on a large, deep-pile rug while a girl of two or three sat
watching from the sofa. I thought it unnatural. Another
time I watched a man who was lying on a big double bed
romping with two women at once. It didn't arouse my
moral indignation, but there were many other observations
that could leave me shaken. On one occasion, and unable to
intervene, I witnessed a vicious fight over money. I wasn't
quite sure, but it looked rather like one man was left for
dead inside the flat after the other had made off.
These are obviously remembered fantasy, but I learnt
from such fantasies. They were often full of insight. Much of
the material for the many detective novels I later inspired
was gathered from these mental journeys. Usually, a
detective novel has a plot that can be condensed into a
single page. The author's skill is simply to keep this kernel of
factual information back. The detective must spend time -
and use cunning - to arrive at the solution. That's what the
readers like. Piece by piece, the investigator gets a better
idea of what has actually happened. He must also be
decoyed up blind alleys, but as the picture gradually
becomes clearer and more complete, the readers feel clever,
they believe that they have helped to solve the case them-
selves.
I learnt from dreams as well. A dream could be like an
open book. At the time I had two or three recurrent dream
landscapes, as well as a few dream characters who manifested
themselves at regular intervals. I was convinced they weren't
just a reflex to stimuli from the external world; far from it,
they represented something new, they were genuine new
experiences from which I learnt and which have moulded
me into the man I am today. But where did the dreams
come from? I couldn't work out if all my dreams and mental
journeys were the fruits of specially sensitive antennae
attuned to things that came from outside, or if I had some
sonar of the soul that was able to detect layer upon layer of
secrets from a bottomless well within me.
I no longer dreamt of the little man with the cane, though
I wouldn't have minded meeting him in a sleeping dream. It
would have been far preferable to dream about him than
have him roaming around the flat the whole time.
I made even more spectacular mental journeys, too. I went
to the moon, for example, long before Armstrong and
Aldrin. I remember once standing on the surface of the
moon and looking up at the earth. High up there were all
the people. It has since become a cliche, but years before
Armstrong made that giant leap for mankind, I found myself
on the moon discovering for the first time how tragi-comic
all wars and national boundaries were. I was possibly twelve
when I made that journey of the mind. Ever since then, I've
had a heightened sense of all the trivialities with which
people pack their lives. Praise and punishment, fame and
honour seemed even more farcical.
Some of my mental travels took me even further into
space. I once went on a time-machine trip and arrived back
on earth before there was any life here. I moved over the
face of the waters, and the earth lay like a bud that's ready to
burst, because I knew that life on earth would begin soon.
That was about five billion years before Gerhardsen's first
government.
Or I could rove about on mental wings to various places
in the city, like the fly-loft in a theatre where I could sit high
up, just beneath the roof, and gaze down at all the actors. On
one occasion the little man was seated on a lighting batten
only five feet away from me. He glanced furtively at me
with a world-weary face and said in a thick voice: So you're
here as well, are you? Can't I ever do anything on my own? That
was a bit rich coming from him.
I kept on getting new ideas. Sometimes they breathed down
my neck, fluttered like butterflies in my stomach, or ached
like open wounds. I bled stories and narratives, my brain
effervesced with novel concepts. It was as if this fever-red
lava welled up from the hot crater within me.
Relieving the pressure of my thoughts was a constant
necessity, almost ceaselessly having to go somewhere where
I could sit discreetly with a pencil and paper and let them
all out. My excretions might consist of long conversations
between two or more voices in my head, and frequently on
specific ontological, epistemological or aesthetic subjects.
One voice might say: It is perfectly clear to me that the human
being has an eternal soul, which only inhabits a body of flesh and
blood for a short while. The other voice might answer: No,
no. Man is an animal just like any other. What you term the soul
is inextricably linked to a brain, and the brain is ephemeral. Or,
as the Buddha said on his deathbed: All that is composite is
transitory.
Such dialogues could soon run to dozens of sheets of A4
paper, but it always felt good to get them out of my head.
And yet, no sooner had I transferred them to paper, than I
was full of voices again and had to relieve myself once more.
The dialogues I spewed out might just as easily be of a
thoroughly mundane nature. One voice might say: So there
you are. Couldn't you at least have phoned to say you'd be late?
And the other voice would answer: I told you the meeting
might last a long time. Then the first voice again: You don't
mean to say you've been sitting in a meeting all this time? It's
almost midday! And so the row would begin.
I never worked out in advance what such introductory
exchanges presaged. Indeed, it was to avoid thinking about
it that I willingly sat down and wrote the entire altercation
out, so as to get it out of my system. The only way to get
relief from an over-active mind was to fix its impulses in
writing.
Occasionally I would bathe my brain in alcohol and,
when I did, the spirit would flow back out again as stories; it
was as if the liquid evaporated and got distilled as pure
intellect. Though alcohol had a very stimulating effect on
my imagination, it also dampened my angst about it too. It
both primed the engine within me and gave me strength to
endure its workings. I might have a shoal of thoughts in my
head, but after a few drinks I was man enough to corner
them all.
