I think that was why I loved diving. Diving down into the depths as I was doing now. I understood, somewhere in my subconscious, that this was not merely a search for a piece of jewellery, this was an undertaking which could lead to my making a fundamental discovery.
Even so, when I rose to the surface after one particularly gruelling dive, I was ready to give up. I ached all over. But as I gasped for breath I seemed to take in something else, something more: spirit. One more dive, I told myself. And as soon as my hand reached the bottom my fingers lighted on the circlet. I did not touch gold. I felt I was touching the future.
Later she presented me with a book. We were at her place, alone, in the villa down the road from the school. She wanted to give me something, the finest thing she could think of, as a thank-you for finding her bracelet. It was Victoria by Knut Hamsun. ‘It’s a love story,’ she said with a look which implied that that said it all. She gave me her own dog-eared copy. I liked the title, liked the association with victory. Too late I discovered that I ought to have perused more than the title of that novel. A lot of people have had their own personal experience of Victoria by Knut Hamsun, I’m sure, but none has been anything like mine.
She had pressed fresh orange juice and this she poured into two elegant wine glasses. We drank as one. I felt strange, as if she had stirred a magic powder into the drink. Then she kissed me for the first time. I felt even stranger. Filled with light. Filled. I could have drawn this conclusion at that moment, but I did not: it might be that what I called spirit was just another word for love.
Afterwards we sat in the garden, on a green lawn. I was feeling so lightheaded that I had to lie with my head in her lap. There was a sprinkler on the go. Opera music drifted from the house next door. I lay with my head in her lap. I could have lain there for the rest of my life. I looked down on myself from high in the air, saw myself lying there in a luxuriant garden with my head in a girl’s lap; I saw how lovely and how right it was, saw that this might even be what was known as working in depth.
Few triumphs in my life can compare with the moment when, with swelling heart, I clambered ashore and handed her the bracelet. We were alone at Svarttjern. We stood on the only rock still in the sun. Neither of us said anything. First she slipped the bracelet onto her wrist. The metal glowed against her skin. She gazed into my eyes and then she wrapped her arms around me. I stood there inside a circlet of gold. I looked up at the sky. I noticed that the clouds were moving faster, that something was happening to the weather, the whole atmosphere. The water was perfectly still, reflecting the dense, shadowy forest all around. For me Svarttjern would always be a sacred lake. She held me for a long time. No more than that. Just held me. I experienced some of the same pressure that I felt underwater, when I dived. She held me and I unfolded; I stood still, inside a circle of skin, and I was transformed. Being held by Margrete. If God gave me the chance to relive one thing in my life I would choose this: to be held by Margrete. Held, tight, long.
I was to make the acquaintance of this pressure in an embrace again, on a later occasion. That too began with a dive, but into a different body of water, a lagoon just off a small private beach on a tropical island. I was fraught with presentiment, fraught with expectancy; I had been staying at the home of a certain woman for three days and so far nothing had happened, I had hardly seen her. I whiled away the time by swimming, diving, holding my breath under water, still pursuing that old hobby. On the morning of the fourth day — I thought she had gone to work — I went snorkelling out on the coral reef. I was following a dense shoal of small fish along the reef when she suddenly came gliding towards me through the mint-green water, she too wearing a mask, as if I were a fish she wished to take a closer look at. Her hair streamed out behind her as she swam straight towards me, her breasts, barely contained by her low-cut bathing suit, looking heavy and commanding. I became rather shamefully aware of the way my eyes were being drawn to the cleft between them, while at the same time conscious of an unbearable pressure building up in my body, even though I was only a metre below the surface.
What is love? My escapades, though few, have been thought-provoking. One day, out of the blue, I received a letter bearing some strange and intriguing stamps. It was from Anna Ulrika Eyde, a girl I had known all through school, but with whom I had lost touch when she moved to England to study engineering. She was currently working on a bridge project on an island in the Indian Ocean and was actually inviting me to come and visit her. And stay at her place.
Anna Ulrika, or Ulla, was what you would call ugly, extraordinarily ugly, in fact. Although I would be more inclined to say: fascinatingly ugly. Her hideousness teetered on the brink of incomparable beauty. To be honest I think I was always a little besotted with her. We had dubbed her the Iron Woman, both because she was so unattractive and because as a little girl, unusually for her sex, she had had a Meccano set from which she created the most intricate — not to mention extremely impressive — constructions out of gleaming, perforated miniature girders. But the woman who came to meet me, years later, at Plaisance airport was surprisingly good-looking. Or, the word came to me right away: ‘striking’ — beautiful as only rather ugly girls can be; the sort who often become famous models. She seemed to have opened up a wing in her person that no one had known was there. She laughed at me; laughed at my evident surprise. The backsweep of her lips, in particular, was hard to ignore; she was so unexpectedly attractive that it made me uncomfortable.
For the first few days I was left to my own devices. Ulla worked for the contractors responsible for the building of a new bridge on the west side of the island. I took a break from diving in the lagoon to visit the island capital, saw the sights, strolled around the central market: you could buy absolutely everything there, from dried squid and herbs for treating asthma or a bad heart to models of pirate ships made out of tortoiseshell and objects for sacrificing to the gods. The most amazing item I came across, however, was a tattered old poster of Sonja Henie in the midst of a soaring split jump against a backdrop of snow-covered Alps. ‘Want to buy?’ the Hindu who owned the stall asked. ‘Very popular. American star. Danced like Shiva on the ice.’ I had to smile at this find. I was struck by the unreality of it, not least because of the cultural and geographical divide: a picture of skates and ice, here, in the middle of the tropics, where books rotted in the heat and humidity and I spent my afternoons lazing on the beach below the bougainvillea-framed bungalow which Ulla had rented close to the beautiful Grand Baie beach.
Then, on the morning of the fourth day, she suddenly showed up in the water, or rather: under the water. Buxom and smiling. She had the day off, she explained as we floated on the surface. Might she be permitted to give me the grand tour?
We drove in her car through a landscape so green that all Norwegian notions of the concept ‘green’ seemed to fall short; the old Peugeot bowled along through Gauguin-hued mountains which took on new and fanciful forms with every turn of the road. Ulla showed me round a recently opened aquarium full of fish which made me think of all the women in brightly coloured saris whom we had passed along the way; knowing that I had just started studying architecture she took me to see some of the island’s bold new, ultra-modern hotels. We climbed the many steps up to a small candy-coloured Tamil temple set high on a ridge overlooking Quatre Bornes, one of the island’s main towns. And at all times: that involuntary sense of attraction, the pull of her lips.