The Discoverer

Uranus

In his youth Jonas Wergeland had the ability to follow several lines of thought at once. For long periods of time he also had the feeling that he was living parallel lives. While he may have spent some parts of the day in a basement, seething with rage, for other parts of the day he was, for example, at school — where he came across as a rather shy, polite and, not least, inquisitive young man.

The first time Jonas Wergeland saw the slogan ‘The real thing’ he thought, not of Coca-Cola, but of realskolen — junior high. For him, this truly was ‘real school’. It is not the case, as certain influential branches of psychology would have it, that our characters are formed by the time we are around seven. Things are not, I am glad to say, as dire as all that. Like the mighty banyan tree, human beings too can put down roots from branches high above. Jonas Wergeland received his ‘upbringing’, his most crucial stimuli, at junior high.

If it is true that from the cradle to the grave, from childhood games with stones to the puffing and blowing of old age, man lives out, as it were, the whole history of the species, then junior high was, for Jonas, a Renaissance, a revival of age-old learning, and particularly of the elementary knowledge instilled in him in ‘antiquity’, those three glorious first years at school. Not because he spent so much time with his chum Leonard, known as Leonardo, but because he came under the wing of a person, a teacher, who fully merited the epithet applied to individuals of exceptionally wide-ranging talent and cultivation: a Renaissance man.

Who was this person? Well it was certainly not the Iron Chancellor, who drummed the litany of German prepositions into their heads, nor was it Dr Jekyll, whom they had for English: on the surface a gentleman to his fingertips, dressed from top to toe in tweed and corduroy, but capable of exploding into the most pyrotechnical fits of rage, to which the snapping of a pointer was but the mildest prelude. Nor was it their enigmatic maths teacher, Miss Pi, who could stir a boy’s blood simply with the circular motions of her arms, or the Weed, their natural history teacher, who swooned at the very mention of the word ‘dissect’. And for any favour: forget PE teacher, Tamara Press. At an age when they positively oozed disrespect, only one person slipped through the needle’s eye of their tolerance. He was even exempt from the usual fiendish practical jokes, such as balancing the teacher’s lectern on the very edge of the dais or breaking off matchsticks in the lock of the classroom door. It is a mark of his standing that he did not even labour under a nickname. He was, quite simply, Mr Dehli. Jonas had him for Norwegian and history. In ancient myths and legends one often hears tell of inspired masters, the sort who teach the hero to fence or shoot with bow and arrow. Mr Dehli was such a master. Although the ‘e’ in his surname was actually sounded as ‘ay’ and the ‘l’ and the ‘h’ were the wrong way round, Jonas always pronounced it like that of the capital of India — for reasons which will later become apparent. ‘We’re not going to have Norwegian now,’ Jonas would think before his classes, ‘we’re going to have Indian.’

In all the heated debate which constantly rages around education reforms and books and buildings and grades, it is astonishing how people forget what a difference a teacher can make. You snore your way through years of deadly dull history lessons, then you have a reserve teacher for two periods and you’re hooked on the Thirty Years War or the books of Marguerite Yourcenar for life. Ask anybody — what they remember from school are the teachers. There is nothing to beat an inspiring teacher. There is no substitute — absolutely none — for the charisma of an enthusiast. And if anyone radiated infectious enthusiasm, it was Mr Dehli. He was never seen in the duster coats worn by some teachers in those days; he always came to school looking spruce and dapper in a white shirt, a jacket and a bow tie which was always hopelessly askew by the end of a zestful lesson, as if he had just been in a fight, or on a wild airplane ride. Jonas Wergeland said more than once that he had had only one real teacher in twelve years of schooling. It was also, and not unimportantly, Mr Dehli who introduced him to Maya.

It sometimes seemed to Jonas that it was not actually people who made him feel embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the world. Or for the world. Because of its alarming flatness. But thanks to Mr Dehli, after only a few months at junior high Jonas again began to discern a suggestion of depth, little glimpses of something behind the flatness. Through a fruitful process of repetition Mr Dehli also succeeded in reawakening the round-eyed joy of the first years at school; the delight of drawing a cow’s four stomachs, the pride in managing to construct a ninety-degree angle with the aid of compasses, the wonder aroused by a word like ‘accusative’. And suddenly Jonas understood the full magnitude of things: the purpose of the meridian concept, the consequences of Caesar’s statement when he crossed the Rubicon, the wealth of associations contained within a word like ‘stamen’. Mr Dehli got them to write whole stories in the pluperfect, or the past-future-perfect tense.

‘What is this?’ he asked during their first Norwegian period, writing a large H on the board so emphatically that chalk flew everywhere — Mr Dehli could pull a stick of chalk out of his jacket pocket quicker than any gunslinger. The whole class looked blank. ‘Take a good look,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see that it’s a ladder? Every letter in the alphabet is a ladder. Use them well and you’ll be able to climb wherever you please.’

Mr Dehli set out to elevate his pupils. Provide them with ladders to enable them to reach a higher plane. He never brought a pupil down. Instead, as an educator in the truest sense of that word, he drew out the best in them, drew from them things they did not even know they knew. He was not unlike a personage who would later appear on Norwegian television, the charismatic presenter of the musical quiz programme Counterpoint, Sten Broman who, like Mr Dehli, performed his duties dressed to the nines, in suits he designed himself, and had a knack for eliciting the correct answers from teams who, to begin with, seemed totally stumped; he seemed to take pride in bringing out the contestants’ subliminal knowledge.

Schoolmaster Dehli employed a number of unorthodox methods. When they were studying Ibsen, he turned up for class with a pocket mirror in one hand and his chest covered in medals. ‘It is impossible to understand Ibsen without also taking into account his vanity and his ambition,’ Mr Dehli declared. Who could forget something like that?

Often he would turn things on their heads. ‘There are any number of possible futures, everybody knows that,’ he said during one history class. ‘But did it ever occur to you that there also exists a wealth of possible pasts? For tomorrow I want you to write a couple of pages on what the Second World War would have been like for someone from Japan. Don’t just sit there gawping. Make a note in your homework books.’

Mr Dehli’s main interest lay, however, in impressing upon them the way in which the different subjects were all interconnected, as in an organic system of learning. He showed them how just about everything can be set into a fresh context. He told them about poets in history class and religion in Norwegian classes. It came as a shock to Jonas to hear his teacher say that there was nothing to stop them introducing elements from the Weed’s or Miss Pi’s domains, from natural history and maths, that is, into their essays. Mr Dehli advocated a viewpoint which would hold sway in the universities a decade later: if you wanted to do something original with your life then you needed to have both feet on the ground, firmly planted in at least two different realms of study. The more remote from one another the better.

Although Mr Dehli could not know it, in his mind Jonas likened this idea to a necklace he had seen as a child. On it hung a disc engraved on both sides with obscure strokes and dashes which, when you spun the disc round, spelled ‘I love you’.

Despite his conviction that he was special, despite his gift for thinking, up until now Jonas had not done particularly well at school. Or at least, he had not been interested. With the advent, in fifth grade, of the more soporific, factually oriented lessons, he fell behind. Not even the weird and often funny sentences which their teacher made up to help them remember the names of towns in southern Norway or the fjords of Finnmark could enliven his interest. Particularly when it came to writing Norwegian essays Jonas had a problem: he tended to lose himself in the ramifications of his own mental associations. His essay for the exam in eighth grade was a disaster, rewarded, or punished rather, with a P for Poor.

But here he had found a teacher who did exactly the same thing, the difference being that Mr Dehli turned it into a strength. ‘What is the opposite of truth?’ he asked on one occasion, and answered before they had time to think: ‘Clarity.’ Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the thinnest branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following — heart in mouth, almost — their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and … and … and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but …’, and a sigh of relief would run through the classroom, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.

‘Watch this,’ Mr Dehli said in Norwegian class one day, placing a glass beaker of water over a Bunsen burner. ‘Today we’re going to produce an ester.’ He poured equal amounts of ethanol and acetic acid into a test tube and let it sit for a while in the boiling water. ‘See? Nothing happens,’ he announced, absent-mindedly waving a grammar book in the air. ‘In order to instigate a reaction we need something else. Watch carefully now.’ Mr Dehli added a few drops of concentrated sulphuric acid to the test tube and put it back into the boiling water. A lovely smell, like fruit or perfume, filled the classroom. What was going on? Jonas wondered. Chemistry in the Norwegian class? ‘Imagine that those two liquids are two different thoughts,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘Put them together and nothing happens. But then imagine that a third thought suddenly comes to me and I think this along with the other two. Abracadabra! A reaction is triggered!’ Mr Dehli pointed triumphantly to the test tube containing the sweet-smelling liquid. ‘These are the thoughts you have to pursue,’ he concluded, thereby making the final link between chemistry and Norwegian. ‘Those which act as catalysts.’ No one understood what he was getting at better than Jonas, who had for years been whipping up parallel thoughts while skipping doubles and — perhaps even more crucially — had seen the world grow, thanks to a real live ‘catalyst’.

It’s true, one day the world did grow. Jonas was ten years old, sitting all alone on a rock beside Badedammen — the lake that had been converted into a bathing pond for the residents of Grorud back in the thirties. It was early evening and unusually quiet. No yells from down by the weir, where the boys were given to chucking squealing girls into the water; no shouts, half-fearful, half-gleeful, because Jonas — did he have gills? — was swimming all the way across the pond underwater; no mothers lazing on the grassy slope in distracting bikinis with one anxious eye on the toddlers playing by the water’s edge. A brief shower, a warm drizzle, had only just sent the last bathers home for dinner. Now the park-like surroundings were once more drenched in a warm light. The lifeguards, holders of the most coveted of summer jobs — those white uniform caps alone — had quit the scene, having first emptied the elegant wrought-iron litter bins. The shutters were closed on the kiosk and its rich store of ice-poles and ice-cream cones. Jonas sat with the sun on his back next to the diving board where, only days before, Daniel — clad in his new, tiger-striped bathing trunks — had executed a somersault for the very first time; his triumph marred only by the fact that he forgot to look where he was going and ended up ripping the lilo of a lady who, fortunately, managed to roll off it in time. Jonas stared at a dragonfly which was flitting back and forth across the smooth surface of the lake. A dragon from China. He sat there, hoping that something would happen.

Absently he threw a stone into the water, watched the rings spreading out, further and further out, circle upon circle, a huge target. He was bored, he had no one to play with. The summer holidays had begun, his chums were all away. He cursed the disagreement, instigated by an overbearing uncle, which meant that the summer would be half over before Jonas and his family could go to Hvaler.

He picked up another stone, flung it further out, gazed at the rings which began to spread outwards, felt his thoughts, too, flowing in all directions, fanning out from him in a sort of circle. At that same moment something happened to the ripples on the water. They were broken. Or rather: they ran into rings radiating from some other point. He had not heard a splash, the other stone must have been thrown at exactly the same instant as his own. Jonas’s eyes lingered on the pretty picture in the water, the pattern formed by the waves colliding, intersecting — a much nicer sight than the solitary set of rings.

And then a boat came sailing towards him; it emerged from some bushes to his left and bore in a gentle arc straight towards the spot where he was sitting. He shut his eyes, opened them again. It might have had something to do with the landscape in the background, the absence of people. The boat grew. The whole pond grew. The perspective twisted. The boat became a real ship, a magnificent liner. The pond became the open sea. And suddenly Jonas recognised the vessel, it was the MS Bergensfjord itself, the finest of the American liners. Jonas could not have said how long this vision lasted, an actual ship from the Norwegian American Line on a small lake on the fringes of Lillomarka, but it was dispelled, at any rate, when the model ship rammed into the shore right at his feet. The illusion shattered; his surroundings shrank, reverting once more to the familiar bathing pond.

Jonas fished out the boat: an exact, thirty-centimetre long replica of the splendid Atlantic liner he had more than once seen docked in Oslo harbour. The propeller was battery-driven and you could flick the rudder back and forth. With the ship cradled in his hands he set out along the path leading to the spit of land further up and there, behind the bushes, was another boy of about Jonas’s own age. A Chinaman, was Jonas’s first thought. And the other boy really did have a Chinese look about him. An impression which was only reinforced later when the boy told him his name: Bo Wang Lee. He seemed very secretive, hastily folded up a map. Jonas only caught a glimpse of a couple of lines clearly forming a cross. They must have been made with the stub of pencil stuck behind the other boy’s ear. Underneath the map a yellow notebook came into view. Bo Wang Lee’s trademarks: a pencil stub and a little yellow notebook.

‘Look,’ Bo said, picking something off the ground. It looked rather like a divining rod, one of those forked sticks used to find water. But Bo Wang Lee was never one to content himself with something as simple as finding water. ‘This is a detector which can locate secret underground chambers,’ he said. The word ‘detector’ alone was enough to impress Jonas. ‘We might be able to discover a treasure vault. Or a whole city even.’ Bo spoke Norwegian with a slight accent. Jonas had the feeling that the other boy was trying to divert his attention from the business with the map.

