The Discoverer (80 page)

As I spun slowly round and round on my office chair I noticed how the light from the twenty-odd television sets struck me like rays. Like healing rays. I understood, or had some inkling of, what mental planning, what work – and, not least: what an idea – had to lie behind this complex interaction, the thousands of minute links which caused all these programmes to run together to form one cross-referring network. In the end, in his own way, he had succeeded in organising all of human learning in a new way, shown how the most diverse insights could hang together, on an organic tree of
knowledge
, so to speak. He had proved it to himself; I doubt if he felt the need to prove it to anyone else. I am pretty certain that I am the only person to discover this secret. And this superb self-portrait: how manifold and yet how homogenous is man.

I think it must have been at this point, as I sat in the circle of light, that I realised how little I knew about him. I felt that I was – at long last –
discovering
him. Discovering who my father was. It may sound high-flown, and I really ought not to be the one to say it, but no one else has seen it: Jonas Wergeland was not – when his career was at its height, I suppose I should say – an important person because he represented the world of his day, as he grew so sick of hearing. He was an exceptional person, one in a billion, because he embodied the
possibilities
of his day, all the unrealised potential. He reflected the future. He showed us, me at least, what mankind could be.

As I went on swirling round and round, as I went on trying to keep my eyes on as many screens as possible, I felt the impending depression loosen
its grip. I had a sense of being lifted up. Pulled up. At that moment I was sure that by vouchsafing me a glimpse of his vision, this circle of tales which filled each other out, Jonas Wergeland had saved my life. Saved me from the darkness.

I made up my mind to do something different, start a new kind of company, the OAK Quartet, try to break new ground.

It was morning in Eivindvik. With departure in the air. Kamala and Jonas were travelling on with the
Voyager
; Martin and I were driving back to Oslo. Hanna cheerily announced that they were planning to sail out to Utvær because Jonas was so keen to see the outermost isle, where the Vikings were said to have sharpened their swords before setting out on expeditions into the west. Harald Hardråde too must have gone ashore there on his way across the North Sea to conquer England.

Martin suggested that we wave them off from a spot from which we would be able to see them for as long as possible. The others had found someone who knew the waters around there, they huddled round a sea chart while he showed them a possible course through the scattering of rocks and islets to the west of Ytre Sula. We walked briskly up the slope to Høgefjell, reached the radar dish on the top then carried on across the broad sweep of
Kjeringefjell
. We parked ourselves on the rise furthest to the west. It was a hot day, we were dressed in just shorts and T-shirts. We sat with the sun on our backs, gazing out to sea. It was the Whit weekend so there were quite a few boats out. Visibility was exceptionally good. We could see the skerries around Gulen, the islands out at Solund and Lihesten’s distinctive rocky profile all the way to the north. Below the knoll on which we sat lay the foundations of a lookout hut used during the war. From here you could spot any enemy approaching Sognefjord.

We had not been there many minutes before the
Voyager
came sailing under engine-power through Nyhamarsund, right below us. Martin waved his T-shirt. Hanna and Carl, Kamala and Jonas waved back. The water of the sound was an unreal turquoise due to the algae, shifting to blue at the mouth of the fjord. I settled myself more comfortably while Martin warmed up some mulligatawny soup on the storm cooker, leftovers from the previous evening’s farewell dinner on board the
Voyager
. ‘I’m terribly sorry, memsahib, I’m afraid it lacks a little pinch of coriander,’ he said, and made me laugh. He was
actually
working on another little project on the side, a booklet he intended to call
Cookbook for Two Nomads and a Primus
. We followed the boat with our eyes as we slurped the highly seasoned soup. We saw the old lifeboat veer west, saw them setting sail – mainsail, foresail, jib – and suddenly, at that distance, the
Voyager
took on the air of a timeless vessel. It was a beautiful sight. And a
beautiful thought. One Norwegian, one half-American, one Korean and one Indian. And all of them Norwegian. On their way to Utvær. An Outside Left position, I thought. A new Norway.

