Possibly it was because of the exalted frame of mind induced by his visit to the BBC’s headquarters that he was caught so much off guard by the sight that awaited him when he got off the train in South Kensington. He was in his usual shop on the corner of the arcade in the old station building, taking receipt of a bag containing two chicken sandwiches and two bacon-and-egg sandwiches for the evening’s television marathon, when he started, actually jumped about three feet in the air. Somebody he knew had just walked by outside. His aunt. Aunt Laura. Flamboyantly dressed and looking, from her make-up, as if she had come straight from a stage on which she was playing the lead in an Egyptian romance. And she was not alone, with his aunt was another woman, similarly dressed. Both wore the sort of hats you saw on women at Royal Ascot. Jonas heard them speak to one another in English. They were followed by a man wheeling a goods trolley. Propped up on it was a rug. Jonas had noticed that there was a shop between the two flights of stairs leading down to the platforms. The man lifted the rug into an estate car sitting right outside the arcade; it had British plates and obviously belonged to the woman with his aunt. As if that wasn’t enough, Jonas got the definite impression that these two women were more than friends, they were lovers. Jonas was on the point of calling out, but something stopped him.
Standing there in the sandwich shop he wished he could see the pattern on the rug that Aunt Laura had had wheeled out to the car. Something about the cylinder on the trolley reminded him of a piece of paper – a message – in a bottle, he was sure that everything would be explained if he could just unfold it.
He stared after the car as it drove away. It was blue – blue as the tiled domes in a distant city. Jonas stood outside of himself, saw himself standing there with a black-and-blue eye, a souvenir from the Zetland Arms. It was true. He had been his aunt’s blue-eyed boy, but he had also been blind. He hailed the man when he came past pushing the empty trolley. ‘Excuse me, but do you know that lady, the one who was wearing the bigger hat?’ The carpet dealer stopped, eyed him pleasantly, or with genteel courtesy, adjusted his glasses for a better look at Jonas and his shiner. ‘Why do you ask?’ Jonas hesitated, did not want to say that he was her nephew. ‘I just thought I had seen her before. Is she somebody famous?’ The man motioned towards his shopfront. ‘I couldn’t say,’ he replied, ‘I only know that she’s a good customer. She must have bought fifty rugs from me over the past twenty or thirty years. My shop is one of the oldest in England. She orders rugs from particular regions, specific patterns. And I give her a call when I find one.’ Before disappearing into the shop, the man told Jonas that the two women had a big old house with a luxuriant garden outside of London. He occasionally had to deliver something to them. The house was full of rugs and antiques. ‘Funny thing, though,’ the man said, ‘they call the place “Samarkand”.’
Back at the hotel, Jonas switched on the TV and opened his notebook. He filled a whole page with notes on the first programme he saw, about a trip to Titicaca: the sort of documentary that made you want to race off to the nearest travel agent. And while in his eyes he was on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in his mind two and two slowly flowed together. And did not make five. The Samarkand with which Aunt Laura had presented him was māyā. She had never been to Samarkand. She had never been outside of Europe. She had bought her rugs here, in London, every single one of them. London was the world centre for the Oriental rug trade. This, London, was Aunt Laura’s Samarkand. That grimy little passage in the arcade next to the station was her bazaar. And why was he surprised? Jonas had always known: Samarkand could be anywhere on Earth. Samarkand was the home of our dreams and longings.
He lay on the bed in a hotel room in London. He closed his eyes, left the programme on Titicaca running, as if it inspired long cruises in his mind. Aunt Laura, this too he realised now, had never been with a man. Not one. All of her sketchbooks – like the one in which he himself was now making notes – in which she had drawn penises in all shapes and forms and in every conceivable state, had been nothing but flights of fancy. Jonas lay on the bed, with a voice in his ears talking about the fauna around Lake Titicaca, and thought about Aunt Laura, and he realised that he was not disappointed. It was not a lie that had led him to Samarkand. It was another kind of truth.
So there could be something to the rumour: although Jonas Wergeland was most certainly in London, one could say that his revelation on the secret of good television came to him in Samarkand. In the Samarkand behind Samarkand.
