The Discoverer (73 page)

One suitably beautiful day in September at the very beginning of the
seventies
, they went to work, which is to say: out into Rådhusgaten, more or less as the gold hands on the clock tower announced that the time was four p.m. and the bells struck up a folk tune – on this occasion ‘The Food Song’ from Sunnmøre. A lot of people were going to be hopelessly late for dinner, though, because thousands of cars were soon stuck fast in the centre of Oslo due to a demonstration the aim of which was as simple as it was impossible: ‘Dancing on the Town Hall Square!’

If one did not know better one could be forgiven for thinking that this event was the forerunner of the somewhat incongruous carnivals which would be arranged a decade or so later. Viktor had succeeded in mobilising about forty students from the Cathedral School as well as some from the Experimental Grammar School – an even better breeding ground for
radicalism
and iconoclasm than the Cath., if that were possible, and these now proceeded to march round in a circle extending across the four lanes closest to the Town Hall. They were all dressed and made up to look like caricatures of tourists: Frenchmen in berets, Nigerians in gaily coloured robes, Arabs in long djellabahs, Americans in cowboy hats and Hawaiian shirts, Austrians in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats. Those students posing as Japanese carried cameras and snapped non-stop, their jaws dropping in shock – although, if one were being mean, one could say that they focused on the car
number-plates
, as if their owners were kerb-crawlers. Some carried placards. ‘A
disgrace
to Norway!’ and ‘Is this the city’s finest plaza?’ a couple said in German and English. And in Italian: ‘Would anyone run a four-lane expressway over the Piazza Navona?’ Jonas was guised as an Indian, in a white, high-collared Nehru jacket and Ghandi cap – an outfit which Pernille had helped him with – and he was conscious of feeling not quite so shy in this unfamiliar attire. ‘I am a film director from Bombay and I am here to find locations in Oslo for a film about
māyā
,’ he announced fearlessly in his best curry-and-rice English to one irate motorist who was yelling that there would be hell to pay if he wasn’t there to pick his wife up from the hairdresser’s.

The aim of the demonstration was not the same as at Mardøla: to protect something. The Three Heretics set out to dam the heavy and apparently unstoppable stream of painted bodywork flowing past the Town Hall. And the elliptic circle of flabbergasted tourists, or students rather, in the middle
of the road actually did succeed in stopping the cars and causing a massive traffic jam around the square. Despite threatening overtures from a few angry drivers and some incipient scuffling, the demonstrators were reassured each time they glanced up at the façade of the Town Hall, where St Hallvard, the patron saint of the city, stood with his arms raised, blessing their venture for all to see.

Viktor had given a lot of thought to what they could possibly hand out to the nearest cars, something which – in the spirit of Ghandi – would illustrate the demonstration’s positive aims, but it was Jonas who came up with the idea. He remembered a picture taken around 1950 by OK – Olav Knutzen,
Leonard’s
father – of an open-air dance, or ‘cobblestone ball’ as they were called, with people tripping the light fantastic, happy and proud, on the Town Hall Square. Jonas called the
Aktuell
photographer, who instantly allied himself with their cause and ran off a couple of hundred copies of the photograph at his own expense. It is never easy to get those affected by it to understand the point of a demonstration. Several of the first motorists got very hot under the collar and kept tooting their horns aggressively, but others thought it was fun – even more so when they were handed the long forgotten photograph, inscribed with the words: ‘The heart of the city needs dancing, not lead.’ They realised that they were part of something momentous, that they were making history, so to speak. One or two would also save this picture and frame it in fond memory of that day. They might have been late getting home, but they could see that it truly was a disgrace that the Town Hall Square, of all places, this public space laid out so beautifully in front of the city’s foremost landmark, should be overrun by cars. On Pipervika, people had welcomed Fridtjof Hansen back from his inspiring expeditions. Here those same people had hailed their dauntless king after the war. Albert Schweitzer himself had addressed a large crowd on this very spot. The Town Hall Square was the heart of the city, but it was also its lungs, a corner designed to give us a
breathing
space, oxygen. And the politicians and town planners had turned it into the city’s colon.

