The Discoverer (43 page)

Jonas looked from her face to her fingers, from her fingers to her face. She was a closed book. He stood there facing Sarah B. and knew that he would soon be embarking upon an arduous expedition. What should he take with him?

This question, one which was to colour his whole life, stemmed from his summer with Bo Wang Lee and their assiduous endeavours to find the Vegans’ hiding place in Lillomarka. Bo Wang Lee lived in the United States, but was spending a month at Solhaug, in the end block of flats, with his
Norwegian
mother. His father was at home in the States – he was an American, an archaeologist and his surname was Lee. His mother, surname Wang, was in Oslo to complete a course at the university. The flat belonged to Bo’s
mother’s
sister. Jonas knew that Miss Wang worked on one of the ships of the
Norwegian
American Line – that was the sort of fact boys tended to pick up. She was on holiday in Florida with her boyfriend, who also happened to be the man responsible for the model ship which Bo had launched at Badedammen. The flat was sparely furnished and had the air of a place owned by someone who was not at home much. What with all the suitcases and cardboard boxes which Bo and his mother had brought with them, some of the rooms seemed more like ship’s cabins to Jonas, an impression which was reinforced when he went to the toilet and found himself sitting looking at two photographs hung on the wall, just at eye level: the
MS Oslofjord
and the
MS Bergensfjord
, two floating palaces. Jonas sometimes thought of that summer with Bo as being like a wonderful cruise through totally uncharted waters.

Since Bo’s mother had to get as much work done as possible during their stay in Norway, Bo had the flat pretty much to himself. Jonas caught only
fleeting glimpses of his mother, usually laden with books and papers, on her way down to her sister’s little yellow Citroën 2CV. But there was always a stack of freshly-made sandwiches waiting for them, usually thick,
American-style
double sandwiches, with ham and a kind of mayonnaise from a big glass jar that you spread on with a knife.

On one of their first days together, when they were sitting eating out on the balcony, Bo told Jonas about the Vegans. It was no accident that Jonas had run into him up at Badedammen. Bo had been
on reconnaisance
, as he put it. He had been spying out
coordinates
, as he said. He was trying to find a hidden country, an entire forgotten civilisation. He shot a searching glance at Jonas.

Why were they called the Vegans? Jonas asked, mainly out of
politeness
, while licking the last of an unbelievably good sandwich filling from the corners of his mouth – it was the first time he had tasted peanut butter.

Because they were a small colony of beings from a planet near the star Vega, Bo said. They had arrived on Earth some years earlier and had hidden
themselves
away here, in the heart of Lillomarka. This was ‘top secret’ information. Bo had it from a relative who worked for NASA. Again Bo eyed Jonas, as if assessing whether Jonas was worthy of his confidence, before continuing: a special task force within NASA had traced the unknown spaceship’s
whereabouts
to Norway, more specifically to a spot slightly to the north-east of the capital. According to Bo’s findings – he showed Jonas the map with the two lines forming a cross – the Vegans were located in the area around the little lake. Couldn’t they just go and have a look, Jonas suggested. It was not that simple, Bo said. These beings inhabited another dimension. Bo explained the meaning of ‘dimension’, speaking slowly and solemnly. He described how he imagined this place to be, pulled out the yellow notebook and opened it at an imaginative and highly detailed drawing with, at its centre, a sort of entranceway or passage. Jonas thought it looked a little like Bo’s drawings of the Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. He had started out smiling, but his smile gradually faded as Bo plied him with so many colourful pieces of information that Jonas actually began to believe
him
.

Although Bo knew where the Vegans were located, there were still a couple of snags. One of these concerned the question of how they were to open up the terrain. ‘Open up the terrain?’ Jonas repeated. ‘You mean we’ll have to chop down trees and bushes and stuff?’

‘We have to open up the landscape, but not with an axe or a shovel,’ Bo said. ‘The Vegans’ land lies hidden, a bit like the treasure in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We have to find something that will work in the same way as saying Open Sesame.’

Jonas tried to picture a grove of trees suddenly ‘opening up’, as if a huge
trapdoor of heather and moss had been thrown back only to disclose an alien landscape under the ground. Bo’s story appealed to Jonas, it accorded with a suspicion he had long harboured: that the world could not possibly be as flat as it appeared to be. That there had to be ‘trapdoors’. It had always been a
disappointment
to Jonas that reality never seemed to match up to his image of it. Consequently he was always on the lookout for a different world. He would have liked to think that it was only a hand’s grasp away, as Bo intimated. A tiny twist and everything would be changed.

