What was it like, life with Margrete?
For a long, long time, life with Margrete consisted simply of lying in a big bed, in a nest of duvets and pillows and sheets which reminded Jonas of the atmosphere in his Aunt Laura’s exotic flat in Tøyen, where her goldsmith’s bench smouldered in the far corner of the living room. He would lie in this big bed, having his body stroked by Margrete’s warm hands — when it wasn’t the other way round and he was trying to stroke her skin, cover it with caresses, a skin that was never the same twice, a body whose rises and hollows were always changing, changing with different times of day, different times of the year, of life. Whenever he lay like this, running his fingers and the palm of his hand over Margrete’s limbs, he thought of travels, of riches. One time when he was lying there, fondling her ankle, that exquisite spot, she asked him if he knew how many bones there were in the foot, and when he shook his head she answered herself: twenty-six. ‘That says something about how complex we are,’ she said. ‘And how vulnerable.’
If there was one thing Jonas learned, or ought to have learned, from his very first second with Margrete, it was that love is not blind, but seeing. That love gives you fresh eyes.
It never ceased to amaze Jonas how Margrete could make him forget old habits, and hence memories too, so that each time they made love it seemed to him — no matter how unlikely this may sound — like the first time, or rather, like something new. And, perhaps an even greater miracle: she taught him, a man, to set greater store by those long interludes when they explored each other’s skins than by the act itself. She helped him to see, or learn, that sometimes it can be better to touch a shoulder than a breast. And although Margrete could also wrap her arms around him, make love to him with a passion which almost frightened him, this gentle stroking of the skin was a pleasure above all others, a thrill which transmitted itself to the very smallest of cells. When Margrete laid her hand on his body and ran it over his skin from the sole of his foot to his crown, he understood what life was about: intensity, a heightened awareness of the moment, of his own breathing even, as if by placing her hands on his skin she put him into an unknown gear. It was a kind of education. ‘Be a vessel,’ she whispered to him again and again. ‘Be a vessel, not a sword; learn to take, Jonas.’
And did he? Is it at all possible to sum up a life such as Jonas Wergeland’s? Whatever the case, I hope that any assessment of this man will depend upon which story we place last, Professor. And might it not be — I ask you at least to consider the possibility — that there are other branches to this story, that what I am describing here forms the real starting point for Jonas Wergeland’s future life?
So let us end, or begin again, with the years when they were living together in the ambassador’s lavishly appointed apartment in Ullevål Garden City, in rooms painted in different colours, terracotta, ochre, cobalt: rooms as different from each other as the continents themselves, not least because, taken as a whole, they constituted a proper little museum of ethnography, filled as they were with objects from a goodly number of the earth’s more far-flung cultures — even in the garden, moss-covered statues sat half-concealed among the shrubbery, as if the ambassador had attempted to recreate a corner of some overgrown temple. The bedroom was all white, right down to the sheets and duvet covers — a white broken only by a gold statuette from Thailand. Particularly during those first weeks after they — a student of architecture and a medical student — met one another again and entered into a new relationship, the bed in this room was their domain. In his mind Jonas called it the Silk Road. It was Aunt Laura who had first told him about the miracle of silk — about the silk worms and the way the silk was turned into soft, smooth, shining fabrics — and about the Silk Road, the name given to the trade route, the historic link, between Asia and Europe. And once when he was sitting in his aunt’s flat in Tøyen, lolling back against soft cushions, surrounded by oriental rugs and the glimmer of gold and silver from her workbench, she had suddenly said: ‘The road that runs from a woman to a man, that too could be called a Silk Road.’
And only now, years later, as they lay there in a white room, blessed by a golden idol, lay stretched out alongside one another in a big bed, like two continents, like west and east, did he see what she meant — for with them too, it was as much a matter of exchanging gifts, just as cultures swap inventions, ideas, historical knowledge. This was what Margrete meant when she whispered to him: ‘Be a vessel, learn to take.’ And he took. For many weeks he lay beside her in bed and took from her the equivalent of fine porcelain, peaches, rich fabrics and strange spices, while he gazed at her eyebrows, which looked as though they had been brushed with black ink by a Japanese master of calligraphy. And in the same way he tried as best he could to give, to shower her with the equivalent, from his world, of grapes, walnuts, metals and fragile glass. Because what they were doing as they lay there side by side, with their fingers wandering like caravans over the landscapes of their bodies, was telling stories; for hour upon hour they took it in turns, as all lovers do, to tell each other stories from their lives. A good many of Jonas’s were about Buddha, about how clever he was at imitating people on the television, not to mention his repertoire of ABBA songs, and there was a lot about Danieclass="underline" the account, for example, of the bizarre incident which had converted him to Christianity; and Margrete told him about her parents, about her mother’s unhappy life, or about the time when she, Margrete, supported herself for a whole year in Paris by doing street theatre: stood on an upturned rubbish bin outside Saint Germain des Prés, dressed as Buster Keaton and doing a doleful but hilarious imitation of him which elicited both roars of laughter and money from passers-by; or about the walking tour she made, not in the mountains of Norway, but of China, not from hut to hut, but from temple to temple. She told him, not least, about all that she had read, all the books, and when Jonas asked her why she read so much she replied: ‘Because I’m lonely, and reading helps me learn to live with my loneliness.’
On one such evening, when Margrete had just finished a long story about the International School in Bangkok, Jonas leaned back, his body heavy with contentment: ‘Do you think that one day’s happiness could save a whole life?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Margrete. And a moment later: ‘Just as a second’s hate can destroy it.’
He didn’t understand what she meant, that she may have been trying to forestall something, make him see that any fruitful transaction can be ruined the minute one of the parties starts to feel dissatisfied and decides they would prefer to be in charge, become a conqueror, have the upper hand.
One evening, one bright evening when the scent of spring was drifting through the open bedroom window, after he had told her about the strange fish and the oyster he hadn’t opened, she got out of bed and disappeared for a couple of minutes. When she returned she held out a clenched fist to him. ‘Open it,’ she said. ‘Pretend it’s an oyster.’
Jonas prised open her fingers, one by one, really had to work at it, because she truly seemed to be trying to make her fist as hard to open as an oyster shell. In the palm of her hand lay a pearl, a small, slightly irregular, natural pearl. She had found it in Japan when she was a little girl. ‘Here take it, it’s yours,’ she said. Jonas looked at it, noted the way in which the light was both absorbed and reflected by it, sat gazing at it for ages, with his throat constricting and his lips tightening. ‘It may not be perfect, but it is a real pearl,’ she said.