The Discoverer (37 page)

It was worth it all for that instant of intense closeness. Jonas had the feeling that they did not need to do any more than that. That this brief,
electrified
moment more than justified all the ski trekking, the months of red-hot expectation, the pictures of her which he had blown-up almost to the point of unrecognisability and caressed in his dreams.

They got to their feet, brushed off the snow. His leg hurt. She turned to run her fingers over the marks his ski binding had made in the tree trunk, as if he had carved their names inside a heart. Although he tried not to, eventually
he had to meet her eye and as he held her gaze he saw it all, as in a red haze, a darkroom in which pictures were developed at lightning speed. Up to this point you might say that he had merely loved her with his eyes, and only now did his mind seem to catch up with his vision and compel him to perceive her in another way, forced him to consider whether his eyes might have been wrong. Again he was made aware of what a blessing and a curse it was to be able to extract all he could from a girl at their first meeting, or from the moment when he understood that things could get serious. He was unable to stop the thoughts that flew off into the future, there to branch out in all directions, as if he were standing at a crossroads, covering every possible ski route at the same time – and all in order to determine whether she was the person he hoped she would be. Within a matter of seconds he found himself delving, despite his youth and lack of experience, deep into the exhausted possibilities of wedded life, into the petty arguments of a fifteen-year-old marriage; and not only that, he also explored all of the alternative forks in the road, the various,
hypothetical
paths in life he encountered at different points along the way. He stood there gazing into her eyes, and in his mind he saw their first kiss, actually saw quite vividly how he caught the taste of raspberry jam, then saw them going to the cinema and, weeks later, how he touched her breasts – from outside a flannel shirt, it’s true; how he had dinner at her house, not only that, but that they had grouse, shot by her father, and then how, late one evening, in front of a roaring fire he slipped his hand between her legs; how they got engaged, the mad, passionate lovemaking in a sleeping bag; how they got married, the speech she made at the wedding, their first child, buying a house – log-built – dinners with friends, the general wear and tear, the quarrels over lopsided cheese-cutting. Everyone knows the expression ‘to undress her with his eyes’. Jonas carried on where others left off. Not only was Jonas Wergeland capable of simulating an orgasm, he could simulate an entire marriage.

They struggled back up the hillside to Sinober. She kept her body pressed close against his the whole time, acting almost as a crutch. They phoned from the café. Haakon Hansen drove up through Nittedal to collect him. As Jonas shut the car door she stared at him through the window with eyes that made him quake. He was hers, those eyes said, or so Jonas imagined. And she wanted him as he was now, hurt, an invalid of sorts, someone on whom she could take pity, care for, help. Jonas did not know whether he was
misinterpreting
all this. His mother had once hinted that maybe he took life too
seriously
. Sometimes Jonas thought that he also took love too seriously. Or was too scared. Scared of being disappointed. Scared of finding that not only the world but love, too, was flat. In other words: scared of catching Melankton’s syndrome.

When he returned to school a couple of days later, she came straight over to him at the morning break, wanting to hold his hand, to show that they were going together, although there had been no talk of this between them. He refused, but again she had looked at him with that feverish expression on her face which told him that any rebuff would be lost on her. At every break that day she came running happily up to him and groped eagerly for one of his hands. He kept them in his pocket.

By the last interval of the day the penny had finally dropped. ‘I can’t go out with you,’ he said, barely managing to get the words out before she grabbed him roughly and threw him to the ground, hard, right down into the slush. More in desperation than in anger. Several of the others saw it, whispered. She walked off. She sounded as though she was crying. Jonas could not understand how someone so apparently robust and strong-minded could react in such a way.

Then, one night in March when Jonas was just on his way to bed, the whole family heard someone shouting out on the flag green. They went to the windows. In the centre of the patch of lawn between the blocks of flats stood Eva N. in her red anorak, calling his name. Loudly and clearly. And
broken-heartedly
. Daniel almost killed himself laughing, but his mother shushed him sternly.

