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.
‘How,’ I asked.
‘Use your imagination,’ she said, and off she went.
I knew I couldn’t just stick them on the shelves any old way. She expected more of me. I regarded the mess on the floor. Books that had stood next to one another were now scattered all over the place. I stared despondently at the bookshelves, a bare tree waiting for branches and foliage. I was eleven years old. For the first time I had to try to set the world to rights.
Although it was tempting to do something decorative — at one point I did consider going by the colours of the spines, or by whether they were tall or short, fat or thin — I soon came to the conclusion that I would have to put works on the same subject together. Karen Mohr had a lot of books about painters, about art, so I started putting these on the bottom shelves. Then I stopped, uncertain. Why not on the middle shelf? Or ought I to reserve that for the books Karen Mohr liked best. But which books did she like best?
I was a little giddy at the thought of being in her bedroom. It smelled not of books, but of lady. The bed was spread with a soft patchwork quilt. Without thinking, I buried my face in it and inhaled the scent, as if I needed some pepping up.
I picked up the first book. In my mind I pictured a scheme based on the matrix of the bookcases. Poetry could go in the section next to fiction. And all the books on disease — she had a lot of these — could be placed alongside the countless works with the word ‘love’ in their titles. I tried my best to keep this provisional arrangement in mind while slowly — as I came upon books on subjects I had not thought of — expanding my system. I soon ran into difficulties. Where, for example, was I to put the big illustrated book on football? Under sport? But she had no other books on sports or games. Under art maybe, or dance? What about politics? Wasn’t it right that in South America football could degenerate into a war? Why didn’t I simply put it next to the books on religion? There were several sections into which I would have liked to set it, but I could only put it in one place. I kept having to move books off the shelves which I had initially chosen for them, it was like one big jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces could fit into any number of spaces.
My confused, but soon zealous, endeavours may also have been connected to the fact that this happened just after I had collided with Margrete’s bike at the school gate so hard that we both landed on the pavement. As I gathered up the books that had fallen out of my satchel, my eyes met hers for the first time. She looked at me. I was conscious to the very tips of my toes of being seen. Already here, in this fragrant bedroom, I had an inkling that if I was to have the slightest chance of understanding anything of this new addition to my life, a wonder that went by the name of Margrete Boeck, then I would have to get these stupid books into some kind of order.