The Discoverer (27 page)

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

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

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

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 And even at a distance I could see that withdrawn look in her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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