Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It is amazing, really, that Kristin should have wound up in such company, on board an old lifeboat. When she was offered the chance to work in television I strongly advised her to turn it down. She went against my wishes — it may be that in this particular instance she had to go against me. Kristin, this young girl, was given the job of hosting a prime-time, Friday evening programme, a talk show on which it did not really matter who the guests were: it was the presenter who was the star. And she was a star. Pert and saucy and smart in a way that Norway was ready for. As the papers said, she had star quality. Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding her my name rarely came up, and then only as a by-the-way, and only at the start.

Then, when she was right at the top, she bowed out. After a couple of interim stages — high-profile pursuits — she set up her own company, one that in many ways involved all the things with which she had worked: music, software development, television, advertising, journalism. Her business card gives her occupation as ‘association artist’. According to Hanna she is a genius when it comes to spotting, forging, connections, inserting ‘links’ as they say. She has become something of a guru within IT circles. At an age when I had barely begun to figure out what my first project should be, she already has a whole lifetime behind her.

When I asked her about this one evening — Martin had served margueritas up on deck — about all the things she had done and whether there was any common denominator between them, she had looked at me in surprise, glared almost. ‘I’m a storyteller,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it obvious? The future belongs to the storytellers. I’ve always known that. And that’s the challenge with what we’re doing here. To find the underlying story.’

I sit here in a fjord, surrounded by steep hillsides, and think of fly tying. The questions are always more important than the answers. In Lærdal the salmon flies are the question and the fish is the answer. I am fascinated by the craftsmanship involved. Many salmon flies are real works of art. The patterns, and the poetry of the names, make me think of cocktails, or butterflies. Golden Butterfly, Yellow Eagle, Evening Star, Jock Scott. A Victorian salmon fly might consist of more than forty materials, some of them taken from exotic birds and animals; they looked like magical ornaments. If I were part of the OAK Quartet I would weave in lots of information on salmon flies. They keep talking about ‘teasers’, items designed to catch the browser’s interest. Could not the whole story of Lærdal be encapsulated within those flies? They are the perfect bait for the eye.

In the evenings I tend to sit off to one side and listen to them discussing things in the warm light of the paraffin lamp in the saloon. The conversation is fast and furious, almost as if they were bouncing rubber balls to one another, or playing a variation on ‘My ship is loaded with …’. A thought which is not so far out, at that. The Voyager is a cargo ship. They are loading it with information.

Most of their talk has to do with the task in hand, here in Sognefjord, but they keep straying onto other subjects. They may start out talking about Lærdal fly tier Olaf Olsen, and from there the conversation will turn to Loki, who took the shape of a salmon, before winding up with a discussion of all the Hollywood films they have seen in which fishing plays a key part — particularly those in which someone spends their whole life trying to catch the king salmon itself, only to let it go again when they finally succeed. The other day they spent over an hour debating Martin’s assertion that Sisyphus was the happiest man in the world. Hanna maintained that only Job — poor, tormented Job, mark you — was happier. In the middle of all this Carl proceeded to hold forth on his fascination with those blue pellets or cubes that used to be found in urinals. As far as I could gather, he believed these could be employed as a form of narcotic. The OAK Quartet have an almost shocking ability to hop, for example, from the question of whether jam should be put on cornflakes before or after the milk, to thoughts on the undulating lines of Alvar Aalto’s architecture, and finish up with an exchange on whether or not Mother Teresa was an egoist — as if all of these issues were of equal importance. It reminds me of the talk show which Kristin presented, Container it was called: it was in many ways epoch-making television, a real lucky dip of a programme filled with all sorts of rubbish out of which she forged meaning. She had people talking about empty trivia one minute and deeply serious matters the next. So too on board the Voyager . They take the same burning interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language as they do in the design of a complex motorway intersection or the lyrics of the Swedish Hoola Bandoola Band’s protest songs from the seventies. I have also remarked that they keep branching off into stories. Maybe it’s the boat that inspires them, maybe that is what comes of sitting in the glow of an old paraffin lamp.

I am instilled with their sense for detail. I understand how fraught with meaning ostensibly dry, neutral objects can be. What bearing has the old, black Bakelite telephone had on my life. All of the different watch-straps I have owned, the appearance and feel of which I can recall with a clarity that astonishes me?

Is there some detail which could explain why she did it?

I have been given the whole of the for’ard cabin to myself — Hanna and Carl occupy the bunks in the saloon, Kristin and Martin share the big bunk in the aft corridor. Every evening I lie here thinking. The creaking of the rigging, the smell of paraffin and tar conjure up memories not only of an old actor, but also of Margrete. Before I go to sleep, my thoughts often go to those two other Voyager ships, small vessels sailing along, way out there in space, beyond the rings of Saturn, packed to the gunnels with answers to Bo Wang Lee’s question: What should we take with us?

I am writing again, something which comes almost as a surprise to me. Not that I don’t do a lot of writing now anyway, I am a secretary. What I mean is: writing about myself. I have been stimulated. By her. I know she is writing something. She has always been a great one for writing. I think she means to have it published. I have nothing against that.

My motives in writing are somewhat different this time around. I feel as if I am suffering from amnesia. I want to try to remember. And more than anything I want to try to remember the middle part.

In Grorud, when I was a boy, there were some old stonemasons who were real hard drinkers. We did not know what to make of them: these drunks — grown men lying senseless on the edge of the wood in the middle of the day — never moved us to feel critical of society or of our home town. But we were not scared of them either. They wouldn’t have hurt a fly. On one occasion we crept up on one of them to pinch the empty bottles that lay scattered around him on the grass. Suddenly the old drunk came to and started telling us a story, as if we were a longed-for audience. He stank of beer and piss, his crotch area was all wet and disgusting. We stayed and listened for a while; I thought it was very interesting, it was all about the cutting of the stone, about the huge, unwieldy blocks, but the others were itching to get away, to cash in the empties, buy gumballs from the new vending machine from which a lucky turn of the handle might deliver a ring as well. I went back later. The drunk man was still sprawled on the grass and I was able to catch the end of the story; and a pretty powerful ending it was, something to do with meeting a nursing sister, a future wife, in a hospital — not even the stench of beer and piss could spoil it. I ventured, from a safe distance, to ask why he had told this story. The drunk answered that it was a good story. He just had to tell it, even if no one was listening. This taught me something about stories. About telling stories to no one. Even more importantly, though, I was filled with curiosity. I had heard the beginning and the end, but not the middle bit. And what I wondered was: what had occurred between what I knew of the beginning, the part about the stone cutting, and the wonderful ending? An accident?