The Discoverer (75 page)

One spring evening, with the light fading outside and an all too familiar scent wafting into the room through the open window inside the bars, he lay in bed with his eyes fixed on the large, blue-sheened X-ray of his lungs. Before his eyes it turned into a face, a familiar face, Margrete’s face. It may have been a mirage, he did not know, nor did he feel like speculating on it; instead he let his mind wander to a concept which had intrigued him when he was studying architecture, a phenomenon known as a room’s ‘fifth dimension’ that occurred when the external surroundings – adjoining rooms or the natural environment – were brought into the room itself. It must be the same with people, he thought, as he beheld the woman’s face delineated on the X-ray photograph. A person’s true depth lay not in them, but within someone else. He recalled Karen Mohr’s words when, as a boy, he had found the door leading to her bedroom and library and she had spoken of secret doors in more personal terms: ‘Our secret chambers lie not within us, but outside of us.’ When he saw Margrete’s face in that picture of his lungs, he knew that she was his ‘fifth dimension’. His centre, his core, lay in Margrete. He ought to have realised this when he found her dead, in his dressing gown. His deepest story dealt not with Jonas Wergeland, but with Margrete Boeck.

He lay in bed, in a prison cell, savouring the spring air wafting through the open window, air which brought with it the scent of her. He looked at the X-ray, at the tiny white, butterfly-shaped patch right next to his heart, at the rudiments of the organ which he would dub the love lung. Because he had felt that pressure in his chest for the first time when Margrete died. She had been
the catalyst, it was her who had caused this possible organ to develop. And when he finally understood how much she had loved him it began to grow.

He lay in bed in his cell, gazing at the X-ray picture, in which his lungs seemed to shimmer, or gleam gold, in the waning light from outside. He thought: for the first time in my life I may have discovered something important.

The end. But as always an ending which, in its answers, contains a new
beginning
. The rudiments of something as yet unimagined. Other questions. What happened to Bo Wang Lee? Why did Viktor Harlem finally wake up? How could Kamala Varma be world famous? What was Melankton’s syndrome? And above all: what happened in Lisbon – or rather: why did he do it?

A fork in the road awaited him in Lisbon, that
Kaba
of every explorer. This much Jonas understood even in the taxi from the airport to his hotel, as he gazed out of the window at the grimy house fronts, the traces of a
long-gone
empire. There was something underneath, behind that faded beauty, something lay waiting for him. Not a country but another life.

The taxi driver had been eyeing him in the mirror for some time. ‘I can tell just by looking at you,’ he said out of the blue. ‘You’re from Scandinavia. You are so pure, so noble, you people.’ When Jonas laughed and responded with the word ‘Norway’ the driver, warming to his subject, began to talk about Gro Harlem Brundtland; he had read about her in the newspaper, something about an environmental report soon to be presented to the UN’s
secretary-general
. ‘She’s far too done-up, though,’ he said with a blend of deference and sarcasm. ‘But who knows: maybe there is a dark, dangerous Harlem inside this Brundtland – did you ever wonder about that. Whether there might be a black Harlem in Norway itself? Because that is probably your only hope.’

These words echoed in Jonas’s head the next day as he was more or less slinking around Rossio, the city’s main square. He was about to embark upon a risky venture. He was on the hunt for someone. His only hope. A woman whom he had managed to track down, but had then lost sight of. It should not be that hard to find her again, though. He was feeling mildly
optimistic
, smitten by the mood that met him wherever he went. Portugal had just become a member of the EU. The country was seething with new building projects. The future was looking bright, Jonas thought to himself, also for his own project.

He made a show of strolling aimlessly along the pavements around the square, trying to disguise his keen, not to say desperate, scrutiny of the tables in each café he passed and glancing impatiently, almost beseechingly, into the shops, half of which were as beautiful inside as the old Swan Chemist’s Shop in Oslo. September was moving into its last week and there were not too many tourists about. He strode down to the bottom end of the square,
positioned himself in the centre next to the flower sellers, so close to the big fountain that he could feel the spray from it. He had been lookng round about for quite some time, in growing desperation, when at last he spotted her, Marie H., sitting under a yellow parasol at a pavement café just beyond Café Nicola. It was so typical of her, not to go to a place as obvious as the Nicola, but to the one next door. She did not look much like a tourist either. He hardly recognised her. At NRK, or within any group of men she was known simply as the Battleship, a double-barrelled nickname inspired by her three most striking attributes: long legs, stunning breasts and a pair of
flashing
eyes. The mere sight of her, especially if she happened to be sitting in a chair opposite you with her legs crossed, called to mind a certain class of battleship with three stepped gun batteries. But her nickname also alluded to her impregnability. Or unattainability. She always wore light-coloured suits, with her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, as if intent on concealing or neutralising her charms. Here in Lisbon, though, her hair hung loose and she was wearing a short, black waistcoat over a white T-shirt, tight, pale-blue jeans and soft sandals. With her long, wavy hair she could easily have passed for a woman from the Iberian Peninsula.

