Jonas was ejected from the premises as roundly as an undesirable individual being kicked out onto the street in a Hollywood movie. ‘Goodnight, Mr Amundsen,’ they roared after him. ‘The South Pole’s that way.’ Jonas huddled on the pavement, the back of his head and his eye throbbing with pain; he knew, though, that they had not hurt him badly, they had contented themselves with teaching him a lesson.
And Jonas accepted it as such, although his drinking cronies would probably have been surprised to discover how he took it to heart. He had never been all that interested in Roald Amundsen. He was now, though. He was really keen to know more about a fellow-countryman who could still, so long after his death, make people’s blood boil. At the airport he did something unusual: he bought a book, a relatively new book about the race between Scott and Amundsen – written by an Englishman at that.
Jonas knew nothing of these ructions, or of his off-the-cuff book purchase, that evening at Margrete’s cottage somewhere on the outskirts of Jotunheimen, then too in polar conditions as it happened, looking out each time he raised his eyes from the book he was reading onto a vast, snow-covered landscape. Nor did he realise that he could well be exposing himself to something far worse than the risk of a black eye.
Almost a year had already passed since he had run into Margrete again, but their unexpected reunion was still fresh in his memory. Suddenly there she had been, at the tram stop, and he had had the impression of maps, worlds, flying up to reveal something quite different at the very back. Her. He realised that all the other girls had been māyā. Jonas sat in the cottage, in a chair next to Margrete, still in the first flush of love. The room smelled of woodfires and cocoa. He was filled with an indescribable sense of well-being. He glanced fondly at her. As far as he could see she was reading a novel called The Golden Notebook.
Why did he do it?
Jonas had often been surprised by the way Margrete read. She always kept one hand flat on the page, as if constantly searching for a deeper meaning; as if she imagined that there was some sort of Braille underneath the visible print. If, that is, she was not trying to hold on to the story, much as a gecko clings to the ceiling with its feet. She had the same look on her face when she read as when she was hunting for something, a pair of stockings, mushrooms in the forest: intent, on the lookout. The stillness of Margrete with a book in her hand was a stillness full of movement. It was not hard to see how she became involved, with all of her being, in what was going on in the pages of the book. And this despite her intelligence, Jonas always thought to himself, as if reading novels and having a high IQ were mutually exclusive. She was also liable to say things which to Jonas came worryingly close to sounding simple-minded. ‘Marguerite Duras changed my soul for ever,’ she said once. Was that possible? Could one be changed by a book? And one’s soul? Margrete was also prone to sentimentality when she read. It was not unusual for Jonas to find her crying over a book. On one occasion he had asked what the matter was. It was Berthe, she said. Berthe who? he asked. It turned out it was Emma Bovary’s daughter, who had had to go to work in a cotton mill; she was only a peripheral character, but to Margrete she was the whole key to Flaubert’s novel. It may have been wrong to call it sentimentality. It had more to do with her gift for empathy. Now and again Jonas discerned a link between this ability to identify, even with fictional characters, and her skills as a doctor.
In any case, Jonas understood that Margrete regarded reading as an experience on a par with other experiences in life. Books, for her, had to do not with escape, but with a zest for life. Which may be why she read everywhere, even in the kitchen. Where other women had a shelf of cookery books close to the cooker, Margrete had a little library of novels. This was where she kept her favourite books, volumes which she was quite liable to suddenly dip into in the middle of making dinner, to read a particular passage; and these readings seemed almost to inspire her cooking, or her appetite, as much as any cookbook.
When Jonas thought back on those first months after he started seeing Margrete again, he could see – if he was honest – that he had been more shaken by the discovery that she was a reader than by other, possibly more questionable aspects of her character. He noticed how Margrete became someone else when she opened a book, that she slipped away from the girl he thought he had come to know; she became a person with whom he feared he would never be able to make contact. As if to prove him right in this she frequently sat like a mermaid, with her legs drawn up underneath her, when she was reading. As if she truly was in another element, in the deep, in an ocean of words. Seeing her sitting like that, as now, at the cottage on the outskirts of Jotunheim, with a rock face outside the window turned pink by a temperature of twenty below, Jonas was reminded of the film Blow-Up; it struck him that he would never be able to discover what this picture of a woman reading held in the way of secrets. He could enlarge it all he liked, but it would do no good.
