The Discoverer (16 page)

This was Jonas Wergeland’s first experience of the female sex. Right at the start he was made aware of how unpredictable they were, how different. The next day, Hjørdis came up to him in the playground to say she was sorry. Jonas shrugged it off as if it was no big deal. Actually, he had lost interest, he ‘broke it off’ shortly afterwards. And even if he was not exactly mad at her, this may have been an instinctive rejection of girls who did not take love
seriously
. Who did not consider it absolutely central. The fact is, though, that Jonas himself did not know whether he had been moved by pride or fear. After all, if she could fool him with a hug, who could say where it might end.

Jonas often thought of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis, three girls so alike that you could take them for one. The funny thing was that in the years to come they began to branch out in different directions – became so unlike one another that they were known to some as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. More than anyone, it was the triplets who taught Jonas that nature and nurture did not necessarily say everything there was to know about a person.
And although all three were passionate climbers, possibly because their births had coincided with the conquest of Mount Everest, it can be revealed that only one of them became a public figure, an eminent diplomat and expert on the Middle East. In interviews she always said the same thing: ‘As one of triplets you have to be a good mediator.’

It seems only reasonable that Jonas should have been torn between three girls at a time when he was also something of a mental bigamist – in making, that is, his first clumsy attempts to pursue several streams of consciousness at the same time. For months it became a regular routine with him to go down to the basement where, in the darkness, with the aid of the skipping rope he conducted his exhausting, but felicitous mental workouts. After a while, however, a new challenge presented itself: what was he to do with it, this discovery that he was capable of thinking multiple thoughts? So far it had simply been something beautiful, like sparkling crystals, like walking on air – a kick in itself. His dream of becoming a lifesaver, his first serious
undertaking
, having ended in a miserable anticlimax, he had become more and more convinced that the power of thought might hold the key to a worthy
alternative
, a possible new goal in life.

Could these parallel reflections save him from the flatness? Skipping gave him a reassuring sense of being inside a sphere, thanks to the arc of the rope. His observations, the layers of ramifying thoughts, could perhaps help him to get to the
other side
of things. What if he could plumb his own true depths through thought? Prove that reality was round. Even if the world was flat. If he was to be a discoverer, he would have to be the type who made discoveries with the mind, not with the eyes.

Or rather: Jonas suspected that his powers of imagination would make him good at a game such as chess, possibly very good, but then people would think he was a run-of-the-mill genius and he did not want to be a run-
of-the
-mill genius, he wanted to be an extraordinary human being. There were plenty of minor geniuses around, but few exceptional individuals. He aimed to be an exception.

Karen Mohr was clearly an exception. The more visits Jonas paid to her, the more he talked to her in that Provençal-style living room in the middle of an otherwise drab Norwegian housing estate, the more sympathy he had for this woman who believed that a moment could constitute a whole life. The way Jonas saw it, the reason she maintained her glowing complexion was that she lived under a mental sun lamp. He had the feeling that Karen Mohr also skipped, that she had succeeded in doing something which he had
unconsciously
been striving to do for some while: she had stopped time, she hung suspended in a permanent double skip.

‘I thought you worked with precious stones,’ Jonas said on one occasion as he stifled a contented belch, having just consumed one of her superb
omelettes
, a golden half-moon with a filling which was a delight to the palate.

That was not such a bad guess at that, she said, stroking one of the shells on the shelf. She probably could be regarded as a diamond-cutter of sorts. She was in the process of cutting a very big diamond, endeavouring to bring out the light in it. ‘I have spent years, many, many years on extracting every ounce from that day,’ she said. Jonas suddenly felt that he could discern
different
facets to her countenance, or that he was observing her from three sides at once, just as in the sketch on the wall. One thing, at least, was for sure: Karen Mohr did not have ‘a bit on the side’, what she had lay in the centre.

During his visits Jonas often noticed Karen Mohr run her fingers over a ceramic figurine or a smooth, round pebble on the shelf, with an
absent-minded
smile. Or she might pause beside the green plant which Jonas liked best because its leaves looked as though someone had taken the scissors to them – a
mónstera
, she told him later. Sometimes she would fall to fingering those elaborate leaves as if, through them, she was suddenly transported into reminiscences in which she relived certain inexhaustible seconds.

‘Did you leave right away?’ Jonas asked.

‘I stayed for some weeks,’ she said. ‘But I never saw him again, if that’s what you’re wondering.’ She poured herself a glass of Pernod. Jonas loved to watch the clear liquid turn greyish and semen-like when she added water. He had conceived the notion that this might be what fertilised her imagination.

Jonas’s eyes also lingered on the objects in her living room, as if he were understanding more and more of what he was seeing. At first he had thought that she was sad, hurting somehow, but he soon realised that she was happy; she was one of the most contented people he would ever meet. Karen Mohr taught Jonas that happiness could be something other than he had imagined.

‘It may be that we only
live
once during the years when we walk the earth,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘In which case we really have to cherish this time.’ She cleared the table. ‘I was lucky. I had those weeks by the
Mediterranean
. Some people, a great many, I think, have never experienced life – raw, vibrant life – in such a way.’

A lot of folk would, nonetheless, automatically have construed that
eccentric
living room of hers as being an escape from something. Jonas –
possibly
because he was a child – never thought of it that way. He understood, although he could not have put it into words, that even though Karen Mohr might retreat into a parallel world from time to time, she never lost sight of the ‘normal’ world. It was more as if that other world, her memories of Provence, was forever filtering through to enrich her life in Oslo. She said it
herself: ‘I don’t live in another world. I live in two worlds. Compared to most other people, who inhabit just the one, I am twice as happy.’ It would be no exaggeration to say that Karen Mohr was one of the greatest teachers Jonas Wergeland ever had. A true educator. Someone who brought out the best in him. Broadened his mind. Raised his consciousness. She taught him that it was possible to live in two places at once.

