The Discoverer (35 page)

He knew what he wanted to see first: Registan Square, the centre of the city, this too once a marketplace. And when he sank to the ground there, simply sat right down with his legs crossed, he knew that it had been worth all the travails of the preceding days; all the hassle, all the discouragement, all the dirty looks from officials in hilarious big hats. Although Aunt Laura refused to tell him about her own experiences, she had described this place to him again and again, told him that it was far and away the finest public square in the world – the West had nothing to equal it. She had
compared
it to a square with the most imposing gothic cathedrals on three of its four sides. ‘Imagine the Town Hall Square,’ she said, ‘And then imagine another, almost identical, Town Hall where the Western Station is, and a similar building on the spot where Restaurant Skansen sits. And all of them covered in the most exquisite ceramic tiles. Can you picture it?’ Yes, Jonas could picture it. The Town Hall in Oslo was, for many reasons, his favourite building in Norway.

Jonas sat in a sort of lotus position on the edge of the square, soaking up these ornamental riches, now partially restored after years of neglect. The buildings – the Ulug Beg to the west, the Tillya Kari to the north and the Shir Dar to the east – had once been
madrasahs
, Muslim colleges. Minarets flanked the three massive façades, in each of which was a doorway thirty to forty metres tall. The entire complex was faced with glazed tiles in bright colours, a mass of geometric patterns, floral motifs and Kufic calligraphy. An incredible jigsaw puzzle. Jonas lingered over each wall in turn, not
worrying
about the time, loving the way the slowly shifting light kept revealing
new details in the mosaics. He opened up. Tried to make himself open to something which lay within him and was only waiting for him to find a way of drawing it out. He
would
find a missing piece here, a story, or at least a snippet of a story.

He had sensed it the moment he reached the square and sank down onto the ground.

Jonas sat there gazing at the three façades. Like three gigantic oriental rugs. They almost seemed to cancel one another out, to generate a void of sorts, concentrated nothingness. He could lose himself in those walls, in the ornamentation, disappear into them. Get to the back of them, he thought. If he stared at them for long enough he might even be able to step out into Aunt Laura’s bazaar of a flat, where he had played as a child, with a torch in the dark.

Samarkand was more than a place. Jonas was conscious of a Samarkand beyond Samarkand, something which was not a city, but a crucial insight. This feeling was confirmed as he sat cross-legged on Registan Square. Because if there was any truth in his suspicion, that the world was flat, then here, in Samarkand, he had found the edge. Samarkand had to be a good place for an outsider. An outside-left position from which one could open up the game, change the rules almost. Not for nothing had Samarkand’s greatest ruler invented a variation on chess using twice as many pieces. For an instant, Jonas had a sense of being back in the world as it was before Copernicus, before people knew that the earth was round. Of being able to start afresh. Follow another fork in the road than that which humanity had so far taken.

And then, just as he felt that something vital was about to rise to the surface, that Samarkand beyond Samarkand, much in the way that one feels a sneeze building up, suddenly it slipped away and in its place was another thought, or a cluster of thoughts, as impenetrable and manifest and rich in nuance as one of the glowing façades before him: Margrete. He had come to this place because he thought he would meet Margrete here. Or at least that there was a possibility of meeting her here. If there was the slightest chance of meeting her anywhere in the world it had to be here, in Samarkand. After all, what was Margrete like? Margrete was the sort of person who could easily take it into her head to go to Samarkand. He realised, although he had never come anywhere close to formulating such a thought before, that he was
sure
he would meet Margrete here. It was the same sensation, albeit greatly intensified, which he had occasionally experienced as a lovesick teenager: you would go a long way out of your way, or ski for miles, if there was even the most microscopic chance of running into the girl you loved, as if by pure
accident
. And Jonas saw that, unconsciously, this was exactly what he had been
thinking this time too. If he went to Samarkand, the most unlikely place in the world, he was bound to run into her. It was a simple as that.