Jonas said he didn’t see how you could find a whole city underneath the ground. He handed the model ship back to Bo, then he picked up a small, flat stone, threw it hard and low and got it to bounce six or seven times across the surface of the pond. Bo was not to be put off. His father was an archaeologist. And Bo’s father had told him about the mighty Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in China, who had ordered the building of a massive underground tomb for himself. Even though Bo was spouting all this information, Jonas did not feel that he was showing off. Again Bo brought out his yellow notebook, and proceeded, while apparently consulting it, to paint a vivid picture of how this mausoleum had looked. Just listening to this description almost took Jonas’s breath away. The Emperor Qin had designed his tomb in the form of a whole city — or no, more than just a city: a miniature replica of his empire, a place in which to live even after death, with palaces and little streams of mercury, mountains sculpted out of copper and a firmament studded with pearls. The Emperor Qin’s obsession with immortality bordered on madness, Bo said. A host of intricate and lethal booby traps were meant to prevent robbers from getting at the wonders within. 700,000 of Qin’s subjects were said to have helped build this vast complex. Bo showed Jonas an astonishingly realistic sketch in the yellow notebook, he claimed it was based on the description by an ancient Chinese historian which his father had read aloud to him. ‘When I grow up I’m going to go to China and find that tomb,’ Bo said with a determined look on his face. ‘It’s in a place called Xi’an. Will you come with me?’ As if in a symbolic attempt to persuade Jonas he started up the MS Bergensfjord again and set it in the water.

‘I don’t see me ever going to China,’ Jonas said as he watched Bo flick a stone across the water too. It skiffed an untold number of times, reaching almost all the way to the other side.

Now Bo Wang Lee was obviously not Chinese, but that is how Jonas would always think of him; he had such an inscrutable air about him, as if he really did belong to some distant, exotic and, above all, tremendously wise civilisation — or as if there was a mysterious buried city inside him too. Later, it struck Jonas that he had felt older during those weeks than he did in all the time spent smouldering with wrath in Leonard Knutzen’s basement.

As time went on Jonas also came to think of Bo as a prince. With his coal-black hair, cut in an odd pudding-bowl style — later Jonas would associate it with the Beatles’ hairdos on the cover of Rubber Soul — his friend was almost the spitting image of Prince Valiant, whom Jonas had come across in the only comics which Rakel, his sister, deigned to read; she had a whole pile of them under her bed.

The two boys got so caught up in skiffing stones that they did not notice until it was too late that the MS Bergensfjord was on a steady course towards the gap in the weir where the water flowed out. Again Jonas felt the perspective twist, felt that the model boat had turned into a real ship and that this slit represented a rift in existence, that the boat was not headed for America, but into another reality, at the back of this one. He did not have time to follow these thoughts to their conclusion. They took off along the path, past the diving board and down to the car park next to the weir. They got there just in time to see the MS Bergensfjord come sailing over the falls on a cascade as thin and bright and clear as a curved glass panel, before being dashed inexorably against the rocks in the shallow stream below. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Bo cried, lifting out the model boat which, luckily, was not too badly damaged. As Bo bent down, Jonas noticed a chain with a little disc attached to it fall out of the neck of his shirt. Later he would have the chance to study this disc more closely. There were marks and dashes engraved on either side. ‘It’s cuneiform writing,’ Bo joked. But when he flicked the disc and it spun round fast, Jonas saw the words: I love you. Jonas found this much more impressive than Daniel’s somersault.

Jonas and Bo did not find any treasure under the ground around Badedammen that evening, but they did find one another; they found one another with a force that almost made Jonas feel uneasy. He could tell with half an eye that this was someone with whom he would become best friends, that this was the sort of person who would send ripples spreading far into his life. The four weeks which lay ahead of him would seem like one long, breathless journey of discovery, in which simply picking globe-flowers along the banks of the stream became an expedition into the least explored reaches of the Amazonian rainforest, and to sit in Charlie’s Chariot, the wreck of an ancient Volkswagen down at the dump, was to be driving in the arduous Paris-Dakar rally with Bo as navigator and multilingual interpreter. Bo Wang Lee was like a tropical butterfly which, for a brief and unforgettable time, fluttered into Jonas’s life.

‘I’m telling you, we can find a whole city,’ Bo said, looking like a giant with the sparkling waterfall, a tiny Niagara Falls, behind him and the Atlantic liner under his arm. And as if to prove the truth of his words he pulled out the yellow notebook and waved it in the air. ‘Are you coming?’

And Jonas went. It is probably safe to say that he would have followed Bo anywhere. In the course of those weeks they undertook an expedition which would stand forever in Jonas’s memory as the most important journey he ever made. They went in search of the Vegans.

After this, Jonas did not hear of Vega again until junior high, when Mr Dehli gave a short, but enthusiastic lecture on the Swedish writer Harry Martinson’s Aniara — neither in Norwegian nor history class, but during a lunch break, right outside the staffroom door with, beyond it, the packed lunch which Mr Dehli never got to eat. Without once having to straighten his bow tie he told them how the spaceship in this poem cycle was bound for the constellation of Lyra, whose brightest star was called Vega. Oddly enough, modern astronomers believed that there might be life in that very area, the schoolmaster said, hinting with a raised eyebrow at the prophetic gifts of the writer. Then the bell rang.

The last period of that same day finished, incidentally, with this tireless mentor of so many young and angry, but enquiring, minds running an uncommonly chalky hand through his hair and making the following announcement: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to tell you about Maya. This may change your lives.’ Now that was how a school day ought to end. Jonas could hardly wait, he imagined that this Maya had to be some really extraordinary girl. But despite Mr Dehli’s warning he was in no way prepared for the fact that she truly would change his life.

Girls frequently took Jonas by surprise. He was, for example, most definitely not out girl hunting one Saturday morning two years later when he wandered into the National Gallery and heard music playing. He and Leonard Knutzen were there to check whether it might be possible to use the Antiquities Room, a gallery claustrophobically full of sculptures, in one of Leonard’s — or rather: Leonardo’s — new cine films, a work which, at the manuscript stage, was looking exceptionally promising, wanting only just such an unusual location to make it absolutely superb. Jonas was at high school, the Cath, by this time; he did not see as much of Leonard any more, but he still lent a hand with shooting films when the occasion arose — films which, according to Leonard, would do for Oslo what ‘the new wave’ had done for Paris and, before that, the ‘neo-realists’ had for Rome, thanks to his discriminating choice of locations. So now and then Jonas would accompany Leonard on his walks around the Norwegian capital in search of symbolic advertising signs on gable ends, dockland areas populated with particularly grim-looking cranes, decoratively tiled entranceways, statues which looked good in pouring rain, parks lit by lamps with metaphysically dull surfaces, staircases which split into two. According to Leonard, the Antiquities Room at the National Gallery was the perfect place with which to illustrate the weighty legacy of history. But Jonas did not join him among the Greek and Roman statues, because he had caught the strains of beautiful — or sweet — music filtering down from the first floor, and followed the sound. It was coming from the room containing the best-known paintings from the National Romantic period: works by Fearnley and Cappelen, Balke and J.C. Dahl — and back then also Tidemand and Gude.

In the centre of the room was a string orchestra. They were playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Serenade in C-major’. But even more captivating, for Jonas, than the music was the sight of a girl sitting in the front row, playing the violin and, in the absence of a conductor, directing the others with nods of her head and raised eyebrows. She was in the parallel class to his at the Cath. She had caught his eye mainly because he had seen her carrying a square guitar case. And if this surprised him, then he had been even more impressed to find that it contained a red and white twelve-string Rickenbacker, identical to the one which George Harrison had played in the first Beatles film. At a meeting of the school debating society she had rigged up an amp and played a couple of instrumental numbers so brilliantly and with such feeling that everyone there had been completely knocked out. He asked around after this, found out a bit about her. Sarah B. was her name and she played in a girl band, one of the few which would, in fact, attract some — well-merited — notice at the time; and in later years she would become even better known as an ambassador for the arts in Norway with her electric twelve-string guitar, a pioneer within what became known as world music, a blend of folk airs, jazz and timeless melodies — an echo perhaps of the house in which she had grown up, designed by an eccentric father: a mansion bristling with spires and turrets and stylistic features drawn from every corner of the globe. Jonas had only ever seen her playing an electric guitar, he was not at all prepared for the sight of her sitting here in a gallery, dressed in a long, elegant dress, rather like a throwback to the previous century, and with a violin in her hands. It would be some years yet before she came down in favour of the guitar as her first instrument.

It was an impressive sight. These young people, in the most fascinating of all the fascinating rooms in the National Gallery; romantic music performed in a gallery full of marble busts and gilded frames, glistening oil paintings of moons half-hidden behind dramatic cloud formations and wrecks being relentlessly beaten against sharp rocks. All the members of the orchestra were elegantly dressed, the boys in dark suits, the girls in long dark-blue frocks of various design, and with their hair up. All were possessed with that elation and ardour only found in young musicians who have just reached the stage where they can master any piece of music. There was an exuberance and a passion in their playing, in the tossing of their heads, the flaring nostrils, the glances they exchanged, that you never saw in an established orchestra consisting of older, experienced musicians. To Jonas they all looked as though they were in love. As though this wholehearted, fiery performance was merely the foreplay to some steamy, feverish lovemaking. He could not tear his eyes away from Sarah. She made a natural focal point with her theatrical, but at the same time natural arm movements. Jonas felt particularly drawn to her hands and fingers; one had the impression that she could have done anything with them, produce sound from a stone. And as he watched, as she kindled and sustained a wonder in him and in the other museumgoers who stopped short then sank down, entranced, onto the chairs set round about, he thought what a rare delight it would be to feel those graceful fingers on the back of his neck, running through his hair.

The paintings gave added resonance to Tchaikovsky’s serenade, the music lent a new glow to the canvases on the walls. Balke’s pale images of the North Cape and the lighthouse on Vardø positively shimmered. Jonas ran his eye over motif after motif, over mountains, glaciers and waterfalls, cog-built farmhouses and milkmaids in traditional costume, menhirs and herds of wild reindeer. It may even have been that Jonas saw the twenty-odd paintings in the room as forming a frieze illustrating Norway itself: an impression so powerful that — yes, why not — he actually began work on his television series Thinking Big right here.

And speaking of that mammoth television production: we have already touched on Jonas Wergeland’s schooldays, so something ought also to be said about the final and by far the most surprising phase of his education, a brief, but momentous apprenticeship on which he embarked towards the end of his time as an announcer on NRK television.

Having abandoned his original, high-flying plans — behind him lay several disheartening years at university and college — Jonas Wergeland considered himself lucky to have found a job in which his talent did not trouble him, where he could, in fact, in all likelihood, have buried it for good and all. But since he and Margrete had been together — he was inclined to say: because of Margrete — an ambition had begun to stir in him once more. He wanted to make television programmes himself. In the early eighties, Jonas Wergeland made the leap from announcer to programme-maker, moved by a desire to try to dive, as it were, from the surface down into the depths. When the NRK bosses agreed to his request he packed his suitcase, with Margrete’s blessing, and left the country. If one did not know better, one might think that he had had second thoughts, that he was running away from his big chance.

Later, all manner of rumours went the rounds — prompted mainly by the acrobatic, televisual feats Wergeland performed — about where he had been and what he had done. Some people affirmed that the original idea discernible behind all of Wergeland’s programmes could only be ascribed to his having been inspired by Sufism during a visit to Samarkand — an assertion which also appeared in print in a serious article. Others maintained, with all the confidence of insiders, that he had been sitting at the feet of the celebrated film director Michelangelo Antonioni. There were even a few who, in the wee, small hours in some bar, could be heard to mumble something about a Mexican woman by the name of Maya. None of these more or less mythical accounts came anywhere close to the truth. Over the years, to the question regarding what had led up to his epoch as a programme-maker, Wergeland honed an honest, if cryptic reply which not uncommonly so nonplussed his interlocutor that he or she asked no more questions: ‘I got to the top by lying on my back.’

In going abroad, Jonas was making a virtue of necessity. Timewise, his trip fell exactly midway between the two referendums which led to Norway saying no to Europe. Although Jonas Wergeland often viewed his homeland as an unscrupulous Festung Norwegen, there were times when he was more inclined to liken the Norwegians’ tendency to shut themselves off to a mentality he found reflected in René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s hilarious Asterix comics. For while their Gallic neighbours allowed themselves to be conquered by the Romans, Asterix and his kinsmen stood their ground. One small village still held out, as it said at the beginning of each story. The same could have been said of Norway. The way Jonas saw it, the wealthy land of Norway had surprisingly many things in common with Asterix’s indomitable community. Norway, too, shielded itself from the world around it, while raising menhirs to its own excellence and having its praises sung by unspeakable bards. Like Asterix’s Gauls, the Norwegian people considered themselves invincible, and the oil was their magic potion. Jonas Wergeland did not find it at all hard to envisage Norway as the world’s largest village, surrounded, and almost driven into the sea, by the mighty civilisation of the Roman Empire.

But, like Asterix, sometimes one had to journey out — out of the provinces, to the Rome of one’s day. And because of his special requirements, Jonas Wergeland was never in any doubt as to what was the Rome of his day: London. Jonas’s favourite Asterix story was, as it happens, Asterix in Britain. Generally speaking, Jonas felt he had a lot of ties with the British metropolis, from the music of LPs such as Rubber Soul, recorded at Abbey Road, to the exterior scenes from films like Blow-Up, which had got into his blood.

