Melankton Hansen did not say much. He took a job on the pilot boat as if nothing had happened. During the holidays he kept his lip buttoned even tighter than usual, not to shatter the idyll for the summer visitors from the capital, or holidaymakers as the locals, and in due course Jonas too – his father had been born on the island, after all – called them somewhat condescendingly. Because there was nothing the city folks liked better than to be on speaking terms with one of the locals. This carried as much prestige as, later, Norwegian aid workers derived from saying that they knew a Negro. One could, for example, be forgiven for thinking that Mr Wilhelmsen the shipping magnate flew over in his seaplane every Friday evening, then exchanged his suit for an old sweater and jeans with holes in the knees, purely in order to pass the time of day with Melankton Hansen down by the harbour and listen, in the lags in the conversation, to the clip-clip of an oystercatcher skimming the waves at their feet. The holidaymakers loved to be able to come back from the shop in the morning and tell the rest of the family: ‘I ran into
Melankton. He had a pail full of flat fish, heaped up like pancakes. He netted twenty-odd plaice out at Ekholmsflua.’ It was all part of the joys of summer: you wrote postcards to friends in the city about the Simple Life and Getting Back to Basics. Melankton could not only show the city folk a freshwater spring on a tiny islet, or take them out to a stretch of water where porpoises often popped up like spluttering wheels, he could also teach them the words, the essential words, the ones which, when the holidaymakers repeated them, sent shivers of pleasure running down their spines, as if they were not on a small island in the Norwegian skerries, but on a foreign continent where they had managed the prodigious feat of learning the native language. They rocked back and forth on their heels, bursting with pride, when they used the correct terms for different types of boat or reeled off the names of islets or reefs – or better still, a fishing ground, or a skerry which was good for torching crabs. ‘Hue,’ they repeated to themselves after a conversation with Melankton about the headland across from the steamship wharf. ‘Rokka,’ they would murmur, almost reverently, with reference to the narrow strait leading to the open sea.
But Melankton was not always able to contain himself, and less and less as the years passed. Occasionally he would let fall a remark which – and on this all the islanders were agreed – betrayed his vast knowledge and experience of life. Stories started to circulate about weird conversations he had had with holidaymakers, of words and phrases such as ‘the Pre-Raphaelites’, ‘Ernest Hemingway’ or ‘Cartesian philosophy’. One summer visitor, a teacher from Oslo, told the island postmaster that for the first time he now understood the theory of relativity, after having had it explained to him by Melankton Hansen. Some people said that the crate Melankton had brought back to the island with him contained a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a massive work of reference, and that he had worked his way through this in much the same way as other people read Gone with the Wind. Secretly they called him ‘the walking encyclopedia’. The islanders were proud of Melankton Hansen. But he was also something of a mystery to them. He looked like someone who had miraculously managed to escape from East Germany to Western Europe and then, having seen all the delights of its countries, had inexplicably and quite voluntarily, returned to the East as if nothing had happened.
Jonas’s father had told him how proud he had been of his uncle – his father who, as a boy, would willingly give up anything to go trolling for mackerel with Melankton. There was nothing to beat sitting in a motor-boat as it chugged gently across a sea which in Haakon Hansen’s memory was always calm and shimmering, with half an eye on your lines. Once every fifteen minutes or so his uncle might come out with a word, or a sentence, or a whole little story – about the names of the clouds, about life in the rainforests, about the Hindu belief in karma or the big earthquake in Lisbon; fragments which to Haakon – the way he told it to Jonas – went far beyond what any one person could pick up in the way of learning. Not even the mackerel’s rainbow-hued sheen could match his uncle’s sparse utterances; not even the thought of dinner: crisp, fried mackerel and rhubarb soup.