And with thoughts of this nature running through his head, he realised how much she had been on his mind all the years since she had left, how much he missed her, what an indelible impression those months with her had made on him.
This
was the story which he had come here to uncover. This was the Samarkand beyond Samarkand. The story of Margrete’s absence, the gaping void she had left inside him. Unbeknown to him, the memory of
Margrete
had bulked larger and larger in his mind. Maybe, he thought to himself, he was more deeply, more devotedly hers here, now, than when they were going out together.

Jonas rested his eyes on the blue dome of the Tillya Karis, let his mind dwell on a blue found nowhere else in the whole world. Wasn’t blue the colour of hope?

He felt that he was ready. Ready for something. The world was flat and he was sitting on its edge. He knew that something was going to happen, but he was not prepared for the fact that it was already happening. He was just getting to his feet, and then it happened. He felt a hand being placed lightly on his shoulder. There was someone behind him.

Why did he do it?

During his years with Leonardo, in the epoch of the Italian school and more especially at the height of their Grorud filming fervour, Jonas
imagined
that he had forgotten Margrete. One might even say that Michelangelo Antonioni helped him, or consoled him, by making films which showed that love today was an extremely tricky, and possibly downright impossible,
business
. Only once did the thought of Margrete crop up, like a wound, in his mind – when they were hunting for a leading lady. They were looking for a girl who would be as ravishingly beautiful as Jeanne Moreau or Monica Vitti. ‘Whatever happened to that Bangkok chick of yours,’ Leonard asked. ‘Shut up,’ Jonas retorted. It was one of the few occasions when he felt like punching his pal.

In the end they picked Pernille, mainly because she was a year older and had a scooter, a Vespa, which was the perfect prop for a film as heavily
influenced
by the Italians as Leonard’s. Jonas could not deny that Pernille was disconcertingly attractive, with a dark and rather sulky beauty reminiscent of Claudia Cardinale; secretly he dreamed of being kissed by her the way Cary Grant was kissed by Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious
: for three whole minutes, the most famous kiss in the history of the cinema, or the most
groundbreaking
at any rate, in the way it so cunningly got round the censors.

But Leonard wanted them back to back. A good many weird ten-minute
tales were shot in open countryside, with a lot of wandering past one another, far apart, a lot of staring into space. ‘Look anxious,’ Leonard would yell at Jonas, ‘look as though you’re feeling guilty about something, although you don’t know what.’ Nothing happened and everything was a mystery.
Nonetheless
, Jonas was often amazed by the way in which what, to him, was simply a succession of obscure scenes could, when shuffled around and spliced together in the final, grainy short films which Leonard showed on a sheet in the Red Room to the accompaniment of the projector’s hum, suddenly appeared to have a vague plot. He once asked his friend what he enjoyed most about film-making and was not at all surprised when Leonard replied: ‘The editing.’

Then came the great revolution. Or the great loss. The loss of wrath. If, that is, it had not been lost long before. Jonas and Leonard had missed seeing Antonioni’s new film
Blow-Up
at the cinema, having been on their summer holidays at the time, but just over a year later they found themselves in the Oslo Cinematographers’ screening room in Stortingsgaten along with the Film Club study group, for a showing of this unforgettable movie, so steeped in the London of the sixties, steeped in the music and design of the sixties and, above all else, steeped in metaphysical overtones. It was about a
photographer
who had taken some pictures of a couple, eventually just the woman, in a park and when he enlarged the photographs discovered that on film he had also – possibly – caught a crime being committed in the background, in the bushes, a man with a gun and a body on the ground. Amazing, thought Jonas. You take pictures of what you think is a love scene, and it turns out to be connected to a murder. With his heart in his mouth he watched as the main character blew up one section of the photograph, from which he then blew up another section. Jonas and Leonard sat in the dark, eyes glued to the screen, letting themselves be seduced by Antonioni’s visual conjuring tricks. Like the photograph they, too, were blown up, enlarged. For a while after this Leonard regretted having chosen film rather than photography. They felt like borrowing Olav Knutzen’s Leica and Rolleiflex and taking pictures of every bush they saw. What would they find if they enlarged sections of them? For several weeks they were possessed of an urge to blow up everything.

