The Discoverer (18 page)

One night, in the moonlight, she took Jonas by the hand and led him up onto the city wall beside the north gate. And here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she produced a kite she had bought and flew it from the top of the wall in the winter night, steered it expertly, making it swoop low then soar again, a sight which reminded Jonas of something he had seen before, in another life so it seemed. ‘Here, you try,’ she said, standing behind him and helping him, guiding him. ‘Well done,’ she said, as if talking to a child. Jonas stood there, wrapped in his thick, quilted coat, and flew a kite so high that it was just a black dot in the moonlight. It was all about control. About relaxing. Letting things run.

Margrete said not a word. Jonas Wergeland stood atop a city wall in China, flying a kite in the moonlight and he understood.

So why did he do it?

At the airport, on the day of their departure, Jonas took their guide aside. ‘That was so nice, that piece by Grieg you played. Thank you.’ The man was gratified by this, he could see.

‘Yes, Grieg was a great hit-maker,’ the guide said. ‘I know several tunes by him. Next time you come to Xi’an I will play them for you.’

Again that night in the hotel in Beijing Margrete snuggled in to his back, as if wanting not only to warm him, but also to defend him against attack from behind. She lay there, breathing on him. He was dead, a mere form; he had not yet discovered his true potential. He might have created the most famous Norwegian television series of all time, a worldwide success, and be arguably the biggest celebrity in the whole country, but he had not found his way in life.

The rows and rows of terracotta warriors had also given him a sense of déja vu. They reminded him of his youthful endeavours back home in the
basement
at Solhaug: the skipping, the rope, the thoughts that were unearthed, in serried ranks. Maybe his basement had been just such a subterranean realm, a place where he had tried to do much the same as Emperor Qin: to make time stand still, win eternal life. Build a world of his own, which no one could invade, where he would be safe.

But during that secret basement period of his life, on his journeys of
discovery
into the world’s most beautiful hemisphere: the brain – to the extent that this is the seat of thought – his objective kept shifting. At one stage all his efforts were focused on mastering a triple skip, what he called a triplet. Gradually, however, he became more and more obsessed with punching a hole in something, breaking down a sort of wall of thoughts, of reaching
beyond
. He took it into his head that if he could just get enough thoughts turning in his mind simultaneously, something would burst open, all those different reflections would latch onto one another, their united weight rip the surface and they would sink down to illuminate something in the depths, like a bathysphere exploring some hitherto unplumbed fissure in the seabed. Or perhaps the ‘other place’ thus revealed would turn out to be what, in his mind, he called Samarkand. Many a time when he was skipping like a soul possessed in the dark basement, with the rope whirring round him as he did doubles, he felt as if he were caught in a whirl, as if he were a dervish of the skipping world. More and more often, once he had mastered the knack of following four trains of thought simultaneously, he had the impression that he was on the point of making some great find – that something massive, something colossal, was lying in wait, that it could break through at any minute. This reminded Jonas of the thrill of anticipation he experienced with
a well-composed pop song the second before the chorus kicked in, or the feeling inside him when his father reached the final chord in a choral prelude and the hymn proper was about to thunder out. But even then, hovering inside the arc of the rope with four thoughts held suspended in the air, that was as far as it went. It was like working his way up to an orgasm, a liberating climax, which then subsided. The world which he sensed was there, remained hidden behind an unopened door, so to speak. It was as if he could hear it knocking, but could not open the door to it.

And speaking of unopened doors, for a long time Jonas had no idea what Karen Mohr did – for a living that is. But she was a great reader, that much he knew. Jonas had a theory that it was tales from warmer climes which had endowed her skin with such a dusky tint – if, that is, it was not her perpetual and powerful memory of the Riviera. Frequently, especially after a glass of Pernod, she would find occasion to quote thoughts on love to him, primarily reflections she had come across in French literature. One Saturday afternoon, one of those Saturdays when she was not due to dine at Bagatelle in Bygdøy allé, she told him about a writer by the name of Stendahl. He had written a whole book solely about love. ‘Would you mind nipping into the bedroom and getting it?’ she asked him. ‘It’s called
De l’Amour
and it’s just on your left, at eye-level, as you go in.’