Jonas booked into a hotel in Harrington Road in South Kensington, only a stone’s throw from the tube station. The hotel is under new ownership now, and has a new name. Nonetheless, they ought to hang a plaque on the wall outside, because it was here that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his illustrious career. It was in this part of the city, too, that he would have two encounters which would totally floor him, the one physically, the other mentally.

Jonas Wergeland never took an academic degree in Norway, but if his uncompleted studies in astrophysics and architecture could be said to count as a foundation course of sorts, then his major course of study was conducted in London. Jonas always maintained that he left Norway to study at Britain’s foremost university. And by Britain’s foremost university he meant neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but British Television. Jonas Wergeland travelled to London quite simply to watch television. So he had only two requirements in choosing a hotel: the television in his room and the accompanying remote control had to be in good working order, and the bed had to meet a satisfactory standard. I should perhaps also say that this was in the days before satellite dishes made it possible for NRK — or anyone else, for that matter — to receive virtually any channel you could wish for. Although Jonas would probably have gone anyway: he preferred to conduct these studies in secret.

Having got himself installed, he strolled eagerly down to Exhibition Road and a shop selling art materials. Here he purchased a large notebook with blank pages and marbled covers together with a couple of good pens. For once, Jonas Wergeland was planning to write, and to his mind this was such a momentous decision that he thought of his new acquisition as a copybook, much like the ones in which he had written his first ‘a’s, or ‘H’s, ladders up which to climb. In a newsagent’s next to the tube station he bought the TV Times and the Radio Times, which between them provided information on the week’s programmes on all four channels. And the rest, you might say, is history. Jonas pulled out a pen, opened the notebook at the first blank page, switched on the TV and settled back on the bed, and there he stayed. In one month he got through four thick notebooks with different coloured marbled covers, filling them with terse notes in tiny writing, as well as lots of little diagrams and sketches. In later years he would refer to these four volumes as ‘the golden notebook’.

It’s odd really. Norway’s most influential television personality of all time was for a long while very sceptical of television. A scepticism which quickened one late August afternoon towards the end of the sixties when he and a couple of chums went home with one of their classmates to complete a tricky homework exercise set by Mr Dehli. Instead, they all ended up with their eyes glued to the television screen. And what were they watching, these otherwise so rebellious, angry young men, who should perhaps have been more concerned with what was going on in the newly invaded Czechoslovakia? They sat totally transfixed, watching the wedding of the Crown Prince of Norway to Miss Sonja Haraldsen. They were dazzled by how brilliantly NRK controlled the eighteen cameras in operation for the occasion: five inside the cathedral and thirteen along the procession route. Norway had taken the definitive step into the television age and the era of the mass media, a time when the world once more became flat and small, a time when people seemed to imagine that a screen could represent reality.

Jonas Wergeland’s negative attitude towards television changed, however, over the next decade, thanks in large part to the passion for films which he indulged along with Leonard. He also understood that he would have to take television seriously for the simple fact that people around him would spend something like ten years of their waking lives as Homo zappiens, stuck in front of the TV screen. And that this box would therefore act as the fount from which they would obtain almost all of their knowledge, their humour and their moral values. People would no longer read, they would watch. Jonas Wergeland was one of the first to comprehend that the NRK building in Marienlyst far outweighed the Parliament when it came to influencing people, to shaping the attitudes and opinions of the Norwegian people.

Nevertheless, he continued to be extremely selective in his viewing, and his scepticism remained intact. What bothered him most was that, as a medium, television did not exploit its own inherent potential to the full. On top of which, he had observed that television almost always rendered intelligent individuals dumb. Or perhaps he should have said ‘flat’. He first witnessed a demonstration of this on an Open to Question programme in which the Aurlandsdalen question came up for discussion and one of Norway’s most knowledgeable botanists was laughed out of court, made to look like a complete fool and treated as such by the programme’s chairman — the first, by the way, in a long succession of television presenters who would be applauded and admired for making fun of clever people.

It did, however, take Jonas some time to find the common denominator in his favourite programmes, productions which made an indelible impression on him, almost in spite of himself: all were British. Over the years Jonas would come to have something approaching a love affair with the BBC, as well as ITV — the collective name for such independent television companies as Granada, Anglia, Thames and Yorkshire Television. Jonas’s heart instinctively lifted whenever one of their logos appeared on the screen: Thames Television’s reflected image of St Paul’s Cathedral, Anglia’s revolving knight.

So what did Jonas watch? First and foremost, through NRK’s Television Theatre he was introduced to examples of superb British television drama, plays by such strong and controversial figures as Peter Watkins and Ken Loach and lengthy, top-quality series like The Brontes of Haworth and David Copperfield. NRK’s own clued-up drama department had screened marathon productions such as The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs, Downstairs, The Onedin Line and I, Claudius — every one of them so good as to be unforgettable. And thanks to the NRK documentary department — or the Swedish channels, for those who could receive them — the people of Norway were able to enjoy mammoth ventures along the lines of Life on Earth and Civilization, in which the programmes’ respective presenters, David Attenborough and Kenneth Clark, popped up here, there and everywhere as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to inform, to enlighten viewers on the mysteries of Nature and mankind’s tortuous cultural development. Jonas realised early on that some of these television programmes would leave their mark on an entire generation, not only in Norway, but throughout the world; that they would be employed as rock-solid points of reference in life.

All credit to NRK. Other than Denmark, Norway was the only country in the seventies to import more programmes from Great Britain than from the United States. Not much is known about Jonas Wergeland’s political views, beyond his adherence to an obdurate Outside Left line, but it is safe to say that he regarded the Americanisation of Europe with something resembling serious concern. It was one thing to be dependent on the United States where matters of security policy were concerned, quite another to be reliant on the US when it came to making sense of the world. There was, for some years, an ongoing debate as to whether America should be allowed to deploy missiles in Norway, but what everyone forgot was that it had already deployed something far more important there: its television programmes. So when Jonas Wergeland elected to go to England to gain inspiration for television projects — and not to America, as so many other people in Norwegian broadcasting did — this was as much a conscious decision as choosing a European film-maker as role model.

Nothing but the best would do. London was, for Jonas Wergeland, what Rome had been for Henrik Ibsen. He found a new aim in life, a standard to live up to. He had his eyes opened to true excellence — a crucial lesson for someone from a country where every mediocre variety-show crooner was hailed as the new Caruso. Jonas also formed a firm belief — one to which he would hold even when many, later, would call him naive: the belief that television could have a democratising effect, that at certain happy moments television could actually rouse people, encourage them to think big. In short, it was in London, through the studies he conducted in a hotel room in the early eighties, that Jonas Wergeland became convinced that it paid to go for quality, even in a commercial context, and that quality did not necessarily preclude entertainment.

So it was no great achievement to simply lie on a bed and watch TV for a whole month at a stretch, jotting down the odd note now and again, more or less sketching out an idea; in fact it was a pleasure. Jonas felt sure that he could train himself to be a TV wizard merely by lying back and moving nothing but his fingertips. People today often complain that they get up from the television with a feeling of emptiness. When Jonas Wergeland got up off that bed in London after staring at the screen for four solid weeks, he did so as a cultivated man. He did not even feel bad about the fact that he had not visited any of the countless museums and galleries around his hotel as he had planned.

The fact is, you see, that Jonas was a bit of an art lover. As a small boy he had often attended exhibitions with his maternal grandmother. Not only did he love looking at the pictures, he delighted just as much in the things Jørgine was liable to say about them, comments which made passers-by turn their heads and stare, dumbfounded, at the elderly lady with the cigar stump wedged in the corner of her mouth. He particularly remembered their wanderings through the National Gallery, best of all their visits to the red room where the light streamed down over magnificent canvases by the so-called National Romantics — not least among them Johann Christian Dahl. Granny could spend half an hour just gazing at the massive painting from Stalheim in Sogn, telling Jonas about how it was painted and what it depicted, and look at those teeny-weeny figures on the road and the goats in the foreground and oh, isn’t that sweet, that horse there has a foal, d’you see? As a grown man, whenever Jonas came across that picture in one of its countless reproductions it was not only his grandmother he thought of — J.C. Dahl’s painting also brought with it another, even stronger memory, one bound up with the Byrds’ exquisitely wistful, biblically-inspired song ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’.

Jonas remembered seeing Leonard’s back as he walked off towards the antique sculptures, disappearing into the maze of grubby plaster copies, while Jonas himself followed the sound of the strings and soon found himself in the gallery containing the masterpieces of the National Romantic period, among them ‘From Stalheim’. But he did not look at Dahl’s painting, commanding though it was; he looked at her, Sarah B., he stared at her, at her face, her lips, the fingers moving with virtuoso precision over the violin’s finger board. She must have sensed his gaze because she turned, sent him a startled glance, then her lips flashed him a quick smile. He could not take his eyes off her, the lovely blue dress, her chignoned hair, her throat, her hands, but most of all her fingers. It was there, in those first few seconds that everything happened; this was the high point, not what would occur in the weeks thereafter. Because he knew how it would go. She would note his interest and when they had finished playing she would come over to him and say: ‘I didn’t know you were into paintings, are you into music too?’ And he would know that this was an invitation, an opening, a fork in the road.

With his eyes riveted on her he listened to the music, heard how the orchestra threw itself into the lively second movement, a waltz, and he knew that he would not speak to her in the schoolyard on Monday, but that they would look at one another differently during break, and that he would walk up to her on Friday, just before they went home and ask if she would like to go to the Film Club with him the following day. And she would say that she would call him. He stood in the National Gallery, in the shadow of J.C. Dahl’s painting from Stalheim, one of the icons of his childhood, listening to a rousing waltz — so infectious that he almost felt like taking a twirl around the floor — and foresaw that he would go crazy, waiting for Sarah to call.

Jonas would have the house to himself that Saturday and he would spend the whole day waiting. The waiting would drive him round the bend, and he would realise that he was in love, so much in love that he had to think of something, which is to say: without being aware of it he would think of something, a ploy which would convince her that he was special, that he appreciated music, and not just any old music. When the phone rang he needed to have something really unusual playing on the stereo in the background, so she could hear that he liked this music, which in turn would persuade her that he was the boy for her.

He would know exactly what to play. The reason Jonas knew about Rickenbacker guitars was that, for reasons only his body understood, he had chosen The Byrds as his favourite group. And if there was one thing which epitomised the sound of this — sadly, and undeservedly, somewhat forgotten — American group, it was a twelve-string Rickenbacker. So Jonas would get out all of his Byrds’ records and have a good think, because it was, of course, absolutely vital that he pick the right song; and after long and agonising consideration he would finally decide upon bass player Chris Hillman’s simple, but catchy ‘Have You Seen Her Face’ from the consistently excellent album Younger Than Yesterday. In choosing this track he would in fact be saying: See, you caught my eye! See, I’m an outsider too, I don’t play the same crap as everybody else!

Jonas stood in the red room in the National Gallery and observed how the light fell on Sarah’s chignoned hair, how her fingers danced over the violin strings, and he thought of that Saturday when he would start to play the carefully selected Byrds’ track. And he would play it again and again because she could call at any minute; he would commence playing it at nine in the morning, and by the time ten o’clock came, still with no phone call from her, he would have played it almost twenty times. He would know that it was crazy, sheer stupidity, and yet at the same time not know it, he would continue to ensure that the strains of ‘Have You Seen Her Face’ filled the living room, again and again, with him caterwauling along to it, adding his own frantic tones to the harmonies; he could not stop playing it, because she had to hear that he was listening, just by chance really, to this song when she called; in other words: that he had the most discriminating taste in music and definitely merited her keen interest. Eleven o’clock would come and go and the same Byrds’ track would be sounding from the stereo for something like the fiftieth time — and then, just as he was contemplating giving up, or had decided to play ‘Have You Seen Her Face’ just one last time, more as a dirge this time, she would call, and even then, at this moment of triumph, he would not be able to help thinking, far at the back of his mind, that the fulfilment of this most heartfelt wish also came as something of a letdown. And without any indication that she could hear a tune distinguished by the sound of a twelve-string Rickenbacker playing loudly, remarkably loudly, in the background, Sarah would arrange to meet him outside the Saga cinema later that day, but still he would be positive that she had been in two minds right up to the second when he picked up the phone, that it was only because he had been playing that song that she had consented to go out with him.

Jonas stood in the National Gallery listening to a string orchestra, noticing how the instruments gleamed like freshly varnished boats, and he thought of how they would see one another several Saturdays in succession. She would go to the Film Club with him and afterwards they would stroll down to Karl Johans gate and say goodbye at the corner of Universitetsgaten, where their ways parted. And it would be on one such Saturday, in late April, when Leonard had gone off home, leaving Jonas alone with Sarah, that she would place her fingers lightly on the back of his neck and draw him towards her and they would kiss for the first time, right there on the corner, in the middle of Karl Johans gate, in the middle of the main thoroughfare in Oslo. Not counting the kiss from Margrete in elementary school, this would be the first serious kiss of Jonas Wergeland’s life and yet again he would discover that there was something unique about these first experiences with girls, for while one’s first oysters, for instance, or first sip of wine seldom tasted good, Jonas would feel that this kiss, the touch of her lips, exceeded all expectations — which is saying a lot, when one considers his gift for simulation; it would be like experiencing a twelve-string kiss after dreaming of a six-stringer. It would, therefore, be only right and proper that this should take place on Karl Johan, the most public spot in the whole of Norway; and Jonas would be quite giddy with pleasure, the very fact of blatantly kissing in the middle of the main street on a Saturday afternoon, kissing for all to see, rendering it all the more exciting, causing a delicious tingling sensation to ripple from his lips into every muscle and joint in his body, until it seemed to him that he had actually keeled over and was hovering, flat on his back, the way conjurers could make people hang in mid-air, while at the same time standing in the middle of Karl Johan, kissing.

