have got her foot caught in one of the tree trunks which could be seen floating, like water nixies, just under the surface and which, if you were unlucky, you could get caught on, or even be dragged under by. Then I heard it: ‘I’ve lost my bracelet,’ Margrete cried. She was so upset that she switched to English, as if she was still at the International School in Bangkok. I managed to grasp, nonetheless, that it was her mother’s bracelet, that she had borrowed it, that it was of gold and a bit big for her, which is why it must have slipped off without her being aware of it. Who but a girl from Thailand would wear a gold bracelet when she went swimming? She was broken-hearted, sobbing loudly. Some of the girls tried to comfort her.

Georg and the others leapt into the tarn. Shouts and yells filled the air as the water was transformed into a churning mass of flailing bodies. It occurred to me that this was how it must look when natives dived for coins thrown by tourists. Eventually they gave up, one by one.

Margrete glanced up at the hillock on which I was lying, snapping peanut shells in two. I thought I saw a question in that look. Or was it an entreaty? With her streaming wet hair, her forlorn expression, she seemed more bedraggled. More attainable. Georg looked almost sheepish, the match between his teeth was gone.

‘Let me have a go,’ I said, getting to my feet amid the sort of dramatic hush that falls when someone steps forward and volunteers for an impossible mission. Aunt Laura had told me the story of how van Gogh cut off a piece of his ear to impress a woman. This might not have been quite so original, but still — it was something. I would happily have dived until I cramped up.

‘You?’ Georg said. ‘Can you swim?’ I saw the confusion in his eyes, a desire not to lose face, a suppressed fury. I faced up to him. A sergeant taking command from a colonel. He was blocking the way to the water. He could have punched me. Or, he could have tried to punch me. But he must have guessed that just at that moment nothing could touch me. That inside me there dwelt a miracle. He took a step to the side, like a crab. I walked, no: I strode down to the edge of the rock and with all eyes upon me I dived in; it was in all probability the best dive of my life, with little or no splash. I came up to the surface and flicked my hair back with a practised toss of the head. ‘Whereabouts?’ I shouted, heard it echoing in the silence around the tarn. Margrete had come down to the water’s edge. She pointed. She seemed to be pointing at me. ‘There,’ she said.

I dived. To begin with the others stood and watched. I heard the odd gasp of admiration at the length of time I stayed under. I dived. Surfaced, filled my lungs with air and dived again. The comments petered out. There was a deathly hush every time I surfaced. People began to leave. The shadows were also lengthening over the lake. Georg had his match stuck between his teeth again. ‘Good luck,’ he said when he walked off, as if he could afford to show a degree of magnanimity. He shot a glance at Margrete. She did not meet his gaze, sat where she was. Sat there in all her Persian beauty, looking at me. She looked at me as though she were asking: Who are you?

Many years later, when I met her again and we started living together, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that she had switched on the light above the bed and was lying there considering me, as if trying to uncover a secret: ‘Who are you?’ she would whisper then. On more than one night I was woken in this way. It was as though she were studying me, thought she could discover more about me when I was asleep than when I was awake. ‘You look about seven years old,’ she told me. ‘I am seven years old,’ I said.

Now and then she would ask me about a dream I had just had. She might ask me why I had shot wide of the goal. And I would actually have been dreaming about football. She could read my dreams, or was so interested in me that she could guess what I was likely to be dreaming about. Or — this thought has occurred to me — maybe she gave me them, put these dreams into my head by lying there looking at me, considering me.

Even at night when we were making love, I would occasionally feel her fingers running over my face in the dark, as if my features were in Braille and she was trying to read me.

Her curiosity about me. And not the other way round.

Soon we were alone. Even Leo had left, pointedly, as though washing his hands of the whole business. I dived again. It was dark down there, the water was turbid. The bracelet could have fallen off at a spot so deep that I would not be able to reach it, even with all the training I had done — out at Hvaler, too, where I had made several dives to a depth of ten metres with flippers. Her black pupils followed me, stayed fixed on me, as if she were not only asking: Who are you? but also: Where are you when you dive?

I would not give up, took another deep breath before gliding down into the depths. The pressure was getting to me. My ears were starting to hurt despite the fact that I pinched my nose shut with one hand. I could not give up. I felt the pressure, as much from within as from without. This was a situation which would work a change in me.

The pressure. And this might be a good point — here, with me in a submerged position before an expectant Margrete — at which to allude to what lay at the core of my image of myself, a view so complex — or so simple — that I am afraid it goes beyond words: in my life it has not so much been a case of developing as in growing, but rather of evolving.

When I went to my grandfather’s outdoor privy on Hvaler I always left the door wide open so I could gaze out to sea, at the boats sailing past. There was nothing quite like it. The quiet. The spider in the corner. The green moss outside. The smell of the beach, the sea. My eyes had often been drawn to a piece of cloth which had been rolled into a ball and wedged into the hole in the door jamb where once there had been a lock. One day, on impulse, or because I had a hunch about it, I winkled the bit of cloth out. And when I gently began to pull on the ends, opening out the clump of fabric which, over the years, had become almost totally gummed up, it proved to be an old tablecloth. Some scorch marks explained why it had been discarded. Printed on the cloth was a map of the world. And filthy though the fabric was, I could see how nice it was. The names of lots of countries were quite legible. I never forgot this experience. That I could unfold a disgusting-looking clump of fabric and reveal a hidden world.

I probably ought to keep quiet about this — especially considering the lowly part I now play — but there is something I have to confess, although I never dared to say it out loud: I was a child wonder. Or, no: that is not quite right. I was a wonder. As a very small boy I was sure that I could speak seven foreign languages and jump ten metres in the air, all I had to do was to figure out how. Sometimes I felt, with such swelling conviction that it scared me, that I could make objects shatter just by staring at them very hard, that I only needed to clench my fist in order to set great wheels in motion — if not within my own immediately perceptible surroundings then somewhere far out in space. At times I felt a pressure, almost a pain, inside my skull, often throughout my whole body, as if something was trying to unfold itself. As if I carried within me a seed containing a mighty tree.

One Sunday the whole family went for a drive after church. We stopped out on Ekeberg moor where some gypsies had made camp. They were something of an attraction. For ten øre some of the gypsy children would sing, one girl danced. But — and this was far more thrilling — you could also have your fortune told. Some curious onlookers stood in a semi-circle around a young woman seated on a chair outside a caravan. ‘Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a stunner,’ Daniel hissed, and then he shoved me through the circle of people and gave the woman a krone. ‘Now you can find out whether you’re going to end up dumping sewage or washing bodies,’ he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Or whether you’ll get off with Anne Beate Corneliussen.’ The woman smiled invitingly. She really was a stunner. Dark. Genuinely mysterious. She took my hand. She tilted it slightly. I felt her stiffen, almost jerking backwards in her seat. She raised her eyes and looked at me. I do not know how to describe it. As if she were afraid? Overwhelmed? She waved me away, said nothing, simply gave Daniel his krone back. She motioned to me to leave, as if she did not understand, had not been able to see anything.

I was a child. And yet. We have tens of billions of nerve cells in our brains and each of them capable of connecting with hundreds of thousands of other nerve cells. From time to time some expert can be heard to state that we are not even close to utilising the brain’s full capacity. A large proportion of our genetic material is also said to be a mystery: we have no idea what purpose it serves. What if I had detected talents which were in some way associated with those white patches in our knowledge, I would think at heady, almost uneasy moments when I was older. Should I regard this as a blessing or a curse?

I cannot deny it, however. For long periods this was my driving force, my strength and, at the same time, the source of the deepest misgivings: I felt unfinished as a human being. Which is not to say that I was unhappy with myself, with the person I was. But I knew — and this rankled me — that I harboured untapped potential. It lay coiled up inside me. Or packed away in little boxes, like Granny’s chandelier. I was, in other words, less interested in what I was than in what I could be. So one minute I was on the lookout for situations which would help this unknown quality to uncoil, enable me to excel myself. Or, more precisely: become the real me. The next minute I was filled with the need to hide, the wish that these latent gifts might leave me be. Sometimes, I confess, I even hoped they would never come to anything.

In my life, unlike many people, I have never been all that concerned about traumas or evil inclinations, all the things that drag me down. I have been more interested in whatever it is that lifts me up. I have felt something lifting me up. Of all the questions I have had to address, this is the one I hold to be the most crucial: is mankind descended, metaphorically speaking, from the animals or the angels? Or perhaps this is merely a variation on another question: should we let ourselves be ruled by the past or the future? By who we are or who we will become?

It was during a visit to Aunt Laura that I first received some intimation of how radical my potential was. Or at least, I believed that I was given a sign. I must have been about seven. My aunt was a goldsmith, specialising in avant-garde jewellery. In her flat in Tøyen all the walls of the living room and the rooms adjoining it were covered in rugs she had bought on her amazing and, as she told it, not entirely risk-free, travels in the Middle East and Central Asia. This home represented, for me, a source of stimulation that cannot be overrated. And although the name Tøyen actually stems from another word entirely, it always made me think of the word ‘tøye’, meaning to stretch and hence, for me, represented a place where I would be broadened, extended. A feeling which was enhanced by the flat itself; it seemed almost boundless. As if, by some magic, this average-sized dwelling consisted of hundreds of little nooks and chambers.

In the evenings, when my aunt was making dinner, I was allowed to shut the kitchen door and play in the living room. Aunt Laura bound a silk scarf around my head like a turban and lent me a torch. Then I switched off the living-room light and made believe I was a sultan going out in disguise to see how things stood in my realm — just like the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights. I was especially fond of pretending that I was walking around the bazaar, where I envisaged the most arcane occurrences taking place. The platter of oranges on the table was transformed with ease into a cornucopian fruit stall, the bowl of little pistachio cakes turned into an aromatic pastry shop and the coils of silver wire on the workbench in the corner became glimpses of palaces in a distant city. My imagination was given added wing by the delicious smells issuing from the kitchen, often from my aunt’s speciality: Lebanese dishes, including my favourite, machawi, small chunks of meat threaded onto a skewer and grilled — the skewer was a treat in itself. When I shone the torch on the many different oriental rugs they altered character. As with the one in Karen Mohr’s home they, too, concealed doors of a sort leading to new and exciting chambers. Their labyrinthine patterns took on a fascinating depth and revealed an assortment of tableaux; took me on journeys of discovery to cities such as Baghdad and Basra and, if I was lucky: to far-off Samarkand.

