The Discoverer (17 page)

Then one December day she came home from work and asked him to take the following week off from his job at NRK. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Just do it,’ she said. ‘Make some excuse about illness in the family,’ she said. ‘But why?’ he said again. ‘Because I want to show you a world as unreal as the one you’re living in right now,’ she said. Later Jonas was to think that what she had
actually
been saying was: ‘Because you are dead. Because I want to bring you back to life.’

A week later they were at the airport. Jonas wanted to ask where they were going, but some foolish sense of pride prevented him from doing so. Margrete did not say anything either, not about their destination anyway, otherwise she was quite chatty, making comments about the other
passengers
, relating funny incidents from her many travels as a girl. Not until they were in the transit hall at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport, when Margrete indicated to him that their flight was now boarding, did Jonas see the name of their destination on the display: Beijing! Beijing, China. Margrete slept through most of the long flight, but Jonas was so agitated that he was not
even capable of enjoying the deluxe in-flight service. But when they landed, she said, as if referring to his recent uncivilised behaviour: ‘Here, in these people’s eyes, we are both barbarians, here – on neutral ground – we might be able to talk to one another.’

As it turned out, though, Beijing was merely a stopover point, they still had a bit to go. Once again Jonas was amazed by what a woman of the world Margrete proved to be in such situations. She obviously knew a smattering of essential Chinese words and phrases – she could certainly make herself understood – and while they were waiting for their domestic flight, she managed to get hold of some sort of fast food: bulky, white polystyrene boxes whose contents Jonas dared do little more than pick at, but which she,
Margrete
, gobbled down with every sign of genuine relish, aided by chopsticks which she plied as if they were natural extensions of her fingers. With her faintly oriental features one could have been forgiven for thinking that these were her natural surroundings.

Throughout the flight, on board a domestic aircraft which reminded him of a run-down flat, reeking of grease and stale cooking smells, Jonas sat stiff with fright. Most of the passengers were soldiers, all clad in heavy overcoats which they kept on and which gave off an odour of sun-warmed rubbish bins. Jonas kept an anxious eye on the emergency exits – he could feel a distinct draught from the one closest to him. In all the confusion he had not caught the name of their destination, so he swallowed his pride and asked Margrete. ‘Wait and see,’ she said. ‘Why can you never just enjoy a surprise?’

But when they landed, late in the afternoon, Jonas still had no idea where they were. There was no snow, but it was bitterly cold and it was getting dark. They were met by a driver and a man who was obviously some sort of guide. Margrete had arranged everything in advance, more as a matter of form than out of necessity. It very quickly became plain to Jonas that she was every bit as well-informed as their guide. They drove through a broad, monotonous landscape. Jonas recalled a film he had once seen,
Yellow Earth
by Chen Kaige. ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me where we are?’ Jonas asked the guide. The man turned to look at him in some surprise: ‘Welcome to Xi’an, one of the oldest cities in China,’ he said with a smile.

At the hotel, a showy but characterless modern building right next to the old clock tower in the heart of Xi’an, they ate a silent supper in the
restaurant
. Their guide, a middle-aged man whom Margrete had invited to join them, sensed that something was up and in an effort to lighten the mood, as they were finishing their meal he went over to an ancient, out-of-tune piano and began to play a piece which at first – and mainly because that was what he was expecting – Jonas took to be a traditional Chinese melody, some old
chestnut, a worn-out tune, but suddenly he recognised it. It was not very well played, but it was, nonetheless, ‘Morning’ by Edvard Grieg. The other diners applauded enthusiastically. The guide was all smiles when he returned to Jonas and Margrete. Jonas knew he ought to say something, that he owed it to the guide to ask how he came to know that tune, since the answer would no doubt reveal a lot about the man and his background, his life, but Jonas had been poisoned by his own thoughts, his own worries, by the underworld which at all times existed alongside the one he inhabited: a phosphorescent green stalactite cave in which Margrete committed the most obscene acts with another man, one of Jonas’s friends, at that; an ice-cold basement which, by means of some sort of osmosis, had seeped into his Xi’an world. He was so bewildered that he proceeded once again, in the hotel room, as if it were the only thing of which he was capable, to ask Margrete what the other man was like in bed, whether he took her from in front or behind? He knew he ought to be feeling more enthusiastic, show some interest in the place and the sights they would be seeing there, but his mind was clouded, as they say. The thought of Margrete’s supposed affair bulked larger for him than the whole amazing existence of China. Margrete did not answer him. But she talked, chatted about other things, reassured him indirectly, as it were. And at night she snuggled up to him, she did not get mad; at no time over the past six months had she avoided him, not even when he had hurled the most
appalling
accusations at her, even though it was possible – he did not dare to pursue this thought to its conclusion – that she had problems of her own; every night she lay down behind him, snuggled in close to his back, as if to warm him. Or as if he were a child, a little creature that did not know what was best for it, that had to be protected from itself. It was bitterly cold in Xi’an that December: ‘I’m freezing,’ he said.

