The difference between us, which had diminished over the years but was never completely erased because it had nothing to do with opinions or attitudes, it was basic character, buried deep in the forever un-influence-able, manifested itself in all its clarity in a present Geir gave me after I had finished writing A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. It was a knife, the model that US Marines use, which couldn’t be used for much else apart from killing someone. He didn’t do this as a joke, it was simply the finest object he could imagine. I was pleased, but the knife, so intimidating with its polished steel, sharp blade and deep indentations to enable blood to flow, remained in its box behind some books on an office shelf. He may have realised how alien this object was to me because when A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven came out a few months later, he gave me another present, a replica edition of an eighteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica — profoundly fascinating for all the objects and phenomena it did not describe since they did not yet exist — which of course was more up my street.
He took out a polysleeve containing a few sheets of paper and passed it to me.
‘It’s just three pages,’ he said. ‘Could you read it and tell me if it’s better?’
I nodded, pulled the sheets from the sleeve, stubbed out my cigar-ette and began to read. It was the opening of the essay I had been looking for when I went through his manuscript. It was based on Karl Jaspers’ concept of Grenzsituationen, border situations. The point where life is lived at maximum intensity, the antithesis of everyday life in other words, close to death.
‘This is good,’ I said when I had finished.
‘Sure?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Good,’ he said, replacing the papers in the sleeve and dropping it in the bag on the chair beside him. ‘You’ll get more to read later.’
‘I’m sure I will.’
He pulled his chair closer, rested his elbows on the table and folded his hands. I lit another cigarette.
‘Your journalist rang me today, by the way,’ he said.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that Aftenposten guy.’
Since the journalist was writing a portrait he had asked if he could talk to a couple of my friends. I had given him Tore’s number, who was a bit of a loose cannon in that respect, likely to say anything at all about me, and Geir’s, as he knew more about my present situation.
‘What did you say then?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Why not?’
‘Well, what should I have said? If I’d told him the truth about you, he would have either not understood it or totally distorted it. So I said as little as possible.’
‘What was the point of that?’
‘How should I know? It was you who gave him my number…’
‘Yes, so that you could say something. Anything, I told you, it doesn’t matter what they print.’
Geir eyed me.
‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Well, actually, I did say one thing about you. Perhaps the most important, in fact.’
‘And that was?’
‘That you have high morals. Do you know what the idiot answered? “Everyone has.” Can you imagine that? That’s exactly what they don’t have. Next to no one has high morals or even knows what they are.’
‘That just means he has a different interpretation of morals from you.’
‘Yes, but he was only after a bit of scandal. A few anecdotes about how drunk you once were and stuff like that.’
‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘We’ll see tomorrow. It can’t be that awful. This is Aftenposten after all.’
Geir, sitting on the other side of the table, shook his head. Then his eyes went in search of the waitress, who came over at once.
‘Pork and onion sauce, please,’ he said in Swedish. ‘And a pale Staropramen.’
‘I’ll have the meatballs, please,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘And another of these.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ the waitress said, putting her tiny notebook in her breast pocket and heading for the kitchen, which you could glimpse through the ever-swinging doors.
‘What do you mean by high morals?’ I asked.
‘Well, you’re a deeply ethical person. There is an ethical foundation at the base of your personality and it is irreducible. You react in a purely physical way to inappropriate behaviour, the shame that overwhelms you is not abstract or conceptual but a hundred-per-cent physical, and you cannot escape it. You’re not a dissembler. Nor a moralist though. You know I have a predilection for Victorianism, their system with the front stage where everything is visible and a back stage where everything is hidden. I don’t think that kind of life makes anyone happier, but there is more life. You’re a Protestant through and through. Protestantism, that’s inner life, that’s being at one with yourself. You couldn’t live a double life even if you wanted to, it’s not something you can make happen. There’s a one-to-one relationship between life and morality in you. So you are ethically unassailable. Most people are Peer Gynt. They fudge their way along life’s road, don’t they? You don’t. Everything you do you do with the uttermost seriousness and conscientiousness. Have you ever skipped a line of the manuscripts you read, for example? Has it ever happened that you haven’t read them from the first page to the last?’
‘No.’
‘No, and there’s something in that. You can’t fudge anything. You can’t. You’re an arch-Protestant. And as I’ve said before, you’re an auditor of happiness. If you have some success, generally something others would die for, you just cross it off in the ledger. You’re not happy about anything. When you’re at one with yourself, which you are almost all the time, you’re much, much more disciplined than me. And you know what I’m like with all my systems. There are unmapped areas in your mind where you can lose control, but when you don’t go there, and nowadays invariably you don’t, you are absolutely ruthless in your morality. You are exposed to temptations far more than me or anyone else. If you had been me you would have lived a double life. But you can’t do that. You are doomed to a simple life. Ha ha ha! You’re no Peer Gynt and I think that is the heart of your nature. Your ideal is the innocent, innocence. And what is innocence? I’m right at the other end. Baudelaire writes about it, about Virginia, do you remember, the picture of pure innocence, which is confronted with the caricature, and she hears coarse laughter and realises that something dishonourable has happened, but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know! She folds her wings around herself. And then we’re back to the painting by Caravaggio, you know, The Cardsharps, where he’s tricked by all the others. That’s you. That’s innocence as well. And in that innocence, which in your case also lies in the past, the thirteen-year-old you wrote about in Out of the World, and the crazy nostalgia trip you have for the 1970s… Linda has some of this too. How was it she was described? Like a mixture of Madame Bovary and Kaspar Hauser?’