The Discoverer

Miranda

Why did she do it? I need to write more. About the middle part. About the longest seconds in my life. Evening. Late April. Returning home from a World’s Fair. I ask the driver to drop me off at the shopping centre. I want to walk the last bit of the way, I want to savour the smell of spring, I want to pass through pockets of air of varying temperatures. I breathe deep, fill my lungs as after a long dive. I think, I am sure, that I have never been so full of drive, of ideas, of a sheer desire to embrace life. So present in spirit — yes, that’s it.

I delighted in the fresh coolness on my brow after the heat in Spain; I savoured every sound, every millimetre of the scene, those familiar surroundings, trees with branches on which the leaves were already discernible. Greedily I inhaled the powerful odour of the soil. I walked along with my senses wide open. I caught the scent of bonfires. I heard the smack of a skipping rope. I knew it could not be right, but I had rediscovered my powers of thought, the sparkling exuberance of my childhood. A belief in the impossible. I had the urge to stop by the stream, sink my teeth into the bark of a pussy willow tree from which we used to make flutes. At one spot I actually left my suitcase standing in order to experience again the feel of a coltsfoot stalk against the skin of my finger, came very close, in fact, to prostrating myself — the way people do in ultra-romantic film scenes — and kissing the earth on which, by some cosmic will, I had been allowed to walk. And more than anything: I could not wait to see Margrete again, the mere thought of her face, her eyes, the gold glints in those eyes, sent warm jolts running through me. I was aching to tell her all about Seville, about my new plans; I was longing to hear her tell me what she had been up to, what Kristin had been up to; I was looking forward to sitting on the sofa, nuzzling her neck, listening to her talk, maybe while she peeled an orange in that ingenious way of hers, popping a wedge into my mouth and making some wry comment in response to my breathless description of a World’s Fair on the theme of ‘The Age of Discovery’, featuring life-size replicas of everything from Columbus’s ships to space shuttles. For Margrete, the woman I loved, the great discoveries began much closer to home, for example with an orange wedge in the mouth. ‘And feel this,’ she might say, guiding my hand roguishly to her shoulder. ‘This isn’t a collar-bone, it’s a clavicle — a “key-bone”. Go on, feel it.’

The spring was in my blood, I was all set to unfold. My head was full of colossal, and possibly dangerous, notions, Wagnerian ideas. I had regained my faith in a Project X. Once again I was going to be a mover in the deep, someone who could make people all over the country snap their chairs into the upright position before swivelling them round, as one, like tiny cogs in a gigantic mechanism, to face a screen which gave them, the whole national machine, a fresh injection of energy. For a few giddy seconds on the plane, with impressions of a hectic World’s Fair buzzing around in my head, I had had the feeling that I could make something no one had ever seen before; a television production which would represent a new synthesis of all knowledge and all art forms.

There was an explanation for my elation: several times in the course of the past year Margrete had criticised me. Tactfully, it’s true. I had brooded more on this than I cared to admit. I also knew what it was that she found hardest to forgive: I had succumbed to the temptation to become a TV host. I had been seduced by empty flattery. I had presented two of the light entertainment department’s main offerings, on Friday evenings one autumn and on Saturdays in another. A huge hit. Pages and pages about me in every weekly and weekend supplement going. But Margrete was right, it was mindless. And, what was worse, pointless. She reminded me of the Thinking Big series. One evening she pretty much forced me to watch the programme on Kirsten Flagstad again. By the end she was in tears. I asked her why. ‘Can’t you see how good it is?’ she said. ‘So why are you crying?’ I asked. ‘I’m crying because it lifts me up,’ she said.

I had thought a lot about this. Which is why I felt such eagerness now, as I tramped up the gravel driveway to the house, drinking in air suffused with spring. Margrete had asked me not to go. She had seemed somehow listless when I left. ‘I need you to hold me,’ she had said. But I had to go. She would forget, forgive me, when I came home inspired — inspirited — my head full of great plans. I had not, as she said, degenerated as a programme-maker. In this buoyant frame of mind, with a sense of being on the threshold of something totally new, I opened the living-room door and found her dead. And the world turned upside down.

I sit on deck, writing, as the Voyager glides along the peaceful green fjord. We pass few other craft. Mainly ferries and shuttle boats, the odd cruise ship, its loudspeakers blaring tinny facts across the water in three languages. Carl is sitting across from me. Just at this minute he is showing his brass figure of Ganesh to Kamala. It’s such a comical sight: this crop-headed, broad-shouldered bodyguard type holding out, tenderly almost, an object which is all but lost in his huge hand. It is shiny where his fingers have been rubbing at it in his pocket. I cannot hear what they are saying, but I think Kamala is telling him a story about the elephant-headed god, possibly something from The Mahabharata. Carl is all ears. Captivated. Everyone is captivated by Kamala. At one planning session the OAK Quartet were discussing the possibility of setting up ‘sites’ for users to visit like so-called ‘avatars’. With a little smile, and almost as a digression, Kamala treated them to a brief lecture on avatars in Hindu philosophy. That gave them food for thought.

Rakel is up aft with skipper Hanna. Benjamin is in the well, manning the tiller. He is wearing Kristin’s black beret and an expression worthy of Ghengis Khan himself.

A little while ago I experienced again that sensation of everything being turned upside down. We had just cast off, Fjærland was slipping away to stern. I was lying on the foredeck, peering over the bow. The smooth surface of the water reflected the surrounding scenery as perfectly as a mirror: the steep mountainsides bounding the narrow fjord, the snow on their tops, the sky and the clouds. I had an uncannily strong sense of being on an interface, of balancing on a knife-edge between two worlds, one real and one reversed. I thought: this feeling is the perfect encapsulation of my view of life. An existence characterised as much by artificiality as by reality. Then, all of a sudden, everything spun around. I had an utterly lifelike sensation of the world revolving. The next moment I had no idea where I was, in the real or in the reflected world. I had to shut my eyes, lay there just listening to the rush of the bow cutting through the water. When I opened my eyes I was once more lying safely in between, right on the interface.

Through the skylight I can see Kristin and Martin, still hard at work in the saloon. Their project keeps putting out new shoots. I have to smile at their almost ferocious zeal. And at the contrast in their appearances: it is like seeing a guerrilla leader deep in conversation with a Silicon Valley hacker disguised as a thief from Marrakesh. I can tell that she is in love with him.

Who is she? I have picked up snatches of locker-room stories that made my hair stand on end with worry. She has had her dark times, I think. But she has come through them. I do not know how.

The hardest part about being in prison was to know that I was missing out on the last stages of Kristin’s adolescence, the fact of not being there to experience her hundred and one ways of slamming a door. Her experiments with black nail polish. There was not much of that sort of thing when she came to see me. In short, I missed being able to take an active daily part in her upbringing.

Otherwise it soon became quite easy to keep up with her doings on the outside. I could read all about them in the newspapers. I am not thinking here of her television career. When she was only fifteen and still living with her grandmother, my mother, she won the Golden Mouse award for the best Norwegian homepage on the Internet, but it was through her music that the media first latched on to her. She became the lead singer with a band playing advanced techno. I could never make anything of it; let’s just say her music was a far cry from Rubber Soul. After her spell as a talk-show host and the whole TV circus thing, she joined a new young advertising agency and had a hand in several landmark campaigns, including one in which she painted a red nose on Che Guevara, thus inflaming the ulcers of the old ’68 generation — not to mention the Hitler moustache she stuck on the face of the peace-loving Mahatma Ghandi.

And it may well be the same people who are now fighting to give her work, competing for the unique expertise possessed by the OAK Quartet, a company working on the borderline between the multinational software and hardware corporations and Norwegian culture. One of the big television channels has already tried to buy the company. It doesn’t surprise me. Anyone can see that the OAK Quartet is on its way up, that it is starting to make its mark on the international scene. Which is actually no more surprising than the fact of a Norwegian firm of architects designing the new library in Alexandria.

More and more I can see what a clever idea it was to do their research for the Sognefjord project from a boat. This compels them to think of navigation on all levels, and not merely in an electronic space. I note the assurance with which they work their way along the fjord. How confidently, but unassumingly, they gain their bearings in the world. I believe this is how they envisage the product which they are developing — as a navigational tool for people who are curious. Not only about Sognefjord, but about things in general. They are working on a kind of astrolabe or a sextant which could, in principle, be employed within any sphere of existence.

One day, while we were sitting in the saloon eating curried pirogs, made by Martin and Kamala amid much hilarity, I told them, at Kristin’s request, about the Voyager mission, which is to say: the two space probes launched in 1977. I knew more about Voyager 2 which, having sailed past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — a tremendous navigational feat, this — had now left our solar system and was heading out into the far reaches of space. Although my astrophysics studies were only a blind, right from the start I had been fascinated by this project. In the primitive, but warm light of a paraffin lamp I told the crew on board their Norwegian sister ship some of the new things we had learned about the outer planets, thanks to the Voyager probes — like the fact that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, was volcanically active, or that Saturn had thousands of separate rings, the particles of which were held in place by ‘shepherd moons’. And then there was the unbelievably complex and varied surface of Miranda, one of Uranus’s moons. I could tell that my audience was astonished, although they had obviously heard of this before. Carl who, as well as Ganesh, always kept a little yellow notebook and a stub of pencil in his pocket, came over to me later, wanting to know more, particularly about the ‘message’ disc carried by both Voyager probes.

I told him what I knew. I never tire of thinking of this concept: a sort of gramophone record attached to each spaceship, containing greetings to any eventual extra-terrestrial civilisations. The people who made this had asked themselves the same questions as Bo Wang Lee had done: ‘What should we take with us?’ What should we present? And which of all the Earth’s sounds should we select? They had ended up with 118 pictures, all of which, in different ways, said something about mankind and its culture; these included diagrams of the DNA structure and of the human sex organs, but there too were photographs of fungi in a forest, a dancer in Bali and a classroom in Japan. Somewhere far beyond Pluto’s orbit there also drifted greetings in almost sixty different languages. ‘You could say that the Voyager disc is a World’s Fair shot into space,’ I said to Carl. ‘But first and foremost — obviously — it’s a message to mankind itself.’

The middle part. My homecoming from a World’s Fair. It is all there in those minutes. I remember how I paused outside the house. I stood there looking at, admiring, the bricks of the walls, the extension in Grorud granite; I feasted my eyes on the crocuses in the flower beds, the bare branches of the apple trees in the garden. I positively revelled in my own good fortune. For a second I could not believe that this was my home, this welcoming house, the warmth of the light beyond the gauzy white curtains covering the living-room window — all that was lacking was for her shadow to go gliding past.

I knew how I would find Margrete when I entered the living room. She would be writing letters. She almost always wrote letters in the evening, when she was not reading. And when she had finished a book she wrote letters non-stop. For her these two things went hand in hand, reading and writing. She used expensive pens and the finest quality writing paper; when we were out travelling she was always on the lookout for pretty envelopes and unusual paper. I often watched her on the sly when she was writing. Her face took on a different expression then, as if she were doing something requiring deep concentration. ‘I’m weaving,’ she would say. She said the same thing when she was reading: ‘I’m weaving.’ I had no idea what she put in her letters, mostly everyday stuff I guessed: quotes from books she had read, a verse of a poem. And she wrote in a hand which must have given the receiver as much pleasure as the actual contents. ‘Attractive handwriting is as important for a woman as beauty,’ she said once. It must have been an honour to receive a letter from Margrete. She wrote to her friends abroad on tissue-thin paper. Sometimes, if I was there, she would hold the paper up in front of her eyes. And I saw her face as if through a veil of script.

There was one evening when she had hung lots of Chinese lanterns around the terrace. We had had guests, they had just left and she was stretching out in a mahogany chair. The coloured lanterns made the house, made Grorud, look as if it lay under other skies. I thought of something, fetched a thick sheet of paper which I kept at the back of a cupboard. It was a large Chinese character, written — or painted — by Bo Wang Lee as a farewell present. I showed it to Margrete. ‘This means friendship, right?’ She considered it for some time. ‘This is the character for love,’ she said, her face bathed in the glow of the paper lanterns. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘The person who wrote this said it was the sign for friendship.’ She looked up at me, with a smile in her eyes. ‘That’s as may be,’ she said, ‘but this says “love”.’ She explained the intricate character to me, even showed me how the Chinese word for heart — four exquisite strokes, like chambers — lay in the middle of it, like a word within the word. ‘Love without heart is no love at all,’ she murmured, more to herself. Then she looked at me again. ‘Maybe there was something about the person who wrote this that you didn’t understand,’ Margrete said. She was right, of course. There was a lot I had not understood about Bo Wang Lee.

I opened the gate at the bottom of the drive with my heart hammering — like a man in love, I thought. I walked slowly up to the front door, with waves of warmer air wafting towards me, caressing my brow. I knew Kristin was at her grandmother’s, that we, Margrete and I, had the weekend to ourselves. To this day I can recall the distinctive sound of gravel under my shoes, a sound I have always liked and which, on this fragrant spring evening, felt especially good, as if each little stone were scrunching expectantly, welcoming me home.

And then, I open the door, step inside, put down my suitcase, walk into the living room — and there she is, Margrete, this precious person, lying dead in the middle of the room, shot, and not just shot, but shot through the heart.

What was my first impulse? I know no one will believe me, but my first impulse was to get out, fast, and shut the door behind me. Fast. I thought I had come to the wrong place. Not the wrong house, but the wrong reality.

One autumn, when I was a student and working on my Titanic Project X, I accepted an invitation — a rare exception, this — to a party. I do not know whether it was because I was tired, had eaten too little or been working too much, but that evening I had a very weird experience, one which I interpreted nonetheless as a sign that I was on the right track, that there really was something lying behind, beyond, just waiting for me. I did not know the people who were holding the party, presumably medical students or pharmacy undergrads: the pure alcohol was flowing freely, mixed with everything imaginable, from juice to the most sickly-sweet essences. There seemed to be about a hundred rooms in the flat, all painted white and almost bare of furniture. And in the background, throughout, the lazy sound of Billie Holiday singing. At one point, pretty late on, I set off down one of the long corridors. I was looking for the guys I had come with. I opened a door and stepped inside. And — I swear to God — I found myself in the Forum Romanum; which is to say: I had entered it at the corner closest to the Temple of Vespasian, and not only that, but I was in Roman times, people walked past dressed in togas and everything, although it might not have been Roman times, because there were other things there too, ultra-modern looking objects which were strange to me, I had no idea what they were. I have always regretted that I did not attempt to speak to someone, to ask, but I got such a fright that, more or less on instinct, I fled back out of the door, slamming it shut behind me, and hurried off down the corridor. Once I had calmed down I went back and opened the door again. Behind it now was a large, white-painted room and a couple having it off on a mattress in the corner, next to a Ludwig drum kit. I opened the other doors round about, but found only white rooms, sparsely furnished, and partygoers with glasses in their hands, standing around, flirting or discussing Schopenhauer. I know it sounds crazy, but it was not a dream, nor was it a hallucination.

After having stood — for I don’t know how long — outside, I opened the living-room door again. So great was my belief, or my hope, or my horror, that I fully expected another sight to meet my eyes: she would be sitting there, pen in hand, she would turn to me, smiling. But she was still lying on the floor, shot through the heart, just as dead. In my dressing gown. For ages I stood there, looking down at her, as if there was a tissue-thin sheet of paper lying on her face, covered in the loveliest handwriting. A letter to me.

We have reached Balestrand. We are moored right alongside the aquarium, at the mouth of the little Esefjord, surrounded by towering peaks: Vindreken, Tjuatoten, and in the middle Keipen — the ‘Rowlock’ — with its characteristic notched peak, with Gulleplet Crag in front of it. It is a breathtaking sight, even for a Norwegian used to such landscapes. Fruit trees in bloom at the feet of these sculpted, snow-capped massifs. I can well understand why the artists of the nineteenth century reached frantically for their brushes the moment they set eyes on this scene.

There was a letter waiting for me at the hotel reception desk. From Viktor Harlem, a friend from high school, now a name known to all of Norway. He knew I was coming here. It was nothing really, just a hello and a line from The Cantos by Ezra Pound: ‘And then went down to the ship …’ The others collected the company’s mail, forwarded to the local post office. I had noticed that they received amusing — and creative, also in their outward appearance — missives from all over the world. Benjamin immediately started clamouring for the stamps. The OAK Quartet think nothing of being in close contact with individuals, groups, with similar interests, in other countries. Without even being aware of it, Kristin and her friends tend to think in terms of categories which transcend national boundaries. In sailing the fjord they are also sailing all over the world. I like to think that they are in the process of founding a county within a virtual space, populated by ‘Sogn folk’ from every corner of the globe.

Kamala and I had decided to book in to Kvikne’s Hotel for the days when we were docked at Balestrand. Kamala wanted to stay in the old house, a grand and graceful, wooden, Swiss-style building overlooking the fjord. The manager gave us one of his best rooms, high up and with its own balcony. I thought at first this was for my sake. Then I realised it was for Kamala’s.

The most obliging manager also allowed Benjamin to pitch his well-used, twelve-man army tent on the lawn next to the hotel, just across from the little islet of Lausholmen. We gave him a hand. Benjamin is a nomad. As soon as his tent is up he is home. Benjamin. There’s a whole book right there. I often think about how mad I was when he was born. I was so upset that I spent years after that fuming with rage in a basement we called the Red Room. I pretended to be incensed by everything and everybody, when I was really only angry at myself. I abhorred my thoughtless act of sabotage, that imperceptible slit in a diaphragm. I was to blame for his birth. Sometimes it occurs to me that Benjamin is my deepest motivation. Once, when he visited me in prison he left behind a note. It said: ‘Thank you because I’m alive.’ It could be read in several different ways. Today that note forms the core of my being.

A group of Japanese tourists were taking pictures of Kristin. Someone at the hotel had told them she was a celebrity in Norway. No one recognises me any more. I am merely a secretary. And a name, a minor name on the title page of a love story.

When the Japanese caught sight of Kamala there was almost a riot. They were all shouting and screaming and pointing. They could not believe that it really was Kamala Varma, a world-famous personality, right here in their midst.

I am sitting on the balcony. Benjamin, a restless specimen of the species Homo Ludens, is out swimming, jumping off the diving board on Lausholmen even though it is drizzling with rain. The view is even more spectacular in grey weather. Low shreds of cloud melt into one another or drift apart in fits and starts, like stage curtains opening or closing. Suddenly one of the mountains will heave into sight, mighty and distinct, almost like a separate planet, before its peak is enveloped again; or Vik, on the other side of the fjord, lies bathed in sunlight for a few minutes, while the countryside round about is dark and rain-drenched. I feel as though I am beholding several landscapes, like an increasingly hazy succession of veils. Suddenly Sognefjord has a Chinese look about it. I like it better this way. In fine weather all of the National Romantic aspects stand out so starkly, so unequivocally.

Some places have an impact that cannot be put into words. Margrete did right to take me to Xi’an. I am sure that certain spots spark off specific thoughts better than others. Were anyone to ask me, I would say that Sognefjord was the best place to start for anyone wishing to understand Norway. Our nation’s mentality. It is said that the sense of recognition engendered by a tree is so powerful because it is a reflection of ‘the inner tree’. Might not the same apply to a fjord. Do not all Norwegians have a fjord inside them?

Is it strange, I wonder, that I think so little about my years in prison? In many ways I found prison life as such, both the physical surroundings and the practicalities, the least difficult part of it all. I had no problem with the locked doors, the interrogations; with having to strip to my skin, with the knowledge of being under surveillance. I did not need to resign myself to my new life. I was already resigned to it. The other inmates very soon dubbed me The Monk. An apt nickname. I never spoke and wished only to be alone. The way I saw it I had entered a monastery. There were days when I did nothing in my free time except sit and repeat a mantra to myself, a word which encompassed everything I did not understand: ‘Purusasukta.’ I had finally found the perfect hiding place. I felt like the man in the print Margrete bought for me in Xi’an, a picture which I had hung up and often contemplated: a tiny, solitary figure in a vast and rugged vertical landscape full of blank patches.

After some years I began to think of my cell as the first cell, to imagine that I was back at the start, that everything was beginning anew, could begin anew. It was up to me to fertilise this cell, to generate life again.

For the first time since Project X I was reading — the first time, that is, not counting my readings to Viktor from The Cantos by Ezra Pound. I read a tattered copy of Victoria twenty times and more. I also read a bundle of books which I had come across as a teenager, books my mother had inherited and which I secretly sold off to antiquarian bookshops, having first noted down a quote from each one. From the library I borrowed the standard classics of the nineteenth century, books by Alexander von Humboldt, Søren Kierkegaard, William Morris. I didn’t understand it all. I understood a little. But I read them all resolutely, from cover to cover: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde. It was a kind of penance, an act of contrition. As if I wished to atone for my ignorance. I waded my way through the whole of The History of Philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel from which, prior to this, I could cite only one sentence — taken from the introduction, at that: ‘We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.’

Despite the efforts made to shield me, I did of course get to hear of a lot of the vicious, spiteful things that were written about me. That was tough. Then Kamala’s book appeared, and after it the strange biography for which Rakel was responsible. These marked a turning point. And were of invaluable help. To listen to, to read, my story as it was told by these two, by people who wished me well. I might not be alive today were it not for their accounts. And Kristin. Her visits. Her hands holding me. I was encouraged to survive by the knowledge that I was loved.

I am also quite certain that I began to write as a direct consequence of the two aforementioned books. And even though my manuscript was an embarrassingly cack-handed affair, circling evasively around a dark centre, it did serve a purpose. In the evenings, before I got rid of those sheaves of paper, I would run my eye over all the lines of letters. I was reminded of a long thread. For many years I had believed that I could not possibly have any more unfolding to do. This was not true. All the writing had helped me to evolve even further. I was not the person I had been when I started writing.