‘I’m here,’ she whispered behind him, in his ear. He felt her warm breath against his skin.

Somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, Jonas suspected that these fancies were nothing but red herrings, meant to distract his mind from
something
possibly more troubling: the fear that he was not worthy. ‘Worthy’
pronounced
with stretched vowels and a rolled ‘r’. From the moment when he had run into Margrete again he had known that she was a more intelligent person than he. Better equipped, in all ways. He had thought – as if he were living in the age of chivalry – that he had to bring her something, as proof that he was, despite all the signs to the contrary, good enough. That he quite simply had to do some great deed. And although he eventually abandoned such notions, he was occasionally inclined to believe that this was why he had never really settled into his cushy announcer job, and was indeed what had moved him to
make the whole
Thinking Big
series. Nevertheless, here he was, in Xi’an, and he was so afraid. Afraid that even that great work was not enough. Afraid that in some way it was too simple. So afraid that he had had to seek refuge in another, more plausible reason for his fear; a non-existent lover. Part of him cosseted the thoughts that raged inside his head, part of him was ashamed of them, of the details which he magnified to the point of unrecognisability, as though he were on the track of a crime far more serious than adultery.

The first thing Margrete did the next morning was to take him to a clothes market down a side street where, for next to nothing, she bought him a green quilted military greatcoat with gold buttons and an imitation fur collar. They climbed into the car and drove for half an hour through Shaanxi province, past bare fields and gardens full of leafless trees, to the district of Lintong, where they pulled up outside what looked like a huge hangar surrounded by smaller buildings and a busy souvenir shop. Margrete knew exactly where to go, she bought tickets then made a beeline for the largest building and led Jonas up a stairway flanked by urns adorned with dragons. Then suddenly, after passing through a dimly-lit vestibule lined with sales booths, they came face to face with what Margrete had brought him halfway round the world to see. And actually this said all there was to say about Margrete Boeck, this was her in a nutshell: you accused her of something and instead of answering you she took you to China.

And so it was here, as they stood at the pale-green railing on a platform overlooking a piece of ground the size of a football pitch, a sort of enormous sandpit, that Jonas, clad in a military greatcoat, discovered himself, or rather: an army of replicas, semblances of himself. Thousands of petrified human forms. He felt himself to be every bit as dead as them. He felt as if he had been baked, burned, by love.

It was the strangest sight. Jonas stood there like a general inspecting his troops of fired clay, terracotta, who looked as though they were marching up out of the ground, ready to do battle. There had to be a couple of thousand soldiers there, row upon row of them, all life-size, and behind them
thousands
of others, still hidden in the earth and waiting for the archaeologists to dig them out. The whole thing seemed oddly familiar, he must have read about it somewhere or other. Either that, or he had had this feeling inside him for a long time. The feeling that something, an entire world, would rise up out of the ground itself. Ever since that summer with Bo Wang Lee. And he understood, or thought he understood, what Margrete’s purpose had been in bringing him here to see this wonder.

