by Reif Larsen
But Otik would not be deterred. He connected a set of wires and then snapped the head of the bird onto the body. He then repeated this preparation on a second bird. His hands were working quickly, massaging the necks of the creatures with an unexpected tenderness. Back at his workbench, he opened a laptop and began to peck away at the keys, muttering to himself.
“Otik, please,” said Lars. “Let’s leave it.”
Otik slapped a final button and raised his arms in triumph.
“Let’s dance, baby,” he said, turning to face the birds.
They waited, Radar holding his breath. Shostakovich played on in the background. Nothing happened. Radar glanced over at Otik, whose face had turned sour. They waited some more. The birds lay still on the table.
“Bem ti sto majki!” said Otik, deflating back into his seat. “I told you it was problem. I told you before: amplitude shackles are such bullshit.”
“And welcome to life at Xanadu,” said Lars. “We spend most of our time attempting to figure out how we just screwed up. It’s a game of outrunning our own failure.”
“Kirkenesferda,” said Radar, stumbling over the strange word. “Wait. Are these the same people who electrocuted me?”
Lars sighed. “First of all, I want you to know I had nothing to do with your electro-enveloping. I was only ten years old at the time, so I plead the ignorance of youth.”
Fig. 3.9. Notes from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 493
“Electro-enveloping?” Radar said.
“The technology came about accidentally from Kirkenesferda’s investigations into some old Tesla designs. After Kirk To, they began looking into organic circuitry so as to try and make the human body into a puppet of itself. It was an attempt to circumvent Kleist’s dilemma. An awareness of ourselves as an actor on the stage inevitably corrupts the essence of our movements. We think, and therefore we cannot just be. Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet was meant to rewire the body so that another could control our movements, just as if we were a puppet. The project did not pan out, but many other discoveries came from this.”
“Like how to electro-envelope someone’s skin,” said Radar.
“Well, yes. Among other things. But really, they had no idea what they were doing. The technology was primitive, brutally so. Let me tell you this: what they did to you was not right. Leif should never have offered his services. He was charismatic and excitable, but he was also a schizophrenic delusional. At the time, I worshipped him. Everyone did. And everyone wanted to believe in what he said, but now I see that he was just a boy playing with a toy, and this toy should never have been used on a living human being, and certainly not a child. I’d like to think that Kirkenesferda’s come a long way since then. We’ve matured—spiritually, morally, karmically.”
“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I’m still not quite following you. What is Kirkenesferda?”
“It is most important group in all of performance history,” said Otik, looking up from his workbench.
“Well . . . let’s stay modest, shall we?” said Lars.
“It is truth,” said Otik. “You want to argue about this?”
“What he means is that their contributions have often been overlooked.”
“It’s not what I mean,” said Otik. “I mean they are most important group in history.”
“Your father played an important role.”
“It is truth,” said Otik. “Your father, he had so much talent. He was the best.”
“He was?” said Radar. It was only after a moment that he heard the past tense in Otik’s words.
“So much,” said Otik, shaking his head. “So, so much. Genius.”
“But what do you mean, was?”
“Ah, let’s not quibble about semantics. Otik’s English is not the best,” said Lars. Otik opened his mouth, but Lars held up a finger in warning. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Anyone for coffee? Radar?”
“I actually don’t really drink coffee,” said Radar. It was true: coffee, like alcohol, caused his already malfunctioning body to go into overdrive.
“In that case, I’ll just drink yours,” said Lars. He busied himself with an electric kettle. “So how would one describe Kirkenesferda? I think Per called us a ‘metaphysical army of Arctic puppeteers,’ but of course that’s a ridiculous explanation. Per has a tendency to overstate his case.”
“Who’s Per?” Radar asked.
“Per Røed-Larsen. My stepbrother.” Lars went over to the bookshelf and took down a mammoth beige book. He handed it to Radar. “He’s written the most comprehensive history of Kirkenesferda, even if most of it’s not quite true. He and I don’t speak anymore, but I must say his work’s impressive, if perhaps overly critical, although I would be, too, if my father abandoned me for some metaphysical army. I don’t mean to go all Freudian on you, but Per was a little obsessed. He elected himself the primary Kirkenesferda historian, much to the outrage of Brusa Tofte-Jebsen.”
Radar leafed through the book, staring at the pages and pages of graphs and tables. A whiff of the familiar. He felt as if he had held this book before.
“Your father abandoned you?”
Fig. 3.10. Jens Røed-Larsen at the Bjørnens Hule (1968)
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 96
“No. He abandoned Per and his sister. You see, in 1939, my father, Jens Røed-Larsen, was one of the most important nuclear physicists working in Norway.” Lars came over and flipped to a page in the book. “There. That’s him. Per claimed he was on track to win the Nobel Prize, but I’m not sure about all that. Anyway, when the Nazis invaded, Jens was forced to flee to Stockholm with his wife, Dagna, and their baby, Kari. Both the Germans and the Allies of course wanted him for their nuclear weapons programs, but he refused. He was something of a die-hard pacifist at the time. But while he was hunkered down in Sweden, he heard whispers about this avant-garde performance group working on the Russian frontier, in Lapland. They were supposedly making a courageous stand against the war through these art pieces centered around the physics of the nuclear bomb. You’ve got to remember that the bomb at this point was only a dream, a terrifying possibility on the horizon. Hiroshima was still two years away. My father’s interest was piqued. He heard this group were in need of a nuclear physicist on the team, so, in 1943, he essentially left his family and traveled up to Kirkenes. You can imagine what a difficult choice this was.”