I had borrowed an old IBM typewriter with a golf ball. At the time when I was writing, I was forever taking the golf ball off and placing it on the desk in front of me. It looked like a miniature globe, its surface covered in letters. Maybe that is how the Earth looks from space, I thought: like a symbol-bedecked sphere.

It is a relief to be on board the Voyager, not only because of the crew’s optimism, their young minds, but because they are working on a project with which I have such a lot of sympathy — a combination, no less, of the world’s two greatest industries: travel and entertainment. Life on board is not exactly as I had imagined it. Granted, they do play computer games on laptops, but they are just as likely to be found playing chess on an actual board. They know as much about the Nimzo-Indian opening as they do about Myst. They are comfortable with everything from an old Commodore 64 computer to antiquarian books, from rococo balls and foxtrots to rave parties and trip hop music. They visit Net cafés, swathed in Palestinian keffiyehs.

I can see, of course, that they also have their problems to contend with, individually and as a group — oh yes, there can be friction on board! — but right now, at the stage I am at, I am much more interested in their positive than their negative sides. Hanna, for example — who, with her Korean features, sometimes reminds me of Bo Wang Lee — is also a qualified architect. She has worked on what was, at that time, the busiest building site in Europe, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, and is still liable to refer to things she learned there, theories on town planning, when discussing the OAK Quartet’s own ideas. The other evening the four of them suddenly got onto the subject of the world’s biggest dam-building project, the Three Gorges Dam in China. Carl had actually been there and seen the work in progress. I cannot believe how much they have managed to do in such a short space of time.

And then there is their music. Not by chance have they called themselves a quartet. They can sing just about anything in perfect four-part harmony. Martin plays a whole range of instruments, from the mouth organ to the didgeridoo, the long pipe traditional to the Australian aborigines. He can also play Joni Mitchell’s songs, including the tricky ‘Song for Sharon’ from Hejira with the capo in just the right position and the guitar tuned exactly as the writer herself has it. I mean, not even I can do that, and I’ve listened to my fair share of Joni Mitchell — I, who did, after all, insert an F sharp/A sharp chord on the piano at the beginning of the fifth bar of ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’, a harmonic transition which, if I am lucky, is the only thing likely to get me into heaven.

It is evening. I am sitting on the balcony of our hotel room with a whisky. The weather has cleared up. I look across to the other side of the fjord. I was over that way once, to the west of Vik, west of Arnafjord. I saw something there, a man with his head in a woman’s lap, a sight I will never forget.

It is still light. The air is balmy. It is the sort of evening that causes me to remember. Takes me back to the inescapable centre of my life. To the living room and Margrete’s body. A dead wife clad in my own dressing gown. The spring evening outside the windows; a yellow, then a reddish glow on the horizon. I stood there staring. For how long I do not know. I realised that, unconsciously, I had been holding my breath. For more than a minute. For much more than a minute. As if I was diving for her, hunting for a pale glint of gold in the mud, that flash of gold which sometimes flickered in her eyes. I think I was making a last, desperate effort to save Margrete’s life. If, that is, it was not — again — my own.

Then, as if it were the only natural thing to do, I sat down next to her. I lifted Margrete’s head onto my lap. For a long time I sat like this, sat with her head in my lap. It reminded me of something. Reminded me very much of something else. I had once seen two people sitting exactly like this, in a wild and desolate landscape, a man and a woman on an almost luminously green grassy bank by a lake. The man had been lying with his head in the woman’s lap. The water was like glass, mirroring the encircling mountains. It could have been a happy scene, set in an almost impossibly beautiful landscape. Then all at once the woman began to sing, with a large orchestra behind her, and the whole scene altered character due to the deep solemnity of the music. The woman sang, she sang in German, she sang ‘Mild und leise’ from the end of the third and final scene in the third and final act of Richard Wagner’s revolutionary opera Tristan and Isolde; sang out of great pain, great love, great sorrow. Her lover, the man whose head lay in her lap, was dead, and she too was close to death. She sat there, surrounded on all sides by tall cliffs, looking almost as though she were shut inside an enormous cauldron which, because of the singing, the music behind it, seemed to be full of seething passions.

I did not see it when we were filming the scene. Only afterwards, when I was looking at it on the screen, that shot, the posing, was I struck by how much it reminded me of an episode from my youth: Margrete with my head in her lap, in her garden at Grorud.

No other programme in the Thinking Big series was as easy to make as the one on Kirsten Flagstad. It made itself. Right from the start I knew that I had to avoid depicting her as she appears in a well-known film clip, kitted out with chainmail and wingéd helmet and spear, her hair fluttering in the breeze from a wind machine as she sings ‘Hojotoho! Hojotoho!’ from The Valkyrie, the sort of set-up which, magnificent voice or no, only served to confirm all of the prejudices which so many Norwegians had about opera. I wanted to break this pattern by filming in the outdoors, to bring opera to life, you might say. Not until later did I realise that I had built the whole programme around one of the biggest operatic clichés of all: a person singing as they die.

I had no difficulty in deciding which incident from Flagstad’s life to highlight. It had to be her stupendous breakthrough at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in February 1935, performances which turned her into an international star overnight. And since she could be said to have made two debuts, I chose the second one, made four days after the first, when she sang Isolde — which was also the part she was to sing more than any other in her career. The audience is reported to have been in ecstasies; they had apparently stormed the stage at the end of the second act. And it truly was a sensation. For the first time, a Met audience heard the voice which, some said, Wagner must have heard in his subconscious when he wrote the opera: possibly the most dramatic soprano of all time — the Voice of the Century as she was also called. The way I saw it, I was not making a programme about Kirsten Flagstad the woman, but about her lungs. About breathing. Because that was the secret: to be capable of turning air into resonance, into music. Into images. When you heard Flagstad sing, you thought of rivers of gold and floods of light.

I had listened to this opera again and again and was in no doubt that I had to concentrate on the ending, the ‘love-death’. When I mooted the possibility of shooting outdoors, of finding a dramatic natural setting, one of the cameramen, who hailed from Vik in Sogn, suggested filming the scene in what he called ‘Sognefjord’s best kept secret’ — to which, sadly, more than a million Norwegians were now to be made privy — namely Finnabotn at the head of Finnafjord. And when we arrived there by boat I knew with every fibre of my being that this was the place. Something about the landscape at Finnabotn told me this was the chance of a lifetime. One almost felt that the scenery alone could have engendered that all-embracing, yet uncompromising, love.

The scene opened with a still from the actual occurrence, the 1935 performance of Tristan and Isolde, Act III, at the New York Met, with Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde and Lauritz Melchior as Tristan, a picture which I held, flickering, on screen while I narrated the events leading up to this moment. Playing in the background — a recurring motif throughout the programme, this — was the famous prelude, a piece of music which, from the first fateful, ominously atonal bars warned of a stable core, the music’s very centre of gravity, which had become distinctly shaky, just as life does when love comes along. Then — let there be light! — I had the dead image of Flagstad and Melchior in their typical opera costumes and extravagant make-up, fade into living film, full colour, and a couple, ordinary people, in the same pose as Flagstad and Melchior on the stage, only here they were lying on a green hillside by the lake in everyday clothes, clothes that made one think of young people, teenagers even. And gradually the prelude gave way to the music from Act III and the woman on the grassy bank lip-synched rapturously to Flagstad’s voice, as it sounded in a superb recording from 1953 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler: a voice full of light, velvet and molten gold.

A couple: a woman with a man’s head in her lap. Only when I was going through the rough footage for the programme did it strike me that this scene could have been drawn straight from my own life. One day I dived into Svartjern and found a gold bracelet and not long afterwards I found myself lying on a luminously green lawn with my head in Margrete’s lap, while opera music streamed into the garden next door from an open window. She had given me freshly pressed orange juice and I was enchanted. I lay with my head in her lap, revelling in those minutes, not knowing that this would be the happiest moment of my entire life.

She, Kirstin Flagstad, or rather, the actress playing Flagstad, or the actress who played all those who have ever had a broken heart or known what it is to lose someone you love, sang ‘Mild und leise’, and as she, Flagstad, this unhappy woman, sang the camera began to pull up, suddenly showing the scene from the air, revealing more and more of the surrounding scenery, the wild and truly spectacular landscape of which the grassy bank by the water was a part. Soon, as the sound of the music and the singing intensified, one saw that these two, the woman with the man’s head in her lap — Isolde with the dead Tristan, Isolde, who was herself about to die, and her dead lover — were not sitting in a crater, by a lake bounded by plunging cliffs, as first thought; as the camera pulled even further up it became apparent that the couple were lying on a grassy slope at the head of a fjord, at Finnabotn which, some kilometres further on, near Finden’s Garth, ran into a narrow sound before opening out into Finnafjord itself which, in turn, ran into Sognefjord with all its many other arms. Even for me it was a stunning prospect; the view of Finnabotn with, barely visible, a couple of dots, two people, two lovers, dying. And then they were gone, as if transformed into music, or to landscape: a fjord, encircled by snow-covered mountains, which was also a part of the great fjord, all its branches. The beauty and the drama of Flagstad’s voice accorded perfectly with the beauty and the drama of the scenery. The two became one.

The first time I saw television — probably an episode of Robin Hood on a Saturday at Wolfgang Michaelsen’s house in the early sixties — I went up and placed my hands flat against the screen. I felt the prickle of the static, but I was disappointed that nothing happened. The picture, the world inside the box, remained flat. Kristin and the OAK Quartet work with a medium that has overcome this flatness. When I touch the screen something happens. Their screen, that interface with its appetising signposting, gives me the feeling of something leading one endlessly further and further in. When I study their intricate structure map, I cannot help thinking of māyā.

I really was not sure about it when I booked the helicopter for the shoot; I was afraid the whole thing might end up being a bit too Hollywoodish, or too much like a music video. But the end result exceeded all expectations. It took the helicopter a little over ten minutes to climb to 12,000 feet, but byspeeding up the film we managed to get it to fit exactly with the final three minutes of ‘Mild und leise’, the point of view rising as the music intensified, soaring upwards, until both the viewpoint and the music reached their peak with ‘in des Welt-Atems wehendem All’. The fabulous thing about it was the way the point of view, the shot, the helicopter spiralled upwards. When I ran through the final cut of the scene I was so moved that I could not speak. The shot of that scene and that landscape from a certain height told us that those two people did not die, there was no way they could die. They were not shut in, they were on a fjord. In their love-death lay the opening of something new.

I struck lucky with that programme. A commentary in one newspaper said that I had cut through the whole debate as to where the new opera house should be situated. I had shown that the opera lay here, in the heart of the rugged Norwegian countryside. Norway was opera.

Once when she was telling a story from The Mahabharata, Kamala mentioned one of the weapons which Drona the master gave to the hero Arjuna; an astra which could hold all the warriors on a battlefield spellbound by the illusions it created. ‘That’s pretty much what you did with your television programmes,’ she said to me.

One writer pointed out that, seen from above, this landscape, with the arms of the fjord reaching deep into the country, looked not unlike a network of nerve fibres, and as such could lead one to think, or imagine, that one was inside the brain, in the area relating to hearing, the enjoyment of sounds — or indeed, why not: inside the nervous system of love itself. I have heard that this place, the grassy bank running down to the water at the head of Finnafjord, has become a sacred spot of sorts for lovers. Quite a number of bridal couples have reportedly gone there after their weddings.

There would come a day when it would dawn on me that with this scene I had not only unwittingly reflected one of the happiest moments in my life, but that I had also prefigured the unhappiest. For a moment, as I sat there on the floor of Villa Wergeland, with Margrete’s lifeless head in my lap, I had a feeling of stepping outside of myself, of being lifted up; of seeing myself and Margrete on the living-room floor from a great height. A picture of dead love.

For a long, long time I sat there with her head in my lap, looking round about me. Looking at all the blood. Outside the sky was red, lit up, so it seemed by a huge flare. For one bewildered second I had the idea that she had been shot by some incensed viewer. Or rather: I hoped. But I had known straight away. She had shot herself. Right before I got home. And something told me that her mind had been perfectly clear when she chose to curl her finger around the trigger. That she had not been consumed by the darkness. That she may merely have seen the darkness approaching. And that she had done it not because of me, but — however inconceivable it seemed — for my sake. Shot herself in the heart. In her innermost chambers. Those four strokes at the centre of the Chinese character for love. Distraught though I was, behind it all there was a feeling of anger. You simply did not do something like this. Something so brutal. Why not pills? She was a doctor, for Christ’s sake. She could have cut her wrists, the way other women do. But this was Margrete. And I knew nothing about her. It was almost as if she wanted to show me that I had not understood a single thing.

Why did she do it?

I cursed my stupidity; to think that, in a fit of paranoia and worry about our safety, I had shown her that bloody gun, which I kept in the cupboard in my workshop. I had even had it primed and loaded. I had received threats after a programme on immigrants — I may even have been a little bit proud of this, proud that — after all those tame light-entertainment shows — I had once again made a programme with the ability to shock, something with a touch of dangerous originality. I let her hold the gun, an old Luger, a relic of an enigmatic grandfather. I showed her, solemnly almost, ceremoniously, how to release the safety catch. She had muttered something about Hedda Gabler. Smiled. I eyed the gun lying there on the living-room floor, with its remaining bullets. Gently I removed her head from my lap. I picked up the pistol. It seemed suddenly heavier. I put it to my head. I beheld her, with the gun muzzle pressed against my temple. It was almost as though I saw her — her beauty — for the first time.

I had had this same thought that time when I ran into her again, while I was studying architecture. Suddenly, one day, there she was. She had left me on a winter day in the rain and now, on a spring day years later, there she was again, in that same soft rain, as if she had only gone behind a waterfall and now calmly stepped out again.

I stood for a long time staring in disbelief at the more mature, but just as unmistakeable face, there, right in front of me, in a web of water. I was overcome by a sense of touching wonderful depths. Meeting Margrete again, being faced with that rather diffident smile, was like seeing a whole lot of tangled threads gather themselves into one solid, conclusive knot, like receiving a sign that everything had a purpose. I remembered the stories of people who lost gold rings only to find them twelve years later, inside a potato, or a fish.

It’s hard to describe the sort of first impression Margrete could make. Once, for example, when she was eighteen, she was on a plane: as the daughter of a diplomat she travelled a lot and usually first class. Someone came over and placed a hand on her shoulder — a young man, the heir to the throne of a small but wealthy country in the East. He asked her to marry him. Right out of the blue, but most formally. She knew right away that he was not just flirting with her, he was offering her the life of a princess. Such was the effect the sight of Margrete had on some people.

Including me. I stood in the soft spring rain, trying to take it in. The unusual orange coat. Her ‘Persian’ beauty. Her eyes. Those black pupils in irises shot with gold. She stood there glowing, shining, at me. I remembered what my old neighbour, Karen Mohr, had once said: ‘Someone looks at you — and everything changes.’ When Margrete fixed her eyes on me, it felt as though I had not been seen in a very long time. As if I had been invisible for years. I stood there before her and I was discovered.

I had, of course, always cherished a hope of meeting her again, quite by accident like this, at a tram stop. I had dreamt of this scene a thousand times. And even though, deep down, I knew the chances of it happening were very slim, one thought was always there: I swore that I would not fall in love. And not only that — as if it were the twin of the hope of seeing her again, I toyed with the notion of revenge. Even when I ran into her again on that spring day and could hardly believe it, my luck, this merciful turn of events, for a fleeting moment I did also consider paying her back for the pain she had caused me in seventh grade.

The spring after the break-up outside the Golden Elephant restaurant was the most miserable of my life. It’s easy to joke about it today, but when you’re in seventh grade and you’re unhappy, there is no end to how miserable you can be. When summer came I went into hiding on Hvaler, I camped out at Smalsund, in the very south of the island, could not face being at the house with everybody else; they left me alone, understood that I was upset, merely made sure that I had everything I needed, some food and, most important of all: batteries. I was a castaway. I lay out on the rocks, just me and a couple of mink which soon got used to me; I simply lay there, flat out, stupefied by sunshine and the sparkling sea, listening to the waves, the water lapping and splashing right at my feet, for all the world as if the elements shared my grief, were sobbing with me. I was a real ‘nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land’. The holidays were almost over and I had worn Rubber Soul thin, playing it on a battery-driven Bambino record player. That LP had spun round and round all summer long, like a black sun next to my head, and was now as bent out of shape as I felt in my mind. I had long since memorised every song on it, but still listened intently for something in the background hiss, behind the music, like one of those indefatigable, ever-hopeful scientists who listens out for radio signals from outer space. I lay there and I knew: I had to do something.

It was August, the nights were already starting to draw in. I was sitting by the Pilot Lookout on its hilltop, gazing at the lights out at sea. I often sat by this little shed. Maybe because I too was in sore need of a pilot. Maybe because it contained an advanced short-wave radio. Through the wall I could hear calls in lots of different languages. This put me in touch, in a way, with the wide world, with that place far overseas where she was. One day in the spring I had even taken the bus out to Fornebu Airport, just to be able to hear the flights being called over the tannoy.

I scanned the sea, gazed at the Koster Islands on the horizon. How was I going to get her back? Because that was obviously what I wanted. I wished that somehow, possibly by means of telepathy, she would be overcome with remorse, with love for me. Or — a common thought, this, at such self-pitying moments — that she would see me, on a monitor, sitting here next to a pilot lookout, next to a radio, benumbed, yearning. What I wanted was for her, wherever she was, to get on a plane and fly to Norway, move back, live with relatives or whatever. Just as long as she came back. ‘Do something,’ I told myself. ‘You have to do something.’

I grasped the iron railing and pulled myself to my feet. And then it hit me, as such thoughts have a way of hitting an adolescent, that I could get her back, on one condition: I would have to swim across the strait I saw before me, an ocean in miniature; I would have to swim across Sekken, one of the most exposed and daunting stretches of open sea along the whole coastline. Only by doing this could I, in some mysterious — but in my mind completely logical — way, win her love again. Awaken her. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing.

I had never swum such a long distance at one go. It was a risky venture. But I was in no doubt. I ran back to the tent, cast a glance at the battered cover of Rubber Soul, from which the four members of the Beatles gazed up at me approvingly. I changed into swimming trunks, strode down to the beach, slipped through the seaweed and out into the dark, almost lukewarm water. I swam with quick, impatient strokes across to Gyltholmen, walked up to the cairn and stood there for a moment considering the broad band of sea at my feet. The nearest, dark islets on the Swedish side were a long way off. In another continent so it seemed. The continent of hope. During the war this last stretch had spelled life or death for many refugees. I clambered down to the rocks and did something close to a racing dive, shallow and flat, as if I were in a hurry. The weather was with me. A few clouds. A light breeze. A gentle swell. No current to speak of. I swam. I swam without thinking. Or at least, I thought in the way that leaves no trace. I tried to conserve energy, to simply drift across. Soon I was level with Sekkefluene, those insidious skerries. A light flashed on a post to starboard. Many a boat had gone down just here. Wrecks lurked in the darkness below me.

I swam on, and as I began to flag my thoughts became clearer. Each stroke was like throwing myself at her, into her arms. I bobbed up and down in the swell and my thoughts seemed to me to rise and fall in the same way. I tried not to think about it, but thought about it anyway, behind my other thoughts: the deeps underneath me. The unknown. There was a reason why Margrete had left me, one which I had never known. Which I ought to have known. I had disappointed her in some way. I was swimming more slowly. I was exhausted. My arms were aching. My legs were turning numb. I was more than halfway there. For a channel swimmer this stretch of water would probably be a piece of cake. For me, a thirteen-year-old, it was far too long. But only the impossible could bring Margrete back. These tiny currents, I thought, generated by the action of my limbs, will be transmitted through the water, rather like whale song, and come to a sea where she is swimming at this very moment, at another hour, and she will instantly comprehend the message, my desperate plea. The thought struck me: in swimming here I was doing what I had always wanted to do: work in depth. Seen from far enough away, I might have been a spermatozoon on my way to impregnate someone.

The clouds to the south parted. A moon appeared. An unnaturally big, almost full moon. All of a sudden I was swimming through a band of molten gold. The water around me had acquired an odd purplish cast, becoming almost phosphorescent. And yet: I was freezing. I was utterly worn out. Heavy. The temptation: to just let myself sink. So easy. Done with everything. Why should I go on swimming? Go on living? The thought flashed through my mind: was I actually trying to kill myself?

I had a vision. Or maybe it really happened. I looked back and saw that my path through the water, across Sekken, formed a broad inverted S; and that this path was lined on either side with buildings, grand palaces ranged side by side, all of them different and yet almost identical. I distinctly heard a voice say: ‘Make it new,’ before I sank, before I died.

I drowned. Died. I came to my senses on the white sand of a beach in Sweden, on the islet I had been swimming towards. Whatever had happened, I had done it. I had made it to another country. I was dead, but I was alive. I lay on my stomach on the beach, cold, but hopeful. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, a man about to embark upon a new life. Build everything up from nothing.

I never told anyone about that swim. The next morning I was back in Norway, I hitched a ride on a Swedish boat which had been anchored in a bay just along from the beach where I was washed ashore. It’s an odd thing. For some years I was famous for being on television. But no one knows anything about my greatest achievements. That I fell over a cliff and lived. That I swam across an unswimmable body of water. That I came this close to devising a new categorisation of all human knowledge. My most remarkable experiences and thoughts have remained my secret.

That morning, as I took down my tent for the summer, I realised only that I was on the threshold of a new life. One without Margrete.

