Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
But what intrigued me most was the grammar he wrote. Might this be the most important book written by a Norwegian? I had actually held it in my hands, an exquisite volume with blue covers tooled in gold. I had spent hours leafing through it.
A Grammar of the Santhal Language
. Published in Benares – that alone: Benares – in 1873. It was hard for me to conceive of such a feat. Skrefsrud believed that the uninitiated underestimated the Santals’ language. He maintained that it was one of the most complex and philosophical in the world, as sophisticated as Sanskrit. The verbs in particular had such an
overwhelming
wealth of different forms. I flicked through the pages, shaking my head in disbelief at the thought that any man could wrest the intricacies of a language from it in such a way. I came to the part on the verb tenses – there were no less than twenty-three of them. How could that be? I still remember some of them: the Optative, the General Incomplete Present, the Indecisive Pluperfect, the Inchoative Future, the Preliminary Expostulative, the
Continuative
Future. I leafed through this book, almost enamoured of it – so much so that I really felt like learning Santali.
Suddenly I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu. I had actually done something like this myself. Skrefsrud’s linguistic interpretations and his attempts to break through the Santals’ sound barrier had their parallel in my own life, in my year with
Rubber Soul
. I had received a communication from Margrete about a foreign language and had attempted to translate this album into something comprehensible, edifying even.
Where Skrefsrud succeeded I failed. That language remained a mystery to me.
I did not manage to realise my idea of making a programme about a man and a book. I still have a videotape on which I have preserved some
lamentably
bad clips from it. From these it is easy to see how difficult, not to say
impossible, I found it to produce a memorable programme about a book. My powers of imagination laboured under my – then, dare I say – halting relationship with books. I was not well enough read, it was as simple as that.
Unless of course this fiasco had its roots in my inability or unwillingness to understand. My fatal defect. I possessed none of the patient resolve shown by Skrefsrud. Because Skrefsrud understood the full enormity of the task. In order to understand a man’s language you had to understand everything about his society. Her society. Skrefsrud taught himself the Santals’ songs. He, a Christian, participated in their rites, danced with them – danced naked some say. He, a missionary eager to communicate, realised how vital it was for him to acquaint himself with their sayings and ideas, their tunes and their customs, their knowledge of medicinal plants, their tales and legends.
Consequently
, Lars Skrefsrud also took an interest in the Santals as people and pled their cause with the authorities. Lars Skrefsrud was nothing less than one of the most significant figures in the history of the Santals.
I am not sure, but I have always felt that I should have spent more time on Skrefsrud. Had I done so, I might have gained more courage, and not have recoiled in such fear and cowardice when confronted with the greatest foreign culture I would ever know: a woman. I cannot rid myself of the thought: maybe Margrete would have been alive today.
To understand another human being.
A Grammar of the Language of Love.
I stood in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched Margrete beating her head off the wall and I thought to myself: I don’t understand her. This is another culture. With a different god. An unfathomable language. From my viewpoint, in my universe, this was a woman beating her head against a brick wall. In her world, it might be an attempt to shed a skin, emerge from a chrysalis. If, that is, she was not trying to show me something. A chamber of which I knew nothing – of which I was not qualified to know anything. A wordless chamber. One which no words
could
describe. All at once I felt afraid. Or lost heart. The realisation crept over me: even if I were to intervene, or she were to stop, I would never know why she did it.
In prison I gave a lot of thought to the question of how much two people need to have in common in order for a relationship to work, for them to be able to talk to one another and not past one another. How great would the lowest common denominator have to be? The mission service has a similar problem. A missionary has to try to find areas of common ground. After all, how are you supposed to translate concepts such as conscience and absolution into a language which has never heard of such things? You meet
a strange woman and you wonder whether she has something, some sort of mechanism, which enables her to understand your words. Do the two of you have – pretty essential, this – the same word for love? As far as the missionary is concerned, there is, for example, the question of whether he can use the tribe’s name for god as the name for God. The Santals’ highest deity was known as Thakur-Jiu. Elsewhere in India, missionaries used the name Ishwara for God – Ishwara being the Sanskrit word for Lord. Lars Skrefsrud was of the opinion that in Santali God should be called Thakur, but he had to give way on this point: the word finally decided upon was Isor, a Santali version of Ishwara. Could that God ever be the same as Skrefsrud’s God?
The night Margrete died, before I called the police, I spent a long time in the office we shared at Villa Wergeland. In among all her medical textbooks and journals I found some books that I had never noticed – although it could be that she had only recently put them there, having brought them from somewhere else. Many of these books were in Sanskrit, and it looked as though she knew the language – going, at least, by all the underlinings and the remarks in her handwriting. I discovered that these were copies of the Vedas, the Hindus’ oldest sacred texts. A number of the other works proved to be religio-historical commentaries on the Vedas. Why had she not told me about this? I leafed through a treatise on the
Rig-Veda
. She had made lots of notes in the margins. Particularly in the chapters dealing with the tenth book. I read a little of it. But it was too involved, especially considering my frame of mind. I did, however, absorb the name of one of the hymns with which, to judge by all the underlining, she had been most taken:
Purusasukta
. Now and then, in prison, I would murmur this word to myself, like a mantra.
Those books in Sanskrit – was that her Project X?
This discovery got me thinking. I remembered that during the carnival fever which had gripped a normally so phlegmatic Oslo in the early
eighties
, when it seemed that everyone had had a sudden urge to transport the Norwegian capital to another, warmer, more temperamental latitude,
Margrete
always wore saris. She had a number of these. At the age of nineteen she had lived in New Delhi, when her father was the ambassador there. She had looked fabulous in those colourful garments; she could almost have passed for an Asian thanks to her black hair and her ‘Persian’ beauty. ‘You didn’t know you’d married a woman from the
ksatriya
caste, did you?’ she said.