All at once he was overcome by a terrible fit of shyness. In his mind he was already on his way to the airport, having failed in his mission. But he managed to control his frantic breathing. He reminded himself of what was at stake here: everything. A whole life project.

He pulled out a yellow notebook and began to sketch the fountain. With its distinctive statues and jets of water spraying in two directions it was
certainly
worth looking at. He was standing directly across from her, on the other side of the street. He sketched assiduously, making sure to stand in profile every now and again. If she looked up she was bound to notice him, a man apart, standing there sketching the fountain. At long last he heard her call out and turned round. Affecting bewilderment. Who did he know here? In Lisbon?

She waved to him. Eagerly. And happily. Or was he mistaken? He crossed the street without closing the notebook. ‘What in the world are you doing here?’ she asked, genuinely surprised. He felt a flutter of panic, glanced down at the notebook as if at a script. ‘I’m making a study of Brazilian soap operas,’ he said. It could have been a wisecrack. It could have been true. If anyone in Norway were likely to travel to Portugal simply to watch endless
telenovelas
, then that person was Jonas Wergeland.

She motioned to him to take a seat. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘Is it true what they say about you camping out in a hotel room in New York for three months, learning all about American television?’

He dismissed the question with a laugh, wondering as he did so why she had never asked him before – if she really wanted to know. He took stock of her. Her long legs were concealed from view by the yellow tablecloth. The ample breasts and flashing eyes were much in evidence though. An
unassailable
woman. An unmarried workaholic. Other than that he did not know much about her. No one knew much about her. Some people said she drank too much.

‘How did the shoot in England go?’ she asked, suddenly all business. ‘What was it you were working on there, the Harald Hardråde piece?’ She kept an eye on the production schedules then. An eagle eye, most likely.

‘I got rid of all the extras,’ he said. ‘Saved a lot of money that way.’ A little hint. She did not rise to it, kept her eyes fixed on a nearby shoeshine boy. She was drinking beer. On her plate lay the tail fins of some grilled prawns. She had been reading a book,
Os Lusíadas
. About voyages of discovery – it had to be: on the blue jacket was a picture of an old map of the world. It was no secret that Marie H. was interested in literature. To say the least. As a young girl, after moving from Nordland to the capital she had published two collections of poems in rapid succession. They had been exceptionally well received and not only because of her raven beauty. But she was no longer writing. This had won her a high and somewhat mythical status in NRK circles.

People streamed past. A good many Africans, or Brazilians maybe. A few cripples. ‘You know this square was the scene of the Inquisition’s bonfires,’ he remarked casually, nodding at her book as if this was what had made him think of it. ‘Both people and books were burned here.’

‘I know what you’re driving at,’ she said with a hint of hostility in her voice. And disappointment perhaps. ‘You couldn’t stand the rejection, could you? But it’s a far cry from that to the Inquisition, you know. This is about finance, not heresy.’ Still she did not look at him, instead she lifted her eyes to the castle on the hill opposite. Jonas felt his diffidence threatening to
immobilise
his self-confidence. He thought: she’s invincible. A battleship. It’s no use.

Who was Marie H.? Marie H. was head of programming and financial controller of the three-ring circus that was NRK TV. She had more say than anyone else within NRK, apart from the Director General. Some people even went so far as to say that she carried more clout than the man at the top.

Jonas felt unnaturally detached from the whole situation, felt as if he were sitting on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. He wondered what to do, had the urge to buy a lottery ticket from the seller stationed just across from them. His future career would be decided in these seconds. The
Thinking Big
series
was half completed, but they had run over budget to a record-breaking degree – the word scandal was being whispered in the corridors – and Jonas’s boss, the head of department, had put his foot down. They had already spent more than the projected budget for the whole series. Jonas had protested as best he could, he had tried reasoning, he had tried yelling, but this man had simply gone to his boss, the head of programming – which is to say, Marie H. – who upheld his decision. She ordered Jonas to cease production right away – or at least after filming the footage needed in order to finish those programmes which were more or less in the can.

Only someone familiar with the essential concept behind the series, its very mainstay in formal terms could understand – if only in a small way – what a disaster, what a
death blow
, this was for Jonas. This concept was a part of his being, so to speak, part of his way of thinking; it dated from a discovery he had made back in the summer when he met Bo Wang Lee or, to put it another way, an imaginative force in full bloom.