Bo never did say how he had figured it out, but he had discovered the key that would open up the landscape. A picklock of sorts. They needed eight things: four crystals and four butterflies. Jonas did not know what he found more surprising: the crystals or the butterflies. And yet it fitted, it struck a nice chord inside him. Something hard and something soft. Something dead and something alive.

Bo took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook. If the black pageboy hairstyle made Bo look like Prince Valiant then these, the pencil and the little yellow book, were his sword and his shield. Swiftly and with a sure hand Bo sketched four crystals on a blank page – ‘from memory’ as he said. What Jonas saw was four differently shaped prisms. ‘I know where I can get hold of something like that,’ he cried eagerly. Bo nodded, as if he had expected nothing less of Jonas.

That left only the butterflies. Why butterflies, Jonas asked. It had
something
to do with chemistry, Bo said. Jonas barely knew what chemistry was, could not even guess at a future in schoolmaster Dehli’s Indian classroom.

The next week they went butterfly hunting. And not just any specimens of these tiny fluttering creatures would do. Far from it. Bo knew exactly what was needed: a brimstone butterfly, a peacock butterfly, a red admiral and a small tortoiseshell. Again Bo pulled out his notebook and presented a brief rundown of their markings, their flying season, behaviour, the sort of terrain and flowers they preferred – it made Jonas think of the descriptions of wanted criminals, but then Bo showed him the most beautiful, meticulously coloured drawings of all four butterflies in the notebook. Each armed with a net they proceeded to comb the fields around the Ammerud farms and the hillsides along the roads down to the stamp-mill and the quarry; they searched the woods around Monsebråten and, of course, Transylvania. Catching
butterflies
was not nearly as easy as Jonas had thought. And when they did spot one, on the banks of the stream running down to Grorudsdammen and the
ski-jump
hill, for instance, it was usually the wrong species. Often, Jonas would simply stand, butterfly net in hand, gazing in wonder at the way some
butterflies
flew swiftly and purposefully, while others flitted this way and that;
he wondered whether there was a conscious navigational strategy governing the inscrutable routes a butterfly could follow across a meadow; it seemed to him that his thoughts travelled in different directions depending on which type of butterfly his eyes were fixed on. Bo had told him a bit about just how remarkable these little creatures were. They tasted with their feet. Jonas tried to imagine what it would be like to taste with your feet, stick your toes into a bowl of chocolate blancmange and custard. Even stranger, Bo said, was the butterfly’s ability to see ultra-violet colour patterns which were invisible to human beings. ‘This fact, that they can see something we can’t, is very
important
,’ Bo said portentously. ‘Do you think somebody could train their eye to see such things?’ Jonas asked. ‘Ssh, there goes a butterfly,’ said Bo, almost as if he did not like this question.

They eventually managed to catch a peacock, a tortoiseshell and an admiral. This last had only just arrived in Norway from the south. Bo popped each insect into its own large glass jar with air holes in the lid. Ranged side by side in this way, they looked like parallel thoughts, Jonas thought. But the brimstone butterfly presented more of a problem; its primary flying season was probably over, Bo said; their only hope was to find a straggler. He studied the yellow notebook, with a worried frown. ‘Couldn’t we use a Camberwell beauty?’ Jonas asked. Bo glowered at him. ‘It has to be a
gonepteryx rhamni,
otherwise the whole thing’ll be ruined.’ It was Bo who taught Jonas never to make compromises.

At last, one day on a hillside just down from the dump behind the garages, Jonas spied a brimstone butterfly, as bright and conspicuous as a yellow Citroën tootling around on the slope. Jonas’s heart was pounding, he had never thought a fluttering yellow insect could make him feel so happy, so thrilled. He caught this wonderful creature in his net at the first attempt, and the ground seemed to tremble slightly, as if something were already starting to reveal itself.