Oh, the bliss of unwrapping her from those exquisite lengths of fabric when we rolled home drunk from the madcap dancing in the streets. The
luminous silks seemed to make her bubble with joie de vivre. ‘Come here and I’ll show you a position I saw carved into the stone in one of the temples at Khajuraho,’ she would say, pulling me down onto the bed.
I thought I understood her. Lars Skrefsrud wrote about missionaries who claimed to be able to speak the Santals’ language. One of them lost his temper and warned the Santals that he would give them a hare if they did not listen to him. The Santals told him that they would be happy to take the hare, but not his words. He had meant to say that he would punish them, but instead he said he would give them a hare. Nor were the Santals all that impressed with the Christian God when another missionary announced that: ‘God sends his Holy Spirit to laugh at us.’ He meant ‘to comfort us’.
I was still standing in the middle of the white bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, there was no help to be had from the statuette in the corner, a golden god with half-shut eyes. She was still kneeling on the bed, banging her head against the wall. If I said something – would she construe it as comfort or ridicule? Was she aware of me at all? I sensed a distance akin to that I was to feel when Kristin was born the following year. That through the haze of pain she both knew and did not know that I was there.
The pounding seemed to intensify. She was gripping the rails of the
bed-head
as if they were the bars of a prison, as if she were locked up and was making a desperate attempt to break out. In any case it was not healthy. That much I could tell from the sight of her brow, from which the relatively rough brick wall had now drawn blood.
And then, without any warning, she stopped. She simply slid down onto the sheet with her eyes shut and pulled the duvet over herself. ‘Margrete,’ I said again. She had her back to me. She put out a hand to me, that was all – but it was something. I set down the mug of iced tea, lay on the bed, took her hand in mine. I saw, I felt, how small it was.
She fell asleep. I lay there thinking. A new tension had been introduced into my image of Margrete. If I were to describe it I might say that it was similar to the tension between a painting by Vermeer and one by Munch. The tranquil and the hysterical. A combination of
Woman Pouring Milk
, a person absorbed in an everyday chore, and
The Scream
, a person ridden with angst. Two such pictures laid one on top of the other. She was
many
. It was like being with the triplets again, all three at once.
I am no stranger to the thought that this day marked the beginning of my work on the television series
Thinking Big
, even though it would be another
seven years before I had the idea for it. As soon as I saw Margrete banging her head against the wall I started looking for an excuse. I had the feeling that I would never be able to cope with her vulnerability, that I needed to have something I could blame, some demanding, all-consuming project, so that at some point – when the accusations started flying – I would be able to say: But I was so busy.
That evening, when we were sitting in the living room, I asked her about it, why had she been beating her head against the wall? ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything,’ she said. ‘Don’t give it a thought,’ she said.
And I accepted that. I wanted to accept it. To look upon it as an isolated incident. Anyone can lose their balance, even in a flat field. But underneath an immediate sense of relief churned the certainty: I had been sent a clear signal. I could shut my eyes to it, but from that day onwards I bore a responsibility which I would much rather not have had to bear. She was not as strong as I had thought. She might survive a concentration camp, but I realised – or at least, after that incident, I suspected – that the slightest thing could be enough to break her, and I mean forever.
As a boy I had rescued a child. It had been easy – light work, you might say, in more ways than one. I had been almost annoyed by how easy it was to save a life. Sitting in that living room in Ullevål Garden City, surrounded by cast-iron Japanese lanterns and silver crosses from Ethiopia, as Margrete’s fingers felt for mine again, clutching at my hand, as it were, I felt an icy pang of fear: I would not be capable of dealing with the real weightiness of life.
Although I do not see the connection I am suddenly reminded of how I met Leo, my best friend when I was in my early teens, my sparring partner in the Red Room. We had actually been in the same class for four years, but this was the first time I had really noticed him, felt like getting to know him. It happened one spring day when two of the bigger boys, a pair of notorious hooligans, had tricked some little kids into setting light to a huge stretch of tinder-dry grass at the bottom end of the estate. When the fire got out of control and began to spread towards the wood the big lads made themselves scarce and the little kids were left standing with their shoe soles scorched, watching and blubbering. Some of the mothers alerted the fire brigade. The fire was put out. One of the firemen – I can still recall those commanding bass tones – asked: ‘Who started the fire?’ Everybody pointed to a little lad who was still standing numbly with the matchbox clenched in his fist. I could tell just by looking at him that this boy would go under if the grown-ups believed that he was to blame, that this was the event which would change his life for ever. Then up stepped Leonard Knutzen, or maybe he had been
there among the group of bystanders for some time; Leo in a spanking new pair of black Beatles boots with pointed toes – murder on the feet, but they won you bags of prestige. ‘I did,’ he said. One of the mothers was so angry – she had also laddered her stockings – that she promptly gave him a searing clout round the ear. Leo merely shot her a forbearing glance before he was led away by the grown-ups. It had all happened so fast and been so unexpected that none of us who knew what had really happened managed to get a word in. In any case, there was something about Leo, the black boots, his manner, the ghost of a smile on his lips, which prevented anyone from objecting. You could tell that he was tough enough to take it.
I was right in the midst of my life-saving career and felt obliged therefore to give a lot of thought to this incident. This, too, was a form of life-saving. How far would someone go in order to save a life? I found such an idea
shocking
. To save a life – not by some heroic deed, but by playing the bad guy almost. Or to be made to suffer even when you were innocent.
Once when we were flopped in bed after a strenuous sexual workout, between gasps for breath I told Margrete about my fear that my heart might give out. As my father’s and my grandfather’s had. ‘I need to be careful, I’ve got a weak heart,’ I joked. I thought she would laugh, but instead she said: ‘Yes, that’s what’s wrong with you.’