Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
When I came to, something had happened to my respiration. I was
breathing more freely. It was as if, without being aware of it, I had been
suffering
from an attack of asthma which had now stopped.
Afterwards she lay and held me in her arms. There was nothing she liked better than to lie quietly with her arms around me. It is said that we discover who we really are in moments of stress. I discovered my true self in a totally undramatic situation, as I lay there in Margrete’s arms. It was also on such a day, with Margrete’s arms wrapped round me – and suffused with what I had once called spirit, but which I now called love – that I felt something being set in motion, a process, a stream of thought which flowed out some years later into the decision to make my own television programmes. Although at the time I did not know where it would lead. I merely lay there praying silently that she would never let me go.
Why did she do it?
I have long suspected: I cannot answer this because I have not come up with the right question. The whole thing bears a troubling resemblance to another painfully complicated search, a process with a long story behind it. I do know when it began, though: on a visit to Karen Mohr, my reserved and taciturn neighbour, who had decorated her living room like a Pernod-scented Provence and her bedroom like a dim library. One day she asked me to fetch a book by Stendahl, a request which led to me being caught under a veritable avalanche of books. This gave Karen Mohr the excuse for some major
renovation
work and on my next visit she proudly showed me into a bedroom in which the bookshelves, now repaired, were completely bare. All the books were strewn around the floor. I was invited to stay for a ham omelette, but Karen Mohr apologised for the fact that she would have to go to the shop first. In the meantime there was no reason why I couldn’t start to put the books back on the shelves, she said.
‘How,’ I asked.
‘Use your imagination,’ she said, and off she went.
I knew I couldn’t just stick them on the shelves any old way. She expected more of me. I regarded the mess on the floor. Books that had stood next to one another were now scattered all over the place. I stared despondently at the bookshelves, a bare tree waiting for branches and foliage. I was eleven years old. For the first time I had to try to set the world to rights.
Although it was tempting to do something decorative – at one point I did consider going by the colours of the spines, or by whether they were tall or short, fat or thin – I soon came to the conclusion that I would have to put works on the same subject together. Karen Mohr had a lot of books about painters, about art, so I started putting these on the bottom shelves. Then I
stopped, uncertain. Why not on the middle shelf? Or ought I to reserve that for the books Karen Mohr liked best. But which books did she like best?
I was a little giddy at the thought of being in her bedroom. It smelled not of books, but of lady. The bed was spread with a soft patchwork quilt. Without thinking, I buried my face in it and inhaled the scent, as if I needed some pepping up.
I picked up the first book. In my mind I pictured a scheme based on the matrix of the bookcases. Poetry could go in the section next to fiction. And all the books on disease – she had a lot of these – could be placed alongside the countless works with the word ‘love’ in their titles. I tried my best to keep this provisional arrangement in mind while slowly – as I came upon books on subjects I had not thought of – expanding my system. I soon ran into difficulties. Where, for example, was I to put the big illustrated book on football? Under sport? But she had no other books on sports or games. Under art maybe, or dance? What about politics? Wasn’t it right that in South America football could degenerate into a war? Why didn’t I simply put it next to the books on religion? There were several sections into which I would have liked to set it, but I could only put it in one place. I kept having to move books off the shelves which I had initially chosen for them, it was like one big jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces could fit into any number of spaces.
My confused, but soon zealous, endeavours may also have been connected to the fact that this happened just after I had collided with Margrete’s bike at the school gate so hard that we both landed on the pavement. As I gathered up the books that had fallen out of my satchel, my eyes met hers for the first time. She
looked
at me. I was conscious to the very tips of my toes of being
seen
. Already here, in this fragrant bedroom, I had an inkling that if I was to have the slightest chance of understanding anything of this new addition to my life, a wonder that went by the name of Margrete Boeck, then I would have to get these stupid books into some kind of order.
