Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I told him what I knew. I never tire of thinking of this concept: a sort of gramophone record attached to each spaceship, containing greetings to any eventual extra-terrestrial civilisations. The people who made this had asked themselves the same questions as Bo Wang Lee had done: ‘What should we take with us?’ What should we present? And which of all the Earth’s sounds should we select? They had ended up with 118 pictures, all of which, in different ways, said something about mankind and its culture; these included diagrams of the DNA structure and of the human sex organs, but there too were photographs of fungi in a forest, a dancer in Bali and a classroom in Japan. Somewhere far beyond Pluto’s orbit there also drifted greetings in almost sixty different languages. ‘You could say that the Voyager disc is a World’s Fair shot into space,’ I said to Carl. ‘But first and foremost — obviously — it’s a message to mankind itself.’

The middle part. My homecoming from a World’s Fair. It is all there in those minutes. I remember how I paused outside the house. I stood there looking at, admiring, the bricks of the walls, the extension in Grorud granite; I feasted my eyes on the crocuses in the flower beds, the bare branches of the apple trees in the garden. I positively revelled in my own good fortune. For a second I could not believe that this was my home, this welcoming house, the warmth of the light beyond the gauzy white curtains covering the living-room window — all that was lacking was for her shadow to go gliding past.

I knew how I would find Margrete when I entered the living room. She would be writing letters. She almost always wrote letters in the evening, when she was not reading. And when she had finished a book she wrote letters non-stop. For her these two things went hand in hand, reading and writing. She used expensive pens and the finest quality writing paper; when we were out travelling she was always on the lookout for pretty envelopes and unusual paper. I often watched her on the sly when she was writing. Her face took on a different expression then, as if she were doing something requiring deep concentration. ‘I’m weaving,’ she would say. She said the same thing when she was reading: ‘I’m weaving.’ I had no idea what she put in her letters, mostly everyday stuff I guessed: quotes from books she had read, a verse of a poem. And she wrote in a hand which must have given the receiver as much pleasure as the actual contents. ‘Attractive handwriting is as important for a woman as beauty,’ she said once. It must have been an honour to receive a letter from Margrete. She wrote to her friends abroad on tissue-thin paper. Sometimes, if I was there, she would hold the paper up in front of her eyes. And I saw her face as if through a veil of script.

There was one evening when she had hung lots of Chinese lanterns around the terrace. We had had guests, they had just left and she was stretching out in a mahogany chair. The coloured lanterns made the house, made Grorud, look as if it lay under other skies. I thought of something, fetched a thick sheet of paper which I kept at the back of a cupboard. It was a large Chinese character, written — or painted — by Bo Wang Lee as a farewell present. I showed it to Margrete. ‘This means friendship, right?’ She considered it for some time. ‘This is the character for love,’ she said, her face bathed in the glow of the paper lanterns. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘The person who wrote this said it was the sign for friendship.’ She looked up at me, with a smile in her eyes. ‘That’s as may be,’ she said, ‘but this says “love”.’ She explained the intricate character to me, even showed me how the Chinese word for heart — four exquisite strokes, like chambers — lay in the middle of it, like a word within the word. ‘Love without heart is no love at all,’ she murmured, more to herself. Then she looked at me again. ‘Maybe there was something about the person who wrote this that you didn’t understand,’ Margrete said. She was right, of course. There was a lot I had not understood about Bo Wang Lee.

I opened the gate at the bottom of the drive with my heart hammering — like a man in love, I thought. I walked slowly up to the front door, with waves of warmer air wafting towards me, caressing my brow. I knew Kristin was at her grandmother’s, that we, Margrete and I, had the weekend to ourselves. To this day I can recall the distinctive sound of gravel under my shoes, a sound I have always liked and which, on this fragrant spring evening, felt especially good, as if each little stone were scrunching expectantly, welcoming me home.

And then, I open the door, step inside, put down my suitcase, walk into the living room — and there she is, Margrete, this precious person, lying dead in the middle of the room, shot, and not just shot, but shot through the heart.

What was my first impulse? I know no one will believe me, but my first impulse was to get out, fast, and shut the door behind me. Fast. I thought I had come to the wrong place. Not the wrong house, but the wrong reality.

One autumn, when I was a student and working on my Titanic Project X, I accepted an invitation — a rare exception, this — to a party. I do not know whether it was because I was tired, had eaten too little or been working too much, but that evening I had a very weird experience, one which I interpreted nonetheless as a sign that I was on the right track, that there really was something lying behind, beyond, just waiting for me. I did not know the people who were holding the party, presumably medical students or pharmacy undergrads: the pure alcohol was flowing freely, mixed with everything imaginable, from juice to the most sickly-sweet essences. There seemed to be about a hundred rooms in the flat, all painted white and almost bare of furniture. And in the background, throughout, the lazy sound of Billie Holiday singing. At one point, pretty late on, I set off down one of the long corridors. I was looking for the guys I had come with. I opened a door and stepped inside. And — I swear to God — I found myself in the Forum Romanum; which is to say: I had entered it at the corner closest to the Temple of Vespasian, and not only that, but I was in Roman times, people walked past dressed in togas and everything, although it might not have been Roman times, because there were other things there too, ultra-modern looking objects which were strange to me, I had no idea what they were. I have always regretted that I did not attempt to speak to someone, to ask, but I got such a fright that, more or less on instinct, I fled back out of the door, slamming it shut behind me, and hurried off down the corridor. Once I had calmed down I went back and opened the door again. Behind it now was a large, white-painted room and a couple having it off on a mattress in the corner, next to a Ludwig drum kit. I opened the other doors round about, but found only white rooms, sparsely furnished, and partygoers with glasses in their hands, standing around, flirting or discussing Schopenhauer. I know it sounds crazy, but it was not a dream, nor was it a hallucination.

After having stood — for I don’t know how long — outside, I opened the living-room door again. So great was my belief, or my hope, or my horror, that I fully expected another sight to meet my eyes: she would be sitting there, pen in hand, she would turn to me, smiling. But she was still lying on the floor, shot through the heart, just as dead. In my dressing gown. For ages I stood there, looking down at her, as if there was a tissue-thin sheet of paper lying on her face, covered in the loveliest handwriting. A letter to me.

We have reached Balestrand. We are moored right alongside the aquarium, at the mouth of the little Esefjord, surrounded by towering peaks: Vindreken, Tjuatoten, and in the middle Keipen — the ‘Rowlock’ — with its characteristic notched peak, with Gulleplet Crag in front of it. It is a breathtaking sight, even for a Norwegian used to such landscapes. Fruit trees in bloom at the feet of these sculpted, snow-capped massifs. I can well understand why the artists of the nineteenth century reached frantically for their brushes the moment they set eyes on this scene.