One evening, when Aunt Laura spent longer than usual in the kitchen, I fell asleep among the soft cushions on the sofa. I was woken by my aunt shaking me gently. Other children might wake with a start and imagine that they had just grown in their sleep. I tended, instead, to wake with a shudder. As an adult it struck me that this was not unlike the spasms of an orgasm. On this occasion, too, that deep tremor ran through me from top to toe, as if all the molecules in my body were swapping places. I looked around me. Everything was different. The same, but altered. When I had switched out the light there had been a platter of oranges on the table. Now the dish was piled high with lemons, inflamingly yellow and with that little tip which, later in life, always made me think of a girl’s breast. When I had last seen Aunt Laura in the kitchen, she had been wearing a gold sea-horse on a chain around her neck, a piece of jewellery she claimed was made from the wedding rings of men with whom she had slept. But now a dolphin dangled before my eyes.

I said nothing. Not because I was not sure, but because I was scared. The Jonas I had now become had more to him than the Jonas who had fallen asleep — whatever had happened. There was much to suggest that whatever I had, until then, taken to be myself was only a fragment of a much larger whole. Amid all my fear and confusion, however, I also detected another, conflicting emotion: one of wild excitement.

It is tempting to dismiss all of this as no more than a fanciful childish or youthful daydream. Nevertheless, for years it coloured my life; I have no wish to deny it. The same went for my suspicion that the pressure I occasionally felt, that sense of being unfolded, was connected to something else. For, while my brother Daniel had a constant fixation with soul, I let myself be seduced, possibly as a protest, by a rival concept within those same hazy and exalted spheres. Spirit. I would not be surprised if that was why we ended up in such different walks of life, despite having one lowest common denominator: the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin’s impassioned rendering of ‘Spirit in the Dark’, more especially the live version, sung with Ray Charles — Aretha’s ecstatic scream of ‘Don’t do it to me!’ left us both with goosebumps on our inner thighs. This was soul and spirit in perfect harmony.

I automatically pricked up my ears at any mention of the phenomenon. I cherished words such as ‘spirited’ and ‘inspirit’. I understood that life and spirit were inextricably bound up with one another. Always, without thinking about it, I would say inspire rather than inhale. I felt the same about breathing as other people did about the heart or the pulse. Even as a small child I would find myself taking big, deep breaths, in and out, as if performing an exercise of some sort; as if I instinctively knew that I had not mastered this vital function, nay, this art. Whenever I saw pictures of the lungs they reminded me of sails, two spinnakers designed to speed us along. I would eventually come to have great respect for the wise men of other cultures who called attention to the link between breathing and thinking, between breathing and our potential for reaching unknown areas of the mind.

One thing became clear to me very early on: in order to unfold as a person, I had to have spirit. Once, when I was in elementary school, I went into town with my father. We were strolling along the dockside at Pipervika — we had just bought a bag of shrimps from one of the boats tied up there — when we were witness to a demonstration down by Hønnørbrygga of a new type of life-raft. At first I could make nothing of it. The raft was just a small white egg, a glass-fibre pod with two halves to it. But when the container was thrown into the water and a man tugged on a cord a raft proceeded to swell out of the egg, truly to unfold, black and orange, like a brightly hued bird emerging from a conjuror’s hand. It must have been very closely packed, because it was big. Our curiosity aroused, we moved closer and heard a man saying that there was a gas cylinder inside the pod. The cord was attached to a trigger which punctured a membrane inside the cylinder, thus releasing air into the raft and inflating it. ‘Do we have a cylinder like that inside us,’ I asked my father. I think there was a hopeful note in my voice.

In ancient languages such as Hebrew and Greek, the word for spirit and wind is the same. I have the feeling that this may explain my weakness for the organ, an instrument which so perfectly combines these two words, converting wind into spirit. My father often said to me: ‘Playing the organ, Jonas, that’s truly inspired work.’

Not until long after my father’s funeral did my mother tell us what she had done when she got the urn back from the crematorium. She took some of the ashes and put them into five separate, airtight envelopes which she addressed to five organists in different parts of Norway, all of them good colleagues and friends of Haakon Hansen who had agreed to carry out the Grorud organist’s wishes and his plan. These five went to their respective organs and poured the ashes down into one of the large pipes producing the deepest pedal notes, and at a prearranged moment they began, simultaneously, to play the same Bach prelude. ‘That was your father’s real funeral,’ my mother told me. I saw it more as a resurrection. He had been assured of a kind of eternal life. The thought appealed to me: my father lying there in different parts of Norway, vibrating in the air from his favourite chords, hovering on that exquisite music. As spirit.

The aim was not, of course, to become spirit. The aim was to become more of a person. I often thought of that incident when I saved a little child from drowning and how, afterwards, completely disillusioned, I had felt that my mission in life had been accomplished, that my life had, as it were, been fulfilled. It took a while for me to realise that this, all the practising, had simply been a preparation, training for a more difficult task: that of being filled with spirit. In order to expand and grow. All of the diving, those many minutes under water, had simply been an excuse for learning to control my respiration. My diving was a testimony to my powerful lust for life.

I had this same feeling as I swam down into the depths of Svarttjern, frantically diving after Margrete’s gold bracelet. My ability to hold my breath was finally to come into its own. This was what I had been training for. I had been training to win Margrete. I had been training to save my own life.

Every time I surfaced her eyes met mine, questioningly. Even from a distance I saw those eyes only as pupils — like deep, black pools. I had the feeling that I was as much diving in them, after the gold in them; that this was also my first attempt to get to the bottom of her. Of Margrete’s ‘Persian beauty’. She sat perfectly still, said not a word, and yet, with her eyes she was saying: How long can you hold your breath for me?

I took a rest then dived again, determined to beat every record going. I slipped down into the darkness, pinched my nose and blew through my mouth, equalising the pressure. Five metres down the water was noticeably cooler. I could not see a thing. But it was as if I was being given a warning: this is what life with her will be like, a long dive into the darkness, hunting for gold.

I noticed that my thoughts ran along different lines when I was underwater. It may have had something to do with the pressure, the buoyancy, the lack of oxygen. I acquired second sight. Down in the darkness I saw images from a whole future drift past my eyes, as if the water was developing fluid. I saw a golden elephant, a long-playing record, a dangerous swim, two adults in soft spring rain, a doctor’s white coat, a flat full of things from all over the world, a woman banging her head against a wall, a child, a television studio. And finally I saw a gun.

I had to hunt for the bracelet with the hand that was not holding my nose. I felt about in the most likely spot, directly below the knoll she had jumped off several times. Despite the darkness I swam with my eyes open, as if I thought it must be possible to discern a smouldering glimmer of gold. A glimmer of love, I thought feverishly. I could not see a thing. I was reduced to groping with my fingers. My lungs were starting to ache. My ears hurt. I thought of van Gogh. I thought I saw tropical fish glide by, like the ones in the television Interlude. I would not be able to take it much longer. A shiver ran through me. What if she had taken off the bracelet on purpose? What if she had wanted to test the boys, find out which of them was most deserving of her. Which one was worthy. Was she liable to do something like that? Would she be willing to sacrifice her mother’s expensive bracelet even if she received no answer.

I ran my hands over the bottom, centimetre by centimetre. I thought of the tales from the Arabian Nights which Rakel had read aloud to Daniel and I when we were small, particularly of those stories in which a character came across a ring embedded in the ground; and when he lifted the ring he raised a trapdoor, revealing stairs leading down into another world. Was it something like this I was searching for, without knowing it?

I have asked myself: what is the greatest driving force in my life? I think I know. It is the desire to work in depth. To invent something simple which would, nevertheless, have major consequences. Something along the lines of the wheel, the rudder, the stirrup. A new alphabet. To work at the most fundamental level. Like a power station deep inside a mountain. Lighting up cities far away. Being a spring which suddenly wells up and renders a desert fertile. Or being someone who shakes things up. Shakes up the classifications. Shakes the foundations. Like Samson toppling those pillars and bringing a whole heathen temple tumbling down. Being someone who splits open the shell we have built up around mankind.

I think that was why I loved diving. Diving down into the depths as I was doing now. I understood, somewhere in my subconscious, that this was not merely a search for a piece of jewellery, this was an undertaking which could lead to my making a fundamental discovery.

Even so, when I rose to the surface after one particularly gruelling dive, I was ready to give up. I ached all over. But as I gasped for breath I seemed to take in something else, something more: spirit. One more dive, I told myself. And as soon as my hand reached the bottom my fingers lighted on the circlet. I did not touch gold. I felt I was touching the future.

Later she presented me with a book. We were at her place, alone, in the villa down the road from the school. She wanted to give me something, the finest thing she could think of, as a thank-you for finding her bracelet. It was Victoria by Knut Hamsun. ‘It’s a love story,’ she said with a look which implied that that said it all. She gave me her own dog-eared copy. I liked the title, liked the association with victory. Too late I discovered that I ought to have perused more than the title of that novel. A lot of people have had their own personal experience of Victoria by Knut Hamsun, I’m sure, but none has been anything like mine.

She had pressed fresh orange juice and this she poured into two elegant wine glasses. We drank as one. I felt strange, as if she had stirred a magic powder into the drink. Then she kissed me for the first time. I felt even stranger. Filled with light. Filled. I could have drawn this conclusion at that moment, but I did not: it might be that what I called spirit was just another word for love.

