Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Why did she do it?

I do not know when I first understood it. Or no, now I’m being coy — I never did understand it. But very early on in our relationship, something occurred, an incident which I made light of at the time, but which gradually came to seem important. Like a choice. It was one of those moments when I was able to look into several arms of a fjord at one time.

It was a normal afternoon. We were still living in her parents’ museum of a flat in Ullevål Garden City. Margrete was a doctor, doing her specialist training in dermato-venereology at the University Hospital. I was in the process of putting my architecture studies, which is to say Project X, behind me. We were both head over heels in love, by which I mean that we were still at the stage in a love affair when you have been caught up in a warm wave and are just letting yourself be swept along. We showed face at all the timeless places, at Herregårdskroa where the service was so appalling, Frognerseteren with its overrated apple cake, Theatercafeen, where we were so wrapped up in one another that we did not even hear how badly off-key the old dinner orchestra was. We went to the cinema merely in order to sit with our eyes closed and hold hands; we went to the theatre solely so that we could smooch openly at the bar during the interval; we went to exhibitions for the sole purpose of gazing adoringly at one another amid the crowds of art-goers. We rediscovered the city: the shrimp boats, the chestnut trees, the glove shops, seeing everything for the first time, because we were together. But above all else: we made love, for hours at a time; laid each other down and sailed over and around each other’s bodies; we were Captain Cook circumnavigating the globe, or Bartholomeo Diaz bound for the Cape of Good Hope. We might start by exploring one another’s toes or foreheads, eventually to reach the middle where she always ended up running her ship aground on my lighthouse.

It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon. Margrete was lying in bed. We had made love. We had made long and glorious love. So it cannot have been that. The bedroom was white. Even the pine floorboards had a whitish sheen in the bright afternoon light which streamed through the fine veil of the curtains now that the blinds had been pulled up. The only objects in the room were a double bed with white bed linen and a brass headrail, and a gleaming gold statuette from the East. It was just how a bedroom, a place for lovemaking, should look. Love was, and always will be, a white patch, an undiscovered continent, watched over by an alien god with half-shut eyes.

This room and the kitchen were the ones I liked best in that otherwise unreal flat. The other apartments were chock-full of all manner of souvenirs from the Boeck family’s hectic diplomatic life in distant lands. Buddhas of jade and stone, Japanese garden lanterns of cast-iron, floral patterned china plates, camphor-wood chests, marble torsos, bronze temple lions. They may have been mementoes, but they did nothing for me. At times I had the feeling that I was wandering around inside other people’s memories. At others I thought: the first time I set foot in this house I knew that marriage would be the greatest journey of my life.

Buenos Aires, the white, stucco-like façades on the Avenido de Mayo. Moscow, the dull gold of the domes on the Kremlin. The Victoria Falls, the glistening black of the snake that crossed my path. Shanghai, the noxious brown river. Samarkand, the sweet, yellow melons. Margrete, the blue veins at her temples, a tiny fjord with a multiplicity of arms.

She was lying in bed in the bedroom. Or rather: I thought she was lying in bed. I had gone out to fetch a jug of iced tea from the fridge — iced tea was a habit, or a vice, she had acquired in other climes. When I walked into the white bedroom, which still smelled of sex, she was kneeling on the bed, on the pillow, banging her head against the wall. Not all that hard, perhaps, but it was a brick wall. She was naked. She was quite oblivious to me. I stood there holding the jug. Two slices of lemon twirled slowly round, two small, unconnected wheels. She went on beating her head against the wall with trance-like regularity. I noticed the way the light refracted and formed a rainbow around her. I heard a sound like the tinkling of wind-chimes, possibly from the empty glasses on the floor. Or from her brittle skull. I remembered the first time I saw her. Through a teardrop.

My maternal grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, was not like other grandparents, or any other old people for that matter. Granny’s house did not smell of Pan Drops or 4711 eau-de-cologne, instead there was a pronounced aroma of cigars. She can best be described as an activator: she made things happen wherever she went. I always looked forward to visiting her flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. The memory of one occasion in particular has stayed with me. ‘You’d better come over,’ she said on the phone, in a voice befitting her statesmanlike countenance. ‘It’s time to dismantle the Crystal Palace.’

This is a story about seeing the love of one’s life. Not about the first meeting, but about seeing one’s beloved. Afterwards I said to her: ‘Now I’ve really seen you. Seen you as you are.’ I did not know how true that was.

The Crystal Palace was not a place in England. It was a huge, rare and precious crystal chandelier which hung over the dining table in Granny’s sitting room, a room lofty enough to accommodate it. Once a year, usually on a day like this, a bright, sunny Saturday in August, Granny and I would lift the big mahogany table out of the way and set up the stepladder preparatory to cleaning the chandelier, removing dust and dirt and, not least, the film of nicotine from Granny’s cigars which had built up in the holes bored in the crystals. It was a big job, a combination of chemistry and physics lessons, of window-cleaning and jigsaw puzzle. I had the task of climbing the stepladder and ‘tearing down the castle in the air’ as Granny put it. The chandelier had been restored and altered slightly. So the spikes on the base, hundreds of them, were no longer fixed to the rings, but had to be unhooked, one by one. The festoons, the chains of prisms running from the top to the hoop were easier to remove.

I carefully detached each piece and handed it to Granny. They were then dipped in basins filled with warm water and soft soap and rinsed, dipped in soapy water again and rinsed, then laid on soft cotton cloths by Granny to dry. It was a job which called for patience. And precision. Just as I had reached the stage of building complicated Lego constructions without having to follow the accompanying, step-by-step instructions, so my grandmother knew the position of every piece by heart, even though there must have been over a thousand of them. Fortunately, many of them were joined together. She sorted through them, separated them into groups. I could spend ages just marvelling at the assurance with which she arranged crystals of different shapes and sizes on the cloths. When I saw all those prisms glittering and twinkling on the dining table I felt like Aladdin in the cave, surrounded by clusters of precious gems.

At a certain point we changed places. Granny mounted the stepladder — not unlike a young seaman on the Christian Radich — and cleaned the gilded bronze stem and light sockets while I dried all the crystals with a dishcloth, polishing them until they shone. It was a solemn undertaking. I remember every detail of it to this day. The feel of sharp edges against my fingers. The sunlight streaming through the windows. The smell of soft soap. The sound of tinkling glass, like sleigh bells. Old crystal is not white, there is a touch of grey in it, of pink and violet, and when I turned the prisms to check that they were clean, patterns of light danced across the walls. It was quite a spectacle: tiny, vibrant spectrums at every turn. That is how I remember Granny: encircled by rainbows.