Jonas stood in the National Gallery’s red room, next to J.C. Dahl’s huge painting from Stalheim, that sweeping vista, and thought of how they would kiss and kiss, greedily, avidly; how Sarah would stand with those longed-for fingers of hers on the nape of his neck before running them through the hair at the back of his head as if she had found some invisible strings on which she could play; and they would stand there intertwined, intent on losing themselves in one another, and he would note the way her nostrils vibrated when she kissed him, just as they did when she was playing the violin, and his tongue would meet hers and he would think to himself that he would never break contact with it, that nothing could drag him away from that mouth, not even the sight of a neighbour, such a notorious gossip as Mrs Five-Times Nielsen; and they would stand there, kissing unrestrainedly, and the days would pass, and the outdoor cafés would open, offering prawn smørbrød and foaming glasses of beer, and the long children’s parade would pass them by on May 17th, shouting and cheering and waving flags in their faces; but they would carry on kissing, totally engrossed, while summer came in with blaring brass in the small circular bandstand directly opposite and people popped into Studenten for fragrant ice-cream cones; they would stand with their lips pressed together while pigeons landed and shat on the statue of Henrik Wergeland in Studenterlunden and young men came out of Cammermeyer’s bookshop carrying copies of Line by Axel Jensen; they would kiss and kiss even while Spanish-speaking tourists unfolded maps round about them and different flags were raised on the poles along Karl Johan as heads of state from various countries saw fit to visit the city, and the weeks would pass and they would kiss, feverishly, oblivious to the fact that school had started and schoolchildren were pouring out of Norlis’ bookshop armed with new sets of compasses and rulers, and focused-looking law students were once again strolling into lectures in the old University banqueting hall; they would kiss while tempting posters advertising the season’s programme were hung up outside the National Theatre and even when autumn drew on and the leaves fell off the lime trees still they would stand there kissing, observed on the last Friday of the month by cabinet ministers driving, discreetly, impotently, past them and up to the Palace in black limousines; they would kiss, shamelessly, insatiably, while people walked by on their way to see American films at Palassteatret, they would kiss, stand there embracing, mouth to mouth, only snatching a breath every now and again, much in the way that whales occasionally rise to the surface, while the Town Hall bells marked each hour with a different folk tune they would remain in this haze, kissing despite the fact that it began to snow, kissing all the harder in fact, to keep warm; and they would stand there, lost to the world, as Christmas approached, with festive decorations in the street and people going into the record shop to buy Bach’s Christmas Oratorio as a present for especially dear friends, and they would kiss as the New Year fireworks banged and crackled above their heads, they would kiss, unfazed by the decidedly merry diners emerging from Restaurant Blom, reeking of brandy and trying vainly to hail cabs, and they would kiss as folk trudged past with skis over their shoulders, off to catch the tram to Frognerseter, they would go on kissing until spring came, with birds singing and newly-sprung, heart-shaped leaves on the lime trees and ejaculating fountains in Studenterlund, Jonas would stand there for an eternity, kissing Sarah, and perhaps for that very reason this kiss would be as much of a revelation as if she had removed her mask at the very end of an exhausting masquerade and when it was gone so too would the thrill, though Jonas could not have said why or how — if, that is, it was not that the thrill lay in the mask and not in the face, and all at once Jonas realised that he was kissing an illusion, depths which again turned out to be flatness; in any case, Jonas would have to tear himself free and with the kiss thus over he would say a cheerful, but uneasy goodbye.

They would go on seeing one another for some months, would kiss repeatedly over those months, but because what he had found behind the mask was not what he had hoped for there would come a day when he would decide to break it off, and he would be strengthened in his conviction that Sarah, like him, had reached the stage where she wanted to do more than kiss — yet again Jonas would, in other words, find a romance being struck by Melankton’s syndrome. Unless, that is, his own fear or, to couch it in more positive terms: his honourable intent, was actually a vicarious motive. For what if all of this merely concealed a horror of losing his independence, a fear of having to consider another human being?

And he would take her back to that corner on Karl Johan, imagining that she would not make a scene with so many people about. But when he said it, said that it was over, breaking it to her as considerately as he could, she would not let him off that easily and she would ask him why, and he would finally come up with the answer for which he had searched on a couple of previous occasions, an answer which, while it might smack of high romance and chivalry, would strike at the heart of the matter; and even though this answer had been drawn from another person’s life Jonas would now feel mature enough to use it himself: ‘You’re not worthy,’ he would say and even though he said it gently and was at pains to assure her that someone else would find her worthy, she would simply stand there staring at him in disbelief, and then, still with her eyes fixed on his, she would scream, really howl, so stridently and piercingly that everybody, every single person on or about Karl Johan would look round in alarm, but still she would go on wailing, as unabashed as when they had kissed; a ghastly shriek, like the screech from the highest violin string, with her hands over her ears. Then she would turn on her heel and hurry away, while in his head, like a grim echo, he would hear a verse from ‘Have You Seen Her Face’.

She would be off school for a week. This would surprise him. They had gone out together for a few months, they had talked for hours, played music to one another. And now — it would dawn on him that he had not known anything about her, not a blind thing.

Jonas stood in the National Gallery, where he and Leonard were supposed to be investigating the possibilities of being allowed to film in the sculpture gallery, but where instead Tchaikovsky’s exquisite music had led him up to the first floor, to the room containing J.C. Dahl’s huge painting from Stalheim. He listened to Sarah B. playing the violin, watched her fingers as the orchestra came to the end of ‘Serenade in C-major’. There was a burst of applause, loud and heartfelt. One starry-eyed gentleman, clearly a tourist, possibly American, went up to Sarah and presented her with his ring before bowing gallantly and walking out. She got to her feet, smiling, and came over to him, to Jonas, and said: ‘I didn’t know you were into paintings. Are you into music too?’

Jonas looked from her face to her fingers, from her fingers to her face. She was a closed book. He stood there facing Sarah B. and knew that he would soon be embarking upon an arduous expedition. What should he take with him?

This question, one which was to colour his whole life, stemmed from his summer with Bo Wang Lee and their assiduous endeavours to find the Vegans’ hiding place in Lillomarka. Bo Wang Lee lived in the United States, but was spending a month at Solhaug, in the end block of flats, with his Norwegian mother. His father was at home in the States — he was an American, an archaeologist and his surname was Lee. His mother, surname Wang, was in Oslo to complete a course at the university. The flat belonged to Bo’s mother’s sister. Jonas knew that Miss Wang worked on one of the ships of the Norwegian American Line — that was the sort of fact boys tended to pick up. She was on holiday in Florida with her boyfriend, who also happened to be the man responsible for the model ship which Bo had launched at Badedammen. The flat was sparely furnished and had the air of a place owned by someone who was not at home much. What with all the suitcases and cardboard boxes which Bo and his mother had brought with them, some of the rooms seemed more like ship’s cabins to Jonas, an impression which was reinforced when he went to the toilet and found himself sitting looking at two photographs hung on the wall, just at eye level: the MS Oslofjord and the MS Bergensfjord, two floating palaces. Jonas sometimes thought of that summer with Bo as being like a wonderful cruise through totally uncharted waters.

Since Bo’s mother had to get as much work done as possible during their stay in Norway, Bo had the flat pretty much to himself. Jonas caught only fleeting glimpses of his mother, usually laden with books and papers, on her way down to her sister’s little yellow Citroën 2CV. But there was always a stack of freshly-made sandwiches waiting for them, usually thick, American-style double sandwiches, with ham and a kind of mayonnaise from a big glass jar that you spread on with a knife.

On one of their first days together, when they were sitting eating out on the balcony, Bo told Jonas about the Vegans. It was no accident that Jonas had run into him up at Badedammen. Bo had been on reconnaisance, as he put it. He had been spying out coordinates, as he said. He was trying to find a hidden country, an entire forgotten civilisation. He shot a searching glance at Jonas.

Why were they called the Vegans? Jonas asked, mainly out of politeness, while licking the last of an unbelievably good sandwich filling from the corners of his mouth — it was the first time he had tasted peanut butter.

Because they were a small colony of beings from a planet near the star Vega, Bo said. They had arrived on Earth some years earlier and had hidden themselves away here, in the heart of Lillomarka. This was ‘top secret’ information. Bo had it from a relative who worked for NASA. Again Bo eyed Jonas, as if assessing whether Jonas was worthy of his confidence, before continuing: a special task force within NASA had traced the unknown spaceship’s whereabouts to Norway, more specifically to a spot slightly to the north-east of the capital. According to Bo’s findings — he showed Jonas the map with the two lines forming a cross — the Vegans were located in the area around the little lake. Couldn’t they just go and have a look, Jonas suggested. It was not that simple, Bo said. These beings inhabited another dimension. Bo explained the meaning of ‘dimension’, speaking slowly and solemnly. He described how he imagined this place to be, pulled out the yellow notebook and opened it at an imaginative and highly detailed drawing with, at its centre, a sort of entranceway or passage. Jonas thought it looked a little like Bo’s drawings of the Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. He had started out smiling, but his smile gradually faded as Bo plied him with so many colourful pieces of information that Jonas actually began to believe him.

Although Bo knew where the Vegans were located, there were still a couple of snags. One of these concerned the question of how they were to open up the terrain. ‘Open up the terrain?’ Jonas repeated. ‘You mean we’ll have to chop down trees and bushes and stuff?’

‘We have to open up the landscape, but not with an axe or a shovel,’ Bo said. ‘The Vegans’ land lies hidden, a bit like the treasure in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We have to find something that will work in the same way as saying Open Sesame.’

Jonas tried to picture a grove of trees suddenly ‘opening up’, as if a huge trapdoor of heather and moss had been thrown back only to disclose an alien landscape under the ground. Bo’s story appealed to Jonas, it accorded with a suspicion he had long harboured: that the world could not possibly be as flat as it appeared to be. That there had to be ‘trapdoors’. It had always been a disappointment to Jonas that reality never seemed to match up to his image of it. Consequently he was always on the lookout for a different world. He would have liked to think that it was only a hand’s grasp away, as Bo intimated. A tiny twist and everything would be changed.

Bo never did say how he had figured it out, but he had discovered the key that would open up the landscape. A picklock of sorts. They needed eight things: four crystals and four butterflies. Jonas did not know what he found more surprising: the crystals or the butterflies. And yet it fitted, it struck a nice chord inside him. Something hard and something soft. Something dead and something alive.

Bo took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook. If the black pageboy hairstyle made Bo look like Prince Valiant then these, the pencil and the little yellow book, were his sword and his shield. Swiftly and with a sure hand Bo sketched four crystals on a blank page — ‘from memory’ as he said. What Jonas saw was four differently shaped prisms. ‘I know where I can get hold of something like that,’ he cried eagerly. Bo nodded, as if he had expected nothing less of Jonas.

That left only the butterflies. Why butterflies, Jonas asked. It had something to do with chemistry, Bo said. Jonas barely knew what chemistry was, could not even guess at a future in schoolmaster Dehli’s Indian classroom.

The next week they went butterfly hunting. And not just any specimens of these tiny fluttering creatures would do. Far from it. Bo knew exactly what was needed: a brimstone butterfly, a peacock butterfly, a red admiral and a small tortoiseshell. Again Bo pulled out his notebook and presented a brief rundown of their markings, their flying season, behaviour, the sort of terrain and flowers they preferred — it made Jonas think of the descriptions of wanted criminals, but then Bo showed him the most beautiful, meticulously coloured drawings of all four butterflies in the notebook. Each armed with a net they proceeded to comb the fields around the Ammerud farms and the hillsides along the roads down to the stamp-mill and the quarry; they searched the woods around Monsebråten and, of course, Transylvania. Catching butterflies was not nearly as easy as Jonas had thought. And when they did spot one, on the banks of the stream running down to Grorudsdammen and the ski-jump hill, for instance, it was usually the wrong species. Often, Jonas would simply stand, butterfly net in hand, gazing in wonder at the way some butterflies flew swiftly and purposefully, while others flitted this way and that; he wondered whether there was a conscious navigational strategy governing the inscrutable routes a butterfly could follow across a meadow; it seemed to him that his thoughts travelled in different directions depending on which type of butterfly his eyes were fixed on. Bo had told him a bit about just how remarkable these little creatures were. They tasted with their feet. Jonas tried to imagine what it would be like to taste with your feet, stick your toes into a bowl of chocolate blancmange and custard. Even stranger, Bo said, was the butterfly’s ability to see ultra-violet colour patterns which were invisible to human beings. ‘This fact, that they can see something we can’t, is very important,’ Bo said portentously. ‘Do you think somebody could train their eye to see such things?’ Jonas asked. ‘Ssh, there goes a butterfly,’ said Bo, almost as if he did not like this question.

