Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It has occurred to me that I ought to have been looking at her through tears many years later, in Ullevål Garden City, when she was kneeling on the bed, steadily banging her head against the wall. Naked, heart-rendingly exposed somehow. But I merely stood there watching, still clutching the handle of a stupid mug of iced tea. I stood there quietly, I too naked, but with all my wits about me, with no excuse, and watched Margrete Boeck, my wife-to-be, banging her head against a wall. I stood there looking at her, as dumbstruck, as nonplussed, as I had been that time in Granny’s sitting room. In my head I heard what might have been the tinkling of the crystals on a chandelier. What she was banging off the wall was every bit as fragile. But I knew that this was infinitely more complicated. So inconceivably much more precious and beautiful.

Why did she do it?

This was not like Margrete. The Margrete I had come to know after we met up again was, in fact, really quite the opposite. I often caught myself marvelling at her conscious presence in the moment, her appetite for life. She would wander about in the mornings with almost unashamed contentment written all over her. As if it was enough simply to draw breath. That was her. Euphoric, delighted just to be alive. I could stand, lost in wonder, in the evening or as night drew on, watching her as she sat on the terrace, with or without a glass of wine, surveying the apple trees in the garden; enviously I would contemplate her blissful features, the way she shut her eyes and savoured the moment. I felt that I was witnessing sheer, unadulterated, incomprehensible joy.

She was strong too. From the moment I met her in elementary school I had viewed her as being much stronger than me. She also possessed what I would call a jade-like quality: in a dim light that partly translucent, partly impenetrable side of her shone through. At such times her eyes had an even richer golden glow to them. You had a sense of her depth, of that rare inner strength. I always felt that she was the sort of person who would survive in a concentration camp.

And so, when I found her kneeling on the bed, banging her head off the wall, I thought she was larking about; I thought it was some sort of a joke, some symbolic act which I was supposed to interpret — a bit like playing charades, when you have to mime a song title and your team has to guess what it is. If I could just say the magic words she would stop. I stood in a bedroom in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched a woman — a woman whom, what is more, I loved — pounding her head against the wall, with a thud that was more soft than hard. I glanced down, as if looking for help, into the mug of iced tea, to where the wheels of the two lemon slices twirled each in their own direction. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She simply persisted in that mesmerising action, as regular as a pendulum. ‘Margrete, what’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Stop it, please.’

I have a wise daughter. She has set up her own company, inspired by the belief that we keep coming up with more and more ingenious methods of communication, but with less idea than ever before of what to say, what to communicate.

Margrete went on pounding her head against the wall. The thought flashed through my mind that this meant trouble. That I was going to become embroiled in some immensely complicated situation. And this was not a good time. In fact it was, to put it mildly, a very bad time. I had worries enough of my own. For weeks I had been agonising over whether to abandon Project X. This sight that I beheld, Margrete’s soft skull striking the wall again and again was like hearing a knock at the door when you absolutely do not wish to be disturbed.

And beneath all this: why was I surprised? After all, from the moment I saw her through my crystal monocle I had known that she was many. Or greater. She reminded me of Aunt Laura’s flat: viewed from the outside it consisted of four rooms, but when you stepped inside it seemed to go on forever. To begin with, just after we met one another again, every time we went out for a meal or had a drink in one of the innumerable new bars that opened up around that time, I felt as though I had to ditch my previous impression of her and start from scratch. She kept displaying different facets of herself. I had merely been spared seeing this side of her till now.

Or at least, there had been an incident, earlier on. It may have been a warning. We had been sitting at the piano, playing a Mozart sonata four-handed. Is that something which should give me pause for thought, I wonder: that she liked Mozart best, while I liked Bach? Then, all of a sudden, she slid off the bench and burst into tears. No ordinary crying fit, this, but an abrupt, loud and totally despairing fit of weeping. She crumpled up on the floor in the same position that Muslims adopt when they pray, rocking backwards and forwards. I felt shaken and helpless. It was the most harrowing sight. But when I cautiously knelt down, put my arm around her and asked her what was the matter, all she said, through her sobs, was: ‘I love you so much.’ I assumed, therefore, that she had been moved by the Mozart piece we had been playing, that sparkling sonata. And I left it at that. It was so typical of her, to burst into tears at the thought of us, two sweethearts, sitting side by side and managing with our four hands to produce that carefree music. It occurred to me that she must have seen it as a harmonious foretaste, a sign of how happy we would be together.

But this was something else, this was worse, this went deeper: to bang your precious head off a wall, as if intent on smashing it or ridding yourself of something that was eating away at you in there. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She seemed somehow heavy. It crossed my mind that Margrete was also trying to drive a truck through a wall. That she was doing this out of love for me. It was, nonetheless, madness. In my eyes. Something from which I backed away. I had no wish to be confronted with this kind of love. It scared me. I stayed where I was, losing patience now, watching her, watching her beat her head against the wall, slowly, but with uncanny steadiness. ‘Margrete?’ I said again. More sharply. No response. I felt as if I was standing a long way off. As if an impassable gulf stretched between me in the middle of the room and her on the bed. I, an erstwhile lifesaver, stood there and watched a person drowning, unable to lift a finger to help.

I cannot go on. I have to stop. I need to dwell on this contrast, this old lifeboat lying at the quayside in this quiet fjord. She walks past on the deck, smiles, hands me a cup of coffee, pretends not to see the notebook, the pen. Who is she? I have a feeling that she carries a dark burden of her own. After what she has experienced. Which goes beyond just about anything that is usually likely to befall a young person. Certainly, in the past — when she came to visit me — I occasionally used to pick up worrying signals. I keep catching myself studying her. I know that she also studies me. We have a tacit understanding. She always wears a black beret, prompting associations with guerrilla warfare and with art. It has become her trademark; thanks to her, more young Norwegians than ever now sport such headgear. I never tire of looking at her. She has a little flaw, a relatively big gap between her two front teeth, one which she has deliberately done nothing about. ‘In some African countries it would give me enormous cachet,’ she remarked on one occasion. It simply serves to render her appearance even more intriguing. She is, as one journalist put it, ‘made for television’.

She cannot take one step off the boat without people stopping to stare, whisper. She has lived only a couple of decades, but already she is an idol. For a long time I thought she would be a writer. You sometimes hear of kids reading Anna Karenina at the age of thirteen. Kristin tried to write Anna Karenina when she was thirteen. One time, just before she died, Margrete came across something that Kristin had written. ‘She’s so good it’s uncanny,’ Margrete said to me. ‘It almost scares me. She’s barely in her teens, but she writes like an adult.’