I have a wise daughter. She has set up her own company, inspired by the belief that we keep coming up with more and more ingenious methods of communication, but with less idea than ever before of what to say, what to communicate.
Margrete went on pounding her head against the wall. The thought flashed through my mind that this meant trouble. That I was going to become embroiled in some immensely complicated situation. And this was not a good time. In fact it was, to put it mildly, a very bad time. I had worries enough of my own. For weeks I had been agonising over whether to abandon Project X. This sight that I beheld, Margrete’s soft skull striking the wall again and again was like hearing a knock at the door when you absolutely do not wish to be disturbed.
And beneath all this: why was I surprised? After all, from the moment I saw her through my crystal monocle I had known that she was many. Or greater. She reminded me of Aunt Laura’s flat: viewed from the outside it consisted of four rooms, but when you stepped inside it seemed to go on forever. To begin with, just after we met one another again, every time we went out for a meal or had a drink in one of the innumerable new bars that opened up around that time, I felt as though I had to ditch my previous impression of her and start from scratch. She kept displaying different facets of herself. I had merely been spared seeing this side of her till now.
Or at least, there had been an incident, earlier on. It may have been a warning. We had been sitting at the piano, playing a Mozart sonata four-handed. Is that something which should give me pause for thought, I wonder: that she liked Mozart best, while I liked Bach? Then, all of a sudden, she slid off the bench and burst into tears. No ordinary crying fit, this, but an abrupt, loud and totally despairing fit of weeping. She crumpled up on the floor in the same position that Muslims adopt when they pray, rocking backwards and forwards. I felt shaken and helpless. It was the most harrowing sight. But when I cautiously knelt down, put my arm around her and asked her what was the matter, all she said, through her sobs, was: ‘I love you so much.’ I assumed, therefore, that she had been moved by the Mozart piece we had been playing, that sparkling sonata. And I left it at that. It was so typical of her, to burst into tears at the thought of us, two sweethearts, sitting side by side and managing with our four hands to produce that carefree music. It occurred to me that she must have seen it as a harmonious foretaste, a sign of how happy we would be together.
But this was something else, this was worse, this went deeper: to bang your precious head off a wall, as if intent on smashing it or ridding yourself of something that was eating away at you in there. ‘Margrete?’ I said. No response. She seemed somehow heavy. It crossed my mind that Margrete was also trying to drive a truck through a wall. That she was doing this out of love for me. It was, nonetheless, madness. In my eyes. Something from which I backed away. I had no wish to be confronted with this kind of love. It scared me. I stayed where I was, losing patience now, watching her, watching her beat her head against the wall, slowly, but with uncanny steadiness. ‘Margrete?’ I said again. More sharply. No response. I felt as if I was standing a long way off. As if an impassable gulf stretched between me in the middle of the room and her on the bed. I, an erstwhile lifesaver, stood there and watched a person drowning, unable to lift a finger to help.
I cannot go on. I have to stop. I need to dwell on this contrast, this old lifeboat lying at the quayside in this quiet fjord. She walks past on the deck, smiles, hands me a cup of coffee, pretends not to see the notebook, the pen. Who is she? I have a feeling that she carries a dark burden of her own. After what she has experienced. Which goes beyond just about anything that is usually likely to befall a young person. Certainly, in the past — when she came to visit me — I occasionally used to pick up worrying signals. I keep catching myself studying her. I know that she also studies me. We have a tacit understanding. She always wears a black beret, prompting associations with guerrilla warfare and with art. It has become her trademark; thanks to her, more young Norwegians than ever now sport such headgear. I never tire of looking at her. She has a little flaw, a relatively big gap between her two front teeth, one which she has deliberately done nothing about. ‘In some African countries it would give me enormous cachet,’ she remarked on one occasion. It simply serves to render her appearance even more intriguing. She is, as one journalist put it, ‘made for television’.
She cannot take one step off the boat without people stopping to stare, whisper. She has lived only a couple of decades, but already she is an idol. For a long time I thought she would be a writer. You sometimes hear of kids reading Anna Karenina at the age of thirteen. Kristin tried to write Anna Karenina when she was thirteen. One time, just before she died, Margrete came across something that Kristin had written. ‘She’s so good it’s uncanny,’ Margrete said to me. ‘It almost scares me. She’s barely in her teens, but she writes like an adult.’
I knew she was special. As a little girl she happily lumped together alphabet blocks, Barbie dolls, old Matchbox cars, train sets and bits from Airfix construction kits. The way she saw it, they were all part of the same world, so there was no reason why they could not be used in combination, rather than separately. She was already practising what would later be referred to as ‘sampling’. One winter night when we were gazing up at the stars and I had dusted off my old knowledge of astronomy, on the spur of the moment she dubbed Orion ‘the Hourglass’ and changed Leo’s name, right then and there, to ‘the Question Mark’. She had a head like a pinball machine. Her thoughts were forever zooming this way and that; you could positively hear them go ping, see the lights flashing behind her brow.
I sit on the mizzen shroud, as if wishing to be close to the lifebuoy. The coffee is exceptionally good, it reminds me of Margrete’s, although Martin bemoaned its quality. ‘Not exactly what you’d get at Caffé Sant’Eustachio in Rome, where they roast their beans in a wood-burning stove,’ as he said. Martin hails from Nordkjosbotn in the far north, but with his rawboned, weatherbeaten features he might just as easily have come from Marrakesh. He also tends to wear stripy, loose-fitting clothes, not unlike the sort of thing worn in North Africa.
As far as I can gather, the OAK Quartet has been commissioned to devise a product, a good or a service which I find impossible to define — the term ‘multimedia’ seems too tame, already old hat. Nor do I understand the language they use, all those words flying through the air: ‘information architecture’, ‘navigation design’, ‘hierarchy of levels’. What I do understand, however, is that this is a large-scale undertaking with solid financial backing from the most diverse institutions, not least from the business sector. This trip is just a first foray, a kind of reconnaissance mission; I am not certain who their target group are, whether the product will be geared towards the travel industry or is also designed for educational or entertainment purposes. Nor am I clear on whether the end-result will be sold in CD form or put out on the Internet — or be presented in one of the many other media spawned by the digital revolution. The OAK Quartet are forever discussing the question of what’s next for television. Everything changes so fast these days. Their main concern appears to be that the actual concept, its sum and substance, the thinking behind it, should be applicable to lots of forms, including some yet to come. And they must remember to allow for the possibility for continual updating. ‘We have to try to envisage all sorts of media, forms of communication of which we haven’t even begun to dream,’ Hanna said one evening. Hanna is almost thirty and the eldest of the group. Her Asian looks sometimes put me in mind of a geisha — not due to any promiscuous tendencies on her part, but because of her air of refinement. Hanna is in charge of finance and marketing, she works out plans of action with clients, acts as producer and coordinator. She is also the vessel’s skipper, keeps the logbook, coils ropes east to west and can put out a spring line and make fast in a way that would make Colin Archer proud of her.