They eventually managed to catch a peacock, a tortoiseshell and an admiral. This last had only just arrived in Norway from the south. Bo popped each insect into its own large glass jar with air holes in the lid. Ranged side by side in this way, they looked like parallel thoughts, Jonas thought. But the brimstone butterfly presented more of a problem; its primary flying season was probably over, Bo said; their only hope was to find a straggler. He studied the yellow notebook, with a worried frown. ‘Couldn’t we use a Camberwell beauty?’ Jonas asked. Bo glowered at him. ‘It has to be a gonepteryx rhamni, otherwise the whole thing’ll be ruined.’ It was Bo who taught Jonas never to make compromises.

At last, one day on a hillside just down from the dump behind the garages, Jonas spied a brimstone butterfly, as bright and conspicuous as a yellow Citroën tootling around on the slope. Jonas’s heart was pounding, he had never thought a fluttering yellow insect could make him feel so happy, so thrilled. He caught this wonderful creature in his net at the first attempt, and the ground seemed to tremble slightly, as if something were already starting to reveal itself.

In the afternoon they sat out on the balcony with their ham and mayonnaise sandwiches, contemplating the four different butterflies in their respective clear glass jam jars, as if they were looking at the key to some vital code. Bo had placed an orangeade top filled with sugared water in each jar. They observed the way the butterflies unrolled the probosces which at other times lay coiled like fire hoses under their heads — a real little fakir trick, this. Crouched down in front of the jars, examining the insects’ markings — the admiral’s reddish-orange bands, the blue spots on the peacock’s lower wings — Jonas sensed that they had an inherent potency, that they embodied tremendous forces, that collectively they were, in a way, dynamite. That they could be downright dangerous, were they to come into contact with one another. Bo studied the contents of each jar through a magnifying glass. ‘Perfect,’ he murmured, taking the pencil stub from behind his ear and scribbling down a sentence in the notebook. That pencil always seemed to Jonas to be sharp, although he never saw Bo sharpen it.

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ Bo said. ‘That leaves just one question. What should we take with us?’

‘D’you mean like sandwiches and stuff?’

‘I was thinking of something to show the Vegans what we are. Who we are. What we believe in. So they won’t turn us away.’

For Jonas, this question was to be of much greater consequence than the expedition itself. Bo made it sound as though they could be killed on the spot if they did not come up with just the right things to take with them. Maybe that was why Bo talked more than usual that evening about his homeland. As they sat on the balcony surveying the holiday-quiet lawns and roads, as they sipped from their mini bottles of Cola through paper straws, Bo spoke, with a stronger American accent, about everything from cars with fins to the delights of candy floss — spun sugar on a stick; of grilled steaks as big as pancakes and machines with popcorn whirling around inside a glass box, and had Jonas ever heard of marshmallows? Bo scooted off and came back with a bag; Jonas sniffed that blissful aroma. Bo described the Chrysler building, waxed eloquent about Disneyland and hummed songs by Elvis, the king of them all. But above all else he told him about American television, which even had programmes in the middle of the day: game shows and quiz programmes and really great series, best of all Batman. From then on Jonas always thought it was nice to sit on the toilet at Bo’s place and consider what he ought to take with him, while feasting his eyes on the pictures on the wall of the American liners with ‘fjord’ in their names. In his imagination, these ships were breakaway fjords that had branched outwards.

The thought of Norwegian-American Bo Wang Lee crossed my mind several times during our visit to Fjærland. Although I was actually thinking more of the mass exodus from Norway to America in the nineteenth century. After Ireland, Norway was the one country in Europe which had sent the largest percentage of its population across the sea, and Sogn was one of the areas hardest hit by emigration; between thirty and forty thousand people were said to have left the hamlets and villages around the fjord. I have always been fascinated by the thought of another Sogn in the United States. By the possibility of a ‘Lærdal Association’ in Iowa. There is more than just one small town in Kansas called Norway, to some extent a whole Norway is contained within the USA. In that vast land there lies a hidden Norway, like an invisible, many-armed fjord. During their first years there, some enthusiasts even dreamt that ‘the spirit of Norway’ would come to form the backbone of the American nation. The reason such reflections should have been prompted by Fjærland, of all places, was, of course, that Walter Mondale, former vice president of the United States, had made several much publicised visits to the village of Mundal, home of his forebears. He had even had the honour of opening one of the long tunnels not far from where we were docked, just down from the lovely old Hotel Mundal, near the very head of the narrow Fjærlandsfjord which at this time of year had an otherwordly air about it, owing to the way the mineral particles washed down with the glacier water in the rivers refracted the light, lending a mystical green cast to the fjord.

The thought of America also gave me a sense of affinity, stronger than before, with Columbus. My discovery was, however, the result of journeying not outwards, but inwards, deeper and deeper into my native land. I was forever making new discoveries. It was almost too much sometimes. I did not see how we could possibly include even a fraction of all the possible subjects which presented themselves. What about the seals in Nærøyfjord? What about Balzac’s strange tale Séraphîta, set in a Norwegian fjord? What about Johann Christian Dahl; all the pictures he had painted of places around the fjord: ‘View of Fortundalen’, ‘Winter in Sogn’? What of all the old photographs by Wilse and Knudsen? What about the mass of information we had collected on bird reserves, wilderness museums and nature trails? There were times when I wondered whether we had bitten off more than we could chew, or whether the notion of converting Sognefjord into digital form was, in fact, both blasphemous and insurmountable.

Nevertheless, we endeavoured to make the most of every minute at each stop along the way, noting down thoughts and suggestions for a concept of this, the longest, and most beautiful fjord in the world; in just a few months we had to present the initial outline to our clients. Sometimes it felt as though the abundance of ideas would alter, or break the bounds of the very medium we meant to employ, and this in spite of the fact that it was a totally new medium, an unprecedented fusion of words, pictures, film, sound, architecture and design, of facts and storytelling. Were we already working towards something else, an as yet unconceived medium?

In any case, we had to choose what to take with us, which is to say: decide on the essentials. We tried to evade the issue, but it was brought home to us again and again: some sort of hierarchy was unavoidable. Certain things had to be accorded higher priority than others. A thought occurred to me: this was the all-eclipsing problem of our age, ethically and existentially, a dilemma we did not like to think about. For people today the difficulty lay both on the horizontal and the vertical plane. You could not take in everything, far less immerse yourself in everything. Maybe that was the main challenge of life, apart from meeting the primary needs: choosing what to take with you and which elements of this to concentrate on. For an individual living in the first years of a new millennium, it was more difficult to discard than to accumulate. It was a constant struggle for us. As far as I can remember it was at this stage that we discussed the possibility of restricting the menu to twenty-odd carefully selected headings or ‘links’, the main attractions, as it were. We knew that many consumers of our product would be short on time; what their senses first encountered was most definitely not immaterial. Every visitor to Sognefjord suffered the same agonies of indecision. You have three days. What should you see, visit? When the brain was seething with such questions as these it was a relief to resort to the saloon and dig your teeth into one of Martin’s pizzas with sardines and black olives.

I noticed how my thoughts on the Sognefjord project were increasingly coloured by my interest in Jonas Wergeland. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Ought we to design our product, this service, as a ‘biography’ of the fjord? Ought I to write about him as if I were describing a place? He was sitting right there on the deck in front of me. At any minute I could go over to him and touch him, talk to him. What I most wanted to do was to hug him, to just sit beside him with my arms around him. More and more often I found myself thinking: if he lay flat out and spread his limbs he would look like a piece of the Norwegian landscape — or, why not: a fjord.

I had taken a particular liking to Fjærland. Not merely because of the almost unbelievable scenery around us: Skeisnipa with the dazzling Flatbreen glacier rearing up at the head of the valley, the green waters of the fjord, the surrounding fields, the roads fringed with dandelions. I believe it may have had more to do with the fact that in this small place one was so aware of branches reaching out into the world. And here I am thinking not so much of the migration as of all the books. Fjærland was full of books. Fjærland was positively awash with books. Inwardly and outwardly. There were bookcases ranged along the roadsides. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the glacier had retreated, leaving behind a moraine of books. Hen-houses and old shops, disused ferry terminals and hotel lounges had all been turned into second-hand bookshops. Byres still complete with pig troughs and slurry channels running down the middle of their floors now held shelves and shelves of books. Fjærland had a name for being Norway’s book town. It was part of a network of other book towns — Hay-on-Wye in Wales, Montolieu in France, Bredevoort in Holland; when you walked the streets of tiny Fjærland you were, in a way, also in touch with book towns in Germany and Switzerland, in Canada and America, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. It was a beautiful idea. Almost too beautiful. I kept my fingers crossed as I walked around. Long may Fjærland endure as Norway’s book town.

I was particularly taken with the bookcases by the roadsides, crammed with books, surrounded by the humming of bees and the smell of seaweed. It was something like this that we were trying to do: to put information out on the streets, set it down in a landscape; wrap knowledge in an experience; show that our product, this apparently inexhaustible source of learning, was only one small part of the great narrative that was the world. Occasionally I spotted Jonas Wergeland prowling about, looking into second-hand bookshops, albeit circumspectly, as if he were afraid of running into a ghost, one of those spiteful biographies of his person. Might his thoughts have gone to his old neighbour, Karen Mohr, with the library in her bedroom? One morning when the whole eastern side of the fjord and the hillsides were in shadow and the other bathed in golden sunlight, I came across him sitting on the hatch above the companion-way to the for’ard cabin, reading a slim volume he had purchased. This surprised me. He was not a reader. I noticed that the book was Victoria by Knut Hamsun. He spent the whole morning sitting there reading it. Reading it while unconsciously running a finger over the cross-shaped scar on his forehead. Now and again he would look up, close his eyes and move his lips, as if he already knew the passage by heart. Once or twice I could have sworn he wiped away a tear. When he did that he looked like a little boy.

Why did he do it?

On our second last day at Fjærland, Kamala Varma came to join us. She had hitched a ride with Jonas’s sister Rakel. Benjamin, the brother with Down’s syndrome was there too. They had driven up in Rakel’s trailer-truck, or at least, there was no trailer attached to the black tractor — or juggernaut as Kamala called it — when it pulled up, rumbling and bulldog-like. Benjamin was bursting with pride, he tooted the horn before jumping out of the massive rig. Later he let me hear the wheezing air brakes and showed me the impressive hi-fi system and the bunks in the cab, the fridge and the TV. He babbled on about how wonderful it was to sit so high above all the other traffic — like being on a horse galloping through a flock of sheep. And with ABBA playing full blast. ‘The favourite right now being “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme”,’ Rakel chipped in, rolling her eyes. Usually Benjamin slept in a tent, but he agreed to stay the night at the Hotel Mundal when Jonas promised that he could have the room the queen slept in when she was there. Benjamin straightened his shoulders at the prospect of sleeping in the same bed as a queen. And an American vice president. Not only that but the place was said to be haunted. Benjamin broke into ‘Dancing Queen’ and walked off with his brother.

I could not help thinking that this was a rather solemn, an almost historic gathering. Here we were, three women, all of whom had written, or were in the process of writing about Jonas Wergeland, telling his story; each coming from our own corner of the world to meet, as it were, at a crossroads. We were like three sisters. And it seemed only fitting that we should rendezvous in a place that was full of books.

Kamala was already enthusing about Fjærland. They had stopped at the Glacier Museum, designed by Sverre Fehn. Straight away she had noticed how the building, lying there on the plain underneath the glaciers, looked like some weird astronomical instrument, of the sort found at Jantar Mantar, the old Indian observatory in Jaipur. Carl and Hanna, who had made several visits to the inspiring Glacier Museum, each time with a feeling of boarding a ship, were gratified to hear her make this comparison. Kamala was even more bowled over by the fjord, or what she had seen of it so far. ‘Sognefjord has more pairs of arms than Shiva,’ she exclaimed.

While Jonas drove off with Rakel to Boyabreen, the fastest moving glacier in Norway, to let Benjamin see the almost phosphorescent blue light emanating from the glacier face and hear the noises it made — cracks like rifle shots — Kamala strolled around Fjærland with a dumbfounded expression on her face, looking at the book displays; hen-houses, boathouses, cafés offering literature of every description. She spent a long time reverently observing a gull sitting on a nest above the entrance to one of the smallest antiquarian bookshops, an ochre-coloured sheep cot. When she came to the bookcases set out along the roadside she stopped short. Kamala Varma, a woman of Indian descent and herself a writer, stood there gazing at the rows of books against that stunning panorama, the mighty mountains and the glaciers, then she suddenly whispered: ‘Māyā. This is pure māyā.’

Although Jonas found it interesting to roam around Fjærland, and even went so far as to buy a novel by Knut Hamsun, he actually had a somewhat fraught relationship with books. One of his nastiest boyhood experiences dated from an encounter with a book and, as one might expect, it involved his big brother. At home, under the telephone table of all places, as if it were a phone book, lay a fat Family Bible. This treasure had lived out at Hvaler, but after Jonas’s paternal grandmother died, his grandfather could not bear to have it in the house. In Åse and Haakon Hansen’s nigh on bookless home this Bible was something of a museum piece, and the boys used it as a prop in the most bizarre games. The hefty clasps made it look like a chest, a proper little piece of furniture. Only after Daniel had run up against the gravity of life in the long-jump pit did this volume come to serve its rightful purpose: as the revelation of God’s word.

