The Discoverer (83 page)

He had been confronted with his exceptional blindness back in the summer he spent with Bo Wang Lee. He was never quite sure when he
discovered
it – the truth about Bo, that is. Or whether he had actually known right from the start, but had simply chosen to ignore it. Bo was more than he seemed. More than a Chinese even.

It may have started with the little electronic organ in one of the rooms in Bo’s aunt’s flat. Bo said his aunt was keeping it for her boyfriend, who also worked with the Norwegian American Line. Bo had been given strict instructions not to touch it, but he thought he could at least demonstrate the hypnotically pulsating rhythm box. Simply by pressing a few buttons Bo conjured up the sensuous rhythms of the rumba, the samba, the
cha-cha-cha
. Jonas thought it was pretty smart. But it was more than smart to Bo, he turned up the sound and began to dance, and Jonas saw, to his amazement, horror almost, that Bo knew the basic steps, and not only that: something weird had happened to his body, there was something a little too graceful
and supple – voluptuous – about it as he swayed around the floor with an invisible Latin American partner, sending Jonas a strangely enigmatic, zig-zag smile, as if he were feeling both proud and a bit sheepish.

Even more thought-provoking, though, was what happened when Jonas showed Bo one of Daniel’s ballpoint pens, purchased in Strömstad. On it was a lady in a black bathing-suit and when you turned the pen upside down the bathing-suit slid off. Jonas thought it was kind of sexy. But when he looked at Bo, expecting to be complimented on the stripper in his pen, he saw that Bo was not the least bit impressed. If anything, he looked as if he was disappointed that Jonas should fall for something so appallingly cheap and vulgar.

There had been more of such incidents, but they had been evenly
dispersed
and only later was Jonas able to view them all together as one long clue to something he should have noticed right away. If, that is, he had not, in fact, seen it but – busy as they were with their games – had chosen not to see it.

Tucked away in one of the many cardboard boxes which testified to the fact that Bo and his mother were nomads, residing only temporarily in the flat at Solhaug, was a calligraphy set. Often when Jonas rang Bo’s doorbell in the morning his friend would be sitting writing with elegant pens and real ink which contrasted sharply with the rude pen which Jonas had shown him. Jonas simply did not get it – a boy who just sat there writing. Who liked to write. Not only liked it – Bo loved it, Jonas could tell from the rapt expression look on his face. Bo’s father, the archaeologist who was so interested in China and the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, had taught him some of the Chinese characters which he knew. One day when Jonas arrived earlier than usual, Bo went straight back to a large, white sheet of paper and carried on writing, or drawing I suppose one should say, with a brush and ink as black as his Prince Valiant hair. Jonas stood and watched. They had arranged to go fishing up at Breisjøen – ‘to catch the biggest swordfish in the world,’ as Bo said – but Jonas could not bring himself to disturb his friend, so absorbed was he, sitting at his aunt’s desk writing, or drawing. The sheet of paper bristled with weird brushstrokes; Jonas thought it looked like an octopus, with tentacles going all ways. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered, afraid of breaking Bo’s concentration. ‘The Chinese sign for friendship,’ Bo said. ‘These four strokes in the middle, like four chambers, stand for “heart”.’

Jonas thought it looked difficult. As difficult as true friendship, Bo said. Writing and reality went hand in hand.

Bo picked up a new sheet of paper, wrote the word again. Slowly but surely, better than his previous attempt. This time the character looked more like a woman doing a pirouette with arms outstretched. Jonas stood looking
over Bo’s shoulder, watching as the brush was drawn, moist and black, over the white paper, seeing the lovely, damp pattern which took shape. He
marvelled
at the movements, it was like a dance, except that it was executed with a brush. ‘Why are you doing it again?’ Jonas asked. Bo looked more like a Chinese than ever before. ‘Because I’m practising friendship, or something that’s more than friendship,’ Bo said and suddenly glanced up at him with a penetrating look in his eye that Jonas had never seen before. ‘Here, you can have it,’ he said and handed the paper to Jonas.

