The Discoverer (13 page)

At the age of twenty, after completing her schooling, Karen Mohr had set out to travel around Europe. This was in the years just before the Second World War. One summer day in the south of France she came to a small place called Mougins, a few kilometres outside of Cannes, that town later to become so famous for its film festival. And it was here, while sitting all
unsuspecting
in a café, that the incident occurred which would change – Jonas did not know whether to say open up or lock down – her life.

She had been eating an ice-cream cone when she sensed that she was being watched, keenly observed, although she could not have explained what gave her this impression – not until a striking looking man approached her table. He must have been about fifty, balding and short of stature. He asked most politely if he might sit down. She was not sure, but after looking into the big, dark eyes fixed on her own, she nodded. ‘I’ll never forget those eyes,’ she told Jonas. ‘I know what they spoke of. You see it in children’s eyes. The light of imagination. Irrepressible curiosity and irrepressible creativity.’

He was a painter, he said. She had an extremely distinctive face. Would she allow him to paint her? Would she come back to his studio with him? Karen Mohr found this quite funny: artists like him probably said the same
thing to all the ladies. And yet – she was tempted. There was something about this man which told her he was not just another artist. That he was more than that. That what she was being offered here was not the chance to visit his studio, to pose as a model, but a turning point in her life. She sat for a while, thinking it over as she licked her ice cream. He played with a couple of
croissants
from a basket on the table, stuck them on either side of his head, pretended he was a bull about to ravish her. He made a lovely sailboat out of a fork and a napkin; he looked as if he had trouble sitting still, always had to be doing something. But from time to time he would stop and just look at her with the blackest pupils into which she had ever gazed.

She indicated that she was in a quandary. He asked where she was from, asked if she was enjoying her visit to this part of France, asked if she had been to any art exhibitions, whether she was fond of animals, whether – this was important – she had tasted lavender honey. She was filled with a sense of tranquillity. Of gravity. Of light. Felt that she was being lit from within. Suffused with life. ‘I grew as he watched me. I felt as though I was being lifted up, that I sprouted wings,’ she told Jonas. ‘My head was perfectly clear. All of a sudden I could see
through
everything. See how everything was connected.’

That’s how it should be, Jonas was ever afterwards to believe. But just at that moment he was growing impatient: ‘What did you say?’

She had paused, deliberately taking her time, because she wanted the moment to last, wished she could sit there, under that probing gaze, and be discovered, be
beheld
with this same intensity, for all eternity. She felt as though, with those eyes, those senses, he discerned a multiplicity, saw things in her that no other man had ever perceived. He saw, she felt, her hidden beauty, all her potential for love. ‘The feeling of it was stronger than any kiss, if you know what I mean,’ she told Jonas. ‘I’m sure that not even … you know what, could compare with it.’

Jonas felt his heart pounding, though he could not have said why. ‘So what did you do?’ he asked.

‘I thanked him, but declined. Politely.’

She could tell that the man was disappointed, genuinely disappointed. Sad, even. He asked if it would be alright for him to draw her portrait as she sat there in the café. She nodded. He pulled out pencils and some sheets of paper, sat facing her, totally absorbed; covered a couple of blank sheets with black strokes. ‘I drew you before you were born,’ he murmured. She stayed perfectly still. Again she wished that time could be suspended. That she could sit like this and be studied, drawn, by this enigmatic, this dynamic man, for ever. ‘I felt as though he was unveiling me,’ she told Jonas, ‘really unveiling me, stripping away veil after veil.’

‘Until you were naked?’ Jonas flinched at the boldness of his own remark.

‘More than naked.’

When the stranger was finished, he stood up and handed her one of the sheets of paper. ‘Would you like me to sign it?’ he asked. She instinctively knew that this was more than the offer of an autograph; that it was meant as a gift, something which she could possibly trade in for a lot of money. ‘No, you don’t need to do that,’ she said, not even glancing at the sketch. He made ready to leave. ‘Would you come to the beach with me tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘If it is too hot for you, I can hold a parasol over your head while we walk along the shore.’ She shook her head. Although she was not really there, her body shook her head without her being aware of it. He walked away, stopped in the doorway and sent her one last searching, almost mirthful look.