When I woke up in the morning I couldn't always
remember what I'd been writing or making notes about
the evening before, or at least, the very last thing I'd
scribbled on the writing pad after a couple of bottles of
wine. Then, it could be exciting to sling on a dressing gown
and saunter into my work-room just to cast a glance over
my desk. It wasn't inconceivable that something interesting
might be lying there and, if I found a sheaf of notes I had no
recollection of writing, it was almost like receiving a
mysterious document that had come to m
e via automatic
writing.
Perhaps one driving force behind my imagination and my
periodic drinking was that thing I was always trying to
forget, but which I couldn't really remember either. Why
did I expend so much energy forgetting something that I
couldn't even recollect?
Only the countryside and visits from girls could provide me
with brief interludes of a kind of intellectual peace.
I was a natural mystic even before I began Sixth Form
college. I saw the world as a thing dreamlike and bewitched.
I wrote in my diary: I've seen through almost everything. The
only thing I am unable to fathom is the world itself. It is too vast. It
is too impenetrable. I've long since given up as far as that's con-
cerned. It's the only thing that stands in the way of a feeling of total
insight.
I was also a romantic. I could never have contemplated
telling a girl I loved her if it wasn't true. Perhaps that was
why I kept inviting all those girls. I realised that one day I
might become a faithful lover. As far as I was concerned, I'd
have been able to spend the rest of my life in a little cabin in
the woods together with the girl I really loved. I just had to
find her first. While I was out walking I was convinced she
could turn up at any moment. Perhaps she'd be there on the
path round the next bend, I really thought it was possible.
It's no exaggeration. I hadn't the slightest doubt she existed.
*
That June day I'd walked to Ullev�lseter from another skiing
hut. There was virtually no one hiking in the forests
surrounding Oslo on a hot summer afternoon; perhaps that
was why it held such a special air of anticipation. For a large
portion of the journey I hadn't met a soul, and that increased
the chance that she might suddenly come walking towards
me. If the forest had been packed with people it would have
been harder for us to notice each other, and we certainly
wouldn't have stopped to chat.
I went into the caf� and bought a waffle and a cup of hot
blackcurrant before going out to rest on the grass. On a
bench a little way off sat a girl with dark curls. She was
wearing blue jeans and a red jumper and we were the only
two people at Ullev�lseter. She was sipping something too,
but after a while she got up and came sauntering over
towards me. For a moment I was afraid she was one of the
girls who'd slept over at my place - a number had been
brunettes, some with curly hair, and it wasn't easy to
remember them all. But the woman who stood before me
now must have been quite a bit older, she might have been
eight or ten years their senior. A girl my age would never
have taken such an unself-conscious initiative. She sat down
on the grass and said her name was Maria. She was Swedish
by the sound of her voice, and I'd never been with a
Swedish girl before. I was convinced that Maria was the
person I'd been searching for over the past few months. It
had to be us, there was no one else here. It would have been
too much of a coincidence to meet at Ullev�lseter on a hot
June afternoon unless we were meant for each other.
After only a few minutes' casual conversation we were
speaking quite freely and easily and felt almost like old
acquaintances. She was twenty-nine and had just finished a
doctorate in the history of art at Oslo University. Prior to
that she'd studied Renaissance art in Italy. She lived on the
university campus, and this was another auspicious novelty.
The girls I'd previously met always had to come back to my
place because they lived with large families of parents and
younger siblings. Maria had been born in Sweden, but her
parents now lived in Germany.
She was quite unique, but the better I got to know Maria,
the more I thought that we had much in common. She was
charming, engaging and playful all at once. But she had
something of my own talent for making swift associations
and imaginative leaps. She possessed a refined, cognitive
imagination and was the same cornucopia of thoughts,
attitudes and ideas as me. She was sensitive and easily hurt,
but she could also be inconsiderate and uncouth. Maria was
the first person I'd met for whom I had a genuine feeling and
with whom I was able and willing to communicate. It was as
if we were a split soul: I was Animus, and she was Anima.
I fell deeply in love for the first time in my life, and I didn't
experience the love itself as at all superficial. I'd known many
girls, a great many in fact. It wasn't out of any lack of ex-
perience that I fell so heavily for Maria. I felt I'd built a solid
foundation on which to start a serious relationship.
Even as we sat out on the grass at Ullev�lseter, I began to tell
Maria stories. It was as if she could see from my eyes that I
was full of stories, as if she knew she could simply tease them
out of me. She always knew which were made up and
which were real. Maria understood irony and meta-irony �
so essential for true communication.