I glanced across at Martin, a guy who claimed to come from a little
junction
in Troms, a guy I liked a lot. He had Norway’s most common surname, but he was the most uncommon Norwegian I had ever met. He had climbed just about everything, from the Bonatti Pillar to Ama Dablam, but here he was, sitting next to me at the top of a 1,400-foot hill, looking totally
awestruck
. He gazed out across the sea. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said. ‘It’s like sitting at the world’s biggest crossroads.’

We sat quietly, relishing the last spoonfuls of mulligatawny soup and the sight of the boat. A boat laden with questions. I glanced at the ruin below me, the vestiges of the lookout hut. Jonas Wergeland was sailing away from
Festung Norwegen
. I thought fondly of the man on board the lifeboat out there at the mouth of the fjord. I had finished his story, I knew what was needed to complete the final draft. I would have to bring myself to write about the Belém tower. It was only right that this idea should have come to me atop a hill called Kjeringefjell – Old Wife’s Fell. It was from women that the most telling stories about Jonas Wergeland had come.

The
Voyager
had a fair wind. As the lifeboat passed the southernmost point of Husøy and bore north, something flashed on the deck, like light off a mirror. I was not sure, but it was my guess that Jonas had got out the sword he had bought, more as a joke really, at Balestrand: a copy of a magnificent Viking sword. I pictured him standing in the stern, brandishing this sword, putting on a little show for Kamala; or maybe he was waving it at us, in
farewell
. Or signalling that he was cutting himself out of a net – a net which so many people had tried to throw over him, catch him in. One mighty slash and he would be free. Maybe this was only the beginning. Maybe Jonas
Wergeland
was, in fact, now poised on the starting line, all set to embark on his real career, the great conquests of his life. He just had to stop off at Utvær first, to hone his sword. I suddenly remembered the moment when he gave me his two notebooks. I had not been quite sure whether he had called them his
pittance
or his pretence. He had been smiling, but the look in his eyes had been quizzical, admonitory: So you think you have me now?

We lay there for a long time – until the
Voyager
was no more than a speck slipping or drifting off into the blue. For a second the vessel looked like a little spaceship heading for a star cluster, heading out across the cosmos.

When the boat vanished from view, the thought flashed through my mind that Jonas Wergeland had ‘left the saga’ as they said in the old tales; but on second thoughts I am more inclined to say that he sailed out of a minor, local
saga and into another, greater one. As the secretary of a world-class
storyteller
. Lying there on the top of Kjeringefjell I realised that all of my thoughts and my literary efforts were not, in fact, aimed at explaining, through
reference
to stories from the past, why Jonas Wergeland had become who he was. I was more intent on looking forward, on considering what he
could
become. He would have applauded such a thought: the future, that was the crucial story.

It was also the future he had been thinking of in Lisbon, when he met Marie H., the head of programming, at the Hieronymite Monastery as arranged, having first run into her, accidentally on purpose, on the Rossio the day before. She was dressed differently, in a light, patterned summer dress which revealed that she still had a healthy tan. After almost dutifully
surveying
the south portal of the chapel, a prime example of Manueline architecture, they walked round the monastery gardens, with Jonas airing his knowledge, perhaps a little too blatantly, as if keen to prove that he was only here for the architecture. He could never be sure, but Marie’s suggestion that they visit the Maritime Museum might have been a form of revenge; he meekly followed her to the west wing of the monastery, and through the endless rooms
dedicated
to the discoveries made around 1500. Wherever he turned his eyes were met by objects testifying to great navigational feats. And yet: right then he could not have cared less about navigation; he wanted to drift with the wind and the waves. He eyed her on the sly: her tanned legs, her partially exposed breasts, her glowing eyes; he tried, vainly, to concentrate on the makeshift sea charts, the compasses, the astrolabes. There’s only one way to save my life’s work, he told himself. By losing control.

Why did he do it?

