The Discoverer (36 page)

Jonas looked at her from under the crust of rime on his eyelashes, which was now starting to melt. He was about to say something, but his voice cracked, everything cracked. She looked so strong. Invulnerable. She was the sort of person who could withstand anything. Sleep out in temperatures of forty below. Drink urine and eat reindeer moss. But Jonas saw something else too. He saw what was written all over her: Danger. High Voltage.

‘Fancy going on a bit further?’ she asked, bending down and picking up a fistful of snow, squeezing it, examining it, as if debating whether to rewax. Rewax life, Jonas thought. This was not part of the plan. He had never been further than Sinober. Places such as Varingskollen or Kikut were only vague names. He glanced up at the arrows. The signpost looked like a
many-branched
tree, it called to mind the ones found at certain tourist attractions, with signs showing the direction and the distance to various capital cities. Here the signs pointed out across the winter landscape, towards Movatn, Nittedal, Snippen, Grefsen, Sørskogen. He could ski like a champion – as long, he hoped, as he didn’t have to ski down to Movatn, or to Tømte. Might as well ask: Do you want to take a run down to Hell?

‘Fancy a run down to Tømte?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said, quick as a wink. Knowing this was sheer lunacy.

Now Jonas had, for some time before this, associated women with a certain amount of risk. He was well aware that in giving a girl the eye you also laid yourself open to the possibility of losing your head. Jonas was by no means a stranger to the idea that, when you came right down to it, women were dangerous.

All of this had its roots in the first death which Jonas could remember. A death which was, in the words of the grown-ups, ‘mysterious’ and ‘
incomprehensible
’. Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, had been killed in an accident – not on a scheduled flight, a cataclysmic, catastrophic crash in a Caravelle, but in his little Piper Cub. It so happened that Jonas’s mother had to take him with her on the day when she had to go through her brother’s things. His grandmother could not face it. The accident had clearly brought back painful memories. When the news was broken to her she had gone to lie in the bath and listen to the BBC. This was always a bad sign. ‘He was an excellent pilot,’ she murmured, chewing on the butt of a cigar. ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’

Jonas was glad of the chance to visit the flat. Lauritz had been his hero, although his uncle was hardly ever around. He was like a knight who rode into Jonas’s life from time to time and dropped off a toy from Paris or a box of Quality Street from London. Once, when some bigger boys were
threatening
to beat Jonas up for puncturing their football, a taxi pulled up and Uncle Lauritz got out, dressed in his navy-blue uniform with the four gold stripes on the cuffs. The other boys just stood there, awestruck, outside Jonas’s
building
. At that moment, in Jonas’s eyes, his uncle was an angel.

His mother had never been to the flat before. Her brother had never invited her or any other members of the family over. If he asked them out it was always to Restaurant Skansen or the Moorish Salon at the Hotel Bristol. ‘Lauritz lived his own life,’ she explained apologetically to Jonas. He was seldom home either, what with him being a pilot. Jonas could tell that, grief-stricken though she was, his mother was also a little curious. ‘He was actually very shy. Bashful. A bit like you. It must run in the family,’ his mother remarked to Jonas. She and Lauritz had not had much to do with one another since their childhood days at Gardemoen. Even as a boy her brother had been obsessed with the desire to get away: ‘I want to fly high. And far.’

In the end, though, his flight was short. And low. The general view – and the one also expressed in the coroner’s report – was that it was unthinkable for a pilot as experienced as Lauritz to have flown into a high-voltage cable by accident, or certainly not the cable in question, which was a known hazard. It wasn’t as if the weather had been bad, nor had it been particularly windy. No
one actually came out and said it, but it was there between the lines: suicide. Jonas preferred the words ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Rakel said the whole thing reminded her of what had happened to a legendary French flier by the name of Saint-Exupéry – Jonas liked the name the moment he heard it – who had disappeared on a mission towards the end of the Second World War. Neither he nor his plane had been found.

Some said he had crashed in the Alps, others that he went down in the Mediterranean. No explanation for the accident was ever forthcoming. Which was just how it should be, Jonas thought. The death of a knight, not to mention an angel, ought to be shrouded in mystery.

