My maternal grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, was not like other grandparents, or any other old people for that matter. Granny’s house did not smell of Pan Drops or 4711 eau-de-cologne, instead there was a pronounced aroma of cigars. She can best be described as an activator: she made things happen wherever she went. I always looked forward to visiting her flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. The memory of one occasion in particular has stayed with me. ‘You’d better come over,’ she said on the phone, in a voice befitting her statesmanlike countenance. ‘It’s time to dismantle the Crystal Palace.’
This is a story about seeing the love of one’s life. Not about the first meeting, but about seeing one’s beloved. Afterwards I said to her: ‘Now I’ve really seen you. Seen you as you are.’ I did not know how true that was.
The Crystal Palace was not a place in England. It was a huge, rare and precious crystal chandelier which hung over the dining table in Granny’s sitting room, a room lofty enough to accommodate it. Once a year, usually on a day like this, a bright, sunny Saturday in August, Granny and I would lift the big mahogany table out of the way and set up the stepladder preparatory to cleaning the chandelier, removing dust and dirt and, not least, the film of nicotine from Granny’s cigars which had built up in the holes bored in the crystals. It was a big job, a combination of chemistry and physics lessons, of window-cleaning and jigsaw puzzle. I had the task of climbing the stepladder and ‘tearing down the castle in the air’ as Granny put it. The chandelier had been restored and altered slightly. So the spikes on the base, hundreds of them, were no longer fixed to the rings, but had to be unhooked, one by one. The festoons, the chains of prisms running from the top to the hoop were easier to remove.
I carefully detached each piece and handed it to Granny. They were then dipped in basins filled with warm water and soft soap and rinsed, dipped in soapy water again and rinsed, then laid on soft cotton cloths by Granny to dry. It was a job which called for patience. And precision. Just as I had reached the stage of building complicated Lego constructions without having to follow the accompanying, step-by-step instructions, so my grandmother knew the position of every piece by heart, even though there must have been over a thousand of them. Fortunately, many of them were joined together. She sorted through them, separated them into groups. I could spend ages just marvelling at the assurance with which she arranged crystals of different shapes and sizes on the cloths. When I saw all those prisms glittering and twinkling on the dining table I felt like Aladdin in the cave, surrounded by clusters of precious gems.
At a certain point we changed places. Granny mounted the stepladder — not unlike a young seaman on the Christian Radich — and cleaned the gilded bronze stem and light sockets while I dried all the crystals with a dishcloth, polishing them until they shone. It was a solemn undertaking. I remember every detail of it to this day. The feel of sharp edges against my fingers. The sunlight streaming through the windows. The smell of soft soap. The sound of tinkling glass, like sleigh bells. Old crystal is not white, there is a touch of grey in it, of pink and violet, and when I turned the prisms to check that they were clean, patterns of light danced across the walls. It was quite a spectacle: tiny, vibrant spectrums at every turn. That is how I remember Granny: encircled by rainbows.
On the day she came, the day on which I was to see my beloved, I was up the stepladder, taking the single prisms and the chains handed to me by Granny and hooking them back into place. It was all going very smoothly. Crystals hung thicker and thicker on the chandelier. Only once did Granny have to give me instructions: ‘No, no, that Empire spike should go further out!’ I was glad to see her in such good form. For over six months, according to my mother, she had done nothing but lie in the bath, smoking cigars and listening to the BBC World Service. She had been suffering from depression following the death in January of her idol Winston Churchill, in bed with his cat beside him.
Reassembling the chandelier took time, but the end result was commensurate with the work involved. The chandelier had a spiked base, an inverted pyramid consisting of three circles of long, slender prisms. I could get almost the whole of my head inside that cone of glass before hanging the nethermost pendants on their hooks. As far as I was concerned there was nothing quite as wonderful as being encircled by a close-knit network of crystals. To stand amid those glittering prisms and hear them chinking against one another. For many years, the lighting of those sixteen candles was, for me, the very definition of beauty. Not even Mr Iversen’s extravagant New Year’s Eve firework display could come close.
It had not always been so easy. I remembered the first time. I was seven. I was to be staying at Oscars gate for a couple of days. Without any warning, Granny had started carrying one cardboard box after another into the sitting room, finishing up with what, although I did not know it, were the stem, rings and arms of a chandelier. ‘The spoils of war,’ she remarked mysteriously.
She proceeded to unpack the boxes. I thought at first they were full of bits of cloth and tissue paper, but concealed inside the cloth and the paper were diamonds, prisms of Bohemian crystal. It seemed to me as though Granny were unravelling an enormous crystal chandelier from paper, from a pile of small boxes. She spread the whole lot out on the dining table. It was years since she had packed it away; she tried to remember what bit went where. The whole scenario reminded me of a Christmas Eve when I was given a jigsaw puzzle with over a thousand pieces.
We spent the whole weekend figuring it out. And when, after much trial and error, the freshly washed chandelier was finally mounted and hanging from the ceiling over the mahogany table — sixteen tiny flames multiplied into a starry firmament — Granny put a record of Strauss waltzes on the gramophone, elbowed me in the ribs and announced proudly: ‘Welcome to the Queen’s Chambers!’ Which was not that far from the truth. Because there was a story attached to that chandelier.
I have been dogged all my life by my association with those hand-ground pieces of glass. Nothing could ever beat the sensations I experienced, the air of festivity with which I was filled, under that crinoline of crystals, bathed in a light which was both absorbed and emitted. The first time I heard of a network formed by computers I immediately thought of Granny’s chandelier. I had actually had a prism of my own since I was very young. I used to play with it a lot, regarded it as something lovely and perfect in itself. Not until my grandmother brought out her chandelier did I see that my prism was part of a greater whole. It would not surprise me if this realisation lay at the root of my Project X, the idea that all but broke me.
I had almost finished re-hanging all the droplets when it happened. I had my head stuck half inside the chandelier, was running my eyes over crystal after crystal, as if in a trance. It was not true what the grown-ups said: that they only reflected partial, splintered images. Here, inside the chandelier, I could see the whole picture, all the different sides of it at once.