The Discoverer (62 page)

One reason why I chose to study astrophysics while I was working on Project X was that it allowed me to work with the largest possible scale, with a
perspective
in which the word billion kept cropping up and mankind was an incidental glimmer of light in an atom on the outskirts of a grain of sand called the Milky Way. Nevertheless, at one weary moment when, to
distract
my thoughts, I opened my textbook for A101, the foundation course in astronomy, I found that the first chapter dealt with the Earth. Maybe Margrete was right. Maybe there was no greater Magellanic prospect than that of embracing another human being.

Very occasionally I could still be woken in the night by her crying. I would
reach out a hand to her. I knew it was no use. But now and again, even so, I would catch myself holding my breath, as if my body, independent of my brain, was making a last attempt to save her.

One night she said: ‘Why do you lie with your back to me?’

I said: ‘You don’t hold me.’

Love and time. In my mind I sometimes picture love as being like those charts in the ophthalmologist’s office on which the letters get smaller and smaller, harder and harder to read, no matter how good your eyesight is. Until at last there is nothing but meaningless symbols.

As if to show me that she regarded my arrangement with the knots as a
contemptible
joke, false security, she never wore that string of pearls again. The evening when I came home from Seville and found her dead I could not help thinking that she had done it at last: broken the thread, the strand of her own life. I had not understood a single thing.

I looked down at her, lying there in the middle of the room, surrounded by walls lined with bookshelves. I could practically see plastic tablecloths covered in writing fluttering, ring upon ring, around me.
This
, Margrete dead on the floor was a true reorganisation of all knowledge. I saw now what I had lacked in my Project X: a person at the centre. A person who was someone other than myself.

After this I stumbled about a house in which Margrete’s blood was
congealing
all around her. I was sure I was going to come unstuck. When I finally raised the alarm and the police arrived, I collapsed. They looked after me. I was taken to hospital, but the very next afternoon I presented myself at
Grønland
police station to make my statement. I did not say too much, I did not say too little. I told them how I had found her, why I had not picked up the phone right away, and every now and again – very carefully and with a
clear-sightedness
so cold-blooded that I have to wonder where it came from – I fed them the details which, in due course, would inevitably point back to me.

I had managed to do everything I needed to do before I called the police. I knew the house would be sealed off. If there were any incontrovertible clues pointing to Margrete’s own hand and not to mine, I had to find them.

Wearing thin gloves, I embarked upon a methodical, not to say surgical, examination of the house, room by room. I was grief-stricken, in turmoil, but I was also filled with another emotion, one that surprised me: curiosity. I went over my own house like a detective. I looked, listened, turned things this way and that, half purposeful, half stupefied. Her scent, that indescribable scent, still hung in every room. Even in prison, years afterwards, that scent
could reach me, in spring especially, a breath on the air, as if the whole world were suddenly exuding the odour of Margrete.

I staggered around the house. Searching. And I found things. A string of pearls fraught with memories. Books in Sanskrit. But first and foremost I discovered how she had managed to conceal how things stood with her. A systematic search of her things eventually turned up an empty box for the sort of pills she must have swallowed by the score over the past few years. It was dated six months earlier. It was a drug I knew of, one of the most popular anti-depressants on the market. She had prescribed it for herself. I had to admire her ingenuity. All tracks covered. Not a single colleague informed. She had never had a nervous breakdown. Her women friends had had no idea, or not, at any rate, of how serious it was, there were plenty of them who would have warned me had they known. I had noticed that there were spells when she spent a lot of time in bed, but I simply assumed it was the job that wore her out, she needed to sleep. As I say, only once did I really feel worried, in the days after the Lisbon episode. Then suddenly she was back to normal. That must have been when she started treating herself.

I knew I had to get rid of the box. I do not know why, but I ate the label bearing the words ‘Ad usum proprium’ and, underneath this, her name. Then I disposed of the box in a watertight manner.

I will never be able to describe those terrible days. But amid all the
commotion
, while the newspapers were floating theory after theory, each one more sensational than the one before; while they were reporting what people felt, thought, said, I was simply happy that I did not appear to have forgotten anything. The police investigators found only what I wanted them to find. And so I waited. Waited patiently for the police to do what they had to do. Waited for the net which I myself had spun – a web worthy of a cross spider – to slowly tighten around me.

At the very end of my Project X period, during the days when everything suddenly went black, I took a shower one evening, in the hope that this might help clear my thoughts. Afterwards I went back into the living room, still wet and naked, to take one last, desperate look at my circles of headings covering all the world’s knowledge; and because it was still nothing but a haze of words floating on transparent plastic panels, desperation got the better of me. I felt so frustrated that I started tearing at the sheet closest to me, almost as if I refused to give in without one last fight. The sheet came loose and as it did so I slipped, grabbed for something to hold onto and succeeded only in
dragging
a whole lot of other plastic panels down with me. I crashed to the floor, embroiled in layers of transparent plastic covered in writing. I was encased
in a cocoon spun from my own bewildering, abstract attempts to classify the world. I was so mad that I actually burst out laughing.

When I managed to disentangle myself I found that the writing had transferred itself to my damp body. My skin was covered in black fragments, obscure symbols, like an intricate tattoo. For two days I just lay in bed moping.

Not all that long after this episode I was lying in another, a new, world, next to Margrete in the bed in Ullevål Garden City. When she ran her fingers over my body, her fingertips seeming to read the last traces of lettering on my skin, it also felt as though she was stroking a defeat off me, as if she were unravelling me from that cocoon, setting me free.

