Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

But my scepticism went even deeper. I had a suspicion that some things must have been left out of this stupid system completely, that this guy Dewey could not possibly have allowed for everything. I was willing to bet, for example, that not one of his thousands of sections covered heartbreak. I was actually feeling pretty annoyed with Mr Meivil Dewey. And what about all the new branches of knowledge which were continually springing up, on the outside left as it were, right out on the sideline. And anyway, anything could be divided into ten, for heaven’s sake. I flinched, as if in horror at the thought. Something told me that a different arrangement of these books could have a great and unimagined ripple effect. It was not merely a matter, here, of books, but of the fundamental thoughts and ideas of mankind. I really was inside a Potala Palace with a thousand rooms, a house dedicated to a religion, an attempt to come to terms with the universe. The faces of the librarians seemed to me to take on a special radiance, and I suddenly saw that they could easily be lamas in disguise.

On our way out, I stopped by the black pillars and looked back. I surveyed the Central Lending and Reference Department, ran an eye over the walls, the books ranged side by side all around that vast chamber. It looked enormously impressive and complicated, but still I knew it was too simple. It was — I thought of Karen Mohr’s own words — not worthy . This room, this arrangement of books, did not reflect the way people thought. I knew it: this room spoke of too much order. The whole library was an illusion, what my teacher in junior high would call māyā . I would go so far as to say that even at this early juncture, and even though I did not consider myself fully evolved, I understood that a voyage of discovery, one of Magellanic proportions, lay waiting for me here. My life’s project. A unique opportunity to work in depth.

On the bus home I asked Karen if it wasn’t a bit boring being a librarian. She looked at me and winked. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘Casanova worked as a librarian in later life, and he was a great seducer.’

The seeds of my Project X were sown there in the Central Lending and Reference Department of the Deichman Library and would shoot and grow into a jungle which I would manage to hack my way out of only with great difficulty. When I met Margrete again, I had just been dealt the deathblow by Silapulapu, and was about to abandon the whole enterprise. My whole body was smarting from this defeat, but just being with her made the pain go away. She gave me a different perspective on things. Or, as she replied once when I asked her whether she thought there was life on Mars: ‘Is there life on Earth?’

The first year was taken up with making love. Every time she lowered herself onto me I had to laugh at the thought of my over-ambitious Project X. No man could ask for anything more than to lie as I did now, enfolded by such a woman. Because Margrete showed me that what I had always hoped for was true, she showed me that the human act of love allowed room for expansion, that it did not consist solely of urges and irrational emotions, of slobbering and grunting, with the possible little addition of tricks picked up from hordes of superficial manuals. Margrete showed me that there ran a path from sex life to life. It may sound strange, but when having sex with her I had a constant sense of being a worker in depth. Making love to Margrete was like being part of an infinitely ramified network. I would never reach higher or deeper in life.

Sometimes, when I was lying, spent, on top of the white sheets, she would get out her stethoscope with a grin and sound me. ‘I do believe you are suffering from a very bad case of love, Mr Wergeland,’ she would say. I thought she was listening to my pounding, sex-satiated heart. But no. She told me that she was listening to my lungs. ‘The lungs, not the heart, are the organ of love,’ she said.

The months after we were reunited were full of surprises, but nothing surprised me as much as the riches contained in those silent caresses, that fact that those lips on lips, that pleasure , contained so much insight. She could run her finger tenderly and inquisitively over the double scar above my eyebrow and the world would open up before my eyes. It struck me that I, whose aim all my life, or half of it at least, had been to think an original thought, should perhaps have striven instead to experience an original feeling. That feeling and thinking were perhaps comparable. For as I lay beside her, snuggled in to her, holding and being held, I realised that these caresses were every bit as rich and meaningful — and profound — as the thoughts put forward by Plato in his dialogue on love. In that white room, in bed, with Margrete’s arms around me, I glimpsed a corrective to the great goal of my life. Then I pushed it from me.

Sometimes when I came home in the evening she would be sitting there in my dressing gown. When I asked her why, she would reply: ‘Because I miss you.’

When we were not making love — although this, too, was a part of the lovemaking — we lay cuddled up together, with our hair sticking in sweat-soaked curls to the backs of our necks. We could lie in bed all day, coiled up together in a sort of circle, playing the second movements of our favourite symphonies and telling each other things. After I had told her about the advent calendars from my childhood that I remembered best, the three-dimensional ones particularly; and about skimming downhill so fast in a toboggan with a steering wheel that sparks flew from the runners, and about the entrance exam for the School of Architecture, she told me about the songs on the red, blue and yellow Donald Duck records, which she knew by heart; about the taste of her first strip of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and about the year when she picked oranges on a kibbutz in Israel. While there, she had also visited the Roman ruins at Baalbek in the Lebanon. She described this as the greatest trip she had ever made. Baalbek was akin to other such complexes at Angkor Wat and Karnak, Borobodur and Persepolis — all of them structures which seemed to have been built by a race other than mankind. In passing she happened to mention when she had been there, and I realised that at that exact same point I had been sitting in Samarkand. I lay on the bed, gazing at the golden statuette in the corner of the white bedroom and thought of a stone I had once thrown into Badedammen, of the rings that had spread out and, at an unforgettable moment, ran into other rings.

‘Why do you want to be with me?’ I asked one day when she was lying with her arms around me, hooting with laughter. It was dusk and the light was fading outside the windows. She grew serious: ‘Because you need someone to hold you.’

‘Oh, and why so?’ I teased.

Her face remained serious. ‘Because otherwise you would fall apart,’ she said, with eyes which, in the twilight, revealed a depth, a glow which almost made me feel uneasy.

She did not ask me. Maybe she simply took it for granted that I would have said the same.

I do not know about other people, but to me this was both confusing and shocking. To encounter someone, a woman, who claimed that to put your arms round someone could be purpose enough in life. Not to hold your breath, but to hold a person.

I said: ‘Okay. You have my permission to hold me.’

It was on this evening, in my twenty-sixth year, in a white bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, that I fought shy of my life’s epiphany.

As luck would have it, I had just joined NRK TV as an announcer. The way I saw it, I was done with all projects. My ambitions had been shipwrecked and I took the unexpected response from viewers as a sign that they could see this; they showed the same sympathy towards me as they would have done to a castaway. But something was brewing. New processes had been set in motion and — strangely enough, considering that she was the catalyst — my attention was drawn away from her.