“Why did he do it?”
“I still don’t know, really. War causes strange things to happen. People’s priorities shift. I suppose he came to think that this cause was something pure, something effectual. Still, I can’t imagine. It was quite a dangerous trip for my father. You see, the Nazis still controlled the entire North. The whole reason they were occupying Norway in the first place was so they could produce heavy water to make an atom bomb. But my father risked it anyway. He was guided by a small band of Sami. They say it was bitterly cold—one of the worst winters on record—and he lost two toes in the process. But he made it. They took him over the mountains and then down into Fennoscandia to the Bjørnens Hule. My father then worked on Kirk En in 1944, the first of the two nuclear events.”
The kettle began to shiver.
“You sure I can’t interest you in some?” said Lars. “I get it from this great little place by the docks in Constable Hook.”
“No, thanks,” said Radar. “Did you say nuclear events? You mean like bombs?”
“Heavens, no.” Lars laughed. He took out a small French press. “Not bombs—happenings. Movements. Kirk En took place in Poselok, before the war was even finished. This was the whole reason my father was invited up north. It was an installation largely about nuclear fission, but also about longing and witnessing and infinity, I believe, but then, this is just my interpretat
ion. Per, of course, disagrees with me. One of my great regrets is that I never got to see it. They never even took photographs. Can you believe it? All that work, and no evidence of its existence. Sometimes, in my more skeptical moments, I wonder if it even happened. But it must’ve been beautiful—I can picture it in my mind very clearly—a small, isolated island in the Arctic, perhaps twenty meters across. A forgotten shred of land. There’s a chance no human had ever even set foot on the island until they staged this miraculous event. ‘A silent, devastating critique of our obsession with manipulating natura into instruments of mass execution,’ writes Per. I think that’s well put.”
“So what was the event?”
Fig. 3.11. Kirk En Heavy Water Shoe Dip
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 154
“No one actually witnessed it, so all we have left is the description,” said Lars, pushing down the plunger of the French press. “Two hundred and thirty-five jars, arranged in a perfect circle. The jars were all filled with heavy water allegedly stolen from the Nazi plant in Vemork. Inside each jar, three tiny dolls are floating. The dolls are designed to have the exact density as the heavy water, and so they appear essentially weightless. And in the middle of the circle, two hundred thirty-five beautiful puppets, made from fox skeletons, mounted on tracks, each with a single shoe cradled in its arms—”
“Wait, I’m sorry—no one ever even saw the show?” said Radar.
Lars smiled. “Apparently two Russian fishermen eventually did discover the installation sometime in the eighties. You can imagine their surprise. Bože moj!”
Otik snorted. Lars looked over at him.
“What?” said Otik. “It is funny when you speak. Bože moj! You are funny.”
“So,” said Radar. “I don’t mean to be rude . . .”
“Please,” said Lars, pouring the coffee into his mug.
“You’re saying your father left his family to put together an installation with jars in the Arctic that no one saw except two Russian fishermen?”
“Forty years later, yes.”
“Forty years later.”
Lars smiled. “When you put it like that, it does sound a bit awful, doesn’t it? But you’ve got to understand that at the time, it was much more serious. It felt like a matter of life and death. They truly believed they were changing the course of history by staging such an event.”
“Of course they were changing history,” said Otik. “It is no doubt.”
“But no one ever saw it!” said Radar.
Otik turned around. “You don’t know anything, do you? You are like little child.”
“Please,” said Lars, holding up his hands. “It’s a fair critique. And it’s a critique that’s been leveled at Kirkenesferda by more than a handful of scholars. Many have called us the worst kind of self-satisfied, pretentious time-wasters—creating our art while others die. Sometimes I harbor these same doubts myself. But then I think back to what Leif said all those years ago: that we were circling around something essential, something far too beautiful to abandon—‘an eternal object,’ he used to call it. He used to say small things affect big things, just as big things affect small things.”
“This is true,” said Otik. “Small and big.”
“Okay,” said Radar, eyeing Otik warily. “So then what happened next?”
“After the war, my father moved back to Oslo with his family for a time. He took up his old position at the university again. He went through his routine, taught his courses, but everyone said he wasn’t the same man. He always had his eyes pointed northward. Per was born in 1952, but even this couldn’t keep him there. My father left maybe three years later for Kirkenes. He couldn’t escape it, I suppose. And he essentially abandoned the family, the toddler, the job, everything. You can imagine the effect this had on Dagna. To be left by the same man twice. She never recovered.”
