The Discoverer (46 page)

The Hindu concept of
māyā
occupied a central place in Jonas’s memory. It instinctively sprang to mind, for example, when he was lying in a hotel room in London, zapping back and forth between the best television channels in the world. Occasionally he even had the notion that each new channel caused the previous one to disappear, like a map being pulled up – that he disclosed a new world each time he pressed the remote control.

To the question as to how he had learned the ropes of television
production
, Jonas Wergeland had been known to reply – as if to denote how difficult it had been: ‘I swam the English Channel.’ By rights he should have said ‘the English Channels’, because there were four of them; he arrived in London on the very day that Channel 4 was launched, a channel which aimed to be
innovative
and experimental and to win viewers by appealing to their good taste. So he was lucky enough to catch many of the exceptionally fine programmes scheduled for Channel 4’s first weeks on the air, productions which,
regardless
of genre – soap opera or science documentary, sit-com or arts magazine – oozed intelligence at all levels of production. Even the sports broadcasts were bearable, thanks largely to the civilised British commentators. Jonas felt like a guest in the TV equivalent of a gourmet restaurant.

But he could not stay in that room all the time – although if he had, he would have avoided a rather unpleasant confrontation which left him with a nasty bump on the back of his head and a black eye. Jonas followed the same routine every day. He slept till around twelve, then went out for breakfast, or rather, lunch. Within a very small radius, in the streets around South
Kensington
tube station, Jonas found restaurants serving food from every corner of the globe – the culinary equivalent, if you like, of the British television which he was studying: around the world in eight minutes. During his weeks there he could choose between French, Italian, Indian, Thai, Chinese and
Japanese
restaurants. His favourite, he eventually decided, was Daquise, a little Polish dive with dingy walls and oilcloth-covered tables, serving
shashlyk
and
chlodnik
soup, as well as eight different brands of vodka.

On the way back to the hotel he always picked up a good-sized stack of sandwiches from a shop in the arcade next to the station. He ordered a pot of coffee at reception and his working day could begin. He settled back on the bed, with an appetising tuna fish sandwich within easy reach, and switched on the television.

The aforementioned unpleasant incident was something of an
intermezzo
. It occurred on an evening when, for once, there happened to be a gap between two programmes he wanted to see. Instead of doing a bit of skipping, as he sometimes did, he went for a walk around the neighbourhood and on the way back he was tempted to pop into a pub, The Zetland Arms in Old Brompton Road. He had to stand for a minute just inside the door until his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the interior which, like most English pubs, was all dark mahogany and oriental-style fitted carpets – as if deep down every Briton longed for a return to Victorian times. Jonas meant just to have a quick whisky at the horseshoe bar, but he soon got chatting to an Englishman who invited him over to his table; he had ordered so many pints that Jonas had to help him carry them. Thus Jonas suddenly found himself in the midst of a vociferous group of men around his own age, and as the mood grew even livelier and the conversation turned, quite naturally, to
television
– as all conversations at that time eventually did – Jonas put in his three-ha’pence worth, commenting on aspects of everything from
Coronation Street
to
The South Bank Show
. His companions were impressed, wanted to know how come a Norwegian, a snowed-in Viking, was so well-informed on such matters. ‘I’m writing a thesis on the new British era of world supremacy,’ Jonas said. ‘Cheers!’

He did in fact feel rather like a researcher as he lay on the bed in his hotel room, combing the two weekly TV magazines. Each day he would find masses of programmes he wanted to see; the pages in both magazines
gradually became covered in red circles; many a time there would be a clash between a couple of the delights on offer and he would have to choose; either that or he ended up switching back and forth between two, or even three, programmes – a documentary, a music broadcast, a film made for television – trying to catch the gist of each one.