The thought of my pain, that swim, the idea that she was part of another life, all of these things melted away at the sight of her: Margrete, standing right in front of me in a bright orange coat at a tram stop in Oslo. A glowing spot on a grey rainy day. The thought of revenge, of giving her the cold shoulder, lasted exactly two seconds. I stood there dumbstruck, beholding her through the raindrops, feeling as though a crystal chandelier had slowly been lowered from the heavens and down over my head. I saw Margrete, only Margrete, through all those crystal droplets, thousands of Margretes all around me, filling every part of me, right down to the smallest optic nerve.

‘Jonas?’ I heard her say, as if she had not bumped into me quite by chance, but had tracked me down to my most secret hiding place after years of searching.

For a moment I thought that I had actually managed to swim her back to me, but that it had just taken longer than I had expected. Again I felt the blue flame which was ignited inside me that day when I saw her at Svartjern, summer-bronzed in a bikini. I stood — with a blissful look on my face, I think — staring after the tram I should have taken, but which was now pulling away. I knew that my life had been radically changed. I suddenly came to think of that amazing day when the Swedes changed from driving on the left to driving on the right. I remembered a newspaper photograph showing a city street in which the cars were in the act of crossing from one side of the white line to the other. That is how it was for me on that spring day, on seeing Margrete again. A deep-reaching change in my life, a switch, as it were, from one side to another.

The first weeks of our relationship, our new relationship I should perhaps say, had about them an air of tentative inquiry. Often we would just sit in two chairs facing one another and talk. We had a lot to talk about. To ask about. And yet there were times when we simply fell silent and sat there, looking at one another. I had a suspicion that she was testing my endurance — as if we were actually sitting naked, right opposite one another, delaying something. Or that she wished to display a certain gravity, to enhance the pleasure of what we both knew was to come.

During those first months I found myself constantly amazed by all the things she was liable to do or say, from her way of frying an egg to her comments on the Norwegian royal family. A simple yawn could be turned by Margrete Boeck into a not uninteresting work of art. I came home one afternoon from the course in architecture which I had, mentally at least, already dropped out of — long before this I had met my Silapulapu — to find her folding sheets of paper into all sorts of different shapes. Origami, she called it. She had been writing letters, but had suddenly fallen to brushing up her skills in something she had once learned, a Japanese art. It struck me that these shapes could also be letters of a sort. I thought of the letter I had waited for, the letter I never received. Maybe this was it now. She sat there making birds, animals. Fold me, I thought, full of longing. Bend me into an angel, I thought when, as if reading my mind, she took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom.

The house in Ullevål Garden City was all ruby-red walls and gilded frames, brocade sofas and curios from every corner of the world, but nothing made a deeper impression on me than a small collection of butterflies hanging on the wall in one of the small rooms we passed through on the way to the bedroom. Margrete had caught them as a little girl. A brimstone butterfly, a peacock, an admiral and a small tortoiseshell. A constellation with the power to open. I thought to myself: this here, she, was that hidden country.

And then it came, my first experience of sex. It would be safe to say that I was a late developer. And in bed with her, in the midst of that overwhelming experience, I knew that I had made the right choice. Although it had never been hard for me to turn down other girls. In every case I was soon convinced that they could never be the focus of all my attention. Only Margrete could be that. And yet my first experience of sex, making love with Margrete, exceeded all expectations, all conceptions, all possible metaphors. It was out of this world. Margrete led me into a white bedroom watched over by an unknown golden god; laid me down on white bedlinen and guided me into the erotic landscape; she folded herself tenderly around me, folded herself in as many different ways as she could fold a sheet of paper. And in folding herself around me, she unfolded me, transformed me into something other than I was. She actually loved me into new shapes.

When I came to, something had happened to my respiration. I was breathing more freely. It was as if, without being aware of it, I had been suffering from an attack of asthma which had now stopped.

Afterwards she lay and held me in her arms. There was nothing she liked better than to lie quietly with her arms around me. It is said that we discover who we really are in moments of stress. I discovered my true self in a totally undramatic situation, as I lay there in Margrete’s arms. It was also on such a day, with Margrete’s arms wrapped round me — and suffused with what I had once called spirit, but which I now called love — that I felt something being set in motion, a process, a stream of thought which flowed out some years later into the decision to make my own television programmes. Although at the time I did not know where it would lead. I merely lay there praying silently that she would never let me go.

Why did she do it?

I have long suspected: I cannot answer this because I have not come up with the right question. The whole thing bears a troubling resemblance to another painfully complicated search, a process with a long story behind it. I do know when it began, though: on a visit to Karen Mohr, my reserved and taciturn neighbour, who had decorated her living room like a Pernod-scented Provence and her bedroom like a dim library. One day she asked me to fetch a book by Stendahl, a request which led to me being caught under a veritable avalanche of books. This gave Karen Mohr the excuse for some major renovation work and on my next visit she proudly showed me into a bedroom in which the bookshelves, now repaired, were completely bare. All the books were strewn around the floor. I was invited to stay for a ham omelette, but Karen Mohr apologised for the fact that she would have to go to the shop first. In the meantime there was no reason why I couldn’t start to put the books back on the shelves, she said.

‘How,’ I asked.

‘Use your imagination,’ she said, and off she went.

I knew I couldn’t just stick them on the shelves any old way. She expected more of me. I regarded the mess on the floor. Books that had stood next to one another were now scattered all over the place. I stared despondently at the bookshelves, a bare tree waiting for branches and foliage. I was eleven years old. For the first time I had to try to set the world to rights.

Although it was tempting to do something decorative — at one point I did consider going by the colours of the spines, or by whether they were tall or short, fat or thin — I soon came to the conclusion that I would have to put works on the same subject together. Karen Mohr had a lot of books about painters, about art, so I started putting these on the bottom shelves. Then I stopped, uncertain. Why not on the middle shelf? Or ought I to reserve that for the books Karen Mohr liked best. But which books did she like best?

I was a little giddy at the thought of being in her bedroom. It smelled not of books, but of lady. The bed was spread with a soft patchwork quilt. Without thinking, I buried my face in it and inhaled the scent, as if I needed some pepping up.

I picked up the first book. In my mind I pictured a scheme based on the matrix of the bookcases. Poetry could go in the section next to fiction. And all the books on disease — she had a lot of these — could be placed alongside the countless works with the word ‘love’ in their titles. I tried my best to keep this provisional arrangement in mind while slowly — as I came upon books on subjects I had not thought of — expanding my system. I soon ran into difficulties. Where, for example, was I to put the big illustrated book on football? Under sport? But she had no other books on sports or games. Under art maybe, or dance? What about politics? Wasn’t it right that in South America football could degenerate into a war? Why didn’t I simply put it next to the books on religion? There were several sections into which I would have liked to set it, but I could only put it in one place. I kept having to move books off the shelves which I had initially chosen for them, it was like one big jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces could fit into any number of spaces.

My confused, but soon zealous, endeavours may also have been connected to the fact that this happened just after I had collided with Margrete’s bike at the school gate so hard that we both landed on the pavement. As I gathered up the books that had fallen out of my satchel, my eyes met hers for the first time. She looked at me. I was conscious to the very tips of my toes of being seen. Already here, in this fragrant bedroom, I had an inkling that if I was to have the slightest chance of understanding anything of this new addition to my life, a wonder that went by the name of Margrete Boeck, then I would have to get these stupid books into some kind of order.

Luckily Karen Mohr was not gone for too long. Before she started making the ham omelette she inspected my work. I really had not got very far, the shelves looked more like something out of a shop in a country suffering from a severe shortage of goods. She laughed when she saw that I had set her lavish volumes on Provence next to the innumerable works on monasteries and convents and the cloistered life. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘But what about this one?’ She picked a book off the floor, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I recognised the name, remembered Rakel telling me about his flying and his mysterious disappearance at the time when Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, died. I promptly suggested that we put it on the shelf where I had arranged the works on more technical subjects. It was about flying after all, wasn’t it? Or space travel? ‘I think probably it should go with my other French novels,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, I could slot it in somewhere else, maybe alongside the books on cosmology.’ She explained what cosmology was. I never forgot that. Or her fingers, which suddenly, almost unconsciously, stroked my hair. I would remember that hour among the bare bookshelves, up to my knees in books, at the most diverse moments in my life. I kept trying to dredge up again the openness and inquisitiveness and wonder that had moved me to put Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in with the medical books and The Divine Comedy by Dante next to the Bible. When I picked up a book in Danish entitled Totem og tabu, by Sigmund Freud, I placed it — since Karen had, unfortunately, no books on Red Indians — on the shelf containing the detective novels.

Although I did not know it, in Karen Mohr’s library, which smelled not of books, but of seductive perfume, I had come up against a problem which would dog me for a long time to come: the numerous parallel associations triggered in my mind by the titles and the lists of contents of the books on the floor did not lend themselves to the simple, primitive shelving system with which I was faced. It was simply too rigid. But while Karen Mohr was searching for Stendahl’s book on love, I perceived — inspired yet again, I think, by the thought of the new girl at school, Margrete Boeck — the rudiments of a brilliant system, nothing less than the roots of a new tree of knowledge. As if in a deep trance I stood there, thinking to myself that this meant I would have to take the two biographies on Bach and slot them in among the books on oriental rugs, and shift the volumes on the Second World War over to the reference books on wild animals; and then — in a flash it came to me — the cookery books would have to go in the section on architecture. I pursued this line of thought until everything went black, as if I was about to pass out.

‘Time for a ham omelette,’ Karen Mohr said. She must have been able to tell from my white face that I had had enough for one day. Nonetheless she picked out a book. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘It’s about Marco Polo and Venice. Maybe you’ll go there some day.’ I accepted it warily. Just at that moment I had no great interest in owning books.

Karen Mohr must have sensed my silent protest, my misgivings in the face of all her bookshelves, although she said no more about it, not for a long time. I did not know that she also had access to another library, that Karen Mohr had the key to the greatest book collection in Oslo and that I would soon find myself standing, somewhat apprehensively, before it.

I made two good friends in high school, Viktor Harlem and Axel Stranger. Both were in my class at Oslo Cathedral School. Since — not unusually in that hormonally unstable phase in life — we aspired to the wisdom inherent in all forms of heresy, we called ourselves The Three Heretics. One spring Viktor suggested — nay, more or less demanded — that we should go on a study trip to Venice. ‘Why Venice of all places?’ Axel asked, instantly betraying his qualms about such a venture.

‘Because it’s a car-free city?’ I suggested — this was not long after our legendary demonstration in the Town Hall Square.

‘Because the greatest iconoclast of them all lives there,’ Viktor announced cryptically. Later, after having seen George Lucas’s fabulous masterpiece, one of the colossi of twentieth-century film history, the Star Wars trilogy, I always felt that the Venice trip had been a journey to a watery planet; that, convinced as we were of our status as true Jedi knights, we had set out on a mission to find Yoda, the sage of sages, himself.

Axel’s doubts about Venice were soon replaced by an enthusiasm which ought to have been a warning to us. He announced, with a rather too fervent light in his eyes, that this would be the most important journey of his life. And he was to be proved right. Axel, who pretty much lived in the Central Lending Department at the Deichman Library, had read a disturbingly large number of the world’s books and, galvanised by this passion, he now proceeded to reel off to us all the things he was planning to do in Venice. And it was no small list. He meant to visit the Casetta delle Rose, home to the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio during the First World War; he longed he said, or chanted, to hear the water lapping against the Ca’Rezzonico, where Robert Browning lived for the last years of his life; Axel wanted to breathe the air of the Palazzo Capello, which had provided architectonic inspiration for Henry James when he was writing The Aspern Papers; he wished to run his hands over the walls of the Hotel Danieli, which had housed such guests as Balzac and Dickens; Axel had a feverish look about him as he spoke of his resolve to take in the seaside hotels on the Lido, where Gustav von Aschenbach had languished in Thomas Mann’s masterly novella Death in Venice, before ordering the same drinks as Hemingway in Harry’s Bar, then devoutly settling himself in the Caffè Quadri, where Proust had passed his first evening in the city on the lagoon, if — that is — Axel did not actually set out to track down the objects which had triggered such a string of memories in Proust’s universe: two uneven marble tiles in the Baptistery of St Mark’s. Axel all but swore to swim in the canals like Lord Byron. His list of things to do grew longer and longer, all of it plotted into a very tight schedule. It didn’t stop there, though. He also took to speaking a sort of novelese. He confessed with half-shut eyes that he could hardly wait to see the domes and crooked campanile of his dreams rising out of the waves. ‘I’ll push back the shutters in my hotel room to see the golden angel on the top of St Mark’s flaming in the sunlight!’ he sighed rapturously.

Axel Stranger was pale with excitement. So what happened? When we — The Three Heretics — got to Fornebu Airport, with the prospect of a long May weekend ahead of us, he fainted. The thought that he would soon be treading the very tiles on which Marcel Proust had once set foot, was too much for him. In short, his expectations were too great. As the woman at the check-in desk handed him his ticket, Axel collapsed onto the airport floor. And when he came round he was so weak and dizzy that he declared himself unfit to travel. He insisted, though, that we should go anyway, without him.

I thought to myself, but did not say out loud: reading too many books is bad for you.

And yet — although he never got beyond check-in — Axel always maintained that that journey was the most significant of his entire life. He never went to Venice, but when Viktor and I got back after the long weekend, Axel informed us that he had been writing like a madman. In four days he had written two hundred pages, in a sort of helpless trance, ‘rowing through the dark canals of the imagination in a gleaming black gondola’. He claimed it was the thought of the city on the lagoon, all his mental images of Venice that had driven him to it. Triumphantly he showed us the manuscript. It was roundly and soundly rejected, it is true, but from that day on Axel Stranger wanted only to write. And five years later he made his literary debut with Norway’s finest publishing house, with the idiosyncratic and artistically ingenious novella The Lion in Venice.

‘That trip to Venice changed my life,’ he always said.

A trip can be short and yet unforgettable. When I was thirteen — heartbroken as I was, I now worked to a new time reckoning: year one After Margrete — Karen Mohr took me to her mysterious workplace in the city. As usual she was dressed in a grey suit which somehow did not look drab. ‘Sober grey,’ my mother was wont to say. Something about Karen Mohr made me feel that grey had to be the most interesting colour of all. We got off the bus from Grorud at a stop in Møllergata and a very short stroll down the street brought us to a palatial building in the Hammersborg area, on the same square as the main fire station — an open space graced with fountains, which had not as yet been covered over. In my childhood memory, with the monumental wall in front and the long, slanting flights of steps leading up to it, it looks like the Potala Palace in Lhasa. This was the Deichman Library, Oslo’s main public library. ‘Some bedroom,’ she said.

Minutes later we were standing in the Central Lending and Reference Department, next to a black pillar like something out of a temple, with the vast hall before us. The light falling through the glass in the ceiling brought out a dull golden sheen in the rows of brown leather spines in the tall galleries on either side. ‘Carl Deichman’s book collection,’ Karen Mohr murmured reverently, pointing. To begin with I felt somewhat daunted. Or at least, I had the uneasy feeling that all of the bookcases round about me testified to some tragic event, an unnatural segmentation. These rows of book spines had as little to do with life as a head of beef carved up and frozen, reduced to packs in a cabinet with labels saying ‘sirloin’ or ‘fillet’.

Karen Mohr worked in a room off the main hall which also housed the Technical Department. She ran the section entitled Foreign Fiction, which is to say she was in charge of English and French literature. ‘Although it’s the French that’s closest to my heart,’ she whispered.

Karen Mohr gave me a tour, most notably of the fascinating, labyrinthine depositories downstairs: floor below floor, all packed with books. Karen Mohr clearly knew exactly what each shelf contained. I observed her surreptitiously, her enthusiasm, her pride. For some reason I got it into my head that the whole of the Deichman Library, and this vast, hidden library in particular, was bound up with her experience by the Mediterranean, a conversation, an offer from a charismatic painter. In a way, this really was an extension of her bedroom. I gazed respectfully round about me, and yet I could not help thinking that even this mammoth attempt to organise thousands of books had to be a far simpler task than that of putting a person’s thoughts and motives, dreams and longings in order — be it merely those from a meeting lasting only a few minutes. I was not thinking just of Karen Mohr and Provence. I was also thinking of myself. Because I knew that even the labyrinth of the depositories, all those walls of books, could not contain an explanation of what I felt after Margrete, the glow in her eyes, disappeared out of my life.

The tour ended at the ‘catalogue’, two huge filing cabinets in the middle of the main hall, under Axel Revold’s fresco. ‘As you may have guessed, you need a system in order to find what you’re looking for,’ Karen Mohr said softly, motioning to her surroundings. ‘It’s not quite as easy to get your bearings here as it is in my bedroom.’ She explained that I could search for titles by alphabetical order, by author, title or subject, and that the numbers on the little cards told you where the books were in the library — rather like coordinates.

I opened a drawer and fingered the cards impatiently. ‘Okay, so if I want to find out what it looks like in Iran, should I go to the shelf where the books have a 915 on the spine?’ There was a reason for my interest in Iran. Margrete, who had so inexplicably broken up with me, was now in Teheran. She might as well have been on asteroid B 612. Nonetheless I had a masochistic urge to see the landscape she now inhabited.

Karen Mohr nodded, clearly impressed, and led me over to the shelves where, sure enough, I found books containing pictures of both Iran and Teheran. While I was leafing through these, feeling quite sick and dizzy, Karen Mohr told me for the first time about the system according to which all the books in the Deichman library were arranged, devised by a man called Melvil Dewey. She asked me to think of the library as being split up into ten rooms, nine of them containing specialised libraries and the first of them a more general library. Each of these ten libraries was then split up into ten smaller libraries. And so on. Roughly speaking, Dewey had divided all human knowledge into ten categories and thousands of subcategories. History fell into the so-called 900 class which we were now standing next to.

I do not know what it was — maybe an aversion to the pictures of Teheran, the thought of Margrete — that prompted me to protest. ‘But this is geography,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said, sounding almost embarrassed. ‘It’s rather odd. Geography doesn’t have a main category to itself, instead it comes under history.’

Even at this point it seemed obvious to me that this system couldn’t possibly be much use. I think I must still have had Margrete in mind when I mulishly asked where one would put a work on diamonds.

You had to take a look at the book, Karen Mohr told me, surprised at my contentiousness. It was not always as easy as you might think. It might be that it should go under ‘Economic geology’, in the main category Natural Sciences and Mathematics, or possibly under ‘Mining’ in Technology (applied sciences), or even under ‘Carving and carvings’, in the the Arts. ‘Which is to say, either under 553, 622 or 736,’ she said with a smile. Karen Mohr knew her Dewey.

I looked at the users browsing through the shelves and the library staff pushing trolleys full of books. I made so bold as to ask: was Love one of the ten main categories?

Karen Mohr stood there clad in sober grey; she gave a long pause, then shook her head. Without looking at me she stroked my hair.

We returned to the Foreign Fiction section and Karen Mohr’s secluded desk, which was strewn with English and French magazines and newspapers. I managed to find Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince on a nearby shelf all on my own. And what if I wanted to learn French, where would I find books about that? They were in a totally different section, Karen said. The 400 class, Philology, was out in the Central Lending and Reference Department. She gave me an almost apologetic look, as if she could tell how exasperated I was by a system that did not permit things which were so closely connected to sit next to one another.

But my scepticism went even deeper. I had a suspicion that some things must have been left out of this stupid system completely, that this guy Dewey could not possibly have allowed for everything. I was willing to bet, for example, that not one of his thousands of sections covered heartbreak. I was actually feeling pretty annoyed with Mr Meivil Dewey. And what about all the new branches of knowledge which were continually springing up, on the outside left as it were, right out on the sideline. And anyway, anything could be divided into ten, for heaven’s sake. I flinched, as if in horror at the thought. Something told me that a different arrangement of these books could have a great and unimagined ripple effect. It was not merely a matter, here, of books, but of the fundamental thoughts and ideas of mankind. I really was inside a Potala Palace with a thousand rooms, a house dedicated to a religion, an attempt to come to terms with the universe. The faces of the librarians seemed to me to take on a special radiance, and I suddenly saw that they could easily be lamas in disguise.

On our way out, I stopped by the black pillars and looked back. I surveyed the Central Lending and Reference Department, ran an eye over the walls, the books ranged side by side all around that vast chamber. It looked enormously impressive and complicated, but still I knew it was too simple. It was — I thought of Karen Mohr’s own words — not worthy. This room, this arrangement of books, did not reflect the way people thought. I knew it: this room spoke of too much order. The whole library was an illusion, what my teacher in junior high would call māyā. I would go so far as to say that even at this early juncture, and even though I did not consider myself fully evolved, I understood that a voyage of discovery, one of Magellanic proportions, lay waiting for me here. My life’s project. A unique opportunity to work in depth.

On the bus home I asked Karen if it wasn’t a bit boring being a librarian. She looked at me and winked. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘Casanova worked as a librarian in later life, and he was a great seducer.’

The seeds of my Project X were sown there in the Central Lending and Reference Department of the Deichman Library and would shoot and grow into a jungle which I would manage to hack my way out of only with great difficulty. When I met Margrete again, I had just been dealt the deathblow by Silapulapu, and was about to abandon the whole enterprise. My whole body was smarting from this defeat, but just being with her made the pain go away. She gave me a different perspective on things. Or, as she replied once when I asked her whether she thought there was life on Mars: ‘Is there life on Earth?’

