It was August, the nights were already starting to draw in. I was sitting by the Pilot Lookout on its hilltop, gazing at the lights out at sea. I often sat by this little shed. Maybe because I too was in sore need of a pilot. Maybe because it contained an advanced short-wave radio. Through the wall I could hear calls in lots of different languages. This put me in touch, in a way, with the wide world, with that place far overseas where she was. One day in the spring I had even taken the bus out to Fornebu Airport, just to be able to hear the flights being called over the tannoy.
I scanned the sea, gazed at the Koster Islands on the horizon. How was I going to get her back? Because that was obviously what I wanted. I wished that somehow, possibly by means of telepathy, she would be overcome with remorse, with love for me. Or — a common thought, this, at such self-pitying moments — that she would see me, on a monitor, sitting here next to a pilot lookout, next to a radio, benumbed, yearning. What I wanted was for her, wherever she was, to get on a plane and fly to Norway, move back, live with relatives or whatever. Just as long as she came back. ‘Do something,’ I told myself. ‘You have to do something.’
I grasped the iron railing and pulled myself to my feet. And then it hit me, as such thoughts have a way of hitting an adolescent, that I could get her back, on one condition: I would have to swim across the strait I saw before me, an ocean in miniature; I would have to swim across Sekken, one of the most exposed and daunting stretches of open sea along the whole coastline. Only by doing this could I, in some mysterious — but in my mind completely logical — way, win her love again. Awaken her. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing.
I had never swum such a long distance at one go. It was a risky venture. But I was in no doubt. I ran back to the tent, cast a glance at the battered cover of Rubber Soul, from which the four members of the Beatles gazed up at me approvingly. I changed into swimming trunks, strode down to the beach, slipped through the seaweed and out into the dark, almost lukewarm water. I swam with quick, impatient strokes across to Gyltholmen, walked up to the cairn and stood there for a moment considering the broad band of sea at my feet. The nearest, dark islets on the Swedish side were a long way off. In another continent so it seemed. The continent of hope. During the war this last stretch had spelled life or death for many refugees. I clambered down to the rocks and did something close to a racing dive, shallow and flat, as if I were in a hurry. The weather was with me. A few clouds. A light breeze. A gentle swell. No current to speak of. I swam. I swam without thinking. Or at least, I thought in the way that leaves no trace. I tried to conserve energy, to simply drift across. Soon I was level with Sekkefluene, those insidious skerries. A light flashed on a post to starboard. Many a boat had gone down just here. Wrecks lurked in the darkness below me.
I swam on, and as I began to flag my thoughts became clearer. Each stroke was like throwing myself at her, into her arms. I bobbed up and down in the swell and my thoughts seemed to me to rise and fall in the same way. I tried not to think about it, but thought about it anyway, behind my other thoughts: the deeps underneath me. The unknown. There was a reason why Margrete had left me, one which I had never known. Which I ought to have known. I had disappointed her in some way. I was swimming more slowly. I was exhausted. My arms were aching. My legs were turning numb. I was more than halfway there. For a channel swimmer this stretch of water would probably be a piece of cake. For me, a thirteen-year-old, it was far too long. But only the impossible could bring Margrete back. These tiny currents, I thought, generated by the action of my limbs, will be transmitted through the water, rather like whale song, and come to a sea where she is swimming at this very moment, at another hour, and she will instantly comprehend the message, my desperate plea. The thought struck me: in swimming here I was doing what I had always wanted to do: work in depth. Seen from far enough away, I might have been a spermatozoon on my way to impregnate someone.
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.