She stroked my back and I wanted nothing more than to be able to lie there, for ever, next to a woman who caressed my skin with her fingers.
Margrete
inscribed other, unseen symbols on my body, inscribed new patterns on my skin with a fingernail. She had a sensitivity of touch which I told myself must derive from her work as a doctor. I, who had been driven by that possibly quite ridiculous ambition: to make a mark, work in depth, to leave behind me an inscription that would last for ever – I lay there beside a woman, wanting nothing but to have marks left on me, and they did not need to be any deeper than the almost invisible patterns made by a fingernail on the board of my back.

I found something else on that night I spent in the house with Margrete and her shot-blasted heart. On a bookshelf. Which was only logical, really. I had always been fascinated by the challenge which a bookshelf represented.

At some point I came to the bookcases in the living room, bookcases which held Margrete’s novels, bookcases I never looked at; to me they were just so much wallpaper, a pattern I was used to. It was a paradox, of course, a thought which sometimes gave me pause, but which I would promptly dismiss: that I, who had almost driven myself crazy, battling with classification systems, with the question of how to organise all the world’s books and knowledge, had read so little.

Was this my real sin? That I did not read?

I do not know what had brought me there, but I must have had an
intuition
that somewhere in this particular wall there was a secret door, and as I stood there pondering, muttering the occasional title under my breath, like a mantra, I spied a narrow spine, right in front of me, at eye level and when I stepped up and pulled out this book I saw that it was the little novel which Margrete had given me in sixth grade, as a thank-you for diving down and finding her mother’s gold bracelet:
Victoria
by Knut Hamsun. I vaguely remembered having packed it with the rest of my belongings each time I
moved, it being one of the few books I owned. I also remembered putting it on this shelf when we moved into Villa Wergeland. And I had duly
forgotten
it, never so much as noticed it among the spines of all Margrete’s other novels, whose numbers grew steadily over the years, as if the shelves caused the books to multiply of their own accord. This, I thought; this is the pearl I never found.

And then, when I opened the book for the first time since receiving it, I discovered a number of flimsy sheets of paper tucked in between the pages. And discovered truly is the word – I should perhaps call this the great
discovery
of my life. Because, on the first of these tissue-thin sheets, which I
recognised
right away as the same writing paper that Margrete used for letters to friends abroad, I read my own name; it was a letter, a letter from Margrete, written in her uncommonly beautiful hand, a string of words which I would come to know by heart. I glanced at the other sheets of paper. More letters. All to me. Twenty-odd epistles. And when I read that first letter, after only the first few lines – that was when I cracked. I collapsed, quite literally, in a heap, clutching that little love story, as if it was the one tiny twig which could save me, and I felt the pressure behind my eyes, the ache in my throat, and I burst into tears, I wept as I had never wept before, wept for the first time since arriving home, as if this discovery was actually more shocking than the discovery of her dead body; I wept for so long that I lost all track of time. I did not deserve to live. Of all the blind men walking the Earth, I was the blindest.

’15.10.87. How well I remember your heart-rending “Why?” outside the Golden Elephant, and time and again since then you have asked me why I broke up with you so abruptly and so heartlessly that winter when we were in seventh grade. To answer you: it was not, of course, because I was leaving the country. I broke it off because I realised that you had never opened the book I gave you. I decided that you were not worthy. Even back then I loved to read, probably more than other kids of my age, and this story,
Victoria
, had made an indelible impression on me. I wanted to give you my most prized possession. I knew that not many boys read fiction, but I thought you would give it a try. For my sake. I also believed that this book might tell you
something
about me, and maybe also about the love we felt for one another – if one can talk in terms of love at such a young age. It might even, I thought, give you some warning of the obstacles that might lie in our path. I took it for granted that you would at least look at it, and at the notes I had written in the margins, partly for your benefit, your eyes. I was
sure
you were that curious. About me. I cannot tell you how shocked I was when I asked you a
question at the ice rink – and knew from your reply that not once, in over a year, had you so much as opened that book. I simply could not understand it. A girl gives a novel, a love story, the best thing she can think of, to a boy and he does not even open it. Such an insult – such insensitivity – I couldn’t bear it. I asked myself: Can I possibly go out with a boy like that? You know what the answer was. Just at that moment I was positive that I would never speak to you or see you again.’

On the first page of the novel was a dedication: ‘To Jonas’. I also came upon the little notes in the margins, written in a legible, girlish hand. This book had been there all along. Right under my nose. I noticed that all of the letters dated from the last few years and that the first had been written shortly after my fateful decision in Lisbon. I had been so annoyed by the fact that she had not answered the questions I asked her, but she
had
answered them. And it was so like her not to be able to say it, or not to
want
to say it, but to put it in writing. The answers were here, in blue and white, right in front of me. In a place so obvious that I had not seen them. I remembered this same
phenomenon
from Hunt the Thimble. Things were always hardest to find when they were staring you in the face.

A week later, when the police were finished examining the scene and I was able to move back into the house, the first thing I did was to go to the bookcase and take out
Victoria
. I could tell that nothing here had been touched. Even the forensic team, for all their thoroughness, had not found the letters. It was meagre comfort.

My self-loathing has never been greater than during the months following these discoveries. Why had I not been able to persuade Margrete that life was worth living? Why did she not tell me she was in torment? Because she knew I would not understand? Did not
want
to understand? What made her stop taking the pills? I ate my heart out; ate my heart out, day after day.

And yet: I knew. I had always had some inkling of it. But she had really seemed to be in good form, especially just after the
Thinking Big
series was screened, and so I lulled myself into the illusion that I had closed a circle, succeeded in becoming a lifesaver, realised my childhood dream through my work in television. When she died I knew that I had failed in everything, even my television series.