After a while – though not soon enough to prevent total chaos, with a
tailback
stretching all the way to Malmøya, several kilometres to the south – the law did of course arrive, four squad cars plus mounted police, to disperse the demonstrators. A number had to be carried away, but Jonas and Viktor were the only ones to put up a fight – Jonas was almost happy to feel an old rage stir inside him again. Both were taken to the police station. In a brief item on the
Evening News
Jonas was seen being carted off, still holding aloft the placard bearing his message written, thanks to the kind offices of the
Indo-Iranian
Institute, in Marathi: ‘Destroy not the Gateway of Norway!’ – with
a clear allusion to the Gateway of India, Bombay’s most famous landmark. The irony of it was not lost on Jonas: the first time he managed to achieve his goal in life, to make his name publicly known, it was in the form of an alias, as Vinoo Sabarmati, a famous film director from Bombay. In due course a newspaper photograph was even said to have reached India, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that people there really did take Jonas for a film-maker from Bombay who had accidentally strayed into an unknown corner of the world called Norway, a place overrun by police and cars.

Life is full of mysterious coincidences. Jonas had earlier seen how rings could meet and intersect, and not only in water. Still, though, he was
startled
to read, in prison, that the Town Hall Square – at long last free of cars again – had been paved with flagstones from India. You could almost be said to be walking on the bedrock of India right in the centre of Oslo. This news brought back rather painful memories of his valiant youthful protest, and also revived a thought which had come to him as he was being led down to the harbour area in Montevideo, in far-off Uruguay, by a young,
politically-aware
woman called Ana: there has been too little iconoclasm and too much orthodoxy in my life. I need to be more of a rebel.

Together with Ana, whom he had got talking to thanks to a copy of
Kristin Lavransdatter
displayed in a window, Jonas reached the main gathering point in the old town. Here, in the shadow of the Customs House, lay the Mercado del Puerto: no longer a market, but a bustling, noisy collection of restaurants, a score or more under one roof, in something resembling an old railway shed; a ferment of barbecue fumes, accordion music and newspaper vendors with grotesque, piercing voices. It was like a cross between an infernal snack bar and a dark, poky pub with long, long bars. With the ease of familiarity Ana led him around open fires, casting a critical eye over the dripping cuts of meat laid out on sloping grill racks. She found a place, ordered food and drinks for them both. ‘This is on me,’ she said.

Maybe it had something to do with the atmosphere in the bar, Jonas did not know, but Ana started talking again about Sigrid Undset and
Kristin Lavransdatter
, in fact Jonas had the feeling that this was why she had invited him to lunch. She had read the three books as a teenager, she said, and had been absolutely fascinated by Kristin, or Kristina as she was called in the Spanish translation. Jonas simply could not understand it: how could this dusky beauty with amethysts in her ears, a modern woman, a student of
sociology
who had actually lived in political exile, be so besotted with what was, as far as he was concerned, a stodgy Norwegian novel about a woman in the Middle Ages. And as if to explain, she began alluding, wide-eyed and
animated
, to different episodes from these books about Kristin Lavransdatter
– keen, or so it seemed to Jonas, to share them with him, to revive a pleasure they had both had. She mentioned the part when the child Kristin meets the elf-maid, and the incident when her poor little sister, Ulvhild, has her back broken by a falling log, and what did Jonas think of Bentein trying to rape Kristin, and Arne being stabbed and killed, wasn’t that awful? Jonas, who had not read one word by Undset, found it all pretty hard to follow, but at the same time he could not help being intrigued by the young woman’s anecdotes which tended, because she got so caught up in them, to become little stories in themselves.