The first year was taken up with making love. Every time she lowered herself onto me I had to laugh at the thought of my over-ambitious Project X. No man could ask for anything more than to lie as I did now, enfolded by such a woman. Because Margrete showed me that what I had always hoped for was true, she showed me that the human act of love allowed room for expansion, that it did not consist solely of urges and irrational emotions, of slobbering and grunting, with the possible little addition of tricks picked up from hordes of superficial manuals. Margrete showed me that there ran a path from sex life to life. It may sound strange, but when having sex with her I had a constant sense of being a worker in depth. Making love to Margrete was like being part of an infinitely ramified network. I would never reach higher or deeper in life.

Sometimes, when I was lying, spent, on top of the white sheets, she would get out her stethoscope with a grin and sound me. ‘I do believe you are suffering from a very bad case of love, Mr Wergeland,’ she would say. I thought she was listening to my pounding, sex-satiated heart. But no. She told me that she was listening to my lungs. ‘The lungs, not the heart, are the organ of love,’ she said.

The months after we were reunited were full of surprises, but nothing surprised me as much as the riches contained in those silent caresses, that fact that those lips on lips, that pleasure, contained so much insight. She could run her finger tenderly and inquisitively over the double scar above my eyebrow and the world would open up before my eyes. It struck me that I, whose aim all my life, or half of it at least, had been to think an original thought, should perhaps have striven instead to experience an original feeling. That feeling and thinking were perhaps comparable. For as I lay beside her, snuggled in to her, holding and being held, I realised that these caresses were every bit as rich and meaningful — and profound — as the thoughts put forward by Plato in his dialogue on love. In that white room, in bed, with Margrete’s arms around me, I glimpsed a corrective to the great goal of my life. Then I pushed it from me.

Sometimes when I came home in the evening she would be sitting there in my dressing gown. When I asked her why, she would reply: ‘Because I miss you.’

When we were not making love — although this, too, was a part of the lovemaking — we lay cuddled up together, with our hair sticking in sweat-soaked curls to the backs of our necks. We could lie in bed all day, coiled up together in a sort of circle, playing the second movements of our favourite symphonies and telling each other things. After I had told her about the advent calendars from my childhood that I remembered best, the three-dimensional ones particularly; and about skimming downhill so fast in a toboggan with a steering wheel that sparks flew from the runners, and about the entrance exam for the School of Architecture, she told me about the songs on the red, blue and yellow Donald Duck records, which she knew by heart; about the taste of her first strip of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and about the year when she picked oranges on a kibbutz in Israel. While there, she had also visited the Roman ruins at Baalbek in the Lebanon. She described this as the greatest trip she had ever made. Baalbek was akin to other such complexes at Angkor Wat and Karnak, Borobodur and Persepolis — all of them structures which seemed to have been built by a race other than mankind. In passing she happened to mention when she had been there, and I realised that at that exact same point I had been sitting in Samarkand. I lay on the bed, gazing at the golden statuette in the corner of the white bedroom and thought of a stone I had once thrown into Badedammen, of the rings that had spread out and, at an unforgettable moment, ran into other rings.

‘Why do you want to be with me?’ I asked one day when she was lying with her arms around me, hooting with laughter. It was dusk and the light was fading outside the windows. She grew serious: ‘Because you need someone to hold you.’

‘Oh, and why so?’ I teased.

Her face remained serious. ‘Because otherwise you would fall apart,’ she said, with eyes which, in the twilight, revealed a depth, a glow which almost made me feel uneasy.

She did not ask me. Maybe she simply took it for granted that I would have said the same.

I do not know about other people, but to me this was both confusing and shocking. To encounter someone, a woman, who claimed that to put your arms round someone could be purpose enough in life. Not to hold your breath, but to hold a person.

I said: ‘Okay. You have my permission to hold me.’

It was on this evening, in my twenty-sixth year, in a white bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, that I fought shy of my life’s epiphany.

As luck would have it, I had just joined NRK TV as an announcer. The way I saw it, I was done with all projects. My ambitions had been shipwrecked and I took the unexpected response from viewers as a sign that they could see this; they showed the same sympathy towards me as they would have done to a castaway. But something was brewing. New processes had been set in motion and — strangely enough, considering that she was the catalyst — my attention was drawn away from her.

When did I receive the first hint that something was wrong?

We’re talking hindsight, I know, but I remember one time when we went to a Beethoven recital by a famous string quartet in the University Assembly Hall in Oslo. In the brief pause that followed the Cavatina in Opus 130, that extremely emotional adagio movement which wavers between tristesse and hope, as the audience held its breath, waiting for the ‘Grosse Fugue’ to begin, Margrete suddenly leapt to her feet and started clapping wildly and enthusiastically and shouting ‘Bravo!’ There she stood, under Munch’s sun, all alone and clapping, heedless of the sore breach of etiquette she was committing and the scandalised looks levelled at this person who dared to applaud in the middle of a piece, in front of such world-renowned and no doubt blasé musicians.

After the recital the ensemble’s cellist came over to us. Without a word he handed her the bouquet of roses which had been presented to him.

One afternoon, after we had been making love for what seemed like three days in a row, Margrete lay stroking my chest. One of her long fingers traced intricate patterns on the skin over my ribs. We all had a glowing spot inside is, she told me; and this glowing spot was a weaver. It wove into being a small, imperceptible lung. When we departed this life, this alone would remain, and go on breathing for us, saving us from death, even after we were dead. And this lung was our story. It has since occurred to me that Margrete’s secret organ must, in that case, contain the following image: that of a woman standing up in a packed assembly hall, under Munch’s sun, applauding all alone.

Why did she do it?

On that fateful, maelstrom-like April evening, as I sat looking at her body and put the muzzle of the pistol to my temple, I noticed that one hand, her fingers, seemed to be pointing to her lungs. Was that it? Was this, the Assembly Hall incident, Margrete’s story? Did it also tell why she had done it? For what if that misplaced applause was related to this sight before me, a shot in the heart. What if her shouts of ‘Bravo’ were as much a cry of protest as an impulsive, barefaced show of enthusiasm. She simply could not bear to hear the ‘Grosse Fugue’. I bent over the dead body and touched a fingertip with one of my own. I seem to recall feeling the pain in my chest already then, the nasty twinge of discomfort which would plague me for a long time, also in prison.

From the graze on her brow and the smear of blood on the door jamb I guessed that she must have hit her head off the wall, that she might even have spent a long time kneeling there, banging her head against the brick wall before going to get the gun. I had never understood: the molten gold in Margrete’s eyes was the result of the darkness within her. It was a light which had been constantly on the point of going out, which fought against a blackness. That was why they had been so beautiful. I had only seen the glow, not the darkness surrounding it.

A lot happened during those hours. I was confused, I was devastated by grief, but my mind was also uncannily clear, almost as if I had taken some sort of thought stimulant. I put on gloves and wiped the weapon clean. I also wiped the powder residue off her wrist. I was bewildered, I was shattered, but I was alert and businesslike when it came to removing all signs which could point to Margrete having shot herself. And when it came to leaving clues which would, in due course, point to me. I took the Luger’s old wrappings, the oilcloth and ammunition box from the cupboard in my workshop and hid them so well that it would take the police a long time to find them. I also took into account my older brother’s possible qualms of conscience — he knew about the gun. I was distraught, but at the same time so dazzlingly clear-sighted that the police investigators found only what I wanted them to find, and only at the stages at which I wished them to find them. My own version of what had happened, why I had done it — and it would be a long time before I told it — also took form, almost without my being aware of it, during those hours. It was watertight. Utterly consistent. Perfect, on both the emotional and the rational plane. Just so you know: getting convicted of murder is not as easy as people think.

It is morning at Balestrand. Kamala is asleep. I sit on the balcony of the hotel room looking out on the broad expanse of the fjord. I savour the light, I cannot recall seeing light like this anywhere else in the world. On the lawn below, Benjamin is lying outside his tent gazing up at the drifting clouds, when, that is, he is not shooting glances at the dragons on the spire of the English Church. It is a grand sight: the big, round tent, like a Mongolian ger, and him lying there with a blade of grass in his mouth. The other guests must be quite taken aback when they look out of their windows and see this: Benjamin, in Karakorum, Ghengis Khan’s old capital, an utterly content individual on a boundless plain. I remember when Dad came home from the hospital and told us that we had a brother who was Mongoloid. I thought he was talking about Globoids, the aspirins. Dad certainly looked as if he had a headache. He told us all about the chromosomes, and how Benjamin had one x too many, as it were. In my universe, Benjamin stands as the first representative of the so-called Generation X. He may not be capable of appreciating irony, nonetheless he has lived his life inside inverted commas.

I think about our expeditions into Lillomarka together. All the camping out. All the stories. I have wondered: could I have been trying to hide him. And myself. He found me, though. Benjamin was the first person to show me that I had imagination, that I could do something with the worlds I dreamed up, outside of my own head. Together we established a position on the sideline, an Outer Mongolia which was also an Outer Norway, an outside left. Thinking back to Harastølen and the refugees: I know why I am so obsessed with this fear of foreigners. It is because of Benjamin. If Benjamin has taught me anything it is tolerance. He broadened my view — the first, possibly, to do so — of what a human being is, and can be.

Rakel comes walking towards him. Benjamin points eagerly at something in the sky. Rakel sits down, puts an arm round him. She is another one — a hugger, a holder. They sit for a while, peering up at the clouds, chatting, then they start to pack up. They are going to catch a boat back to Fjærland then drive home in the truck. With a stop at a riding camp along the way. Benjamin is very happy with Rakel and her husband. Rakel tells me they are going to write a book together, the three of them. About trailer-trucks, long-distance lorry driving. Benjamin has already come up with a title: The Golden Horde.

Yesterday I went for a stroll along the road by the beach, past Belehaugene, the two ancient barrows, to take a look at the storybook villas built here a century ago by the artists: half stabbur, half stave church. Then I raised my eyes, only — and again: why was I surprised — to find myself still more entranced by the fjord, the mountains. I almost caught myself humming ‘Beauteous is the Land’. And once more I had to ask myself: Is this really Norway? If any Norwegian should become too blasé, start to hate their country, then they should take a trip to Balestrand, or sail between the unbelievably high mountains around the green fjord running up to Fjærland, expose themselves to the silver threads of the waterfalls and glimpses of wild side valleys. I know opinions differ on this — I know it took the Romantic movement to change people’s ideas about the countryside and what it had to offer — but if you ask me, there is no doubt: Norway’s great asset is its scenery. I have made caustic remarks about it, I have scoffed at it, but on reflection it seems perfectly understandable that it should have been Song of Norway, that regular holiday brochure of a film, which prompted Kamala to come to this country. In other words, I have the splendour of the Norwegian fjords to thank for the fact that, in a roundabout way, she eventually found me.

Its scenery is Norway’s most valuable commodity. Sognefjord is our Grand Canyon, our Guilin and our Machu Picchu all rolled into one. That is why the product, the service which the OAK Quartet is designing is so important. Often it crosses my mind that this could be Norway’s only hope: to translate what Sognefjord represents, our greatest natural asset, into form, into thought, into software.

One afternoon Kamala and I took part in one of the planning sessions on board the Voyager. Before the meeting, Martin, that never-resting wizard with copper pans and spices, served up a whole rijsttafel of delicious little dishes. They had put up the boom tent to give a bit of shade; it was hot, not a cloud in the sky. The way they talked, their enthusiasm, reminded me of the fun I used to have as a small boy, walking along the beach and popping whatever took my fancy into a bucket: shells, stones, feathers, bits of metal. They do the same thing with information.

Each day they gather on deck to discuss new possibilities arising from what they have seen, explored, studied, heard. And tasted. They are mapping out this part of Norway in a way I would never have believed possible. At each new stop along Sognefjord they search for what Carl who, having an American mother does not baulk at using English terms, calls the place’s ‘webness’, its ability to interconnect with other places, through its hidden ‘links’. They mix together all manner of subjects: history, folklore, economics, geography, language, geology. Sometimes I find this work touchingly reminiscent of the television series I once made, but it reminds me even more of my Titanic Project X. They are in the process of doing what I could not: creating a network in which every point of intersection is the centre.

At this particular meeting I surprised them all by suggesting that their main entry on Balestrand should focus on its tourist industry, this place having been one of the main travel hubs in Norway ever since the nineteenth century. They could present an outline of its colourful history, with the German Kaiser and all; I tried to make them see how great it would look with a little cavalcade of the town’s more exotic and somewhat eccentric visitors, from King Chulalongkorn of Siam and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to Egyptian princes and Indian maharajahs. I got quite carried away, suggested that they might also weave in an item on the many old and atmospheric wooden hotels along Sognefjord. They could even insert a link to a page on souvenirs, on which they could show how the rugs and baskets of the old days had evolved into glass polar bears, wooden trolls and pewter Viking ships. And whatever they did — my voice almost cracked with excitement — they must not forget the cruise ships, those ‘floating hotels’ which were such a common sight on the fjord, in the first half of the twentieth century particularly. I launched into a rapturous and detailed description of the Stella Polaris, sang the praises of the picture of the Stella Polaris on Esefjord. Could anyone conceive of a prouder, more evocative sight for a Norwegian — that scenery, coupled with what was arguably the loveliest, the most elegant Norwegian cruise ship of all time, a vessel which might have been designed by Jules Verne for use as a spaceship? I went on talking long into the lovely May night. The others gaped at me — staggered, but also to some degree hooked. Kamala glanced across at me, smiling, as if she were asking: Who are you?

That same evening, still on the subject of travel mementoes, I told them about the disc which the Voyager probes carried with them into space and which could, to some extent, be regarded as a collection of souvenirs from Earth. This disc held, for instance, photographs of the Taj Mahal, the UN building, the Great Wall of China and Monument Valley. Its project was really not that different from the one on which Kristin and her friends were working. Only on a larger scale. While the OAK Quartet was presenting Sognefjord, the Voyager disc was designed to present Tellus herself, including the species which goes under the name Homo sapiens.

A thought crossed my mind. I hunted through Hanna’s choice collection of CDs, found Beethoven’s string quartet no. 13, opus 130, the emotive Cavatina movement. They were clearly mystified. Until I told them that this movement, together with over eighty minutes’ worth of other music — including Bach and Mozart, but also Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, songs by the Navajo Indians and the court gamelan of Java — had all been recorded onto a gold-plated copper disc which had been hurled out into the cosmos — a sort of high-tech message in a bottle.

The purposeful mood which prevails on board, transmits itself to my writing. My urge to write. I have written a lot. I have been writing by hand, as Margrete did. I have managed fine without my old IBM typewriter with its globe-like printing element. Possibly because I am on a boat, a small sphere in itself, covered in symbols. The landscape, the fjord itself, also fire my imagination. Several times on this trip I have fancied that I am on a journey through Margrete. Through her complex mind. The shape of the fjord resembles that of my memories. Just as when deep inside the smallest arm I am still conscious of the main fjord, so too in the deepest branches of my recollection I never lose sight of the middle part: those hours when everything happened, that evening when I came home from a World’s Fair and found her dead.

I knew I had to hold off calling the police. I had to think, I had to come up with a plan, I had to collect my thoughts, I needed time to take a look around, make my own examination of the scene. I staggered about, stumbled from room to room, thinking, searching; searching, at first, as if in my sleep, and then, after a while, wide awake. It is no exaggeration to say that I found things on my nocturnal wanderings that changed my life. I found, for example, her pearl necklace.

A picture comes back to me. She is standing facing me, looking straight into my eyes while her fingers play with the string of pearls around her neck. I know this must have been a fateful situation. This too I know: she might be alive today if I had loved her more. Scientists believe they have proof that animals are sometimes encouraged to stay alive by some sense that they are loved. It took me many years to discover the real reason — the one behind the ostensible, banal explanation with which I had long comforted myself — for why Margrete’s condition deteriorated so drastically after my trip to Lisbon: only then did she see that she was not loved. Lisbon, what happened there, was the famous last straw, the weight in the balance.

The cracks had been appearing in our marriage long before that, though. As many people know from bitter experience, the extraordinary can very quickly become commonplace. During our first months together, and indeed our first years, I did not think I would ever cease to be amazed by Margrete. My head was in a spin, I was walking on air, I was deliriously happy. I am thinking not least, again, of the physical side — and this despite my unrealistic, essentially Utopian, expectations. My notions of sex were associated, after all, with some sort of mechanical world in which the best one could hope for was an intricate meshing of gear-wheels. Margrete took me into an erotic universe involving causes and effects that far outdistanced this, with connections beyond my comprehension. If I close my eyes and think of that first year, all I can see is a white bedroom and a golden idol, and how in bed she led me through room after room, throwing open door after door and showing me new wings within myself. In my euphoria, in my delight at being unwrapped, I did not see that I was living with a woman who had already unfolded, who was more fully evolved than I was.

Nonetheless, I was so truly enthralled by her presence in the moment, by the intensity with which she savoured the smallest everyday tasks: pouring peppercorns into the mill, cleaning a window, arranging flowers at a particular angle in their vase. Or making a bark boat. Most of all, I loved the way she could get me to converse. After we moved into the house in Grorud we would often go for walks around Steinbruvannet talking, as we walked, about everything and anything. Or telling each other things. Here, too — almost as if it were part of our conversation — she would often fashion bark boats and set them in the water, eager as a little child to see how long the frail craft would float before capsizing. All the same: human beings are capable of adapting, in the most amazing fashion, not only to the most appalling conditions, but also to the most intoxicatingly wonderful circumstances. After some months I no longer responded with the same gratitude to Margrete’s refreshing manner, after a couple of years I accepted it as natural, after ten years I took it for granted.

I sometimes thought that we were too unalike, that we represented two different worlds: one of fluttering butterfly wings, one of hard crystals. We, or I, never understood that together, by pure virtue of this, we could have opened up something immense.

But still: why did she do it? When did I spot the first signs of the darkness which took up residence within her. It is with profound shame that I have to confess: I never noticed a thing.

Once or twice, on those rare occasions when her behaviour did disturb me, I may well have asked whether anything was the matter. But she never answered me. I thought she had not answered. One evening, when we were in bed, she suddenly said: ‘What if the house was on fire and we had to get out and you could only take one thing with you. What would it be?’ I did not know, but then I remembered Bo Wang Lee. ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ I said. She laughed. ‘Why not Victoria?’ she asked.

She had answered me. I just wasn’t listening.

In my defence I should say: she was so different. More than anything, the fact that she was a reader and hence a writer was to me symbolic of something alien, sinister even. She read, she wielded a pen, rather than talk. If she sometimes acted strangely, seemed a bit moody, I took it as just another mark of her eccentricity. She occasionally had bouts of what I would have called depression, but her work as a doctor seemed explanation enough for this. I was always popping into the clinic where she worked at that time, and even I could be depressed by those polished floors and impersonal sofa arrangements, not to mention the hangdog patients with their embarrassing STDs.

She had always done strange things. She was quite capable of getting up and walking out of the cinema in the middle of a film, having suddenly got the notion for onion soup, she simply had to have onion soup. I had learned to accept this. In the early days I could spend hours talking about such foibles; I wanted to get to the bottom of the motives behind her weird actions and ideas. But I soon got used to her ways. I ought perhaps to have sensed, however, that something had happened, an acceleration of sorts, just after I got back from Lisbon and the fatal episode at the Belém Tower, distracted though I was by relief at the fact that my plans for a television series were to be realised after all. She was especially tight-lipped, irritable. Hostile, I would say. But — and I never forgot that she had once wanted to be an actress — she never said why.

One day I was at the piano, playing some hymns from the Norwegian Choral Songbook, trying out new chords, the way Viktor did with the jazz standards. Margrete had been known to accuse me of murdering these songs, she said my playing hurt her ears. She did not understand that this was the music of my childhood, a tribute to my father — as well as a means of contemplating Viktor’s pointless fate: a gifted pianist one day, a vegetable slumped in front of a television set the next. But on this occasion, as I sat there, wistfully picking out new harmonies in ‘Here comes a faithful goatherd’, instead of making one of her usual disapproving remarks, she actually slapped me in the face, utterly without warning. ‘Blasphemy,’ she said — I think she must have been referring to the word ‘faithful’ — in a voice seething with anger, one which told me I should probably think myself lucky that she had done no more than hit me. A bruise blossomed on my cheekbone. There were jokes at work about ‘Margrete’s dreaded left hook’. Still, though, I regarded this as no more than a crazy but harmless outburst, something I might even get round to teasing her about later.

But I should have known. And in my memory I keep returning to those endless minutes when she stood there considering me and fiddling with the string of pearls around her neck. The light in Margrete’s golden-brown eyes kept changing as she talked; they seemed to undergo modulations, in the same way as a piece of music. They shifted from gold to lead when she said: ‘Tell me about Lisbon.’

This conversation took place in the latter half of the eighties. I was in the midst of work on the Thinking Big series. We had just come home from an operetta-like party and sat for a while in the living room instead of going straight to bed. The babysitter had gone. Kristin was asleep. We had been visiting Margrete’s parents, who were back in Norway that autumn. There had been plenty to talk about. I had gradually grown more comfortable with the ambassador, despite his somewhat domineering manner, fostered by numerous long and not exactly enviable sojourns in countries with, to say the least of it, undemocratic regimes. I had, however, a serious problem with Margrete’s mother. I was in the mood for talking. Margrete did not seem to feel like it. I kept her up, trotted out all of the comments I had come up with in the car on the way home, mainly on the subject of her mother, a character whom I found downright scary with her submissive shadow existence. She was always in the background, with a drink and a cigarette in the same hand, as if she needed the other for holding on to something, in case she should collapse. I had a lot to say about Mrs Boeck and the possible alcoholism which she hid behind a collection of anonymous Chanel suits, and I wanted to say it all now, not discuss Lisbon with Margrete. And on the subject of alcohol, I was also all set to poke fun at the ambassador’s tedious chat about drinks and how to mix a perfect dry martini. ‘I know how to make over two hundred different cocktails,’ he boasted, pointing with boyish pride to his ridiculous array of drink mixing equipment, ‘but I’m still not sure about the exact ratio of gin to vermouth in a dry martini. Ask me about a Between the Sheets, though. Or a Clover Club. Go on, just ask me!’

