The Discoverer (49 page)

Outside, and later inside, this building, his thoughts went to the most groundbreaking piece of television he had ever seen, this too from the BBC
stable. Jonas had been at home, nodding off in front of the box, when Dennis Potter’s drama series
Pennies From Heaven
was shown on NRK; he had been totally unprepared for it when, only minutes into the first episode, Bob Hoskins, playing a sheet-music salesman who had just been rudely rebuffed by his wife, suddenly pulled back the curtains in his bedroom and burst into song, broke into ‘The Clouds Will Soon Roll By’, or rather: it was not him who was singing, it was a woman, but Bob Hoskins lip-synched along, as rapturously and sincerely as if the song were emanating from his own head, a thought abruptly transformed into song. It came as such a shock, Jonas had to rub his eyes precisely as he had done when Mr Dehli did conjuring tricks with the maps or showed how a third thought could act as a catalyst.
Television
was never the same again; Jonas Wergeland always said that it was at that moment, when Bob Hoskins put his heart and soul into ‘The Clouds Will Soon Roll By’ in a seemingly drab naturalistic setting from thirties’ England, that he first felt the urge to make television programmes himself, even though some years were to pass before he finally came to that decision. Potter had shown him that you could do anything on TV. Good television could show you the inside of a head, show how a person was
thinking
. As far as Jonas was concerned, Dennis Potter was the only true genius fostered by television, and indeed one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, the one against whom Jonas himself most wished to be measured. Just as the Renaissance ushered in a new approach to painting, Dennis Potter proved that flat
television
images could offer experiences of a hitherto unknown depth. Jonas was especially fascinated by the way he used the old popular songs of the thirties and, in
The Singing Detective
, the forties, as if they were every bit as valid, as fraught with emotion, as hymns or fairy tales. Thanks to his experience with
Rubber Soul,
Jonas had no difficulty in comprehending the sentimental force of these tunes, their ability to convey the inexpressible. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, it was Dennis Potter who had led him to that hotel bed in London.

Possibly it was because of the exalted frame of mind induced by his visit to the BBC’s headquarters that he was caught so much off guard by the sight that awaited him when he got off the train in South Kensington. He was in his usual shop on the corner of the arcade in the old station building, taking receipt of a bag containing two chicken sandwiches and two bacon-and-egg sandwiches for the evening’s television marathon, when he started, actually jumped about three feet in the air. Somebody he knew had just walked by outside. His aunt. Aunt Laura. Flamboyantly dressed and looking, from her make-up, as if she had come straight from a stage on which she was playing the lead in an Egyptian romance. And she was not alone, with his aunt was
another woman, similarly dressed. Both wore the sort of hats you saw on women at Royal Ascot. Jonas heard them speak to one another in English. They were followed by a man wheeling a goods trolley. Propped up on it was a rug. Jonas had noticed that there was a shop between the two flights of stairs leading down to the platforms. The man lifted the rug into an estate car sitting right outside the arcade; it had British plates and obviously belonged to the woman with his aunt. As if that wasn’t enough, Jonas got the definite impression that these two women were more than friends, they were lovers. Jonas was on the point of calling out, but something stopped him.

Standing there in the sandwich shop he wished he could see the pattern on the rug that Aunt Laura had had wheeled out to the car. Something about the cylinder on the trolley reminded him of a piece of paper – a message – in a bottle, he was sure that everything would be explained if he could just unfold it.

He stared after the car as it drove away. It was blue – blue as the tiled domes in a distant city. Jonas stood outside of himself, saw himself standing there with a black-and-blue eye, a souvenir from the Zetland Arms. It was true. He had been his aunt’s blue-eyed boy, but he had also been blind. He hailed the man when he came past pushing the empty trolley. ‘Excuse me, but do you know that lady, the one who was wearing the bigger hat?’ The carpet dealer stopped, eyed him pleasantly, or with genteel courtesy, adjusted his glasses for a better look at Jonas and his shiner. ‘Why do you ask?’ Jonas
hesitated
, did not want to say that he was her nephew. ‘I just thought I had seen her before. Is she somebody famous?’ The man motioned towards his
shopfront
. ‘I couldn’t say,’ he replied, ‘I only know that she’s a good customer. She must have bought fifty rugs from me over the past twenty or thirty years. My shop is one of the oldest in England. She orders rugs from particular regions, specific patterns. And I give her a call when I find one.’ Before disappearing into the shop, the man told Jonas that the two women had a big old house with a luxuriant garden outside of London. He occasionally had to deliver something to them. The house was full of rugs and antiques. ‘Funny thing, though,’ the man said, ‘they call the place “Samarkand”.’