In the afternoon they sat out on the balcony with their ham and
mayonnaise
sandwiches, contemplating the four different butterflies in their respective clear glass jam jars, as if they were looking at the key to some vital code. Bo had placed an orangeade top filled with sugared water in each jar. They observed the way the butterflies unrolled the probosces which at other times lay coiled like fire hoses under their heads – a real little fakir trick, this. Crouched down in front of the jars, examining the insects’ markings – the admiral’s reddish-orange bands, the blue spots on the peacock’s lower wings – Jonas sensed that they had an inherent potency, that they
embodied
tremendous forces, that collectively they were, in a way, dynamite. That they could be downright dangerous, were they to come into contact with
one another. Bo studied the contents of each jar through a magnifying glass. ‘Perfect,’ he murmured, taking the pencil stub from behind his ear and
scribbling
down a sentence in the notebook. That pencil always seemed to Jonas to be sharp, although he never saw Bo sharpen it.

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ Bo said. ‘That leaves just one question. What should we take with us?’

‘D’you mean like sandwiches and stuff?’

‘I was thinking of something to show the Vegans what we are. Who we are. What we believe in. So they won’t turn us away.’

For Jonas, this question was to be of much greater consequence than the expedition itself. Bo made it sound as though they could be killed on the spot if they did not come up with just the right things to take with them. Maybe that was why Bo talked more than usual that evening about his homeland. As they sat on the balcony surveying the holiday-quiet lawns and roads, as they sipped from their mini bottles of Cola through paper straws, Bo spoke, with a stronger American accent, about everything from cars with fins to the delights of candy floss – spun sugar on a stick; of grilled steaks as big as
pancakes
and machines with popcorn whirling around inside a glass box, and had Jonas ever heard of marshmallows? Bo scooted off and came back with a bag; Jonas sniffed that blissful aroma. Bo described the Chrysler building, waxed eloquent about Disneyland and hummed songs by Elvis, the king of them all. But above all else he told him about American television, which even had programmes in the middle of the day: game shows and quiz programmes and really great series, best of all
Batman
.
From then on Jonas always thought it was nice to sit on the toilet at Bo’s place and consider what he ought to take with him, while feasting his eyes on the pictures on the wall of the American liners with ‘fjord’ in their names. In his imagination, these ships were
breakaway
fjords that had branched outwards.

The thought of Norwegian-American Bo Wang Lee crossed my mind several times during our visit to Fjærland. Although I was actually thinking more of the mass exodus from Norway to America in the nineteenth century. After Ireland, Norway was the one country in Europe which had sent the largest percentage of its population across the sea, and Sogn was one of the areas hardest hit by emigration; between thirty and forty thousand people were said to have left the hamlets and villages around the fjord. I have always been fascinated by the thought of another Sogn in the United States. By the possibility of a ‘Lærdal Association’ in Iowa. There is more than just one small town in Kansas called Norway, to some extent a whole Norway is contained within the USA. In that vast land there lies a hidden Norway, like an
invisible
, many-armed fjord. During their first years there, some enthusiasts even
dreamt that ‘the spirit of Norway’ would come to form the backbone of the American nation. The reason such reflections should have been prompted by Fjærland, of all places, was, of course, that Walter Mondale, former vice president of the United States, had made several much publicised visits to the village of Mundal, home of his forebears. He had even had the honour of opening one of the long tunnels not far from where we were docked, just down from the lovely old Hotel Mundal, near the very head of the narrow Fjærlandsfjord which at this time of year had an otherwordly air about it, owing to the way the mineral particles washed down with the glacier water in the rivers refracted the light, lending a mystical green cast to the fjord.

The thought of America also gave me a sense of affinity, stronger than before, with Columbus. My discovery was, however, the result of
journeying
not outwards, but inwards, deeper and deeper into my native land. I was forever making new discoveries. It was almost too much sometimes. I did not see how we could possibly include even a fraction of all the possible subjects which presented themselves. What about the seals in Nærøyfjord? What about Balzac’s strange tale
Séraphîta
, set in a Norwegian fjord? What about Johann Christian Dahl; all the pictures he had painted of places around the fjord: ‘View of Fortundalen’, ‘Winter in Sogn’? What of all the old
photographs
by Wilse and Knudsen? What about the mass of information we had collected on bird reserves, wilderness museums and nature trails? There were times when I wondered whether we had bitten off more than we could chew, or whether the notion of converting Sognefjord into digital form was, in fact, both blasphemous and insurmountable.