Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

We who witnessed this episode, the boys at least, knew what was going to happen next. Justice, it was called. You could say that our hearts sang in our breasts when we saw Mr Bastesen striding purposefully across the green with the heavy baseball bat, duly decorated, already half raised. Justice was to be done and no one could say a thing against it, because such was the law, among boys at any rate, and despite all our Sunday School lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Simple and straightforward. When Roar pinched Guggen’s bike, crashed it and smashed his new wing mirror, Guggen’s big brother went straight over and smashed the headlight on Roar’s bike. That was how it worked.

But everybody also knew that, for all the rumours, Mr Bastesen would never dream of hurting anyone, and certainly not a little runt like Major Ness, who was now basically shaking in his shoes; in the hand he held out, a wisp of cotton waste, like a gift, an olive branch. Or was he perhaps offering Mr Bastesen the divine pleasure of polishing an Opel Captain for a few minutes? He seemed to me to cave in on himself, to shrink still further. But Mr Bastesen was making straight for the car, the Major’s pride and joy, his black pearl, and Major Ness must have realised that Bastesen, a man of no education — and quite possibly no cultivation — would not think twice about bashing in the bodywork of this status symbol, this car which, to the Major, was proof that he was not, after all, a complete failure.

The Major, who must have been envisaging the worst of all possible nightmares, a wrecked Captain, did the only thing he could think of, thus going totally against the grain of everything he had striven for in his profession: he went down on his knees — a rare sight for a child, that: a grown man kneeling in the dirt. And as if that wasn’t enough, way up beside the flagpole I heard the Major stammer: ‘Mercy.’ That was all, just one little word, and yet so hard for him to spit out: ‘Mercy.’

And it worked. Mr Bastesen stopped short, with the baseball bat already hovering in mid-air, so to speak, ready to deliver the first devastating blow to the Opel’s bonnet, a car-wrecker’s ‘home run’. He stopped, lowered the baseball bat, eyed both the Major and the car, the car again, and the Major again, and then he said, as he flicked a speck of dust off the hood: ‘Okay. But don’t you ever hit a kid again. I’m just telling you.’

I knew that I was witnessing something momentous. It took some time to penetrate with me. You could get out of being punished for doing something bad, a punishment which you fully deserved, if someone showed you mercy. This was a new and abhorrent concept. That such a thing was possible. That the laws of cause and effect could be broken. That what everyone expected to happen, did not.

And it was this word — bright, clear, lone — which kept rising to the surface, amid all the other chaotic thoughts in my head as I stood over Margrete on the evening when I found her dead. And I remember that I knelt on the floor, right next to her body and muttered it. Or tried to, vainly at first. The word seemed to offer physical resistance. I had to clear my throat again and again, brace myself before, finally, bringing myself to say it: ‘Mercy,’ I murmured. Again and again: ‘Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.’ And as soon as I said it I felt an ache in my chest again, as if the word were puncturing something inside me. To begin with I thought this pain might have been caused by the label which I had swallowed, the piece of paper with her name on it, but it felt more like a sort of pressure, as if something were growing inside me. I looked at the four butterflies which Margrete had caught as a child and which she had brought with her from Ullevål Garden City and hung in their frame on our living-room wall. I think — no, I know, that it was here, on my knees beside a dead wife, that my full potential began to unfold. Only then, during those seconds, did I begin to transcend my own boundaries.

The only right thing to do was to go to prison. There are few things of which I have been more certain. I was guilty. Had I had eyes, been able to talk, to listen, Margrete would not be dead.

You have no say in things in prison. You suffer a lot of indignities in prison. But none of this could compare with my overriding problem: myself. My own thoughts. In the early days I was also troubled by this discomfort in my chest. Like powerful growing pains. I thought it was my heart. That I was going to die. It took a while for it to dawn on me that it was my lungs.

What did I do in prison? I skipped. Occasionally I juggled with oranges. And I felt shame. Year after year, I felt shame. To me, prison was like being made to go and stand in the corner.

Sometimes I also think of those years behind bars as one long swim across dark, dark deeps, and I have the distinct impression that at one point I died. On the day that I walked out of prison I felt the way I had when I woke up on that beach in Sweden, after drowning in Sekken.

I assume that Kristin is writing, and will soon be finished, a book about me. She has asked me a lot of questions during this trip. I’ve noticed that after one of our conversations she settles herself in the saloon with her computer, reads through something, makes changes, inserts details. I have been happy to answer her questions. I have tried to tell the truth. But I know it will be as much of a lie as all the rest.

I am considering giving everything I have written on board the Voyager to Kristin. A lot of it was not included in my ‘big’ manuscript, which she was allowed to look at before I destroyed it. I am thinking, here, of the part about Margrete. I have a suspicion, though, that even as a child Kristin was aware of Margrete’s problem, that she knew Margrete better than I did. Margrete’s death came as a shock to everyone — apart from Kristin. She understood why her mother did not want to live any more. She would not believe that I had killed her. That much at least I gathered from the love and tenderness she showed me when she visited me in prison. I can never thank her enough for the fact that she did not say anything. Although she could not possibly have known my reasons. Or maybe she did, but kept quiet for my sake.

I know I should have sat down with her, told her everything. We should have talked it through. She was old enough by then. I could not do it. But she’ll learn about it now anyway. I am slowly starting to see that all of this may well have been written for her. The irony is not lost on me. I am doing exactly what I accused Margrete of doing. I am writing instead of talking.

It is our last evening at Balestrand. Soon night. I am in bed. Kamala is sitting on the balcony with the door open. All is quiet. Only the lapping of the waves, the odd gull crying. I have lain here for a long while, pretending to be making notes, but all the time watching her. Admiring her. The evening is warm. Kamala is drinking in, insatiably so it seems, the panorama before her: looking across to Vik, to Vangsnes with its huge statue of Fridtjov the Brave, to Fimreite and the ferry landing at Hella. Every now and again she gazes up at the sky, as if in wonder at a light that never lets up.

Why did I survive?

I need to say something about Kamala. I need to say something about this woman who came into my life when it should all have been over. She found me. I had hidden myself away, I thought I had hidden myself too well, but she found me. I could not have cared less, was not the slightest bit interested. Nonetheless I responded to the prison chaplain’s request. He had asked if I would like to have a visitor, an anthropologist who originally hailed from India; and when she stepped into my cell I felt exactly the way I used to do as a child when we played hide-and-seek in the dark and someone shone a beam of light on me and cried: ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found Jonas!’ When I looked in her eyes and she said my name I took my first step out of the darkness, away from the thought of death. The five ‘a’s in her name made it feel like making a fresh start, like learning a different alphabet — Kamala Varma. During her visit she told me that she had just spent some time in Vega, outside Brønnoysund in Nordland. She had been doing a little anthropological study there. I could hardly believe it: she had met, she had written about, the Vegans.