It was, though, the illustrations which first captured Daniel’s interest. He could spend hours studying Gustav Doré’s marvellous pictures, as if he had grown out of the Illustrated Classics and wanted to try something more edifying. He was especially fond of the dramatic etchings depicting the Flood, the tiger on the cliff with its cub in its mouth; or David and Goliath, the blood streaming from the neck of the headless giant. ‘Have you read the Bible?’ people today ask and back comes the answer: ‘No, but I saw the film.’ Daniel, on the other hand, would have said: ‘No, but I’ve seen the pictures.’ As a grown man, Jonas was inclined to think that his brother’s image of God owed more to Gustav Doré than to all the sophistic theological text books he later read.

One day when Daniel was sitting in his room poring over Doré’s illustration for the story of Moses breaking the tablets of the law, Jonas walked in and wanted to know what his brother was looking at — grew even more curious when he noticed that his brother was peering at the page through the self-same magnifying glass which he used to burn his name into wooden walls. Jonas asked if he could see. Daniel said no, almost on principle, and the squabble escalated into a regular fist-fight which ended with Daniel — possibly inspired by Moses and the tablets — hitting his brother so hard over the head with the Family Bible, that little piece of furniture with the metal clasps, that Jonas was actually knocked out cold. The doctor was sent for, this being in the great days when family doctors still made house calls — in the Hansen family’s case a GP who drove up in a jeep like the ones used by the emergency services, for all the world as if Grorud was a jungle, or a highway littered with broken-down vehicles. After examining the patient and looking at the sizeable bump on his tender scalp, he said he believed that Jonas was suffering from concussion. The doctor ordered a day in bed under careful observation. On his way out he cast a glance at the Family Bible, which had been presented as evidence, and shook his head eloquently. Daniel was all innocence, standing there with an affectedly pious expression on his face. Sometimes, if Jonas happened to be in a church where Daniel was preaching, he would see that same look on his brother’s face, up there in the pulpit.

Jonas developed an early mistrust of books. And although he was obliged, over the years, to plough his way through a lot of textbooks, he regarded the fame he eventually won by announcing programmes on a flat screen as proof that his childhood suspicions had been well-founded. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, books could not be the path to making a name for oneself. In this he would prove to be sadly mistaken, although it would take him many years under lock and key to discover this.

Nonetheless, there came a day when Jonas Wergeland picked up a book and almost lost his life. How could that be? Not only that, but it was a novel, and Jonas knew that there was nothing worse than fiction. His bright sister Rakel disappeared into a world of her own at an early age; for years she drifted around Grorud like a local version of Don Quixote on his deluded wanderings, all thanks to the tales of the Arabian Nights. Later she became a truck-driving samaritan after reading a book by Albert Schweitzer. Something told Jonas that the covers of a book could harbour a bewitching power, that the contents could paralyze you, quick as a flash, like the strike of a cobra. Books too, like women, ought to bear a sign saying ‘Danger. High Voltage.’ All books ought to be fitted with hefty clasps and a solid padlock.

This suspicion was borne out by Viktor Harlem, Jonas’s best friend in high school, who told him how he had become hooked on literature. He actually used the word ‘hooked’, as if it were a drug addiction. Viktor had been in eighth grade at the time and had to make a herbarium for school. In order to press the flowers he borrowed the thickest book from his mother’s not exactly extensive library and some weeks later, as he was removing one of the flowers, his eye happened to fall on the page and he started to read. And that was that. ‘It was a germander speedwell that led me to Leo Tolstoy,’ Viktor said. And from there, thought, Jonas, it was no great leap to Ezra Pound and The Cantos, and a life as a vegetable in an institution, or perhaps one should say: a pressed flower in a herbarium.

Even as a child, Jonas understood that the words in books, particularly works of fiction, could be addictive, and read therefore only as much as was absolutely necessary. He did, of course, have to look at those volumes used in school, but even these he merely skimmed, with all his mental defences raised. He knew that at any minute he might be carried off to some Lambaréné, that a slightly unfortunate choice of book could result in him selling up on the spur of the moment and going off to Calcutta to help the poor. But since the works on the school syllabus were usually ruined for ever by one zealous teacher or another, Jonas escaped unscathed.

He never forgot, though, the lesson which Daniel had thumped into him: books were a weapon. They were dangerous. And like wolves, they were at their most dangerous in packs — as he discovered when a shelf full of books came crashing down on him in Karen Mohr’s bedroom. Only rarely did Jonas venture into a bookshop or a library — it was almost as if he half-expected that at any moment the bookshelves would come tumbling down on his head again, and bury him, or that the books themselves, seeing that he was alone, would attack him and tear him to shreds. The unease which Jonas felt in a well-stocked bookshop was not unlike Tippi Hedren’s dread of the crows and gulls perched on tree branches and railings all around her in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds.

And yet — one day, of his own free will, Jonas picked up a book. Why? Because he was in love. And because he wanted to kill a fly.

This was in the days between Christmas and New Year, barely a year after Jonas, now a young man, had met Margrete again. They were spending the holiday somewhere on the outskirts of Jotunheimen, in a cottage owned by Margrete’s parents. Jonas had been working for a short time as an announcer with NRK, he was just beginning to notice the first signs of his growing fame. Beyond the rough log walls it was bitterly cold, more than twenty below zero. They went only for short ski trips in the middle of the day, their shadows long in the almost horizontal rays of the low sun. The rest of the time they made love. They made a bed for themselves in front of the fireplace in the living room so that they would at all times have a view of the landscape outside. They lived on love and hot cocoa. Jonas had never felt so contented, so blissful, so inexplicably happy. He was, you might say, laid wide open to new impulses.

Sometimes Margrete would read. On one such occasion Jonas was lying staring into space, limp from lovemaking and intense conversations. All was quiet. No wind. A fly, wakened by the heat in the cottage, began to buzz; it was like the hiss of a snake in Paradise. Jonas glanced round for something to hit it with and his eye lighted on a paltry shelf of dog-eared paperbacks. He pulled out a copy at random and flattened the fly at the first attempt. Without looking up, Margrete murmured from her chair: ‘Books are not weapons.’

What was the greatest danger to which Jonas Wergeland was ever exposed? Not an easy one to answer, one would think. He had reefed sail in a gale in the middle of the night. He had ignited fury in an English pub. If anyone had asked Wergeland himself he would, however, have had no hesitation in replying: ‘The biggest risk I ever took was to read a book.’

He stood there holding the old paperback, weighing it in his hand. He was feeling a little reckless. He sank down into a chair, opened the book at the first page and began to read. Margrete and he sat each in their chair, with the mountain right in front of them if they raised their eyes: a slope so steep that the snow did not lie there, a normally black rock face to which the freezing cold and the low sun now lent a pinkish cast, a view which seemed almost to belong to another country, another planet. Jonas thought fleetingly of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, of the possibility of opening up the terrain. He dropped his eyes to his book again. He did not know that with this seemingly harmless act he had let a wolf out of its cage and that all unknown to him this wolf was now sneaking up on him from behind. For a few fateful seconds Jonas Wergeland forgot all about his ingrained sense of mistrust. He forgot what a profound impact a novel can have on one. He forgot that every work of fiction, even a flimsy paperback, is a Bible, a sacred text, containing layer upon layer of meaning. In opening a book you could be putting your whole view of the world to the test.

He should have remembered, because in junior high they had also had Mr Dehli for a third subject, one which the schoolmaster himself maintained, with all the enthusiasm and inspiring authority at his command — which is saying something — to be the most important subject of them all: Bible studies, or religion, as the students called it. ‘Choose religion and you choose everything,’ Mr Dehli asserted.

It possibly bears repeating, since teachers of this calibre are the exception: Mr Dehli saw himself not just as a teacher, but also as a guide and mentor. His pupils had to learn facts, but they also had to bear in mind that something bound these facts together. Even in subjects such as Norwegian and history. Mr Dehli dared to bandy that inflammatory word ‘meaning’. ‘And nowhere is the attempt to establish meaning more apparent than in the religions of the world,’ he said. Over a couple of years, Jonas was introduced to the main principles of Islam, Hinduism, Shinto and Buddhism; in other words, he was made aware that there were other philosophies of life besides the Christian one. This may seem obvious, but it was not obvious to Jonas — he belonged, after all, to the last generation in Norway which had to learn Luther’s little catechism by heart.

How could so many fail to see it? Page upon page has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s years at elementary school and high school. But no one has looked at the two years in between. Nevertheless, it was here in junior high that Jonas’s curiosity about the world, not to say life, was truly awakened. It would not be too far from the truth to say that, during this time, Jonas came very close to becoming a Hindu.

Mr Dehli — who did not turn up for classes in a duster coat, but in his best bib and tucker, so to speak — told them even more than usual about Hinduism, possibly because he was especially interested in this religion himself, or because this was the late sixties, when the fascination with all things Eastern was at its height and celebrities were flocking to India to sit at the feet of more or less genuine gurus. All of a sudden it was orange robes, Hare Krishna, sitars and incense at every turn.

It was through Hinduism that Jonas was introduced to Maya. Although this was, of course, not a girl called Maya as Jonas had first thought, but māyā, a concept. Mr Dehli, sporting an exceptionally colourful bow tie for the occasion and with a snowy-white silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket, explained to them that there were many different interpretations of māyā, but that māyā, roughly speaking, was a principle which prevented us from seeing the world as it really was. You mistook something for something else. A coiled rope became a snake. Māyā worked mainly in two ways: it could conceal something, or it could present something false. The concept of māyā, the great cosmic illusion, may have grown out of an ancient weaving symbol, an image representing creativity. Mr Dehli produced a strip of gauze bandage and covered his eyes with it: ‘With my sight thus masked there would be things in the room which I would not notice, on the other hand my eyes could perhaps be confused or deluded into seeing certain other things that are not there. I might, for example, think that Pernille was a statue. Having a little snooze, Pernille?’

Due to our ignorance we apprehended only the material world and not the real world behind it. We could not cope with the idea of infinity and so we created something finite for ourselves: the world. But it was only because we were as if hypnotised that we mistook this mirage for reality. ‘Māyā can be compared to a cloud covering the sun, the moon and the stars,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘And this cloud is there because our consciousness is not clear enough. There is a veil before our eyes. But not everything is an illusion. There is something behind the cloud. Without it there would be no illusion.’

It occurred to Jonas that Leonard had been on the right track: it all came down to honing the eye. The Hindu view of the world, with its assertion that the power of māyā concealed the true nature of existence proved in many ways to be a lifeline for Jonas, a ray of hope. It confirmed his firm belief that there had to be something behind the flatness — of both the world and people, including himself — which was a constant vexation to him. Because, if there were several planes, veil upon veil, might they not even form a chamber, create some sort of depth?

The first time Jonas heard his teacher speak of māyā, he was reminded of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, but later he came to think of another, more infamous episode. Those who are familiar with life at Grorud around that time will not be surprised to hear that this drama centred around a boy by the name of Ivan. Ivan — a problem child, to put it mildly — had long had a crush on the daughter of Arild Pettersen, or Arild the Glazier as he was known, after his business: he was the local Grorud glazier, and most people were acquainted with him through no choice of their own, thanks to accidents great and small. His slogan was: Life is a smash. The best bit, as far as the kids were concerned, was his van, a Volkswagen truck with a flat bed and a rack shaped like an upside-down V on which the plates of glass were carried. One day Ivan took his courage in both hands — in such circumstances even Ivan had to steel himself — and asked Britt, as the object of his affections was called, if she would go out with him, a request which, with the perverse, heartless temerity that girls can display, she flatly rejected. Why didn’t he just run on home, cheeky sod — who the hell did he think he was?

Ivan slunk off, but everybody knew that the matter would not end there. This was, after all, Ivan. A bunch of boys dogged Ivan’s footsteps at a safe distance for the rest of the day, to act as chroniclers of an event which they knew would become legendary. Suddenly the central character announced: ‘I’ll bloody well smash her window in, so I will.’ Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, Ivan set out, cool as you like, to do the deed — only to find, on reaching the house, that Arild the Glazier’s little truck was parked right in front of Britt’s ground-floor bedroom, which looked onto the driveway. Ivan was not one to be put off by a little thing like that. ‘I’ll just have to smash my way through then,’ he muttered, loud enough for the others to hear.

He went for a walk round about and returned with his hands and his pockets full of stones. Afterwards the other lads would try to outdo one another with their descriptions of what happened next. Ivan had thrown the first stone with convincing ferocity and a huge pane of glass had shattered and landed in a tinkling heap on the bed of the truck. Ivan hurled another stone, as surely as the first and another pane of glass disintegrated. And so he continued, unleashing a never-ending avalanche of glass. He threw and he threw as the sheets of glass came cascading down one after another. But he never did break through to Britt’s window, or, as he saw it: to Britt’s heart, behind all the sheets of glass. Britt’s Dad must have had more panes than usual on the back of the truck that day, layer upon layer of them. Ivan was growing desperate. He was breaking sheets of glass as fast as he could, if only to get her at least to show face, but there seemed to be no end to it — or not, at any rate, until Arild the Glazier himself finally came out and belatedly, but effectively put a stop to the vandalism with a headlock invested with more than mere upset at the shattered window panes.

