The Discoverer (24 page)

Why did I hesitate back then? It certainly was not because – to use a
Freudian
cliché – I wished to sublimate my lust. I think I may have had some inkling, in the grip of desire though I was, that it was really supposed to be different. That even sex, for all the indescribable pleasure it gave, ought to be different. Better. Even better. I was about to say: higher. In the same way as I wrestled with thoughts concerning suppressed sides of my nature, so I knew, or suspected, that not even in the sexual sphere could we realise our true potential, stand upright, as it were. What if human sexuality was still at the reptile stage? Because there was no denying: despite five thousand years of civilisation, sex did not seem to have moved on at all. Of all the arts, the sexual act was the least evolved. While painting had had its Rembrandt, its Monet, the art of love was still stuck in the Stone Age. For a long time I did not know what to think about it, this restraint I displayed in the final instance with women. I do not believe it did me any harm, though. Not until I met Margrete when I was a grown man, did I see everything – including this – with fresh eyes.

Only seconds later the rain stopped, leaving behind it the same sense of release as when a drum roll, like a crescendo in the subconscious, suddenly ceases. The wind subsided. We – she also – came to our senses with the same air of bewilderment as people woken by a hypnotist. We stared at one another, or quickly looked away from one another, shyly almost, before opening the doors and clambering, all but tumbling, out of the car, out into the sunlight which streamed unexpectedly and with added intensity down 
over a strangely sodden landscape, anyone would have thought the whole countryside had had an orgasm. The air was searingly fresh, it reminded me of my childhood and the smell of Granny’s tube of Mentholatum.

I never did find out what had actually happened. Nor could the
newspapers
provide any explanation for the sudden storm. That was sex with a woman for you, I told myself. A tropical island in a foreign ocean. A clip round the ear from a cyclone. Forces over which we had no control, would never have control. I glanced round about, feeling as though I ought to be happy to have survived. Not the cyclone, but the amatory eruption.

I eyed her up and down. Her face seemed distorted, her mascara had run, her lipstick was smeared. I was glad I could not see myself. I was sure that more powerful forces had been at work inside the car than out – and that despite the fact that I could see the devastation all around me, the sturdy broken branches strewn on the ground, as if a giant had wandered past.

On the plane home, perhaps because I was seeing the topography of the island from high above, I could not help wondering about the energy I had discerned in her orgasm. That glimpse of something exceedingly powerful. And somehow circular, like a cyclone. Since then I have come to the
conclusion
that my own very best orgasms could also be described in terms of a circle, if not quite in the same way. I think of Granny’s crystal chandelier, that starry firmament in miniature; I think of the times when I stood almost right inside it. For me this is the only experience that comes anywhere close to reflecting the shattering beauty and luminescence, not to mention the wealth of imagery, inherent in an orgasm. Although this could also have something to do with the fact that I was surrounded on all sides by those glittering
crystals
the first time I saw Margrete. Saw her properly.

As a child, standing on the stepladder in Granny’s flat, with my head stuck inside the chandelier, I often had a sense of being strangely powerful,
invincible
. That I
was
what I sometimes suspected myself to be: a wonder. I sensed that the rays of light issuing from all those crystals had a focal point of sorts at the very spot from which my thoughts sprang. This had an effect on my brain. Associations shot out in all directions. The prisms appeared to refract my thoughts in the same way that they refracted the light. A thought would occur to me and in next to no time it would have split into seven, and each of these seven would be split by another crystal, and so on. I wished that I could take the chandelier to school, that I could stick my head inside it every time I had to answer a difficult question. ‘Jonas, what do we mean by democracy?’ ‘Wait a minute, miss. Let me just slip on my crystal crown.’ It would turn me into a wise man. I wondered whether people, scientists or whoever, were
aware of this: that they might find answers to all their problems if they stuck their heads inside just such a chandelier.

