And then one spring, as if the one thing led quite naturally to the next, they attended a seminar on Italian film held at the Film Institute in the Oslo suburb of Røa. If they had been looking for something to ‘believe in’ and were expecting it to appear on the silver screen, then this was their epiphany. Their introduction to Michelangelo.
They took their seats in the cinema expecting more neo-realism, instead they were presented with something quite different. On that weekend at Røa they saw four films in all by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Éclisse and The Red Desert. They were shocked, outraged almost. His scenes reminded them of the stupid, stylised illustrated serials in weekly magazines. Was such a thing possible? They saw figures walking in different directions, one in the foreground, one in the background. The pace was so slow that they had to stifle a yawn. The close-up of a face could be held for ages. Occasionally characters would move out of shot, but the shot, the empty scene, would be held, long. Antonioni did not seem to have any intention of telling them a story. His characters did not do anything, they acted no parts. They looked. As if none of them could make sense of the world in which they found themselves. Jonas and Leonard understood little of it, and even less of what the thinking behind the films might be. They kept wanting to get up and leave, but they never did. Jonas suddenly realised that he had found a kindred spirit, someone who was out to show them that the world was flat.
On the train back into town they sat staring out of the window. Was it possible? To make a film which ended not with a man and woman meeting as they had arranged, and as everyone expected, but with a seven-minute long sequence in which the audience saw nothing but dull scenes from somewhere in a city. And yet: over the next few days, every now and again either Jonas or Leonard would suddenly exclaim: ‘Claudia! Anna!’ in that typical, exaggerated Italian accent. Or, with anguished expression: ‘Perchè? Perchè? Perchè?’ And they knew that they had been sucked into that universe. Or it had taken up residence inside them.
As to the search for some direction for their anger, its future looked precarious. Instead of sneering at the deplorable state of the world, they were more liable to spend an hour discussing Monica Vitti’s bone structure and the broad bridge of her nose: part lioness, part porn model. Her lips. The way she made up her eyes. One Saturday at the Grand café, after the Film Club, Leonard announced – apropos the power of the Italian tradition – that all philosophy, all questions, including that of Monica Vitti, boiled down to the subject of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, the contrast between Plato pointing upward and Aristotle pointing forward. One pointing to heaven, the other to the world. ‘So which way would you choose?’ Jonas asked. Leonard reached a hand into the air, pointing upward. Jonas thought that was his answer. ‘Two coffees,’ Leonard said when the waiter came over. ‘And two marzipan cakes, since there seems to be a shocking want of tiramisù around here.’
Things started to become rather hazy. They did not do much except wander around, looking. Without any idea of what they were looking for. When not eating spaghetti with a carbonara sauce, or possibly a processed cheese and walnut sauce, down there in the basement, in that red laboratory, or darkroom, in which they had originally planned, by dint of experimentation, to figure out what to do with their lives, to develop images of possible plans of attack, they sat and vacillated. And not only that: they doubted. For the moment at least, Leonard seemed more interested in wielding the pepper grinder – Jonas would never forget the sound of that utensil – than in getting hold of a camera. But he succeeded in justifying his vacillation. ‘I wander around absorbing impressions,’ Leonard said, expertly twirling spaghetti round the base of his spoon with his fork. He was gearing up for his career as Norway’s greatest film director. He was honing his eye.
And his role model, or honing steel, was Michelangelo – Antonioni, that is. They discussed his films. The flagpoles in L’Éclisse, the church bells in L’Avventura, the humming radio masts in The Red Desert. They marvelled at the way in which Antonioni reduced everything to flat planes, even using a telephoto lens to compress the depth of the image. It surprised them to find how well they could remember whole scenes, seemingly meaningless snippets of dialogue. The long sequence on the island in L’Avventura had made a particularly strong impact on them: all those people wandering around on their own, tiny figures cutting this way and that across the deserted landscape, looking for Anna, the lost girl. While Jonas regarded Antonioni as a kindred spirit, mainly because his films seemed to be all thought rather than action, for Leonard he was a mentor. He almost wept with rage when a guy at the Film Club told them that Antonioni had been forced to work in a bank for a while. A bank! Leonard, with a father working for the left-wing press and a mother in the Trade Union building, considered this the most degrading of all occupations. ‘A bank! You’d be better working for the Society of the Blind.’
