The Discoverer (47 page)

He read on, page after page in which a description of various doings was interlaced with a stream of thoughts. He got caught up in his own
associations
, lost himself completely in his own memories, dreams, what might almost have been perceptions. Every sentence, every word seemed to lead him down a sidetrack and from there down offshoots from this sidetrack. He began to discern the central theme: the transience of all things. That and the eternality of the smallest daily task. Millions of years as opposed to a second. Now and then he had to laugh at a particular formulation. ‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,’ he read at one point. Jonas was
filled with a colossal intensity; he sat quite still, but on another level he was firing on all cylinders. By chance he happened to look up again. Two hours had passed. For some time he had had a definite sense, in his mind, of being by the sea; he thought he could hear the waves, the swell. He flinched at the sight of the motionless pink rock face, the freezing winter panorama. The landscape had not opened up, but
he
had.

And which book was this? It was
To the Lighthouse
. He read on, conscious of how the author, Virginia Woolf, made him think about thinking, how she could almost catch a thought before it was born. At last, a kindred spirit, his heart exulted; someone who succeeded in showing how thousands of thoughts criss-crossed in one’s mind in the course of a day. Someone who made thought the protagonist. Jonas was bursting with excitement and delight. He did not think that Margrete had read this book. But then he came to a passage which she had marked, he recognised her handwriting in the margin, or a youthful version of it. On the next page he was pulled up short by a metaphor to the effect that in the heart and mind of a woman there could stand tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, like treasures in the tombs of kings. Then came a question which Jonas had also asked himself: was there some art known to love or cunning, by which to push through to those sacred
chambers
? In the margin he saw a ‘Yes!’ in Margrete’s girlish hand. Again Jonas’s heart began to pound palpably.

He carried on reading, even more engrossed, if that were possible. Little did he know that he was risking his life. He had the feeling that he was not looking down at a book, but down into a brain, a body, a landscape far, far greater, deeper, wider than the scene, Jotunheim, which lay before him when he raised his eyes. Jonas felt the world’s flatness threatening, thanks to a measly book, to give way to hitherto unseen depths. Later he was to believe that he had, for a couple of endless seconds, been only a hair’s breadth away from discovering the true nature of life; it was so clear and concrete that he could almost have reached out and touched it, and said: ‘Here it is!’

Then something happened. He came to a new chapter, totally different. Time sped past, year after year and people departed. All of a sudden things were happening with bewilderingly rapidity and this transmitted itself to his thoughts, they were jammed nose to tail, causing pile-ups. He felt as though he had been sucked into a corridor and God knew what awaited him at the other end. And then – it was like being brutally robbed – the central
character
died, in a parenthesis, for God’s sake, wise Mrs Ramsey, this was too much, how could the author let her die like that, just by the bye; and then a few pages further on Prue, the eldest daughter, died – this, too, by the bye. When Jonas came to the part where the son Andrew died as well, in yet
another bloody parenthesis, he had to stop. He could not take it. That these people to whom, though he did not know why, he had begun to feel attached, should die just by the bye, while that blasted abstract time flowed callously onward, filling page after page.

He had to stop. He could not breathe. The insight was too much to bear. He was in imminent danger of being concussed again. He was being hunted by some monster that he could only escape if he closed the book. Jonas slammed it shut, in desperation almost, smack in the face, so it seemed, of something – something deadly. He remembered how as a boy he had run away from Daniel and only just managed, we’re talking millimetres here, to lock the door against him and his murderous rage. The faint smile still played around Jonas’s lips, as if his body had not yet caught up with his
horror-stricken
mind. But then: he realised that he was terrified. It was as though a whole pack of wolves had crept up on him unawares and were all suddenly breathing down his neck. Jonas stared out of the window at the rock face, the wintry Norwegian landscape. He was covered in goosebumps. He had almost lost his life. His old life. Had he finished it, that book would have changed his life. He knew it. And he did not want a novel changing his life.

He had closed
To the Lighthouse
. In the middle of the chapter entitled ‘Time Passes’. He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But he knew he would never pick it up again. He knew that he had come close to making a fatal blunder. He swore to himself that he would never open another novel.

