Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

The clouds to the south parted. A moon appeared. An unnaturally big, almost full moon. All of a sudden I was swimming through a band of molten gold. The water around me had acquired an odd purplish cast, becoming almost phosphorescent. And yet: I was freezing. I was utterly worn out. Heavy. The temptation: to just let myself sink. So easy. Done with everything. Why should I go on swimming? Go on living? The thought flashed through my mind: was I actually trying to kill myself?

I had a vision. Or maybe it really happened. I looked back and saw that my path through the water, across Sekken, formed a broad inverted S; and that this path was lined on either side with buildings, grand palaces ranged side by side, all of them different and yet almost identical. I distinctly heard a voice say: ‘Make it new,’ before I sank, before I died.

I drowned. Died. I came to my senses on the white sand of a beach in Sweden, on the islet I had been swimming towards. Whatever had happened, I had done it. I had made it to another country. I was dead, but I was alive. I lay on my stomach on the beach, cold, but hopeful. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, a man about to embark upon a new life. Build everything up from nothing.

I never told anyone about that swim. The next morning I was back in Norway, I hitched a ride on a Swedish boat which had been anchored in a bay just along from the beach where I was washed ashore. It’s an odd thing. For some years I was famous for being on television. But no one knows anything about my greatest achievements. That I fell over a cliff and lived. That I swam across an unswimmable body of water. That I came this close to devising a new categorisation of all human knowledge. My most remarkable experiences and thoughts have remained my secret.

That morning, as I took down my tent for the summer, I realised only that I was on the threshold of a new life. One without Margrete.

The thought of my pain, that swim, the idea that she was part of another life, all of these things melted away at the sight of her: Margrete, standing right in front of me in a bright orange coat at a tram stop in Oslo. A glowing spot on a grey rainy day. The thought of revenge, of giving her the cold shoulder, lasted exactly two seconds. I stood there dumbstruck, beholding her through the raindrops, feeling as though a crystal chandelier had slowly been lowered from the heavens and down over my head. I saw Margrete, only Margrete, through all those crystal droplets, thousands of Margretes all around me, filling every part of me, right down to the smallest optic nerve.

‘Jonas?’ I heard her say, as if she had not bumped into me quite by chance, but had tracked me down to my most secret hiding place after years of searching.

For a moment I thought that I had actually managed to swim her back to me, but that it had just taken longer than I had expected. Again I felt the blue flame which was ignited inside me that day when I saw her at Svartjern, summer-bronzed in a bikini. I stood — with a blissful look on my face, I think — staring after the tram I should have taken, but which was now pulling away. I knew that my life had been radically changed. I suddenly came to think of that amazing day when the Swedes changed from driving on the left to driving on the right. I remembered a newspaper photograph showing a city street in which the cars were in the act of crossing from one side of the white line to the other. That is how it was for me on that spring day, on seeing Margrete again. A deep-reaching change in my life, a switch, as it were, from one side to another.

The first weeks of our relationship, our new relationship I should perhaps say, had about them an air of tentative inquiry. Often we would just sit in two chairs facing one another and talk. We had a lot to talk about. To ask about. And yet there were times when we simply fell silent and sat there, looking at one another. I had a suspicion that she was testing my endurance — as if we were actually sitting naked, right opposite one another, delaying something. Or that she wished to display a certain gravity, to enhance the pleasure of what we both knew was to come.

During those first months I found myself constantly amazed by all the things she was liable to do or say, from her way of frying an egg to her comments on the Norwegian royal family. A simple yawn could be turned by Margrete Boeck into a not uninteresting work of art. I came home one afternoon from the course in architecture which I had, mentally at least, already dropped out of — long before this I had met my Silapulapu — to find her folding sheets of paper into all sorts of different shapes. Origami, she called it. She had been writing letters, but had suddenly fallen to brushing up her skills in something she had once learned, a Japanese art. It struck me that these shapes could also be letters of a sort. I thought of the letter I had waited for, the letter I never received. Maybe this was it now. She sat there making birds, animals. Fold me, I thought, full of longing. Bend me into an angel, I thought when, as if reading my mind, she took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom.

The house in Ullevål Garden City was all ruby-red walls and gilded frames, brocade sofas and curios from every corner of the world, but nothing made a deeper impression on me than a small collection of butterflies hanging on the wall in one of the small rooms we passed through on the way to the bedroom. Margrete had caught them as a little girl. A brimstone butterfly, a peacock, an admiral and a small tortoiseshell. A constellation with the power to open. I thought to myself: this here, she, was that hidden country.

And then it came, my first experience of sex. It would be safe to say that I was a late developer. And in bed with her, in the midst of that overwhelming experience, I knew that I had made the right choice. Although it had never been hard for me to turn down other girls. In every case I was soon convinced that they could never be the focus of all my attention. Only Margrete could be that. And yet my first experience of sex, making love with Margrete, exceeded all expectations, all conceptions, all possible metaphors. It was out of this world. Margrete led me into a white bedroom watched over by an unknown golden god; laid me down on white bedlinen and guided me into the erotic landscape; she folded herself tenderly around me, folded herself in as many different ways as she could fold a sheet of paper. And in folding herself around me, she unfolded me, transformed me into something other than I was. She actually loved me into new shapes.

When I came to, something had happened to my respiration. I was breathing more freely. It was as if, without being aware of it, I had been suffering from an attack of asthma which had now stopped.

Afterwards she lay and held me in her arms. There was nothing she liked better than to lie quietly with her arms around me. It is said that we discover who we really are in moments of stress. I discovered my true self in a totally undramatic situation, as I lay there in Margrete’s arms. It was also on such a day, with Margrete’s arms wrapped round me — and suffused with what I had once called spirit, but which I now called love — that I felt something being set in motion, a process, a stream of thought which flowed out some years later into the decision to make my own television programmes. Although at the time I did not know where it would lead. I merely lay there praying silently that she would never let me go.

Why did she do it?

I have long suspected: I cannot answer this because I have not come up with the right question. The whole thing bears a troubling resemblance to another painfully complicated search, a process with a long story behind it. I do know when it began, though: on a visit to Karen Mohr, my reserved and taciturn neighbour, who had decorated her living room like a Pernod-scented Provence and her bedroom like a dim library. One day she asked me to fetch a book by Stendahl, a request which led to me being caught under a veritable avalanche of books. This gave Karen Mohr the excuse for some major renovation work and on my next visit she proudly showed me into a bedroom in which the bookshelves, now repaired, were completely bare. All the books were strewn around the floor. I was invited to stay for a ham omelette, but Karen Mohr apologised for the fact that she would have to go to the shop first. In the meantime there was no reason why I couldn’t start to put the books back on the shelves, she said.