The August day when I saw my love, really
saw
Margrete for the first time, I was standing on the stepladder under the crystal tree. We had finished giving it its annual clean. The sitting room smelled of soft soap and the walls were patterned with light. I only had a couple of the nethermost rings on the spiked base left to fill. And Granny had found one crystal droplet which we had forgotten, it was cut like a precious gem. I was too busy figuring out where to hang it to hear anyone knocking or ringing the bell. I was standing with my head stuck way up inside the chandelier, searching for the eyelet through which to thread the hook. I did not notice her going into the hall to answer the door. I gave a start when I became aware of the sitting-room door opening and heard someone say: ‘Jonas?’

I saw nothing but a shower of sparks, a myriad rainbows, reflected light. And in the midst of all this, a figure. I moved down a step, treading halfway out of the chandelier. And, maybe because I was shy, or speechless with
confusion
, I held the crystal droplet up to my eye, as if wishing to hide behind it, use it as a mask. I saw everything through it. I saw the sitting room and the open door. And I saw her. Except that there was not one figure but seven. I could see them quite distinctly when I held the droplet right up close to my eye, like a monocle. Seven people, one in the middle and six in a circle round about it. I saw who it was. It was Margrete. A princess.

This thought was not simply plucked out of thin air. Whenever we washed the prisms, Granny had to recount the fascinating history of the chandelier. Because it had hung in the Royal Palace, the very building that I passed on my way to Oscars gate. I was not surprised. The chandelier was so
magnificent
that it could only have come from there. A lot of the crystals, purchased in Berlin, were removed and sold at auction at the turn of the century, when the Palace switched to electric lighting. ‘And this,’ Granny said, pointing, ‘I came by in a roundabout way. Spoils of war.’

I gathered that it had belonged to her husband. And
that
subject, I mean that of the man who came into her life during the war, after Grandpa’s death, was one on which I never touched, because then I would simply have to listen to her ranting on about Churchill for hours. ‘It hung in the Queen’s
Chambers
, in the Yellow Cabinet,’ Granny said, always with a melodramatic
widening
of her eyes. Those terms, the Queen’s Chambers and the Yellow Cabinet made me tingle all over. I could imagine nothing finer, except perhaps for it to have hung in the Queen’s Bedchamber. Because I often sat staring up at the chandelier. If I stared hard enough I could convince myself that I saw pictures in those small glass pendants, especially when Granny played Strauss waltzes
on the gramophone; scenes which had been stored up inside them and now presented themselves to me, images of royal personages and their guests amidst furniture made from jacaranda wood and walls covered in yellow silk damask. If I tried really hard, peered for long enough into the biggest crystals, I could even see pictures of the balls at the Palace.

And now here was Margrete, standing on the threshold of the Queen’s Chambers as if this was her natural and rightful place. I was surprised. I had never thought she would come. Two days earlier I had dived into Svarttjern and she had put her arms around me. And yet I had hardly dared speak to her when we walked out of the school gates the day before. I had said I was going to see my grandmother the next day. She had asked where she lived. I mentioned the address, Oscars gate. ‘Why don’t you come over,’ I had said, knowing that that would never happen. ‘What if I did come,’ she had said. ‘Come,’ I had said. ‘Won’t you come?’

And she had come. Found me in my hideaway. Suddenly she was just there, filling the doorway, filling the crystal droplet in front of my eye.
Standing
there alone, or all together.

To view one’s beloved through a crystal. I wish everyone could have that same experience. It was so luminous, so scintillating, so magical, and as such it was a true reflection of the emotions roiling inside me. I told myself that it was probably the lead in the crystal that lent this image such weight, made it so unforgettable. And often in the weeks ahead – not because of any prisms, but because I was in love – I would find myself seeing her in this same way, even when she was simply standing, say, in the playground: surrounded by a rainbowed aura.

‘Margrete,’ was all I said, the word barely audible. I knocked into some crystals. They tinkled like tiny bells.

