Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Back at the flat I covered huge sheets of paper with more and more writing, big and small, with connecting lines, fine as silken threads, running this way and that, speaking of a form of order which also had to allow room for disorder. It got to the point where the living-room floor looked like something far more complicated than a spider’s web. I felt as though I was on the verge of a spectacular breakthrough. That it was only a matter of time before a veil would be ripped aside and a claustrophobic grey hallway would have to give way to a light, bright, free Provence. And I was on the scent of something important. Before long I had transformed my flat into a sailing ship and my project into a voyage worthy of Magellan himself.

I’ve been thinking — maybe everyone has their secret Project X, something that drives them, moves them to push themselves beyond their limits. Viktor Harlem, for one, wrestled with just such a mind-boggling idea. And whatever one might think about this vision, or utopian concept, so robust was it that one long weekend in May it brought us — Viktor and me — to Venice.

Axel, who had fainted at the airport and had to stay behind in Oslo, was a dark Adonis with whom I lost touch after high school. Viktor, on the other hand, is as present in my mind to this day as he was back then. It is hard to describe the young Viktor Harlem, the brains behind The Three Heretics, but when I close my eyes what I see is a shining face, a face glowing with an almost uncanny intensity, rather as if a hundred-watt bulb had been screwed into a head that was only designed to take sixty watts.

Although I was quite clear on the purpose of our visit, when the time came to complete the final stage of our mission I began to falter. As Viktor stepped aboard the traghetto which was all ready to push off from the stop outside the Hotel Gritti Palace, I tried to explain to him that I was not coming, that I did not want to leave, could not face leaving, the Grand Canal, that waterway lined on either side by such mesmerising buildings, the sound of the water grinding away at the age-old stone. Why didn’t we find ourselves a table on the hotel terrace, overlooking the canal; order some cake — some tiramisù — and coffee, I asked. Please, I said. What I did not say was that I no longer had any faith in my friend’s audacious plan. I was trying, as gently as I could, to save Viktor from making a terrible fool of himself.

And what did Viktor have in mind. Viktor meant to pay a call on the poet Ezra Pound, a very old man now, and supposedly still living in Venice. Back in the flat in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, when Viktor first mooted the idea of looking up Pound, for a moment I thought he was talking about the British currency, that we were off to find a whole pile of money. Which was not too far off the mark: to Viktor, Pound was as good as a treasure chest.

We were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel, in a dim room dominated by a lagoon-like mirror, with enigmatic stucco decorations on the ceiling. The hotel’s one notable feature was a portrait of Armauer Hansen, hanging on the wall of the lobby. ‘My great-grandfather was a doctor too,’ the hotel manager told us. ‘He met the later so famous Norwegian when the latter visited Venice in 1870 on a travel scholarship, then too in May as it happens.’ Viktor promptly took this as a good omen. ‘We’re on the trail of something much more important than the discovery of the leprosy bacillus,’ he confidently announced to the manager. For my own part, I interpreted the sight of Armauer Hansen’s countenance more as a warning of the city’s contagiousness.

After two days I was actually feeling rather weak. I had spent most of my time on board a vaporetto ; I had travelled up and down the Grand Canal at least twenty times, for much the same reason as one sees a film again and again: to savour scenes that have gradually become familiar and to keep on discovering new details. I could not get enough of it, almost had to rub my eyes as I tried to take in the sight of the rows of Byzantine and Gothic buildings to either side of me; façades redolent of the Renaissance and neo-classicism, walls which altered colour with the light and whose reflections created a rippling fairy tale down in the canal. The fronts of these palazzos were Vivaldi’s music. I leaned over the rail of the boat, staring, staring with lovestruck, avidly curious eyes. I had planned to see other sights in Venice, but I never got beyond the Grand Canal. I never visited the Doge’s Palace, nor the Accademia and — no one will believe it, I know — I did not so much as set foot on the pigeon beset square of St Mark. The Grand Canal was all I needed and more; this lazy, inverted ‘S’ of water winding between rows of palazzos, with each façade that hove into view more evocative than the one before: Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. I felt as though I was sailing along a spine in my own imagination, a backbone made up of identical and yet widely differing vertebrae. I was struck by an intriguing and unnerving suspicion: if I were to enter any one of these buildings along the canal — Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo — inside it I would find another Grand Canal, equally spellbinding, which would hold me there for the rest of my life.

Just before the traghetto left the little jetty, I joined Viktor on board anyway. Something in his face made me do it. All of a sudden he looked worried. As if he realised that everything was at stake here, his whole life project.

When we stepped ashore on the other side of the canal, he seemed even more uncertain. He led the way up the labyrinthine street, in the opposite direction from the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and turned left at the first bridge, onto the Fondamenta di ca’Bala. ‘What if he’s not at home?’ Viktor muttered, stopping short. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

I had to take charge. ‘Of course he’ll be at home, where’s he going to go? He’s as old as the hills, for God’s sake.’

Viktor was an avid fan, to put it mildly, of that motley literary bazaar which went by the title of The Cantos : a fragmented poetic work touching upon just about everything between heaven and earth. At the flat in Seilduksgata in Oslo, Viktor kept having to build more shelves to hold the books which were supposed to help him pursue more of the strands in Ezra Pound’s vast tapestry of words. The Cantos were for Viktor what Provence was for Karen Mohr: an experience which craved a lifetime. Viktor wanted to achieve a thorough understanding of Pound’s work, but he understood very little of it. Then he had the idea of going to Venice. He was devoutly convinced that all would be revealed if only he could meet the poet himself. ‘Devoutly’ being the right word here. Viktor had the same motive for seeking out Pound as some people have for wishing to meet God. It was much like having the chance to ask about the meaning of life.

In spite of all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Viktor walked more and more slowly along the side of the narrow canal. The street scene was what any holiday brochure would describe as ‘picturesque’, with just the right number of cats, flower boxes on the walls, little bridges and elegant motor-boats with hulls of gleaming varnished mahogany. Suddenly Viktor turned left again, looking both quite certain and utterly lost, as if he were wavering between a sense of having been here before and of finding himself on some distant, watery planet. We were standing in the calle Querini, a narrow, paved cul-de-sac, outside a deep-pink or terracotta-coloured house. Viktor goggled at the lion’s head knocker on the dark-green door. His courage failed him. I basically had to half-carry him back to the canal. Viktor pulled a bottle of aquavit out of his satchel: ‘Maybe we should just drink it ourselves.’