Jonas was at a complete loss, did not know which way to turn. She pointed to the wall. Still Jonas was none the wiser, he stood there listening to the
tinkling
of the little fountain in among the plants, as if hoping it might inspire his imagination. Was he supposed to walk through the wall? Then he spied it. A door. He had never seen anything there before but a rug hanging on the wall, but this – he now noticed – exactly covered the door. The door handle had been there all the time, but it was almost invisible. It wasn’t unlike the secret doors in films set in old country houses or castles. It had never occurred to Jonas that of course there had to be other rooms in the flat.

‘It’s odd,’ Karen Mohr said when Jonas laughed and pointed at the door. ‘We’re always so interested in the room we happen to be in. In whether it
consists
of still smaller rooms, harbours secrets. We open drawers, peep behind the sofa. We are so intent on this that we don’t notice the secret doors in the room, which could lead us to great wings containing other rooms entirely. We all live in bigger houses than we imagine.’ On a later occasion – as she raised her eyes to her own portrait on the wall, sketched in Mougins before the war – she framed it in other, more personal, terms: ‘Our secret chambers lie not within us, but outside of us.’ For once her voice was husky with emotion.

As with her living room, he was not prepared for the sight which met his eyes when he walked through her bedroom door. In a way this came as
an even greater surprise. Jonas came from a home almost devoid of books, although Rakel did own one work entitled
My Treasury
. This, Karen Mohr’s bedroom, truly was a treasury. Three of its walls were completely covered with bookcases which looked, with all their rows and rows of books, like brightly-coloured panels. Jonas had the impression of stepping into a warm, mystical forest. The bed was under the window. ‘I sleep well in there,’ he heard Karen say in the living room. Jonas could well understand that. This was how a bedroom ought to be: full of stories. Initially he just stood there staring. It immediately struck him that there was a connection between the two rooms, different thought they were. That this bedroom, with all these books, was the roots and the living room was the tree. Or maybe it was the other way round. The bedroom-cum-library was more like an
interpretation
of the living room. Her book collection had grown, blossomed, out of her thirst for understanding.

Or perhaps – it later occurred to him – all those books dealt with the search for someone who was worthy. It was as complex as that.

It took him a while to find Stendahl. On the left. But at
her
eye level.
De l’Amour
. Outside left, Jonas thought to himself. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. But it was wedged in tight: the shelf was crammed with volumes. He tugged and tugged, trying to pry the book free – only to end up working the whole shelf loose and bringing the entire row of books tumbling down on his head like a flock of wrathful birds. The ensuing din brought Karen Mohr rushing in, but she merely laughed when she saw what had happened. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, still laughing. He gave his head a shake, dazed. The shelf must have been loose, she told him. There was something wrong with the screws that held the shelves in place. She should have had those bookcases fixed long ago.

‘I’m really sorry, but I had to reach up on tiptoe,’ he said.

‘Silly boy,’ she said. ‘You
always
have to reach up on tiptoe to get at the right books.’ She glanced cheerfully at the volumes that had crashed to the floor as he tried to pull out Stendahl’s
De l’Amour
. ‘But let this be a lesson to you,’ she said. ‘When you reach out for love you will soon discover that it is bound up with everything else.’

Jonas, on the other hand, was thinking to himself: I’d bet anything there’s a secret chamber behind these bookshelves too. And there was. A veritable palace. One day Karen Mohr would take him there.

‘Come on, we can sort this out later,’ she said, pointing to the mess on the floor. She could tell from his face that he had had enough for one day. ‘It’s time for a ham omelette.’

Karen Mohr’s bedroom, her secret forest, reinforced Jonas’s belief that
beyond this world another one lay waiting for him. That the world was not flat. He was still skipping regularly in the basement, in the dark, spinning thought after thought, layers of thoughts, above and below, behind and in front of one another, pursuing, or trying to pursue as many as possible at one time. He skipped and he skipped, but he had still not made any kind of a
breakthrough
. He had a suspicion that this would only happen if he were to succeed in weaving all of those simultaneous thoughts, at all those different levels, together in his mind, if he could get them to
intercommunicate
even though, in terms of content and substance, they were all very different. Because that was the really fascinating part: discovering the links between reflections which were worlds apart, which apparently had nothing in common. Was it possible to get these thoughts to chime in unison, like on an organ where the manuals and the stops gave you command, as it were, over several smaller and very different organs, each with its own individual
character
and unique tone. Jonas had seen how, when his father played, he coupled the Principal to the pedals and the Swell – deep in the background, so to speak – with the Choir to the fore; had heard how, in so doing, he produced the most wonderful sound, in which all the minor parts, all the voices from so many different directions, blended together to produce the most divine music. It might be that his trains of thought could also be regarded as strings of notes, as melodies which he had to weave into concords. Occasionally, if he was lucky, Jonas would hear his thoughts singing inside him, like a choir, exquisite wordless harmonies. And sometimes, if he went on doing doubles for long enough, until he was almost hovering in the darkness of the
basement
, he felt as though his whole body had turned into an organ.

