Who are these young people, I have asked myself. Are there such things as short cuts to getting to know a person? One day I was talking to Carl. He is the OAK Quartet’s graphic designer as well as being something of a film buff, an expert on dramaturgy and cinematography. I have already had one argument with him about Orson Welles’s masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. Possibly because Carl, with his close-cropped head and his tall, broad build, reminds me of a nightclub bouncer or a bodyguard, I was surprised when he told me that I only needed to know one thing in order to understand everything about him: ‘In my pocket I have a little brass figure,’ he said. ‘It represents Ganesh, an Indian god with the head of an elephant. I’ve carried it in my pocket for the past fifteen years.’ Was it really true? Could one detail reveal almost everything there was to know about a person? I pondered this nugget of information about Carl the webmaster and the figure of Ganesh in his pocket. It certainly fired the imagination, made me think of a giant with a mouse as a pet.
Which detail would say most about me? It would have to be the fact that there is nothing I do not know about the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album. I could tell you that Ringo played finger cymbals on ‘Norwegian Wood’; that ‘I’m Looking Through You’ was inspired by Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher; that John Lennon stole a line from an Elvis song for ‘Run For Your Life’; that the lyrics to ‘The Word’ were written in coloured pencils; that what one heard on ‘In My Life’ was not a cembalo solo but a speeded up recording of George Martin on electric piano.
I think Carl is right. Such a detail would say just about everything about me.
After some years in a cell, for the first time in my life — if I discount my work on ‘the golden notebook’ — I felt the need to write. I got it into my head that I could survive by trying to tell my own story. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story, as someone once said. But which story? That was the problem.
To begin with I just wrote, without any thought for what the end product would be, who would read it. I wrote with a pleasure which surprised me, I wrote with a delight at finally understanding Margrete’s mania for writing. And I make no secret of the fact that I also had in mind the offers made to me by a number of publishers. ‘Now we’ll have Marco Polo himself putting pen to paper, not his cellmate Rustichello,’ as one editor put it to me cajolingly. I toyed with various titles: Twenty-three Fragments From a Killer’s Hand, Eight Planets I have Visited and the like. For a long time I was tempted to call it The Confession of a Fool, not knowing that that title had already been taken.
Rumours that I was writing were reported in the press. I think people were looking for a public confession or something of the sort. But the more I wrote, the less interested I became in the idea of others reading what I wrote. People were expecting The Truth. Either that or some sort of act of revenge. An exposé of everything and everybody, not least of life inside NRK, the escapades of the celebrities, who was sleeping with whom. But the content of the piece changed character. For a while it seemed to me that this was something between me and a higher power. In the end, though, I came to regard it as an honest-to-goodness Book of the Dead, equivalent to the papyrus scrolls buried with the dead in Ancient Egypt. It was a pile of paper, a scroll which I would take with me to the grave, so to speak. A password, a token I could present, so that I, or my spirit, could gain admission to the hereafter.
It was a confusing manuscript. It developed into a long, incoherent narrative. All the nouns seemed to be there, but none of the verbs. I could see only one solution: I destroyed it. For one very simple reason: no one — with one or two exceptions — would have been able to make head or tail of it. I burned my ‘confession’ with a light heart. Despite the fabulous sums offered to me, during those first years of my imprisonment at least, by a lot of publishers.
It is a relief to be on board the Voyager, to be with the members of the OAK Quartet. It is not that I believe them to have fewer worrying traits than previous generations of young people, but they seem different. Broader. They are just as interested in each single person as they are in society as a whole. They aspire to stronger individuals and a greater spirit of community. And none of them feels bound to stick only to their own specialist area. Martin, with his Marrakesh-style appearance, is a typical computer freak, a whole college on his own when it comes to his technological know-how, but I have long suspected him of being able to turn his hand to just about anything — and not only exotic cookery and mountain climbing. The other day, as we were rounding the point at Fornes he picked up his guitar and sang ‘In My Life’ with such feeling — I have never heard anything like it. The other three gradually joined in, singing in harmony, and it seemed only natural that they should know all the words. I had to take a walk around the deck to save anyone seeing the tears in my eyes. In any case, they could never know what a ridiculously sentimental appeal that song holds for me.
It is amazing, really, that Kristin should have wound up in such company, on board an old lifeboat. When she was offered the chance to work in television I strongly advised her to turn it down. She went against my wishes — it may be that in this particular instance she had to go against me. Kristin, this young girl, was given the job of hosting a prime-time, Friday evening programme, a talk show on which it did not really matter who the guests were: it was the presenter who was the star. And she was a star. Pert and saucy and smart in a way that Norway was ready for. As the papers said, she had star quality. Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding her my name rarely came up, and then only as a by-the-way, and only at the start.
Then, when she was right at the top, she bowed out. After a couple of interim stages — high-profile pursuits — she set up her own company, one that in many ways involved all the things with which she had worked: music, software development, television, advertising, journalism. Her business card gives her occupation as ‘association artist’. According to Hanna she is a genius when it comes to spotting, forging, connections, inserting ‘links’ as they say. She has become something of a guru within IT circles. At an age when I had barely begun to figure out what my first project should be, she already has a whole lifetime behind her.
When I asked her about this one evening — Martin had served margueritas up on deck — about all the things she had done and whether there was any common denominator between them, she had looked at me in surprise, glared almost. ‘I’m a storyteller,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it obvious? The future belongs to the storytellers. I’ve always known that. And that’s the challenge with what we’re doing here. To find the underlying story.’
I sit here in a fjord, surrounded by steep hillsides, and think of fly tying. The questions are always more important than the answers. In Lærdal the salmon flies are the question and the fish is the answer. I am fascinated by the craftsmanship involved. Many salmon flies are real works of art. The patterns, and the poetry of the names, make me think of cocktails, or butterflies. Golden Butterfly, Yellow Eagle, Evening Star, Jock Scott. A Victorian salmon fly might consist of more than forty materials, some of them taken from exotic birds and animals; they looked like magical ornaments. If I were part of the OAK Quartet I would weave in lots of information on salmon flies. They keep talking about ‘teasers’, items designed to catch the browser’s interest. Could not the whole story of Lærdal be encapsulated within those flies? They are the perfect bait for the eye.