And yet, even though he had put the book down, something had
happened
. He noticed it later that evening when he got up, still trembling slightly, to light a candle on the dining table. As he struck the match and his hand edged towards the wick, it occurred to him that all life could be contained in that movement, that a person could write hundreds of pages about this simple action and what was going on in his mind at that moment. He
had
been changed. Not much, but a bit. He was marked for life. Why do you have a scar over your eyebrow? I got it in a fight with Virginia Woolf.

He had read a novel about a woman who knew how to appreciate the perfection of the moment – small everyday miracles. To be able to say, merely of the light on the sea: It is enough! And if he thought about it: Margrete was the same. But what was to become of his life now? What of the ambitions that drove, or had driven, him?

He thought he knew: when he closed Virginia Woolf’s book, he salvaged his faith in his project, or the vestiges of this project. But he also closed the
door on his chance of ever understanding Margrete. Who knows, maybe
To the Lighthouse
would have been the very device that would have opened her up, afforded him some insight into her, just as Bo’s butterflies and crystals could lay open a stretch of terrain in Lillomarka.

Late that night when Jonas was sitting in the outdoor privy in the dark, peering up at Orion, which seemed remarkably close, it was with a sense of having both lost and won. He sat there on the ice-cold toilet seat, gazing up at the stars and thinking of a distant summer, of a friend who looked like Prince Valiant, and who presaged the existence of people like Margrete.

Bo Wang Lee came, in fact, as a foretoken of just about everything. During that brief summer with Bo, Jonas was confronted with a whole bunch of life’s challenges. And possibly the greatest of these took the form of a question. Because, just when he thought that they were all set for the expedition to the Vegans’ hiding place, Bo placed his hands on his hips and said: ‘That just leaves the most difficult question. What should we take with us?’

To begin with Jonas thought that Bo meant something that would
guarantee
their safety. He remembered the pass which Kubla Khan had given to Marco Polo, a gold tablet covered in strange characters which said that Marco Polo was a friend of the Great Khan and enjoyed his mighty protection. If the Vegans were as intelligent as Bo believed, then it was no use trying to fool them; you could not go to meet a race from another solar system carrying little mirrors, copper wire or beads in eleven different colours – the sort of gewgaws that Stanley took with him to Africa. ‘It has to be something which will show them that we are worthy envoys,’ Bo said gravely. He pronounced the word ‘worthy’ exactly as Jonas would later hear Karen Mohr pronounce it, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.

Bo’s mother was studying social anthropology, or ethnography as it was then called – so Bo knew a little bit about what other explorers had taken with them, people from Europe and America, that is, who set out to visit tribes which might never have seen a white man before. It was a
fascinating
idea – to think that you could be eaten if you brought little bells, but crowned as an honorary chief if you handed out marbles. Bo told of explorers who had, for example, taken salt to the highlands of New Guinea. Others leaned more towards practical items: pocket knives or watches. Liquor had also been a popular gift among some primitive tribes. But they had to bear in mind, Bo said, that things also carried a message. ‘What about a record by Jim Reeves?’ suggested Jonas, off the top of his head. “I Love You Because”. Then they would know we come in peace.’

What should they take with them? Jonas considered little gifts
epitomising
Norway – a bar of Freia milk chocolate or a box of Globoid aspirins, a
can of sardines from Bjelland. Too local, maybe. What about a kaleidoscope? One of his father’s metronomes, a pyramid with its own hypnotic, in-built pulse? He could always ask Wolfgang Michaelsen if he could borrow one of his Märklin locomotives. The forthcoming expedition induced Jonas to ransack his surroundings and his life as he had never done before. Did he have in his possession anything good enough to merit a place in his rucksack when he set off into the woods to meet the Vegans? What on Earth was at all worth collecting?

