Who is she? I have picked up snatches of locker-room stories that made my hair stand on end with worry. She has had her dark times, I think. But she has come through them. I do not know how.
The hardest part about being in prison was to know that I was missing out on the last stages of Kristin’s adolescence, the fact of not being there to experience her hundred and one ways of slamming a door. Her experiments with black nail polish. There was not much of that sort of thing when she came to see me. In short, I missed being able to take an active daily part in her upbringing.
Otherwise it soon became quite easy to keep up with her doings on the outside. I could read all about them in the newspapers. I am not thinking here of her television career. When she was only fifteen and still living with her grandmother, my mother, she won the Golden Mouse award for the best Norwegian homepage on the Internet, but it was through her music that the media first latched on to her. She became the lead singer with a band playing advanced techno. I could never make anything of it; let’s just say her music was a far cry from Rubber Soul. After her spell as a talk-show host and the whole TV circus thing, she joined a new young advertising agency and had a hand in several landmark campaigns, including one in which she painted a red nose on Che Guevara, thus inflaming the ulcers of the old ’68 generation — not to mention the Hitler moustache she stuck on the face of the peace-loving Mahatma Ghandi.
And it may well be the same people who are now fighting to give her work, competing for the unique expertise possessed by the OAK Quartet, a company working on the borderline between the multinational software and hardware corporations and Norwegian culture. One of the big television channels has already tried to buy the company. It doesn’t surprise me. Anyone can see that the OAK Quartet is on its way up, that it is starting to make its mark on the international scene. Which is actually no more surprising than the fact of a Norwegian firm of architects designing the new library in Alexandria.
More and more I can see what a clever idea it was to do their research for the Sognefjord project from a boat. This compels them to think of navigation on all levels, and not merely in an electronic space. I note the assurance with which they work their way along the fjord. How confidently, but unassumingly, they gain their bearings in the world. I believe this is how they envisage the product which they are developing — as a navigational tool for people who are curious. Not only about Sognefjord, but about things in general. They are working on a kind of astrolabe or a sextant which could, in principle, be employed within any sphere of existence.
One day, while we were sitting in the saloon eating curried pirogs, made by Martin and Kamala amid much hilarity, I told them, at Kristin’s request, about the Voyager mission, which is to say: the two space probes launched in 1977. I knew more about Voyager 2 which, having sailed past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — a tremendous navigational feat, this — had now left our solar system and was heading out into the far reaches of space. Although my astrophysics studies were only a blind, right from the start I had been fascinated by this project. In the primitive, but warm light of a paraffin lamp I told the crew on board their Norwegian sister ship some of the new things we had learned about the outer planets, thanks to the Voyager probes — like the fact that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, was volcanically active, or that Saturn had thousands of separate rings, the particles of which were held in place by ‘shepherd moons’. And then there was the unbelievably complex and varied surface of Miranda, one of Uranus’s moons. I could tell that my audience was astonished, although they had obviously heard of this before. Carl who, as well as Ganesh, always kept a little yellow notebook and a stub of pencil in his pocket, came over to me later, wanting to know more, particularly about the ‘message’ disc carried by both Voyager probes.
I told him what I knew. I never tire of thinking of this concept: a sort of gramophone record attached to each spaceship, containing greetings to any eventual extra-terrestrial civilisations. The people who made this had asked themselves the same questions as Bo Wang Lee had done: ‘What should we take with us?’ What should we present? And which of all the Earth’s sounds should we select? They had ended up with 118 pictures, all of which, in different ways, said something about mankind and its culture; these included diagrams of the DNA structure and of the human sex organs, but there too were photographs of fungi in a forest, a dancer in Bali and a classroom in Japan. Somewhere far beyond Pluto’s orbit there also drifted greetings in almost sixty different languages. ‘You could say that the Voyager disc is a World’s Fair shot into space,’ I said to Carl. ‘But first and foremost — obviously — it’s a message to mankind itself.’
The middle part. My homecoming from a World’s Fair. It is all there in those minutes. I remember how I paused outside the house. I stood there looking at, admiring, the bricks of the walls, the extension in Grorud granite; I feasted my eyes on the crocuses in the flower beds, the bare branches of the apple trees in the garden. I positively revelled in my own good fortune. For a second I could not believe that this was my home, this welcoming house, the warmth of the light beyond the gauzy white curtains covering the living-room window — all that was lacking was for her shadow to go gliding past.
I knew how I would find Margrete when I entered the living room. She would be writing letters. She almost always wrote letters in the evening, when she was not reading. And when she had finished a book she wrote letters non-stop. For her these two things went hand in hand, reading and writing. She used expensive pens and the finest quality writing paper; when we were out travelling she was always on the lookout for pretty envelopes and unusual paper. I often watched her on the sly when she was writing. Her face took on a different expression then, as if she were doing something requiring deep concentration. ‘I’m weaving,’ she would say. She said the same thing when she was reading: ‘I’m weaving.’ I had no idea what she put in her letters, mostly everyday stuff I guessed: quotes from books she had read, a verse of a poem. And she wrote in a hand which must have given the receiver as much pleasure as the actual contents. ‘Attractive handwriting is as important for a woman as beauty,’ she said once. It must have been an honour to receive a letter from Margrete. She wrote to her friends abroad on tissue-thin paper. Sometimes, if I was there, she would hold the paper up in front of her eyes. And I saw her face as if through a veil of script.
There was one evening when she had hung lots of Chinese lanterns around the terrace. We had had guests, they had just left and she was stretching out in a mahogany chair. The coloured lanterns made the house, made Grorud, look as if it lay under other skies. I thought of something, fetched a thick sheet of paper which I kept at the back of a cupboard. It was a large Chinese character, written — or painted — by Bo Wang Lee as a farewell present. I showed it to Margrete. ‘This means friendship, right?’ She considered it for some time. ‘This is the character for love,’ she said, her face bathed in the glow of the paper lanterns. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘The person who wrote this said it was the sign for friendship.’ She looked up at me, with a smile in her eyes. ‘That’s as may be,’ she said, ‘but this says “love”.’ She explained the intricate character to me, even showed me how the Chinese word for heart — four exquisite strokes, like chambers — lay in the middle of it, like a word within the word. ‘Love without heart is no love at all,’ she murmured, more to herself. Then she looked at me again. ‘Maybe there was something about the person who wrote this that you didn’t understand,’ Margrete said. She was right, of course. There was a lot I had not understood about Bo Wang Lee.