Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

On the day she came, the day on which I was to see my beloved, I was up the stepladder, taking the single prisms and the chains handed to me by Granny and hooking them back into place. It was all going very smoothly. Crystals hung thicker and thicker on the chandelier. Only once did Granny have to give me instructions: ‘No, no, that Empire spike should go further out!’ I was glad to see her in such good form. For over six months, according to my mother, she had done nothing but lie in the bath, smoking cigars and listening to the BBC World Service. She had been suffering from depression following the death in January of her idol Winston Churchill, in bed with his cat beside him.

Reassembling the chandelier took time, but the end result was commensurate with the work involved. The chandelier had a spiked base, an inverted pyramid consisting of three circles of long, slender prisms. I could get almost the whole of my head inside that cone of glass before hanging the nethermost pendants on their hooks. As far as I was concerned there was nothing quite as wonderful as being encircled by a close-knit network of crystals. To stand amid those glittering prisms and hear them chinking against one another. For many years, the lighting of those sixteen candles was, for me, the very definition of beauty. Not even Mr Iversen’s extravagant New Year’s Eve firework display could come close.

It had not always been so easy. I remembered the first time. I was seven. I was to be staying at Oscars gate for a couple of days. Without any warning, Granny had started carrying one cardboard box after another into the sitting room, finishing up with what, although I did not know it, were the stem, rings and arms of a chandelier. ‘The spoils of war,’ she remarked mysteriously.

She proceeded to unpack the boxes. I thought at first they were full of bits of cloth and tissue paper, but concealed inside the cloth and the paper were diamonds, prisms of Bohemian crystal. It seemed to me as though Granny were unravelling an enormous crystal chandelier from paper, from a pile of small boxes. She spread the whole lot out on the dining table. It was years since she had packed it away; she tried to remember what bit went where. The whole scenario reminded me of a Christmas Eve when I was given a jigsaw puzzle with over a thousand pieces.

We spent the whole weekend figuring it out. And when, after much trial and error, the freshly washed chandelier was finally mounted and hanging from the ceiling over the mahogany table — sixteen tiny flames multiplied into a starry firmament — Granny put a record of Strauss waltzes on the gramophone, elbowed me in the ribs and announced proudly: ‘Welcome to the Queen’s Chambers!’ Which was not that far from the truth. Because there was a story attached to that chandelier.

I have been dogged all my life by my association with those hand-ground pieces of glass. Nothing could ever beat the sensations I experienced, the air of festivity with which I was filled, under that crinoline of crystals, bathed in a light which was both absorbed and emitted. The first time I heard of a network formed by computers I immediately thought of Granny’s chandelier. I had actually had a prism of my own since I was very young. I used to play with it a lot, regarded it as something lovely and perfect in itself. Not until my grandmother brought out her chandelier did I see that my prism was part of a greater whole. It would not surprise me if this realisation lay at the root of my Project X, the idea that all but broke me.

I had almost finished re-hanging all the droplets when it happened. I had my head stuck half inside the chandelier, was running my eyes over crystal after crystal, as if in a trance. It was not true what the grown-ups said: that they only reflected partial, splintered images. Here, inside the chandelier, I could see the whole picture, all the different sides of it at once.

I was standing inside a circle of light when it happened. Sometimes, in order to hang a crystal on another part of the chandelier I turned it round. All at once I found myself at the centre of a carousel of tinkling diamonds. I saw everything so clearly. Correlations, associations. The only right thing was, of course, to play, not Strauss, but Johann Sebastian Bach. Again, as always: Bach.

So there I was, with my head inside a shimmering wheel, when it happened. Suddenly, beyond the light, I discerned a figure in the doorway. It was Margrete. Or maybe I could tell from her voice: ‘Jonas?’ I did not see her, saw only the reflections, scintillating light. Often, since then, I have found myself wondering: was that why I fell so madly in love. Was it those prisms, that golden glow, which bound me to her for always?

How does a man meet his wife? I met mine several times. I met her for the first time — was quite literally bowled over by her in sixth grade, just before the summer holidays. We crashed into one another on our bikes right outside the school gate. I remember nothing from that collision except her eyes, her eyes staring at me. And not so much her eyes, as her pupils: it was the first time I had ever remarked on only the pupils of a pair of eyes; I had never seen anything so black, so — what’s the word — bottomless. That collision was like hearing that abrupt, resounding G7sus4th chord at the very beginning of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’: a false start, if you like, before things really got under way. Like a build-up of tension waiting for release.

It did not really come to anything, though, until later in the year, just after we started in seventh grade. One day after school I went swimming with Leo. A lot had happened over the summer holidays, we were older and maybe that is why we did not bike out to Badedammen, where we had always frolicked in the past — beginning our swimming careers there under the careful eyes of anxious mothers — but to Svarttjern, the Black Tarn, a very different class of swimming hole, and more of a challenge in terms of location, lying as it did right out in the wilds, as it were. Badedammen was for little kids. Svarttjern was for strong, experienced swimmers. We had to park our bikes at the foot of Ravnkollen and walk quite a way into the forest to get to the bewitching little tarn ringed by fir trees. Strange to think that today this isolated lake, or what is left of it, is hemmed in by the tower blocks of Romsås, one of the biggest satellite towns in Norway. Although maybe this was simply bound to happen: this was a tarn which had to be civilised, tamed. Rumour had it that many people had drowned there, and that it was the perfect pool for suicides who did not wish to be found. Let me put it this way: Svartjern was not a lake you swam in alone at night. Sometimes, on the way there, I would find myself thinking that anything could happen at Svarttjern.

I spotted her right away. How could anyone not notice her? She was gold among silver. She was much browner than the other girls. I did not know whether this was because she already had a good base tan from Thailand where she had been living before, owing to her father’s work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or whether she was just blessed with such fabulous skin. And yet it was possibly not her looks that impressed me so much as her bearing, her movements. The way she dried herself, the way she walked, almost danced over to the rock when she was going in for a swim. There are no words to describe the unique quality of Margrete’s beauty, but in my mind I called it ‘Persian’. She wore an orange bikini which accentuated the golden effect. And her figure, I might add, because she had the body of an eighth grader, a body which had just begun to reveal something of how it was going to look in four or five years’ time. I had to force myself not to stare, not to be caught with my eyes glued to that sexy bikini top.