Jonas sat there, enjoying the smell, the sound, of burning logs, the sight of a rosy rock face, and reading an old paperback, not knowing that he was playing hazard with his life. The first pages were rather heavy going, but he soon became totally absorbed. It never occurred to him that it was an unusual book, he had read very few novels, so he had nothing with which to compare it. He did not wonder at the measured pulse of the opening lines, at the odd way in which the one character’s pages-long reflections were inserted between brief, banal remarks about the weather that fell every few seconds. Jonas simply enjoyed it, he had a pleasant sense of two parallel phenomena moving at different speeds. Jonas was in a cottage on the outskirts of Jotunheim and for once he was reading a book. Outside it was more than twenty below, but he was sitting beside a roaring fire. He was in love, he was happy with his new job as an announcer with NRK, he was in a good mood, he was open, he read page after page with a faint smile on his lips, he entertained no expectations of this novel, he simply read it, word by word, conscious of nothing but a profound sense of well-being. When he looked up – first glancing at Margrete in her mermaid position in the chair next to his, then out at the pink rock face before him – time stood still. He emerged from a maelstrom into stillness. The events described in the book were totally undramatic, and yet when he looked up, his heart was pounding, as if he had been in a state of unbearable suspense. For a second he had the feeling that the rock face before him could open up at any moment, in response to some magic password, like Open Sesame.
He read on, page after page in which a description of various doings was interlaced with a stream of thoughts. He got caught up in his own associations, lost himself completely in his own memories, dreams, what might almost have been perceptions. Every sentence, every word seemed to lead him down a sidetrack and from there down offshoots from this sidetrack. He began to discern the central theme: the transience of all things. That and the eternality of the smallest daily task. Millions of years as opposed to a second. Now and then he had to laugh at a particular formulation. ‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,’ he read at one point. Jonas was filled with a colossal intensity; he sat quite still, but on another level he was firing on all cylinders. By chance he happened to look up again. Two hours had passed. For some time he had had a definite sense, in his mind, of being by the sea; he thought he could hear the waves, the swell. He flinched at the sight of the motionless pink rock face, the freezing winter panorama. The landscape had not opened up, but he had.
And which book was this? It was To the Lighthouse. He read on, conscious of how the author, Virginia Woolf, made him think about thinking, how she could almost catch a thought before it was born. At last, a kindred spirit, his heart exulted; someone who succeeded in showing how thousands of thoughts criss-crossed in one’s mind in the course of a day. Someone who made thought the protagonist. Jonas was bursting with excitement and delight. He did not think that Margrete had read this book. But then he came to a passage which she had marked, he recognised her handwriting in the margin, or a youthful version
of it. On the next page he was pulled up short by a metaphor to the effect that in the heart and mind of a woman there could stand tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, like treasures in the tombs of kings. Then came a question which Jonas had also asked himself: was there some art known to love or cunning, by which to push through to those sacred chambers? In the margin he saw a ‘Yes!’ in Margrete’s girlish hand. Again Jonas’s heart began to pound palpably.
He carried on reading, even more engrossed, if that were possible. Little did he know that he was risking his life. He had the feeling that he was not looking down at a book, but down into a brain, a body, a landscape far, far greater, deeper, wider than the scene, Jotunheim, which lay before him when he raised his eyes. Jonas felt the world’s flatness threatening, thanks to a measly book, to give way to hitherto unseen depths. Later he was to believe that he had, for a couple of endless seconds, been only a hair’s breadth away from discovering the true nature of life; it was so clear and concrete that he could almost have reached out and touched it, and said: ‘Here it is!’
Then something happened. He came to a new chapter, totally different. Time sped past, year after year and people departed. All of a sudden things were happening with bewilderingly rapidity and this transmitted itself to his thoughts, they were jammed nose to tail, causing pile-ups. He felt as though he had been sucked into a corridor and God knew what awaited him at the other end. And then – it was like being brutally robbed – the central character died, in a parenthesis, for God’s sake, wise Mrs Ramsey, this was too much, how could the author let her die like that, just by the bye; and then a few pages further on Prue, the eldest daughter, died – this, too, by the bye. When Jonas came to the part where the son Andrew died as well, in yet another bloody parenthesis, he had to stop. He could not take it. That these people to whom, though he did not know why, he had begun to feel attached, should die just by the bye, while that blasted abstract time flowed callously onward, filling page after page.
He had to stop. He could not breathe. The insight was too much to bear. He was in imminent danger of being concussed again. He was being hunted by some monster that he could only escape if he closed the book. Jonas slammed it shut, in desperation almost, smack in the face, so it seemed, of something – something deadly. He remembered how as a boy he had run away from Daniel and only just managed, we’re talking millimetres here, to lock the door against him and his murderous rage. The faint smile still played around Jonas’s lips, as if his body had not yet caught up with his horror-stricken mind. But then: he realised that he was terrified. It was as though a whole pack of wolves had crept up on him unawares and were all suddenly breathing down his neck. Jonas stared out of the window at the rock face, the wintry Norwegian landscape. He was covered in goosebumps. He had almost lost his life. His old life. Had he finished it, that book would have changed his life. He knew it. And he did not want a novel changing his life.
He had closed To the Lighthouse. In the middle of the chapter entitled ‘Time Passes’. He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But he knew he would never pick it up again. He knew that he had come close to making a fatal blunder. He swore to himself that he would never open another novel.