It often struck Jonas that all of the journeys he made had their beginnings in the expedition into Lillomarka with Bo Wang Lee to find the secret hiding place of the Vegans. On the ‘right’ day – Bo consulted a complicated diagram in his little yellow notebook and mumbled something about favourable constellations – they set off from home in the afternoon, each with their small rucksack on their back. Jonas was carrying the jam jars containing the brimstone butterfly and the peacock butterfly, two prisms and the slide rule; Bo bore the jars containing the red admiral and the small tortoiseshell, the other two crystals and Huckleberry Finn. Jonas’s suggestion that they take along a couple of little kids as ‘bearers’ was rejected. ‘You still don’t get it, do you,’ Bo snapped. ‘This is serious.’
The hill up to Badedammen smelled of fresh tarmac, the road might have been resurfaced specially for them. They headed out along the old Bergen road, built at the end of the eighteenth century. Jonas was not sure exactly where they were going, but Bo purposefully proceeded along a blue-flashed path which brought them to the northern end of Romstjern Lake. Shortly afterwards he struck off again, onto a barely visible, unmarked track. Jonas had never been here before. The hillside was a mass of yellow crested cow-wheat. The vegetation grew lush and dense all around them; it was like walking through a greenhouse with the sun filtering through green windows in the roof. The scents were remarkably strong, rising from the ground like fragrant gases. Bo stopped. Thought for a moment. The birdsong sounded unnaturally intense, Jonas thought. Only now did he realise how nervous he was. Bo swivelled around, as if he were listening, using all his senses. ‘Watch out for that rock!’ he cried suddenly, pointing. Jonas jumped as if he were standing next to a landmine. Bo took out his notebook, scribbled something down with the stub of pencil. Nodded. ‘This is good,’ was all he said and walked on.
They reached a shadier hollow, a little valley through which ran a brook with lovely little waterfalls tumbling over flat rocks; it looked man-made, like something out of a Japanese garden or the like. Jonas saw Bo nod again. His friend with the glossy, black Prince Valiant hair pulled out a pocketknife, pried a piece of bark off a pine tree and showed Jonas the engraved markings on the backside. The look Bo gave him told Jonas these were not marks left by larvae, but an extra-terrestrial form of writing. They followed the brook upstream until they came to a very long, narrow tarn with a steep cliff running all the way down its western side. At their feet water lilies floated on the surface of the water. This had to be Lusevasaen. Spooky, thought Jonas. He had heard rumours of dangerous undercurrents in this tarn, that it was bottomless. He felt like getting away from there as quickly as possible, was half expecting something to burst to the surface and cast a net at them.
Bo sprang over the brook. They entered some sort of primeval forest, began to clamber up a steep slope under tall fir trees, the nethermost branches of which were dry and withered. Bo zigged and zagged as if negotiating an invisible maze. Jonas felt sure that they had to be the first people ever to penetrate this patch of forest. ‘We could have done with a machete,’ he grunted as they fought their way through the undergrowth. He eyed all the exquisitely shaped toadstools uneasily: what if they were spaceships, spying on them and warning of their arrival? The trees, their branches, blocked out the light, like massive umbrellas rising in tiers. Here and there a fallen tree lay with its vast network of roots in the air. Jonas thought he heard a strange humming sound coming from a gigantic anthill they passed. His face cut through spider’s web a
fter spider’s web, as if he were breaking one finishing tape after another, or better: ripping through veil after veil. ‘Good,’ he heard Bo mutter under his breath. ‘Absolutely excellent.’
At long last they reached the top, coming out suddenly and breathlessly into the open near the edge of the cliff overlooking Lusevasaen. ‘Here,’ Bo whispered. ‘This is it.’ He did not even refer to his notebook.