And yet. There were things which Melankton had seen and done which he never spoke of to anyone – that much even Haakon gathered. ‘Something bad happened to Melankton,’ people on the island whispered. One of the lads on the pilot boat claimed to have heard Melankton mumbling something about ‘a lost ruby’. He had been hurt, folk said. It must have been something to do with a woman. And Jonas’s father realised that there might be a grain of truth in these rumours because sometimes Melankton would take a deep breath and let it out again in an eloquent sigh, shaking his head, as if Haakon were not there. Then he would come to himself, fix his eyes on the boy and declare: ‘When you get right down to it, lad, there’s only one thing to say: “Watch out for Venus!”’
As he bounced up and down on the seat of the old bus in his freshly ironed shirt, on his way to meet Uncle Melankton, Jonas was thinking to himself that now at long last he was going to learn what had happened to this man, the pride of the family and, even more exciting, the story behind a lost ruby.
The thought of Venus, a warning to watch out, may also have crossed his hopeful and mildly inebriated mind as Marie led him into the Belém Tower in Lisbon. But at that particular moment he had no will of his own, and he was curious; it was like waiting for a verdict which he could do nothing to change. She paid for their tickets and led the way to the first floor, an open platform from which they could admire – of all things – a statue of the Virgin Mary. They were alone. It was just before closing time, they had seen people leaving. Again Jonas was conscious of the way her eyes kept flickering across him, as if she were seeing him in a new light, as another person almost. She grabbed his hand and drew him through a narrow doorway, then up the stairs to the bottommost room in the tower itself. She located another opening, a door leading to a dim, tight spiral staircase. She had to let go of his hand and precede him up the stairs. The thin stuff of her dress fluttered like bait in front of his eyes. The smell of her filled his nostrils and reinforced the sense of intoxication. On the steep stairway he could see right up her legs to the edging of her underwear. She wants me to see that, he thought. She climbed quickly, all but running up the smooth, worn stone steps. He followed on her heels, his head spinning, had to put one hand on the rough wall for support, stared at the play of muscle in her legs, at her ankles; he was surprised to discover how lovely and sexy an ankle could be, thought what an underrated part of the female anatomy it was, or perhaps he was thinking about the Achilles tendon, his own Achilles tendon, his weak spot, that he was about to tear it, that something bad was about to happen, which is to say something good, but at the same time bad. They passed through several rooms, met no one, carried on up the stairs until they reached the top; stood there, dazzled by the strong, late-afternoon light. Jonas lifted his face to the refreshing breeze, but his head felt no clearer for it. Again he had the impression, although he could never be sure, that she had been here before. If she had a plan then it had to have been a spur-of-the moment thing, a combination of common sense and madness.
In each corner of the square platform was a small domed watchtower. She pulled him into the one overlooking the river. From it, they could see due west, to the mouth of the Tagus and the ocean stretching out beyond it. He had to turn sideways to get through the door and into the tiny white chamber – there was just room enough for them both. She leaned through the peephole in the wall, leaned far out. Her dress slid up, exposing her thighs, the soft skin; her bottom arched towards him, the pattern on the thin fabric stretched over it making him think of a globe. ‘Look,’ she said, without turning, as if wanting Jonas to bend over her. He tried, moved in close to her. The sea air wafted past him, but did not dilute the smell of her, a heavy scent of patchouli and perspiration. The sun hung low in the sky straight in front of them. She pointed across the glittering sea. ‘This is where they sailed from, the g
reat discoverers,’ she said. Her voice rang hollow in the narrow chamber. For some time nothing was said. Then: ‘Do you feel a bit … peculiar too?’ she asked. Long pause. They both stared at a container ship gliding past. The Nuova Africa, a black hulk heading out to sea. He heard her breathing, every sound amplified under the small domed roof. The water sparkled beneath them, before them. His heavy breathing was bound to sound, to her, like panting. Like a rhinoceros. He swallowed and was about to say something when he felt her hand curl round his buttock and draw him closer, right up against her. Aroused though he was he could not help seeing the funny side of it. To be standing inside a work of art, a building on the unesco World Heritage List; to be inside a monument to the triumph of civilisation – and to feel like a beast, so horny that the two halves of one’s brain have shrunk to two testicles. All thought of his project even, the television series he was trying to save, disappeared, sliding as it were from his brow and down through his body, as if rather than life, rather than anything, he would take sex life. He feared – he knew – that he was succumbing to Melankton’s syndrome, but he didn’t bloody well care; he had long since realised, believed he had long since realised, that for far too many years he had held back in such situations because in his mind he had created a dilemma for himself, one which did not really exist.
