Then I said something about feeling a little sullied by our
financial arrangement, but reminded him that we were still
living in a capitalist society and that a piece of intellectual
property was indeed regarded as a commodity. 'This is not
very different from an artist taking payment for his paint-
ings,' I said. 'They change ownership too, and the artist
can't have any claim to the paintings he's already sold.' I
believe Johannes was glad to be reminded of the normality
of our arrangements.
He said: 'I can't preclude the possibility that I'll use some
of these in a novel I'm writing at the moment ...'
'Perfectly all right,' I replied. 'You'll make money out of
them, a lot maybe, and good luck to you. It's not unusual to
sell a painting for much more than one originally paid for it.
It's what's known as a good investment.'
Fortunately he was the one who brought up the most
sensitive matter. He pointed at the sheaf of papers in front of
him and said: 'But how can I be sure you won't let the cat
out of the bag by saying that these aphorisms are really your
work?'
I said I was only too pleased that the aphorisms would get
published and reminded him that I wanted to stay out of the
limelight. I also mentioned that I had several other things at
home, jottings of various kinds, and that it wasn't incon-
ceivable that we'd return to these on a subsequent occasion.
If I didn't keep quiet about the aphorisms he took with him
today, I'd ruin the opportunity to sell him something in the
future.
This last point was an important one. I had to emphasise
that I had no intention of selling anything I'd written to
anyone other than Johannes. This was vital for building up a
sales network of many clients. Each one had to feel that he
or she was unique, my sole and only favourite.
I had reason to believe that this strategy would work for
many years to come. Authors don't go round announcing
that they employ a ghost-writer. They want to seem like
original and thoroughly authentic individuals.
Correctly handled, there was no reason to fear that my
customers would begin to shoot their mouths off to one
another. I needn't be afraid of the web unravelling, the
threads would only be spun between me and each of my
clients. There would be none to connect my customers with
one another.
Johannes looked about furtively, then he leant across the
table and whispered: 'Two hundred cash, and I'll give you a
cheque for six hundred. OK?'
I nodded. I was particularly grateful for some cash and
not solely because of the beer I had to pay for. Though the
evening was still young, I recalled that the bank was closed.
With discreet movements, almost as if he was performing a
ballet, he took out the two hundred kroner in notes and
his cheque book. He wrote out the cheque as slowly and
thoughtfully as if he was signing a tax return, then pushed
the cheque and notes across the table towards me, and
I folded the sheets and pushed them over the table to
Johannes. Again he squinted round the room, but he didn't
see the little man with the bamboo cane who was about to
run under a waiter's feet.
Johannes quickly stowed the folded pages in the inner
pocket of his jacket. 'Shall we go?' he asked. But I said I was
going to have another beer. 'Thank you very much, Petter,'
were his parting words. With that he got up and began
walking towards the exit. As he turned the corner towards
the cloakroom I saw him pat his breast, presumably to make
sure he really did have the gilt-edged sheaf of papers in his
pocket. I thought I might photocopy his cheque before I
cashed it. I didn't quite know why, but I had the feeling it
might be useful to keep some souvenirs.
It was a good piece of business for Johannes. His return on
those aphorisms was many many times his outlay. But that's
the way it is with any sort of paper investment, you never
know what it may be worth in the future. But I needed the
money right there and then. Maria was on the train to
Stockholm.
Johannes died a short time ago. He will be remembered for
his precise, almost lapidary axioms.
I had already decided not to feed any single author with
more than one genre. It would have seemed highly
implausible if the city had suddenly turned into a literary
cornucopia. There was only one stud, but his rut was
enough to inseminate an entire flock of writers.
And so, with one exception, I fed Johannes solely with a
variety of adages, thoughts and aphorisms, or with 'spice' as
he once called it. Since he was one of the moving spirits
behind the Marxist-Leninists' May Day procession, I also
gave him several clever slogan and catchword ideas over the
years, though I never took any payment for them.
The exception was a plot for a story set in Vietnam. The
sheet of notes he got for a hundred kroner ran something
like this:
Two identical twins are born a few minutes apart in a small village
in the Mekong Delta at the beginning of the 1950s. After their
mother's rape and murder at the hands of a French soldier before the
boys are six months old, they are adopted by separate families and
grow up without seeing each other. One twin joins the FNL, and
the other the American-backed government force. After the Tet
offensive the twins come face to face in the jungle. Both are on
reconnaissance prior to a major action but as yet it's only the two
brothers who've clashed. They are identical in appearance, and each
recognises his twin brother. Now, one of them has to die. But the
two soldiers are equally good with their knives, they have precisely
the same genetic characteristics, and manage to wound each other
fatally.
