Something had to give. I lay there with a blue flame burning inside me, my hopes rising when the girls went in for a swim. I believe I prayed to God that something would happen, that I would be given a chance. Now. This minute. And not the way it happens in the movies, where the hero usually has to wait until the wedding, until only seconds before the bride says ‘I do’, before he can steal her out of the other man’s arms.
I have been thinking: there was something about Margrete’s glossy black hair, which was cut quite short, that reminded me of Bo Wang Lee. Was that why I fell for her the way I did?
My chance presented itself. Leo and I were sharing a bag of monkey nuts, absent-mindedly snapping shell after shell. The girls were in the water. Suddenly Margrete screamed so loudly that everybody turned to look. I thought she must have got her foot caught in one of the tree trunks which could be seen floating, like water nixies, just under the surface and which, if you were unlucky, you could get caught on, or even be dragged under by. Then I heard it: ‘I’ve lost my bracelet,’ Margrete cried. She was so upset that she switched to English, as if she was still at the International School in Bangkok. I managed to grasp, nonetheless, that it was her mother’s bracelet, that she had borrowed it, that it was of gold and a bit big for her, which is why it must have slipped off without her being aware of it. Who but a girl from Thailand would wear a gold bracelet when she went swimming? She was broken-hearted, sobbing loudly. Some of the girls tried to comfort her.
Georg and the others leapt into the tarn. Shouts and yells filled the air as the water was transformed into a churning mass of flailing bodies. It occurred to me that this was how it must look when natives dived for coins thrown by tourists. Eventually they gave up, one by one.
Margrete glanced up at the hillock on which I was lying, snapping peanut shells in two. I thought I saw a question in that look. Or was it an entreaty? With her streaming wet hair, her forlorn expression, she seemed more bedraggled. More attainable. Georg looked almost sheepish, the match between his teeth was gone.
‘Let me have a go,’ I said, getting to my feet amid the sort of dramatic hush that falls when someone steps forward and volunteers for an impossible mission. Aunt Laura had told me the story of how van Gogh cut off a piece of his ear to impress a woman. This might not have been quite so original, but still — it was something. I would happily have dived until I cramped up.
‘You?’ Georg said. ‘Can you swim?’ I saw the confusion in his eyes, a desire not to lose face, a suppressed fury. I faced up to him. A sergeant taking command from a colonel. He was blocking the way to the water. He could have punched me. Or, he could have tried to punch me. But he must have guessed that just at that moment nothing could touch me. That inside me there dwelt a miracle. He took a step to the side, like a crab. I walked, no: I strode down to the edge of the rock and with all eyes upon me I dived in; it was in all probability the best dive of my life, with little or no splash. I came up to the surface and flicked my hair back with a practised toss of the head. ‘Whereabouts?’ I shouted, heard it echoing in the silence around the tarn. Margrete had come down to the water’s edge. She pointed. She seemed to be pointing at me. ‘There,’ she said.
I dived. To begin with the others stood and watched. I heard the odd gasp of admiration at the length of time I stayed under. I dived. Surfaced, filled my lungs with air and dived again. The comments petered out. There was a deathly hush every time I surfaced. People began to leave. The shadows were also lengthening over the lake. Georg had his match stuck between his teeth again. ‘Good luck,’ he said when he walked off, as if he could afford to show a degree of magnanimity. He shot a glance at Margrete. She did not meet his gaze, sat where she was. Sat there in all her Persian beauty, looking at me. She looked at me as though she were asking: Who are you?
Many years later, when I met her again and we started living together, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that she had switched on the light above the bed and was lying there considering me, as if trying to uncover a secret: ‘Who are you?’ she would whisper then. On more than one night I was woken in this way. It was as though she were studying me, thought she could discover more about me when I was asleep than when I was awake. ‘You look about seven years old,’ she told me. ‘I am seven years old,’ I said.
Now and then she would ask me about a dream I had just had. She might ask me why I had shot wide of the goal. And I would actually have been dreaming about football. She could read my dreams, or was so interested in me that she could guess what I was likely to be dreaming about. Or — this thought has occurred to me — maybe she gave me them, put these dreams into my head by lying there looking at me, considering me.
Even at night when we were making love, I would occasionally feel her fingers running over my face in the dark, as if my features were in Braille and she was trying to read me.
Her curiosity about me. And not the other way round.
Soon we were alone. Even Leo had left, pointedly, as though washing his hands of the whole business. I dived again. It was dark down there, the water was turbid. The bracelet could have fallen off at a spot so deep that I would not be able to reach it, even with all the training I had done — out at Hvaler, too, where I had made several dives to a depth of ten metres with flippers. Her black pupils followed me, stayed fixed on me, as if she were not only asking: Who are you? but also: Where are you when you dive?
I would not give up, took another deep breath before gliding down into the depths. The pressure was getting to me. My ears were starting to hurt despite the fact that I pinched my nose shut with one hand. I could not give up. I felt the pressure, as much from within as from without. This was a situation which would work a change in me.
The pressure. And this might be a good point — here, with me in a submerged position before an expectant Margrete — at which to allude to what lay at the core of my image of myself, a view so complex — or so simple — that I am afraid it goes beyond words: in my life it has not so much been a case of developing as in growing, but rather of evolving.
When I went to my grandfather’s outdoor privy on Hvaler I always left the door wide open so I could gaze out to sea, at the boats sailing past. There was nothing quite like it. The quiet. The spider in the corner. The green moss outside. The smell of the beach, the sea. My eyes had often been drawn to a piece of cloth which had been rolled into a ball and wedged into the hole in the door jamb where once there had been a lock. One day, on impulse, or because I had a hunch about it, I winkled the bit of cloth out. And when I gently began to pull on the ends, opening out the clump of fabric which, over the years, had become almost totally gummed up, it proved to be an old tablecloth. Some scorch marks explained why it had been discarded. Printed on the cloth was a map of the world. And filthy though the fabric was, I could see how nice it was. The names of lots of countries were quite legible. I never forgot this experience. That I could unfold a disgusting-looking clump of fabric and reveal a hidden world.
I probably ought to keep quiet about this — especially considering the lowly part I now play — but there is something I have to confess, although I never dared to say it out loud: I was a child wonder. Or, no: that is not quite right. I was a wonder. As a very small boy I was sure that I could speak seven foreign languages and jump ten metres in the air, all I had to do was to figure out how. Sometimes I felt, with such swelling conviction that it scared me, that I could make objects shatter just by staring at them very hard, that I only needed to clench my fist in order to set great wheels in motion — if not within my own immediately perceptible surroundings then somewhere far out in space. At times I felt a pressure, almost a pain, inside my skull, often throughout my whole body, as if something was trying to unfold itself. As if I carried within me a seed containing a mighty tree.