I told a small selection of my best stories, and Maria not
only sat and listened, but she commented, asked questions
and made various intelligent suggestions. Nevertheless, she
always agreed with my endings, and not out of politeness
either, but because she realised she couldn't bring them to a
better conclusion herself. Had I said something foolish or
inconsistent, she would have been the first to pull me up.
But I didn't say anything foolish or inconsistent, everything
I told Maria that afternoon was well thought through. And
she knew it. Maria was an adult.
We began to walk down towards Lake Sognsvann. It felt
superfluous to suggest that we spend the rest of the after-
noon and evening together. We fizzed, we sparkled, it was
as if we were bathing in champagne froth.
However, even on that first meeting I believe I must have
realised that Maria's affinity to me included an unwillingness
to rush into giving any kind of guarantees for the immediate
future. For the first time I was prepared to tell a girl that she
might come to occupy the role of the woman in my life, but
I couldn't tell if Maria was willing to allow me to play such
an important role in hers.
Just before we got down to the lake it began to rain. The
air was sultry. We sought shelter in the bushes beneath some
huge, overhanging boughs not far from the path. I put my
arms about her, and she embraced me. She loosened my
belt, and we took off each other's jeans. It was only after
we'd begun to caress that I asked her if she was on the pill.
She smiled roguishly, but shook her head. 'Why not?' I
asked. She laughed. 'You're looking at it all back to front,'
she replied. I was confused. It was the first time I'd been
with a girl I didn't understand. She said: 'I'm not on the pill
because I'm quite happy to have a baby.' I said she was mad.
&n
bsp; When she'd had her pleasure, I ejaculated into the
bilberry bushes. Maria laughed again. She was ten years
older than the other girls I'd been with. She didn't make a
big thing of the fact that I'd come in the bushes because she
wasn't on the pill. And I'm sure Metre Man didn't either.
He just stood out in the rain under his damp felt hat,
thrashing at the bushes with his spindly cane.
We were together every day in the weeks that followed. For
the first time I knew someone who I felt was my equal. I'd
had a good time with girls before, but I was never sorry to
see them go the next morning. I'd learnt to abhor breakfast
soppiness. Many of my girlfriends viewed breakfast as a sort
of prelude, I saw it as a finale. But I would have missed
Maria if she'd suddenly decided to leave after breakfast. But
because we were so alike, I thought she might vanish from
me at any moment. I also realised that Maria had a low
threshold for the kind of company she could tolerate in
preference to her own. I still satisfied that threshold.
I was always drunk with new ideas after we'd been
together. Maria knew it. She would ask me to tell her what I
was thinking, and I would narrate a story, usually a
completely new story I'd invented off the top of my head.
Sometimes I had the impression that she just went to bed
with me because she knew it was the surest way to hear yet
another enthralling tale. I wouldn't have minded that
arrangement provided it had been an explicit one. I hadn't
done anything blameworthy to the girls I'd been with, and
Maria couldn't be accused of doing anything unjust to me.
We were the same. We shared the same shameless erotic
devotion, the same cynical tenderness. We feasted upon one
another, the question was merely which one of us would
leave the table first.
One evening we went to the opera and saw Madame
Butterfly. The fact that Maria liked Puccini too gave me great
pleasure. Years had passed, but it was as if things had come
full circle and we were again at the opera watching Madam
Butterfly, the only difference was that now no one tried to
refuse us a glass of Cinzano between the first and second
acts. Pinkerton's betrayal was just as callous as before, he
broke the heart of the delicate girl from Nagasaki, but
neither Puccini nor his librettists could have guessed that
only a few years later the Americans would be back to crush
the whole of Nagasaki. We saw it at the height of the
Vietnam war, and after the performance we went to a bar
in Stortorget and talked about the many thousands of
Pinkertons in Saigon - and the even greater number of
butterflies.
*
I wasn't surprised when Maria appeared one day at the end
of August and said that our relationship had to end. It merely
saddened me. I felt stupid. I felt just as awkward as the girls
who'd believed that four or six nights together could form
the basis of a lasting relationship.
The reason I wasn't taken aback by Maria's sudden
announcement was that several times recently she'd spoken
about being frightened of me. She'd begun to be frightened
of looking into my eyes, she told me on one occasion.
When I asked why, she turned away and said that all the
stories I recounted made her apprehensive, she was scared of
what she called my overweening imagination. I was amazed
by her jitteriness. Later she explained that she still loved
hearing me narrate, and that it wasn't the stories themselves
that worried her, but that, in the long run, she didn't know
if she could sustain an intimate relationship with someone
who inhabited his own world more than the real one. I'd
been rash enough to tell her about the little man with the
bamboo cane as well, and a couple of times I'd pointed him
out in the room. Honesty isn't always the best policy.
Now she told me that she'd applied for a job in Stock-
holm. It was a curator's post at one of the big museums.
We continued seeing each other after this, but only once or
twice a week. We remained good friends, there was never
any ill-feeling between us. I remembered how I'd continued
The Ringmaster's Daughter Page 7