At long last Leonard decided that his eye was sharp enough. From one day to the next he started calling himself Leonardo – since the Christian names of all the great Italian film-makers ended in ‘o’: Vittorio, Roberto, Federico, Luchino, Pier Paolo, Bernardo. The time had come for him to make his own films, to found ‘the Italian school’ in Grorud. While other boys received Tandberg tape-recorders or gold watches as confirmation gifts, Leonard was able to show off a fabulous 8 mm cine camera, complete with projector and splicer. And he was hooked. He became as fanatical about his camera as Jimi Hendrix – a fellow outsider – was about his guitar. Word had it that Hendrix slung on his instrument as soon as he got up in the morning; he fried bacon with his guitar hanging at his back and took it to the toilet with him. Likewise, everywhere Leonard went his camera went too. He also started wearing sunglasses, whatever the weather: with black frames, like the ones worn by Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita. Later, during his years at high school, his style of dress also changed. While Jonas stuck, during the cold months of the year, to his duffle coat, Leonard went around with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape and a scarf which he never tied, but simply draped over the coat. No Afghan coat for Leonard. ‘There goes an intellectual,’ his attire said. Or rather: ‘There goes a film director. A Leonardo.’
Jonas was press-ganged into a brief but intense career as an actor in various enigmatic films, or more correctly: disjointed scenes played out in and around Grorud. On one occasion he had to get up at the crack of dawn to sit stock-still in front of the lovely glass rotunda by the ornamental pond in the middle of the shopping centre. Not a soul around. Nothing but an ethereal light. Buildings on three sides. Clear geometric shapes and long shadows. A touch of the Giorgio de Chiricos. ‘Look straight up into the air,’ Leonard shouted as he circled with the little camera. ‘Think of something … deep.’ After shooting four rolls of three-minute film he was satisfied. ‘Superb,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking about? You had a face like a dream machine.’
Possibly because he had been sitting facing the Golden Elephant restaurant, Jonas had been thinking about the one subject that was often in his thoughts, although he was not always conscious of it. Her. Always her. Even when he imagined that he was thinking about other girls. He would experience the same thing again, or a slight variation on it, some years later when he found himself in another almost deserted square, a very long way from Grorud, although here too he was surrounded on three sides by buildings – albeit of a more monumental and very different character. Jonas Wergeland was in that place in the world which had been the goal of his dreams, a shimmering pinprick inside his skull, for as long as he could remember: Samarkand. To Jonas Wergeland this fact seemed so incredible – and so mind-boggling – that he might as well have been standing on Saturn’s moon Titan.
His dreams of Samarkand could be laid, of course, at the door of his Aunt Laura and years of veiled references to a city which, as far as he could gather, was the most important place in her life. ‘Tell me who you met in Samarkand,’ he urged her time and agai
n as he lay on the sofa, letting himself drift dreamily into all the rugs on her walls. ‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she would always reply patiently from the corner where she was working at her glittering little goldsmith’s bench. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’
It was odd, really. He had come here, travelled such a ridiculously long way, all because Aunt Laura would not tell him what had happened to her here. It was not a story, but the absence of a story that had led him deep into Central Asia. From the moment when he first heard his aunt pronounce those syllables, Sa-mar-kand, he had longed to visit this place. The very word itself fascinated him. For Jonas, Samarkand had become the one place in the world most likely to hold the answer to the riddle of every human being. Sometimes Jonas felt that all that was needed for him to become complete was a tiny cog, and that this last little piece just happened to be in Samarkand. He had to go there. Jonas Wergeland’s trip to Samarkand was, in the very truest sense, a formative experience or, as it used to be called in the old days: a Grand Tour.
