Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Sometimes I did not even recognise the room in which I woke up, and it would take me some seconds to realise that I was in my own bedroom. The smell was different. As was the way the light fell on the wall. One morning I actually jumped when I walked into the kitchen. No one noticed anything. But it took me a while to figure out who these people were, that they were Mum and Dad, Rakel and Daniel.

Once, as if she had suddenly thought of it, my mother told me something, just a little story, which I tucked away in my memory. When she was in Akershus Hospital, riding out the last contractions, only seconds before I was born, the Oslo region was shaken by an earthquake. It was, by Norwegian standards, a big quake. Everyone who happened to be indoors at the time felt it. My mother told me this story almost as a joke. And she said no more about it. Nonetheless, I brooded over this piece of information. I even went so far as to check whether it was true. It was. I wondered, yearnfully almost — or fearfully — whether this shaking of the earth’s crust might have given rise to a loop in my genetic material, equipping me with some sort of attribute which few, if any, other people possessed. I imagined, feared, that I might be the first of a new — I will not call it mutant — branch of human development, that I had stumbled almost by accident upon a clue to the future nature of mankind. And although I fought against it, for many years I was visited by an all-pervading sense of a pressure inside me, of being unfolded, slowly. And yet I was unable to identify this possible new addition to my person or put it to use. In later years I would take comfort from the words of my old elementary school headmaster: ‘Four thousand years of civilisation and we still know next to nothing about human nature.’ I never told anyone about this feeling. No one would have understood me anyway.

I know that many people saw me as being a shy man. But I was not so much bashful as self-effacing. I wanted to stay out of sight. I did not want to run the risk of anyone discovering my secret. My confusion over an experience which I did not understand and my uncertainty as to where it might lead. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible. At school I raised my hand as seldom as I could in response to the teacher’s questions, and never if I was the only one who knew the answer. It may sound silly, but sometimes I had the urge to wear a wig in order to distract people’s attention. They would say: We’ve found you out. You wear a wig! And I could pretend to be suitably embarrassed. But I would have prevented them from exposing the real wig: the fact that I was not who I appeared to be — a possible wonder. I concealed my true identity in the same way as a Red Indian on an enemy tribe’s territory would cover up the tattoo which revealed him to be the son of a chief. I had to hide myself away, prepare myself, await my opportunity, wait for the time to be ripe, as they say. I just had to hope that at the end of this frustrating process, once I was fully evolved, a project would present itself. And it would seem so obvious: a unique opportunity, tailor-made, so to speak, for me, to allow me to work in depth.

It should come as no surprise to learn that hide-and-seek was my favourite game. I remember the glee of discovering a really good hiding place. But I also enjoyed being found. In the autumn, when we played hide-and-seek in the dark, my heart would pound with delight every time someone shone a torch beam on my face among the bushes and shouted: ‘I’ve found Jonas!’ There was nothing to beat it. I think I felt as if someone was saving me from myself.

I had the same feeling that day when Margrete showed up in Granny’s sitting room: that she had shone a torch beam on me, found me in one of my favourite hiding places. Saved me from — how can I put it — a false existence, delusions which, although I did not know it, could have been harmful to me. With Margrete, too, came something new. Till then I had believed that in order to unfold as a human being you had to have spirit. Now, thanks to Margrete, I realised that spirit was possibly just another word for love. I could feel it when she kissed me. Margrete could positively paper me with kisses. She could kiss my lips a hundred times and never tire of it. It was as if she were practising life-saving. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This was how love was supposed to be, I thought to myself. Close together. Face to face. Mouth to mouth. And each time she put her arms around me, kissed me, I felt a pull, a pressure, as though something lying tightly coiled inside me was starting to stir, to unfurl. Margrete helped me to see how the two main threads from my youth — my longing to be a lifesaver and my dream of becoming a discoverer — ran, or were woven, together. Because I discovered new life. Not new life in the universe, but on Earth. I found new life inside myself. I discovered that we human beings contain more life than we think.

So when Margrete walked out on me and I was left alone outside the Golden Elephant with my lungs aching, I was filled with a woeful certainty that great prospects were slipping away from me, that my vital spirit itself was forsaking me. I felt utterly dispirited. It is not, in fact, entirely unthinkable that I really did die.

I had one ray of hope. Faint, but still — a hope. ‘You’ll get a letter,’ she said as she turned to leave. A letter. Never have I looked forward so much to a letter. Because she had to tell me why she had done it. Give me a reason. Unless of course it was — oh, hope — a letter to say that she was sorry.

Waiting. Have I ever waited like that? I have never waited like that. For two weeks, waiting for a letter became a full-time occupation for me. During that time I would have had no trouble answering the question as to the meaning of life. The meaning of life was to wait. I do not recall whether I ate, or went to school, or did my homework, or slept; I remember only that I waited, that I was the waiting. I trembled at the thought of it, I dreaded it, longed for it, pictured words, expressions, phrases — even her handwriting, her distinctive ‘a’s — I saw them all so clearly. And underneath it all: the hope.

At long last a letter arrived. Or rather: a parcel. I received the collection slip from the post office on the same day that I was given the awful news — again by one of those ghastly friends of hers, a stuck-up bitch with buck teeth — that she had moved away, that she had left Norway again, gone off with her parents to a country so far away that I had scarcely heard of it, a country where her father, the bloody kidnapper, was to take up a post at the Norwegian embassy. The knowledge that there was a parcel at Grorud post office, waiting to be collected, made it easier for me to cope with the grief of her leaving. At least I would be enlightened as to what had happened, what had been going through her mind. And maybe she would have said something about coming back soon. About — oh, hope — missing me.

I collected the parcel. It was square in shape. And flat. It was an LP. I hunted through the wrappings again and again. No sheet of paper, no distinctive ‘a’s. Just that record. A parting gift, I thought. Only later did it dawn on me that it was a letter.

All I had managed to stammer out when we were standing outside The Golden Elephant was the start of the question that was on my lips: ‘But why … Why … Why …’

She had looked at me for a long time. ‘Idiot,’ she said. I realised that this was an answer. That one word. Idiot. It was a key. For me it has always been a key. I looked it up. It means an ignorant person.

The LP was Rubber Soul by the Beatles. I played it nonstop for a year. That record was like a chandelier, each song an arm, each verse a crystal droplet, each line a different colour. I would stand like — yes, an idiot, for hour after hour, watching the record spin round and round, hypnotised by the rainbow defining the radius of the black disc. Even today my eyes are liable to fill with tears, to the consternation and mystification of everyone around me, whenever I hear one of the songs from that album. All it takes is the intro to that played-to-death golden oldie ‘Michelle’, or the bouzouki-style guitar on ‘Girl’, and I have to sit down to save being laid flat out by all the emotions, the memories, that come tumbling over me.