Not until later, in her room, did she take out the sketch and examine it. She saw her own face. It definitely looked like her, that she could see, but it was a likeness that went far deeper than any photograph, although it was a very simple drawing, more like something a child would do. And he seemed to have drawn her face three times, as if he had been viewing her from three different angles at once. She sensed that, simply by being in his company for those minutes – and perhaps by being drawn by him – she had been given fresh eyes. He had transfigured her purely by observing her. She had been blind and his regard had been like a healing hand. She walked over to the window and opened the shutters. The countryside, the light, the people – everything had looked different. She had met a man, and the world was as new.

Jonas thought, but did not say out loud: that place, Mougins, was Karen Mohr’s Samarkand.

‘That’s it there,’ she said to Jonas, pointing to a framed drawing on the wall, next to one of the plants with the scarlet blossoms. Jonas went over to have a look at it. He had never seen anything like it. It was the sort of picture which, once seen, is never forgotten. A drawing that gave off sparks. Jonas
remembered
every line of it for the rest of his life. It could easily have been Egyptian, he thought to himself. Face on and side on at the same time. Although maybe he had seen something similar before, in real life: triplets.

Triplets were a rare sight in the fifties. But only months after Jonas came into the world, at the same hospital, three girls, identical triplets were born – a sensation which was duly reported in the press; in fact some papers actually gave more space to this than to the climbing of Mount Everest – an order of priority at which no one should wrinkle their nose, since the feat performed by every woman during childbirth is every bit as awesome as the conquest of the highest mountain in the world; you only have to look at print-outs from
the latest CTG machines, the patterns of contractions like the silhouetted peaks of the Himalayas.

Jonas remembered the first time he had ever laid eyes on them; he must have been about four or five and he was in the grocer’s shop with his mother. No one had told him about the triplets. He just stood there staring at them, exactly as one is always told not to gawp at people who have something wrong with them. They were standing next to the crates of fruit and to Jonas they seemed as exotic as the bananas from Fyffes – a name which you always ended up spraying rather than saying. They stood in a huddle, staring back and sticking out their tongues at him in such perfect sync that he was sure there had to be only one girl, that he had been dazzled, was seeing double, triple. He had to shut his eyes several times before coming to the stunned conclusion that there actually were three of them.

These triplets grew up in Grorud, they lived at the bottom of
Trondheimsveien
, but he seldom saw them and on those occasions when he did run into them he tended to regard them more as bringing a touch of carnival to the neighbourhood, like some sort of freak show, or like April, May and June, Daisy’s three nieces in the Donald Duck comics. Seeing them swimming and diving together at Badedammen was tantamount to a preview of the
synchronised
swimming which Jonas was to see on television years later.

It wasn’t until school, though, that he really
discovered
them, more
specifically
in fifth grade, when suddenly it was okay to look at girls – when, indeed, this had become the boys’ favourite pastime. Jonas was tempted to don a pair of those special glasses he had seen people wearing in the cinema, with one red lens and one green, to see if the three of them would merge into one mind-bogglingly three-dimensional girl. He started taking more and more notice of them, to the point where he realised that he was in love – in love with all three of them at once. He was faced, in other words, with an
apparently
insoluble problem: which one should he choose? Or, as Bo Wang Lee would have said: ‘What should you take with you?’

Actually, it was thanks to the triplets that Jonas – so he believed, at any rate – made his big breakthrough in terms of his gift, his powers of thought. He knew, as I have said, that this talent of his had its own inherent potential, that there was more to it than merely being able to make believe, to pretend that he was an anaconda, or that he had crossed the Gobi desert with Sven Hedin. The problem was, how was he supposed to invoke it, how to find the password that would allow him access to the treasure.

