I was right in the midst of my life-saving career and felt obliged therefore to give a lot of thought to this incident. This, too, was a form of life-saving. How far would someone go in order to save a life? I found such an idea shocking. To save a life — not by some heroic deed, but by playing the bad guy almost. Or to be made to suffer even when you were innocent.
Once when we were flopped in bed after a strenuous sexual workout, between gasps for breath I told Margrete about my fear that my heart might give out. As my father’s and my grandfather’s had. ‘I need to be careful, I’ve got a weak heart,’ I joked. I thought she would laugh, but instead she said: ‘Yes, that’s what’s wrong with you.’
Maybe she would be alive today if I had not had such a weak heart.
I am on board an old lifeboat once called the Norway, now renamed Voyager. I have long had the feeling that I am on a journey, making my way out of something. I say this because for so many years I was motionless, shut off. I cannot shake off the memory of Harastølen at Luster, that ludicrous one-time refugee centre halfway up a mountainside. For some days I have had the suspicion that this may also say something about me personally. That this problem: Festung Norwegen, the fear, and my own problem, the one which has dogged me all my life, are one and the same: an unwillingness to open oneself to one’s full potential. I sometimes think of myself as a fertile egg which has put up an effective barrier against all the spermatozoa that have sought me out, that I have, metaphorically speaking, inserted a coil into the womb of my thoughts. I have been aware of my exceptional gifts, known that I might even be a wonder, but I have baulked at using these gifts. So too with love: I never dared to accept it. Like Norway I suffered from the Midas syndrome. I was a gold-plated celebrity, but I could not embrace other people, I could not return the affections of the woman who loved me.
We are out sailing again. I find myself far up the longest fjord in the world. Dead ahead looms Haukåsen, covered with a white cape of snow. Gulls hover motionless on the wind, level with the boat, almost as if they were tame.
I feel a bit like an apprentice with the OAK Quartet. I am particularly interested in the way they communicate. Initially I was surprised to find how little of their work involved computers. The boat is of course packed to the gunnels with the latest digital aids — it is like a Noah’s Ark for our technological society — but they seem to prefer large notepads and coloured pencils. Either that or they just talk and jot down key words. Dialogue, that is the key. Occasionally, through the skylight, I can observe them down in the saloon, deep in discussion, making obscure squiggles on whiteboards. And yet — much of what they do and say reminds me of my own efforts to simulate, to make believe when I was small. Is this what it all comes down to: rediscovering the realms of imagination, the childhood belief in the impossible?
The smell of chicken korma drifts from the galley. A gimballed Primus stove with two burners is no hindrance to Martin. My thoughts turn to Kamala. She will be joining us at Fjærland. I miss her. My meeting Kamala was — how can I put it — an undeserved gift. Kamala saved me. She saved my life, it is as simple as that.
Sometimes I have the notion that I must have acquired a new identity in prison. No one recognises me. I have been forgotten. Not my name, but my appearance. I ought to be pleased, look upon this as cover of a sort. Because in people’s minds my name is linked as much with a crime as with my television celebrity. Everyone believes that I killed my wife. It was on the front page of every newspaper, it was proclaimed on the television and radio, and it was established by judge and jury in a court of law.
Why did she do it? I need to write more.
Titan
While there could, of course, be several explanations for Jonas Wergeland’s fantastic flair for picture-making, his success in television should come as no surprise to any of those who know that in his youth he associated with such greats as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many people can boast of having attended the French school in Oslo, but very few have, like Jonas Wergeland, belonged to the Italian school.
Jonas and Leo became chums towards the end of their time at elementary school, but did not become really close friends until both started at the local junior high school, Groruddalen Realskole, only a couple of stone throws from the railway station. Jonas’s new road to school took him past the church and down the steep slope of Teppaveien, and in one of the old villas on this road lived Leonard Knutzen. Leonard always stood and waited for Jonas, or rather: sat waiting on the satchel which they used in those days instead of a rucksack and which, in the winter, they would send skimming down the hill like a curling stone. At one point during the eighties, after Leonardo’s sensational activities became public knowledge, Jonas received a number of tempting offers from the tabloids to speak out on the subject of their boyhood friendship. He turned them all down. But he could just see the headlines, what a story, full of details which no one could have guessed at.
Leonard’s family belonged to the bastion of the district’s working-class; for generations they had walked at the head of the local 1st of May parade. Aptly enough, their house rested on a solid granite plinth, as if in tribute to the valley’s proud stonemason tradition. Not only that, but they also overlooked the area where the first mills had been built, beside the falls at Alna. Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father was a big, burly, majestic-looking man with a backswept mane not unlike that of the writer and Nobel prize-winner Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It was quite obvious to Jonas that Leonard adored him. In the summer, father and son would go off on long walks in the hills together, and in the winter they would sleep out in snow holes. Leonard, too, was tall and well-built, and he had his father’s flashing eyes. Leonard liked to joke that he and Jonas were of royal blood, since both their fathers — Haakon and Olav — were called after kings. ‘We’re both princes,’ he declared, thumping Jonas on the back.
Jonas would later think of this time in his life as the Age of Wrath. Because what did they do? They sat in the Knutzens’ basement, whipping themselves up into a fury. I yell, therefore I am — that was their watchword. They joined the endless ranks of young men who are filled with pent-up rage in their late teens — a wrath which may simply stem from disgruntlement over the fact that there are no changes taking place in the world around them to match the revolutions that have suddenly broken out in their heads and bodies. But for Jonas there was more to it than that: these furious verbal outbursts also acted as a safety valve, a way of giving vent to his frustration at not being able to turn his parallel thoughts, his feeling of being in possession of exceptional gifts, into something concrete — some extraordinary deed, for example.