Afterwards we sat in the garden, on a green lawn. I was feeling so lightheaded that I had to lie with my head in her lap. There was a sprinkler on the go. Opera music drifted from the house next door. I lay with my head in her lap. I could have lain there for the rest of my life. I looked down on myself from high in the air, saw myself lying there in a luxuriant garden with my head in a girl’s lap; I saw how lovely and how right it was, saw that this might even be what was known as working in depth.

Few triumphs in my life can compare with the moment when, with swelling heart, I clambered ashore and handed her the bracelet. We were alone at Svarttjern. We stood on the only rock still in the sun. Neither of us said anything. First she slipped the bracelet onto her wrist. The metal glowed against her skin. She gazed into my eyes and then she wrapped her arms around me. I stood there inside a circlet of gold. I looked up at the sky. I noticed that the clouds were moving faster, that something was happening to the weather, the whole atmosphere. The water was perfectly still, reflecting the dense, shadowy forest all around. For me Svarttjern would always be a sacred lake. She held me for a long time. No more than that. Just held me. I experienced some of the same pressure that I felt underwater, when I dived. She held me and I unfolded; I stood still, inside a circle of skin, and I was transformed. Being held by Margrete. If God gave me the chance to relive one thing in my life I would choose this: to be held by Margrete. Held, tight, long.

I was to make the acquaintance of this pressure in an embrace again, on a later occasion. That too began with a dive, but into a different body of water, a lagoon just off a small private beach on a tropical island. I was fraught with presentiment, fraught with expectancy; I had been staying at the home of a certain woman for three days and so far nothing had happened, I had hardly seen her. I whiled away the time by swimming, diving, holding my breath under water, still pursuing that old hobby. On the morning of the fourth day — I thought she had gone to work — I went snorkelling out on the coral reef. I was following a dense shoal of small fish along the reef when she suddenly came gliding towards me through the mint-green water, she too wearing a mask, as if I were a fish she wished to take a closer look at. Her hair streamed out behind her as she swam straight towards me, her breasts, barely contained by her low-cut bathing suit, looking heavy and commanding. I became rather shamefully aware of the way my eyes were being drawn to the cleft between them, while at the same time conscious of an unbearable pressure building up in my body, even though I was only a metre below the surface.

What is love? My escapades, though few, have been thought-provoking. One day, out of the blue, I received a letter bearing some strange and intriguing stamps. It was from Anna Ulrika Eyde, a girl I had known all through school, but with whom I had lost touch when she moved to England to study engineering. She was currently working on a bridge project on an island in the Indian Ocean and was actually inviting me to come and visit her. And stay at her place.

Anna Ulrika, or Ulla, was what you would call ugly, extraordinarily ugly, in fact. Although I would be more inclined to say: fascinatingly ugly. Her hideousness teetered on the brink of incomparable beauty. To be honest I think I was always a little besotted with her. We had dubbed her the Iron Woman, both because she was so unattractive and because as a little girl, unusually for her sex, she had had a Meccano set from which she created the most intricate — not to mention extremely impressive — constructions out of gleaming, perforated miniature girders. But the woman who came to meet me, years later, at Plaisance airport was surprisingly good-looking. Or, the word came to me right away: ‘striking’ — beautiful as only rather ugly girls can be; the sort who often become famous models. She seemed to have opened up a wing in her person that no one had known was there. She laughed at me; laughed at my evident surprise. The backsweep of her lips, in particular, was hard to ignore; she was so unexpectedly attractive that it made me uncomfortable.

For the first few days I was left to my own devices. Ulla worked for the contractors responsible for the building of a new bridge on the west side of the island. I took a break from diving in the lagoon to visit the island capital, saw the sights, strolled around the central market: you could buy absolutely everything there, from dried squid and herbs for treating asthma or a bad heart to models of pirate ships made out of tortoiseshell and objects for sacrificing to the gods. The most amazing item I came across, however, was a tattered old poster of Sonja Henie in the midst of a soaring split jump against a backdrop of snow-covered Alps. ‘Want to buy?’ the Hindu who owned the stall asked. ‘Very popular. American star. Danced like Shiva on the ice.’ I had to smile at this find. I was struck by the unreality of it, not least because of the cultural and geographical divide: a picture of skates and ice, here, in the middle of the tropics, where books rotted in the heat and humidity and I spent my afternoons lazing on the beach below the bougainvillea-framed bungalow which Ulla had rented close to the beautiful Grand Baie beach.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, she suddenly showed up in the water, or rather: under the water. Buxom and smiling. She had the day off, she explained as we floated on the surface. Might she be permitted to give me the grand tour?

We drove in her car through a landscape so green that all Norwegian notions of the concept ‘green’ seemed to fall short; the old Peugeot bowled along through Gauguin-hued mountains which took on new and fanciful forms with every turn of the road. Ulla showed me round a recently opened aquarium full of fish which made me think of all the women in brightly coloured saris whom we had passed along the way; knowing that I had just started studying architecture she took me to see some of the island’s bold new, ultra-modern hotels. We climbed the many steps up to a small candy-coloured Tamil temple set high on a ridge overlooking Quatre Bornes, one of the island’s main towns. And at all times: that involuntary sense of attraction, the pull of her lips.

Late in the afternoon, after several stops at places and buildings which struck me as being nothing so much as a series of contrasts, reflections of the country’s numerous ethnic groups and cultures, we came to a lake in the south of the island, Grand Bassin, a mirror-image of the sky amid all the greenery, a sacred lake, site of one of the annual Hindu festivals. Someone was in the process of planting fruit trees. Gradually, possibly due to the look in her eye, her eagerness, it dawned on me that it was not the country, the island, she was showing off to me, but herself. With everything she pointed out to me — boys selling ice cream from big cool boxes on the backs of bicycles, the falling blossom from the flame trees which in many places carpeted the road with red — and all the things she raved about, she was saying: just so, just as diverse, as multi-faceted, am I. And you never knew. She too, Anna Ulrika Eyde, the Iron Woman, was a tropical island in a foreign ocean, one which I had to dive after, discover. In taking me around the island she was also inviting me to uncover the unsuspected mountain formations and impenetrable plantations within her — her temples, her beaches, her reefs.

I stood wreathed in incense fumes, scanning the mirrored surface of the lake while, heedless of my presence, she took out a lipstick and ran it over those enticing lips, laying it on extra thick, as if inspired by the gaudy idols in the little, open-sided temples perched on stilts in the rolling countryside around the lake.

We drove on through fields full of sugar beet. She had suddenly gone quiet. I felt as though we were making our way through something sweet. On our way to something sweet. The green beet plants grew shoulder to shoulder, soon they would be as tall as the drifts at the sides of the roads on the mountain passes in Norway in the winter. But then the countryside opened out and the road wound uphill, into wild country. We pulled in at a lookout point, a lay-by with benches and tables.

From a paper bag she produced small, deep-fried chilli balls and a pineapple which, to my surprise, she proceeded to pare, cleanly and proficiently, slicing away the skin in a neat spiral with a knife that was almost as big as a machete. Before I could take in how she did it the fruit lay before me like a finely carved work of art, fresh and tangy, ready to eat. ‘I learned that from an old man on the beach,’ she informed me solemnly. I liked it: the contrast between the spicy bite of the little meatballs and the luscious fruit. I liked the way she handled that big knife. I liked the pressure she exerted. I liked the jolts of excitement that were running through me.

I admit it: there are few things I know less of than love. Sometimes I think about my sister, who went out with loads of boys. One of them was called Hans Christian. Rakel liked him a lot. But he wasn’t the only boy she fancied. Hans Christian was a truck driver; he had just bought a magnificent new trailer of which he was very proud. One evening he learned that Rakel was at the home of one of her other admirers — she had not yet decided which one to choose. He was so mad that he drove his new sixteen-ton trailer-truck into the garden of his rival and straight through the wall of the extension containing the bedroom. Although it has to be said that he had first checked that Rakel and the others were in the living room, watching TV. The bedroom extension and the double bed were completely wrecked, as was the truck. Rakel was so impressed by such red-hot determination that she married Hans Christian. ‘Believe it or not, but he has eyes as kind as Albert Schweitzer’s,’ she said. To me, however, his conduct in this matter was clear proof of the folly of love. Or its unfathomability.

What is love? Due to an unexpected letter I found myself, as if by magic, among rugged, sculptural mountains on a tropical island with Anna Ulrika Eyde. I savoured the taste of chilli and pineapple, my eyes fixed on her red lips. We were standing by the railing on the edge of a sheer drop into a deep gorge. We were so high up that we could look down on a kestrel swooping over the chasm. To our right a waterfall plunged into a narrow crevasse. ‘There’s nothing lovelier than falling water,’ she said. At the bottom, far below, a river meandered through billowing green jungle, on its way to the ocean. The sky was a clear blue. Again my eyes went to those red lips of hers, the half open blouse, the cleavage between her breasts, every bit as wild and precipitous as the chasm at our feet. Without warning, my body underwent a chemical change; it was as if a powerful pill had suddenly begun to take effect. At that same moment she turned and met my gaze. Her face was unrecognisable, swollen somehow. The next minute we were kissing. I had no chance to register what happened between the look and the kiss, it was explosive. We kissed, almost doing battle with our tongues. It tasted strong and sweet. We kissed as if our lives depended on it, body hard against body. I felt a tremendous pressure in my chest. I could have driven a truck through a wall. She smelled faintly, arousingly, of sweat, tasted of salt water, chilli and pineapple. I do not know how long we stood there kissing. It may have been a good while. I looked up and noticed dark clouds building up, as if the attraction we felt for one another had given echo in the weather. As if a storm had been lying out at sea and we, with our bodies, had drawn it towards land. If, that is, it was not simply a projection of the charged atmosphere between us. The palm leaves scraped against one another in the wind, emitting a hollow, plastic rustle. We had only just emerged from something akin to a maelstrom, gasping for breath, when the first raindrops fell, slowly, far apart: large, glittering, like a crystalline net. For a split-second I had the impression that I could see the whole island, the whole world, including her and me, in every drop.