And as he watched he made notes: a couple of words maybe, a sentence, or some hieroglyphics, a framework, an original idea. After close-down he would make other notes in the margins alongside those he had jotted down earlier in the evening, sketchy associated ideas scrawled in an Outside Left area, a fertile borderline in which the writing became more and more closely packed. Jonas had never written so much at one go. He would lie there, eating a corned-beef or turkey sandwich and writing, scribbling down words that only he could read, in those books with the marbled covers. They were the same as the ones in which Aunt Laura made her almost obscene erotic sketches – male members depicted as the most weird and wonderful
creatures
– on her travels in the Middle East and Central Asia in search of new rugs for her collection. Jonas believed that he filled his four books, collectively referred to by him as ‘the golden notebook’, with what might be called ‘bed art’. However that may be, he certainly regarded them, together with the eight copies of the
TV Times
and
Radio Times
from that month, covered in red circles and marginalia, as lecture notes from the greatest university he ever attended. Later in his career he would still take those fat notebooks out every now and again, looking for tips or inspiration. Those four books were for him what the little yellow notebook was for Bo Wang Lee.

Jonas was, in other words, well qualified to air his views on British
television
at that table in The Zetland Arms, raucously toasting with his effusive, open-handed drinking cronies, and as if to boost the spirit of camaraderie still further – after his fourth pint – he declared
Not the Nine O’Clock News
to be the funniest thing ever shown on a television screen. Several of the guys round the table began to clap, while others broke into a chorus of ‘We are the champions’, and it may have been this, or possibly a desire to pursue his winning line in witty repartee that prompted Jonas to declare, a little too loudly, that that wasn’t always the case, though, was it? That the English were the champions, that is. Well, nobody could say – he plucked an example out of thin air – that Captain Scott had done all that well; Jonas laughed, but this time he laughed alone, and conscious though he was of the sudden, not to say ominous, hush that had fallen over the table, still he continued to hold forth, all undaunted, on that prize idiot, Captain Robert Scott, who had actually gone so far as to take ponies,
ponies
God help us, to the South Pole, and not only that, but – would you believe it –
motor-driven
vehicles, I’m sorry guys,
but I can’t see any good reason to sing ‘We are the champions’ for Robert Scott. Here’s to Roald Amundsen!”

One burly character rose to his feet with demonstrative nonchalance, hoiked Jonas out of his seat on the sofa – as if deeming it cowardly to hit a man when he was sitting down – then slammed his fist smack into Jonas’s eye, the obvious target for his indignation. Jonas toppled backwards, smashing his head into the large ornamental mirror above the sofa, and slid to the floor in a shower of broken glass. And even as his legs gave way he had time to think that it was not only him, but also the image of a hero that had been shattered; it dawned on him that there were other ways of looking at Roald Amundsen than the one which had been instilled in him at school. A hero in one land could be a villain in another. The point might be to come first, but not at any price.

Jonas was ejected from the premises as roundly as an undesirable
individual
being kicked out onto the street in a Hollywood movie. ‘Goodnight, Mr Amundsen,’ they roared after him. ‘The South Pole’s that way.’ Jonas huddled on the pavement, the back of his head and his eye throbbing with pain; he knew, though, that they had not hurt him badly, they had contented
themselves
with teaching him a lesson.

And Jonas accepted it as such, although his drinking cronies would
probably
have been surprised to discover how he took it to heart. He had never been all that interested in Roald Amundsen. He was now, though. He was really keen to know more about a fellow-countryman who could still, so long after his death, make people’s blood boil. At the airport he did something unusual: he bought a book, a relatively new book about the race between Scott and Amundsen – written by an Englishman at that.

Jonas knew nothing of these ructions, or of his off-the-cuff book purchase, that evening at Margrete’s cottage somewhere on the outskirts of
Jotunheimen
, then too in polar conditions as it happened, looking out each time he raised his eyes from the book he was reading onto a vast, snow-covered
landscape
. Nor did he realise that he could well be exposing himself to something far worse than the risk of a black eye.

Almost a year had already passed since he had run into Margrete again, but their unexpected reunion was still fresh in his memory. Suddenly there she had been, at the tram stop, and he had had the impression of maps, worlds, flying up to reveal something quite different at the very back. Her. He realised that all the other girls had been
māyā
. Jonas sat in the cottage, in a chair next to Margrete, still in the first flush of love. The room smelled of woodfires and cocoa. He was filled with an indescribable sense of well-being. He glanced fondly at her. As far as he could see she was reading a novel called
The Golden Notebook
.