They were looking out across a small hilltop covered in grass and heather and dotted with large rocks. An archetypical Norwegian country scene, such an ordinary sight as far as Jonas was concerned that it seemed hard to believe that anything alien could lie hidden here. Beyond, on the lip of the cliff, stood a couple of gnarled pines, smaller versions of the trees his grandmother had pointed out to him in Lars Hertervig’s paintings in the National Gallery. For a second the view took their breath away. They could see all the way across to the northern end of Østmarka, on the other side of the Grorud Valley. A brilliant observation point for any Vegans who might be around, Jonas thought to himself.
The tarn lay black below them. The air was rather close. Oppressive. The sun still hung in a large patch of blue sky, but big clouds were building up in the west. Bo unwrapped the prisms from their handkerchiefs and set them out in a square, roughly in the centre of the hilltop, then he arranged the four jars containing the insects in such a way that they formed a larger square around the crystals. At a sign, Bo and Jonas each took off one lid then raced to the other two jars and did the same with them. And more or less as one the four butterflies fluttered upwards. Jonas was held utterly spellbound. The four butterflies, all so different in colour and pattern, hovered almost motionless above the heather, forming a square with an area of something like five metres. Jonas was able to take in the four movements and the four crystals at one glance, like eight simultaneous thoughts. It was weird. And beautiful. Four sets of sensitively fluttering butterfly wings – so distinct that he thought he could even make out their tiny, colourful scales – and four smooth, sparkling prisms, like mysterious civilisations nestling in the heather. Jonas realised that this could be a gateway. And then, he could hardly believe it, the brimstone and the peacock, the admiral and the small tortoiseshell began to gravitate towards one another. The insects’ square grew smaller, looked set to merge with the square formed by the light-refracting prisms. Because that was the whole idea: all four butterflies had to enter the square defined by the crystals.
Again they held still, or flew in spirals, up and down in the same spot. Jonas was more or less expecting something to manifest itself. He did not know how. Only that something might be revealed, or be opened up. Bo, standing there so proud, a prince, a Chinaman, had convinced him of this. In a way it seem quite natural that the insect which represented the divine process of metamorphosis, from larvae to butterfly, should also be capable of transfiguring this ordinary patch of countryside. Jonas was already starting to feel in his rucksack for the slide rule, the object which would persuade the Vegans that he was a worthy envoy.
But just as it looked as though the butterflies were going to flutter into the centre of the square; just as Jonas was thinking that the landscape was starting to vibrate ever so slightly and emit a faint purplish glow, there came a roar; they turned their heads and saw a small plane flying towards them, or under them. Jonas thought it was a model airplane, he was positive that it was a model airplane, it must have shot out of an invisible slit in the weir of life, until it dawned on him that the plane was actually some distance away, skimming over the trees on the other side of Lusevasaen, that it was, in other words, a real aircraft, and even at that distance Jonas knew which type it was: a Piper Cub, white with red trim – a big butterfly – identical to the one that Uncle Lauritz had had, but it could not possibly be his uncle, because he had been dead for years. Nevertheless, the plane came wobbling over the tops of the trees, as if it was in trouble; it was flying low, far too low, heading straight for the cliff, the rock face underneath them; then, just as Jonas thought they were about to witness a terrible calamity, the aircraft’s nose lifted sharply, bringing it clear of the precipice, it came swooping over the hilltop on which they stood, passed right over their heads, and then it was gone, a sight which would normally have filled them with awe and wonder, but which now only left them panic-stricken, realising as they did that the roar of the plane, the vibrations in the air, could have had an adverse effect on the ‘gateway’. And sure enough: the butterflies had come to a halt. As Bo and Jonas looked on helplessly the insects flitted up and down, then darted away from one another, all flying off in different directions. ‘Shit!’ Bo cried. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Later, after a long walk home in silence, Bo said. ‘Did you see what I saw?’
Jonas nodded, he knew what his friend was referring to. There had been no one at the controls. The cockpit had been empty.
But Bo had observed something else: ‘What was an SAS pilot doing in that plane? And a captain, at that. I saw the four gold bands on the sleeve of his uniform jacket quite clearly when he waved.’