Luckily Karen Mohr was not gone for too long. Before she started making the ham omelette she inspected my work. I really had not got very far, the shelves looked more like something out of a shop in a country suffering from a severe shortage of goods. She laughed when she saw that I had set her lavish volumes on Provence next to the innumerable works on monasteries and convents and the cloistered life. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘But what about this one?’ She picked a book off the floor,
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I recognised the name, remembered Rakel telling me about his flying and his mysterious disappearance at the time when Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, died. I promptly suggested that we put it on the shelf where I had arranged the works on more technical subjects. It was about flying after
all, wasn’t it? Or space travel? ‘I think probably it should go with my other French novels,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, I could slot it in somewhere else, maybe alongside the books on cosmology.’ She explained what cosmology was. I never forgot that. Or her fingers, which suddenly, almost unconsciously, stroked my hair. I would remember that hour among the bare bookshelves, up to my knees in books, at the most diverse moments in my life. I kept trying to dredge up again the openness and inquisitiveness and wonder that had moved me to put Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot
in with the medical books and
The Divine Comedy
by Dante next to the Bible. When I picked up a book in Danish entitled
Totem og tabu
, by Sigmund Freud, I placed it – since Karen had, unfortunately, no books on Red Indians – on the shelf containing the detective novels.
Although I did not know it, in Karen Mohr’s library, which smelled not of books, but of seductive perfume, I had come up against a problem which would dog me for a long time to come: the numerous parallel associations triggered in my mind by the titles and the lists of contents of the books on the floor did not lend themselves to the simple, primitive shelving system with which I was faced. It was simply too rigid. But while Karen Mohr was
searching
for Stendahl’s book on love, I perceived – inspired yet again, I think, by the thought of the new girl at school, Margrete Boeck – the rudiments of a brilliant system, nothing less than the roots of a new tree of knowledge. As if in a deep trance I stood there, thinking to myself that this meant I would have to take the two biographies on Bach and slot them in among the books on oriental rugs, and shift the volumes on the Second World War over to the reference books on wild animals; and
then
– in a flash it came to me – the cookery books would have to go in the section on architecture. I pursued this line of thought until everything went black, as if I was about to pass out.
‘Time for a ham omelette,’ Karen Mohr said. She must have been able to tell from my white face that I had had enough for one day. Nonetheless she picked out a book. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘It’s about Marco Polo and Venice. Maybe you’ll go there some day.’ I accepted it warily. Just at that moment I had no great interest in owning books.
Karen Mohr must have sensed my silent protest, my misgivings in the face of all her bookshelves, although she said no more about it, not for a long time. I did not know that she also had access to another library, that Karen Mohr had the key to the greatest book collection in Oslo and that I would soon find myself standing, somewhat apprehensively, before it.
I made two good friends in high school, Viktor Harlem and Axel Stranger. Both were in my class at Oslo Cathedral School. Since – not unusually in
that hormonally unstable phase in life – we aspired to the wisdom inherent in all forms of heresy, we called ourselves The Three Heretics. One spring Viktor suggested – nay, more or less demanded – that we should go on a study trip to Venice. ‘Why Venice of all places?’ Axel asked, instantly
betraying
his qualms about such a venture.
‘Because it’s a car-free city?’ I suggested – this was not long after our
legendary
demonstration in the Town Hall Square.
‘Because the greatest iconoclast of them all lives there,’ Viktor announced cryptically. Later, after having seen George Lucas’s fabulous masterpiece, one of the colossi of twentieth-century film history, the
Star Wars
trilogy, I always felt that the Venice trip had been a journey to a watery planet; that, convinced as we were of our status as true Jedi knights, we had set out on a mission to find Yoda, the sage of sages, himself.