No one would ever forget that night. Eva had brought something with her. It looked like a cartridge-case. She did something to the top before holding the tube straight up above her head. For a moment Jonas was afraid that she was going to set light to herself, like those Buddhist monks in Vietnam. Up shot a rocket, a coruscating streak, hundreds of metres long, accompanied by a whistling sound. It was a distress flare. Jonas remembered that her father had a boat. The flare exploded high in the sky above the flats. People had come out onto their balconies, they stared up at the bright red ball slowly descending on a tiny parachute. Falling gently and gracefully, burning with a strange intensity. The whole of Grorud seemed to be bathed in red light. And in the scant two minutes for which it lasted, the girl on the grass called Jonas’s name, just his name, helplessly almost, as if she was crying out to be saved, rather than loved. As if she was saying: ‘Look, I am bleeding.’

It was all very embarrassing, of course. That the family, the whole estate, should have been witness to this drama. Mr Iversen was cursing under his breath about people turning a March night into New Year’s Eve, robbing him of his once-a-year shot at the limelight. ‘It’s against the law,’ he muttered. ‘It’s sheer madness.’

At the same time Jonas could not help feeling rather proud. Here was this girl, in the middle of the flag green, and so in love with him that she did not
care two hoots whether she was making a fool of herself in front of the whole estate. It was almost as though, standing there on that March night in the red glow from the flare – in a vast darkroom, if you like – she thought that she could develop love. It may well have been madness. But, looked at another way: she had nothing to lose. She was in distress. She did it in order to save herself, Jonas thought to himself. She wanted to maximise the crisis, so to speak, get the heartache over and done with. From that point of view the red light was the saving of her. And who knows, maybe she recalled this episode, in many ways a heroic deed, years later – by which time she was a famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions – when she saved her own life by sending up a similar parachute flare in Antarctis after her kayak was wrecked and she was left drifting on a large ice floe.

But to get back to the red thread of our story: Jonas was well-equipped to identify with
Blow-Up
– a film that revolved around a room suffused with red light in which an individual produced more and more blurred
enlargements
of smaller and smaller sections of a photograph. It was a film about the mystery of the image, all images. It was a film which quite simply
questioned
the nature of reality. Do we see what we see? Or, in Jonas Wergeland’s version: Are you in love when you are in love?

Somewhat against their will, both Jonas and Leonard were drawn further and further into Michelangelo Antonioni’s universe. Something was
happening
to them. Very gradually. Jonas began to feel unwell. His wrath turned to perplexity. They were looking for answers, but were given nothing but
questions
. They wanted to train their eye, hone it, but instead found themselves losing confidence in it. Leonard did not know that he was soon to lose
confidence
in everything, including his own origins.

For them this was a time of confusion. They ate their spaghetti with an ever growing repertoire of sauces: tuna with olives and tomatoes, a cream sauce with ham and leeks, while their discussions became more and more woolly. As their uncertainty and sense of alienation grew, so the Red Room underwent a metamorphosis. Leonard – now simply Leonardo – had started replacing the familiar photographs from
Aktuell
, hung on the walls by his father, with others. He removed from its frame the picture from Norsk Hydro of workers stacking bars of aluminium and in its stead put a still from Fellini’s
8½
. A photograph of miners on Svalbard was supplanted by a shot from
The Red Desert
of Monica Vitti in an industrial wasteland. Reality was giving way to fiction. They hardly ever left the basement now; day after day they sat in the Red Room eating pasta and discussing films they had seen, films they had not seen and films which Leonardo envisaged making. Jonas would not emerge from this state of confusion and woolliness until he rediscovered both
his wrath and a focus for it through taking part in a spectacular
demonstration
in the Town Hall Square. By then Leonardo was long gone.

Later, Jonas would think it only natural that their almost parodically artificial existence should explode into pitiless reality. He was spending less time with Leonard by then, having started at Oslo Cathedral School. And there was no way that Leonard, or even a befuddled Leonardo, was going all the way into the city to attend some toffee-nosed school. ‘You’re a traitor to your class,’ he muttered to Jonas, in a brief flashback to their early,
neo-realistic
glory days in the Red Room. Leonard went on to a high school in the Grorud Valley. Though with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape.

