Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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.

And when I did not come up with an answer, or would not give an answer, could not give an answer, the string of her necklace snapped, apparently without her being anywhere near it, as if supernatural powers were at work. Pearls sprayed everywhere, a precious, white shower falling to the floor.

During a long period of the life that now lies behind me I felt — for reasons beyond my comprehension — the urge to seek out a worthy mission. How should one spend one’s days? Searching for pearls to thread onto a string? Or should one quite simply create new conditions, seek out another sort of string?

When I joined NRK Television and embarked upon what those who like to exaggerate have described as one of the most influential careers in post-war Norway, no one knew that as far as I was concerned I was in retirement. My real working life was already at an end. My Project X. As far as I was concerned, the rest of my life was going to be a real dawdle, involving no great hazards. I began my job as an announcer. I might just as well have begun work as a lighthouse keeper.

In memory my Project X is long since reduced to two activities — plus the echo of some contrapuntal wonders from Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge . One of these involved crouching down between two gooseberry bushes in a garden, gazing at a cross spider. The other entailed sitting in state atop a great portal between life and learning, at a desk piled high with books on the cosmos. As a sideline I am sure I could have written a treatise on Araneus diadematus . At the very least I should have foreseen the discovery of Pluto’s moon.

I would be twenty before I found my calling — and I have no hesitation in using such a highfalutin word. I had had an idea that I would wind up at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics right from that day at school when a succession of maps whipped up, one after the other, to reveal a stunning poster of the solar system at the very back, like Truth itself. But I did not opt for astrophysics in order to study the cosmos, I wanted only to use the subject, and the reading room that went with it, as a base camp in an expedition to other, I was about to say higher, objectives. I was occasionally heard to say to fellow students: ‘I’m drawing up a new map of the universe.’

It was at this point that all the thoughts that had been running around in my head since the day when I sat amid an avalanche of books, looking at the bare bookshelves in Karen Mohr’s bedroom and waiting for a ham omelette, crystallised into the obvious mission, the Project. In a flash I knew: this is what I was born for. As a child I had always liked the standard adult question: ‘What are you going to be when you grow up.’ Because this told me that I was going to be something . Not just be . Several times already — with a certainty that I did not dare to reveal — I had had the feeling that I was a wonder, but only now did I feel myself to be fully evolved; it was a long time since I had had the sensation of dying, only to live on as a broader person. I was ready. I could almost hear a voice saying: ‘The hour has come.’