Back in our own house, Margrete had risen. She stood in the middle of the room in a short, black dress with spaghetti straps, her arms and shoulders bare. She fiddled absent-mindedly with her necklace; she liked pearls, she had several necklaces made from different sorts of pearls. She was wearing glasses. She wore them for watching television, in the cinema and — as this evening — for driving. They were of indeterminate design, fifties-style maybe. She had had them for as long as I had known her. And yet they always seemed fashionable, signalling, in some way, that here was an outsider. The same went for the slightly tousled hairdo, which gave her a rather impish look, an air of nonchalant elegance. Her whole appearance was, in fact, anachronistic, which is probably why everyone found her so alluring.

I could see that something was bothering her, but at the same time I did not see it, I was too wrapped up in myself, my stockpile of opinions, my interest in a mother-in-law who was clearly teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but concealed it by standing in the background with her drink and a ciggie in one hand, whispering to some other lady about the outrageous amounts of money they made out of the Foreign Ministry’s countless overseas allowances, while in the foreground, Ambassador Boeck held forth on the perfect dry martini as if he were talking about complicated matters of foreign policy. It was a speech I had heard at least ten times already; because, of course, the correct ratio was neither three nor four parts gin to one part dry vermouth, but a balance so delicate, according to Mr Boeck’s cosmic theories — presented with a perfectly straight face — that I could not help thinking of pi, that mathematical quantity with an infinite number of figures after the point. Margrete was still fiddling with the string of pearls. Then, out of nowhere, came that modulation in her eyes: ‘Tell me about Lisbon,’ she said.

There have been moments when I have felt that the films of Michelangelo Antonioni have destroyed my ability to love. To communicate properly. It could be that I became so beguiled by that universe, and at such an impressionable stage in life, that I was left ingrained with the belief that it was impossible to gain insight into another person. Sitting there in the living room, held transfixed by a string of pearls, I felt as though I were back in one of Leonard Knutzen’s films, standing in an empty field, my back to a girl, with a bloody great bulldozer plonked inexplicably between us.

I was just back from Lisbon, from a trip I believed had saved my career. Everything had been at stake, and I had won. Margrete had not asked, but she asked now, did not want to talk about her decidedly rocky mother; had no wish to discuss her father’s priceless theories regarding the optimal dry martini, instead she asked about Lisbon: ‘Did you discover anything there?’ she said. A world of meaning in that one word ‘discover’. There was something about her voice, a trace of doubt, of suspicion — I couldn’t quite tell.

Lisbon was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I made some offhand remark in reply before returning to her mother’s remarkable consumption of alcohol: ‘I’d be a bloody alcoholic too, I’m sure, after thirty years of the corps diplomatique and their stultifying, ivory-tower existence.’

I saw Margrete flinch. She said: ‘Sometimes when you talk it makes me feel the way I did at school when somebody scraped a fingernail across the blackboard.’ Pause. Again those eyes, the irises shifting colour: ‘Didn’t you meet a woman?’ Now and again, a look would come into Margrete’s eye that betrayed her profession: a dissecting gaze.

I said nothing. For a long time. I sat back in the sofa in a room which I had decorated along with the lovely woman standing right in front of me, and as I sat there it struck me that I was doing the opposite of what I wanted to do with my life. I was not unfolding, I was curling in on myself. At long last, prompted by the primitive impulse which says that the best form of defence is attack, I said: ‘Are you jealous. Don’t tell me that you — you — are jealous?’

She may not have been. She was not the type to want to own me, to own anything. Still she stood there fingering the string of pearls, a present from her mother and father for her birthday some weeks earlier and outrageously expensive, no doubt. It had been bought in Japan, a string of pearls with just a temporary clasp, so that she could put it around her neck right away, see how it looked. Her father had asked her to have it restrung at a jeweller’s in Oslo. She had not yet done so, but had wanted to wear it to the party, to please her mother and father. She fingered it like a rosary. As if she were praying, incessantly, entreating me to tell her. I would forgive you everything if only you would tell me, her lips said.

What could I say, I wondered. But I could not think of anything to say. And I could not tell her the truth. I stared at one particular pearl. It did not borrow light, it shed light. I could not breathe, I lacked spirit, that was why I found it so hard to communicate. I stared at the woman before me, I hardly recognised her. The short, black dress with the spaghetti straps, the quaint spectacles, no longer suggested a sexy woman, but a young girl. The collar-bones, which Margrete called key-bones, so sharply defined, spoke of an ominous slenderness, vulnerability. She had her whole hand curled round the necklace now, as if it were an anchor chain that was saving her from being swept away. Away from me, away from this house. Sometimes she seemed so helpless, so flagrantly helpless, that it did not so much confuse as annoy me.

Then there was this other thing. This too a mystery, but in quite the opposite way, you might say. One day, some years into our relationship, and almost by accident, I learned that she was already a respected expert in her field, derma-venereology. She had had several groundbreaking articles published in leading medical journals. Why had she not told me? Or: why had I not got her to tell me? I am no stranger to the thought that I may have viewed her specialty as a threat of some kind, that I was in some way afraid of catching something.

She was a tallboy. I could open the drawers and commit their contents to memory, only to find when I opened them again that they contained something quite different. She, Margrete, was Project X. She always had been. Now, in the instant before it happened, I saw this more clearly than ever.

We were still discussing my trip. She standing, me sitting. The room seemed darker, as if all the light had been sucked into the pearls she wore around her neck. She was worrying so hard at the necklace that one would have thought it felt to her like a detestable dog collar. All at once the skin of her face seemed to craze over. I explained that the trip to Lisbon had been absolutely necessary, a case of to be or not to be. Exactly, she said. But for whom? And then she asked a question which led me to suspect that she might, after all, know everything: ‘What was it you called those women at NRK who sleep their way up the ladder — “telly tarts”, wasn’t that it?’ She fixed her eyes on a point on my forehead, just over my eyebrow, as if seeing there not a scar, but a dirty blemish. A semen stain.

And when I did not come up with an answer, or would not give an answer, could not give an answer, the string of her necklace snapped, apparently without her being anywhere near it, as if supernatural powers were at work. Pearls sprayed everywhere, a precious, white shower falling to the floor.

During a long period of the life that now lies behind me I felt — for reasons beyond my comprehension — the urge to seek out a worthy mission. How should one spend one’s days? Searching for pearls to thread onto a string? Or should one quite simply create new conditions, seek out another sort of string?

When I joined NRK Television and embarked upon what those who like to exaggerate have described as one of the most influential careers in post-war Norway, no one knew that as far as I was concerned I was in retirement. My real working life was already at an end. My Project X. As far as I was concerned, the rest of my life was going to be a real dawdle, involving no great hazards. I began my job as an announcer. I might just as well have begun work as a lighthouse keeper.

In memory my Project X is long since reduced to two activities — plus the echo of some contrapuntal wonders from Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. One of these involved crouching down between two gooseberry bushes in a garden, gazing at a cross spider. The other entailed sitting in state atop a great portal between life and learning, at a desk piled high with books on the cosmos. As a sideline I am sure I could have written a treatise on Araneus diadematus. At the very least I should have foreseen the discovery of Pluto’s moon.

I would be twenty before I found my calling — and I have no hesitation in using such a highfalutin word. I had had an idea that I would wind up at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics right from that day at school when a succession of maps whipped up, one after the other, to reveal a stunning poster of the solar system at the very back, like Truth itself. But I did not opt for astrophysics in order to study the cosmos, I wanted only to use the subject, and the reading room that went with it, as a base camp in an expedition to other, I was about to say higher, objectives. I was occasionally heard to say to fellow students: ‘I’m drawing up a new map of the universe.’

It was at this point that all the thoughts that had been running around in my head since the day when I sat amid an avalanche of books, looking at the bare bookshelves in Karen Mohr’s bedroom and waiting for a ham omelette, crystallised into the obvious mission, the Project. In a flash I knew: this is what I was born for. As a child I had always liked the standard adult question: ‘What are you going to be when you grow up.’ Because this told me that I was going to be something. Not just be. Several times already — with a certainty that I did not dare to reveal — I had had the feeling that I was a wonder, but only now did I feel myself to be fully evolved; it was a long time since I had had the sensation of dying, only to live on as a broader person. I was ready. I could almost hear a voice saying: ‘The hour has come.’

I am not so much of a fool that I cannot laugh at it now. Nonetheless, this phase in my life deserves to be described as it was: utterly serious and totally devoid of self-irony. I knew I did not have all the time in the world. Blame my impatience, if you will, on an exceptional teacher from my high school years, a man who may have been a notorious sceptic and atheist, but who, after a terrible disaster at sea in which he lost all of his closest family, became a deeply religious person — which is not to say that he became a sad, old misery guts on that score. He always wore a beret, like a painter. I often thought that he and my neighbour Karen Mohr would have made a good match. ‘Teaching is the greatest of all the arts,’ he said. During those years I did not go to school, I sat at the feet of a guru. ‘Use your head today, tomorrow it may be too late,’ he said in every second class. ‘Right now, you have no preconceived opinions. And only now, for all too short a time, do you have the necessary measure of naivety.’ According to our astute schoolmaster, no one had an original thought after they turned twenty-five. By then one was set. Almost all significant discoveries, particularly within science, were made by relatively young people. Just look at Newton!

All at once the Project was tantalisingly clear to me. I would discover a new way of thinking, a way which lay dormant within us. I would break down the bars behind which human cognition had been confined by the existing categories. I have to restrain myself here — I can see that the more I say, the more overheated and nebulous and crazy it will sound. Let me put it this way: it was a task worthy of Atlas himself, it was an attempt to lift something colossal, to form the basis for a higher heaven. And yet to me it seemed an imperative and manifestly rational task.

Looking back on it, it is easy to see what I was fighting against: Melvil Dewey’s classification system. Because even though it was only a tool for organising books in a library, to me it was the crowning example of a mode of thought which had paralyzed our potential for evolving as human beings. Ever since my visit to Deichman’s Potala Palace with Karen Mohr, clad in sober grey, I had been unhappy about Melvil Dewey’s method of arranging a large collection of books. His system, with its ten main classes had cemented notions of the importance of the different branches of knowledge and of the relationship between them. I was reminded of my own bafflement and lack of vision that time when Granny dragged out all those small boxes full of crystal droplets. Who would ever have thought that together they would form a glittering chandelier?

Dewey’s system belonged, moreover, to another world, not to a life in which people’s thoughts and ideas were forever changing, in which fields of knowledge expanded in the same way as the universe did. I never forgot the class — a Norwegian class, at that, earmarked for a review of adverbial clauses — in which our unconventional junior-high teacher told us about the explosion of life forms traceable in the Cambrian system. I had a strong sense of living in a new and revolutionary Cambria, in an epoch when everything was gathering speed, when new scientific discoveries were piling up all around us. Dewey’s system was based on a simple, single-celled form of life, so to speak. But now new hybrids were bursting forth, fabulous unguessed-at branches of learning.

What interested me, more than the libraries and the classification system as such, was the organisation of human knowledge. I wanted to promote a different understanding of the collective power of all the arts and sciences; I meant to draw up a new map, on a new projection, with different names for all the regions; I wished to create a springboard for unforeseen discoveries. In glimpses I saw, with a shudder of apprehension almost, the Project’s aim: a new unity. New connections between the various parts of the whole. The chance of a new kind of dialogue. If mankind was to unfold, then our knowledge would also have to be unfolded. Maybe Project X was born on that day in my childhood when I unwrapped a beautiful map of the world from what everybody thought was a filthy, crumpled wad of cloth.

This task instinctively appealed to me. It was all about depth. I wanted to be a person who worked in depth. I often thought of another of the many keen assertions made by our master in junior high: no one now had the energy to care about the big picture, he said, standing in front of a blackboard covered in circles and dotted lines. Any expert today who claimed to know more than one per mil of the existing knowledge in his field was bluffing. And if you were not even anywhere close to knowing your own discipline, how were you supposed to understand the relationship between your subject and other subjects? The sciences in our day were incapable of communicating with one another, our teacher said. And this was catastrophic. Most fruitful theories sprang from the wedding of two ideas from two unrelated fields. He was right. At my best moments I felt a kinship with Thor Heyerdahl.

My life has been a balancing act between the hope of being a wonder, and the fear that I was a fool. I remember how sometimes in maths tests I could juggle quite brilliantly with abstract quantities, while at others I could make the most unforgivably stupid mistakes, could hardly add two and two together.

I once asked Margrete why she had kept those four butterflies, the ones she had caught as a child, hanging in a frame on the wall. ‘I like butterflies,’ she said. ‘And I’m interested in them from a medical point of view, too. They have the most amazing immune system. It has us stumped. We can inject them with cholera or typhus bacteria. But they don’t get sick.’ I tended to think of Margrete in much the same way. She was a doctor, there was no way she could ever get sick.

Luckily, my choice of life project went well with a need for concealment which had not lessened with the years. As an astrophysics student I had access to the big reading room on the top floor of the Physics Building, a lofty, bright, square room. Here, in the yeasty atmosphere generated by the deep concentration of countless students, I could wrestle with my Atlas project, well-hidden, but at the same time situated on a vital axis. Beneath me lay the entrance to the campus, a portal through which thousands passed every day. And from the terrace outside the reading room I could drink in the inspiring view of the city and the fjord.

This was the most unsociable, most reclusive phase of my life. And possibly the only time when I actually did some hard work. I can shake my head at it now, but I cannot deny that I was very content. I had a tiny flat in Hegdehaugsveien, but spent most of my time in the reading room surrounded, for appearances’ sake, by astrophysics textbooks, while reading other works entirely and jotting down, or occasionally sketching out, thoughts and ideas on sheets of paper which gradually grew into a pile as bulky and fanciful as an old Family Bible.

My frame of reference was the Dewey Decimal System, and in order to know what exactly I was protesting against and wished to improve upon I learned the names of the ten main classes, the hundred subdivisions and the thousands of sections or subjects by heart. I can still remember a lot of them, 786: Keyboard Instruments, 787: Stringed Instruments, 788: Wind Instruments. Or 597: Fish, 598: Birds, 599: Mammals. To begin with, I put a lot of effort into tossing these topics around in my head, to see if they might fall into other constellations, with other names. Since, on paper, I was studying astronomy I thought of the stars, thought to myself that this was like drawing new lines between those points of light, creating different signs from those which had been employed ever since the days of the Ancient Greeks. Why 295: Zoroastrianism, 296: Judaism, 297: Islam? Why not invent a new group in which string instruments, birds and Zoroastrianism were put together.

For the first time, during these years, I felt motivated to read. Or rather: I browsed, frantically skimming page after page, hoping to spot ideas, hints, clues which would help me with my project. I scrutinised the other classification systems, from Francis Bacon’s and Henry Evelyn Bliss’s to that devised by the far-sighted mathematician Dr S. R. Ranganathan, before expanding my studies to include every endeavour to organise the world of thoughts and things. I delved with a will into the zoological and botanical systems — in particular Carl von Linné’s twenty-four classes, as well as his optimistic breakdown into genus and species and the resultant two-part Latin name. I pored over medical books on anatomy, I studied the periodic table, I struggled until I was blue in the face to grasp the reasoning behind the twenty-eight magnificent volumes of Diderot et al.’s great French Encyclopedia, I even looked at various books on mazes in all their historical forms.

I sat in the reading room — I saw myself as being in a kind of academic outside-left position — enlightening myself on the infinite variety of human knowledge: biology, economics, meteorology. I read and read, leafed through book after book. By bringing all my mental powers to bear, I eventually decided what I considered to be the main branches of learning, the fundamental categories — I gave them new names, instead of such long-winded appellations as philosophy and natural science — then I split these up into smaller sections and — this was the hardest part — devised a sequence for these main and secondary disciplines which might disclose new inter-category relationships.

I sat on the top of the Physics Building, a gateway to the seat of learning in Oslo, a little cathedral, thanks to Per Krohg’s frescoes in the entrance hall, but I was studying neither physics nor astrophysics, I was reorganising all the world’s knowledge. I sat in the reading room, month after month, in that yeasty atmosphere, trying out idea after idea. I created divisions according to an evolutionary system, based on how things appeared to have emerged in the course of time. I arranged the main classes in the order in which they ought to be studied by someone seeking to be educated. I created systems which progressed from the general to the specific. I tried another sequence which ran from the specific to the general. In one experiment I began with the minor groups and subjects, not the main classes, then drew these groups together to form a bigger picture; attempted, you might even say, to get them to merge together of their own accord, working from the bottom upwards. I tried everything: for a long time, in one of my drafts Ant was a main class, in another I had two categories entitled The Actually Human and The Covertly Human.

It’s odd. I have always believed that these were the years when I thought least about Margrete. I see now that I must have been thinking about her all the time. That she may have been the motive behind the whole Project. That this was another swim across an impossibly wide body of water.

One weekend I stumbled upon a fresh source of inspiration. I was on a visit to my parents at the house in Grorud, and when I went out into the garden on the Sunday morning to look at the apple trees I saw the sun glinting off some silken threads strung between two gooseberry bushes. I bent down to look, and there was a cross spider. It had just finished attaching the first frame threads of a web. What with the cross on the spider’s back, I could not help feeling that it would be as good as a church service just to sit here in the grass for an hour, observing with creeping fascination how the creature slung its wonderful wheel-web between the branches.

The snag with Dewey’s way of thinking was its disastrous one-dimensionality. The main classes and their subdivisions formed one long, vertical chain. My observation of the spider’s web inspired me to experiment with a new scheme in which the groups would also be ranged side by side in rows. Such a set-up might well reveal totally new, horizontal links between the subjects. A hitherto unseen interplay between, let’s say, biology, economics and meteorology.

I knew it was impossible, but ideally every book in a library would be placed in such a way that it abutted on every other book. It was something of this sort that I had dreamt of as I struggled to organise the books on Karen Mohr’s shelves. Each book should have connecting lines running in several directions. What I was looking for was a network, not a classification system. A similar notion had been running through my mind as I stood in the vast Central Lending and Reference Department in the Deichman Library. When you walked over to a shelf and pulled out a book, a string of others ought to be pulled out along with it. Sitting in the garden in Grorud, gazing at the spider’s web, I pictured myself taking Peer Gynt off its shelf in the Central Lending and Reference Department, and how, in so doing, I caused a number of other works to fall out, including some from other sections: a travel guide to Egypt, Norwegian folk tales, music by Edvard Grieg, the history of the National Theatre, a biography of Ibsen, a history of language, poems by Lord Byron, a lavishly illustrated book on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

In the reading room on the top of the Physics Building I did occasionally leaf through my astronomy books — more for fun, really. I was particularly taken with a little-supported theory that there might be a tenth planet, lying beyond Pluto, dubbed Planet X. So it came about that I named my own search — or research as I cockily referred to it — Project X. Although it is possible that in adopting this letter I was also saying something else: I did not know what my project actually entailed. And thanks to my ill-fated encounter with Silapulapu, I am still none the wiser.

When the reading room closed I carried on working back at the flat in Hegdehaugsveien, to the accompaniment — morning and evening for many years — of Bach on the stereo, as if I were trying to deduce the spirit with which he bound his notes together; a spirit, a sort of glue almost, which I thought might be of help to my own ‘Kunst der Fuge’. I had eventually come up with forty-six main classes and a whole host of subdivisions, some of them denoted only by Greek letters. I had covered large sheets of paper with writing and these I spread out all over the living-room floor. Time and again I was heartened by the astonishing correspondences that came to light when I read across or down or diagonally. But just as often, even with Bach’s fugues playing in the background, I saw only impenetrable constellations. Although they may simply have seemed that way due to my own limitations.

At the weekends, summer and autumn, I went out to Grorud where I would spend the mornings in the garden, looking at the cross spiders building their wonderful silken wheels among the bushes. For some weeks I was also able to stuff myself with gooseberries which, with their sharp, complex flavour — the tough, hairy skin and the soft flesh that was both sweet and sour — spurred me on in my hunt for subjects rich in contrast. When the dew was lying and the sun shining, the webs looked like little galaxies, spirals of glittering stars. I wanted to spy out the secret of their construction technique. The first stage of the process in particular appeared to be crucial, the way in which the spider attached the anchor threads, bridges of a sort, often with the aid of the wind, before commencing on the actual framework. It was these foundation threads which varied most from web to web. The radii, the spokes of the wheel, were always spun from the centre outwards. The construction of the capture spiral followed this same pattern, with strands radiating out from the centre and sticky threads running inwards again. Finally — and this really intrigued me — the centre was destroyed and respun. I never tired of lying there in the grass, watching those fragile, shimmering works of wonder take shape before my eyes.

Back at the flat I covered huge sheets of paper with more and more writing, big and small, with connecting lines, fine as silken threads, running this way and that, speaking of a form of order which also had to allow room for disorder. It got to the point where the living-room floor looked like something far more complicated than a spider’s web. I felt as though I was on the verge of a spectacular breakthrough. That it was only a matter of time before a veil would be ripped aside and a claustrophobic grey hallway would have to give way to a light, bright, free Provence. And I was on the scent of something important. Before long I had transformed my flat into a sailing ship and my project into a voyage worthy of Magellan himself.

I’ve been thinking — maybe everyone has their secret Project X, something that drives them, moves them to push themselves beyond their limits. Viktor Harlem, for one, wrestled with just such a mind-boggling idea. And whatever one might think about this vision, or utopian concept, so robust was it that one long weekend in May it brought us — Viktor and me — to Venice.