Back at the hotel, Jonas switched on the TV and opened his notebook. He filled a whole page with notes on the first programme he saw, about a trip to Titicaca: the sort of documentary that made you want to race off to the nearest travel agent. And while in his eyes he was on the shores of Lake
Titicaca
, in his mind two and two slowly flowed together. And did not make five. The Samarkand with which Aunt Laura had presented him was
māyā
. She had never been to Samarkand. She had never been outside of Europe. She had bought her rugs here, in London, every single one of them. London was
the world centre for the Oriental rug trade. This, London, was Aunt Laura’s Samarkand. That grimy little passage in the arcade next to the station was her bazaar. And why was he surprised? Jonas had always known: Samarkand could be anywhere on Earth. Samarkand was the home of our dreams and longings.

He lay on the bed in a hotel room in London. He closed his eyes, left the programme on Titicaca running, as if it inspired long cruises in his mind. Aunt Laura, this too he realised now, had never been with a man. Not one. All of her sketchbooks – like the one in which he himself was now making notes – in which she had drawn penises in all shapes and forms and in every conceivable state, had been nothing but flights of fancy. Jonas lay on the bed, with a voice in his ears talking about the fauna around Lake Titicaca, and thought about Aunt Laura, and he realised that he was not disappointed. It was not a lie that had led him to Samarkand. It was another kind of truth.

So there could be something to the rumour: although Jonas Wergeland was most certainly in London, one could say that his revelation on the secret of good television came to him in Samarkand. In the Samarkand behind Samarkand.

It often struck Jonas that all of the journeys he made had their beginnings in the expedition into Lillomarka with Bo Wang Lee to find the secret hiding place of the Vegans. On the ‘right’ day – Bo consulted a complicated diagram in his little yellow notebook and mumbled something about favourable
constellations
– they set off from home in the afternoon, each with their small rucksack on their back. Jonas was carrying the jam jars containing the
brimstone
butterfly and the peacock butterfly, two prisms and the slide rule; Bo bore the jars containing the red admiral and the small tortoiseshell, the other two crystals and
Huckleberry Finn
. Jonas’s suggestion that they take along a couple of little kids as ‘bearers’ was rejected. ‘You still don’t get it, do you,’ Bo snapped. ‘This is serious.’

The hill up to Badedammen smelled of fresh tarmac, the road might have been resurfaced specially for them. They headed out along the old Bergen road, built at the end of the eighteenth century. Jonas was not sure exactly where they were going, but Bo purposefully proceeded along a blue-flashed path which brought them to the northern end of Romstjern Lake. Shortly afterwards he struck off again, onto a barely visible, unmarked track. Jonas had never been here before. The hillside was a mass of yellow crested
cow-wheat
. The vegetation grew lush and dense all around them; it was like walking through a greenhouse with the sun filtering through green windows in the roof. The scents were remarkably strong, rising from the ground like fragrant gases. Bo stopped. Thought for a moment. The birdsong sounded
unnaturally intense, Jonas thought. Only now did he realise how nervous he was. Bo swivelled around, as if he were listening, using all his senses. ‘Watch out for that rock!’ he cried suddenly, pointing. Jonas jumped as if he were standing next to a landmine. Bo took out his notebook, scribbled something down with the stub of pencil. Nodded. ‘This is good,’ was all he said and walked on.

They reached a shadier hollow, a little valley through which ran a brook with lovely little waterfalls tumbling over flat rocks; it looked man-made, like something out of a Japanese garden or the like. Jonas saw Bo nod again. His friend with the glossy, black Prince Valiant hair pulled out a pocketknife, pried a piece of bark off a pine tree and showed Jonas the engraved
markings
on the backside. The look Bo gave him told Jonas these were not marks left by larvae, but an extra-terrestrial form of writing. They followed the brook upstream until they came to a very long, narrow tarn with a steep cliff running all the way down its western side. At their feet water lilies floated on the surface of the water. This had to be Lusevasaen. Spooky, thought Jonas. He had heard rumours of dangerous undercurrents in this tarn, that it was bottomless. He felt like getting away from there as quickly as possible, was half expecting something to burst to the surface and cast a net at them.