Jonas aged seven, in the freshest of freshly ironed white shirts and on his way to meet the family’s learned treasure, was blissfully unaware of these future deliberations. Jonas’s father was a conscientious man who made a point, every summer, of visiting his surviving relatives on Hvaler. It was a couple of years, however, since he had last seen Melankton Hansen, his uncle having moved into an old folks’ home on one of the neighbouring islands. And since Jonas was now old enough he was given the honour of accompanying his father. He knew Haakon was looking forward to introducing him to this unique uncle who would prove to Jonas, once and for all, that they were not descended only from simple, fishy-smelling folk, rough, loose-living machinists or the keepers of general stores with paintbrushes hanging from the ceiling, outdated advertising posters on the walls and a spittoon still set discreetly in the corner. ‘In our family, son, we also have some real, live geniuses. Just you wait and see.’
And Jonas, bumping up and down on the bus seat in his white shirt, could hardly wait. Soon he was going to hear words he had never heard, the words. He might even – if he were lucky – get to hear more about ‘the lost ruby’, or about Venus. He had heard the story many times: when Melankton returned from his unknown adventures he moved into one of the little white cottages on the south side of the island, a property which he gradually turned into a star attraction. While his neighbours toiled over dry lawns covered in molehills, Melankton’s garden was a riot of exotic blooms and every sort of fruit tree – he was even said to have succeeded in growing apricots. It was like coming to another place, another country, visitors said.
The final proof that something bad had happened to Melankton came on the day that the steamship pulled into the wharf with a very strange object standing in the bow, rather like a figurehead. Jonas’s father had also been there that day: Haakon Hansen, soon to leave the island himself to go over to the town, later the capital, and become an organist. It was a naked woman, a divinely beautiful creature holding aloft a pitcher. Melankton stood proudly on the quayside, like a groom waiting for his bride. He told people that it was a statue of Venus, the goddess of love. He meant to put it in a fountain he was planning for his garden. No one dared to say anything, but secretly they shook their heads: Melankton had gone too far this time, this was hubris. And they were right. Very carefully the crew began to hoist the marble statue ashore, having almost bashfully refrained from laying hands on her bare breasts – and just at the moment when she hung suspended between the bow and the wharf, as everyone was secretly admiring the lines of this divine figure, the rope gave way and the statue plunged into the deep with a white, frothing sigh.
From that day on Melankton said not one word to the locals. Whatever they did hear about him they got in dribs and drabs from the summer visitors. But no one forgot that story. Any time children, including those just there on holiday, swam off the wharf, the grown-ups would shout: ‘Watch out for Venus!’ They were worried that the marble goddess would be sticking out of the blue clay like a white lance, ready to spear anyone who dived too deep, or that she would drag them into the mire if they tried to swim down to her. Despite all the warnings a lot of boys did dive, trying to catch a glimpse of Venus; they may even have been excited by the thought of stroking those smooth breasts, sticking a hand into her pitcher.
Haakon Hansen was in a good mood as he and Jonas rattled along the narrow road in the old bus. Jonas had brought a bag of King of Denmark aniseed balls, which he thought might be just the gift for Uncle Melankton. He knew intuitively, although back then he could not have put it into words, that he was to be offered a glimpse of his own potential. He was about to have his fortune told.
Jonas would never forget that warm summer day and the visit to the old folks’ home: the large, white wooden building set amid copper-coloured pines with swaying tops, the blue sky with clouds scudding across it. He and his father walked along a path, over a soft carpet of pine needles, surrounded by the scent of resin and salt water. He was going to meet the family genius, the ‘walking encyclopedia’.