It was also largely thanks to this sort of approach that, as a grown man, having taken up skipping again, he was able to resolve the problems
surrounding
his programme on Svend Foyn. Many of the episodes in the
Thinking
Big
series had something of the character of a discovery about them, but with the programme on Foyn one felt more like an inventor, or rather: felt as though one had a front-row seat inside the mind of an inventor. Jonas Wergeland made a programme about Svend Foyn’s moment of revelation, a few seconds which, on television, lasted for forty-five minutes. When viewers got up, their armpits damp from excitement, and looked at the clock, they could not believe the time.

The programme opened with a shot being fired from a cannon in the bows of a whaler and it ended with a bomb-tipped harpoon slamming into the side of a whale – hardly anyone spotted that the latter scene had been filmed on an underwater set. And presented between the shot and the strike were Svend Foyn’s thoughts, his speculations on how to catch a whale, with Wergeland
switching every now and again from this to a brief flash of the harpoon – the spearhead of his thoughts, as it were – flying through the air towards the back of the whale in the sea, in much the same way as, in more recent films, we can follow the flight of missiles or Robin Hood’s arrows. By using trick photography Wergeland made it look as though the camera was fixed to the projectile, an illusion so effective that viewers felt almost as though they were being sucked into the picture.

But as I say, what really made the programme was not the special effects, but the way in which Jonas Wergeland succeeded in reflecting a thought process, one which actually continued, with much trial and error, for some years, but which Wergeland condensed into one compact burst of effort. As the outer framework to this one had Svend Foyn – actor Normann Vaage received a great many compliments for his snowy mane and magnificent white beard – slumped pensively in a deckchair on a deserted beach, gazing out to sea. To either side of him were other deckchairs, all empty. The wind made their fabric billow out like sails.

Jonas Wergeland started with images, which is to say with the line of thought which illustrated the first part of what was a multifaceted problem: the question of whether the whale was a good commercial prospect; in other words: Foyn’s reflections on contracts and markets, on how a new industry of this nature should be organised and which products were likely to be the most attractive – oil, for example, and whalebone. The other question which had to be considered, was that of the boat – huge, fast-swimming whales could not be caught from rowboats. This train of thought gave rise to a series of shots, concluding with a scene showing Foyn’s introduction of the steam engine to whaling; he had figured out that what he needed was a small,
powerful
steamship with good manoeuvrability – the prototype was christened
Spes & Fides.
This was followed by another reflection, a fresh problem, with Jonas Wergeland continually cutting to shots from the first two lines of thought. The third problem, the trickiest of them all, concerned the harpoon itself, since there was no way, either, that such massive and immensely strong creatures could ever be caught with hand-held harpoons. In this lay the
programme’s
greatest challenge – to depict the experiments which led to Foyn’s greatest invention, the bomb harpoon: the development of the right sort of explosives and detonators for the right harpoons; the discovery that
explosive
device and harpoon would need to be combined in the same projectile. And finally, or more correctly, interwoven with the three other visual threads, came the scenes in which television viewers were at long last introduced to the target: the whales, colossi such as the humpback whale, the fin whale and the blue whale, as yet unconquered by man, creatures which did not die easy,
but which, when they did, sank. Svend Foyn had spent a lot of time sailing the Arctic Ocean and had invaluable experience of the nature and behaviour of the whale. This made, as one might expect, for some captivating scenes, footage which had been bought-in – there is nothing quite like the sight of a whale, that exotic creature, swimming in the ocean, surfacing, spouting. And then there was the soundtrack, recordings of so-called whale-song played in the background throughout the programme, communicating non-stop with the subconscious. Once or twice, when a number of whales sang out at the same time, Jonas raised their singing into the foreground, this euphonious, enigmatic music forming an accompaniment to Foyn’s branching lines of thought. And apropos this last: as a child, crawling into the organ casing and seeing all the pipes that surrounded him, Jonas had often made believe that he was inside the belly of a whale.