Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I dived. To begin with the others stood and watched. I heard the odd gasp of admiration at the length of time I stayed under. I dived. Surfaced, filled my lungs with air and dived again. The comments petered out. There was a deathly hush every time I surfaced. People began to leave. The shadows were also lengthening over the lake. Georg had his match stuck between his teeth again. ‘Good luck,’ he said when he walked off, as if he could afford to show a degree of magnanimity. He shot a glance at Margrete. She did not meet his gaze, sat where she was. Sat there in all her Persian beauty, looking at me. She looked at me as though she were asking: Who are you?

Many years later, when I met her again and we started living together, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that she had switched on the light above the bed and was lying there considering me, as if trying to uncover a secret: ‘Who are you?’ she would whisper then. On more than one night I was woken in this way. It was as though she were studying me, thought she could discover more about me when I was asleep than when I was awake. ‘You look about seven years old,’ she told me. ‘I am seven years old,’ I said.

Now and then she would ask me about a dream I had just had. She might ask me why I had shot wide of the goal. And I would actually have been dreaming about football. She could read my dreams, or was so interested in me that she could guess what I was likely to be dreaming about. Or — this thought has occurred to me — maybe she gave me them, put these dreams into my head by lying there looking at me, considering me.

Even at night when we were making love, I would occasionally feel her fingers running over my face in the dark, as if my features were in Braille and she was trying to read me.

Her curiosity about me. And not the other way round.

Soon we were alone. Even Leo had left, pointedly, as though washing his hands of the whole business. I dived again. It was dark down there, the water was turbid. The bracelet could have fallen off at a spot so deep that I would not be able to reach it, even with all the training I had done — out at Hvaler, too, where I had made several dives to a depth of ten metres with flippers. Her black pupils followed me, stayed fixed on me, as if she were not only asking: Who are you? but also: Where are you when you dive?

I would not give up, took another deep breath before gliding down into the depths. The pressure was getting to me. My ears were starting to hurt despite the fact that I pinched my nose shut with one hand. I could not give up. I felt the pressure, as much from within as from without. This was a situation which would work a change in me.

The pressure. And this might be a good point — here, with me in a submerged position before an expectant Margrete — at which to allude to what lay at the core of my image of myself, a view so complex — or so simple — that I am afraid it goes beyond words: in my life it has not so much been a case of developing as in growing, but rather of evolving.

When I went to my grandfather’s outdoor privy on Hvaler I always left the door wide open so I could gaze out to sea, at the boats sailing past. There was nothing quite like it. The quiet. The spider in the corner. The green moss outside. The smell of the beach, the sea. My eyes had often been drawn to a piece of cloth which had been rolled into a ball and wedged into the hole in the door jamb where once there had been a lock. One day, on impulse, or because I had a hunch about it, I winkled the bit of cloth out. And when I gently began to pull on the ends, opening out the clump of fabric which, over the years, had become almost totally gummed up, it proved to be an old tablecloth. Some scorch marks explained why it had been discarded. Printed on the cloth was a map of the world. And filthy though the fabric was, I could see how nice it was. The names of lots of countries were quite legible. I never forgot this experience. That I could unfold a disgusting-looking clump of fabric and reveal a hidden world.

I probably ought to keep quiet about this — especially considering the lowly part I now play — but there is something I have to confess, although I never dared to say it out loud: I was a child wonder. Or, no: that is not quite right. I was a wonder. As a very small boy I was sure that I could speak seven foreign languages and jump ten metres in the air, all I had to do was to figure out how. Sometimes I felt, with such swelling conviction that it scared me, that I could make objects shatter just by staring at them very hard, that I only needed to clench my fist in order to set great wheels in motion — if not within my own immediately perceptible surroundings then somewhere far out in space. At times I felt a pressure, almost a pain, inside my skull, often throughout my whole body, as if something was trying to unfold itself. As if I carried within me a seed containing a mighty tree.

One Sunday the whole family went for a drive after church. We stopped out on Ekeberg moor where some gypsies had made camp. They were something of an attraction. For ten øre some of the gypsy children would sing, one girl danced. But — and this was far more thrilling — you could also have your fortune told. Some curious onlookers stood in a semi-circle around a young woman seated on a chair outside a caravan. ‘Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a stunner,’ Daniel hissed, and then he shoved me through the circle of people and gave the woman a krone . ‘Now you can find out whether you’re going to end up dumping sewage or washing bodies,’ he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Or whether you’ll get off with Anne Beate Corneliussen.’ The woman smiled invitingly. She really was a stunner. Dark. Genuinely mysterious. She took my hand. She tilted it slightly. I felt her stiffen, almost jerking backwards in her seat. She raised her eyes and looked at me. I do not know how to describe it. As if she were afraid? Overwhelmed? She waved me away, said nothing, simply gave Daniel his krone back. She motioned to me to leave, as if she did not understand, had not been able to see anything.

I was a child. And yet. We have tens of billions of nerve cells in our brains and each of them capable of connecting with hundreds of thousands of other nerve cells. From time to time some expert can be heard to state that we are not even close to utilising the brain’s full capacity. A large proportion of our genetic material is also said to be a mystery: we have no idea what purpose it serves. What if I had detected talents which were in some way associated with those white patches in our knowledge, I would think at heady, almost uneasy moments when I was older. Should I regard this as a blessing or a curse?

I cannot deny it, however. For long periods this was my driving force, my strength and, at the same time, the source of the deepest misgivings: I felt unfinished as a human being. Which is not to say that I was unhappy with myself, with the person I was. But I knew — and this rankled me — that I harboured untapped potential. It lay coiled up inside me. Or packed away in little boxes, like Granny’s chandelier. I was, in other words, less interested in what I was than in what I could be . So one minute I was on the lookout for situations which would help this unknown quality to uncoil, enable me to excel myself. Or, more precisely: become the real me. The next minute I was filled with the need to hide, the wish that these latent gifts might leave me be. Sometimes, I confess, I even hoped they would never come to anything.

In my life, unlike many people, I have never been all that concerned about traumas or evil inclinations, all the things that drag me down. I have been more interested in whatever it is that lifts me up. I have felt something lifting me up. Of all the questions I have had to address, this is the one I hold to be the most crucial: is mankind descended, metaphorically speaking, from the animals or the angels? Or perhaps this is merely a variation on another question: should we let ourselves be ruled by the past or the future? By who we are or who we will become?