Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
Nonetheless, I was so truly enthralled by her presence in the moment, by the intensity with which she savoured the smallest everyday tasks: pouring peppercorns into the mill, cleaning a window, arranging flowers at a
particular
angle in their vase. Or making a bark boat. Most of all, I loved the way she could get me to converse. After we moved into the house in Grorud we would often go for walks around Steinbruvannet talking, as we walked, about
everything
and anything. Or telling each other things. Here, too – almost as if it were part of our conversation – she would often fashion bark boats and set them in the water, eager as a little child to see how long the frail craft would float before capsizing. All the same: human beings are capable of adapting, in the most amazing fashion, not only to the most appalling conditions, but also
to the most intoxicatingly wonderful circumstances. After some months I no longer responded with the same gratitude to Margrete’s refreshing manner, after a couple of years I accepted it as natural, after ten years I took it for granted.
I sometimes thought that we were too unalike, that we represented two different worlds: one of fluttering butterfly wings, one of hard crystals. We, or I, never understood that together, by pure virtue of this, we could have opened up something immense.
But still: why did she do it? When did I spot the first signs of the darkness which took up residence within her. It is with profound shame that I have to confess: I never noticed a thing.
Once or twice, on those rare occasions when her behaviour did disturb me, I may well have asked whether anything was the matter. But she never answered me. I
thought
she had not answered. One evening, when we were in bed, she suddenly said: ‘What if the house was on fire and we had to get out and you could only take one thing with you. What would it be?’ I did not know, but then I remembered Bo Wang Lee.
‘Huckleberry Finn,’
I said. She laughed. ‘Why not
Victoria
?’ she asked.
She had answered me. I just wasn’t listening.
In my defence I should say: she was so different. More than anything, the fact that she was a reader and hence a writer was to me symbolic of
something
alien, sinister even. She read, she wielded a pen, rather than talk. If she sometimes acted strangely, seemed a bit moody, I took it as just another mark of her eccentricity. She occasionally had bouts of what I would have called depression, but her work as a doctor seemed explanation enough for this. I was always popping into the clinic where she worked at that time, and even I could be depressed by those polished floors and impersonal sofa arrangements, not to mention the hangdog patients with their embarrassing STDs.
She had always done strange things. She was quite capable of getting up and walking out of the cinema in the middle of a film, having suddenly got the notion for onion soup, she simply
had to have
onion soup. I had learned to accept this. In the early days I could spend hours talking about such foibles; I wanted to get to the bottom of the motives behind her weird actions and ideas. But I soon got used to her ways. I ought perhaps to have sensed, however, that something had happened, an acceleration of sorts, just after I got back from Lisbon and the fatal episode at the Belém Tower, distracted though I was by relief at the fact that my plans for a television series were to be realised after all. She was especially tight-lipped, irritable. Hostile, I would
say. But – and I never forgot that she had once wanted to be an actress – she never said why.
One day I was at the piano, playing some hymns from the Norwegian Choral Songbook, trying out new chords, the way Viktor did with the jazz standards. Margrete had been known to accuse me of murdering these songs, she said my playing hurt her ears. She did not understand that this was the music of my childhood, a tribute to my father – as well as a means of
contemplating
Viktor’s pointless fate: a gifted pianist one day, a vegetable slumped in front of a television set the next. But on this occasion, as I sat there,
wistfully
picking out new harmonies in ‘Here comes a faithful goatherd’, instead of making one of her usual disapproving remarks, she actually slapped me in the face, utterly without warning. ‘Blasphemy,’ she said – I think she must have been referring to the word ‘faithful’ – in a voice seething with anger, one which told me I should probably think myself lucky that she had done no more than hit me. A bruise blossomed on my cheekbone. There were jokes at work about ‘Margrete’s dreaded left hook’. Still, though, I regarded this as no more than a crazy but harmless outburst, something I might even get round to teasing her about later.