‘Jonas,’ she said again and laughed. ‘You look like a king with the world’s biggest crown!’

‘Who’s this?’ my grandmother whispered to me.

‘I’m his girlfriend,’ Margrete said.

I had not asked her. But now it was official. We were boyfriend and
girlfriend
. That was always her way. She cut through all the chit-chat and
formalities
. You saw ghosts and she took you to China. She walked through a door and said things straight out.

Up on the stepladder I felt the chandelier lose a little of its lustre, as if it had at long last met its match. I realised what it was that this wondrous object lacked: humanity. Life. Margrete could be said to have invaded my brittle world of glass and light, my blessed symmetry. With Margrete came disorder.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she laughed.

But I just went on standing, dumbstruck, under the chandelier, looking at her. In the silence all that could be heard was the faintest tinkling of the glass pendants. I held a crystal droplet up in front of my face, a large teardrop and endeavoured to take her in with my eyes. I did not know it, but I was also looking into the future.

It has occurred to me that I ought to have been looking at her through tears many years later, in Ullevål Garden City, when she was kneeling on the bed, steadily banging her head against the wall. Naked, heart-rendingly exposed somehow. But I merely stood there watching, still clutching the handle of a stupid mug of iced tea. I stood there quietly, I too naked, but with all my wits about me, with no excuse, and watched Margrete Boeck, my wife-to-be, banging her head against a wall. I stood there looking at her, as dumbstruck, as nonplussed, as I had been that time in Granny’s sitting room. In my head I heard what might have been the tinkling of the crystals on a chandelier. What she was banging off the wall was every bit as fragile. But I knew that this was infinitely more complicated. So inconceivably much more precious and beautiful.

Why did she do it?

This was not like Margrete. The Margrete I had come to know after we met up again was, in fact, really quite the opposite. I often caught myself marvelling at her conscious presence in the moment, her appetite for life. She would wander about in the mornings with almost unashamed
contentment
written all over her. As if it was enough simply to draw breath. That was her. Euphoric, delighted just to be alive. I could stand, lost in wonder, in the evening or as night drew on, watching her as she sat on the terrace, with or without a glass of wine, surveying the apple trees in the garden;
enviously
I would contemplate her blissful features, the way she shut her eyes and savoured the moment. I felt that I was witnessing sheer, unadulterated, incomprehensible joy.

She was strong too. From the moment I met her in elementary school I had viewed her as being much stronger than me. She also possessed what I would call a jade-like quality: in a dim light that partly translucent, partly impenetrable side of her shone through. At such times her eyes had an even richer golden glow to them. You had a sense of her depth, of that rare inner strength. I always felt that she was the sort of person who would survive in a concentration camp.

And so, when I found her kneeling on the bed, banging her head off the wall, I thought she was larking about; I thought it was some sort of a joke, some symbolic act which I was supposed to interpret – a bit like playing
charades
, when you have to mime a song title and your team has to guess what
it is. If I could just say the magic words she would stop. I stood in a bedroom in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched a woman – a woman whom, what is more, I loved – pounding her head against the wall, with a thud that was more soft than hard. I glanced down, as if looking for help, into the mug of iced tea, to where the wheels of the two lemon slices twirled each in their own direction. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She simply persisted in that mesmerising action, as regular as a pendulum. ‘Margrete, what’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Stop it, please.’

I have a wise daughter. She has set up her own company, inspired by the belief that we keep coming up with more and more ingenious methods of communication, but with less idea than ever before of what to say, what to communicate.

Margrete went on pounding her head against the wall. The thought flashed through my mind that this meant trouble. That I was going to become embroiled in some immensely complicated situation. And this was not a good time. In fact it was, to put it mildly, a very bad time. I had worries enough of my own. For weeks I had been agonising over whether to abandon Project X. This sight that I beheld, Margrete’s soft skull striking the wall again and again was like hearing a knock at the door when you absolutely do not wish to be disturbed.