“So you had a different mother?”
“I did. Her name was Siri. My father met her at the Bjørnens Hule. He had been living up north for ten years or so. This was after they had already staged Kirk To, in 1961. My mother joined them in 1968 or something like this. I’ll have to look at Per’s book. She was the only woman in the camp.”
“Why did she come?”
Fig. 3.12. Frame still from Kirk To, Gåselandet
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 230
“Oh, I don’t know. She was a hippie. A Norwegian hippie. You know—long dresses, no bra, the whole gambit. But beneath this flower-power routine, she was a fiercely intelligent idealist. She was a set designer. Just brilliant. She had seen the famous nuclear bomb footage of the Gåselandet performance at some drug party in Oslo and decided this was what she wanted to do. And when she showed up at the camp, you can imagine . . . There was a kind of brutal competition for her affection among the men. Some of them had not seen a woman in years. And yet it was Jens, the old professor, who won out. I don’t think my father was really even interested in meeting a woman. A part of him was still in love with Dagna, and he must’ve felt great guilt about leaving Kari and Per behind. But Siri was Siri, and he couldn’t resist. I’m glad he didn’t. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“So when did my father come in?”
“Your family visited the Bjørnens Hule in 1979. This was when Kermin first met Leif.”
“Who’s Leif again?”
Lars flipped though the book and pointed to a picture. “Leif Christian-Holtsmark,” he said. “He was one of the founders of Kirkenesferda. Him and Brusa Tofte-Jebsen. And then Brusa left after a disagreement about the group’s future, so really Leif became our spiritual mentor for many years. He was the heart. Leif asked your father to help him out for Kirk Tre, the Cambodia movement in Anlong Veng.”
“Cambodia?”
A weary look came across Lars’s face. “It was the first time they did a movement in a place of active warfare. Everything changed after that.”
“And my father went, too?”
Lars shook his head. “No, thank God. But he made the puppets. They were incredible.”
“Incredible,” Otik agreed. “Most.”
“They had screens for heads. It was very complicated, very time-consuming. They were these fantastic creatures with essentially infinite faces. The puppet could become anything you wanted it to be,” said Lars. “And they were magic. Absolute, utter magic. I wish you could’ve seen them. Some of the most beautiful objects ever made. Here—here’s a drawing from Per’s book. It doesn’t really do it justice.”
Otik came over and looked at the image with them. “It changed my life when I see this,” he said. “I remember someone showed me this photo and I think, ‘Ah, okay, everything is possible now. I must work like son of bitch.’”
Radar stared at the image of the thin little puppet-man with the circular television screen for a head. So simple, yet captivating, even in this black-and-white iteration. He imagined the puppet-man moving, eyes blinking on the screen. The slow bend of his arm, the nod of the head. His father had made this. Something approximate to pride stirred inside of him.
“So then?” he said. “What happened in Cambodia?”
“Oh,” said Otik, returning to the workbench.
“Oh?” said Radar. He looked over at Lars and saw a slight grimace pass over his face. The mood in the room shifted.
“Why do you always ask these questions?” said Otik. “You are like child with all of your questions.”
“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I didn’t mean to—”
Lars held up his hand.
“It’s okay. Of course you didn’t.” He sighed, running a finger around the rim of his mug. When he looked up again his eyes were heavy. “It wasn’t good.”
“It was beautiful,” said Otik.
“Only in theory.”
“In more th
an theory. Anlong Veng was most important event in twentieth-century performance.”
“It was a human catastrophe,” said Lars. “The only thing we can be grateful for is that your father wasn’t there. Only his work.”
Radar was silent. The music on the radio encountered a brief batch of static. Strings evaporating.
After a moment, Lars began speaking again. His gaze had moved to some distant point, far away from the room. “We got in. It was a bloody miracle that we got in at all, thanks to Raksmey.”
“Raksmey?” He had heard this name somewhere.
“Raksmey Raksmey,” murmured Lars. He stopped and closed his eyes.
“You see?” Otik said to Radar. “You see what you do?”
Lars shook his head. He took a sip of coffee. “I lost everything that night,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
Lars looked up and smiled weakly. “Of course, everyone assumed it was the end. I mean, there’s no way to recover from something like that. And your poor father . . . he had no idea what had happened. I was stuck in Thailand in government custody. I turned eleven while I was there. And then, out of nowhere, Brusa Tofte-Jebsen reappeared. He’d been out of the picture for years. He’d been writing his articles about Kirkenesferda, of course, but I’d never met him before. And he just swooped into Bangkok and got me out of there. I don’t know how he did it . . . Per claims he paid a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe, but Brusa always denied it. As you can imagine, I was in complete shock. For years. After losing both of my parents like that . . . There was talk about sending me to live with Dagna and Jens’s old family. But the relationship wasn’t good with her, so in the end, Brusa ended up adopting me. He was also the one who contacted Kermin and told him what had gone down in Cambodia. I think it was hard for your father, being so distant, not knowing what to do . . . He had put so much energy into a show that had ended with all of these people getting killed.”