‘It must have been a woman,’ Jonas heard his mother say to his father. His uncle had worn a locket around his neck, the sort with a compartment for a small picture. But when they were preparing for the funeral and his mother opened it, it was empty. Still she stuck to her theory. ‘It’s the only possible explanation,’ she said. ‘An unhappy love affair.’ Jonas pondered this expression. It was the first time he had heard a negative word used in conjunction with the one word which he held to be the most positive in life. He sampled this pairing: ‘unhappy’ and ‘love’. This was the first intimation Jonas was given of the gravity of love, and different in nature from what he would later derive from Karen’s Mohr’s story from Provence. This one spoke of the possible consequences of love. Love did not only make you fly high, it could just as easily make you fly low. Too low. Maybe love was not something one should reach out for without thinking. Jonas had the wild idea that all girls ought to wear signs around their necks saying: ‘Danger. High voltage.’ Love was like electricity. It could give warmth and light, but it could also black out a life, short-circuit it.

‘What do you think his flat looks like?’ Jonas asked on the way over there.

‘I’ve no idea. He’d only been living there for three or four years. Probably just the same as anyone else’s. Perfectly ordinary.’

Jonas guessed that his mother was hoping to find some clue there to her brother’s decision to end his life by embracing a high-voltage cable. A solemn declaration on his desk, maybe. A box of passionate love letters. Jonas, on the other hand, was thinking that he was soon going to be entering the flat of one who had loved, a man who had been a victim of love. In short, he was about to see the chamber of love itself. It started out well enough. As far as Jonas was concerned at any rate. A door with three big, burglar-proof locks. No one had keys to it. There had been no keys in his pockets. ‘There are no keys to a human being,’ his father had said softly from the piano bench, having declined to come with them. His mother had called a locksmith, made an appointment, the man had arrived at the same time as them. ‘Lauritz didn’t
open up to anyone,’ his mother muttered when the door was finally breached. Jonas’s first thought was that this place must harbour some great – and
possibly
dark and scandalous – secret. After all, you didn’t have three huge locks on your door for nothing.

They stepped inside. Jonas tried to conceal the hope he felt. He
remembered
the first time Wolfgang Michaelsen had invited him into his room and he walked in to find lots of model warplanes hanging in the air, at least fifty of them, and every one painted in the right colours. It had come as such a shock, it made you start; it was like opening a door and walking straight into the middle of World War II.

More than anything, Jonas was hoping that they would find something valuable. A legacy of some sort. He wished that he had other qualities in common with his uncle, apart from shyness. He saw a secret room. Full of gold ingots. Or unknown paintings by Tidemann and Gude, worth millions. Or at the very least a few volumes of comic books.

But the flat was all bare. And all white. It was like breaking into a massive safe and finding it empty. They wandered through three large rooms. No books, no rugs, nothing on the walls. Nothing in the bathroom, not even a razor or a bottle of aftershave. The kitchen too was empty. The fridge, all the shelves were bare. Maybe he really was an angel, Jonas thought, a being who did not need food, did not need to shave. There was nothing in the bedroom but a bed, perfectly made. In the fitted wardrobe hung a couple of suits and uniforms. Apart from a few spartan pieces of furniture and the requisite electrical appliances they found only one thing of any value:
underneath
the window sat an imposing, exclusive stereo system, exotic pieces of equipment which gave the living room the look of a large cockpit and, next to them, an orange box full of Duke Ellington records. Jonas was to think later that this was possibly as good as any flight recorder, that if you listened carefully enough to these discs, tried pronouncing their titles, you would find the answer. This thought struck him, of course, only after Margrete had given him
Rubber Soul
as a farewell present. For all they knew, this box of records could have been the equivalent, for Uncle Lauritz, of a box of love letters – worth more than all the gold ingots in the world.

The bare white walls made Jonas feel as though the whole flat was just one big white room. The opposite of a darkroom. A place where not a single picture could be developed. The more he thought about this, the more
reasonable
– and right – it seemed to him. Everyone needed a place in which they could feel lonely. In his day-to-day life Uncle Lauritz the SAS pilot occupied a room that encompassed the whole world. So vast. So full of
everything
. One day Cairo, the next Athens. Which was why he needed this inner
space that was all his own. Maybe for him it could never be white enough or empty enough.

