Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
She was lying in bed in the bedroom. Or rather: I thought she was lying in bed. I had gone out to fetch a jug of iced tea from the fridge – iced tea was a habit, or a vice, she had acquired in other climes. When I walked into the white bedroom, which still smelled of sex, she was kneeling on the bed, on the pillow, banging her head against the wall. Not all that hard, perhaps, but it was a brick wall. She was naked. She was quite oblivious to me. I stood there holding the jug. Two slices of lemon twirled slowly round, two small,
unconnected
wheels. She went on beating her head against the wall with
trance-like
regularity. I noticed the way the light refracted and formed a rainbow around her. I heard a sound like the tinkling of wind-chimes, possibly from the empty glasses on the floor. Or from her brittle skull. I remembered the first time I saw her. Through a teardrop.
My maternal grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, was not like other
grandparents
, or any other old people for that matter. Granny’s house did not smell of Pan Drops or 4711 eau-de-cologne, instead there was a pronounced aroma of cigars. She can best be described as an activator: she made things happen wherever she went. I always looked forward to visiting her flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. The memory of one occasion in particular has stayed with me. ‘You’d better come over,’ she said on the phone, in a voice befitting her statesmanlike countenance. ‘It’s time to dismantle the Crystal Palace.’
This is a story about seeing the love of one’s life. Not about the first meeting, but about
seeing
one’s beloved. Afterwards I said to her: ‘Now I’ve really seen you. Seen you as you are.’ I did not know how true that was.
The Crystal Palace was not a place in England. It was a huge, rare and
precious
crystal chandelier which hung over the dining table in Granny’s sitting room, a room lofty enough to accommodate it. Once a year, usually on a day like this, a bright, sunny Saturday in August, Granny and I would lift the big mahogany table out of the way and set up the stepladder preparatory to cleaning the chandelier, removing dust and dirt and, not least, the film of nicotine from Granny’s cigars which had built up in the holes bored in the crystals. It was a big job, a combination of chemistry and physics lessons, of window-cleaning and jigsaw puzzle. I had the task of climbing the
stepladder
and ‘tearing down the castle in the air’ as Granny put it. The chandelier
had been restored and altered slightly. So the spikes on the base, hundreds of them, were no longer fixed to the rings, but had to be unhooked, one by one. The festoons, the chains of prisms running from the top to the hoop were easier to remove.
I carefully detached each piece and handed it to Granny. They were then dipped in basins filled with warm water and soft soap and rinsed, dipped in soapy water again and rinsed, then laid on soft cotton cloths by Granny to dry. It was a job which called for patience. And precision. Just as I had reached the stage of building complicated Lego constructions without having to follow the accompanying, step-by-step instructions, so my grandmother knew the position of every piece by heart, even though there must have been over a thousand of them. Fortunately, many of them were joined together. She sorted through them, separated them into groups. I could spend ages just marvelling at the assurance with which she arranged crystals of different shapes and sizes on the cloths. When I saw all those prisms glittering and twinkling on the dining table I felt like Aladdin in the cave, surrounded by clusters of precious gems.
At a certain point we changed places. Granny mounted the stepladder – not unlike a young seaman on the
Christian Radich
– and cleaned the gilded bronze stem and light sockets while I dried all the crystals with a dishcloth, polishing them until they shone. It was a solemn undertaking. I remember every detail of it to this day. The feel of sharp edges against my fingers. The sunlight streaming through the windows. The smell of soft soap. The sound of tinkling glass, like sleigh bells. Old crystal is not white, there is a touch of grey in it, of pink and violet, and when I turned the prisms to check that they were clean, patterns of light danced across the walls. It was quite a spectacle: tiny, vibrant spectrums at every turn. That is how I remember Granny:
encircled
by rainbows.
