The Discoverer (53 page)

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.