She took me by the hand and ran laughing towards the car, opened the door to the back seat. We fell upon one another, groping blindly, found each other’s mouths again, kissed, licked, bit, kissed, literally took leave of our senses. I pawed at her breasts like a teenager while her hand felt hungrily for my crotch. It was a bit like what as boys we had called petting, heavy petting. I have ridden in similar old Peugeots since then, mainly in a number of Third World countries, and I have never been able to sit there on those rather lumpy, plastic-covered seats, or look at the rickety chrome door-handles — those that aren’t actually missing — the ashtrays, the distinctive dashboard, without thinking of Ulla and petting.

Something was happening outside, in line, as it were, with what we were up to in the car, or rather: the weather appeared always to be one step behind us, mimicking our ardour. In between all the kissing and feeling up I managed to take in the fact that the wind had risen dangerously and the palms were taking on the form of inside-out umbrellas. She tore off her blouse and bra, amid much loud and impatient moaning, wriggled out of her skirt, then her panties, tossed these garments into the air as large leaves began to swirl past outside; she arched her back with excitement, thrusting her pelvis into my face, offering herself like a piece of peeled fruit, the flesh glistening. The rain outside increased to a torrential downpour. Through the window I caught an occasional glimpse of the surrounding countryside, which now had the look of an underwater scene, as if we were inside a bubble that had been lowered into the ocean — I almost expected to see fish swimming past; and what I saw between her legs had also acquired something of a marine cast, reminiscent of sea anemones, coral reefs. I felt — there, inside the car — the same heavy pressure as when I went diving. I had the weird notion that this must have summoned up a depression, that all of this was my fault. It was the very end of the cyclone season, no warnings had been issued, and yet this, the tumult outside, had all the makings of a cyclone, the sort of cyclone which, at its height, could cut the sugar harvest in half. Rain streamed down the windows, making it impossible for us to see out, it was like being in a car-wash. Side by side with, or underlying, her desire, Ulla seemed to have a fascination with the power of the rainstorm, as if she drew energy, an even greater sexual charge, from the water pelting down, striking the car roof with a sound like the drumming of small, galloping hooves. I am not certain, but it may even have been here that she had the crucial flash of inspiration which, some years later, would find artistic expression. Ulla turned to making fountains, monumental works; she became an internationally renowned and much sought-after fountain designer, an artist who married the soft with the hard, moisture with steel, water with stone, the softly purling with the rigidly erect. She was intrigued with the possibilities of building such fountains in deserts and received commissions to do just that, primarily from wealthy Arabs, people with a reverence for water. Ulla made a fortune from water, from her ability to work on the borderline between engineering and art, her knowledge of the power and the beauty of falling water.

She must have been sunbathing in her swimming costume; her body was completely white, while her limbs and face were brown; she appeared to be lifting a torso up to me, or at least, I remember thinking of armour, that this, the white section of her body was an impenetrable carapace, something of which I knew nothing, even though I was well into my twenties. She spread her legs. I had the impression of something swollen and inflamed, as though she had applied lipstick there too. I had never done this before, she helped me by putting her hands at the back of my neck and drawing my head down to her fragrant and moistly glistening vulva. I licked those lips, poked my tongue inside, the rain poured down, drummed on the roof, a stray branch hit the bonnet with a bang, she hardly noticed, I too was in a daze, only half aware of what was going on. But when the lightning began to fork across the sky and the thunder made the ground shake — the car was basically sent flying, it hovered in mid-air — I started to worry, as though I were half expecting us to collide, partly because at that moment her body began to writhe uncontrollably. She came — she came to the accompaniment of a rending bolt of lightning and a piercing scream which passed over into a stream of incomprehensible babble, then she burst into floods of tears, all while we were on the point of being engulfed by water and shaken to bits by thunderclaps. ‘Where are you?’ she sobbed, grabbing at me, trying to pull me down, pull me inside her. And just as I was thinking: I’ve waited long enough, I’ve waited a damn sight more than long enough — which is to say, just before I gave in, lifted her up onto my lap, slid her down over me — I realised, with another part of myself that we would be wiped out by a natural disaster if I were to fulfil my intent, that only restraint on my part could prevent the cyclone from sweeping full force across the island, and I pulled away from her with a grunt of disappointment, coupled with a sense of truly having saved our lives.

Why did I hesitate back then? It certainly was not because — to use a Freudian cliché — I wished to sublimate my lust. I think I may have had some inkling, in the grip of desire though I was, that it was really supposed to be different. That even sex, for all the indescribable pleasure it gave, ought to be different. Better. Even better. I was about to say: higher. In the same way as I wrestled with thoughts concerning suppressed sides of my nature, so I knew, or suspected, that not even in the sexual sphere could we realise our true potential, stand upright, as it were. What if human sexuality was still at the reptile stage? Because there was no denying: despite five thousand years of civilisation, sex did not seem to have moved on at all. Of all the arts, the sexual act was the least evolved. While painting had had its Rembrandt, its Monet, the art of love was still stuck in the Stone Age. For a long time I did not know what to think about it, this restraint I displayed in the final instance with women. I do not believe it did me any harm, though. Not until I met Margrete when I was a grown man, did I see everything — including this — with fresh eyes.

Only seconds later the rain stopped, leaving behind it the same sense of release as when a drum roll, like a crescendo in the subconscious, suddenly ceases. The wind subsided. We — she also — came to our senses with the same air of bewilderment as people woken by a hypnotist. We stared at one another, or quickly looked away from one another, shyly almost, before opening the doors and clambering, all but tumbling, out of the car, out into the sunlight which streamed unexpectedly and with added intensity down over a strangely sodden landscape, anyone would have thought the whole countryside had had an orgasm. The air was searingly fresh, it reminded me of my childhood and the smell of Granny’s tube of Mentholatum.

I never did find out what had actually happened. Nor could the newspapers provide any explanation for the sudden storm. That was sex with a woman for you, I told myself. A tropical island in a foreign ocean. A clip round the ear from a cyclone. Forces over which we had no control, would never have control. I glanced round about, feeling as though I ought to be happy to have survived. Not the cyclone, but the amatory eruption.

I eyed her up and down. Her face seemed distorted, her mascara had run, her lipstick was smeared. I was glad I could not see myself. I was sure that more powerful forces had been at work inside the car than out — and that despite the fact that I could see the devastation all around me, the sturdy broken branches strewn on the ground, as if a giant had wandered past.

On the plane home, perhaps because I was seeing the topography of the island from high above, I could not help wondering about the energy I had discerned in her orgasm. That glimpse of something exceedingly powerful. And somehow circular, like a cyclone. Since then I have come to the conclusion that my own very best orgasms could also be described in terms of a circle, if not quite in the same way. I think of Granny’s crystal chandelier, that starry firmament in miniature; I think of the times when I stood almost right inside it. For me this is the only experience that comes anywhere close to reflecting the shattering beauty and luminescence, not to mention the wealth of imagery, inherent in an orgasm. Although this could also have something to do with the fact that I was surrounded on all sides by those glittering crystals the first time I saw Margrete. Saw her properly.

As a child, standing on the stepladder in Granny’s flat, with my head stuck inside the chandelier, I often had a sense of being strangely powerful, invincible. That I was what I sometimes suspected myself to be: a wonder. I sensed that the rays of light issuing from all those crystals had a focal point of sorts at the very spot from which my thoughts sprang. This had an effect on my brain. Associations shot out in all directions. The prisms appeared to refract my thoughts in the same way that they refracted the light. A thought would occur to me and in next to no time it would have split into seven, and each of these seven would be split by another crystal, and so on. I wished that I could take the chandelier to school, that I could stick my head inside it every time I had to answer a difficult question. ‘Jonas, what do we mean by democracy?’ ‘Wait a minute, miss. Let me just slip on my crystal crown.’ It would turn me into a wise man. I wondered whether people, scientists or whoever, were aware of this: that they might find answers to all their problems if they stuck their heads inside just such a chandelier.

The August day when I saw my love, really saw Margrete for the first time, I was standing on the stepladder under the crystal tree. We had finished giving it its annual clean. The sitting room smelled of soft soap and the walls were patterned with light. I only had a couple of the nethermost rings on the spiked base left to fill. And Granny had found one crystal droplet which we had forgotten, it was cut like a precious gem. I was too busy figuring out where to hang it to hear anyone knocking or ringing the bell. I was standing with my head stuck way up inside the chandelier, searching for the eyelet through which to thread the hook. I did not notice her going into the hall to answer the door. I gave a start when I became aware of the sitting-room door opening and heard someone say: ‘Jonas?’

I saw nothing but a shower of sparks, a myriad rainbows, reflected light. And in the midst of all this, a figure. I moved down a step, treading halfway out of the chandelier. And, maybe because I was shy, or speechless with confusion, I held the crystal droplet up to my eye, as if wishing to hide behind it, use it as a mask. I saw everything through it. I saw the sitting room and the open door. And I saw her. Except that there was not one figure but seven. I could see them quite distinctly when I held the droplet right up close to my eye, like a monocle. Seven people, one in the middle and six in a circle round about it. I saw who it was. It was Margrete. A princess.

This thought was not simply plucked out of thin air. Whenever we washed the prisms, Granny had to recount the fascinating history of the chandelier. Because it had hung in the Royal Palace, the very building that I passed on my way to Oscars gate. I was not surprised. The chandelier was so magnificent that it could only have come from there. A lot of the crystals, purchased in Berlin, were removed and sold at auction at the turn of the century, when the Palace switched to electric lighting. ‘And this,’ Granny said, pointing, ‘I came by in a roundabout way. Spoils of war.’