Just before they left, Jonas spotted something. A small dark square on one of the living-room walls, like a stamp stuck on Antarctis. A sign of life. Jonas went over to it. It was a portrait, smaller than a passport photo, fixed to the wall with a pin. A woman’s face. His mother was standing next to him. She said nothing. Jonas knew what she was thinking: this was the picture which had once sat in the locket that Uncle Lauritz wore around his neck. ‘I knew it,’ his mother said, sounding almost relieved. ‘It was a woman.’

And yet for Jonas this altered everything. The flat was no longer empty. It was full of love. Unless, of course, that microscopic portrait betokened a desperate wish to minimise things, a frantic attempt to render the greatest thing in life nigh on invisible. However that may be: the flat did have a secret room. That tiny picture, that face.

Jonas had not yet met Bo Wang Lee; nevertheless it did occur to him that this flat also constituted an answer to the question of what you should take with you. You walked for a while on this Earth. What was worth collecting? He liked Uncle Lauritz’s simple answer: the music of Duke Ellington and a face.

On the way home his mother suddenly said, more to herself than to Jonas: ‘She wasn’t good enough for him. If you ask me she was a tart.’

Jonas pretended not to hear, but this comment confirmed his misgivings – paradoxical though they were, considering those white rooms – concerning the darker aspects of love, and the risk of losing one’s head completely.

He was to learn more about what it meant to lose one’s head that day at Sinober when he stood under the ski-trail signpost, those arrows pointing in all directions, staring as if bewitched at a gigantic white room covered in snow. He had agreed without a moment’s hesitation when Eva asked if he wanted to take a run over to Tømte with her, even though he knew that in order to get there they would first have to ski down to Movatn Lake. And Movatn was the main reason that Jonas had never gone beyond Sinobar. The slopes down to the lake were legendary, known for being among the very worst the whole of Nordmarka had to offer in the way of downhill runs. Even Daniel, fanatical skier that he was, referred to them with a faint shudder as the Slopes from Hell. And as if that wasn’t enough, there had been a bit of a thaw, then the surface had frozen hard again: the trails were covered in a lethal layer of ice.

Even on the first, not particularly taxing slopes, Jonas knew that he had embarked on a downright dangerous expedition. ‘Careful, now,’ Eva called over her shoulder a moment later, then the back of her red anorak
disappeared over the top of something which looked to Jonas like an endless plunging descent, with steep slopes rising up on either side. The track was narrow and icy, there was no chance of ploughing; Jonas felt like he was on a bob-sleigh run; fir trunks loomed close, tightly packed, braking was
impossible
, he simply had to go for it, even though he had tears in his eyes and was travelling faster and faster over the glassy surface; and at the bottom there was a sharp turn to the left, one which the experienced skiers knew about, but not Jonas, with the result that he shot straight off into the forest at breakneck speed and crashed, inevitably and sickeningly, into a tree. Although to Jonas it was not a tree, but a high-voltage cable. He had known it was there ever since he fell in love, knew that he was bound to go careering into it sooner or later. For a few seconds everything went black. Or, not black: red.

He came round to find Eva standing over him. Fortunately he had hit the tree with his feet, with the sides of his skis first – there was an ugly gash in the trunk – even so he was battered and bruised and seemed to have broken, or at least sprained his leg, possibly tearing up his old football injury, the very source of his wrath. He could not get up. Then he noticed something which, for a moment, made him forget his pain. Eva was looking at him with a face which was unrecognisable, which pulsed with warmth, as if she were running a high fever. Jonas realised that Eva was in love, although in his dazed condition he thought that this was something which had only
happened
now, thanks to his accident. His battered state was the whole premise for her falling in love. The fact that he was done for. Down for the count. Not strong at all, no Lillomarka elk, but weak. She bent down to put her arms round him. Jonas caught a faint whiff of goat’s cheese, blackcurrant cordial and universal wax. She slipped as she tried to help him up, fell on top of him, almost on purpose, he thought. Jonas was conscious of her lips brushing his cheek, felt her breath on his neck, the smell of her, the softness; that ‘hard’, fit, muscular girl, and yet this softness. As if the contours of her body were more palpable through anoraks and sweaters and tights than if she had been naked. For a few seconds there, it seemed to Jonas that he could feel every millimetre of that half of her body which was in contact with his.