It so happened that the memory of a personal blow-up was still quite fresh in Jonas’s mind. The year before he had been head over heels in love. And blow-up is the word. After all, what is love but one huge exaggeration. And even more so if it hits you during that crazy, mixed-up period known as
adolescence
. Jonas was constantly aware of how, depending on the circumstances, his eyes would turn into a microscope or a telescope. All of a sudden his ears were as sensitive as the finest microphones; he could readily detect ten
different nuances of tone in one ‘Hi.’ He could smell a girl at two hundred metres, and if a feminine shoulder or arm were to nudge against him, his skin felt as tender as a newborn kitten. Just watching a girl sucking on a lolly pop made him want to run amok. The sight of Anne Beate Corneliussen using his bicycle pump to blow up her tyre could send him into inordinate frenzies of excitement. Jonas felt as though his head was becoming human, while his body was still stuck at the animal stage. And maybe it was this same split which gave rise to the tendency to exaggerate everything – if, that is, it was not a last, desperate attempt to hang on to childhood, a state in which reality and fantasy could exist side by side. Later, on the other side of the border, so to speak, it would occur to Jonas that exaggeration was a toll you had to pay when you passed into the realms of adulthood.

For Jonas Wergeland the summer of 1967 was never the Summer of Love. He would have understood, though, if anyone were to describe the following winter as the Winter of Love. Because those were the months when he saw red, which is to say: when his love for Eva N. burned brightest and he made fruitless forays into Lillomarka on skis every single Sunday, hoping to run into her – quite by chance – at Sinober.

Then, on the eleventh Sunday, an exceptionally cold day in the middle of March, Fortune smiled on Jonas. Having taken Daniel’s laughing, but
well-meant
, advice to apply grip wax to the middle section of his ski soles, he plunged into the forest, where skiing conditions were still decent. He strode out frantically, as if he knew that this was his last chance; conscious,
shamefully
almost, of how much fitter he was, and that he was really getting the hang of it now, even managing to exploit the give of the skis in the
innumerable
dips. Yet again he stopped at the foot of the last slope before Sinober to blow a coating of rime over his brows and lashes, and yet again an impressive diagonal stride brought him skimming up to the café. Everything was the same as always, apart from a bright flash of red outside the main café
building
. At first he thought maybe he was seeing spots in front of his eyes, due to his racing pulse, but no, there she was, there was Eva’s sturdy figure and, not least, her red anorak.

He pretended not to see her, leaned nonchalantly on his poles, as if resting for a second or two, before wheeling round, voracious mile-eater that he was, and scooting off again. He stopped beside the signpost, at a crossroads with lots of arrows pointing to different lives. In the end she came over to him, with half a slice of bread and goat’s cheese cupped in her mittens. She eyed his rime-covered eyebrows curiously. ‘Jonas? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you liked skiing.’ What she did not say was that she fell for him at that very moment.

A month later Jonas asked himself, for several reasons, why a girl like Eva N. should have fallen for him. From a subjective point of view, flushed with love as he was, he had of course been sure that he would win her, but objectively he knew that she was unattainable. He could execute all the best Gjermund Eggen moves and it would make no difference. He could not know that what Eva, like a couple of dozen other women, had fallen for was, quite simply, the look in his eyes. Or an expression which was written large on his face, as clear as the scar over his eyebrow. They immediately perceived that he, Jonas Wergeland – although he did not know it – was restlessly searching for something great, something important, and every one of them believed that they were the key to this great and important thing for which he was searching. Jonas’s conscious or unconscious urge to discover things and the indefinable talent from which it derived was as obvious to these women as a set of antlers on his head would have been. In their eyes he was one in a billion. The bearer of different thoughts, a man whose eyes, whose face,
testified
to the fact that he was obsessed with the desire to achieve a goal, an outer limit, possibly even a backside, with the power to expand reality. And this, they thought – while at the same time thinking that he must sense it too – he could only do through a woman. To them, that handful of women, this was irresistible, more powerful than any aphrodisiac. They were not attracted by good looks or power or money – and most certainly not by skiing skills – but by a curiosity which was focused on an impossibility.