I gathered that it had belonged to her husband. And that subject, I mean that of the man who came into her life during the war, after Grandpa’s death, was one on which I never touched, because then I would simply have to listen to her ranting on about Churchill for hours. ‘It hung in the Queen’s Chambers, in the Yellow Cabinet,’ Granny said, always with a melodramatic widening of her eyes. Those terms, the Queen’s Chambers and the Yellow Cabinet made me tingle all over. I could imagine nothing finer, except perhaps for it to have hung in the Queen’s Bedchamber. Because I often sat staring up at the chandelier. If I stared hard enough I could convince myself that I saw pictures in those small glass pendants, especially when Granny played Strauss waltzes on the gramophone; scenes which had been stored up inside them and now presented themselves to me, images of royal personages and their guests amidst furniture made from jacaranda wood and walls covered in yellow silk damask. If I tried really hard, peered for long enough into the biggest crystals, I could even see pictures of the balls at the Palace.

And now here was Margrete, standing on the threshold of the Queen’s Chambers as if this was her natural and rightful place. I was surprised. I had never thought she would come. Two days earlier I had dived into Svarttjern and she had put her arms around me. And yet I had hardly dared speak to her when we walked out of the school gates the day before. I had said I was going to see my grandmother the next day. She had asked where she lived. I mentioned the address, Oscars gate. ‘Why don’t you come over,’ I had said, knowing that that would never happen. ‘What if I did come,’ she had said. ‘Come,’ I had said. ‘Won’t you come?’

And she had come. Found me in my hideaway. Suddenly she was just there, filling the doorway, filling the crystal droplet in front of my eye. Standing there alone, or all together.

To view one’s beloved through a crystal. I wish everyone could have that same experience. It was so luminous, so scintillating, so magical, and as such it was a true reflection of the emotions roiling inside me. I told myself that it was probably the lead in the crystal that lent this image such weight, made it so unforgettable. And often in the weeks ahead — not because of any prisms, but because I was in love — I would find myself seeing her in this same way, even when she was simply standing, say, in the playground: surrounded by a rainbowed aura.

‘Margrete,’ was all I said, the word barely audible. I knocked into some crystals. They tinkled like tiny bells.

‘Jonas,’ she said again and laughed. ‘You look like a king with the world’s biggest crown!’

‘Who’s this?’ my grandmother whispered to me.

‘I’m his girlfriend,’ Margrete said.

I had not asked her. But now it was official. We were boyfriend and girlfriend. That was always her way. She cut through all the chit-chat and formalities. You saw ghosts and she took you to China. She walked through a door and said things straight out.

Up on the stepladder I felt the chandelier lose a little of its lustre, as if it had at long last met its match. I realised what it was that this wondrous object lacked: humanity. Life. Margrete could be said to have invaded my brittle world of glass and light, my blessed symmetry. With Margrete came disorder.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she laughed.

But I just went on standing, dumbstruck, under the chandelier, looking at her. In the silence all that could be heard was the faintest tinkling of the glass pendants. I held a crystal droplet up in front of my face, a large teardrop and endeavoured to take her in with my eyes. I did not know it, but I was also looking into the future.

It has occurred to me that I ought to have been looking at her through tears many years later, in Ullevål Garden City, when she was kneeling on the bed, steadily banging her head against the wall. Naked, heart-rendingly exposed somehow. But I merely stood there watching, still clutching the handle of a stupid mug of iced tea. I stood there quietly, I too naked, but with all my wits about me, with no excuse, and watched Margrete Boeck, my wife-to-be, banging her head against a wall. I stood there looking at her, as dumbstruck, as nonplussed, as I had been that time in Granny’s sitting room. In my head I heard what might have been the tinkling of the crystals on a chandelier. What she was banging off the wall was every bit as fragile. But I knew that this was infinitely more complicated. So inconceivably much more precious and beautiful.

Why did she do it?

This was not like Margrete. The Margrete I had come to know after we met up again was, in fact, really quite the opposite. I often caught myself marvelling at her conscious presence in the moment, her appetite for life. She would wander about in the mornings with almost unashamed contentment written all over her. As if it was enough simply to draw breath. That was her. Euphoric, delighted just to be alive. I could stand, lost in wonder, in the evening or as night drew on, watching her as she sat on the terrace, with or without a glass of wine, surveying the apple trees in the garden; enviously I would contemplate her blissful features, the way she shut her eyes and savoured the moment. I felt that I was witnessing sheer, unadulterated, incomprehensible joy.

She was strong too. From the moment I met her in elementary school I had viewed her as being much stronger than me. She also possessed what I would call a jade-like quality: in a dim light that partly translucent, partly impenetrable side of her shone through. At such times her eyes had an even richer golden glow to them. You had a sense of her depth, of that rare inner strength. I always felt that she was the sort of person who would survive in a concentration camp.

And so, when I found her kneeling on the bed, banging her head off the wall, I thought she was larking about; I thought it was some sort of a joke, some symbolic act which I was supposed to interpret — a bit like playing charades, when you have to mime a song title and your team has to guess what it is. If I could just say the magic words she would stop. I stood in a bedroom in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched a woman — a woman whom, what is more, I loved — pounding her head against the wall, with a thud that was more soft than hard. I glanced down, as if looking for help, into the mug of iced tea, to where the wheels of the two lemon slices twirled each in their own direction. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She simply persisted in that mesmerising action, as regular as a pendulum. ‘Margrete, what’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Stop it, please.’

I have a wise daughter. She has set up her own company, inspired by the belief that we keep coming up with more and more ingenious methods of communication, but with less idea than ever before of what to say, what to communicate.

Margrete went on pounding her head against the wall. The thought flashed through my mind that this meant trouble. That I was going to become embroiled in some immensely complicated situation. And this was not a good time. In fact it was, to put it mildly, a very bad time. I had worries enough of my own. For weeks I had been agonising over whether to abandon Project X. This sight that I beheld, Margrete’s soft skull striking the wall again and again was like hearing a knock at the door when you absolutely do not wish to be disturbed.

And beneath all this: why was I surprised? After all, from the moment I saw her through my crystal monocle I had known that she was many. Or greater. She reminded me of Aunt Laura’s flat: viewed from the outside it consisted of four rooms, but when you stepped inside it seemed to go on forever. To begin with, just after we met one another again, every time we went out for a meal or had a drink in one of the innumerable new bars that opened up around that time, I felt as though I had to ditch my previous impression of her and start from scratch. She kept displaying different facets of herself. I had merely been spared seeing this side of her till now.

Or at least, there had been an incident, earlier on. It may have been a warning. We had been sitting at the piano, playing a Mozart sonata four-handed. Is that something which should give me pause for thought, I wonder: that she liked Mozart best, while I liked Bach? Then, all of a sudden, she slid off the bench and burst into tears. No ordinary crying fit, this, but an abrupt, loud and totally despairing fit of weeping. She crumpled up on the floor in the same position that Muslims adopt when they pray, rocking backwards and forwards. I felt shaken and helpless. It was the most harrowing sight. But when I cautiously knelt down, put my arm around her and asked her what was the matter, all she said, through her sobs, was: ‘I love you so much.’ I assumed, therefore, that she had been moved by the Mozart piece we had been playing, that sparkling sonata. And I left it at that. It was so typical of her, to burst into tears at the thought of us, two sweethearts, sitting side by side and managing with our four hands to produce that carefree music. It occurred to me that she must have seen it as a harmonious foretaste, a sign of how happy we would be together.

But this was something else, this was worse, this went deeper: to bang your precious head off a wall, as if intent on smashing it or ridding yourself of something that was eating away at you in there. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She seemed somehow heavy. It crossed my mind that Margrete was also trying to drive a truck through a wall. That she was doing this out of love for me. It was, nonetheless, madness. In my eyes. Something from which I backed away. I had no wish to be confronted with this kind of love. It scared me. I stayed where I was, losing patience now, watching her, watching her beat her head against the wall, slowly, but with uncanny steadiness. ‘Margrete?’ I said again. More sharply. No response. I felt as if I was standing a long way off. As if an impassable gulf stretched between me in the middle of the room and her on the bed. I, an erstwhile lifesaver, stood there and watched a person drowning, unable to lift a finger to help.

I cannot go on. I have to stop. I need to dwell on this contrast, this old lifeboat lying at the quayside in this quiet fjord. She walks past on the deck, smiles, hands me a cup of coffee, pretends not to see the notebook, the pen. Who is she? I have a feeling that she carries a dark burden of her own. After what she has experienced. Which goes beyond just about anything that is usually likely to befall a young person. Certainly, in the past — when she came to visit me — I occasionally used to pick up worrying signals. I keep catching myself studying her. I know that she also studies me. We have a tacit understanding. She always wears a black beret, prompting associations with guerrilla warfare and with art. It has become her trademark; thanks to her, more young Norwegians than ever now sport such headgear. I never tire of looking at her. She has a little flaw, a relatively big gap between her two front teeth, one which she has deliberately done nothing about. ‘In some African countries it would give me enormous cachet,’ she remarked on one occasion. It simply serves to render her appearance even more intriguing. She is, as one journalist put it, ‘made for television’.

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 — and 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?

It was Margrete who made me see that I was not only a wonder. I was also a fool.

At first I did not believe it possible; no one could be engulfed by darkness in such a bright room, certainly not after such incandescent lovemaking. It was as if she had drawn down a black blind inside herself. And a blind between us. It crossed my mind that she must have remembered something terribly sad. This was, as I say, at the time when she was doing her specialist training in skin disorders, including venereal diseases. She came across enough distressing cases, heard lots of disillusioning stories. For one crazy, almost grimly comic, moment I wondered whether she might be trying to test how much her skin could withstand. Or how thick-skinned she was.

