So there you stand, watching television, amazed in a way by images following images, a soundless flickering, and you stare and you stare at this screen that has won you so much acclaim, a glittering career, you think, doubly so, you think, and one that has led you here, to this bewildered room, and you place your finger on the ‘off’ button while watching images that become more and more baffling the longer you gaze at them, and you click the button, you see the colours fade to black while the set crackles with static, and you feel as if you had switched off yourself, that your life is finished, a pointless programme, you think, and now it is over, you think.
You look at the seven blue jars on the shelf above the set as if they were another programme, a more significant programme, because they remind you of something, Margrete, you think, and you turn back round the corner, to be met by the sight of her figure on the floor, on its back, as if in total surrender, you think, betrayed, you think, and again you are struck by that uncontrollable urge just to collapse, and you look at the Persian rug over by the window between the two armchairs, a Bukhara, you think, or a Sehna, you think, you would not mind collapsing onto that, that’s for sure, onto that rug, disappearing into that pattern, that landscape, to come out in some other land, and you long for your aunt’s dimly-lit flat, for a pile of soft cushions and a time when life was one long story, and you look back at Margrete and only now do you see, or wish to see, that she is lying on a polar-bear skin, and you look and you look, and you cannot figure out what it is doing here, the polar bear, a brother, you think, it doesn’t fit, you think, it feels like a betrayal, you think, as if someone had returned evil for good, and you look at the picture of Buddha, then your eye goes back to the skin and you see only the skin, the red blood against the white skin, as if the bear had been shot, you think, or as if it had been in a fight, you think, between an animal and a human being, you think, and again you look at Margrete, and you feel like screaming a a a a a for so long that it will cover all the a’s you wrote in your copybook in first grade and all the a’s you have written since, to no good purpose, you think.
So there you stand, Jonas Wergeland, disciple of the Kama Sutra, opera lover, climber of Jebel Musa, in the centre of your own living room with an inaudible scream in your ears, and you try to listen, and you think to yourself that this is important, the sounds, that the cause may lie here, and you think that you must remember the sounds, cherish them, and you listen intently, stand stock-still in the middle of the room with your eyes fixed on Margrete’s dead body, and you listen, and you hear a car drive by further down the road, and you hear, or think you hear, a mouth organ far in the distance, if it isn’t a siren, a fire engine you think, something that could save you, you think, and you cross the room and press the remote control, filling the room once more with Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugue, and you think that you would like to crawl inside the organ chest again, you want to be healed, you want to be brought to life, you think, another life, you think, a life far from this room, you think.
You stand there looking at the body of your dead wife, looking and looking, and you don’t know why the tears always have to well up when you hear this music, and you notice how the tears distort your vision, and you fumble in your pocket for something, a prism, before you remember that you have given it away, and you think to yourself that you will never manage to find another angle here, break up the sight before you, veer out of the big picture and into the detail, impossible, you think, impossible in the face of all this blood, you think, so I can see, or at least I try to understand, more than anyone else, why you do not walk across to the telephone, why you do not call the police, why instead you go into the bathroom, why you feel a frantic need to wash yourself, or not wash, but rinse yourself, and you pull off your clothes, toss them in all directions, knock over one of the ferns before climbing into the shower cabinet, turning on the water and shutting your eyes, you let the water stream down over you, turning the hot tap further and further, as if it could never be hot enough for you, for ages you stand there, without reaching for the soap, just letting the hot water stream down over you, until at last you turn it off and step out into a bathroom now filled with steam, like the old Torggata Baths you think, and you stand at the washbasin, and you gaze into a mirror that has misted over and you gaze at all of Margrete’s things on the shelf, at the bath salts, and you remember how Margrete loved taking a bath, how she loved to have the water scalding hot, like the Japanese you think, how much she enjoyed it, how she had this unique capacity for enjoying everything, turning any ordinary day into unadulterated pleasure, you think, and you gaze at all the other strange bottles and jars that are hers, were hers, and you open a perfume bottle, and you sniff, inhale, and suddenly you remember a whole lot of things connected with this scent, and you feel as if your head is beginning to mist over, like the mirror, and you know you are close to passing out, and you hang onto the washbasin and think to yourself that you had better do something sensible, so you pick up your electric razor, the good one, better than the little one in your suitcase, and you start to shave, shaving in exactly the same way as always, doing your best to follow the same pattern as always, as if the simple force of habit, the pedantry of it, could be the saving of you at this moment, keep chaos at arm’s length, or possibly because right now it seems important to consider how you look, in case a television team should show up. ‘How did you feel when you entered the room?’ you think, the sort of question put to sports’ stars, and you go on shaving for so long that the mirror clears and you see your own face, and you pick up a bottle of aftershave to pour a few drops onto your palm, and you think of your mother’s seven lovers, and at the thought of the seven lovers you begin to have some inkling of who you are, as if all this time you had been trying to suppress the knowledge.
You walk back through to the living room, naked, and you remember who you are, it’s being naked that does it, you think, and all at once a name from the bundle of letters comes into your head, the letters you glanced at when you came home, and naked you walk across to the antique bureau where you left the letters and again you flick through them, and you find it, and you read the sender’s name, a woman’s name, you think, the name of a very famous woman, you think, and you remember those women whom you have loved and who have loved you, heartily, you think, deeply, you think, and who have given you of their abundance, and you turn towards Margrete with the letter in your hand, naked, and you realize that one of them, one of these women, might be behind Margrete’s death, one who refuses to let go of you, who still loves you, and you think of your golden balls, and it’s only to be expected, you think, that one day they would be your downfall.
15·46·6
Jonas Wergeland is nine years old. It is late at night and he wakes with a tightness around his balls.
I doubt if I need to remind anyone of the sexual frustrations of pre-pubertal boys and the ways they find of letting off steam. Some play rather artful games of ‘doctors and nurses’. Others can make do with reading the small ads in the newspaper, under the heading of ‘Health and Hygiene’, or uttering the name ‘Mount of Venus’ with all its connotations of scaled peaks and astronomical mysteries. Some run a tremulous felt tip along the side of the transformer station under cover of darkness, making up smutty rhymes ending in ‘pussy’, ‘Lucy’ and ‘juicy’, while others run a black market in condoms stolen from unwitting fathers. Some turn up in triumph at school with a stuffy sex manual discovered in an old dusty box in a far corner of the cellar, while others concoct myths about Mamma Banana, the girl who lives in the Swiss villa across from the flats, who was said to be so randy that every night, if no boys showed up, she had to stick an Ice Pole up ‘you know where’ to cool herself down, and we’re talking a fifty-øre Ice Pole at that. When Jonas Wergeland was a boy there were even some who plucked up the courage to club together for a pretty harmless girlie magazine, playing a nerve-racking game of poker to decide who would go into the shop, with sweaty palms and a tongue like lead, to buy it, so they could read it on the sly behind the garages and learn how even the most dauntingly pale and unimaginably ugly women — sporting light-green eye-shadow and weird hair-dos — could get you seriously worked up and leave you with friction burns on your foreskin.