Axel, who had fainted at the airport and had to stay behind in Oslo, was a dark Adonis with whom I lost touch after high school. Viktor, on the other hand, is as present in my mind to this day as he was back then. It is hard to describe the young Viktor Harlem, the brains behind The Three Heretics, but when I close my eyes what I see is a shining face, a face glowing with an almost uncanny intensity, rather as if a hundred-watt bulb had been screwed into a head that was only designed to take sixty watts.

Although I was quite clear on the purpose of our visit, when the time came to complete the final stage of our mission I began to falter. As Viktor stepped aboard the traghetto which was all ready to push off from the stop outside the Hotel Gritti Palace, I tried to explain to him that I was not coming, that I did not want to leave, could not face leaving, the Grand Canal, that waterway lined on either side by such mesmerising buildings, the sound of the water grinding away at the age-old stone. Why didn’t we find ourselves a table on the hotel terrace, overlooking the canal; order some cake — some tiramisù — and coffee, I asked. Please, I said. What I did not say was that I no longer had any faith in my friend’s audacious plan. I was trying, as gently as I could, to save Viktor from making a terrible fool of himself.

And what did Viktor have in mind. Viktor meant to pay a call on the poet Ezra Pound, a very old man now, and supposedly still living in Venice. Back in the flat in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, when Viktor first mooted the idea of looking up Pound, for a moment I thought he was talking about the British currency, that we were off to find a whole pile of money. Which was not too far off the mark: to Viktor, Pound was as good as a treasure chest.

We were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel, in a dim room dominated by a lagoon-like mirror, with enigmatic stucco decorations on the ceiling. The hotel’s one notable feature was a portrait of Armauer Hansen, hanging on the wall of the lobby. ‘My great-grandfather was a doctor too,’ the hotel manager told us. ‘He met the later so famous Norwegian when the latter visited Venice in 1870 on a travel scholarship, then too in May as it happens.’ Viktor promptly took this as a good omen. ‘We’re on the trail of something much more important than the discovery of the leprosy bacillus,’ he confidently announced to the manager. For my own part, I interpreted the sight of Armauer Hansen’s countenance more as a warning of the city’s contagiousness.

After two days I was actually feeling rather weak. I had spent most of my time on board a vaporetto; I had travelled up and down the Grand Canal at least twenty times, for much the same reason as one sees a film again and again: to savour scenes that have gradually become familiar and to keep on discovering new details. I could not get enough of it, almost had to rub my eyes as I tried to take in the sight of the rows of Byzantine and Gothic buildings to either side of me; façades redolent of the Renaissance and neo-classicism, walls which altered colour with the light and whose reflections created a rippling fairy tale down in the canal. The fronts of these palazzos were Vivaldi’s music. I leaned over the rail of the boat, staring, staring with lovestruck, avidly curious eyes. I had planned to see other sights in Venice, but I never got beyond the Grand Canal. I never visited the Doge’s Palace, nor the Accademia and — no one will believe it, I know — I did not so much as set foot on the pigeon beset square of St Mark. The Grand Canal was all I needed and more; this lazy, inverted ‘S’ of water winding between rows of palazzos, with each façade that hove into view more evocative than the one before: Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. I felt as though I was sailing along a spine in my own imagination, a backbone made up of identical and yet widely differing vertebrae. I was struck by an intriguing and unnerving suspicion: if I were to enter any one of these buildings along the canal — Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo — inside it I would find another Grand Canal, equally spellbinding, which would hold me there for the rest of my life.

Just before the traghetto left the little jetty, I joined Viktor on board anyway. Something in his face made me do it. All of a sudden he looked worried. As if he realised that everything was at stake here, his whole life project.

When we stepped ashore on the other side of the canal, he seemed even more uncertain. He led the way up the labyrinthine street, in the opposite direction from the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and turned left at the first bridge, onto the Fondamenta di ca’Bala. ‘What if he’s not at home?’ Viktor muttered, stopping short. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

I had to take charge. ‘Of course he’ll be at home, where’s he going to go? He’s as old as the hills, for God’s sake.’

Viktor was an avid fan, to put it mildly, of that motley literary bazaar which went by the title of The Cantos: a fragmented poetic work touching upon just about everything between heaven and earth. At the flat in Seilduksgata in Oslo, Viktor kept having to build more shelves to hold the books which were supposed to help him pursue more of the strands in Ezra Pound’s vast tapestry of words. The Cantos were for Viktor what Provence was for Karen Mohr: an experience which craved a lifetime. Viktor wanted to achieve a thorough understanding of Pound’s work, but he understood very little of it. Then he had the idea of going to Venice. He was devoutly convinced that all would be revealed if only he could meet the poet himself. ‘Devoutly’ being the right word here. Viktor had the same motive for seeking out Pound as some people have for wishing to meet God. It was much like having the chance to ask about the meaning of life.

In spite of all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Viktor walked more and more slowly along the side of the narrow canal. The street scene was what any holiday brochure would describe as ‘picturesque’, with just the right number of cats, flower boxes on the walls, little bridges and elegant motor-boats with hulls of gleaming varnished mahogany. Suddenly Viktor turned left again, looking both quite certain and utterly lost, as if he were wavering between a sense of having been here before and of finding himself on some distant, watery planet. We were standing in the calle Querini, a narrow, paved cul-de-sac, outside a deep-pink or terracotta-coloured house. Viktor goggled at the lion’s head knocker on the dark-green door. His courage failed him. I basically had to half-carry him back to the canal. Viktor pulled a bottle of aquavit out of his satchel: ‘Maybe we should just drink it ourselves.’

I said nothing. We simply stood there, leaning against the railing along the canalside, staring down the cul-de-sac at the pink house front, as if we both knew that all would be revealed if only we waited long enough, stared hard enough. Then the bells of Santa Maria della Salute began to chime. It might have been the cue for a revelation: the green door opened and around it came a head, a lion’s head larger than that on the door knocker; an old man walking with a stick and accompanied by a white-haired woman. They came hirpling towards us. Something happened to Viktor. He woke up, or woke up and all but fainted away. Pound appeared to have the same effect on him as Venice had on Axel — the reality was just too much for him. I nudged him in the ribs and as he pulled himself together I heard a panic-stricken: ‘What do we do?’ And I, to whom this man meant nothing, said: ‘Ask him. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ As far as I was concerned this was an interesting dilemma. You meet God. You are allowed one, possibly two, questions. What should you ask?

The woman and the old man were now level with us. Viktor took the plunge, he held up his hand, stopped the couple. They did not seem surprised, nor particularly well-disposed. Pound was wearing a broad-brimmed brown hat. His hair stuck out from underneath it. The maze of wrinkles on his face was like script, the marks of many lives. I remarked on his eyes, blue but with a sort of mist over them. Viktor approached Ezra Pound. Produced a book, ‘every heretic’s bible’ as he put it, the latest, expanded edition of The Cantos. The writer squinted at Viktor for some time before accepting the proffered pen and signing his name, along with a couple of words, on the title page. As he took the book back Viktor handed the bottle of aquavit to the poet, as a thank-you — or, why not: an offering — pointing as he did so to the ship on the label and reciting the first line from ‘every heretic’s bible’: ‘And then went down to the ship …’

Pound peered curiously at Viktor as he handed the bottle to his companion. Viktor’s worshipful expression did not appear to make much of an impression on him.

‘A masterpiece,’ Viktor said, or sighed almost. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but which canto do you consider to be the most important.’ Viktor stood there, waiting for the magic word, the key that would lay the work wide open instead of, as now, being only slightly ajar. This was no formative trip, but something far more ambitious: a mission in search of the answer to all things, the ultimate truth. I was reminded of my own feelings on that day in my childhood when I was introduced to Uncle Melankton.

Pound stood as if in a dream, his mind somewhere else behind those misty blue eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, motioning towards the book. He went on standing there, gazing into space, shook his head slowly while the fingers of one hand scratched the knuckles of the other. ‘Those poems don’t make sense,’ he said, ‘they were written by a moron.’ ‘But, but, but …’ I could see that Viktor was totally thrown. ‘But it’s … a masterpiece,’ he said again.

‘It’s a botch,’ Ezra Pound said. ‘Stupid and ignorant. I knew too little about so many things.’

And with that the ancient left us, walked off slowly along the canalside with the white-haired woman. Viktor just stood there with his mouth opening and shutting, as if he were choking on a sentence. I told him to relax, Pound was probably just feeling a bit down, I said. I followed the woman and the old man with my eyes until they disappeared into a restaurant. ‘Cici’ it said on the sign. And all at once I realised that I had come face to face with myself, a wonder who knew, nonetheless, that he was a fool.

Viktor was left with a faraway look in his eyes. Or maybe he was lost in one of those whirlpool visions Pound was always on about. Viktor stared into mid-air, at the point where the poet’s head had been. Aghast, I thought at first, but after he had been standing like this for some minutes it dawned on me that he was actually awestruck. ‘What heresy,’ he gasped. ‘To condemn your own life’s work.’ Viktor kissed the book. I had a nodding acquaintance with Hamlet, and to me Viktor looked exactly like Ophelia at the moment when she started to lose her marbles.

We wandered back to the hotel. Viktor was acting like an absolute lunatic. Hooting with laughter one minute, cursing and swearing the next. Shaking his head and slamming his fist into walls along our way. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed every few minutes. ‘Je-sus!’ In the hotel room he slumped down into a shabby armchair among all the other heavy, cherry-wood furniture, with a look in his eyes that could have won him a part as the occupant of a deckchair on the beach in the film of Death in Venice, which Visconti had just finished making. He opened the bottle of grappa we had bought. ‘Holy shit,’ he said after the first swig. ‘They wouldn’t win any prizes for this. I should have kept the aquavit.’

Barely a year later, in Lillehammer, Viktor Harlem received a blow on the head from a block of ice which left him staring into space in an institution for twenty-odd years. The look in his eyes the same as in Venice: faraway. Or rather, the light in his face was extinguished, as if a light bulb had gone out. I always had the feeling that his head would tinkle if I shook it. Despite Viktor’s affected wonder at Ezra Pound’s self-denigrating statement, it often occurred to me that it was actually in Venice that he was dealt the blow to the head that put him out of action for so many years. That he had been hit, not by a block of ice, but by a book. It was as if he needed twenty years to digest the shock of his guru describing his life project — a superhuman feat and the object of Viktor’s unstinting admiration — as a complete and utter failure. Each time I visited Viktor at the institution I was met by the eyes of someone who did not consider it worthwhile being fully conscious in such a meaningless world.

After all those years, he would one day get up and perform an achievement which would leave a lasting impression, but I knew nothing of this in Venice. To be honest I had worries enough of my own. In all probability I had been more thrown by the meeting with Ezra Pound than Viktor, at that point anyway. I needed room to breathe. I needed to be alone with my fear. It seemed clearer to me than ever: I could wind up a fool. Despite the knowledge of the powers pulsating within me.

Having deposited Viktor at the hotel with the bottle of grappa, I hopped onto the first vaporetto to come sailing along the Grand Canal. I had to take my mind off things, I had to find solace. I gazed at the buildings slowly slipping past, seeming to pile up in my memory. And suddenly I discerned a secret, mutual affinity between them, an all but invisible similarity, even between façades lying far apart; and at one spot, near the Rialto Bridge, it struck me that if I looked a little closer I would see that all of the house fronts were in fact the same façade. They were all part of an endeavour to say something about the perfect façade. Just as Cézanne painted the same mountain again and again. Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. Variations on the same possibility. I leaned over the rail of the vaporetto, trying to memorise each frontage — Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo — so that in my mind I might be able to lay them one on top of the other, veil upon veil as it were, to create the underlying, ideal, façade, the palace in the depths, behind, beneath everything.

I am not sure, but sometimes I am inclined to see a connection between the television series Thinking Big and the ranks of façades along the Grand Canal. At the time I regarded the canal more as a long strand and the palazzos as almost identical pearls. Something I could collect, something which, by mere accumulation, could save me from ending up as a fool.

I had laughed at Viktor’s discourses on The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s megalomaniac attempt to construct a different sort of unity out of fragments. But some years later, by which time Viktor — I almost envied him — had found an impenetrable hiding place in an institution, there I was myself, striving to draw up a new map of human knowledge, a Project X which probably had more in common with the American bard’s euphoric songs than I liked to think.

My study of — I might almost say: worship of — the cross spider’s wheel web had inspired me also to try working breadthwise and from here it was only a short step to a more spatial perspective. I left my seat in the reading room and took instead to roaming around the campus. By studying the relationship of the university buildings to one another, which departments occupied which floors, I hoped I might discover something about the relative order of the various disciplines. Why were the buildings housing Sociology and Physics situated so far apart? And why did Philosophy occupy the floor above Theology in the Niels Treschow building?

It may well have been these strolls around the campus which prompted me to move base to the College of Architecture. Because my aim was not to become an architect; I was still looking for some means of organising all human knowledge — something better than the stunting 534: Sound and related vibrations, 535: Light and paraphotic phenomena, 536: Heat and thermodynamics; what I sought was a set-up which would make the most of the potential stored within the knowledge common to all of us, hence enabling us to take a cognitive leap forward. The first months there seemed especially promising. I had been spurred to apply the principles of floor-planning to my work. I grouped the sheets of paper I had spread out on the floor of the living room in Hegdehaugsveien as if the main classes and the subdivisions listed on them were rooms in a large house, or private and public premises in a metropolis.

This soon had to give way, however, to a more ambitious plan — this too architectonically inspired — in which I tried to find a dimension of depth in the connecting tissue of the arts and sciences. I tore up the sheets of paper on the floor. I started working with larger sheets, progressed from miniatures to massive canvases, so to speak. The living room was now full of transparent plastic tablecloths suspended from the ceiling, closely covered with subject headings. It looked rather like a lot of bookcases sitting one behind another, the only difference being that these you could see through, see all the way to the very back. Sometimes I had the impression that I was once more on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal; I felt as though I was gliding past a succession of transparent, almost identical palazzo façades. On the first sheets I had listed the more concrete main classes and subjects; the further back you went the more abstract they became. Each heading had, therefore, possible links running in countless directions. I suddenly perceived, for example — with the taste of gooseberries in my mouth, as it happens — that there might be a connection between palaeontology’s interest in fossilised dinosaur bones and modern neurology’s theories regarding the reptilian layer of the brain. Often, when I was standing looking at these transparent tablecloths, contemplating the groups of subjects hanging in layers, one behind the other, I felt something close to a new state of mind, as though my vision and my thoughts were now in tune with an awareness I had always possessed.

What Margrete liked better than anything else was to walk around the garden, barefoot and without an umbrella, when it rained in the summer. She was the sort of person who could set such store by a fine dinner service that she would stroke it with her fingers. Sometimes she would kiss me just to enjoy the sound of a kiss. That was the best sound in the world, she said: the sound of a kiss. I never made any allowance for such knowledge, such wisdom, when I was struggling with my Project X.

I have never been all that interested in the so-called explorers, all except one: Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan as he was known to us in school. True he was killed in the Philippines, so he never made it back to his starting point in Spain himself, but it was his initiative and vision which brought about the first circumnavigation of the Earth. No one combined strength of will with cosmographic perception and nautical know-how the way Magellan did. The others hit upon a bit of land here and there, but it was Magellan who tied a string around it all, binding all of the individual discoveries together, threading the pearls neatly onto a strand so that they formed a circle. There could no longer be any doubt: the world was round.

There were times when I thought of my Project X as a Magellanic voyage. Like Magellan I wanted to find other routes, new straits to sail through. I dreamed, not least, of an outcome every bit as deep-reaching as his: a completely new view of the world. Magellan showed the people of his day that the world was bigger than they thought.

I soon came to look upon the plastic tablecloths filling the living room as sails, especially when I aired the room and the sheets flapped gently in the draught. I was not in Hegdehaugsveien at all, I was on board my Victoria, the only one of Magellan’s ships to make it home. Magellan sailed round the Earth. I wished to sail round, to encircle reality. When I read those layers upon layers of words, I felt a breeze blowing inside me, or rather, I felt as if something were being opened up, as if I were about to acquire more of that profound insight of which, all my life, I had known myself to possess only a subset. Meanwhile, the work, the thinking, was taking its toll on me. It is said that while crossing the Pacific Magellan’s men lived on worm-eaten biscuits and dirty, foul-smelling water, before they took to eating rats and sawdust, and chewing hide ripped off the timbers. During the Pacific Ocean phase of the Project I led an equally spartan, if not quite so drastic existence. Leonard’s Italian cuisine was a thing of the past. If I did get round to eating anything, I tended to fall back on Spaghetti à la Capri, which I did not even bother to warm, just spooned straight from the tin. It reminded me of my childhood, when the only provisions we needed for a walk in the forest was a stock cube to lick.

The actual crossing of ‘il Pacifico’, a totally unknown area, was Magellan’s greatest achievement. They thought it would only take a few days to sail from the New World, America, to the Moluccas, the centre of the oriental spice trade, instead it took almost four months. Magellan could almost be said to have discovered the Pacific, its vast scale. I too wanted to find something like that: an unknown, or underestimated sea. In selecting the main classes for my new system I gave priority to those subjects pertaining to the mind or things immaterial. I aimed to disentangle a hidden, as yet unrealised, meaning from the world. Fold out reality. A few of today’s particle physicists maintain that we can have no conception of the greater part of the universe simply because it is comprised of a form of matter so essentially different from anything we can imagine. I know it sounds strange, not to say crazy, but I believe that during the most transparent phases of my Project I was on the track of something like that.

Once, I was waiting for Margrete outside a cinema. She took a taxi from work. I observed her through the dark, tinted window as she was paying the driver. I could only just make out her face. The thought struck me that she was trapped inside a black crystal. That I would never be able to break through to her.

The longer I stayed in that room, among those transparent panels covered in writing, the more the feeling I had had ever since studying the spider’s web was confirmed — a hunch which was reinforced by the notion of circumnavigating the world: I ought to arrange the subjects in a circle. Like a wheel.

I reorganised the room. This time I hung the sheets in concentric rings. And the first time I sat down on a chair in the centre and scanned the headings of the subjects and the classes surrounding me, receding layers of script, words forming sentences of sorts, spokes radiating to an outer rim, I sensed what a tremendous boost this gave to my thinking. Everything seemed to explode. I saw patterns of breathtaking beauty. I glimpsed concepts, totally new sciences, with names as yet unuttered by any human being. I caught flashes of solutions in which everything interlocked — not by dint of thousands of tiny gear-wheels, but with all the categories mixed up in such a way that gear-wheels meshed with butterfly wings and crystals, the whole thing encircled by elementary particles. I was thrilled, but I was also startled. The plastic tablecloths seemed to glow. For some time I felt that I was on the threshold of a breakthrough which would have incalculable consequences, that I was all set to make a magnificent contribution to civilisation. There I was: friendless, gaunt, dead-beat, but I truly had created a chandelier of knowledge, three-dimensional, something that could be considered from all sides, with every piece hanging in its rightful place in relation to the others, not packed in boxes and tucked away singly on shelves. At my most audacious moments I felt I was on the scent of something comparable in importance to the alphabet, something which would enable us to form new concepts; an instrument by which mankind could steer, one which could give progress a hefty, and most timely, nudge.

During those first weeks, when we spent more time in bed than out of it, I told Margrete about my endeavours, about the project which I had, by then, abandoned. She got a big laugh out of my descriptions of this, laughed heartily and sincerely, as if it really was a priceless joke. But she caressed me too, as if to console me; she ran a finger wonderingly over the double scar I have over one eyebrow: ‘Hey … you’ve got an “X” on your forehead,’ she whispered. That was all she said, but I ought to have known what she meant.

And then I met my Silapulapu. Silapulapu was the chief of the natives who killed Magellan on the little island of Mactan. On the threshold of his great triumph, almost at the very moment of victory, Magellan was run through by spears. And that is pretty much what happened to me.

I woke one morning with an awful sinking feeling in my stomach and a bitter taste in my mouth. I leapt out of bed and ran, stark naked, straight into the centre of my circle. It was all just a blur. I stared at the transparent plastic sheets covered in writing, only once again to see nothing but chaos. I tried to regain my clarity of vision, but everything was just grey. Māyā, I murmured under my breath. Everything was māyā. I spent the whole day wandering around in a daze, staring, reading, thinking. My eyes hurt, my head hurt, I felt sick from exhaustion, from hunger, from lack of sleep. I was still naked when I climbed into bed that night.

I ought probably to repudiate my grotesque project, make fun of it. And yet I have to admit that I look back on those years with something akin to respect. It may have been a ridiculous venture, but it was beautiful. And who knows, maybe, for a second or two, I actually was only millimetres away from a Pacific Ocean discovery.

I stuck at it, almost in spite of myself, for another few weeks, hung up still more closely-written plastic sheets at different points around the circles. All in vain. Nor was my base at the College of Architecture of any use to me now, my studies of the construction and design of some of the world’s most audacious buildings: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Opera House in Sydney, the Parliament Buildings in Brasilia. I had an idea that the problem lay in the number of main classes. I would have to prune them, single out those which I felt might function in the same way as the spider’s anchor points for the first foundation threads. I thought of Francis Bacon who had managed with just three categories: Memory, Imagination, Reason.

Eventually, almost dropping with exhaustion and possibly inspired by Uncle Melankton’s attempt to reduce the Encyclopedia Brittanica to a single word, I managed to gather everything under two headings: Matter and Mind. Then: Living and Dead. And finally just one: Storytelling. This single main class could thereafter be split up into subdivisions consisting of bigger and bigger lies.