Some useful ideas: dwell on the choice facing the two of them, the
logic of war. The man who doesn't kill his brother risks getting
killed himself. Do the brothers manage to say anything to each other
before their last gasp? Do they gain any new insight? (A short
dialogue here?) Don't forget the battle scene: the two dying twins
who once were at peace with one another in their mother's womb
and later, when they each suckled at one of her breasts, but who
have now killed each other. The circle is complete. They were born
in the same hour and now their blood mingles in a single pool. Who
finds the twins? What reaction does the discovery provoke?
Johannes used the story, but turned it into a novella. When
I read it in a literary periodical a year later, I thought it was
well written, and I was particularly impressed with his
detailed knowledge of military hardware and all the telling
background descriptions of Vietnam. But it made me rather
depressed all the same.
Johannes' version of the story ended, of course, with the
twin who represented the army of liberation being unable to
kill his twin brother, even though this brother had enlisted
as a lackey of US imperialism. And so he'd been brutally
liquidated himself.
Throughout the novella the words 'sly' and 'heroic' were
used repeatedly, but never of the same twin. Johannes had
known how to deploy the fact that the twins were identical.
He had used the story to demonstrate how little effect
inherited characteristics have on a person's development.
I can't say I was shocked by this turn of events, for it was
hardly surprising. That was the way a lot of literature was
written in the seventies. Literature's job wasn't principally to
debate problems. It was supposed to be uplifting.
*
During the next few years I established myself on a national
basis and I also made a few contacts in the other Scandi-
navian countries as well. It took longer to go international,
that was the next step.
One important principle was that I couldn't sell the same
notes more than once. That would have been spotted. What
a spectacle it would have been if two detective novels
by two separate authors based on exactly the same plot
had appeared in the same year! The thought struck me
occasionally and it was a seductive one, because it would
indubitably have been interesting to see, just once, what two
authors made of the same idea.
I also had to be careful which stories I told in company. I
couldn't run the risk of a critic pointing out that a recently
published novel was based on a story which had been doing
the rounds for ages and which the reviewer had most
recently heard related across a table at the Tostrupkjelleren.
This forced me to segregate the stories I could tell myself
from the plots that were earmarked for sale. I had to curb
my oral development. Living with this limitation was an
excellent challenge. It pushed me ever harder to invent
something new the whole time.
Right from the start I had to live with one big exception
to this rule. I'd told so many good stories to Maria that I
didn't feel I could keep them all back. If Maria read
Norwegian novels during the eighties and nineties, she'd
have chuckled quite regularly. In more recent years she'd
also have been able to reminisce about the days when
she nestled in my arms, by reading various foreign novels. I
have several film synopses on my conscience too, or on
my list of credits, depending on how you look at it. I like
the thought of Maria going to the cinema and watching an
epic cinematic version of one of the many stories I made up
for her after we'd made love. I need no other copyright
acknowledgement.
So from the first, Maria was the only one able to pinpoint
me as The Spider. I never told my authors about Maria, and
I never told Maria about them, even though my business
was well established by the time we last met. But I felt I was
safe with her - she had used my sendees too. Maria's darling
child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. That was her little
secret that she didn't want revealed. Perhaps she was as
scared of it becoming common knowledge as Johannes was
of the whole city finding out I'd written the twenty aphor-
isms that had added zest to the novel that proved to be his
literary breakthrough. In this regard but only in this, Maria
was in exactly the same boat as Johannes.
When a thing was sold, it was gone. This didn't pose a
problem. The idea that I'd ever run out of ideas never
occurred to me, it was the only thing I simply couldn't
conceive. I'd been much alone in childhood, I'd had my
own flat since I was eighteen, I'd been in training ever since
I went to nursery school.
However, I made a point of keeping a photocopy of all
the notes I sold. They were kept in separate ring-binders
marked 'SOLD'. On the top of each page I wrote who I'd
sold them to and how much for. In the early days this was
the only system of receipts I used, but that was before I
realised that it was possible one day for a counter-force to
build up, to equalise the pressure that arose from within
me. It was before I began to carry a dictaphone in my
inside pocket when I talked to authors, and before I began
to tape telephone conversations. However, I did keep
photocopies of every cheque I'd received right back to my
earliest transactions. And I might as well make it clear that
those, too, are kept in my bank box, together with the
tapes.
The enterprise got going just at the time when photo-
copiers were coming on to the market. For a short while
I was dependent on the coin-operated machines at the
university or in the library, but it wasn't long before I had
my own Rank Xerox. When personal computers made
their appearance in the 1980s, the office work became much
simpler, and when I went international in earnest, I never
travelled anywhere without a powerful laptop.
I had to accept being the centre of a large circle of acquaint-
ance. This was a bit of a trial sometimes, but it wasn't
onerous. I was a sociable person, I was well liked, and I
rarely found I had to pay my share of restaurant bills. I
couldn't always explain why myself but, whenever a bill was
presented, someone had almost always settled up for me.