Leonard’s dreadful discovery was made shortly after his last hike with his father. It was years since they had gone hill-walking together, but it may be that Leonard was making an effort to shake himself awake, thinking that the Norwegian mountains and fresh air would form a counterbalance to the Red Room and the flickering images of individuals incapable of making contact with one another. In the summer of 1970 he and his father went walking in the hills around Aurlandsdalen and it was here that Olav Knutzen took a picture which would eventually find its way into a host of yearbooks and reference works. Because by this time a new trend had long been
apparent
in the media: they would all – every last news outlet – descend on one spot. Everyone covering the same story. And even though at one time there had been some debate about Aurlandsdalen and the question of inalienable natural heritage versus energy needs, in the press as well as in an uproarious edition of television’s
Open to Question
chaired by the Grand Panjandrum himself, Kjell Arnljot Wig, the focus shifted away from Aurlandsdalen with the advent of the Mardøla affair. That summer, the eyes of the nation were on the great falls in the Møre og Romsdal region and a demonstration during which protesters, including professor of philosophy Arne Næss, were gently and politely carted off by the police. Meanwhile, in Aurlandsdalen, the Oslo Electricity Board could quietly get on with the work of damming Viddalsvatn and the waters beyond to form one huge lake, without anyone blocking the broad construction road with so much as a twig. So, with the accuracy of a Zen master, Olav Knutzen took the only photograph from Låvisdalen recording the merest hint of a demonstration, a faint protest, at least, against the development which got under way here in June of the same year as the Mardøla project. It was an important piece of documentary evidence, this picture, which is also why it has been reproduced so often; because in Norway it is Aurlandsdalen, and not Mardøla, which represents a watershed in the history of nature conservation; the Aurlandsdalen controversy was
proof that an element of reflection had bored its way into all views on
constant
progress, heedless growth – something which led, among other things, to the establishment a couple of years later of an environmental protection agency. Olav Knutzen took his snap at the point when work had just begun on a structure of pyramid-like dimensions, a dam 100 metres in height and 370 metres in length and as broad at its base as it was tall. This photograph – in the background of which one can see the building contractor,
Furholmen
’s
, massive construction machines at the foot of the dam, as well as some summer steadings which would soon be under water – shows Leonard with a wry little grin on his face – whether of confusion or anger Jonas could never decide. In his hand he holds a placard bearing the legend: ‘
SAVE THE DALE
’. Although perhaps what it should have said, or so Jonas would later think, was ‘Save the illusion’.

That same autumn Leonard got in touch with Jonas, and as soon as Jonas entered the basement room he knew that something was badly wrong. The aroma of simmering pasta sauce was noticeably absent. His friend greeted him with a face as deadpan as Buster Keaton’s. ‘I’ve made a horrible discovery,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned something that has changed my life. I’m not the person I thought I was.’

At the time Jonas had merely laughed at him, but much the same thought was to strike him years later, before his trip to Samarkand. The fact is, you see, that Jonas went all the way to Samarkand, to that blow-up in his mind, because he was in something of a dilemma regarding his future. He felt the need, therefore, to find some place far beyond the real world, a place where he could contemplate himself and his life at the greatest possible remove. And without realising it he fell back on Leonard’s choice of words: I am not the person I think I am. In short, Jonas set out on the long journey to Samarkand in order to discover himself.

After having sat for a long time exposing himself, exposing his body to the intricate beauty still discernible in the faded façades on Registan Square, Jonas got to his feet with the vague idea of visiting a nearby museum. It was at this moment that someone placed a hand, very lightly, on his shoulder. Jonas turned round and stared in bewilderment into the face of a man around his own age. He must have been sitting right behind him, in his blind spot, so to speak. The stranger smiled at the way Jonas started. ‘Tourist?’ he inquired, in pretty good English. ‘I did not think I would ever see a tourist here.’