Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I knew she was special. As a little girl she happily lumped together alphabet blocks, Barbie dolls, old Matchbox cars, train sets and bits from Airfix construction kits. The way she saw it, they were all part of the same world, so there was no reason why they could not be used in combination, rather than separately. She was already practising what would later be referred to as ‘sampling’. One winter night when we were gazing up at the stars and I had dusted off my old knowledge of astronomy, on the spur of the moment she dubbed Orion ‘the Hourglass’ and changed Leo’s name, right then and there, to ‘the Question Mark’. She had a head like a pinball machine. Her thoughts were forever zooming this way and that; you could positively hear them go ping , see the lights flashing behind her brow.

I sit on the mizzen shroud, as if wishing to be close to the lifebuoy. The coffee is exceptionally good, it reminds me of Margrete’s, although Martin bemoaned its quality. ‘Not exactly what you’d get at Caffé Sant’Eustachio in Rome, where they roast their beans in a wood-burning stove,’ as he said. Martin hails from Nordkjosbotn in the far north, but with his rawboned, weatherbeaten features he might just as easily have come from Marrakesh. He also tends to wear stripy, loose-fitting clothes, not unlike the sort of thing worn in North Africa.

As far as I can gather, the OAK Quartet has been commissioned to devise a product, a good or a service which I find impossible to define — the term ‘multimedia’ seems too tame, already old hat. Nor do I understand the language they use, all those words flying through the air: ‘information architecture’, ‘navigation design’, ‘hierarchy of levels’. What I do understand, however, is that this is a large-scale undertaking with solid financial backing from the most diverse institutions, not least from the business sector. This trip is just a first foray, a kind of reconnaissance mission; I am not certain who their target group are, whether the product will be geared towards the travel industry or is also designed for educational or entertainment purposes. Nor am I clear on whether the end-result will be sold in CD form or put out on the Internet — or be presented in one of the many other media spawned by the digital revolution. The OAK Quartet are forever discussing the question of what’s next for television. Everything changes so fast these days. Their main concern appears to be that the actual concept, its sum and substance, the thinking behind it, should be applicable to lots of forms, including some yet to come. And they must remember to allow for the possibility for continual updating. ‘We have to try to envisage all sorts of media, forms of communication of which we haven’t even begun to dream,’ Hanna said one evening. Hanna is almost thirty and the eldest of the group. Her Asian looks sometimes put me in mind of a geisha — not due to any promiscuous tendencies on her part, but because of her air of refinement. Hanna is in charge of finance and marketing, she works out plans of action with clients, acts as producer and coordinator. She is also the vessel’s skipper, keeps the logbook, coils ropes east to west and can put out a spring line and make fast in a way that would make Colin Archer proud of her.

Who are these young people, I have asked myself. Are there such things as short cuts to getting to know a person? One day I was talking to Carl. He is the OAK Quartet’s graphic designer as well as being something of a film buff, an expert on dramaturgy and cinematography. I have already had one argument with him about Orson Welles’s masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. Possibly because Carl, with his close-cropped head and his tall, broad build, reminds me of a nightclub bouncer or a bodyguard, I was surprised when he told me that I only needed to know one thing in order to understand everything about him: ‘In my pocket I have a little brass figure,’ he said. ‘It represents Ganesh, an Indian god with the head of an elephant. I’ve carried it in my pocket for the past fifteen years.’ Was it really true? Could one detail reveal almost everything there was to know about a person? I pondered this nugget of information about Carl the webmaster and the figure of Ganesh in his pocket. It certainly fired the imagination, made me think of a giant with a mouse as a pet.

Which detail would say most about me? It would have to be the fact that there is nothing I do not know about the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album. I could tell you that Ringo played finger cymbals on ‘Norwegian Wood’; that ‘I’m Looking Through You’ was inspired by Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher; that John Lennon stole a line from an Elvis song for ‘Run For Your Life’; that the lyrics to ‘The Word’ were written in coloured pencils; that what one heard on ‘In My Life’ was not a cembalo solo but a speeded up recording of George Martin on electric piano.

I think Carl is right. Such a detail would say just about everything about me.

After some years in a cell, for the first time in my life — if I discount my work on ‘the golden notebook’ — I felt the need to write. I got it into my head that I could survive by trying to tell my own story. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story, as someone once said. But which story? That was the problem.

To begin with I just wrote, without any thought for what the end product would be, who would read it. I wrote with a pleasure which surprised me, I wrote with a delight at finally understanding Margrete’s mania for writing. And I make no secret of the fact that I also had in mind the offers made to me by a number of publishers. ‘Now we’ll have Marco Polo himself putting pen to paper, not his cellmate Rustichello,’ as one editor put it to me cajolingly. I toyed with various titles: Twenty-three Fragments From a Killer’s Hand, Eight Planets I have Visited and the like. For a long time I was tempted to call it The Confession of a Fool , not knowing that that title had already been taken.

Rumours that I was writing were reported in the press. I think people were looking for a public confession or something of the sort. But the more I wrote, the less interested I became in the idea of others reading what I wrote. People were expecting The Truth. Either that or some sort of act of revenge. An exposé of everything and everybody, not least of life inside NRK, the escapades of the celebrities, who was sleeping with whom. But the content of the piece changed character. For a while it seemed to me that this was something between me and a higher power. In the end, though, I came to regard it as an honest-to-goodness Book of the Dead, equivalent to the papyrus scrolls buried with the dead in Ancient Egypt. It was a pile of paper, a scroll which I would take with me to the grave, so to speak. A password, a token I could present, so that I, or my spirit, could gain admission to the hereafter.

It was a confusing manuscript. It developed into a long, incoherent narrative. All the nouns seemed to be there, but none of the verbs. I could see only one solution: I destroyed it. For one very simple reason: no one — with one or two exceptions — would have been able to make head or tail of it. I burned my ‘confession’ with a light heart. Despite the fabulous sums offered to me, during those first years of my imprisonment at least, by a lot of publishers.

It is a relief to be on board the Voyager , to be with the members of the OAK Quartet. It is not that I believe them to have fewer worrying traits than previous generations of young people, but they seem different. Broader. They are just as interested in each single person as they are in society as a whole. They aspire to stronger individuals and a greater spirit of community. And none of them feels bound to stick only to their own specialist area. Martin, with his Marrakesh-style appearance, is a typical computer freak, a whole college on his own when it comes to his technological know-how, but I have long suspected him of being able to turn his hand to just about anything — and not only exotic cookery and mountain climbing. The other day, as we were rounding the point at Fornes he picked up his guitar and sang ‘In My Life’ with such feeling — I have never heard anything like it. The other three gradually joined in, singing in harmony, and it seemed only natural that they should know all the words. I had to take a walk around the deck to save anyone seeing the tears in my eyes. In any case, they could never know what a ridiculously sentimental appeal that song holds for me.