Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

There you have it, my life in a nutshell: I was a wonder who contented himself with being an idiot.

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.