That, thought Jonas, that is how it must be with māyā. An endless succession of windows. We would never be able to break through to the truth. Māyā spoke, quite simply of gaping holes in our knowledge. When Jonas pictured the world as being flat, this was exactly what he was getting at. Everyone was well aware that our view of the world, our view of human nature, would be totally different in a few hundred years, in a thousand years. And yet we believed, surprisingly often at least, that we knew just about everything there was to know. Māyā showed us that we knew very little.

Schoolmaster Dehli had another, possibly even better, way of illustrating this. He positioned himself next to the map rack. ‘Just as maps are like masks of the world, so the world is merely a mask covering something else, something more real,’ he said. Sitting at his desk, Jonas thought of Karen Mohr’s flat, the grey hallway concealing a Provence in the middle of Grorud. Mr Dehli had pulled down all of the maps, about ten altogether. Then he sent them whipping up, one after another, tugging and releasing with superb precision, as if he had had a lot of practice at this. The maps snapped and cracked in a sort of chain reaction, pure pyrotechnics. It made Jonas think of roller-blinds shooting up to disclose an endless succession of different prospects, different worlds, until they, the pupils, were almost shaking in their shoes, half expecting something horrendous to stand revealed at the very back, Reality itself, in all its awfulness or beauty. But at the very back — and this Mr Dehli left as it was — hung an enormous map of the solar system, of the cosmos as it were, and of all the hovering jewels here displayed, the one on which Jonas fixed was the planet Uranus, a shimmering green eye. What a show — perfect, like a conjuring trick rounded off with one final mind-boggling sleight of hand.

There are too few teachers like Mr Dehli. There are too few teachers who pull such original, inventive educational stunts. Who charge their classrooms with electricity and the smell of chalk dust.

Such sessions were not easily forgotten. Not for nothing did three members of this class go on to become religious historians, while two became ministers of the church. And, even more noteworthy perhaps: five ended up in the Oslo Stock Exchange. As for Jonas, in the first instance they would result in the world coming tumbling about his ears.

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.

He read on, page after page in which a description of various doings was interlaced with a stream of thoughts. He got caught up in his own associations, lost himself completely in his own memories, dreams, what might almost have been perceptions. Every sentence, every word seemed to lead him down a sidetrack and from there down offshoots from this sidetrack. He began to discern the central theme: the transience of all things. That and the eternality of the smallest daily task. Millions of years as opposed to a second. Now and then he had to laugh at a particular formulation. ‘The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,’ he read at one point. Jonas was filled with a colossal intensity; he sat quite still, but on another level he was firing on all cylinders. By chance he happened to look up again. Two hours had passed. For some time he had had a definite sense, in his mind, of being by the sea; he thought he could hear the waves, the swell. He flinched at the sight of the motionless pink rock face, the freezing winter panorama. The landscape had not opened up, but he had.

And which book was this? It was To the Lighthouse. He read on, conscious of how the author, Virginia Woolf, made him think about thinking, how she could almost catch a thought before it was born. At last, a kindred spirit, his heart exulted; someone who succeeded in showing how thousands of thoughts criss-crossed in one’s mind in the course of a day. Someone who made thought the protagonist. Jonas was bursting with excitement and delight. He did not think that Margrete had read this book. But then he came to a passage which she had marked, he recognised her handwriting in the margin, or a youthful version of it. On the next page he was pulled up short by a metaphor to the effect that in the heart and mind of a woman there could stand tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, like treasures in the tombs of kings. Then came a question which Jonas had also asked himself: was there some art known to love or cunning, by which to push through to those sacred chambers? In the margin he saw a ‘Yes!’ in Margrete’s girlish hand. Again Jonas’s heart began to pound palpably.

He carried on reading, even more engrossed, if that were possible. Little did he know that he was risking his life. He had the feeling that he was not looking down at a book, but down into a brain, a body, a landscape far, far greater, deeper, wider than the scene, Jotunheim, which lay before him when he raised his eyes. Jonas felt the world’s flatness threatening, thanks to a measly book, to give way to hitherto unseen depths. Later he was to believe that he had, for a couple of endless seconds, been only a hair’s breadth away from discovering the true nature of life; it was so clear and concrete that he could almost have reached out and touched it, and said: ‘Here it is!’

Then something happened. He came to a new chapter, totally different. Time sped past, year after year and people departed. All of a sudden things were happening with bewilderingly rapidity and this transmitted itself to his thoughts, they were jammed nose to tail, causing pile-ups. He felt as though he had been sucked into a corridor and God knew what awaited him at the other end. And then — it was like being brutally robbed — the central character died, in a parenthesis, for God’s sake, wise Mrs Ramsey, this was too much, how could the author let her die like that, just by the bye; and then a few pages further on Prue, the eldest daughter, died — this, too, by the bye. When Jonas came to the part where the son Andrew died as well, in yet another bloody parenthesis, he had to stop. He could not take it. That these people to whom, though he did not know why, he had begun to feel attached, should die just by the bye, while that blasted abstract time flowed callously onward, filling page after page.

He had to stop. He could not breathe. The insight was too much to bear. He was in imminent danger of being concussed again. He was being hunted by some monster that he could only escape if he closed the book. Jonas slammed it shut, in desperation almost, smack in the face, so it seemed, of something — something deadly. He remembered how as a boy he had run away from Daniel and only just managed, we’re talking millimetres here, to lock the door against him and his murderous rage. The faint smile still played around Jonas’s lips, as if his body had not yet caught up with his horror-stricken mind. But then: he realised that he was terrified. It was as though a whole pack of wolves had crept up on him unawares and were all suddenly breathing down his neck. Jonas stared out of the window at the rock face, the wintry Norwegian landscape. He was covered in goosebumps. He had almost lost his life. His old life. Had he finished it, that book would have changed his life. He knew it. And he did not want a novel changing his life.

He had closed To the Lighthouse. In the middle of the chapter entitled ‘Time Passes’. He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But he knew he would never pick it up again. He knew that he had come close to making a fatal blunder. He swore to himself that he would never open another novel.

And yet, even though he had put the book down, something had happened. He noticed it later that evening when he got up, still trembling slightly, to light a candle on the dining table. As he struck the match and his hand edged towards the wick, it occurred to him that all life could be contained in that movement, that a person could write hundreds of pages about this simple action and what was going on in his mind at that moment. He had been changed. Not much, but a bit. He was marked for life. Why do you have a scar over your eyebrow? I got it in a fight with Virginia Woolf.

He had read a novel about a woman who knew how to appreciate the perfection of the moment — small everyday miracles. To be able to say, merely of the light on the sea: It is enough! And if he thought about it: Margrete was the same. But what was to become of his life now? What of the ambitions that drove, or had driven, him?

He thought he knew: when he closed Virginia Woolf’s book, he salvaged his faith in his project, or the vestiges of this project. But he also closed the door on his chance of ever understanding Margrete. Who knows, maybe To the Lighthouse would have been the very device that would have opened her up, afforded him some insight into her, just as Bo’s butterflies and crystals could lay open a stretch of terrain in Lillomarka.

Late that night when Jonas was sitting in the outdoor privy in the dark, peering up at Orion, which seemed remarkably close, it was with a sense of having both lost and won. He sat there on the ice-cold toilet seat, gazing up at the stars and thinking of a distant summer, of a friend who looked like Prince Valiant, and who presaged the existence of people like Margrete.

Bo Wang Lee came, in fact, as a foretoken of just about everything. During that brief summer with Bo, Jonas was confronted with a whole bunch of life’s challenges. And possibly the greatest of these took the form of a question. Because, just when he thought that they were all set for the expedition to the Vegans’ hiding place, Bo placed his hands on his hips and said: ‘That just leaves the most difficult question. What should we take with us?’

To begin with Jonas thought that Bo meant something that would guarantee their safety. He remembered the pass which Kubla Khan had given to Marco Polo, a gold tablet covered in strange characters which said that Marco Polo was a friend of the Great Khan and enjoyed his mighty protection. If the Vegans were as intelligent as Bo believed, then it was no use trying to fool them; you could not go to meet a race from another solar system carrying little mirrors, copper wire or beads in eleven different colours — the sort of gewgaws that Stanley took with him to Africa. ‘It has to be something which will show them that we are worthy envoys,’ Bo said gravely. He pronounced the word ‘worthy’ exactly as Jonas would later hear Karen Mohr pronounce it, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.

Bo’s mother was studying social anthropology, or ethnography as it was then called — so Bo knew a little bit about what other explorers had taken with them, people from Europe and America, that is, who set out to visit tribes which might never have seen a white man before. It was a fascinating idea — to think that you could be eaten if you brought little bells, but crowned as an honorary chief if you handed out marbles. Bo told of explorers who had, for example, taken salt to the highlands of New Guinea. Others leaned more towards practical items: pocket knives or watches. Liquor had also been a popular gift among some primitive tribes. But they had to bear in mind, Bo said, that things also carried a message. ‘What about a record by Jim Reeves?’ suggested Jonas, off the top of his head. “I Love You Because”. Then they would know we come in peace.’

What should they take with them? Jonas considered little gifts epitomising Norway — a bar of Freia milk chocolate or a box of Globoid aspirins, a can of sardines from Bjelland. Too local, maybe. What about a kaleidoscope? One of his father’s metronomes, a pyramid with its own hypnotic, in-built pulse? He could always ask Wolfgang Michaelsen if he could borrow one of his Märklin locomotives. The forthcoming expedition induced Jonas to ransack his surroundings and his life as he had never done before. Did he have in his possession anything good enough to merit a place in his rucksack when he set off into the woods to meet the Vegans? What on Earth was at all worth collecting?

There was something Aunt Laura had once told him. During the Renaissance, palaces were sometimes built with a small, windowless room at their centre, a chamber which did not even appear on the architect’s drawings of the building. This was known as the studiolo or guarda-roba. In this the prince kept the most widely diverse objects, all of which had just one thing in common: they inspired wonder. Here one might find rarities from the animal and plant kingdoms together with a whole gallimaufry of other things, all with nothing to connect them except whatever the viewer himself could detect. The German princes called this room a Wunderkammer. Jonas had always thought that Uncle Lauritz must have had just such an inner chamber to which he could withdraw in order to meditate. All he needed were two inexhaustible objects: a box of Duke Ellington records and a tiny portrait of a woman.

The day before their departure Jonas at last found the article which he would take with him: Rakel’s slide rule, with its movable Perspex panel and a centre section which could be pushed out and in. He was always left speechless by the sight of this, a device which could help you to work out difficult maths problems. In his mind he saw himself, Jonas W. Hansen standing face to face with a being the like of which no man had ever seen, in a small clearing in the woods, with the sunlight slanting through the trees; saw how he, Jonas, held out the slide rule, pi signs and all, whereafter the alien accepted this gift and immediately made a gesture which said that he, she, it understood everything — in other words, that he, Jonas, standing there bathed in the slanting sunlight, had somehow saved the Earth by finding the one thing which carried the right message: here you are, our civilisation in a nutshell.

He was surprised to see what Bo had chosen. A book. A book! What sort of thing was that to bring? Huckleberry Finn. Why this one? Jonas asked. Because it was the best book Bo had ever read. ‘One hundred per cent wisdom,’ Bo said. ‘Pure, compressed power. Mightier than an atom bomb.’

They began to get ready for the next day, packing their things into two small rucksacks. ‘Have you got the crystals?’ Bo asked. He had not yet seen them. Jonas pulled out the handkerchiefs containing the four prisms he had collected from his grandmother. She had had no hesitation in lending them to him once he had told her what it was for. ‘The Vegans — I see,’ she had said. ‘Ah yes, it’s always best to stay on the right side of them.’

Where had he got them, Bo wanted to know, holding first one, then another prism up to the light like a master jeweller.

It was a secret, Jonas said. Why did they need the crystals anyway?

Because they contained the whole world, Bo told him.

Jonas said nothing, he knew Bo was right. Jonas had seen for himself some of the pictures a prism could contain. A yellow cabinet. A palace ball with hundreds of guests. The question of ‘keys’, of what to take with one, was possibly the same as asking: how small a piece of the world do you need in order to see the whole world? That was why Bo had brought a book.

His friend was sitting in one of the rooms in his aunt’s flat which reminded Jonas of a ship’s cabin and almost made him believe that if he looked out of the window he would see the entrance to New York harbour. Bo was studying the map of Lillomarka and looking up various entries in the yellow notebook. Jonas noticed that more lines had been drawn on the map. Some contour lines of equal elevation had been coloured in. ‘Tomorrow it is, then,’ Bo said happily. ‘Tomorrow we’re off to find the Vegans.’

Jonas had always been fascinated by maps. Despite their indisputable two-dimensionality they made him feel that the world could not be flat after all. Not because of the swirling lines denoting elevation and gradient, but because they appealed so strongly to his imagination. He never forgot the pleasure of his first atlas, the thrill of discovering that Norway and Sweden together looked like a lion, while Norway on its own resembled a fish. Little did he know that an imaginative way with maps could also lead to the world coming tumbling about your ears.