One night, in the dark, she told me what had made her decide to become a doctor. She had actually had her heart set on becoming an actress. While living in Paris she was part of a travelling theatre group which staged dramatisations of episodes from The Mahabharata — Margrete often entertained me in bed with little stories from the Indian epic; I really enjoyed them, particularly the adventures of the hero Arjuna who was conceived through the offices of the god Indra. Then one of her girlfriends suddenly became seriously ill and died in terrible pain. The helplessness she had felt then, at her friend’s sickbed, made her decide to study medicine. To help people. Ease suffering. Margrete had a tendency to take things upon herself.

I did not know her. I had a suspicion that her past had been one long search for the next adrenalin rush. My lack of ardour was a constant source of annoyance to her. As was the fact that I was so reserved. ‘You’re not shy, you’re spineless,’ she said. I had been the baffled witness to her occasional need to scream from a mountaintop — quite literally, I mean: she would actually climb to the top of a mountain and scream for all she was worth. That was why I did not react right away to the head-banging. I was prepared to regard it as some necessary, harmless exercise.

She was a tireless advocate of the wisdom of feelings. ‘I feel sorry for you; you’re not in touch with your feelings,’ she often said to me. One evening I found her lying blubbering for no apparent reason, when I came to bed. I asked what was wrong, but received no answer. ‘Get a grip!’ I cried when she kept on sobbing. ‘Why should I?’ she asked, suddenly angry.

At such moments it was as if words failed her. ‘If something’s worrying you, won’t you please tell me what it is?’ I said on one of the few occasions when I found her like this. ‘There are no words to describe it,’ she had said. She had had this helpless, sorrowful look on her face. ‘It’s like it goes deeper than thought,’ she said. I could not understand it — this intelligent woman, a brilliant doctor in the making, all that reading — that she should be lost for words. But when I looked into her eyes, nor could my own thought penetrate the black depths of her pupils.

I stood there naked, holding a mug, watching her bang her head against the brick wall. I had the desire to translate this sight into something rational. But behind it all I knew: this was a scream. A scream for help disguised as a senseless action.

It is easy to say that I should have stopped her, that I should have done something, slipped a pillow, a fender, between the wall and her forehead, grabbed hold of her and pulled her away from there by force. But just at that moment that monotonous, destructive action seemed to have a paralyzing effect on me. Something about the unexpectedness of it — we had made love, I had only gone out to fetch a mug of iced tea — made me feel as though I had fallen into an ambush. I got it into my head that I had to stay perfectly still, to save anything even more awful from happening.

Or at least, that is not the whole truth. I know, I remember, that I had the rather cruel, almost delirious, thought that if I stopped her right now, if I threw myself between her and the wall, I would miss this chance of seeing her reveal a side of herself of which, until now I had known absolutely nothing. Just a few minutes ago I had asked her whether she was content. ‘Content?’ she had replied. ‘Not just content — happy.’ What if there was no contradiction between the fact of being happy and the act of beating one’s head against the wall as I had at first thought. What if, in her world, this was an expression of a deeper, logical deduction. As if she were saying: ‘I am happy and I slam my head against the wall.’ Or: ‘We all have our ways of generating ideas. You skip. I beat my head off the wall.’

Egoism disguised as impotence. I felt my thoughts shooting off in lots of directions at once, as if the sight of her had provoked an amazing shift in consciousness, so powerful that for a while I forgot about her and instead stood there with all of my attention focused inwards as I attempted to pursue as many as possible of the countless lines of thought which were branching outwards at breathtaking speed and which might, if I could only mobilise all of my powers, lead me to some unique flash of insight which would justify the fact that I did not intervene. She went on beating her brow against the white wall, as if trying to break through a barrier, using her head as a battering ram. I stayed where I was, mug in hand, staring at her and pursuing my own thoughts while, with another part of my brain — in a third corner of my mind I could not help admiring this facility — every now and again, mainly to salve my own conscience perhaps, saying her name: ‘Margrete’. It came out almost as a question, as if I was afraid of waking her. Something about the golden statuette in the room moved me to imagine, just for a second, that this might be some sort of religious ritual, much like making one’s devotions to a god in a temple. One which, in this case, would have to be akin to Kali, the goddess of destruction.

Oh yes, she knew how to destroy. I was only twelve years old when she all but broke me. I have always felt that that was why I was afraid of love. That that was why I did not dare to try again for such a long time. Or never dared. After all, how was it possible? How could anyone be so broken up inside, so miserable, simply for the want of a slender hand to hold, a mouth to which to press one’s lips, a body to put one’s arms around? The most powerful force on earth, so they say, is that created between two particles in an atom. I would venture to suggest, however, that no force on earth is greater than the love between an adolescent boy and girl.

Is there anything I remember more clearly than that day in seventh grade, the day she told me it was over? There had been an incident the week before when we were out skating. Since then she had acted differently towards me, seemed to be seeing me with fresh eyes. I hoped. I hoped, while waiting only for those awful words to fall.

They were uttered one afternoon. In the rain, an unseasonal downpour of the sort that all children hate because it ruins ski trails, snowmen, ski-jump hills, and the ice for skating, all of the best things about winter. It also ruined everything for me.

Through her most odious henchwoman — that in itself an ominous sign — I had received word that she wanted to meet me outside the Golden Elephant, the posh new restaurant in the shopping centre. In one final attack of wishful thinking I took her choice of meeting place as a sign that she wanted to make up. Well, why there of all places? The Golden Elephant was a new and exotic addition to Grorud; the lovely miniature elephants gave the illusion of a little piece of Asia in the middle of our little suburb. I even had the crazy idea that her father, a genteel diplomat, was going to take us out to dinner. But I was also afraid that the name, the Elephant, would remind Margrete of Thailand, Bangkok, a world of which I knew nothing, a standard I could never meet.

On top of everything else, she was late. She was never on time. Not as an adult either. At that particular moment it was sheer torture. To have to hang about waiting. But when she appeared, a quarter of an hour late, in all her ‘Persian’ beauty — her skin golden even at that time of year, late in the winter — I was not annoyed, only relieved. Or again: hopeful. Desperately hopeful. I feasted my eyes on the lithe body which I had seen turning cartwheels in the summer. And at the same time, through my mind flashed the thought: I don’t know her. I’ve been going out with her for almost a year and a half and I don’t know her, I have no idea what she is liable to do, or say. And even at a distance I could see that withdrawn look in her eyes.

I was to observe that same look on another occasion, as a grown man, at Villa Wergeland. One autumn. At night. She didn’t see me. I stood in the living-room doorway and regarded her where she sat, in a chair by the unlit hearth, lighting matches one after the other, a whole box of them; letting each match burn all the way down and not turning so much as a hair when it scorched her fingers, then tossing them, burnt out, into the fireplace. A totally dark room. Her eyes turned inward. Match after match. As if she were trying to light something inside herself.

I stood outside the Golden Elephant and watched her walking towards me. Should I have known, from seeing those seven figures in Granny’s crystal prism? That there was also a ruthless, a pitiless, a — why not say it — cruel Margrete?

But I knew nothing, I was simply terrified, trying to hold on to hope, but terrified. Shivering. Shaking. The way I did when I was really dreading something. A performance. A vaccination. The school dentist. Dr Mengele. Most of us have been there. And we all know the agony of it. To stand there and watch a girl walking towards you, a girl who embodies all of your adolescent yearnings, the sum of your tender, supremely vulnerable sensibilities. And then she stands in front of you, and then she looks at you, and then you swallow, and you try to say something, and not one word will come and then she says it, straight out, before you can open your mouth, with no beating about the bush: ‘It’s over. I’m breaking it off.’ She did not even glance away, she looked straight at me, straight into me with those remarkable eyes of hers, pupils floating in irises of gold. It seemed such a contradiction for two eyes as warm as those to belong to the utterer of such cold, such harsh words. She gave me a look that expunged all trace of doubt from my soul. It was over.

I was left with a question on my lips which I never got to ask, but which, standing in the rain outside the Golden Elephant, I formulated in my mind for the first time: Why did she do it? It is here that this whole story, everything I have written so far, has its start. Margrete must have known: in India, Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, is the god of storytelling.

I believe, all things considered, that this was the hardest blow I have ever been dealt. I believe, if I am honest, that not even the shock of finding her dead on the living-room floor many years later, was as bad. And the pain was of another order, much more all-embracing than it was that time when I broke my leg, when I lay writhing on the grass after being injured by a spiteful Lyn player. I, a past-master at holding my breath, found myself fighting for air. I knew what was happening: I was quite simply having problems with my respiration. I was losing my vital spark.

I stared at her black hair, her woolly hat. With eerie clarity I discerned every strand of hair, every drop of rain on the wool. I tried to think, tried to hold onto one thread, but it was all such a tangled mess, just one big agonising, indissoluble backlash.

And then she walked away. From me. The back of her jacket retreated out of the shopping centre, and was gone. I had been dumped. I was not worthy. This was in the days when everybody wore ridiculously long scarves; even wrapped twice round the neck they still hung to the hips. Once she was out of sight I pulled mine off as if it were a boa constrictor.

I was gasping for breath. The lungs, not the heart, are the seat of love. If I had not known it before I knew it now. I almost fainted, I was so horribly short of breath that I almost fainted. I thought I was going to die. And maybe I did. I died even though I was on my feet. I died as I watched Margrete’s back retreating.

I must touch, once again, on this mystery in my life. I would like to make it clear that it has nothing to do with megalomania; I write this in all humility, in sorrow almost, since I have understood so little of it. To be honest I have never dared try to get to the bottom of these thoughts and incidents.

