The Discoverer (63 page)

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.