Perhaps that was why getting there proved so difficult. Nowadays, when everybody and their uncle is circling the world on a bike with a video camera and a laptop, or visiting every city in the world beginning with the letter B in the course of a year, it is as easy to get to places as it is hard to discover anything knew, anything semi-original. Of all the journeys Jonas Wergeland made, there was only one which he considered to have been really gruelling, and that was the trip to Samarkand. For a Norwegian in the seventies, it was one of the few places which was completely out of reach. It presented a challenge on a par with crossing Antarctica on crutches. Getting in to Uzbekistan, in that far-flung corner of the Soviet Union, at that time – with no excuse other than an incomprehensible urge to see Samarkand – was an accomplishment, a feat of daring unparalleled in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Strictly speaking it could not be done, but Jonas did it. Thanks to the art of persuasion, bluffing, bureaucratic hurdling, charm, patience and amazing luck. And, not least, wrath. Jonas simply got so mad that he won through. For a short while his anger found a direction, a clear purpose.
So the contrast, once he was actually there in Samarkand, was all the greater. Because no one appeared to care any more. It was all very peaceful and undramatic. He may well have been under surveillance, but he was free to go where he pleased, see whatever he liked, alone, ostensibly at any rate, in a city which nestled so beautifully among the snow-covered mountains; where everything, as far as he could tell, revolved around cotton and melons. And silk – a reminder of a time when this city was a bustling hub on the Silk Road. Jonas had the feeling that he knew this place. He found himself thinking, of all things, of Snertingdal. He half expected to see a sign saying ‘The Norwegian Organ and Harmonium Works’.
He knew what he wanted to see first: Registan Square, the centre of the city, this too once a marketplace. And when he sank to the ground there, simply sat right down with his legs crossed, he knew that it had been worth all the travails of the preceding days; all the hassle, all the discouragement, all the dirty looks from officials in hilarious big hats. Although Aunt Laura refused to tell him about her own experiences, she had described this place to him again and again, told him that it was far and away the finest public square in the world – the West had nothing to equal it. She had compared it to a square with the most imposing gothic cathedrals on three of its four sides. ‘Imagine the Town Hall Square,’ she said, ‘And then imagine another, almost identical, Town Hall where the Western Station is, and a similar building on the spot where Restaurant Skansen sits. And all of them covered in the most exquisite ceramic tiles. Can you picture it?’ Yes, Jonas could picture it. The Town Hall in Oslo was, for many reasons, his favourite building in Norway.
Jonas sat in a sort of lotus position on the edge of the square, soaking up these ornamental riches, now partially restored after years of neglect. The buildings – the Ulug Beg to the west, the Tillya Kari to the north and the Shir Dar to the east – had once been madrasahs, Muslim colleges. Minarets flanked the three massive façades, in each of which was a doorway thirty to forty metres tall. The entire complex was faced with glazed tiles in bright colours, a mass of geometric patterns, floral motifs and Kufic calligraphy. An incredible jigsaw puzzle. Jonas lingered over each wall in turn, not worrying about the time, loving the way the slowly shifting light kept revealing new details in the mosaics. He opened up. Tried to make himself open to something which lay within him and was only waiting for him to find a way of drawing it out. He would find a missing piece here, a story, or at least a snippet of a story.
He had sensed it the moment he reached the square and sank down onto the ground.
Jonas sat there gazing at the three façades. Like three gigantic oriental rugs. They almost seemed to cancel one another out, to generate a void of sorts, concentrated nothingness. He could lose himself in those walls, in the ornamentation, disappear into them. Get to the back of them, he thought. If he stared at them for long enough he might even be able to step out into Aunt Laura’s bazaar of a flat, where he had played as a child, with a torch in the dark.
Samarkand was more than a place. Jonas was conscious of a Samarkand beyond Samarkand, something which was not a city, but a crucial insight. This feeling was confirmed as he sat cross-legged on Registan Square. Because if there was any truth in his suspicion, that the world was flat, then here, in Samarkand, he had found the edge. Samarkand had to be a good place for an outsider. An outside-left position from which one could open up the game, change the rules almost. Not for nothing had Samarkand’s greatest ruler invented a variation on chess using twice as many pieces. For an instant, Jonas had a sense of being back in the world as it was before Copernicus, before people knew that the earth was round. Of being able to start afresh. Follow another fork in the road than that which humanity had so far taken.