‘It was from the harbour here that Vasco da Gama set out,’ Marie said when they were outside again. ‘Belém is where it all began.’ How apt, Jonas thought. He too would have to discover a cape, a new strait, if he was to have any future. The next minutes with this woman who had decided to call a halt to his
magnum opus
, a television series the likes of which had never been seen, would decide everything. Whether he would be able to produce an
extraordinary
work or merely an amputated version, the contours of which would be indiscernible. Jonas felt as though he were standing before a great queen, and that he had to convince her of the possibility that an apparently hazardous expedition could succeed.

Both his eyes and his legs were tired from wandering around the museum; he made no objection whatsoever when, on the way to the Belém Tower, she led him towards a building, a café, and through a door half-hidden by shrubs covered in purple and pink flowers. She seemed to know her way
around, made straight for the bar, and that in a place where one was
constantly
reminded of the importance of navigation. On the walls, alongside the stuffed fish and pictures of old sailing ships, hung all sorts of nautical
instruments
. But he had no time for them now. He drank too much. Deliberately drank too much. She drank a lot too. Something about her make-up, her black-lined eyes made him think of Maria Callas. Was he reading anything, she asked. Like what, he said. Fiction, she said. He played for time, tried to change the subject. What was his favourite book? she asked.
Victoria
, he said, plucking it out of thin air, a title from a distant memory. She ordered them another drink. He began alluding to his series again, as if the alcohol had given him fresh courage, fresh hope. ‘How can you cancel it now, halfway?’ he said. ‘Doesn’t anyone see that without the whole thing you have nothing.’

She did not reply. But there was a look in her eyes. A different look. Less forbidding. And she was looking at him.
Seeing
him, as if sighting him for the first time. She continued to cast burning, sidelong glances at him as they strolled the last bit of the way to the Belém tower, a building so unique that
UNESCO
had designated it part of our world heritage. Again the thought flashed through his mind, she seems to know her way around. And as if to confirm this she pulled him impatiently round to the other side of the
building
and pointed to a weathered, sculpted form underneath a watchtower jutting out over the water. ‘A rhinoceros?’ he said. She nodded vigorously and told him that in olden days there had been a plan to stage a fight near the monastery they had just visited between a rhinoceros and an elephant. Like a fight between you and me, Jonas thought. The two strongest forces within NRK.

How could anyone miss seeing it? Why has no one before described the most important decision, or absence of a decision, in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

On the way back to the ramp running across the water to the entrance, she suddenly took his hand, in a way that made him think that at last he was going to discover who she was, the Battleship, this unapproachable, seemingly flinty woman who played around with people’s lives. He marched towards the tower, feeling hopeful – but also a little afraid. He had not felt anything quite like this since the summer of the year he was seven when, clad in a
freshly-ironed
white shirt, he sat in a hot bus trundling along a narrow road lined by golden pine trunks. He would start school that same autumn, but looking back on it he realised that his schooling had begun some weeks earlier. He learned a lesson that summer that would leave its mark on him for life.

It was not a Sunday, but it felt like a holiday all the same. He was going to meet ‘Uncle’ Melankton, the pride of the family, for the first time. Now, he thought, he was going to be told something about the hidden meaning of life.
And, if he was lucky: about Venus. The name Melankton made him think of something fundamental, a first cause of sorts, in the same way that the word plankton did.

It was June, that month so extravagant with light. As always, they were spending the summer holidays at his father’s childhood home on Hvaler, an island at the mouth of Oslo fjord. Herringbone clouds stretched across the sky and the swallows were on the wing until late in the evening. To Jonas, life was just one long, lazy Sunday, full of peaceable bumble bees, motor-boats with flags flying astern and the smell of freshly baked beer bread. It had been an exceptionally hot week, he could not remember ever having seen such low tides; it was a time when things came to view. Some days, when especially large patches of the seabed lay exposed, he half-expected Venus herself to show up. He had detected an unwonted note of anxiety in his mother’s voice as they ran off down to the steamship wharf to swim: ‘I’m just going to say one thing, boys: watch out for Venus!’