While he leaned on the railing, as if on a boat, gazing at an ocean,
Margrete
told him about the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, tyrant and reformer,
who built with one hand and pulled down with the other; the emperor who was responsible both for the Great Wall and the decree ordering the burning of all scrolls. Less well-known were his paranoid endeavours to safeguard his life even after death. Archaeologists had not yet ventured to explore the burial mound, the mausoleum itself, which lay some kilometres from there, and which Jonas would see on the way back.

Jonas listened, and the more Margrete told him, the more this story seemed to find an echo in his own ambition, his urge to make a name for himself, not least when he thought of the television series into which he had invested such an inhuman amount of work and which he had only recently presented to over a million Norwegians – a Great Wall of images, if you like.

Jonas surveyed the thousand-odd soldiers so far unearthed. He thought he could also descry, like something lying
behind
them, the over six
thousand
figures waiting under the ground. They were all part of Emperor Qin’s vast kingdom of the dead. The terracotta army was there to defend his tomb, ensure him of eternal life. Margrete concluded her tale. Jonas looked at her, saying nothing, but with a wordless question on his face: Why are you telling me all this? And at that same moment it dawned on him that in talking about Emperor Qin she was actually talking about him, Jonas; she regarded them, Qin and him, as parallel characters, though not in the way he had first
imagined
– the real similarity between them had little to do with their ambitious undertakings.

‘Extreme security calls for extreme brutality,’ she said.

Jonas knew what she meant. He stood there inside a huge hangar, as far away from home as he could possibly be, on Earth at any rate, stood there clad in a quilted military greatcoat, like a living, breathing terracotta soldier, and he knew.

She caught and held his eye. ‘Jonas,’ she said. He met the gaze of those dark-brown eyes which did not see through him, but into him, seeming to embrace his whole being. ‘You can never feel secure,’ she said. Or did not say. He read it in her eyes.

They spent some days in Xi’an, in that windy, dusty city which seemed to Jonas to mark a new beginning for Margrete and him, or at any rate a fresh chance. It was also the starting point of the Silk Road, Marco Polo’s Chang’an, once the greatest city in the world. Jonas had spent a whole day walking about on his own amid the fumes of coal fires and baked yams, trailed up and down Xi’an’s four main streets, which ran to the four points of the compass:
symbolic
, so it seemed, of four alternative paths. His marriage, which had been pretty rocky for some time, suddenly seemed full of possibility again, there was no knowing where it might end. He wandered the streets in his heavy
greatcoat like a terracotta soldier resurrected; roamed around Xi’an, his head buzzing with thoughts – and it came to him. No matter what
he
did – built a wall around her, built a wall
for
her – he could never feel secure, there was no guarantee that she would find him worthy. All he could do was to trust her. He had been like a lump of clay, set hard, but he had been brought back to life. And he knew why. She had breathed life into him.

He woke up, became a new man. Margrete took him by the arm and showed him around, needed no guide. In an almost tourist-free Xi’an, under a clear, cold blue sky, they visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Green Dragon Temple and the Provincial Museum of History which, as it
happened
, was also a mosque. Something about her passion for candied plums, which they bought threaded onto a stick, and the way she ordered the taxi drivers about, told him that she had been here before. With amazing
assurance
she tracked down the best herbalists and silk merchants, as well as the most out-of-the-way restaurants, hidden down backstreets, in gardens where carp and mandarin fish swam in glass tanks and snakes coiled in cages with reassuring stones on their lids. Margrete, too, seemed different now, somehow relieved, or hopeful; she came out with all sorts of information about China, smiled and pointed at little children with knitted Gagarin helmets on their heads, but bare bottoms showing through the slits in the backs of their
trousers
even in the biting cold. At night she lay and looked at him, reminded him of things they had done when they were going out together in sixth grade. Of the weighing machines at the Eastern station that dispensed wise sayings along with a note of their weight. Of the time when Jonas won a ski race because the weather suddenly changed and all the other competitors’ skis got clogged up. They laughed. Laughed together as they had not done in ages. Her eyes were golden, deep and smouldering. And like gold they only really came into their own in the twilight.