I gave up. It was — and I say this even when looking at it with today’s eyes — the greatest defeat of my life. Or the second greatest. My only comfort was that my shipwreck had been a private affair. No one ever learned of it. I held my peace and went to work in television. I suppose I could say: with Storytelling. Lies. When they showed me the studio, the little cubicle from which I was to do my announcing, in my extraordinary naivety I thought to myself: this could be the perfect hiding place. I did not know that television was a medium within which a fool could be taken for a wonder.

I had one little ray of hope, though. On that day when I found Le petit prince by Saint-Exupéry on the Deichman’s well-organised shelves, Karen Mohr opened the book and read a sentence aloud to me in exquisite French and then translated it: ‘It is only with the heart that once can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ I did not think about it at the time, but I thought about it when I abandoned my Project X: maybe it was not my eyes, nor even my brain that I should be training, concentrating on, if I was to discover something new, but my heart.

I reached this insight at about the same time that I met Margrete again. All of the subject headings in the world, all of Melvil Dewey’s thousands of sections, flowed smoothly into one: Love. And who knows, perhaps it was those crazy hypotheses which gave wind to Margrete’s sails and caused her to set course for Norway once more. She certainly told me that for a long time she had considered settling down somewhere else. But then she had been overcome by an uncontrollable and inexplicable urge to go home.

And now, ten years later, I was standing facing this same woman. And yet even after ten years and thousands of experiences of love I could not understand why she should suddenly seem so hostile; why, towards the end of a confused conversation, she should have worried so much at the necklace that the string snapped.

Pearls sprayed everywhere, went tumbling to the floor. The sound triggered a memory from my childhood: I had knocked a bag of peas out of the cupboard as I tried to sneak a handful of raisins. They made an incredibly complex sound, those peas. A māyā sound if ever there was one, layer upon layer of the same sound, in different nuances of tone. I can still recall the sight of it too, how slowly the pearls, which had suddenly acquired an even deeper sheen, fell through the dim lamplight in the living room, as if they were not falling, but drifting, floating downwards. I noticed how Margrete seemed to be trying to follow each individual pearl with her eyes, the course of each one, at the same time. As if her eyes were doing the splits. And since I was watching her more than the pearls, I saw how she, too, positively fell apart and tumbled to the floor, shattering into pieces that rolled off in all directions. She muttered something which I only grasped after she had muttered it several times: ‘My life’s thread has snapped.’

Then she simply walked out. Or at least, she turned in the doorway and said goodnight. She paid no mind to the pearls, it was as if they were now worthless, a currency which had fallen disastrously in value after a terrible crash — of a moral, not an economic, nature.

I felt I ought to pick them up. I crawled around the parquet floor on my hands and knees. I knew there were forty-six pearls; an increasingly tipsy Mrs Boeck had announced this fact often enough at the party earlier that evening. I hunted for all I was worth and when I counted them an hour later, in the middle of the night, I had forty-five. I have always had a suspicion that the missing pearl, that particular pearl, held a secret. Or that it was not a pearl I had lost, but Margrete.

Over the following days she never asked about the pearls. She seemed apathetic. Almost as if she were doped up. The black discs of her pupils put me in mind of a solar eclipse. She complained of headaches. And the nights were different. I would wake to find her lying sobbing. One night she screamed out loud, shook the bed-head like a child. As if she thought I was not there, that I had left her. Gently I got her to lie down again, speaking soothingly to her. Her head looked so small in the big bed, against the white bed linen. It reminded me of the minuscule portrait on the white wall in Uncle Lauritz’s flat. I had had the same thought then as now: love was a massive map on which there was just one big white patch, an undiscovered land — all except for one small face.

I returned the pearls to her one Sunday morning, at breakfast. Everything seemed normal enough — the orange juice which she had squeezed herself, English marmalade and two exquisite flowers in a vase on the table. We were alone. I had had the necklace restrung, with knots between the pearls. And I had bought a new Akoya pearl, identical to the others. Margrete took the necklace and counted the pearls. Or no, she did not count them, she ran them through her fingers as she was saying something to me. She smiled. And then she began to cry. For joy, I thought. ‘This one’s new,’ was all she said, her fingers around one pearl, the third from the loop side of the clasp. The jeweller had shown me where he had put the pearl I had bought. ‘One of the original pearls is gone,’ she said.

She could tell by feel that it was a different pearl. She could see with her hands. She could sense that I had been with another woman in Lisbon. She could run her fingers over me, over my penis and know right away that it was no longer the same. This was an intelligence beyond my ken. Margrete could not only read books, she could read the temperature of the skin, the light in the eyes, the taste of the lips, the body’s secretions.

I confessed. Or rather, I merely said: ‘You’re right, something did happen in Lisbon.’ She put up a hand, a stop sign: ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’ And yet, if she knew, why was it that only after this did I sometimes catch a new look in her eyes. Not jealousy. Her eyes told me that she was hurt. Humiliated. Or forsaken, lonely. That look said she knew she was not loved. That was what destroyed her. She became more and more quiet after that.

Can you kill a person by neglecting to think about them?

Sometimes I can delude myself into believing that I gave up on love back at the point when I abandoned Project X. After all, if I stopped believing it was possible to arrive at a unified whole, then I also stopped believing in love.

Not long after this evening I found a scalpel in our bed. I was making the bed, and there, between the two single mattresses, lay a scalpel, a chillingly sharp surgical instrument, a lethal weapon in the hands of an expert. Like a sword laid between us. When I asked her about it she made light of it, she must have dropped it, was all she said, she used it to cut the pages of the occasional Danish book. I couldn’t help wondering, though. She was a doctor. I felt scared. Slept with my hands under the duvet.

The next few weeks were marked by Margrete’s baffling behaviour: fits of rage, emotional outbursts over the slightest thing, bouts of weeping. She cried so much that she made me feel as if I had thrown sulphuric acid in her face, her features were so altered, the flesh looked ready to slip right off the bones. Then came a period when she simply seemed lost, sad. Engulfed by darkness. Occasionally I would find her sitting dead still in a chair, with unhappiness written all over her. She looked as though she was trying to do a very easy jigsaw puzzle, one with only six or seven big pieces, but could not even manage that much. ‘Buck up,’ I told her one day, quite sharply. If only I had known.

Now and again, when I tried to talk to her, to get through to her, I was reminded of when I was a teenager, hunkered down in front of the radio, fingers delicately searching out the music stations on the medium waveband. Still I did not seriously begin to worry about her until near the end of this phase, which culminated during a Christmas holiday when she seemed apathetic. Blank, I would say. It was clearly all she could do just to exist. She shuffled around her own house as if she did not even know that this was where she lived. I did not realise how bad things were, though, until there were no longer flowers on the breakfast table, no freshly ground coffee, no orange juice which she had squeezed herself. The gold glint in her eyes was gone. I could not help thinking of granite. She seemed hard through and through. Not like stone. She was stone.

Even so, and I am not trying to defend myself here: she did not stay off work and I never saw any sign of Kristin being affected by it.

Could I have done more? I told myself there was nothing I could do. With hindsight I would say I could not be bothered doing anything. And anyway, I had had my alibi well thought-out long before this: I was so busy; I was working day and night on my masterpiece, my big television series.

I could not even say for certain how many months — years? — this thing that I called her ‘problem’ lasted. And then, although I did not actually notice the transition, she was, to all intents and purposes, her old self again, recognisable for that vibrant, reckless beauty. I believed, I wanted to believe, that everything was okay. Things between us were still a little strained, that was all. War cleanses, as Karl Marx said, but when at last she kissed me again, I felt as though there was a pane of glass between our lips. As if I was already in a prison and she was there to see me, in one of those visiting rooms you see in American films.

Most dreadful of all: her virtual absence of sexual appetite and non-existent orgasms moved me, at one point, to accuse her of having taken a lover. Margrete took me to Xi’an in China. It was like a second honeymoon. For some months I hoped that everything was going to be the same as before, including our love life. But then we lapsed back into our old ruts, circles that never touched.

One night I came upon her standing in the dark kitchen with the fridge door wide open, her face lit by the stark light from inside. I thought she must be feeling peckish, looking for something to eat, but she just stood there like that; stood there for five minutes, ten minutes, stood with her face coloured by that white light, in the way too big T-shirt she wore as a nightie, gazing into the fridge. She reminded me of a pearl. Exquisite, but impenetrable to the eye, hiding its nature under layer upon layer of opacity. In the end I had to speak to her. She did not wake up, but turned slowly to face me. Leaned against me. Her face was cold in the hollow of my throat.

I thought I tried. I did ask her now and again. Asked what was wrong. Asked if there was anything I could do. Questions I had been honing for a long time. She did not answer. Or, again: I thought she did not answer. I felt as though we were back in the old situation outside the Golden Elephant, in seventh grade. ‘Idiot,’ she had answered back then. She seemed to be saying the same thing to me now: ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said wordlessly. ‘You’re an ignoramus.’

There you have it, my life in a nutshell: I was a wonder who contented himself with being an idiot.

One reason why I chose to study astrophysics while I was working on Project X was that it allowed me to work with the largest possible scale, with a perspective in which the word billion kept cropping up and mankind was an incidental glimmer of light in an atom on the outskirts of a grain of sand called the Milky Way. Nevertheless, at one weary moment when, to distract my thoughts, I opened my textbook for A101, the foundation course in astronomy, I found that the first chapter dealt with the Earth. Maybe Margrete was right. Maybe there was no greater Magellanic prospect than that of embracing another human being.

Very occasionally I could still be woken in the night by her crying. I would reach out a hand to her. I knew it was no use. But now and again, even so, I would catch myself holding my breath, as if my body, independent of my brain, was making a last attempt to save her.

One night she said: ‘Why do you lie with your back to me?’

I said: ‘You don’t hold me.’

Love and time. In my mind I sometimes picture love as being like those charts in the ophthalmologist’s office on which the letters get smaller and smaller, harder and harder to read, no matter how good your eyesight is. Until at last there is nothing but meaningless symbols.

As if to show me that she regarded my arrangement with the knots as a contemptible joke, false security, she never wore that string of pearls again. The evening when I came home from Seville and found her dead I could not help thinking that she had done it at last: broken the thread, the strand of her own life. I had not understood a single thing.

I looked down at her, lying there in the middle of the room, surrounded by walls lined with bookshelves. I could practically see plastic tablecloths covered in writing fluttering, ring upon ring, around me. This, Margrete dead on the floor was a true reorganisation of all knowledge. I saw now what I had lacked in my Project X: a person at the centre. A person who was someone other than myself.

After this I stumbled about a house in which Margrete’s blood was congealing all around her. I was sure I was going to come unstuck. When I finally raised the alarm and the police arrived, I collapsed. They looked after me. I was taken to hospital, but the very next afternoon I presented myself at Grønland police station to make my statement. I did not say too much, I did not say too little. I told them how I had found her, why I had not picked up the phone right away, and every now and again — very carefully and with a clear-sightedness so cold-blooded that I have to wonder where it came from — I fed them the details which, in due course, would inevitably point back to me.

I had managed to do everything I needed to do before I called the police. I knew the house would be sealed off. If there were any incontrovertible clues pointing to Margrete’s own hand and not to mine, I had to find them.

Wearing thin gloves, I embarked upon a methodical, not to say surgical, examination of the house, room by room. I was grief-stricken, in turmoil, but I was also filled with another emotion, one that surprised me: curiosity. I went over my own house like a detective. I looked, listened, turned things this way and that, half purposeful, half stupefied. Her scent, that indescribable scent, still hung in every room. Even in prison, years afterwards, that scent could reach me, in spring especially, a breath on the air, as if the whole world were suddenly exuding the odour of Margrete.

I staggered around the house. Searching. And I found things. A string of pearls fraught with memories. Books in Sanskrit. But first and foremost I discovered how she had managed to conceal how things stood with her. A systematic search of her things eventually turned up an empty box for the sort of pills she must have swallowed by the score over the past few years. It was dated six months earlier. It was a drug I knew of, one of the most popular anti-depressants on the market. She had prescribed it for herself. I had to admire her ingenuity. All tracks covered. Not a single colleague informed. She had never had a nervous breakdown. Her women friends had had no idea, or not, at any rate, of how serious it was, there were plenty of them who would have warned me had they known. I had noticed that there were spells when she spent a lot of time in bed, but I simply assumed it was the job that wore her out, she needed to sleep. As I say, only once did I really feel worried, in the days after the Lisbon episode. Then suddenly she was back to normal. That must have been when she started treating herself.

I knew I had to get rid of the box. I do not know why, but I ate the label bearing the words ‘Ad usum proprium’ and, underneath this, her name. Then I disposed of the box in a watertight manner.

I will never be able to describe those terrible days. But amid all the commotion, while the newspapers were floating theory after theory, each one more sensational than the one before; while they were reporting what people felt, thought, said, I was simply happy that I did not appear to have forgotten anything. The police investigators found only what I wanted them to find. And so I waited. Waited patiently for the police to do what they had to do. Waited for the net which I myself had spun — a web worthy of a cross spider — to slowly tighten around me.

At the very end of my Project X period, during the days when everything suddenly went black, I took a shower one evening, in the hope that this might help clear my thoughts. Afterwards I went back into the living room, still wet and naked, to take one last, desperate look at my circles of headings covering all the world’s knowledge; and because it was still nothing but a haze of words floating on transparent plastic panels, desperation got the better of me. I felt so frustrated that I started tearing at the sheet closest to me, almost as if I refused to give in without one last fight. The sheet came loose and as it did so I slipped, grabbed for something to hold onto and succeeded only in dragging a whole lot of other plastic panels down with me. I crashed to the floor, embroiled in layers of transparent plastic covered in writing. I was encased in a cocoon spun from my own bewildering, abstract attempts to classify the world. I was so mad that I actually burst out laughing.

When I managed to disentangle myself I found that the writing had transferred itself to my damp body. My skin was covered in black fragments, obscure symbols, like an intricate tattoo. For two days I just lay in bed moping.

Not all that long after this episode I was lying in another, a new, world, next to Margrete in the bed in Ullevål Garden City. When she ran her fingers over my body, her fingertips seeming to read the last traces of lettering on my skin, it also felt as though she was stroking a defeat off me, as if she were unravelling me from that cocoon, setting me free.

She stroked my back and I wanted nothing more than to be able to lie there, for ever, next to a woman who caressed my skin with her fingers. Margrete inscribed other, unseen symbols on my body, inscribed new patterns on my skin with a fingernail. She had a sensitivity of touch which I told myself must derive from her work as a doctor. I, who had been driven by that possibly quite ridiculous ambition: to make a mark, work in depth, to leave behind me an inscription that would last for ever — I lay there beside a woman, wanting nothing but to have marks left on me, and they did not need to be any deeper than the almost invisible patterns made by a fingernail on the board of my back.

I found something else on that night I spent in the house with Margrete and her shot-blasted heart. On a bookshelf. Which was only logical, really. I had always been fascinated by the challenge which a bookshelf represented.

At some point I came to the bookcases in the living room, bookcases which held Margrete’s novels, bookcases I never looked at; to me they were just so much wallpaper, a pattern I was used to. It was a paradox, of course, a thought which sometimes gave me pause, but which I would promptly dismiss: that I, who had almost driven myself crazy, battling with classification systems, with the question of how to organise all the world’s books and knowledge, had read so little.

Was this my real sin? That I did not read?

I do not know what had brought me there, but I must have had an intuition that somewhere in this particular wall there was a secret door, and as I stood there pondering, muttering the occasional title under my breath, like a mantra, I spied a narrow spine, right in front of me, at eye level and when I stepped up and pulled out this book I saw that it was the little novel which Margrete had given me in sixth grade, as a thank-you for diving down and finding her mother’s gold bracelet: Victoria by Knut Hamsun. I vaguely remembered having packed it with the rest of my belongings each time I moved, it being one of the few books I owned. I also remembered putting it on this shelf when we moved into Villa Wergeland. And I had duly forgotten it, never so much as noticed it among the spines of all Margrete’s other novels, whose numbers grew steadily over the years, as if the shelves caused the books to multiply of their own accord. This, I thought; this is the pearl I never found.

And then, when I opened the book for the first time since receiving it, I discovered a number of flimsy sheets of paper tucked in between the pages. And discovered truly is the word — I should perhaps call this the great discovery of my life. Because, on the first of these tissue-thin sheets, which I recognised right away as the same writing paper that Margrete used for letters to friends abroad, I read my own name; it was a letter, a letter from Margrete, written in her uncommonly beautiful hand, a string of words which I would come to know by heart. I glanced at the other sheets of paper. More letters. All to me. Twenty-odd epistles. And when I read that first letter, after only the first few lines — that was when I cracked. I collapsed, quite literally, in a heap, clutching that little love story, as if it was the one tiny twig which could save me, and I felt the pressure behind my eyes, the ache in my throat, and I burst into tears, I wept as I had never wept before, wept for the first time since arriving home, as if this discovery was actually more shocking than the discovery of her dead body; I wept for so long that I lost all track of time. I did not deserve to live. Of all the blind men walking the Earth, I was the blindest.

’15.10.87. How well I remember your heart-rending “Why?” outside the Golden Elephant, and time and again since then you have asked me why I broke up with you so abruptly and so heartlessly that winter when we were in seventh grade. To answer you: it was not, of course, because I was leaving the country. I broke it off because I realised that you had never opened the book I gave you. I decided that you were not worthy. Even back then I loved to read, probably more than other kids of my age, and this story, Victoria, had made an indelible impression on me. I wanted to give you my most prized possession. I knew that not many boys read fiction, but I thought you would give it a try. For my sake. I also believed that this book might tell you something about me, and maybe also about the love we felt for one another — if one can talk in terms of love at such a young age. It might even, I thought, give you some warning of the obstacles that might lie in our path. I took it for granted that you would at least look at it, and at the notes I had written in the margins, partly for your benefit, your eyes. I was sure you were that curious. About me. I cannot tell you how shocked I was when I asked you a question at the ice rink — and knew from your reply that not once, in over a year, had you so much as opened that book. I simply could not understand it. A girl gives a novel, a love story, the best thing she can think of, to a boy and he does not even open it. Such an insult — such insensitivity — I couldn’t bear it. I asked myself: Can I possibly go out with a boy like that? You know what the answer was. Just at that moment I was positive that I would never speak to you or see you again.’

On the first page of the novel was a dedication: ‘To Jonas’. I also came upon the little notes in the margins, written in a legible, girlish hand. This book had been there all along. Right under my nose. I noticed that all of the letters dated from the last few years and that the first had been written shortly after my fateful decision in Lisbon. I had been so annoyed by the fact that she had not answered the questions I asked her, but she had answered them. And it was so like her not to be able to say it, or not to want to say it, but to put it in writing. The answers were here, in blue and white, right in front of me. In a place so obvious that I had not seen them. I remembered this same phenomenon from Hunt the Thimble. Things were always hardest to find when they were staring you in the face.

A week later, when the police were finished examining the scene and I was able to move back into the house, the first thing I did was to go to the bookcase and take out Victoria. I could tell that nothing here had been touched. Even the forensic team, for all their thoroughness, had not found the letters. It was meagre comfort.

My self-loathing has never been greater than during the months following these discoveries. Why had I not been able to persuade Margrete that life was worth living? Why did she not tell me she was in torment? Because she knew I would not understand? Did not want to understand? What made her stop taking the pills? I ate my heart out; ate my heart out, day after day.

And yet: I knew. I had always had some inkling of it. But she had really seemed to be in good form, especially just after the Thinking Big series was screened, and so I lulled myself into the illusion that I had closed a circle, succeeded in becoming a lifesaver, realised my childhood dream through my work in television. When she died I knew that I had failed in everything, even my television series.

The guilt was almost too much to bear. When at long last, towards the end of the court case, I felt that the time was right to confess, I meant it with all of my heart when I said: ‘Then I aimed the gun at my wife and executed her.’ That evening, that night, in the living room, bending over Margrete, with a slim volume in my hands, I knew that only one thing could save me. A word was running around inside my head, a word which had haunted me for a long time and which I had first encountered, or actually felt on my person, as if the word were actually physical, once when I was kneeling on a soft hassock at the altar rail in Grorud Church. I was in the same position as I had assumed during my confirmation the year before. Dad had gone, had asked me to latch the door behind me. I was alone. I was — what? I was devastated.

Then that word crossed my mind. A word I remembered. A word I had contemplated more than once, but had never dared to utter. I spoke this word. Kneeling at the altar in Grorud Church I said it out loud. For the first time in my life. And instantly … I do not know whether I heard the rush of wings. I do not know whether I sensed the presence of some divine being. I do not know whether I really saw one of the angels depicted on the fresco behind the altar. I only know that a sighing filled my head and my body. I only know that a breeze blew inside me. I only know that I thought of wings. And that something embraced me. Held me.

I let myself out of the church. Christmas was just around the corner. The air was thick with snowflakes, so light that they danced, swirled upwards. They looked not so much like snow as a dense swarm of tiny white butterflies. I felt as light, as full of dance, as those lovely flakes.

I knew everything would be alright. I was breathing differently. I knew I would meet Laila. And meet her I did, down at the shopping centre. She was standing outside the ironmonger’s, looking in the window, bareheaded and wearing a thick, white woollen sweater. I called out and for the first time in ages she turned to face me. Snowflakes lay like white flowers on her hair. I had been going to say something, but when she looked round I realised that I did not need to say anything; something in my voice when I called her name may have told her everything anyway. What mattered was that she looked round. After so many wretched weeks she turned to me and smiled. The old smile. ‘Hey, Jonas, come and see this fabulous crystal bowl, you can see rainbows in it.’ I knew this was an invitation. Nothing had been forgotten. But we could start afresh. She tilted her face to the snowflakes, caught some on her tongue. Even though we were in the middle of the centre and even though Laila was Laila, I walked right up to her, put my arm round her and whispered something in her ear. It sounded, I hoped, like ‘Thanks.’ I went into the shop and bought the bowl for her. Not for the past, but for the future. ‘A Christmas present,’ I said. She gave me a hug. She was happy. Stood there with snowflakes, little stars, in her long hair, beaming. When Laila was happy no one was as happy as her.