In due course, Jonas received an explanation for her mysterious outings on that one evening each month. One Saturday afternoon when he
happened
to be there, she suddenly said: ‘It’s time you were going. I have to get changed. I’m going into town.’ It turned out that she was going to a restaurant at the bottom of Bygdøy Allé by the name of Bagatelle, commonly known as Jaquet’s Bagatelle, after the owner Edmond Jaquet – although actually by this time it was being run by his son Georges. The Bagatelle was still a
colourful
and popular restaurant when Jonas was at university, not least because Georges Jaquet kept his food and wine prices low enough that even Jonas and his friends could afford to eat there. And since they were studying
astrophysics
, they gave Georges Jaquet many more stars than the latter-day Bagatelle could ever boast.

On one Saturday evening in the month, Karen Mohr dressed in her best and dined alone at Bagatelle on Bygdøy Allé. She described to Jonas what a pleasure it was to be welcomed by the unfailingly charming Georges in his dark suit and be seated at a white-clothed table under a drawing by Le
Corbusier
himself, who also happened to be a cousin of Edmond Jaquet’s. Jonas’s mouth watered when she told him what a treat it was to read the menu – different every day and written in both French and Norwegian; the thrill of running an eye over such tempting offerings as
turbot au vin blanc
and
riz de veau grand duc
. And she always had a word with the head chef or the
sous-chefs
, often in French. Georges set great store by regular patrons like Karen Mohr; she could even take the liberty of nodding discreetly to journalist Arne Hestenes or Robert Levin the pianist. Jonas never asked her why she
frequented
Bagatelle, but he fancied that he knew the reason. She went there to contemplate her life. To consider the fact that she had turned down one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. Perhaps the name of the place helped her to reduce the whole episode to a mere bagatelle. Or maybe she was actually
celebrating
it. Whatever the case, it was not a nostalgia trip, but a salute to a moment. Jonas imagined her having snails as a starter, to check the speed of her reminiscences, ensure that they slid through her very slowly.

On another occasion in her flat, when Jonas was enjoying freshly baked
croissants
and Karen was drinking what she called
café au lait,
not from a cup but from a bowl, Jonas had asked her why she had turned down that painter,
because he understood that she had rejected him, had said no to more than just having her portrait painted. Karen had thought for a moment, most likely because she was not sure whether Jonas would understand. Then she had said: ‘Even though I had only met him minutes before I knew that he was, how shall I put it, too simple. I could tell that he was a genius, and yet – perhaps for that very reason – he was too simple. Most men are too simple.’ To Jonas it sounded as if she were saying: too
flat
. Karen Mohr raised her bowl to her lips and took a sip. Jonas suspected that she was concealing a smile.

The worst of it was that she had no regrets, she said. Despite the intensity of the moment, those few charged seconds, the pleasure of being the object of his searching gaze, and despite the fact that she may well have been saying no to living with him, to sharing the luxury of his fame. And she had made the right decision.

‘Even though you could have made a name for yourself?’ Jonas asked.

She looked at him as if she did not understand the question, then went on talking about something else – if, that is, it was not the same thing: ‘I did not deem him … worthy,’ she said. That word ‘worthy’ was to become a catchword in Jonas’s life.

‘Did you ever find someone who was worthy?’ he asked, doing his best to pronounce the word with the same gravity as Karen Mohr, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.

‘No, I never did.’ And then, anticipating Jonas’s next question. ‘But I have never reproached myself.’

Jonas could not know that many times in the future his eyes would fill with tears at the memory of her face as she spoke of this. She had provided him with a mainstay, one that would stand within him forever; she taught him something about the uncompromising nature of love, the solemnity of it – a solemnity which made him feel a little uneasy, gave him a sense of the heavy responsibility which rested on his shoulders whenever he was faced with a woman. Karen Mohr had received an offer from a man admired by half the world, but had not deemed him worthy. Love is no mere bagatelle, that’s for sure, was Jonas’s first thought.

The memory of Karen Mohr would come into his mind in the oddest places, such as the time, decades later, when he found himself confronted by a desert of sorts, and saw thousands of warriors marching towards him, soldiers in full battle gear, rank upon rank. For a few seconds he had thought that they were coming to get him, to punish him; that this vast army had been mobilised because he, Jonas Wergeland, had been unfaithful in love, had shown himself
unworthy
.

For several terrible weeks Jonas had laboured under the delusion, as
nightmarishly
vivid as only the mind of a jealous man could produce, that his wife was having an affair with one of his closest friends. It is tempting to recount all his suppositions and mental agonies, his occasionally churlish behaviour and pathetic accusations, but while the whole notion of being a cuckolded husband is not nearly as old hat as many would have it – the sort of thing that only befalls the Strindbergs of this world – these aspects must take second place to the account of how the other party, Margrete that is, dealt with the situation and, not least, with her husband’s need for a bulwark of promises and assurances, in short: his desperate longing for security. And when one considers what Jonas himself had created in the way of problems some years earlier – with his fateful escapade in Lisbon – it is hard to see how Margrete managed to muster the patience she displayed; it says a lot about originality and forgiveness, about a woman who in so many ways had no equal.

For months Jonas inhabited two worlds, one of which – the delusional one – gradually gained the upper hand. In his imagination, he was constantly witness to every detail of Margrete’s infidelity, her rendezvous and sexual gymnastics with a man whom, till then, he had counted his friend. And every night in bed when, shamefully but nonetheless belligerently, he confronted her with accusations based on his delusions, lengthy tirades which always ended with him asking how else she could explain why she was no longer interested in him, sexually, she would hear him out, then repeat what she had said the night before, and the night before that: ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, you won’t listen anyway.’