Naive though children can be, from the very start Jonas knew there was something special about Bo Wang Lee, apart from the fact that he looked like a Chinese, or a handsome Prince Valiant with his glossy, black pageboy haircut; but he never really had the time to speculate on this. And he received no clues from anyone else, since he was always alone with Bo. Only very
occasionally
did he catch a glimpse of Bo’s mother walking off in the morning with a big bundle of papers under her arm, on her way to the yellow Citröen 2CV and the host of things she had to get done for her university course. Each time an unconscious suspicion began to smoulder inside him Bo was right there with a fresh plan. ‘I know what we can do,’ he would announce at the first hint of a crease in Jonas’s brow. ‘Let’s go diving for the
Titanic
in Badedammen!’ That summer passed in such a whirl, the days filled with sundials and windmills and rockets with parachutes that opened
automatically
. Or sometimes Bo would simply roll away a rock to reveal a microscopic zoo that would keep them occupied for hours. Experiences and bright ideas accumulated, piling up on top of one another. Suddenly life was overflowing with peanut-butter sandwiches and intrepid cave explorations and hazardous rock climbs with clothes-ropes as their only lifeline and stories of
maharajahs
who killed themselves by swallowing crushed diamonds. Jonas barely had time to gather his thoughts. Whenever he showed the slightest sign of uncertainty Bo would become a proper firecracker, bursting with ideas. His little yellow notebook was a constant fount of suggestions and sketches for the most amazing activities.

‘Bo, I was wondering …’ Jonas might start. And before he could say any more Bo would be rooting like a badger in one of the numerous boxes
scattered around the flat which he and his mother were borrowing from Bo’s aunt and which, because of all the suitcases, not to mention the beguiling pictures of the
MS Bergensfjord
and
MS Oslofjord
in the toilet, made Jonas feel that these weeks of summer were one long and eventful cruise on an Atlantic liner. ‘Look,’ Bo would cry triumphantly, waving a huge hand in the air, ‘I brought my catcher’s mitt with me. Want to try it?’

Another time he took the best crystal wine glasses out of his aunt’s cabinet, set them on the table and filled them, swiftly but surely, with
different
amounts of water. All at once he was the leader of an orchestra, playing ‘Frère Jacques’ by moistening his finger and rubbing the rims of the glasses. Bo’s ingenuity never waned. After Jonas had examined the odd-looking oval ball which his chum claimed was used in a weird sport called American football, Bo showed him how to fix a silver ashtray to the bottom of it with some sticky tape and hey presto, they had a brilliant zeppelin with which they could have hours of fun. When, that is, Bo did not spend the morning showing Jonas how Chuck Berry hopped across the stage with his guitar. ‘Here, use this carpet-beater as a guitar. It’s called the “duck-walk”. That’s it, well done, bend your knees a bit more!’ Or they would go off into the woods and make a campfire. Bo had an inexhaustible supply of marshmallows, soft and sweet, which they threaded onto sticks and held over the hot coals until the outside of the velvety cushion had gone all golden and runny. In Jonas’s memory that whole summer with Bo smelled of marshmallows.

And then there was the juggling, an experience which would leave its mark on Jonas for the rest of his life. This particular show took place during the careful preparations for the indisputable high point of those weeks: the expedition to the Vegans’ hide-out in Lillomarka. Jonas had happened to ask why they had to plan everything in such detail, do so many things at the same time; work out positions on the map, catch butterflies, get hold of glass prisms, choose things to take with them. And it was then that Bo – they were in the living room at the time – picked up three, then four, then five oranges from a dish and started to juggle with them. Jonas construed this as a practical lesson of sorts: if they were to uncover the hidden country they would need to combine things, keep several balls in the air at one time. He did not realise that what he was witnessing was a rare feat. Anyone can juggle with three balls; juggling with four is far more difficult and takes dedicated practice; juggling with five is a real tour de force, of which only very few are capable. It was all Jonas could do simply to follow the golden pattern that took shape before his eyes: five oranges passing so quickly through Bo’s hands and so high up in the air that the effect was quite mesmerising. ‘This is what we’re going to try to do,’ Bo cried, as if he had to raise his voice in order to
break through his own wall of concentration. As far as Jonas was concerned this was pure alchemy: Bo had transformed something perfectly ordinary into a ring of gold.

‘Here, now you try,’ said Bo. He handed Jonas three oranges and proceeded to peel one of the others.

Jonas had a go, tossed the oranges into the air one after another. Made a complete botch of it, of course. ‘Try again,’ Bo said. ‘And look up this time. Focus on a point just under the top of the circle.’ Bo taught Jonas the basic techniques while sitting on the sofa, popping wedges of orange into his mouth and laughing at Jonas’s hapless efforts, with oranges thudding, and eventually splattering, onto the floor. ‘Don’t walk forward!’ Bo yelled, doubled up with laughter.