On the day she came, the day on which I was to see my beloved, I was up the stepladder, taking the single prisms and the chains handed to me by Granny and hooking them back into place. It was all going very smoothly. Crystals hung thicker and thicker on the chandelier. Only once did Granny have to give me instructions: ‘No, no, that Empire spike should go further out!’ I was glad to see her in such good form. For over six months, according to my mother, she had done nothing but lie in the bath, smoking cigars and listening to the BBC World Service. She had been suffering from depression following the death in January of her idol Winston Churchill, in bed with his cat beside him.
Reassembling the chandelier took time, but the end result was
commensurate
with the work involved. The chandelier had a spiked base, an inverted
pyramid consisting of three circles of long, slender prisms. I could get almost the whole of my head inside that cone of glass before hanging the nethermost pendants on their hooks. As far as I was concerned there was nothing quite as wonderful as being encircled by a close-knit network of crystals. To stand amid those glittering prisms and hear them chinking against one another. For many years, the lighting of those sixteen candles was, for me, the very
definition
of beauty. Not even Mr Iversen’s extravagant New Year’s Eve firework display could come close.
It had not always been so easy. I remembered the first time. I was seven. I was to be staying at Oscars gate for a couple of days. Without any warning, Granny had started carrying one cardboard box after another into the sitting room, finishing up with what, although I did not know it, were the stem, rings and arms of a chandelier. ‘The spoils of war,’ she remarked mysteriously.
She proceeded to unpack the boxes. I thought at first they were full of bits of cloth and tissue paper, but concealed inside the cloth and the paper were diamonds, prisms of Bohemian crystal. It seemed to me as though Granny were
unravelling
an enormous crystal chandelier from paper, from a pile of small boxes. She spread the whole lot out on the dining table. It was years since she had packed it away; she tried to remember what bit went where. The whole scenario reminded me of a Christmas Eve when I was given a jigsaw puzzle with over a thousand pieces.
We spent the whole weekend figuring it out. And when, after much trial and error, the freshly washed chandelier was finally mounted and hanging from the ceiling over the mahogany table – sixteen tiny flames multiplied into a starry firmament – Granny put a record of Strauss waltzes on the gramophone, elbowed me in the ribs and announced proudly: ‘Welcome to the Queen’s Chambers!’ Which was not that far from the truth. Because there was a story attached to that chandelier.
I have been dogged all my life by my association with those hand-ground pieces of glass. Nothing could ever beat the sensations I experienced, the air of festivity with which I was filled, under that crinoline of crystals, bathed in a light which was both absorbed and emitted. The first time I heard of a network formed by computers I immediately thought of Granny’s chandelier. I had actually had a prism of my own since I was very young. I used to play with it a lot, regarded it as something lovely and perfect in itself. Not until my grandmother brought out her chandelier did I see that my prism was part of a greater whole. It would not surprise me if this realisation lay at the root of my Project X, the idea that all but broke me.
I had almost finished re-hanging all the droplets when it happened. I had my head stuck half inside the chandelier, was running my eyes over crystal
after crystal, as if in a trance. It was not true what the grown-ups said: that they only reflected partial, splintered images. Here, inside the chandelier, I could see the whole picture, all the different sides of it at once.
I was standing inside a circle of light when it happened. Sometimes, in order to hang a crystal on another part of the chandelier I turned it round. All at once I found myself at the centre of a carousel of tinkling diamonds. I saw everything so clearly. Correlations, associations. The only right thing was, of course, to play, not Strauss, but Johann Sebastian Bach. Again, as always: Bach.
So there I was, with my head inside a shimmering wheel, when it
happened
. Suddenly, beyond the light, I discerned a figure in the doorway. It was Margrete. Or maybe I could tell from her voice: ‘Jonas?’ I did not see her, saw only the reflections, scintillating light. Often, since then, I have found myself wondering: was that why I fell so madly in love. Was it those prisms, that golden glow, which bound me to her for always?