A nurse in a pristine white uniform showed them up the worn stairs to a room in which they found Uncle Melankton sitting by the window in a mouldering spindleback chair; a room with flaking paintwork, a room that stank of piss and sweet, half-rotten bananas. ‘Someone to see you, Melankton,’ she cried, as if talking to a child. Jonas noticed that the room was completely bare except for a bed and a chair. Not a picture. Not a book. The old man was wearing a shirt that had once been white, but which was now almost yellow, and most definitely not freshly ironed. He was looking out at the garden. He’s dreaming of apricots, Jonas thought. He sees Venus standing in the middle of a fountain, encircled by laden apricot trees.
‘Hello, Uncle Melankton,’ Haakon Hansen said a little too cheerily and rather uncertainly. Even at that point he must have known.
Slowly the old man turned round. Jonas had been expecting a countenance that spoke of matchless sagacity, but this face looked blank. Still, though, Jonas was sure that Uncle Melankton had an amazing memory, that he could come out with nuggets of nigh on divine wisdom at any minute. His face was bathed in sunlight and the furrowed skin had the same warm cast to it and the same deep criss-crosses as smooth, weathered rocks by the sea at the end of a quiet, sunny day. Jonas stood there in his white Sunday-best shirt, hair neatly combed, waiting for some pearls of wisdom, for something close to the essence of life itself to be revealed.
‘Cunt,’ said Uncle Melankton-
For a few seconds there was total silence.
‘Uncle, it’s me, Haakon,’ Jonas’s father said patiently. ‘We brought you some grapes and a bag of aniseed balls.’
‘Cunt, cunt, cunt,’ babbled old Melankton, with a trickle of drool running from the corner of his mouth.
‘Totally senile,’ Jonas’s father murmured softly, half to himself, half to Jonas. ‘Totally gaga.’
Jonas liked the fact that his father did not seem embarrassed, and did not try to smooth things over. Although he could not have said why, he felt an immediate sympathy for this family member. He opened the bag of aniseed drops and slipped a couple into Melankton’s hand. The old man promptly popped them into his mouth and a blissful expression spread across his face, as if he suddenly remembered that he had once shaken the hands of kings or dallied with beautiful women in distant harbours. Haakon Hansen sat down heavily on the bed and lifted Jonas onto his knee. They sat there for a while, as if they had to stay for a set length of time so as not to offend convention’s invisible timekeeper. They sat there with Uncle Melankton, the pride of the family, as he rocked back and forth in his chair, muttering ‘Cunt, cunt,’ every now and again, sucke
d on another sweet and stared out of the window at the clouds sailing swiftly, like Flying Dutchmen, across the sky, above pine-tree tops which, with a little stretch of the imagination, could be likened to luxuriant pussy hair.
Jonas did not know what to think. He was not disappointed, though. Some profound truth about life had been revealed. Later it would occur to him that this man’s words had given him his first sight of mankind’s strange ability, for good or ill, to simplify complex concepts. It was a phenomenon he would later encounter again and again, in the most unexpected areas of life: the Encyclopedia Brittanica boiled down to one word.
As they were leaving, Uncle Melankton winked at Jonas and stuck out his tongue, on which an aniseed drop lay moist and glistening – almost as if his words had taken the shape of a sparkling, polished ruby.
In time, this experience would give rise in Jonas to a certain anxiety. He became wary where girls were concerned. It might even be that part of the reason Jonas was so slow in making his sexual debut lay in his boyhood meeting with Melankton Hansen. Senile old man or no, Jonas could not help interpreting that slavering ‘cunt, cunt’ of his great-uncle’s as an explanation of sorts for his return to the island at the mouth of the fjord, for why his gifts were never allowed to burst into full bloom. The path from cultivating one’s genius to cultivating one’s genitalia could be appallingly short. For a long time, Melankton represented for Jonas the living embodiment of a dilemma, the question of either-or. Not until he met Margrete again was Jonas able to see, thanks to her, that the one did not necessarily exclude the other. By then he had for years been labouring under a sad misapprehension, been afraid that he would go the same way as Melankton: that the yearning for life would be forced to give way to the yearning for sex life.
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