So Jonas was prepared, and yet not, when they were playing up at
Badedammen
one day, just before Bo was due to go back to America. The day was sultry; they got caught in a sudden hail shower. ‘Somebody’s getting married in heaven,’ Bo cried delightedly and did a pirouette with arms outstretched. Jonas knew where they could take shelter, he ran ahead to a small tunnel through which the stream from Steinbruvannet was channelled underneath the road and down to Badedammen. They could barely stand upright in the square concrete pipe, but at least they didn’t get their feet wet – the stream only ran down the very centre of the pipe. They were in a secret chamber.

Outside the hail hammered down. Jonas listened to the lovely, pattering sound mingling with the purling of the stream. Big, white pearls sprayed down and bounced away. Within a couple of minutes the stream was almost white. ‘A farewell present from me,’ Bo said with a smile, fiddling with the chain around his neck.

Jonas was not sure whether it was this hail shower which caused some sort of membrane to burst. At any rate this was when it happened. A moment which branded itself into him. The hail abruptly stopped and the sun came out, bathing everything in a golden light. They heard the loud drone of an engine. Across the patch of sky visible from the tunnel mouth glided a light plane, white with red stripes, like a giant butterfly. At that same moment Jonas became aware that something was happening to Bo. Jonas stood there and watched a person unfold. Bo turned slowly to face him and was someone else. One turn and everything had changed. He was she. And she put her arms around him and hugged him, embraced him in the true sense of the word, wrapped her arms around him, and Jonas felt embarrassed and pleased and confused and happy all at once, as if lots of conflicting emotions were being juggled about inside him and kept in the air at the same time.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ Bo said, she said, close against him and smelling of marshmallows.

Jonas felt a lump in his throat and a pressure behind his eyes, but he bit his lip, swallowed again and again.

‘I love you,’ she said, in such a way and such a tone that ever afterwards,
when Jonas heard those words uttered, in a song, in a film, or even in a soap opera, he would remember that moment.

Jonas was lost for words. Outside the hailstones were melting in the sun, sparkling like tiny crystals. He wanted to stay there holding, being held by, this girl for the rest of his life. He wanted her to juggle him into a unified whole. And when she finally let go of him, and he let go of her, he knew that from then on he would always be looking for a girl like Bo. And maybe that was why he had to wait so long. Because girls like Bo, who practised writing the sign for love while pretending that it was the sign for friendship, did not exactly grow on trees. Who knows, Jonas thought, they could be as rare on Earth as Vegans.

Margrete was, however, just such a girl. And she too went away and left him. But he waited. He did not know that he was waiting, but he waited patiently till she returned. After Margrete died he met Kamala Varma.

One day towards the close of the millennium, while Jonas Wergeland was still in prison, Kamala Varma walked into the office of her talented and
experienced
agent in Holland Park Avenue in London and laid the manuscript of her new novel on his desk. ‘You won’t regret having put your faith in me,’ she said.

As the book’s title –
The Tree of Love
– suggested, it was a love story. Kamala Varma had been writing for a long time; as she said later in
interviews
, she had always written. She enjoyed great international respect as a social-anthropologist, but she had also published a couple of novels which had been well received in the English-speaking world; for, although she was a Norwegian citizen and had even written a controversial biographical novel in almost flawless Norwegian – and that despite the Hindi of her childhood – English was her natural first language. But nothing in these earlier works of fiction could have prepared anyone, not even her clever agent, for the impact of the story she had now delivered.

The British publishers knew a good thing when they saw it; they could tell right away that this was something special. Bidding for the rights was
unusually
fast and furious and the publisher who won the auction – to everyone’s satisfaction the same house which had published her previous books – had not thrown away its money. Unlike Harald Hardråde, Kamala Varma really did conquer England and thereafter the rest of the world. When the novel came out it was instantly welcomed by ecstatic, nigh on infatuated reviewers and readers who had apparently been waiting for, not to say yearning for, such a story for decades. Within just two years
The Tree of Love
had been translated into over forty languages. Suddenly everybody wanted a piece of Kamala Varma: the press, television, this body and that, and all of them at the
same time. She was interviewed everywhere, she was invited to appear
everywhere
, she was discussed everywhere. There was a period when her name cropped up in every corner of the information society, from Hammerfest to Santiago de Chile.