But I should have known. And in my memory I keep returning to those endless minutes when she stood there considering me and fiddling with the string of pearls around her neck. The light in Margrete’s golden-brown eyes kept changing as she talked; they seemed to undergo modulations, in the same way as a piece of music. They shifted from gold to lead when she said: ‘Tell me about Lisbon.’
This conversation took place in the latter half of the eighties. I was in the midst of work on the
Thinking Big
series. We had just come home from an operetta-like party and sat for a while in the living room instead of going straight to bed. The babysitter had gone. Kristin was asleep. We had been visiting Margrete’s parents, who were back in Norway that autumn. There had been plenty to talk about. I had gradually grown more comfortable with the ambassador, despite his somewhat domineering manner, fostered by
numerous
long and not exactly enviable sojourns in countries with, to say the least of it, undemocratic regimes. I had, however, a serious problem with Margrete’s mother. I was in the mood for talking. Margrete did not seem to feel like it. I kept her up, trotted out all of the comments I had come up with in the car on the way home, mainly on the subject of her mother, a character whom I found downright scary with her submissive shadow existence. She was always in the background, with a drink and a cigarette in the same hand, as if she needed the other for holding on to something, in case she should collapse. I
had a lot to say about Mrs Boeck and the possible alcoholism which she hid behind a collection of anonymous Chanel suits, and I wanted to say it all now, not discuss Lisbon with Margrete. And on the subject of alcohol, I was also all set to poke fun at the ambassador’s tedious chat about drinks and how to mix a perfect dry martini. ‘I know how to make over two hundred different cocktails,’ he boasted, pointing with boyish pride to his ridiculous array of drink mixing equipment, ‘but I’m still not sure about the exact ratio of gin to vermouth in a dry martini. Ask me about a Between the Sheets, though. Or a Clover Club. Go on, just ask me!’
Back in our own house, Margrete had risen. She stood in the middle of the room in a short, black dress with spaghetti straps, her arms and shoulders bare. She fiddled absent-mindedly with her necklace; she liked pearls, she had several necklaces made from different sorts of pearls. She was wearing glasses. She wore them for watching television, in the cinema and – as this evening – for driving. They were of indeterminate design, fifties-style maybe. She had had them for as long as I had known her. And yet they always seemed
fashionable
, signalling, in some way, that here was an outsider. The same went for the slightly tousled hairdo, which gave her a rather impish look, an air of nonchalant elegance. Her whole appearance was, in fact, anachronistic, which is probably why everyone found her so alluring.
I could see that something was bothering her, but at the same time I did not see it, I was too wrapped up in myself, my stockpile of opinions, my
interest
in a mother-in-law who was clearly teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but concealed it by standing in the background with her drink and a ciggie in one hand, whispering to some other lady about the
outrageous
amounts of money they made out of the Foreign Ministry’s countless overseas allowances, while in the foreground, Ambassador Boeck held forth on the perfect dry martini as if he were talking about complicated matters of foreign policy. It was a speech I had heard at least ten times already; because, of course, the correct ratio was neither three nor four parts gin to one part dry vermouth, but a balance so delicate, according to Mr Boeck’s cosmic theories – presented with a perfectly straight face – that I could not help thinking of pi, that mathematical quantity with an infinite number of figures after the point. Margrete was still fiddling with the string of pearls. Then, out of nowhere, came that modulation in her eyes: ‘Tell me about Lisbon,’ she said.
There have been moments when I have felt that the films of Michelangelo Antonioni have destroyed my ability to love. To communicate properly. It could be that I became so beguiled by that universe, and at such an
impressionable
stage in life, that I was left ingrained with the belief that it was
impossible to gain insight into another person. Sitting there in the living room, held transfixed by a string of pearls, I felt as though I were back in one of Leonard Knutzen’s films, standing in an empty field, my back to a girl, with a bloody great bulldozer plonked inexplicably between us.