And then, just as he felt that something vital was about to rise to the surface, that Samarkand beyond Samarkand, much in the way that one feels a sneeze building up, suddenly it slipped away and in its place was another thought, or a cluster of thoughts, as impenetrable and manifest and rich in nuance as one of the glowing façades before him: Margrete. He had come to this place because he thought he would meet Margrete here. Or at least that there was a possibility of meeting her here. If there was the slightest chance of meeting her anywhere in the world it had to be here, in Samarkand. After all, what was Margrete like? Margrete was the sort of person who could easily take it into her head to go to Samarkand. He realised, although he had never come anywhere close to formulating such a thought before, that he was sure he would meet Margrete here. It was the same sensation, albeit greatly intensified, which he had occasionally experienced as a lovesick teenager: you would go a long way out of your way, or ski for miles, if there was even the most microscopic chance of running into the girl you loved, as if by pure accident. And Jonas saw that, unconsciously, this was exactly what he had been thinking this time too. If he went to Samarkand, the most unlikely place in the world, he was bound to run into her. It was a simple as that.
And with thoughts of this nature running through his head, he realised how much she had been on his mind all the years since she had left, how much he missed her, what an indelible impression those months with her had made on him. This was the story which he had come here to uncover. This was the Samarkand beyond Samarkand. The story of Margrete’s absence, the gaping void she had left inside him. Unbeknown to him, the memory of Margrete had bulked larger and larger in his mind. Maybe, he thought to himself, he was more deeply, more devotedly hers here, now, than when they were going out together.
Jonas rested his eyes on the blue dome of the Tillya Karis, let his mind dwell on a blue found nowhere else in the whole world. Wasn’t blue the colour of hope?
He felt that he was ready. Ready for something. The world was flat and he was sitting on its edge. He knew that something was going to happen, but he was not prepared for the f
act that it was already happening. He was just getting to his feet, and then it happened. He felt a hand being placed lightly on his shoulder. There was someone behind him.
Why did he do it?
During his years with Leonardo, in the epoch of the Italian school and more especially at the height of their Grorud filming fervour, Jonas imagined that he had forgotten Margrete. One might even say that Michelangelo Antonioni helped him, or consoled him, by making films which showed that love today was an extremely tricky, and possibly downright impossible, business. Only once did the thought of Margrete crop up, like a wound, in his mind – when they were hunting for a leading lady. They were looking for a girl who would be as ravishingly beautiful as Jeanne Moreau or Monica Vitti. ‘Whatever happened to that Bangkok chick of yours,’ Leonard asked. ‘Shut up,’ Jonas retorted. It was one of the few occasions when he felt like punching his pal.
In the end they picked Pernille, mainly because she was a year older and had a scooter, a Vespa, which was the perfect prop for a film as heavily influenced by the Italians as Leonard’s. Jonas could not deny that Pernille was disconcertingly attractive, with a dark and rather sulky beauty reminiscent of Claudia Cardinale; secretly he dreamed of being kissed by her the way Cary Grant was kissed by Ingrid Bergman in Notorious: for three whole minutes, the most famous kiss in the history of the cinema, or the most groundbreaking at any rate, in the way it so cunningly got round the censors.
But Leonard wanted them back to back. A good many weird ten-minute tales were shot in open countryside, with a lot of wandering past one another, far apart, a lot of staring into space. ‘Look anxious,’ Leonard would yell at Jonas, ‘look as though you’re feeling guilty about something, although you don’t know what.’ Nothing happened and everything was a mystery. Nonetheless, Jonas was often amazed by the way in which what, to him, was simply a succession of obscure scenes could, when shuffled around and spliced together in the final, grainy short films which Leonard showed on a sheet in the Red Room to the accompaniment of the projector’s hum, suddenly appeared to have a vague plot. He once asked his friend what he enjoyed most about film-making and was not at all surprised when Leonard replied: ‘The editing.’
The Discoverer Page 28