There was something Aunt Laura had once told him. During the
Renaissance
, palaces were sometimes built with a small, windowless room at their centre, a chamber which did not even appear on the architect’s drawings of the building. This was known as the
studiolo
or
guarda-roba
. In this the prince kept the most widely diverse objects, all of which had just one thing in common: they inspired wonder. Here one might find rarities from the animal and plant kingdoms together with a whole gallimaufry of other things, all with nothing to connect them except whatever the viewer himself could detect. The German princes called this room a
Wunderkammer
. Jonas had always thought that Uncle Lauritz must have had just such an inner chamber to which he could withdraw in order to meditate. All he needed were two inexhaustible objects: a box of Duke Ellington records and a tiny portrait of a woman.

The day before their departure Jonas at last found the article which he would take with him: Rakel’s slide rule, with its movable Perspex panel and a centre section which could be pushed out and in. He was always left
speechless
by the sight of this, a device which could help you to work out difficult maths problems. In his mind he saw himself, Jonas W. Hansen standing face to face with a being the like of which no man had ever seen, in a small
clearing
in the woods, with the sunlight slanting through the trees; saw how he, Jonas, held out the slide rule, pi signs and all, whereafter the alien accepted this gift and immediately made a gesture which said that he, she, it
understood
everything – in other words, that he, Jonas, standing there bathed in the slanting sunlight, had somehow saved the Earth by finding the one thing which carried the right message: here you are, our civilisation in a nutshell.

He was surprised to see what Bo had chosen. A book. A book! What sort of thing was that to bring?
Huckleberry Finn
. Why this one? Jonas asked. Because it was the best book Bo had ever read. ‘One hundred per cent wisdom,’ Bo said. ‘Pure, compressed power. Mightier than an atom bomb.’

They began to get ready for the next day, packing their things into two small rucksacks. ‘Have you got the crystals?’ Bo asked. He had not yet seen them. Jonas pulled out the handkerchiefs containing the four prisms he had collected from his grandmother. She had had no hesitation in lending them
to him once he had told her what it was for. ‘The Vegans – I see,’ she had said. ‘Ah yes, it’s always best to stay on the right side of them.’

Where had he got them, Bo wanted to know, holding first one, then another prism up to the light like a master jeweller.

It was a secret, Jonas said. Why did they need the crystals anyway?

Because they contained the whole world, Bo told him.

Jonas said nothing, he knew Bo was right. Jonas had seen for himself some of the pictures a prism could contain. A yellow cabinet. A palace ball with hundreds of guests. The question of ‘keys’, of what to take with one, was
possibly
the same as asking: how small a piece of the world do you need in order to see the whole world? That was why Bo had brought a book.

His friend was sitting in one of the rooms in his aunt’s flat which reminded Jonas of a ship’s cabin and almost made him believe that if he looked out of the window he would see the entrance to New York harbour. Bo was studying the map of Lillomarka and looking up various entries in the yellow notebook. Jonas noticed that more lines had been drawn on the map. Some contour lines of equal elevation had been coloured in. ‘Tomorrow it is, then,’ Bo said happily. ‘Tomorrow we’re off to find the Vegans.’

Jonas had always been fascinated by maps. Despite their indisputable two-dimensionality they made him feel that the world could not be flat after all. Not because of the swirling lines denoting elevation and gradient, but because they appealed so strongly to his imagination. He never forgot the pleasure of his first atlas, the thrill of discovering that Norway and Sweden together looked like a lion, while Norway on its own resembled a fish. Little did he know that an imaginative way with maps could also lead to the world coming tumbling about your ears.

Mr Dehli shared Jonas’s weakness for maps; he frequently employed them in his lessons and not only as a means of illustrating one of the most enigmatic words in Sanskrit –
māyā
. The huge expanses of paper which could be pulled down to cover the wall behind the teacher’s lectern seemed charged with a
singular
magic. This was partly due to the fact that the maps in junior high were newer than their more tattered and faded counterparts in elementary school. In any case, it was a real treat to see Mr Dehli – while telling them, say, about Xerxes and the ancient kingdom of Persia – send his pointer dancing across a map of Asia half the size of the wall, printed in colours so bright and clear that the topographical features seemed to take on three dimensions and bulge right out into the room. Learning was suddenly brought to life, a connection established between it and the real world. They were halfway into the
wonderful
reddish-brown massifs of the Zagros Mountains when the bell rang.