Bo sprang over the brook. They entered some sort of primeval forest, began to clamber up a steep slope under tall fir trees, the nethermost branches of which were dry and withered. Bo zigged and zagged as if negotiating an invisible maze. Jonas felt sure that they had to be the first people ever to
penetrate
this patch of forest. ‘We could have done with a machete,’ he grunted as they fought their way through the undergrowth. He eyed all the exquisitely shaped toadstools uneasily: what if they were spaceships, spying on them and warning of their arrival? The trees, their branches, blocked out the light, like massive umbrellas rising in tiers. Here and there a fallen tree lay with its vast network of roots in the air. Jonas thought he heard a strange humming sound coming from a gigantic anthill they passed. His face cut through spider’s web after spider’s web, as if he were breaking one finishing tape after another, or better: ripping through veil after veil. ‘Good,’ he heard Bo mutter under his breath. ‘Absolutely excellent.’

At long last they reached the top, coming out suddenly and breathlessly into the open near the edge of the cliff overlooking Lusevasaen. ‘Here,’ Bo whispered. ‘This is it.’ He did not even refer to his notebook.

They were looking out across a small hilltop covered in grass and heather and dotted with large rocks. An archetypical Norwegian country scene, such an ordinary sight as far as Jonas was concerned that it seemed hard to believe that anything alien could lie hidden here. Beyond, on the lip of the cliff, stood
a couple of gnarled pines, smaller versions of the trees his grandmother had pointed out to him in Lars Hertervig’s paintings in the National Gallery. For a second the view took their breath away. They could see all the way across to the northern end of Østmarka, on the other side of the Grorud Valley. A brilliant observation point for any Vegans who might be around, Jonas thought to himself.

The tarn lay black below them. The air was rather close. Oppressive. The sun still hung in a large patch of blue sky, but big clouds were building up in the west. Bo unwrapped the prisms from their handkerchiefs and set them out in a square, roughly in the centre of the hilltop, then he arranged the four jars containing the insects in such a way that they formed a larger square around the crystals. At a sign, Bo and Jonas each took off one lid then raced to the other two jars and did the same with them. And more or less as one the four butterflies fluttered upwards. Jonas was held utterly spellbound. The four butterflies, all so different in colour and pattern, hovered almost
motionless
above the heather, forming a square with an area of something like five metres. Jonas was able to take in the four movements and the four crystals at one glance, like eight simultaneous thoughts. It was weird. And beautiful. Four sets of sensitively fluttering butterfly wings – so distinct that he thought he could even make out their tiny, colourful scales – and four smooth,
sparkling
prisms, like mysterious civilisations nestling in the heather. Jonas
realised
that this could be a gateway. And then, he could hardly believe it, the brimstone and the peacock, the admiral and the small tortoiseshell began to gravitate towards one another. The insects’ square grew smaller, looked set to merge with the square formed by the light-refracting prisms. Because that was the whole idea: all four butterflies had to enter the square defined by the crystals.

Again they held still, or flew in spirals, up and down in the same spot. Jonas was more or less expecting something to manifest itself. He did not know how. Only that something might be revealed, or be
opened up
. Bo, standing there so proud, a prince, a Chinaman, had convinced him of this. In a way it seem quite natural that the insect which represented the divine process of metamorphosis, from larvae to butterfly, should also be capable of transfiguring this ordinary patch of countryside. Jonas was already starting to feel in his rucksack for the slide rule, the object which would persuade the Vegans that he was a worthy envoy.

But just as it looked as though the butterflies were going to flutter into the centre of the square; just as Jonas was thinking that the landscape was starting to vibrate ever so slightly and emit a faint purplish glow, there came a roar; they turned their heads and saw a small plane flying towards them,
or under them. Jonas thought it was a model airplane, he was
positive
that it was a model airplane, it must have shot out of an invisible slit in the weir of life, until it dawned on him that the plane was actually some distance away, skimming over the trees on the other side of Lusevasaen, that it was, in other words, a real aircraft, and even at that distance Jonas knew which type it was: a Piper Cub, white with red trim – a big butterfly – identical to the one that Uncle Lauritz had had, but it could not possibly be his uncle, because he had been dead for years. Nevertheless, the plane came wobbling over the tops of the trees, as if it was in trouble; it was flying low, far too low, heading straight for the cliff, the rock face underneath them; then, just as Jonas thought they were about to witness a terrible calamity, the aircraft’s nose lifted sharply, bringing it clear of the precipice, it came swooping over the hilltop on which they stood, passed right over their heads, and then it was gone, a sight which would normally have filled them with awe and wonder, but which now only left them panic-stricken, realising as they did that the roar of the plane, the vibrations in the air, could have had an adverse effect on the ‘gateway’. And sure enough: the butterflies had come to a halt. As Bo and Jonas looked on helplessly the insects flitted up and down, then darted away from one another, all flying off in different directions. ‘Shit!’ Bo cried. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’