Axel’s doubts about Venice were soon replaced by an enthusiasm which ought to have been a warning to us. He announced, with a rather too fervent light in his eyes, that this would be the most important journey of his life. And he was to be proved right. Axel, who pretty much lived in the Central Lending Department at the Deichman Library, had read a disturbingly large number of the world’s books and, galvanised by this passion, he now
proceeded
to reel off to us all the things he was planning to do in Venice. And it was no small list. He meant to visit the Casetta delle Rose, home to the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio during the First World War; he longed he said, or chanted, to hear the water lapping against the Ca’Rezzonico, where Robert Browning lived for the last years of his life; Axel wanted to breathe the air of the Palazzo Capello, which had provided architectonic inspiration for Henry James when he was writing
The Aspern Papers
; he wished to run his hands over the walls of the Hotel Danieli, which had housed such guests as Balzac and Dickens; Axel had a feverish look about him as he spoke of his resolve to take in the seaside hotels on the Lido, where Gustav von Aschenbach had languished in Thomas Mann’s masterly novella
Death in Venice
, before ordering the same drinks as Hemingway in Harry’s Bar, then devoutly
settling
himself in the Caffè Quadri, where Proust had passed his first evening in the city on the lagoon, if – that is – Axel did not actually set out to track down the objects which had triggered such a string of memories in Proust’s universe: two uneven marble tiles in the Baptistery of St Mark’s. Axel all but swore to swim in the canals like Lord Byron. His list of things to do grew longer and longer, all of it plotted into a very tight schedule. It didn’t stop there, though. He also took to speaking a sort of
novelese
. He confessed with half-shut eyes that he could hardly wait to see the domes and crooked
campanile
of his dreams rising out of the waves. ‘I’ll push back the shutters in
my hotel room to see the golden angel on the top of St Mark’s flaming in the sunlight!’ he sighed rapturously.
Axel Stranger was pale with excitement. So what happened? When we – The Three Heretics – got to Fornebu Airport, with the prospect of a long May weekend ahead of us, he fainted. The thought that he would soon be treading the very tiles on which Marcel Proust had once set foot, was too much for him. In short, his expectations were too great. As the woman at the check-in desk handed him his ticket, Axel collapsed onto the airport floor. And when he came round he was so weak and dizzy that he declared himself unfit to travel. He insisted, though, that we should go anyway, without him.
I thought to myself, but did not say out loud: reading too many books is bad for you.
And yet – although he never got beyond check-in – Axel always
maintained
that that journey was the most significant of his entire life. He never went to Venice, but when Viktor and I got back after the long weekend, Axel informed us that he had been writing like a madman. In four days he had written two hundred pages, in a sort of helpless trance, ‘rowing through the dark canals of the imagination in a gleaming black gondola’. He claimed it was the thought of the city on the lagoon, all his mental images of Venice that had driven him to it. Triumphantly he showed us the manuscript. It was roundly and soundly rejected, it is true, but from that day on Axel Stranger wanted only to write. And five years later he made his literary debut with Norway’s finest publishing house, with the idiosyncratic and artistically ingenious novella
The Lion in Venice
.
‘That trip to Venice changed my life,’ he always said.
A trip can be short and yet unforgettable. When I was thirteen – heartbroken as I was, I now worked to a new time reckoning: year one After Margrete – Karen Mohr took me to her mysterious workplace in the city. As usual she was dressed in a grey suit which somehow did not look drab. ‘Sober grey,’ my mother was wont to say. Something about Karen Mohr made me feel that grey had to be the most interesting colour of all. We got off the bus from Grorud at a stop in Møllergata and a very short stroll down the street brought us to a palatial building in the Hammersborg area, on the same square as the main fire station – an open space graced with fountains, which had not as yet been covered over. In my childhood memory, with the monumental wall in front and the long, slanting flights of steps leading up to it, it looks like the Potala Palace in Lhasa. This was the Deichman Library, Oslo’s main public library. ‘Some bedroom,’ she said.
Minutes later we were standing in the Central Lending and Reference
Department, next to a black pillar like something out of a temple, with the vast hall before us. The light falling through the glass in the ceiling brought out a dull golden sheen in the rows of brown leather spines in the tall
galleries
on either side. ‘Carl Deichman’s book collection,’ Karen Mohr murmured reverently, pointing. To begin with I felt somewhat daunted. Or at least, I had the uneasy feeling that all of the bookcases round about me testified to some tragic event, an unnatural segmentation. These rows of book spines had as little to do with life as a head of beef carved up and frozen, reduced to packs in a cabinet with labels saying ‘sirloin’ or ‘fillet’.