I did my best to forget that time at Aunt Laura’s when I woke up to find that the oranges had been replaced by lemons. Or rather: I wished to forget. Not least because such an experience, ability, or whatever I ought to call it, seemed so utterly useless. But then a couple of years later, one summer, I had an even more curious experience. It was a Sunday morning, very early. I was playing by myself while I waited for some of the others to appear. I climbed a hill on the outskirts of the estate, one with lots of steep, rocky outcrops. It had rained during the night and the rock was slippy. I ventured beyond the fence skirting a drop which our parents deemed dangerous. And as I was standing there, feeling pretty pleased with myself and a bit miffed that there was no one there to marvel at my daredevil climbing feat, I lost my balance, fell over the edge and died. I say this without a qualm. I am convinced that I killed myself on that Sunday morning early when I was nine; I can even remember being aware, in a flash, in the hundredth of a second as my head struck the tarmac at the foot of the cliff, of embracing death. But when I opened my eyes I felt no pain. I put my hand to my head. I could detect no wound, no blood. I pulled myself to my feet and ran an eye over myself. I was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Not a scratch. Not a mark on my clothes even though the ground was damp and muddy. No one had seen me fall. Everybody was either sleeping or having breakfast. I squinted up at the cliff, it had to be a drop of at least eight or nine metres. I simply could not have survived such a fall.

There were times, later, when I felt that the same thing had happened to me again, although never under quite such dramatic circumstances. More often it was a case of waking up filled with the absolute certainty that I had been dead. And inseparable from this: the certainty that I was a different person from the one I had been before. I was the same, but with more to me. As if my original self had been expanded. All of my senses seemed to be fresher. Sharper. I do not know how to describe this sensation, the word death seems to be the only one that covers it.

Sometimes I did not even recognise the room in which I woke up, and it would take me some seconds to realise that I was in my own bedroom. The smell was different. As was the way the light fell on the wall. One morning I actually jumped when I walked into the kitchen. No one noticed anything. But it took me a while to figure out who these people were, that they were Mum and Dad, Rakel and Daniel.

Once, as if she had suddenly thought of it, my mother told me something, just a little story, which I tucked away in my memory. When she was in Akershus Hospital, riding out the last contractions, only seconds before I was born, the Oslo region was shaken by an earthquake. It was, by Norwegian standards, a big quake. Everyone who happened to be indoors at the time felt it. My mother told me this story almost as a joke. And she said no more about it. Nonetheless, I brooded over this piece of information. I even went so far as to check whether it was true. It was. I wondered, yearnfully almost — or fearfully — whether this shaking of the earth’s crust might have given rise to a loop in my genetic material, equipping me with some sort of attribute which few, if any, other people possessed. I imagined, feared, that I might be the first of a new — I will not call it mutant — branch of human development, that I had stumbled almost by accident upon a clue to the future nature of mankind. And although I fought against it, for many years I was visited by an all-pervading sense of a pressure inside me, of being unfolded, slowly. And yet I was unable to identify this possible new addition to my person or put it to use. In later years I would take comfort from the words of my old elementary school headmaster: ‘Four thousand years of civilisation and we still know next to nothing about human nature.’ I never told anyone about this feeling. No one would have understood me anyway.

I know that many people saw me as being a shy man. But I was not so much bashful as self-effacing. I wanted to stay out of sight. I did not want to run the risk of anyone discovering my secret. My confusion over an experience which I did not understand and my uncertainty as to where it might lead. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible. At school I raised my hand as seldom as I could in response to the teacher’s questions, and never if I was the only one who knew the answer. It may sound silly, but sometimes I had the urge to wear a wig in order to distract people’s attention. They would say: We’ve found you out. You wear a wig! And I could pretend to be suitably embarrassed. But I would have prevented them from exposing the real wig: the fact that I was not who I appeared to be — a possible wonder. I concealed my true identity in the same way as a Red Indian on an enemy tribe’s territory would cover up the tattoo which revealed him to be the son of a chief. I had to hide myself away, prepare myself, await my opportunity, wait for the time to be ripe, as they say. I just had to hope that at the end of this frustrating process, once I was fully evolved, a project would present itself. And it would seem so obvious: a unique opportunity, tailor-made, so to speak, for me, to allow me to work in depth.

It should come as no surprise to learn that hide-and-seek was my favourite game. I remember the glee of discovering a really good hiding place. But I also enjoyed being found. In the autumn, when we played hide-and-seek in the dark, my heart would pound with delight every time someone shone a torch beam on my face among the bushes and shouted: ‘I’ve found Jonas!’ There was nothing to beat it. I think I felt as if someone was saving me from myself.

I had the same feeling that day when Margrete showed up in Granny’s sitting room: that she had shone a torch beam on me, found me in one of my favourite hiding places. Saved me from — how can I put it — a false existence, delusions which, although I did not know it, could have been harmful to me. With Margrete, too, came something new. Till then I had believed that in order to unfold as a human being you had to have spirit. Now, thanks to Margrete, I realised that spirit was possibly just another word for love. I could feel it when she kissed me. Margrete could positively paper me with kisses. She could kiss my lips a hundred times and never tire of it. It was as if she were practising life-saving. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This was how love was supposed to be, I thought to myself. Close together. Face to face. Mouth to mouth. And each time she put her arms around me, kissed me, I felt a pull, a pressure, as though something lying tightly coiled inside me was starting to stir, to unfurl. Margrete helped me to see how the two main threads from my youth — my longing to be a lifesaver and my dream of becoming a discoverer — ran, or were woven, together. Because I discovered new life. Not new life in the universe, but on Earth. I found new life inside myself. I discovered that we human beings contain more life than we think.

So when Margrete walked out on me and I was left alone outside the Golden Elephant with my lungs aching, I was filled with a woeful certainty that great prospects were slipping away from me, that my vital spirit itself was forsaking me. I felt utterly dispirited. It is not, in fact, entirely unthinkable that I really did die.

I had one ray of hope. Faint, but still — a hope. ‘You’ll get a letter,’ she said as she turned to leave. A letter. Never have I looked forward so much to a letter. Because she had to tell me why she had done it. Give me a reason. Unless of course it was — oh, hope — a letter to say that she was sorry.

Waiting. Have I ever waited like that? I have never waited like that. For two weeks, waiting for a letter became a full-time occupation for me. During that time I would have had no trouble answering the question as to the meaning of life. The meaning of life was to wait. I do not recall whether I ate, or went to school, or did my homework, or slept; I remember only that I waited, that I was the waiting. I trembled at the thought of it, I dreaded it, longed for it, pictured words, expressions, phrases — even her handwriting, her distinctive ‘a’s — I saw them all so clearly. And underneath it all: the hope.

At long last a letter arrived. Or rather: a parcel. I received the collection slip from the post office on the same day that I was given the awful news — again by one of those ghastly friends of hers, a stuck-up bitch with buck teeth — that she had moved away, that she had left Norway again, gone off with her parents to a country so far away that I had scarcely heard of it, a country where her father, the bloody kidnapper, was to take up a post at the Norwegian embassy. The knowledge that there was a parcel at Grorud post office, waiting to be collected, made it easier for me to cope with the grief of her leaving. At least I would be enlightened as to what had happened, what had been going through her mind. And maybe she would have said something about coming back soon. About — oh, hope — missing me.

I collected the parcel. It was square in shape. And flat. It was an LP. I hunted through the wrappings again and again. No sheet of paper, no distinctive ‘a’s. Just that record. A parting gift, I thought. Only later did it dawn on me that it was a letter.

All I had managed to stammer out when we were standing outside The Golden Elephant was the start of the question that was on my lips: ‘But why … Why … Why …’

She had looked at me for a long time. ‘Idiot,’ she said. I realised that this was an answer. That one word. Idiot. It was a key. For me it has always been a key. I looked it up. It means an ignorant person.

The LP was Rubber Soul by the Beatles. I played it nonstop for a year. That record was like a chandelier, each song an arm, each verse a crystal droplet, each line a different colour. I would stand like — yes, an idiot, for hour after hour, watching the record spin round and round, hypnotised by the rainbow defining the radius of the black disc. Even today my eyes are liable to fill with tears, to the consternation and mystification of everyone around me, whenever I hear one of the songs from that album. All it takes is the intro to that played-to-death golden oldie ‘Michelle’, or the bouzouki-style guitar on ‘Girl’, and I have to sit down to save being laid flat out by all the emotions, the memories, that come tumbling over me.

I can safely say that I have never listened to any record, any bunch of songs, as closely as I did to that one. I attributed deeper meaning to those in many ways hopelessly banal lyrics than to, say, The Cantos by Ezra Pound. I looked for signs, messages, codes in each note, each instrument, each word, in between the words. Later, when I heard of people who tried to pick up hidden messages by playing Sergeant Pepper backwards with their fingers, not to mention those who pored over the cover and lyrics, searching for clues to the effect that Paul is dead, I was not the slightest bit surprised: I had long been familiar with such overheated modes of interpretation.

I am quite certain that no one in Norway knows as much about this particular record as I do. Rubber Soul may well be the only subject I have ever known anything at all about. For months, one of my chief pastimes involved learning absolutely everything I could, every little detail about this record. Such as the fact that Ringo played the Hammond organ on ‘I’m Looking Through You’; that ‘Norwegian Wood’ is a song about infidelity, not drugs; that Paul was given some help with the French words in ‘Michelle’ by Jan Vaughan, the wife of one of his friends. All the effort put into unearthing this information was part of an unconscious defence mechanism, a way of distracting myself, leaving me less time for pining. It reached the stage where I could have appeared on Double Your Money to answer questions on Rubber Soul. There was nothing I did not know: about the fuzz box attached to Paul’s bass for ‘Think For Yourself’, George Martin playing the mouth organ on ‘The Word’, the cowbell on ‘Drive My Car’ or the jazz chord on ‘Michelle’.

From a more objective point of view, it seems only fitting that my break-up with Margrete should be bound up with this music. Because as I began to get things into a broader perspective I realised that the Beatles had left a more indelible stamp on the sixties than all the assassinations and political debacles, or phenomena such as Woodstock and the rise of the Black Panthers. I venture to make this assertion on the grounds that neither the story of the group nor their music has ever lost its grip on people. The Beatles pervaded the consciousness of a whole generation. The Beatles were the sixties. The Beatles stand as the most powerful story of that decade. Their music was, still and all, the worthiest accompaniment I could have had to my grief, my anguish, my despair.

