The Discoverer (55 page)

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.