Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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’.

Karen Mohr worked in a room off the main hall which also housed the Technical Department. She ran the section entitled Foreign Fiction, which is to say she was in charge of English and French literature. ‘Although it’s the French that’s closest to my heart,’ she whispered.

Karen Mohr gave me a tour, most notably of the fascinating, labyrinthine depositories downstairs: floor below floor, all packed with books. Karen Mohr clearly knew exactly what each shelf contained. I observed her surreptitiously, her enthusiasm, her pride. For some reason I got it into my head that the whole of the Deichman Library, and this vast, hidden library in particular, was bound up with her experience by the Mediterranean, a conversation, an offer from a charismatic painter. In a way, this really was an extension of her bedroom. I gazed respectfully round about me, and yet I could not help thinking that even this mammoth attempt to organise thousands of books had to be a far simpler task than that of putting a person’s thoughts and motives, dreams and longings in order — be it merely those from a meeting lasting only a few minutes. I was not thinking just of Karen Mohr and Provence. I was also thinking of myself. Because I knew that even the labyrinth of the depositories, all those walls of books, could not contain an explanation of what I felt after Margrete, the glow in her eyes, disappeared out of my life.

The tour ended at the ‘catalogue’, two huge filing cabinets in the middle of the main hall, under Axel Revold’s fresco. ‘As you may have guessed, you need a system in order to find what you’re looking for,’ Karen Mohr said softly, motioning to her surroundings. ‘It’s not quite as easy to get your bearings here as it is in my bedroom.’ She explained that I could search for titles by alphabetical order, by author, title or subject, and that the numbers on the little cards told you where the books were in the library — rather like coordinates.

I opened a drawer and fingered the cards impatiently. ‘Okay, so if I want to find out what it looks like in Iran, should I go to the shelf where the books have a 915 on the spine?’ There was a reason for my interest in Iran. Margrete, who had so inexplicably broken up with me, was now in Teheran. She might as well have been on asteroid B 612. Nonetheless I had a masochistic urge to see the landscape she now inhabited.

Karen Mohr nodded, clearly impressed, and led me over to the shelves where, sure enough, I found books containing pictures of both Iran and Teheran. While I was leafing through these, feeling quite sick and dizzy, Karen Mohr told me for the first time about the system according to which all the books in the Deichman library were arranged, devised by a man called Melvil Dewey. She asked me to think of the library as being split up into ten rooms, nine of them containing specialised libraries and the first of them a more general library. Each of these ten libraries was then split up into ten smaller libraries. And so on. Roughly speaking, Dewey had divided all human knowledge into ten categories and thousands of subcategories. History fell into the so-called 900 class which we were now standing next to.

I do not know what it was — maybe an aversion to the pictures of Teheran, the thought of Margrete — that prompted me to protest. ‘But this is geography,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said, sounding almost embarrassed. ‘It’s rather odd. Geography doesn’t have a main category to itself, instead it comes under history.’

Even at this point it seemed obvious to me that this system couldn’t possibly be much use. I think I must still have had Margrete in mind when I mulishly asked where one would put a work on diamonds.

You had to take a look at the book, Karen Mohr told me, surprised at my contentiousness. It was not always as easy as you might think. It might be that it should go under ‘Economic geology’, in the main category Natural Sciences and Mathematics, or possibly under ‘Mining’ in Technology (applied sciences), or even under ‘Carving and carvings’, in the the Arts. ‘Which is to say, either under 553, 622 or 736,’ she said with a smile. Karen Mohr knew her Dewey.

I looked at the users browsing through the shelves and the library staff pushing trolleys full of books. I made so bold as to ask: was Love one of the ten main categories?

Karen Mohr stood there clad in sober grey; she gave a long pause, then shook her head. Without looking at me she stroked my hair.

We returned to the Foreign Fiction section and Karen Mohr’s secluded desk, which was strewn with English and French magazines and newspapers. I managed to find Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince on a nearby shelf all on my own. And what if I wanted to learn French, where would I find books about that? They were in a totally different section, Karen said. The 400 class, Philology, was out in the Central Lending and Reference Department. She gave me an almost apologetic look, as if she could tell how exasperated I was by a system that did not permit things which were so closely connected to sit next to one another.