I am not sure, but I doubt if I have ever hurt as badly as I did during those first months after Margrete left me. This was also my earliest experience of a psychosomatic disorder, of being ill, feeling pain even when the doctor can find nothing wrong with you. I suddenly realised that it was possible: you could die of a broken heart. Strictly speaking, considering all I had learned about my own body, all its irrational responses, I really ought to have been better equipped to comprehend the anguish which Margrete suffered. The thought has also occurred to me — a dreadful thought, but I cannot rid myself of it: was my later blindness simply a form of revenge?

Broken-hearted as I was, I listened to the fourteen tracks on Rubber Soul with an intensity, a sensitivity, which might even have surprised Lennon and McCartney. To this day any one of those songs — ‘You Won’t See Me’, for instance — can still knock me off my feet. Not only my soul, my legs too turn to rubber. If I’m driving along in my car and the radio starts playing the ambiguous lyrics to ‘Drive My Car’ I have to pull into the side and stop. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I feel like curling up in the foetal position and dissolving into fits of sentimental sobbing. The beautiful vocal harmonies on ‘Nowhere Man’ hit all of my senses smack in the solar plexus. And every time I hear ‘Norwegian Wood’ the sitar playing sends me into a sort of trance, the real world seems somehow to dissolve, to melt into a succession of veils. It’s odd. I can listen, say, to Sibelius’s violin concerto, that intense, impassioned and in many ways stirring music, without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow. But those simple melodies: ‘Wait’, or ‘If I Needed Someone’, with their even simpler lyrics, can just about do for me, they are almost more than I can bear.

I have been thinking about what I wrote concerning the incident outside the restaurant, about losing my spirit. I have since come up with another explanation. She left me because I lacked spirit. Because I was incapable of communicating, did not speak her language. I deserved to be called an idiot. Well, it was obvious really: spirit also entailed being able to understand, having the gift of empathy. At any rate if my ever growing suspicion was correct; if, that is, spirit and love belonged to the same family of words.

In religious instruction classes at elementary school I was much taken with the description of the Holy Spirit. It was a real treat to hear our teacher relate, as only she could, the events of the Pentecost, when the disciples were endowed with the Holy Spirit and tongues of flame descended upon their heads. All at once they were able to speak and understand every language. I studied the illustration by Gustav Doré in the Family Bible. I could do better than that, I thought. I drew that same picture again and again: people with huge fires blazing on their heads. The teacher could not help laughing, but for me this was something to aim for, a sudden longing. How was I to acquit myself, how to utilise my gift, such that I too would be crowned with flame, become a torch. Be understood by all. Or, more importantly: understand others.

Maybe that was why I went into television: to be able to work with such a bright, such a far-reaching light — with fire, you might say. With communication. Spirit. I remember my father and what he said when he converted air into music at the organ. Now I could say the same thing myself: ‘My work has to do with true inspiration.’

Much has been said about the television series Thinking Big. Much has also gone unsaid. In 1989 the walls came tumbling down all across Europe. Even in the grey, dreary Soviet Union which I had once visited the colours began to peep through, those that had been lying dormant, in the underground at least. But that year also saw the fall — one almost as momentous — of a wall of sorts in Norway, in Festung Norwegen. The Thinking Big series made the country open up, if only for a very short while. People pointed this out, almost incredulously, in newspapers, discussed it on television. One comment from that year stuck in my mind, one of the greatest compliments I have ever received, as it happens: ‘These programmes have engendered a new mood of tolerance in Norway, they have led to a new mode of communication with the world around us. Only a truly inspired work could have such an effect.’

How paradoxical. So why all this difficulty in getting through to a person whom I only needed to put out my hand in order to touch.

I had been looking forward to working on Lars Skrefsrud, the thief and jailbird who became Norway’s most famous missionary. Not even the religious aspect of the subject could put me off. Television was the perfect medium for this. At the sight of satellite receivers — we see them everywhere we go here in the Sogn area too — I always find myself thinking that television is the religion of our times, that these dishes are the private domes under which people worship their new god. In more misanthropical moments I am inclined to feel that the TV room has become the poor man’s Nirvana, a place in which we can empty our heads of all thought, step into the Void, switch off completely. If that is so, then it is also the fault — and possibly the boon — of the programmes being shown. The majority of television channels see it as their job to induce people to cut off, and out, completely.

I do not know whether to be sorry or pleased that no one has ever spotted the numerous autobiographical elements which I introduced, unwittingly perhaps, into the Thinking Big series. Although some are impossible to detect, since in these instances I had to abandon my original idea. As in the programme on Skrefsrud. From the minute I started on the groundwork for the programme I knew what I wanted to have as its hub: a book. A volume which would perfectly encapsulate the essence of Lars Skrefsrud: a man of spirit, a man who could communicate. Because that is the basis of all missionary work. If you wish to talk to a stranger, to explain your beliefs to him, you have to learn to speak his language. Her language. Skrefsrud’s work in India represented a lifelong endeavour to understand other people’s beliefs, something which also required him to expose himself to their culture.

Lars Skrefsrud arrived in India in 1863. He had been sent out there by the Gossner Society, but after some years he left the mission station at Purulia along with Hans Peter Børresen from Denmark to go to the village of Benegaria in Santal Parganas, and there, among one of the indigenous tribes of India, they set up their own centre, now known simply as the Santal Mission. They also founded the Ebenezer mission station. Skrefsrud had found his purpose in life. To master the Santals’ language.

There are few programmes on which I have spent so much time and effort, and few programmes with which I have been less happy. This was one of those unnerving experiences which gave me to know that I was an idiot, not a wonder. Or more of an idiot than a wonder. In the end I had to construct the programme around the dramatisation of two crucial and telling events in the history of the Santal Mission: contrasting its tentative beginnings, the baptism of the first three Santals, with the consecration twenty-two years later of the new church at Ebenezer, a building capable of accommodating as many as three thousand. By this time, thousands of Santals had become Christians and the mission station resembled a small, well-tended version of Paradise. The television footage was certainly colourful enough — piquant, you might say, as a curry compared to the bland fare of the Norwegian state church — but I was not happy. The Skrefsrud programme was in all ways a stopgap solution. I derived no comfort from the record number of applications to the Missionary College that year. My aim had been to make a programme about a book, about one man’s struggle to understand and be understood. I had wanted to depict something which lies deep inside every human being: the dream of speaking the same language.

Lars Olsen from Skrefsrud was a man of words. The first thing he did when he was released from prison, in which he had made up his mind to become a missionary, was to buy French, Greek and Latin grammars. He was already fluent in German and English. At the Gossner Society’s school in Berlin he studied several other languages including Hebrew and, not least, Hindi. In India he taught himself to speak Bengali and later went on to learn four other Indian dialects. Although it is unlikely that he spoke more than forty languages, as some would have it, it would be no exaggeration to call him a linguistic genius. His command of foreign tongues extended all the way down to the most difficult part of all, the actual tone of voice.

It is not that long since I read through my notes for this programme, with a good deal of nostalgia. I was amazed to find how well I remembered the original concept, and particularly all the details relating to Skrefsrud’s efforts to give the Santals a written language — take, for example the mere fact that before anything else he had to create a system of characters, an alphabet of sorts, using fifty ‘letters’ to reproduce the various sounds of the language. Having done this, he then wrote a grammar, while at the same time constantly noting down new words. More and more words. Within a very short time he had collected over ten thousand words which he later passed on to another Norwegian missionary who, in due course, included them in a massive five-volume dictionary. Norwegians have accomplished many great deeds; Roald Amundsen was, for instance, the first to reach the South Pole, but as far as I am concerned — you’ll have to pardon my subjectivity — there can be no greater deed than that of bestowing a written language upon a people which has none of its own. I like to think of Skrefsrud standing in front of a mirror beside a Santal tribesman, pronouncing words, sounds; I picture him mimicking the Santal, before examining his larynx and vocal chords with a laryngoscope. In my mind’s eye I see him roaming the countryside, on horseback, on foot, on his month-long expeditions among the Santals, always with his notebook to hand.

But what intrigued me most was the grammar he wrote. Might this be the most important book written by a Norwegian? I had actually held it in my hands, an exquisite volume with blue covers tooled in gold. I had spent hours leafing through it. A Grammar of the Santhal Language. Published in Benares — that alone: Benares — in 1873. It was hard for me to conceive of such a feat. Skrefsrud believed that the uninitiated underestimated the Santals’ language. He maintained that it was one of the most complex and philosophical in the world, as sophisticated as Sanskrit. The verbs in particular had such an overwhelming wealth of different forms. I flicked through the pages, shaking my head in disbelief at the thought that any man could wrest the intricacies of a language from it in such a way. I came to the part on the verb tenses — there were no less than twenty-three of them. How could that be? I still remember some of them: the Optative, the General Incomplete Present, the Indecisive Pluperfect, the Inchoative Future, the Preliminary Expostulative, the Continuative Future. I leafed through this book, almost enamoured of it — so much so that I really felt like learning Santali.

Suddenly I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu. I had actually done something like this myself. Skrefsrud’s linguistic interpretations and his attempts to break through the Santals’ sound barrier had their parallel in my own life, in my year with Rubber Soul. I had received a communication from Margrete about a foreign language and had attempted to translate this album into something comprehensible, edifying even.

Where Skrefsrud succeeded I failed. That language remained a mystery to me.

I did not manage to realise my idea of making a programme about a man and a book. I still have a videotape on which I have preserved some lamentably bad clips from it. From these it is easy to see how difficult, not to say impossible, I found it to produce a memorable programme about a book. My powers of imagination laboured under my — then, dare I say — halting relationship with books. I was not well enough read, it was as simple as that.

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.