I was just back from Lisbon, from a trip I believed had saved my career. Everything had been at stake, and I had won. Margrete had not asked, but she asked now, did not want to talk about her decidedly rocky mother; had no wish to discuss her father’s priceless theories regarding the optimal dry martini, instead she asked about Lisbon: ‘Did you
discover
anything there?’ she said. A world of meaning in that one word ‘discover’. There was something about her voice, a trace of doubt, of suspicion – I couldn’t quite tell.
Lisbon was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I made some offhand remark in reply before returning to her mother’s remarkable consumption of alcohol: ‘I’d be a bloody alcoholic too, I’m sure, after thirty years of the
corps diplomatique
and their stultifying, ivory-tower existence.’
I saw Margrete flinch. She said: ‘Sometimes when you talk it makes me feel the way I did at school when somebody scraped a fingernail across the blackboard.’ Pause. Again those eyes, the irises shifting colour: ‘Didn’t you meet a woman?’ Now and again, a look would come into Margrete’s eye that betrayed her profession: a dissecting gaze.
I said nothing. For a long time. I sat back in the sofa in a room which I had decorated along with the lovely woman standing right in front of me, and as I sat there it struck me that I was doing the opposite of what I wanted to do with my life. I was not unfolding, I was curling in on myself. At long last, prompted by the primitive impulse which says that the best form of defence is attack, I said: ‘Are you jealous. Don’t tell me that you –
you
– are jealous?’
She may not have been. She was not the type to want to own me, to own anything. Still she stood there fingering the string of pearls, a present from her mother and father for her birthday some weeks earlier and outrageously expensive, no doubt. It had been bought in Japan, a string of pearls with just a temporary clasp, so that she could put it around her neck right away, see how it looked. Her father had asked her to have it restrung at a jeweller’s in Oslo. She had not yet done so, but had wanted to wear it to the party, to please her mother and father. She fingered it like a rosary. As if she were praying,
incessantly
, entreating me to tell her. I would forgive you everything if only you would tell me, her lips said.
What could I say, I wondered. But I could not think of anything to say. And I could not tell her the truth. I stared at one particular pearl. It did not borrow light, it shed light. I could not breathe, I lacked spirit, that was
why I found it so hard to communicate. I stared at the woman before me, I hardly recognised her. The short, black dress with the spaghetti straps, the quaint spectacles, no longer suggested a sexy woman, but a young girl. The collar-bones, which Margrete called key-bones, so sharply defined, spoke of an ominous slenderness, vulnerability. She had her whole hand curled round the necklace now, as if it were an anchor chain that was saving her from being swept away. Away from me, away from this house. Sometimes she seemed so helpless, so flagrantly helpless, that it did not so much confuse as annoy me.
Then there was this other thing. This too a mystery, but in quite the
opposite
way, you might say. One day, some years into our relationship, and almost by accident, I learned that she was already a respected expert in her field, derma-venereology. She had had several groundbreaking articles published in leading medical journals. Why had she not told me? Or: why had I not got her to tell me? I am no stranger to the thought that I may have viewed her specialty as a threat of some kind, that I was in some way afraid of catching something.
She was a tallboy. I could open the drawers and commit their contents to memory, only to find when I opened them again that they contained
something
quite different. She, Margrete, was Project X. She always had been. Now, in the instant before it happened, I saw this more clearly than ever.
We were still discussing my trip. She standing, me sitting. The room seemed darker, as if all the light had been sucked into the pearls she wore around her neck. She was worrying so hard at the necklace that one would have thought it felt to her like a detestable dog collar. All at once the skin of her face seemed to craze over. I explained that the trip to Lisbon had been absolutely necessary, a case of to be or not to be. Exactly, she said. But for whom? And then she asked a question which led me to suspect that she might, after all, know everything: ‘What was it you called those women at NRK who sleep their way up the ladder – “telly tarts”, wasn’t that it?’ She fixed her eyes on a point on my forehead, just over my eyebrow, as if seeing there not a scar, but a dirty blemish. A semen stain.