And yet, even though he had put the book down, something had happened. He noticed it later that evening when he got up, still trembling slightly, to light a candle on the dining table. As he struck the match and his hand edged towards the wick, it occurred to him that all life could be contained in that movement, that a person could write hundreds of pages about this simple action and what was going on in his mind at that moment. He had been changed. Not much, but a bit. He was marked for life. Why do you have a scar over your eyebrow? I got it in a fight with Virginia Woolf.
He had read a novel about a woman who knew how to appreciate the perfection of the moment – small everyday miracles. To be able to say, merely of the light on the sea: It is enough! And if he thought about it: Margrete was the same. But what was to become of his life now? What of the ambitions that drove, or had driven, him?
He thought he knew: when he closed Virginia Woolf’s book, he salvaged his faith in his project, or the vestiges of this project. But he also closed the door on his chance of ever understanding Margrete. Who knows, maybe To the Lighthouse would have been the very device that would have opened her up, afforded him some insight into her, just as Bo’s butterflies and crystals could lay open a stretch of terrain in Lillomarka.
Late that night when Jonas was sitting in the outdoor privy in the dark, peering up at Orion, which seemed remarkably close, it was with a sense of having both lost and won. He sat there on the ice-cold toilet seat, gazing up at the stars and thinking of a distant summer, of a friend who looked like Prince Valiant, and who presaged the existence of people like Margrete.
Bo Wang Lee came, in fact, as a foretoken of just about everything. During that brief summer with Bo, Jonas was confronted with a whole bunch of life’s challenges. And possibly the greatest of these took the form of a question. Because, just when he thought that they were all set for the expedition to the Vegans’ hiding place, Bo placed his hands on his hips and said: ‘That just leaves the most difficult question. What should we take with us?’
To begin with Jonas thought that Bo meant something that would guarantee their safety. He remembered the pass which Kubla Khan had given to Marco Polo, a gold tablet covered in strange characters which said that Marco Polo was a friend of the Great Khan and enjoyed his mighty protection. If the Vegans were as intelligent as Bo believed, then it was no use trying to fool them; you could not go to meet a race from another solar system carrying little mirrors, copper wire or beads in eleven different colours – the sort of gewgaws that Stanley took with him to Africa. ‘It has to be something which will show them that we are worthy envoys,’ Bo said gravely. He pronounced the word ‘worthy’ exactly as Jonas would later hear Karen Mohr pronounce it, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.
Bo’s mother was studying social anthropology, or ethnography as it was then called – so Bo knew a little bit about what other explorers had taken with them, people from Europe and America, that is, who set out to visit tribes which might never have seen a white man before. It was a fascinating idea – to think that you could be eaten if you brought little bells, but crowned as an honorary chief if you handed out marbles. Bo told of explorers who had, for example, taken salt to the highlands of New Guinea. Others leaned more towards practical items: pocket knives or watches. Liquor had also been a popular gift among some primitive tribes. But they had to bear in mind, Bo said, that things also carried a message. ‘What about a record by Jim Reeves?’ suggested Jonas, off the top of his head. “I Love You Because”. Then they would know we come in peace.’
What should they take with them? Jonas considered little gifts epitomising Norway – a bar of Freia milk chocolate or a box of Globoid aspirins, a can of sardines from Bjelland. Too local, maybe. What about a kaleidoscope? One of his father’s metronomes, a pyramid with its own hypnotic, in-built pulse? He could always ask Wolfgang Michaelsen if he could borrow one of his Märklin locomotives. The forthcoming expedition induced Jonas to ransack his surroundings and his life as he had never done before. Did he have in his possession anything good enough to merit a place in his rucksack when he set off into the woods to meet the Vegans? What on Earth was at all worth collecting?
There was something Aunt Laura had once told him. During the Renaissance, palaces were sometimes built with a small, windowless room at their centre, a chamber which did not even appear on the architect’s drawings of the building. This was known as the studiolo or guarda-roba. In this the prince kept the most widely diverse objects, all of which had just one thing in common: they inspired wonder. Here one might find rarities from the animal and pl
ant kingdoms together with a whole gallimaufry of other things, all with nothing to connect them except whatever the viewer himself could detect. The German princes called this room a Wunderkammer. Jonas had always thought that Uncle Lauritz must have had just such an inner chamber to which he could withdraw in order to meditate. All he needed were two inexhaustible objects: a box of Duke Ellington records and a tiny portrait of a woman.
The day before their departure Jonas at last found the article which he would take with him: Rakel’s slide rule, with its movable Perspex panel and a centre section which could be pushed out and in. He was always left speechless by the sight of this, a device which could help you to work out difficult maths problems. In his mind he saw himself, Jonas W. Hansen standing face to face with a being the like of which no man had ever seen, in a small clearing in the woods, with the sunlight slanting through the trees; saw how he, Jonas, held out the slide rule, pi signs and all, whereafter the alien accepted this gift and immediately made a gesture which said that he, she, it understood everything – in other words, that he, Jonas, standing there bathed in the slanting sunlight, had somehow saved the Earth by finding the one thing which carried the right message: here you are, our civilisation in a nutshell.
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