Along with the triplets, a rope played an important part. In later years this would, for Jonas, acquire an air of mystery, rather like the one in the Indian rope trick. It belonged, naturally, to Wolfgang Michaelsen, but Jonas
was often given the honour of carrying it to school, slung over one shoulder and across his chest, as if he were the leader of an expedition to the top of Tirich Mir. A comparison which is not as far off the mark as it might seem, since this, too, was a case of an epoch-making drive forward in life.

It was springtime, the high season for skipping games in the playground. It was still permissible to play with the girls, even though those days were gone when one child would skip while the rest of the gang chanted ‘Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground’ and other such instructions to perform bizarre, and occasionally comical, actions while jumping the rope. The only possible option when boys and girls played together was ‘joining in’, as they called it. ‘Join in, three and nine,’ the caller would shout, which meant that the next person in line had to jump in after the first person had jumped three times. And since the first person had to jump nine times before running out, this meant that three kids were jumping at the same time. It could be a lot of fun, and the more kids you had skipping in time, the more fun it was: a whole tribe of leaping Masai warriors.

Such a game required a certain sense for
timing
. You soon heard about it if you muffed it and hit the rope on your way in or out. The aim was to build up a smooth, steady stream of jumpers in constant vertical and horizontal motion. The rope was long and thick and called for plenty of muscle power on the part of the kids holding the ends and doing the turning; it smacked hard against the tarmac at every turn, emitting a deadly whiplash crack. Now and again someone would take a nasty tumble and end up with badly skinned knees, having come in too late and had their feet knocked from under them by the rope.

A few of the kids had been known to try somewhat more advanced moves, executing intricate interlacing patterns, coming in from opposite sides, jumping in from the wrong side or, harder still: jumping two shorter ropes swung in opposite directions. There weren’t many who could manage this last, it could easily give you the claustrophobic feeling of being whipped up by a giant egg whisk. The simplest version, the one everyone could join in, was also the most popular: jumping in one after another, while the rope formed a beautiful, elongated ellipse around them. The usual order was boy, girl, boy, girl all the way down the line. It just worked out that way. It was great to jump up and down in a cracking circle of rope with a girl to front and back, the crisp ting-a-ling of bicycle bells in your ears, the sight of coltsfoot growing on the grassy banks and the scent of freshly lit bonfires in your nostrils. It released a tension in them. Or whipped them up, to puberty.

On the day of this particular incident, the caller shouted ‘Join in, four and ten’, which is to say: four people jumping together in the loop at any given
time. And on this occasion, just as he jumped in, Jonas was unwittingly struck by a powerful thought. It had been triggered a split-second earlier by
something
he had seen out of the corner of his eye: the teacher on playground duty, wandering around with his hands behind his back; or at least, what had
actually
caught Jonas’s eye was the big bunch of keys dangling from the teacher’s finger. And as he was jumping, and gradually working his way towards the other end, a new thought occurred to him, one which involved a group of little girls from second grade who were chalking out a hopscotch grid over by the bike shed, and not only that, but he realised that he could hold onto that first reflection, the one about the teacher and the bunch of keys on which, not least, the sight of the whistle that was blown whenever anyone got into a fight, spurred on his imagination while he carried on considering the other thought, the one concerning the little girls and their game of hopscotch and the numbers they were chalking inside the squares; he could hold them both in the air at once, as it were. Now Jonas, like all children, had, of course, already had some small taste of this same phenomenon, this knack of being able to do several things at once: read a book, listen to music, maybe even watch TV with the sound turned down, but taking everything in, and on top of all that, at the back of all that, responding to some question from his mother – that same mother who, by the way, regularly palmed the boys off with a: ‘Don’t bother me right now, I can only think of one thing at a time!’ But this phenomenon, these thoughts he carried with him into the rope, were different, much stronger; his mind could be said to have been totally focused on both images; he could enter into them completely, be in two places at once, he could see every single key on the teacher’s keyring, as if they were keys which would open an endless succession of rooms, while at the same time dwelling on, really giving thought to the little girls’ hopscotch grid over by the bike shed, contemplating a pattern of squares which led to thoughts of a plane, or of marble, which in turn transported him to Athens and the Acropolis.