It all began earlier that autumn. Laila was ‘a bit different’ as Mrs Five-Times Nilsen put it. I always had the feeling that she must have experienced something which other people rarely experienced. She was a couple of years older than me and lived in a rather seedy-looking Swiss-style villa up the road from the housing estate where I grew up. There were panes of coloured glass in the windows surrounding the veranda, but some of them were broken. For some reason I suspected Laila of having done this herself.

Laila was pretty. Pretty in a wild sort of way. And very well-developed, as they said. ‘She looks tarty,’ Wolfgang Michaelsen whispered. But I thought there was something exotic about her. She went barefoot all summer. To the boys, particularly those in the throes of puberty, she was the object of masturbatory fantasies and of contempt. Laila’s name cropped up regularly in sentences scrawled on walls and the sides of substations. There was something about her blatant sexuality, her lack of self-consciousness which was both appealing and daunting. I did not know why, but she had always liked me, often sought my company, would happily fall in beside me if we happened to meet. I liked her too. When she looked at me she really looked at me. She looked at me in a way which filled me with wonder.

One day, one autumn day, I asked her if she would like to come to the church with me. I asked her on the spur of the moment. We could listen to my dad playing the organ, I said, and she could see the new stained-glass windows, how lovely they were when the light shone through them. Once inside the church, however, I realised that I had lured her there under false pretences. I pointed hastily at the coloured panes of glass, like larger versions of the windows around her veranda at home. We all but sidled round the walls of the church and I drew her into the sacristy. I think she knew what was going to happen. Or what I was expecting that she would permit to happen.

We were in a room reserved for ‘sacred objects’. The church silver was kept in a big safe in the corner. Even in here the organ music could be heard quite clearly. I do not know whether I had actually planned it, but now that we were alone, seeing her standing right there in front of me, I was seized with a powerful urge to see her naked. Or, to see it. My head felt light, my breathing was weak. It was like an attack of some sort. Maybe she really was feeble-minded, and now her feebleness had been transmitted to my brain, my lungs. Something took control of me, something that spoke, asked her brusquely to take off her clothes. ‘Only if you promise not to touch,’ she said, did not seem frightened, did not seem unwilling. I nodded. Something inside me nodded. ‘Just look,’ she repeated. I nodded. My whole body was one throbbing pulse. ‘Hurry up,’ I heard a husky, unrecognisable voice say. She hurried up and suddenly there she stood, stark naked. I asked her to position herself up against the door leading to the pulpit, with her arms outstretched. It sounded like a command. She had hair under her arms, masses of hair under her arms — along with the black frizz between her legs these tufts of hair formed a triangle. Next to the door hung a crucifix. On the other wall hung pictures of former vicars. The thought that somebody might walk in, unlikely though it was, rendered the situation even more titillating.

She slid down onto the floor, as if she were a bit embarrassed. I was surprised by how much hair there was around her crotch, a real bush. I asked her to spread her legs. No, she said. Gone was her usual saucy air. Please, I said. Or did it come out as a command? Husky-voiced. She complied, but with her eyes lowered. So it was here, in a church sacristy, that I saw a cunt, for the first time. I say cunt, because I was thinking of Uncle Melankton. Until now the closest I had come to this mystery had been when Daniel showed me something which he claimed was a wisp of Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pubic hair. But here I was, looking at the female genitals in all their glory and prosaic majesty. And despite the fact that we boys had discussed all the ins and outs of this subject, and despite all the relatively innocent ‘dirty pictures’ which we had pored over, I was quite taken aback by the sight that met my eyes when Laila spread her legs for me, opening a safe, so to speak, and presenting the sacred objects.

Later I learned that John Ruskin, the famous aesthete, recoiled in horror when he discovered that the female pudenda were covered in hair, something for which the statues of antiquity had not prepared him. I was not that naive. But still I had to swallow, almost gagging, not because of the luxuriant growth of hair, rather like a swatch of shag pile, but at what lay underneath. Daniel, who had once seen a Swedish porn mag with pictures of a woman showing ‘the lot’, called it the Inlying Valleys. That triangle of hair was simply there to distract the attention from something far more interesting. And startling. The thought that came into my mind was of something raw. Raw meat. It looked as though she had a hundred grams of rare roast beef stuffed up inside that crack. I was filled with the same warring emotions as a squeamish medical student before his first dissection. It looked both enticing and repulsive. I had not expected there to be such long fissures. A great gorge with lots of side crevasses. I was panting with impatience, desperate to explore it. I firmly believe that for a few seconds there I saw before me a Samarkand, a place I had always dreamt of going.

I had promised not to touch her, but I could not control myself. My body felt swollen with desire. My head swam, as if this crack I beheld truly was the mouth of an abyss. I heard organ music playing in the church, but it seemed to fade away as I stuck my finger inside her, tried to stick a finger in, forced it in; she did not stop me, my body was numb, my mouth dry, I began to slide my finger, my hand, back and forth, unrestrainedly, knew I was hurting her but could not stop myself. Everything went black. I was brought to my senses by her stopping me. Firmly. I did not get it. According to the rumours, she had done it with everything from smoked sausages to gearsticks.

She sat before me, her back against the door to the pulpit. Still staring at the floor. I could hear the organ music again. And that she was crying.

A couple of days later the awful news reached my ears: someone had broken the stained-glass windows in the church. Thrown stones at them. It is hard to describe the shock and horror aroused by this. In local terms it was like the crime of the century. Who had done it? Who could have done such a despicable thing? By Grorud standards this was an act of vandalism on a par with that committed in Rome some years later, when a man knocked the arm off the Madonna in Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer. Ivan, who was for a long time a suspect, had an alibi. No one knew who had done it. But I knew. You might even say I did it myself.

Over the following weeks I tried everything to get Laila to talk to me again. None of it did any good. Sorry, I whispered, every time I came within earshot of her. But Laila would have nothing to do with me. Not only that, but she looked so woebegone, dejected. People remarked on it. What’s wrong with Laila, they said. Laila who was always so blithe and cheery. If I tried walking alongside her, she would stop, turn her back on me, or run away. That was the worst part: the way she turned her face away. That she would no longer look at me. Look at me as no one else looked at me.

Only one thing could help me. Or, why not: save me. So I waited. Waited to be forgiven, although I did not deserve it. I waited, hoping she would be magnanimous. That she would look at me again.

And at long last it happened, just before Christmas, but only after I had had a foretaste of it in the church, on my knees in that chamber next door to the sacristy, as I said a word out loud. When I embraced Laila in the snow outside the ironmonger’s, it was like an echo of an embrace I myself had felt.

As I knelt at the altar rail, in the minutes preceding my decision to utter that word, I thought of a milestone in my life, an incident which had occurred at Solhaug some years earlier. We had been playing rounders, a simplified version of baseball, on the flag green. One of the boys on the estate, Rikard, was a brilliant hitter. It was the same story again and again: when everybody else had struck out and desperation was setting in, Rikard would step up and save the day with a real cracker of a hit, one which allowed them all to run right round before the other team could get to the ball.

One Saturday afternoon something quite remarkable happened. I was fielding, standing ready by the flagpole, from which the handsome estate pennant fluttered lazily in the breeze, so I had a front-row seat, as it were, for the events that unfolded. The whole batting team was hopping up and down on the line as usual, waiting for Rikard, the last man in, to hit a sixer and get them out of trouble. Rikard strode up to the wicket armed with his dreaded bat. In woodwork, while the rest of us were toiling over stupid herons with beaks that were forever snapping off, Rikard was surehandedly turning a baseball bat that would have elicited appreciative nods from any craftsman. It was a particularly long, heavy bat, perfect for getting some extra spin on the ball. Rikard hit the ball, gave it such a phenomenal whack that it let out a deep sigh — a tennis-ball orgasm, a gasp at being hit so perfectly, at being launched into such a ballistic dream of a trajectory. It was the sort of strike known in baseball as a ‘home run’, the sort of strike that sent the ball flying right out of the park, or smashing into floodlights in a shower of sparks, the sort of strike that brought the crowd leaping to their feet with a roar.

There was only one thing wrong with this hit. It went too far. Because, down at the garages — where he spent pretty much all of his free time — Major Otto Ness was polishing his pride and joy, a black Opel Captain purchased the year before. The care which Major Ness lavished on his car foreshadowed, in fact, the worship of material possessions which the whole of Norwegian society was moving towards, a development which, in just a couple of decades, would take them from tree-planting and community parties to each man polishing his own car and scowling enviously at his neighbours. The Major had just completed the day’s beauty treatment, and was surveying his car with the same look of satisfaction he would have given a gleaming army boot. Major Ness — known to us, despite his spit-and-polish exterior, as Major Mess — was on the short side, to say the least of it: a right little runt. It was so funny to see him driving home with his head, or at least his uniform cap, barely visible, and his hands clutching, not to say straining at, the steering wheel, like a major trying with great difficulty to control his captain. No less comical was the sight of him walking alongside his wife, who was a head taller than her officer. But his vehicle, the Opel, was most definitely among the top brass of Solhaug’s relatively modest fleet of cars — in the Major’s own eyes it raised him to the rank of estate general; it made up for an outsize nag of a wife and a disappointing career in which he had ended up behind a desk, and not behind the guns. That car was his battleship, his tank, his command centre, from which he could rule the world. So, as far as he was concerned it was an open insult, a pure act of aggression, when a tennis ball, hit by Rikard, bounced defiantly on the ground once before thumping, not all that hard, but quite audibly, off the bonnet of Major Ness’s Opel Captain. With a magnifying glass one might have been able to spot a tiny mark. But in the Major’s world this was tantamount to vandalism of the worst sort, a downright declaration of war, in fact.

Major Ness reacted as he was wont to do. In a voice which was surprisingly loud and clear for such a puny little body he demanded to know who had hit that ball. And since he made it sound like a command, Rikard trailed all the long way across the green and down to the garages, where Major Ness pointed first at the ball, then at the car and thereafter, as if it were the natural conclusion, gave Rikard a belt round the ear, smack, which I heard all the way up by the flagpole — a ‘home run’ of a slap, you might say.

The Major had, however, committed one tactical error. His indignation had blinded him to everything else around him. But he had been seen. From above. From one of the second-floor balconies in the block of flats overlooking the flag green Rikard’s father, Mr Bastesen, had been a spectator — or perhaps one should say acted as umpire — to the whole thing. In a remarkably short space of time Rikard’s dad was out of the house and heading across the green towards the garages, and he did not come alone: on his way he picked up his son’s legendary baseball bat, decorated in time-honoured fashion with a branding iron in the Grorud School woodwork room. On his face, one of the blackest looks I can ever recall seeing. I would not call it anger. I would call it wrath.

Mr Bastesen was definitely not a man to be meddled with. Not only was he the caretaker at Solhaug, a person with whom it was best to stay on good terms, he was also a big, burly character who — we knew — lifted weights in the shed where the estate’s communal tools and equipment were kept. To us kids he was a fearsome figure, especially when marching back and forth across the greens behind a roaring lawnmower with tractor wheels. Or in the spring when he put out signs saying ‘Do not walk on the grass!’ On the other hand, like a beneficent god he was also quite liable to let us play in the sprinklers on hot summer days. There was some talk of a background in petty crime, whispers of jail sentences and a dodgy past as a bouncer at one of Oslo’s shadiest nightspots. And now here he was, large and menacing, descending — on tractor wheels, you might say — upon the garages, with one hand curled around a sturdy baseball bat which could beat the living daylights out of anything, no question, and everybody could see that he was positively seething with wrath over a crime of a far more serious nature than walking on the grass. I could not help thinking that Major Ness really was in a major mess now.

We who witnessed this episode, the boys at least, knew what was going to happen next. Justice, it was called. You could say that our hearts sang in our breasts when we saw Mr Bastesen striding purposefully across the green with the heavy baseball bat, duly decorated, already half raised. Justice was to be done and no one could say a thing against it, because such was the law, among boys at any rate, and despite all our Sunday School lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Simple and straightforward. When Roar pinched Guggen’s bike, crashed it and smashed his new wing mirror, Guggen’s big brother went straight over and smashed the headlight on Roar’s bike. That was how it worked.

But everybody also knew that, for all the rumours, Mr Bastesen would never dream of hurting anyone, and certainly not a little runt like Major Ness, who was now basically shaking in his shoes; in the hand he held out, a wisp of cotton waste, like a gift, an olive branch. Or was he perhaps offering Mr Bastesen the divine pleasure of polishing an Opel Captain for a few minutes? He seemed to me to cave in on himself, to shrink still further. But Mr Bastesen was making straight for the car, the Major’s pride and joy, his black pearl, and Major Ness must have realised that Bastesen, a man of no education — and quite possibly no cultivation — would not think twice about bashing in the bodywork of this status symbol, this car which, to the Major, was proof that he was not, after all, a complete failure.

The Major, who must have been envisaging the worst of all possible nightmares, a wrecked Captain, did the only thing he could think of, thus going totally against the grain of everything he had striven for in his profession: he went down on his knees — a rare sight for a child, that: a grown man kneeling in the dirt. And as if that wasn’t enough, way up beside the flagpole I heard the Major stammer: ‘Mercy.’ That was all, just one little word, and yet so hard for him to spit out: ‘Mercy.’

And it worked. Mr Bastesen stopped short, with the baseball bat already hovering in mid-air, so to speak, ready to deliver the first devastating blow to the Opel’s bonnet, a car-wrecker’s ‘home run’. He stopped, lowered the baseball bat, eyed both the Major and the car, the car again, and the Major again, and then he said, as he flicked a speck of dust off the hood: ‘Okay. But don’t you ever hit a kid again. I’m just telling you.’

I knew that I was witnessing something momentous. It took some time to penetrate with me. You could get out of being punished for doing something bad, a punishment which you fully deserved, if someone showed you mercy. This was a new and abhorrent concept. That such a thing was possible. That the laws of cause and effect could be broken. That what everyone expected to happen, did not.

And it was this word — bright, clear, lone — which kept rising to the surface, amid all the other chaotic thoughts in my head as I stood over Margrete on the evening when I found her dead. And I remember that I knelt on the floor, right next to her body and muttered it. Or tried to, vainly at first. The word seemed to offer physical resistance. I had to clear my throat again and again, brace myself before, finally, bringing myself to say it: ‘Mercy,’ I murmured. Again and again: ‘Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.’ And as soon as I said it I felt an ache in my chest again, as if the word were puncturing something inside me. To begin with I thought this pain might have been caused by the label which I had swallowed, the piece of paper with her name on it, but it felt more like a sort of pressure, as if something were growing inside me. I looked at the four butterflies which Margrete had caught as a child and which she had brought with her from Ullevål Garden City and hung in their frame on our living-room wall. I think — no, I know, that it was here, on my knees beside a dead wife, that my full potential began to unfold. Only then, during those seconds, did I begin to transcend my own boundaries.

The only right thing to do was to go to prison. There are few things of which I have been more certain. I was guilty. Had I had eyes, been able to talk, to listen, Margrete would not be dead.

You have no say in things in prison. You suffer a lot of indignities in prison. But none of this could compare with my overriding problem: myself. My own thoughts. In the early days I was also troubled by this discomfort in my chest. Like powerful growing pains. I thought it was my heart. That I was going to die. It took a while for it to dawn on me that it was my lungs.

What did I do in prison? I skipped. Occasionally I juggled with oranges. And I felt shame. Year after year, I felt shame. To me, prison was like being made to go and stand in the corner.

Sometimes I also think of those years behind bars as one long swim across dark, dark deeps, and I have the distinct impression that at one point I died. On the day that I walked out of prison I felt the way I had when I woke up on that beach in Sweden, after drowning in Sekken.

I assume that Kristin is writing, and will soon be finished, a book about me. She has asked me a lot of questions during this trip. I’ve noticed that after one of our conversations she settles herself in the saloon with her computer, reads through something, makes changes, inserts details. I have been happy to answer her questions. I have tried to tell the truth. But I know it will be as much of a lie as all the rest.

I am considering giving everything I have written on board the Voyager to Kristin. A lot of it was not included in my ‘big’ manuscript, which she was allowed to look at before I destroyed it. I am thinking, here, of the part about Margrete. I have a suspicion, though, that even as a child Kristin was aware of Margrete’s problem, that she knew Margrete better than I did. Margrete’s death came as a shock to everyone — apart from Kristin. She understood why her mother did not want to live any more. She would not believe that I had killed her. That much at least I gathered from the love and tenderness she showed me when she visited me in prison. I can never thank her enough for the fact that she did not say anything. Although she could not possibly have known my reasons. Or maybe she did, but kept quiet for my sake.

I know I should have sat down with her, told her everything. We should have talked it through. She was old enough by then. I could not do it. But she’ll learn about it now anyway. I am slowly starting to see that all of this may well have been written for her. The irony is not lost on me. I am doing exactly what I accused Margrete of doing. I am writing instead of talking.

It is our last evening at Balestrand. Soon night. I am in bed. Kamala is sitting on the balcony with the door open. All is quiet. Only the lapping of the waves, the odd gull crying. I have lain here for a long while, pretending to be making notes, but all the time watching her. Admiring her. The evening is warm. Kamala is drinking in, insatiably so it seems, the panorama before her: looking across to Vik, to Vangsnes with its huge statue of Fridtjov the Brave, to Fimreite and the ferry landing at Hella. Every now and again she gazes up at the sky, as if in wonder at a light that never lets up.

Why did I survive?

I need to say something about Kamala. I need to say something about this woman who came into my life when it should all have been over. She found me. I had hidden myself away, I thought I had hidden myself too well, but she found me. I could not have cared less, was not the slightest bit interested. Nonetheless I responded to the prison chaplain’s request. He had asked if I would like to have a visitor, an anthropologist who originally hailed from India; and when she stepped into my cell I felt exactly the way I used to do as a child when we played hide-and-seek in the dark and someone shone a beam of light on me and cried: ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found Jonas!’ When I looked in her eyes and she said my name I took my first step out of the darkness, away from the thought of death. The five ‘a’s in her name made it feel like making a fresh start, like learning a different alphabet — Kamala Varma. During her visit she told me that she had just spent some time in Vega, outside Brønnoysund in Nordland. She had been doing a little anthropological study there. I could hardly believe it: she had met, she had written about, the Vegans.

Kamala is an exceptional individual. A woman of the ksatriya, or warrior, caste, brought up in the Delhi area, educated at Columbia University, New York, working at the University of Oslo. Her only real teething troubles in becoming a ‘Norwegian’ had been a couple of hard winters and a problem with the Norwegian ‘u’ sound. And of course — this was the seventies, after all — a dearth of vegetables, other than potatoes, carrots and cabbage, which was, for a foreigner, hard to credit.

After the first, almost inconceivably wonderful phase, came the break-up. I could not imagine what she saw in me, could not believe the love that had grown. I took fright. Actually took fright. She was gradually turning into Margrete, taking her place. Not least when she started telling stories from The Mahabharata. I had heard Margrete tell quite a few of those same stories. I had not asked Kamala to talk about The Mahabharata. It was too hard. The whole thing reminded me so much of Margrete. I broke it off. I said, I forced myself to say, that I did not want to see her any more. It was a stupid decision. This was just at the time when the first spiteful books about me were published amid a storm of publicity. I could not help but hear about them, even the most defamatory details reached my ears on the inside. Again the thought of suicide presented itself.

Then, out of the blue, came Kamala’s book on me. Or perhaps I should say ‘defence’. I read it. I wanted to get in touch, but did not. Then yet another book appeared, this time written by a professor, with Rakel’s help. I made up my mind to live. I asked to see Kamala Varma again. And when I met her, while out on a day pass, I was so overcome by emotion that I had to sit down on a bench. I saw that, although her skin was darker, she looked like Margrete. I saw that she very nearly was Margrete. It was not Kamala, but Margrete, whom I saw walking towards me. This time I did not take fright. I thought: This — this is mercy.

Kamala understood. She waited. She was there for me when I got out. I knew what it was: Love reborn.

I am a secretary. I am Kamala’s secretary. And I am a name at the beginning of a love story. I have done the one thing I have always dreamt of doing: I am hidden, while at the same time working in depth.

I observe her from the bed. She is sitting on the balcony in the bright night, simply gazing out across the fjord, at the approach lights atop Fimreiteåsen and Bleia, the shimmering snow-covered mountain beyond, between Lærdalsfjord and Aurlandsfjord. She is sitting several metres away from me. She has her back to me. And yet I have the strongest feeling that she is holding me in her arms.

It is only a few months since I saw her in a sari for the first time — on one of those rare occasions when she found reason to wear such a garment. And yet, at home, when I undressed her, I was never in any doubt that her naked body was even more beautiful than that long swathe of fabric with its lovely colours and marvellous patterns. When we made love, quietly, slowly, the sari lay over us like a tent. It struck me that we were two nomads whose paths had chanced to cross. Sometimes when I whisper her name, those three ‘a’s, it sounds like ‘Samarkand’.

I must have dozed off. I was woken by her switching on the bedside lamp. She was bending over me, looking down into my face. ‘I just wanted to see whether you might surrender your secret when you were asleep,’ she said.

There is a well-known adage which says that love bears everything, believes everything, hopes in everything, endures everything. To this should be added: Love changes everything.