Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

On the plane home, perhaps because I was seeing the topography of the island from high above, I could not help wondering about the energy I had discerned in her orgasm. That glimpse of something exceedingly powerful. And somehow circular, like a cyclone. Since then I have come to the conclusion that my own very best orgasms could also be described in terms of a circle, if not quite in the same way. I think of Granny’s crystal chandelier, that starry firmament in miniature; I think of the times when I stood almost right inside it. For me this is the only experience that comes anywhere close to reflecting the shattering beauty and luminescence, not to mention the wealth of imagery, inherent in an orgasm. Although this could also have something to do with the fact that I was surrounded on all sides by those glittering crystals the first time I saw Margrete. Saw her properly.

As a child, standing on the stepladder in Granny’s flat, with my head stuck inside the chandelier, I often had a sense of being strangely powerful, invincible. That I was what I sometimes suspected myself to be: a wonder. I sensed that the rays of light issuing from all those crystals had a focal point of sorts at the very spot from which my thoughts sprang. This had an effect on my brain. Associations shot out in all directions. The prisms appeared to refract my thoughts in the same way that they refracted the light. A thought would occur to me and in next to no time it would have split into seven, and each of these seven would be split by another crystal, and so on. I wished that I could take the chandelier to school, that I could stick my head inside it every time I had to answer a difficult question. ‘Jonas, what do we mean by democracy?’ ‘Wait a minute, miss. Let me just slip on my crystal crown.’ It would turn me into a wise man. I wondered whether people, scientists or whoever, were aware of this: that they might find answers to all their problems if they stuck their heads inside just such a chandelier.

The August day when I saw my love, really saw Margrete for the first time, I was standing on the stepladder under the crystal tree. We had finished giving it its annual clean. The sitting room smelled of soft soap and the walls were patterned with light. I only had a couple of the nethermost rings on the spiked base left to fill. And Granny had found one crystal droplet which we had forgotten, it was cut like a precious gem. I was too busy figuring out where to hang it to hear anyone knocking or ringing the bell. I was standing with my head stuck way up inside the chandelier, searching for the eyelet through which to thread the hook. I did not notice her going into the hall to answer the door. I gave a start when I became aware of the sitting-room door opening and heard someone say: ‘Jonas?’

I saw nothing but a shower of sparks, a myriad rainbows, reflected light. And in the midst of all this, a figure. I moved down a step, treading halfway out of the chandelier. And, maybe because I was shy, or speechless with confusion, I held the crystal droplet up to my eye, as if wishing to hide behind it, use it as a mask. I saw everything through it. I saw the sitting room and the open door. And I saw her. Except that there was not one figure but seven. I could see them quite distinctly when I held the droplet right up close to my eye, like a monocle. Seven people, one in the middle and six in a circle round about it. I saw who it was. It was Margrete. A princess.

This thought was not simply plucked out of thin air. Whenever we washed the prisms, Granny had to recount the fascinating history of the chandelier. Because it had hung in the Royal Palace, the very building that I passed on my way to Oscars gate. I was not surprised. The chandelier was so magnificent that it could only have come from there. A lot of the crystals, purchased in Berlin, were removed and sold at auction at the turn of the century, when the Palace switched to electric lighting. ‘And this,’ Granny said, pointing, ‘I came by in a roundabout way. Spoils of war.’

I gathered that it had belonged to her husband. And that subject, I mean that of the man who came into her life during the war, after Grandpa’s death, was one on which I never touched, because then I would simply have to listen to her ranting on about Churchill for hours. ‘It hung in the Queen’s Chambers, in the Yellow Cabinet,’ Granny said, always with a melodramatic widening of her eyes. Those terms, the Queen’s Chambers and the Yellow Cabinet made me tingle all over. I could imagine nothing finer, except perhaps for it to have hung in the Queen’s Bedchamber. Because I often sat staring up at the chandelier. If I stared hard enough I could convince myself that I saw pictures in those small glass pendants, especially when Granny played Strauss waltzes on the gramophone; scenes which had been stored up inside them and now presented themselves to me, images of royal personages and their guests amidst furniture made from jacaranda wood and walls covered in yellow silk damask. If I tried really hard, peered for long enough into the biggest crystals, I could even see pictures of the balls at the Palace.

And now here was Margrete, standing on the threshold of the Queen’s Chambers as if this was her natural and rightful place. I was surprised. I had never thought she would come. Two days earlier I had dived into Svarttjern and she had put her arms around me. And yet I had hardly dared speak to her when we walked out of the school gates the day before. I had said I was going to see my grandmother the next day. She had asked where she lived. I mentioned the address, Oscars gate. ‘Why don’t you come over,’ I had said, knowing that that would never happen. ‘What if I did come,’ she had said. ‘Come,’ I had said. ‘Won’t you come?’

And she had come. Found me in my hideaway. Suddenly she was just there, filling the doorway, filling the crystal droplet in front of my eye. Standing there alone, or all together.

To view one’s beloved through a crystal. I wish everyone could have that same experience. It was so luminous, so scintillating, so magical, and as such it was a true reflection of the emotions roiling inside me. I told myself that it was probably the lead in the crystal that lent this image such weight, made it so unforgettable. And often in the weeks ahead — not because of any prisms, but because I was in love — I would find myself seeing her in this same way, even when she was simply standing, say, in the playground: surrounded by a rainbowed aura.

‘Margrete,’ was all I said, the word barely audible. I knocked into some crystals. They tinkled like tiny bells.

‘Jonas,’ she said again and laughed. ‘You look like a king with the world’s biggest crown!’

‘Who’s this?’ my grandmother whispered to me.

‘I’m his girlfriend,’ Margrete said.

I had not asked her. But now it was official. We were boyfriend and girlfriend. That was always her way. She cut through all the chit-chat and formalities. You saw ghosts and she took you to China. She walked through a door and said things straight out.

Up on the stepladder I felt the chandelier lose a little of its lustre, as if it had at long last met its match. I realised what it was that this wondrous object lacked: humanity. Life. Margrete could be said to have invaded my brittle world of glass and light, my blessed symmetry. With Margrete came disorder.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she laughed.

But I just went on standing, dumbstruck, under the chandelier, looking at her. In the silence all that could be heard was the faintest tinkling of the glass pendants. I held a crystal droplet up in front of my face, a large teardrop and endeavoured to take her in with my eyes. I did not know it, but I was also looking into the future.