Eventually he felt compelled to admit that he did not know the story at all. She clapped her hands in disbelief, then burst into ripples of laughter. Fortunately their lunch appeared just at that moment: a bottle of wine and
chivitos
: a thin slice of steak together with bacon, cheese, tomato, egg and a salad of sliced peppers and onions, all served between two huge chunks of bread and held together by toothpicks. She carried on laughing as they ate, could not help it; she seemed to find it hard to believe: a Norwegian who had not read
Kristin Lavransdatter
. And for this very reason, perhaps, she started once again, with redoubled enthusiasm, to relate episodes from the book, as if anxious to show him what he was missing; there she sat, Jonas thought in amusement, pleading a Norwegian writer’s case to a Norwegian. Or maybe she simply got so carried away that once she started she could not stop. In any case, she tried to describe to him how wrapped up she had been in the passionate first meetings between Kristin and Erlend, with what trepidation she had read about them dancing together, about Kristin sleeping in his arms, and of how Erlend had kissed her above the knee, thus ‘disarming’ her, and could then lay her down in the hay. Jonas listened with interest, in suspense in fact, and although he did have to interrupt now and again to inquire about some detail, and once to protest at Kristin’s wilful behaviour, for the most part he remained silent throughout the rest of the young woman’s very elaborate narration of everything from the lightning that struck St Olav’s Church at Jørundgård and set it on fire to Kristin on her deathbed acknowledging God’s plan for her. Jonas sat there like a priest in the confessional, one big, hearkening ear, and saw these scenes form a long fresco in his mind’s eye. He found it hard to believe, that he could be here in a foreign country, wreathed in the fumes from barbecue coals and grilled meat, with the sound of an accordion in his ears, listening to a young woman recounting extracts from a book by a Norwegian author with such feeling that from time to time she actually blushed.

‘And now,’ Jonas asked when she was done, with the last sliver of olive on his fork, ‘how do you feel about those books now?’

She smiled almost apologetically. ‘Well, obviously I feel differently about them today,’ she said. ‘I find the sombre, rather humourless, view of life which underlies the whole novel hard to take now.’ Ana raised her glass and looked at him, the amethysts in her ears flashing a strange purplish-blue in the glow of the nearby fire. ‘But I won’t let that spoil what they meant to me when I was young,’ she said. ‘The experience of reading a story which told me love is a primal force that breaks all laws.’

He was back on the white sands, slumped in his deckchair under the
blue-striped
parasol, listening to the roar of the breakers. He raised his eyes to the horizon. Suddenly he saw things more clearly. It all came down to a woman. To his relationship with a woman. It was possibly Ana who had given him the clue. As he lay there in his chair, thinking, he realised that in searching for a unifying theme for a groundbreaking television series, he had also been trying to discover the driving force behind this ambition. And this driving force – he flushed with shame, his cheeks burning even though he was alone, even though it was only a thought – was love. All he wanted, deep down, was to come up with the makings of a work of art which would show Margrete just a fraction of what she had meant to him. It was not a matter of performing some great feat in order to prove himself worthy of her love, as he had once rather childishly imagined; it was a matter of a gift, an unreserved tribute, a way of saying thank you for reawakening a half-dead aspiration and thereby also his neglected creativity. He wanted to show her what she had made of him. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say one day, placing the cassettes containing the programmes before her, ‘I could never have done this without you.’ Yet again, it was
her
he had been thinking about when he did not know what he was thinking about.

Why did he do it? Where did he get the idea?

Jonas was no longer thinking of nothing. He had come to Montevideo in search of not one viewpoint, but many. He needed to garner different
perspectives
. He sat in a deckchair, thinking several thoughts at once. First and last and under everything else he was thinking of Margrete, but he also thought about his visit to Oslo Town Hall, about a night when he was taught to think big, when he caught Fridtjof Nansen in the beam of a torch, or Harald Hardråde in a tapestry depicting the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Keeping this thought in mind and, beneath it, the thought of Margrete, he continued also to reflect on his grandmother and the war, her strange, secret
insurrection
, while at the same pursuing a parallel train of thought along the branch leading to the Town Hall Square and the demonstration staged by The Three Heretics, a demonstration in which he had endeavoured to view a Norwegian phenomenon from the outside, as a foreigner; and this last made him see
that he would have to view television in the same way, as if he were a Hindu, an Indian, a film director from Bombay. Jonas Wergeland sat in a deckchair in Montevideo and thought of Margrete and of all those other things and, finally, of his meeting with Ana and how they had got talking merely because he happened to mention the name of a Norwegian writer, and in the midst of this welter of thoughts, in the midst of a scene in which he saw himself sitting in an ever-increasing succession of deckchairs stretching out along the beach, Jonas sensed that he ought to concentrate hardest on that last one, on Sigrid Undset, who could actually be regarded as a word in an international vocabulary. A lot of people in Uruguay had never heard of Norway. But some there knew of Undset. Undset, a Norwegian word you might say, was also a word in Spanish. Instead of saying you came from Norway, you could say you came from Undset.