That was just the way it was.
I had a reputation as a fount of ideas. If they'd only
known! None of them could see more than the tip of the
iceberg. How could I have kept the business going if all my
clients had discovered that, in reality, I'd spun a finely
meshed web which would one day be so extensive and
fragile and have so many loose ends that it was doomed to
unravel?
At any caf� gathering, several of those seated round the
table might be my clients, but each thought that he or she
was the only one, at least in the early years. They thought I
was monogamous, and I've always considered that a
peculiarly amusing aspect of my unusual trade. To begin
with none of my customers had the slightest inkling that
I was really highly promiscuous. I sometimes felt like a
polygamist who enjoys the favours of several wives simul-
taneously. I knew about them and they knew about me,
but they knew nothing of each other.
If six or eight of us were in company, possibly three of
those present might have bought a plot or two from me. But
each thought he enjoyed a special relationship, and so they
maintained their respect for each other. This was what they
lived for. Many of them had already lost their self-respect. In
those days, lack of self-respect was so rare that I noticed it;
maybe today it wouldn't stand out so much. Self-respect is
the name of a mental state that is less and less in evidence.
And certainly as a virtue self-respect has gone completely
out of fashion.
Naturally no one announced that next month they were
publi
shing a novel based on an idea they'd bought from me.
But, on the other hand, I several times sensed a certain
nervousness that I might suddenly forget myself and blurt
out, for example, that Berit's critically acclaimed detective
story was built on a six-page synopsis I'd sold her for four
thousand kroner. I could detect such nervousness in an
overstrained laugh or a tendency towards abrupt or over-
frequent digressions.
While we sat in the Theatercaf� celebrating Karin's suc-
cess in winning a prestigious award for her latest novel,
she spent the entire evening following me with her eyes.
She was ill at ease. I, on the other hand, was feeling
marvellous. In the citation they had specifically remarked
on the elegant construction of the narrative. Quite right,
I thought. I was satisfied with Karin. She'd taken good
care of what I'd entrusted to her, she hadn't buried her
talent.
I wielded considerable power in such company, and that
was fine by me. I could see nothing wrong in feeling
powerful. Power doesn't have to be abused, and I was a
good example of that. I had shared my own power with
others. I'd always been excessively well endowed with ima-
gination, so much so that I'd even begun to organise a major
power distribution. Bold it may have been, brazen too, but
principally it was generous. As far as the media were con-
cerned it was Berit who had power and I who was weak. If
I'd been longing for a spot in the media limelight I would
have been a self-sacrificing person. But I've never wanted a
place in the public eye.
It amused me to see what my authors made of all the ideas
I fed them, that was all. I had a function, and so I had to
function. I had to have something to live on as well, I had
to ensure my cut of the profits of an industry that was
becoming ever more dependent on my efforts.
When the results were tolerable, I had the pleasant feeling
of being surrounded by my own pack of writers. I could feel
like a king in an enlightened autocracy. I was a passable chess
player, but I was even better at playing with living pieces. I
liked pulling the strings, and I found it entertaining to watch
how the proud authors put on airs. It was fun to watch them
disporting themselves.
Even though I wasn't listed in any professional register, I
decided my business deserved a name. So one day I wrote
'WRITERS' AID' on the large binders of notes I'd sold. It
was a good name.
My business was dependent on bilateral contact with
authors both at home in my flat and in town. I had to
cultivate the art of having several best friends at once. This
led to many invitations to parties and weekend jaunts, far
too many.
Once contact had been established I never needed to push
new products on to my clients. As soon as they required
fresh material, they would return of their own accord, come
back to Uncle Petter. So they would get more and more
dependent on my wares. Some stopped thinking for them-
selves altogether once they saw what I could supply from my
own kaleidoscope of clever ideas, it was as if their brains had
been sucked out. They claimed they felt quite empty.
Making people dependent on me gave me no pleasure,
but it was the way I made my living. I lived by hooking fish
with my bait. I wasn't selling hash or acid, nor yet cheap
cigarettes or smuggled booze. It was imagination, harmless
imagination. But it was the key to urban esteem, the key to
something as complex as a post-modern identity.
If I came across a needy customer � at a large party, for
instance � he would draw me into a corner, out into a lobby
or even sometimes into the lavatory. There he would glance
nervously this way and that before gabbling out his errand in
a low voice: 'Have you got anything, Petter?' Or: 'Have you
got anything today?' Or even: 'What could you give me for
a thousand kroner?'
Both in terms of genres and price categories I had plenty
to offer. A simple bit of inspiration or a pep-talk was clearly
in a totally different price class from, say, the complete
outline of a longish novel, or a highly detailed film synopsis.
The Ringmaster's Daughter Page 11
