Luckily Karen Mohr was not gone for too long. Before she started making the ham omelette she inspected my work. I really had not got very far, the shelves looked more like something out of a shop in a country suffering from a severe shortage of goods. She laughed when she saw that I had set her lavish volumes on Provence next to the innumerable works on monasteries and convents and the cloistered life. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘But what about this one?’ She picked a book off the floor, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I recognised the name, remembered Rakel telling me about his flying and his mysterious disappearance at the time when Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, died. I promptly suggested that we put it on the shelf where I had arranged the works on more technical subjects. It was about flying after all, wasn’t it? Or space travel? ‘I think probably it should go with my other French novels,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, I could slot it in somewhere else, maybe alongside the books on cosmology.’ She explained what cosmology was. I never forgot that. Or her fingers, which suddenly, almost unconsciously, stroked my hair. I would remember that hour among the bare bookshelves, up to my knees in books, at the most diverse moments in my life. I kept trying to dredge up again the openness and inquisitiveness and wonder that had moved me to put Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in with the medical books and The Divine Comedy by Dante next to the Bible. When I picked up a book in Danish entitled Totem og tabu, by Sigmund Freud, I placed it — since Karen had, unfortunately, no books on Red Indians — on the shelf containing the detective novels.
Although I did not know it, in Karen Mohr’s library, which smelled not of books, but of seductive perfume, I had come up against a problem which would dog me for a long time to come: the numerous parallel associations triggered in my mind by the titles and the lists of contents of the books on the floor did not lend themselves to the simple, primitive shelving system with which I was faced. It was simply too rigid. But while Karen Mohr was searching for Stendahl’s book on love, I perceived — inspired yet again, I think, by the thought of the new girl at school, Margrete Boeck — the rudiments of a brilliant system, nothing less than the roots of a new tree of knowledge. As if in a deep trance I stood there, thinking to myself that this meant I would have to take the two biographies on Bach and slot them in among the books on oriental rugs, and shift the volumes on the Second World War over to the reference books on wild animals; and then — in a flash it came to me — the cookery books would have to go in the section on architecture. I pursued this line of thought until everything went black, as if I was about to pass out.
‘Time for a ham omelette,’ Karen Mohr said. She must have been able to tell from my white face that I had had enough for one day. Nonetheless she picked out a book. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘It’s about Marco Polo and Venice. Maybe you’ll go there some day.’ I accepted it warily. Just at that moment I had no great interest in owning books.
Karen Mohr must have sensed my silent protest, my misgivings in the face of all her bookshelves, although she said no more about it, not for a long time. I did not know that she also had access to another library, that Karen Mohr had the key to the greatest book collection in Oslo and that I would soon find myself standing, somewhat apprehensively, before it.
I made two good friends in high school, Viktor Harlem and Axel Stranger. Both were in my class at Oslo Cathedral School. Since — not unusually in that hormonally unstable phase in life — we aspired to the wisdom inherent in all forms of heresy, we called ourselves The Three Heretics. One spring Viktor suggested — nay, more or less demanded — that we should go on a study trip to Venice. ‘Why Venice of all places?’ Axel asked, instantly betraying his qualms about such a venture.
‘Because it’s a car-free city?’ I suggested — this was not long after our legendary demonstration in the Town Hall Square.
‘Because the greatest iconoclast of them all lives there,’ Viktor announced cryptically. Later, after having seen George Lucas’s fabulous masterpiece, one of the colossi of twentieth-century film history, the Star Wars trilogy, I always felt that the Venice trip had been a journey to a watery planet; that, convinced as we were of our status as true Jedi knights, we had set out on a mission to find Yoda, the sage of sages, himself.
Axel’s doubts about Venice were soon replaced by an enthusiasm which ought to have been a warning to us. He announced, with a rather too fervent light in his eyes, that this would be the most important journey of his life. And he was to be proved right. Axel, who pretty much lived in the Central Lending Department at the Deichman Library, had read a disturbingly large number of the world’s books and, galvanised by this passion, he now proceeded to reel off to us all the things he was planning to do in Venice. And it was no small list. He meant to visit the Casetta delle Rose, home to the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio during the First World War; he longed he said, or chanted, to hear the water lapping against the Ca’Rezzonico, where Robert Browning lived for the last years of his life; Axel wanted to breathe the air of the Palazzo Capello, which had provided architectonic inspiration for Henry James when he was writing The Aspern Papers; he wished to run his hands over the walls of the Hotel Danieli, which had housed such guests as Balzac and Dickens; Axel had a feverish look about him as he spoke of his resolve to take in the seaside hotels on the Lido, where Gustav von Aschenbach had languished in Thomas Mann’s masterly novella Death in Venice, before ordering the same drinks as Hemingway in Harry’s Bar, then devoutly settling himself in the Caffè Quadri, where Proust had passed his first evening in the city on the lagoon, if — that is — Axel did not actually set out to track down the objects which had triggered such a string of memories in Proust’s universe: two uneven marble tiles in the Baptistery of St Mark’s. Axel all but swore to swim in the canals like Lord Byron. His list of things to do grew longer and longer, all of it plotted into a very tight schedule. It didn’t stop there, though. He also took to speaking a sort of novelese. He confessed with half-shut eyes that he could hardly wait to see the domes and crooked campanile of his dreams rising out of the waves. ‘I’ll push back the shutters in my hotel room to see the golden angel on the top of St Mark’s flaming in the sunlight!’ he sighed rapturously.
Axel Stranger was pale with excitement. So what happened? When we — The Three Heretics — got to Fornebu Airport, with the prospect of a long May weekend ahead of us, he fainted. The thought that he would soon be treading the very tiles on which Marcel Proust had once set foot, was too much for him. In short, his expectations were too great. As the woman at the check-in desk handed him his ticket, Axel collapsed onto the airport floor. And when he came round he was so weak and dizzy that he declared himself unfit to travel. He insisted, though, that we should go anyway, without him.
I thought to myself, but did not say out loud: reading too many books is bad for you.
And yet — although he never got beyond check-in — Axel always maintained that that journey was the most significant of his entire life. He never went to Venice, but when Viktor and I got back after the long weekend, Axel informed us that he had been writing like a madman. In four days he had written two hundred pages, in a sort of helpless trance, ‘rowing through the dark canals of the imagination in a gleaming black gondola’. He claimed it was the thought of the city on the lagoon, all his mental images of Venice that had driven him to it. Triumphantly he showed us the manuscript. It was roundly and soundly rejected, it is true, but from that day on Axel Stranger wanted only to write. And five years later he made his literary debut with Norway’s finest publishing house, with the idiosyncratic and artistically ingenious novella The Lion in Venice.