How does a man meet his wife? I met mine several times. I met her for the first time – was quite literally bowled over by her in sixth grade, just before the summer holidays. We crashed into one another on our bikes right outside the school gate. I remember nothing from that collision except her eyes, her eyes staring at me. And not so much her eyes, as her pupils: it was the first time I had ever remarked on only the pupils of a pair of eyes; I had never seen anything so black, so – what’s the word – bottomless. That collision was like hearing that abrupt, resounding G7sus4th chord at the very beginning of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’: a false start, if you like, before things really got under way. Like a build-up of tension waiting for release.
It did not really come to anything, though, until later in the year, just after we started in seventh grade. One day after school I went swimming with Leo. A lot had happened over the summer holidays, we were older and maybe that is why we did not bike out to Badedammen, where we had always frolicked in the past – beginning our swimming careers there under the careful eyes of anxious mothers – but to Svarttjern, the Black Tarn, a very different class of swimming hole, and more of a challenge in terms of location, lying as it did right out in the wilds, as it were. Badedammen was for little kids. Svarttjern was for strong, experienced swimmers. We had to park our bikes at the foot of Ravnkollen and walk quite a way into the forest to get to the bewitching little tarn ringed by fir trees. Strange to think that today this isolated lake, or what is left of it, is hemmed in by the tower blocks of Romsås, one of the biggest satellite towns in Norway. Although maybe this was simply bound to happen: this was a tarn which had to be civilised, tamed. Rumour had it that
many people had drowned there, and that it was the perfect pool for suicides who did not wish to be found. Let me put it this way: Svartjern was not a lake you swam in alone at night. Sometimes, on the way there, I would find myself thinking that anything could happen at Svarttjern.
I spotted her right away. How could anyone not notice her? She was gold among silver. She was much browner than the other girls. I did not know whether this was because she already had a good base tan from Thailand where she had been living before, owing to her father’s work with the
Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, or whether she was just blessed with such fabulous skin. And yet it was possibly not her looks that impressed me so much as her bearing, her movements. The way she dried herself, the way she walked, almost danced over to the rock when she was going in for a swim. There are no words to describe the unique quality of Margrete’s beauty, but in my mind I called it ‘Persian’. She wore an orange bikini which accentuated the golden effect. And her figure, I might add, because she had the body of an eighth grader, a body which had just begun to reveal something of how it was going to look in four or five years’ time. I had to force myself not to stare, not to be caught with my eyes glued to that sexy bikini top.
Even when she was lying still, apparently deep in thought, Margrete was the centre of attraction. Everything revolved around her. I observed her out of the corner of my eye. I caught the flash of a bracelet. She took something from her rucksack and handed it round, it obviously was not a pack of Marie biscuits; judging by the exclamations from the others it had to be something fantastic – Chinese fortune cookies or suchlike.
Breakfasts with Margrete. Every one an occasion. Her face. The things she could come out with. Her body language. Her way of being quiet. Her
expression
when she was thinking. Her habits from an itinerant life abroad. Always linen napkins. Always fresh flowers on the table. Always toast. Always a
particular
brand of English marmalade. Always freshly ground coffee beans, her own blend. Always orange juice which she pressed herself.
We lay not far from one another. There was really only one spot where you could lie at Svarttjern, a couple of hillocks on the west side. It was also a good place to dive from, or rather: try to impress the girls with your latest,
well-rehearsed
dives. Margrete was not impressed by that sort of thing though, she never so much as glanced in the direction of the daredevil divers and their antics. I peeped at her on the sly. Peeped is the word. I felt like a Peeping Tom. It got to the point where I was staring quite blatantly. I couldn’t help it. I felt my heart swell with love. It had possibly been lying dormant during the
summer holidays, but now it flared up. I thought of my grandfather lighting the primus stove in the outhouse, the moment when the flame turned blue. I knew it, I was a goner. This may sound a mite high-flown, but I lay there thinking of one of the words which Karen Mohr often used: fate. I am quite certain that the thought of marrying Margrete Boeck crossed my mind there, on the banks of Svarttjern, on an August day when we were in seventh grade. But how was I to catch her attention? Catch her? Or, more correctly: how was I to get her to
discover
me?