Nonetheless, Jonas was disappointed. The experiment with the crystals and the butterflies had failed. Not until they turned the corner into Solhaug, did he begin to suspect that something might, nonetheless, have occurred. The estate seemed unfamiliar, different somehow. When Five-Times Nielsen stepped out of his entry with a carpet beater in his hand, Jonas felt a burning desire to run up to him and present him with the slide rule, as if the Vegans actually dwelt here, in that place in the world which he knew best of all. Jonas shot a glance at Bo. He too seemed different. And at last it dawned on Jonas: it was not the world that had opened up, but him, Jonas. He had changed.
Miranda
Why did she do it? I need to write more. About the middle part. About the longest seconds in my life. Evening. Late April. Returning home from a World’s Fair. I ask the driver to drop me off at the shopping centre. I want to walk the last bit of the way, I want to savour the smell of spring, I want to pass through pockets of air of varying temperatures. I breathe deep, fill my lungs as after a long dive. I think, I am sure, that I have never been so full of drive, of ideas, of a sheer desire to embrace life. So present in spirit – yes, that’s it.
I delighted in the fresh coolness on my brow after the heat in Spain; I savoured every sound, every millimetre of the scene, those familiar surroundings, trees with branches on which the leaves were already discernible. Greedily I inhaled the powerful odour of the soil. I walked along with my senses wide open. I caught the scent of bonfires. I heard the smack of a skipping rope. I knew it could not be right, but I had rediscovered my powers of thought, the sparkling exuberance of my childhood. A belief in the impossible. I had the urge to stop by the stream, sink my teeth into the bark of a pussy willow tree from which we used to make flutes. At one spot I actually left my suitcase standing in order to experience again the feel of a coltsfoot stalk against the skin of my finger, came very close, in fact, to prostrating myself – the way people do in ultra-romantic film scenes – and kissing the earth on which, by some cosmic will, I had been allowed to walk. And more than anything: I could not wait to see Margrete again, the mere thought of her face, her eyes, the gold glints in those eyes, sent warm jolts running through me. I was aching to tell her all about Seville, about my new plans; I was longing to hear her tell me what she had been up to, what Kristin had been up to; I was looking forward to sitting on the sofa, nuzzling her neck, listening to her talk, maybe while she peeled an orange in that ingenious way of hers, popping a wedge into my mouth and making some wry comment in response to my breathless description of a World’s Fair on the theme of ‘The Age of Discovery’, featuring life-size replicas of everything from Columbus’s ships to space shuttles. For Margrete, the woman I loved, the great discoveries began much closer to home, for example with an orange wedge in the mouth. ‘And feel this,’ she might say, guiding my hand roguishly to her shoulder. ‘This isn’t a collar-bone, it’s a clavicle – a “key-bone”.
Go on, feel it.’
The spring was in my blood, I was all set to unfold. My head was full of colossal, and possibly dangerous, notions, Wagnerian ideas. I had regained my faith in a Project X. Once again I was going to be a mover in the deep, someone who could make people all over the country snap their chairs into the upright position before swivelling them round, as one, like tiny cogs in a gigantic mechanism, to face a screen which gave them, the whole national machine, a fresh injection of energy. For a few giddy seconds on the plane, with impressions of a hectic World’s Fair buzzing around in my head, I had had the feeling that I could make something no one had ever seen before; a television production which would represent a new synthesis of all knowledge and all art forms.
There was an explanation for my elation: several times in the course of the past year Margrete had criticised me. Tactfully, it’s true. I had brooded more on this than I cared to admit. I also knew what it was that she found hardest to forgive: I had succumbed to the temptation to become a TV host. I had been seduced by empty flattery. I had presented two of the light entertainment department’s main offerings, on Friday evenings one autumn and on Saturdays in another. A huge hit. Pages and pages about me in every weekly and weekend supplement going. But Margrete was right, it was mindless. And, what was worse, pointless. She reminded me of the Thinking Big series. One evening she pretty much forced me to watch the programme on Kirsten Flagstad again. By the end she was in tears. I asked her why. ‘Can’t you see how good it is?’ she said. ‘So why are you crying?’ I asked. ‘I’m crying because it lifts me up,’ she said.
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