That Kamala Varma survived that first wave of hysteria, the huge spate of publicity which can inundate and all but drown anyone who achieves
international
success, was due not so much to her own level-headedness as to the book itself. Because
The Tree of Love
was – in the words of one reviewer – the sort of story which no one could explain. ‘It is a book that strikes straight at the heart of everyone who opens it,’ he wrote, ‘a story which sinks in and lodges inside the reader like a vital organ.’ Not long ago an American literary critic declared that
The Tree of Love
had done as much for our view of love as Charles Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
did for our view of mankind. And that may be true. Because readers of Kamala Varma’s novel would like to believe that love can evolve, that love is not necessarily the same today as it was four thousand years ago. That it encompasses hitherto unknown
possibilities
. So too with the heart, Kamala Varma said: the human heart also undergoes change.

Overnight Kamala Varma became a world-famous woman. And a rich woman. Even in Norway, that fortress of a country which had tried for so long to kick her out, she gained recognition. People would turn and stare blatantly at her in the smallest, most out-of-the-way places, and not merely because of her colour now. Around the time when Jonas was released from prison, Kamala started writing a new novel – one that went beyond
Victoria
, she told Jonas – while still travelling all over the world, promoting new
translations
of
The Tree of Love
.

What did all this have to do with Jonas Wergeland? It had a great deal to do with Jonas Wergeland, even though Kamala Varma’s love story was not about him in any way. You see,
The Tree of Love
, a work praised to the skies by people all over the world, was dedicated to Jonas Wergeland. At the bottom of one of the very first, perfectly white pages of the original, English edition were the words: ‘For Jonas W.’ That was all: ‘For Jonas W.’

It took him a while to get round to asking her about it, it was almost as if he did not dare. One evening they were sitting by the fire in Kamala’s flat in Russell Square in London, not far from where Virginia Woolf had lived. Neither of them had spoken for some minutes. Then he asked: ‘Why did you do it?’

She had stroked the cross-shaped scar on his forehead with her finger and stared at him, as if surprised that he could not guess. ‘Because it was meeting you, your otherness, that put the idea into my head,’ she said.

Jonas thought about this again and again. What an honour. To have one’s name appear as the first words, as a prelude to, a story which had been printed in millions of copies, a book which would be read by young people sitting on park benches who would turn their faces to the sky every now and again and make sacred vows to themselves. A book which men would buy and quote from at difficult moments, as they knelt before their wives. A book which old folk would read and weep over, because they realised that the insight which this novel had given them and which they had rejoiced over in their youth had been no more than a seed, one which had since sprouted and grown into a mighty tree inside them.

When Jonas got out of prison he became Kamala’s secretary. He took care of the mass of paperwork associated with her books. She would have
preferred
to give him another title. ‘You’re not my secretary,’ she said, ‘you’re my reader.’ But Jonas insisted on being allowed to call himself a ‘secretary’ – a word which, in its original sense, meant a person entrusted with a secret, a private seal, and that was exactly what he wanted to be.

Jonas often took out
The Tree of Love
and ran a finger over his name printed on that page, as if he could not believe it was true. When everything was over, all that would be left of him would be this little dedication in a romantic novel. People would always wonder who ‘Jonas W.’ was – some people would even take the trouble to find out. He, Jonas Wergeland, who had held a whole nation in the palm of his hand, who had once ranked second only to the king, would wind up as a footnote, so to speak, in a love story. What a paradox. All his travails with television – only to be remembered because of a book.

The first time Jonas opened
The Tree of Love
, in prison, and saw those letters on the expanse of white at the very front of the novel, he found it hard to read what they said. The letters seemed to him to be shining, his name seemed to be shining. He sat with the book in his hands and knew that he had made the greatest discovery of his life, a discovery which redefined
everything
, truly expanded him, made him a new person.