Mr Dehli shared Jonas’s weakness for maps; he frequently employed them in his lessons and not only as a means of illustrating one of the most enigmatic words in Sanskrit — māyā. The huge expanses of paper which could be pulled down to cover the wall behind the teacher’s lectern seemed charged with a singular magic. This was partly due to the fact that the maps in junior high were newer than their more tattered and faded counterparts in elementary school. In any case, it was a real treat to see Mr Dehli — while telling them, say, about Xerxes and the ancient kingdom of Persia — send his pointer dancing across a map of Asia half the size of the wall, printed in colours so bright and clear that the topographical features seemed to take on three dimensions and bulge right out into the room. Learning was suddenly brought to life, a connection established between it and the real world. They were halfway into the wonderful reddish-brown massifs of the Zagros Mountains when the bell rang.

The classroom itself altered character completely depending upon which map he had pulled down. The atmosphere in the room was different when savannah-covered Africa hung down over the board than when South America’s rugged Andean spine dominated the field of vision. Sometimes Jonas thought that the maps made the front of the class with the dais and lectern look more like the stage in a theatre. And the sheets of paper hanging rolled up, one behind the other, on that marvellous rack were prospective sets or backdrops. ‘Today we’re going to talk about the Nile,’ Mr Dehli said, loosening his bow tie; and even though it was winter and the classroom was cold, once the wall behind the schoolmaster had been covered by the Middle East and Egypt with their warm green and yellow hues, Jonas was hard put not to remove his jersey. He was transported back to his childhood, to when he had been the owner of an elegant, aromatic cigarette tin with a picture on the lid of the sphinx, the pyramids and Simon Arzt in a red fez.

Many of Mr Dehli’s teaching tours de forces involved maps or globes. By turning the world upside down he taught them the meaning of the word ‘perspective’. On one occasion he actually cut an old map of the world in two, right up the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Why should the Atlantic always been in the centre?’ he asked. ‘Let’s stick it together again with the Pacific in the middle.’ The effect was remarkable. Suddenly Norway was right out on the periphery, up in the far corner — though, to Jonas’s satisfaction, still in a possible Outside Left position. ‘What if so-called Western supremacy was no more than a parenthesis in history?’ Mr Dehli said, thereby anticipating those prophecies made towards the end of the millennium to the effect that the balance of economic power would shift to the east. During another lesson he held up a globe at a particular angle: ‘What do you see?’ They were looking straight at the Pacific Ocean. They could just make out the edges of the continents around the rim of the circle. Jonas had had a globe of the world for years, but had never realised that it could be viewed from such an angle. ‘Nothing but sea,’ Mr. Dehli said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that seventy-five per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water?’ This was during a history lesson, on Vasco da Gama. Mr Dehli then went on to tell them about the great voyages of discovery and the background to them, about sailing ships and navigation. You never forgot it. It seemed to Jonas that this was the whole point of lessons: to teach them how to navigate. Through life.

Mr Dehli’s use of maps to illustrate māyā had its sequel in a Christmas show put on by the pupils in the classroom. It was actually during this same show that Leonard — or Leonardo, rather — despite restless rumblings from his classmates, showed his first 8 mm cine film, a bleak drama in which Jonas and Pernille played a boy and a girl in black polo-neck sweaters, standing back to back in an open field with a huge bulldozer in the background.

Jonas was a much bigger hit on his own and in the flesh. He did an impression of Mr Dehli, wearing a jacket and a bow tie deliberately and hilariously askew. ‘Today I am going to tell you about Maya,’ he said, getting a laugh right away by playing on his own misapprehension and pronouncing māyā like the girl’s name. All the maps had been pulled down beforehand — and at the very back hung an affectionate caricature of Mr Dehli himself. Gesticulating wildly and brandishing his pointer Jonas worked up to his big conjuring trick. But just as he was about to tug on the first cord, acutely aware that all eyes were upon him, he suddenly began to feel very self-conscious, was struck by a terrible fit of shyness, with the result that he tugged too hard; he thought the map was stuck, so he yanked as hard as he could, the map rack came away from the wall and the whole kit and caboodle came crashing down on top of him, to the riotous glee of the class. Jonas must have lifted the pointer on instinct, in an attempt to defend himself against this avalanche of countries and continents, because he came round to find himself sitting on the floor like an emperor draped in a many-layered cloak, with the pointer stuck through the map of Asia. ‘That was the day when the world came tumbling about my ears,’ he was fond of saying.

Mr Dehli showed that he had appreciated this performance by laughing louder than anyone else. ‘I think you’re going to be a great discoverer,’ he said, straightening Jonas’s cock-eyed bow tie on the way out. I should perhaps add that the pointer had not pierced the map just anywhere. Jonas had actually run it right through Samarkand. Thus providing, you might say, the perfect illustration of māyā. In any case, from that day on, Samarkand stood for him as a reality behind reality, he developed a belief that there was a Samarkand behind Samarkand.

The memory of those maps and his attempt to demonstrate the concept of māyā cropped up more than once during the making of his televised portrait of Edvard Munch, a programme which also showed quite clearly how intent Jonas Wergeland was on challenging people’s deeper awareness, or the way they saw things — what Mr Dehli would have called their philosophy of life. Although Thinking Big attracted record-breaking audiences, Wergeland was less interested in viewing figures than in the imprint which the series might leave on people’s minds. In this respect he was a true programme-maker; he wished to programme, or reprogramme, the Norwegian people’s way of thinking.

Owing to his own unforgettable encounter with the wall decorations in one of Oslo’s public buildings — an experience to which we will return — Jonas was seriously tempted to focus on Munch’s popular murals for the Oslo University assembly hall, but he eventually came down in favour of an early phase in the artist’s life. In the key scene, the young Munch was shown standing in a large circular room with many windows. Viewers saw him walking slowly from one window to the next; gazing, clearly moved, out of each of them in turn, as if looking out onto a bewildering and troubling world. Thereafter he sat down on a bench in the centre of the room, his elbow propped on his thigh and his chin resting on his fist, like Rodin’s celebrated sculpture ‘The Thinker’. Here was a man at what was arguably the most crucial stage of his life; a man who had just lost his father, a man who had had the benefit of a couple of inspiring sojourns in France, in St Cloud and Nice, a young man who had only just begun to see what he wanted to do in his art, to find his own style. And underpinning the images of this man deep in thought, nothing but the sound of a brush on canvas. To the viewers it must have seemed as though the deep musings, or memories, around which his thoughts revolved had generated the vision or metamorphosis that now occurred, with first one, then another window, one prospect then another — still accompanied only by the rasp of a brush — turning first into a translucent panel, not unlike a transparent map, and then into a painting, until the circular room was seen to be a gallery, its walls hung with works recognisable as Munch’s own, canvases covered with lines and colours which — one could tell — Munch had seen in his mind’s eye. The world had become art.

Jonas Wergeland had filled the room with over twenty pictures painted by Munch around this time, including a number from the series which Munch would later dub The Frieze of Life. His idea, one which may even have begun to germinate while he was in France, was to create a series of paintings which would present an overall picture of existence, of all the stages of human life. The canvases which formed a circle round Munch showed individuals and landscapes reduced to timeless, placeless images. All inessentials had been omitted. Here were such pictures as ‘Night’ and ‘Evening’ — later renamed ‘Melancholy’; viewers spotted ‘The Sick Girl’, ‘Puberty’ and ‘Death in the Sick-room, ‘Jealousy’ and ‘Despair’ — Jonas did also include a few pictures painted one or two years later. The camera captured a room which bore little resemblance to other rooms containing nineteenth-century Norwegian art, those in the National Gallery in Oslo, for example, full of works by Tideman and Gude, Fearnley and Dahl. You did not play Tchaikovsky in such a room, Debussy or Stravinsky might have done at a push.

In the next scene, Munch was seen pacing restlessly back and forth, round the walls of the room, continually taking down pictures, switching them about, as if he could not decide which paintings should hang next to one another. He evidently felt that there were hidden links between some, or all, of the works, some inner bond. At long last he appeared to be satisfied, sat down again on the bench in his Thinker position. And once more one had the sense of great mental exertion, the impression that Edvard Munch was endeavouring to think about all the pictures, all of these key experiences, at once. And as if it were a result of this very process of visualisation, of the profound insight thus attained, something happened to the pictures: they began to live and breathe. Each painting turned into a screen filled with moving pictures. The works of art, the flat canvases, came to life, with each film presenting a plot, a drama which corresponded with the subject matter of the picture, before they all faded, in perfect sync, into exactly the same scene: a couple kissing, closely entwined, a man and a woman at one of life’s sacred moments. Edvard Munch sat in the circular room, watching as all twenty-odd paintings, or films, became identical, with every scene showing a couple clinging to one another, almost merging into one, in a kiss.

After a prolonged close-up of Munch’s anxious features, his eyes, the camera pulled back to reveal a room once more lined with Munch’s famous works, the kissing couple turned back into the painting entitled ‘The Kiss’. At this point in the programme Jonas Wergeland appeared on screen, in the foreground, in the guise of a reporter and advised in a whisper, before disappearing again just as quietly, that we were in Berlin, the year was 1892 and Edvard Munch had been invited by Verien Berliner Künstler, the Berlin Society of Artists, to exhibit his pictures in the Architektenhaus, in the circular gallery. The exhibition was about to open.

Munch stood up. The soundtrack consisted solely of heartbeats, heavy breathing, the occasional cough. Munch crossed to the nearest paintings. Viewers could now see cords attached to the bottom of each frame. One by one Munch tugged the cords, as if the paintings were roller blinds, and they positively shot up to disclose entirely different pictures underneath. One was given to understand that Munch did the same to every single picture because, when he left the circular room, on the walls hung twenty-odd unrecognisable paintings, glowing ominously and offensively. These pictures had been produced by Jonas’s skilled technicians; they were digitally distorted versions of Munch’s images; hideous pictures with garish colours and tortuous figures, a long way from the modern idea of a good painting. This was Wergeland’s way of showing that we have already forgotten how radical Munch’s work once was, how differently he painted. He did not observe, he saw. To us, those paintings with their smouldering energy had long since become tame calendar fodder, something for the bedroom wall, reproductions to hang in our toilets. It was no longer considered shocking for someone to paint a tree without showing the branches, or a green face, or a countenance with no nose, ears, mouth; for paint to be squirted onto the canvas. With his distorted images, these ‘new’ Munch pictures, Jonas Wergeland wanted to show just how outlandish the original works must have seemed to his contemporaries, what an outrageously far cry they were from anything else being painted at that time, not least in the German art world, where battle scenes and naturalistic pictures were all the rage. Wergeland may even have wished to imply that somewhere in Norway today there had to be another young Munch — an artist we laughed at. It was ironic, certainly, that so many of those who complained to NRK about this scene resorted to the same sort of invective as was levelled at Munch by critics of his day. These ‘new’ pictures in Jonas Wergeland’s otherwise enthralling programme had to be the work of some ‘charlatan painter’, they wrote; those painting were nothing but hideous ‘daubs’, ‘feverish hallucinations’.

The scene ended with the doors of the gallery being opened to the Berlin public. Jonas Wergeland presented close-ups of faces streaming past, their features expressing shock, disgust, laughter, fury. The last shot was of the face of a man putting his hands to his head and screaming in horror at what he had seen.

When this programme was shown on British television — one newspaper described it as being every bit as revolutionary in terms of form and colour as Munch’s pictures — Jonas Wergeland felt that he had repaid a little of his debt; he knew how much he owed to Great Britain after his course of study in a hotel room in London. In fact, towards the tail end of that ‘term’, as he liked to call it, Wergeland himself witnessed something which made him want to scream. This too involved seeing, seeing something behind reality — or what, up to this point in his life, he had taken for reality. In London, he would think later, it wasn’t just my outer eye that got whacked, but my inner eye too.

One afternoon, before the start of the day’s programmes, Jonas took the tube out to White City to take a look at an edifice which held for him the same sacred status as St Paul’s Cathedral, and was as closely bound up in his mind with the proud history and culture of Britain as Trafalgar Square or Bloomsbury: the BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane. Jonas stood outside the brick façade, aware that he was looking at a monument to a highly advanced civilisation. The old British Empire might have collapsed, but what he saw before him, or that which it represented, British television, was the seat of a new, modern empire — an invisible dominion. And the might of this empire was founded on such diverse wonders as The Great War, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Dave Allen Show and The Voyage of Charles Darwin.

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.’

Later, after a long walk home in silence, Bo said. ‘Did you see what I saw?’

Jonas nodded, he knew what his friend was referring to. There had been no one at the controls. The cockpit had been empty.

But Bo had observed something else: ‘What was an SAS pilot doing in that plane? And a captain, at that. I saw the four gold bands on the sleeve of his uniform jacket quite clearly when he waved.’

Nonetheless, Jonas was disappointed. The experiment with the crystals and the butterflies had failed. Not until they turned the corner into Solhaug, did he begin to suspect that something might, nonetheless, have occurred. The estate seemed unfamiliar, different somehow. When Five-Times Nielsen stepped out of his entry with a carpet beater in his hand, Jonas felt a burning desire to run up to him and present him with the slide rule, as if the Vegans actually dwelt here, in that place in the world which he knew best of all. Jonas shot a glance at Bo. He too seemed different. And at last it dawned on Jonas: it was not the world that had opened up, but him, Jonas. He had changed.