The Discoverer (64 page)

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.