Why did he do it?

Jonas had often been surprised by the way Margrete read. She always kept one hand flat on the page, as if constantly searching for a deeper meaning; as if she imagined that there was some sort of Braille underneath the visible print. If, that is, she was not trying to hold on to the story, much as a gecko clings to the ceiling with its feet. She had the same look on her face when she read as when she was hunting for something, a pair of stockings, mushrooms in the forest: intent, on the lookout. The stillness of Margrete with a book in her hand was a stillness full of movement. It was not hard to see how she became involved, with all of her being, in what was going on in the pages of the book. And this despite her intelligence, Jonas always thought to himself, as if reading novels and having a high IQ were mutually exclusive. She was also liable to say things which to Jonas came worryingly close to sounding simple-minded. ‘Marguerite Duras changed my soul for ever,’ she said once. Was that possible? Could one be changed by a book? And one’s
soul?
Margrete
was also prone to sentimentality when she read. It was not unusual for Jonas to find her crying over a book. On one occasion he had asked what the matter was. It was Berthe, she said. Berthe who? he asked. It turned out it was Emma Bovary’s daughter, who had had to go to work in a cotton mill; she was only a peripheral character, but to Margrete she was the whole key to Flaubert’s novel. It may have been wrong to call it sentimentality. It had more to do with her gift for empathy. Now and again Jonas discerned a link between this ability to identify, even with fictional characters, and her skills as a doctor.

In any case, Jonas understood that Margrete regarded reading as an
experience
on a par with other experiences in life. Books, for her, had to do not with escape, but with a zest for life. Which may be why she read everywhere, even in the kitchen. Where other women had a shelf of cookery books close to the cooker, Margrete had a little library of novels. This was where she kept her favourite books, volumes which she was quite liable to suddenly dip into in the middle of making dinner, to read a particular passage; and these
readings
seemed almost to inspire her cooking, or her appetite, as much as any cookbook.

When Jonas thought back on those first months after he started seeing Margrete again, he could see – if he was honest – that he had been more shaken by the discovery that she was a reader than by other, possibly more questionable aspects of her character. He noticed how Margrete became someone else when she opened a book, that she slipped away from the girl he thought he had come to know; she became a person with whom he feared he would never be able to make contact. As if to prove him right in this she
frequently sat like a mermaid, with her legs drawn up underneath her, when she was reading. As if she truly was in another element, in the deep, in an ocean of words. Seeing her sitting like that, as now, at the cottage on the outskirts of Jotunheim, with a rock face outside the window turned pink by a temperature of twenty below, Jonas was reminded of the film
Blow-Up
; it struck him that he would never be able to discover what this picture of a woman reading held in the way of secrets. He could enlarge it all he liked, but it would do no good.

Jonas sat there, enjoying the smell, the
sound
, of burning logs, the sight of a rosy rock face, and reading an old paperback, not knowing that he was playing hazard with his life. The first pages were rather heavy going, but he soon became totally absorbed. It never occurred to him that it was an unusual book, he had read very few novels, so he had nothing with which to compare it. He did not wonder at the measured pulse of the opening lines, at the odd way in which the one character’s pages-long reflections were inserted between brief, banal remarks about the weather that fell every few seconds. Jonas simply enjoyed it, he had a pleasant sense of two parallel phenomena moving at different speeds. Jonas was in a cottage on the outskirts of Jotunheim and for once he was reading a book. Outside it was more than twenty below, but he was sitting beside a roaring fire. He was in love, he was happy with his new job as an announcer with NRK, he was in a good mood, he was open, he read page after page with a faint smile on his lips, he entertained no
expectations
of this novel, he simply read it, word by word, conscious of nothing but a profound sense of well-being. When he looked up – first glancing at Margrete in her mermaid position in the chair next to his, then out at the pink rock face before him – time stood still. He emerged from a maelstrom into stillness. The events described in the book were totally undramatic, and yet when he looked up, his heart was
pounding
, as if he had been in a state of unbearable suspense. For a second he had the feeling that the rock face before him could open up at any moment, in response to some magic password, like Open Sesame.