The Discoverer

Triton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s the record?’ Jonas asked.

Bo handed him the rest of the orange wedges as a consolation prize and took out his yellow notebook. ‘Eleven balls,’ he said. ‘Did you know that scientists today believe that the world has at least eleven dimensions?’ He could tell from Jonas’s face that he would have to explain again what dimension meant, even though he had already done so when talking about the Vegans’ hide-out.

‘I bet there are even more,’ Jonas said.

‘Just as one day somebody will manage to juggle with more than eleven balls,’ Bo said, and scribbled down something with the stub of pencil that was always tucked behind his ear.

That summer, Jonas actually did learn to juggle first with three oranges, then with four. He never felt quite the same about this golden fruit again; from then on he could never eat an orange without thinking of Bo Wang Lee. And for the rest of his life he was always able to impress anyone with his little party trick. Even in the midst of a serious discussion he was quite liable to suddenly toss four oranges into the air and thus manage to say something which he could not put into words. The following year, when Jonas met the triplets, the first thing he thought of was a juggling act, felt he was faced with the possibility of an extraordinary experience. All he had to do was to keep three schoolboy crushes in the air at one time.

But the best was yet to come. The day before the expedition into the forest — Jonas had just wrapped the four crystals carefully in four checkered handkerchiefs — they were in the room where Bo slept. Each sat with a mini bottle of Cola, sipping through a paper straw, as if to gather sustenance, while observing the way the four butterflies in the jars on Bo’s bedside table mimicked their actions, unrolling their probosces like straws and sipping from the orangeade tops filled with sugared water. In one of the open suitcases in the bare, cabin-like room, Jonas spied a dubious-looking shoebox lying next to a Viewmaster containing pictures from Yellowstone National Park. He reached out for it, but Bo stopped him, as if it were taboo. Or private — because Bo opened the box himself, gently lifted out one object after another. ‘It’s just some things I’ve collected,’ he said. ‘Things to speed up the thought processes.’

Bo’s shoebox reminded Jonas of Aunt Laura’s story about the Renaissance princes and the curiosities they kept in secret rooms at the heart of their palaces. Bo laid the objects out on the bed. An old pocket watch which no longer worked, but had a nice pattern engraved on the lid; a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe; a chunk of rock with a trilobite embedded in it; a bunch of funny-looking keys; an old-fashioned purse containing three silver dollars — one of them with a bullet hole in it, made by Wild Bill Hickock. Jonas understood that he ought to take note of these things, since they probably said a lot about who Bo Wang Lee was.

As if to encourage Jonas, to give him heart before setting out on their hair-raising expedition in search of the Vegans, Bo began to juggle with first three, then four, and finally all of these objects. The spinning oranges had been a wonderful sight, but this was more wonderful. Much more. ‘This is the sort of thing we’re going to try to do,’ he told Jonas again, speaking as if through a circular portal. Although these things did not actually form a circle, like the sort you see in drawings of jugglers; they criss-crossed in mid-air in what was for Jonas the most mind-boggling fashion, tracing a loop rather like a figure-of-eight on its side. And Jonas stared and stared; he saw how the purse, a trilobite, a pocket-watch, a bundle of keys and a globe of the world seemed to hover in mid-air while at the same time forming a unified whole, what he would later describe as a synthesis. It was a concrete manifestation of something he had experienced before, many times, when thinking about several things at once. And not only several things, but several different things. And he was delighted to see that the result, this spellbinding infinity symbol which Bo was weaving with his hands, was something quite other than the sum of its individual parts; that it was a whole new, little world, one which belonged to another sphere or perhaps what Bo called another dimension. Or even Vega, he thought. Why not?

Bo juggled the objects so fast that soon they were nothing but a blur. It reminded him of that chain of Bo’s, the one with the words ‘I love you’ broken up into two incomprehensible sets of symbols on either side of a metal disc. Jonas perceived a great deal at that moment, as he watched a friend — a boy he had become closer to than anyone else in only three weeks — who juggled as brilliantly as any wizard. Jonas sensed that he too might be like that, that he could consist of two — or more — elements, completely dissimilar, incomprehensible elements, which could, somehow or other, be set in motion in such a way that they spun together to form a whole. He also had the feeling that with his juggling act Bo was trying to tell him something else; that with this strange pattern in the air he might even be saying: ‘I love you.’

‘That … is absolutely phenomenal,’ Jonas stammered. He motioned to Bo to keep going while he went to fetch a camera from the living room. Jonas wanted with all his heart to capture this sight, since it was for him as sensational and indeed as unbelievable as a UFO. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said, backing cautiously towards the door. But at these words Bo lost his concentration and everything tumbled to the floor or, fortunately, onto a soft carpet. ‘Shit!’ Bo said nonetheless. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

At the sight of the objects on the floor and Bo’s nimble fingers quickly gathering them up, as if he were anxious to hide something, Jonas felt another niggle of suspicion — he could not have said why — and decided that the time had come: ‘Bo, there’s something I need to ask you …’

‘Have you seen these?’ And all of a sudden Bo became a whirlwind, roiling around in another suitcase. ‘American comics!’ And Jonas forgot all else. For a while.

But he never forgot the revelation he had had when Bo was juggling. So powerful was this lesson that years later Jonas would lay it like a keel under his ambitious television series. And it was the threat to this essential premise which Jonas had in mind as he sat opposite Marie H. — looking, you might say, down the barrels of the guns on a battleship — in a café on the Rossio in Lisbon. He had all twenty-odd programmes planned out in minutest detail, not least the links between them, the wide-ranging network of cross-references. If the NRK management, which is to say: Marie H., ordered him to call a halt now, halfway, it would not only mean that the series as a whole would be ruined, that viewers would miss experiencing the magical effect produced when snippets from all of the programmes were borne in mind at the same time — it would also cause the twelve partially completed programmes to fall out of Jonas’s hands. The management did not understand the motivation behind his concept, the truly original, challenging aspect of it. They simply could not grasp the idea of a unified whole. Nor that the potential existed for unimagined wholes. Loose, crazy, tentative, but intriguing schemes. Jonas was afraid that no one today appreciated the idea of an alternative whole. But that was what he had to offer — to offer NRK and the viewers. A whole that only art could produce. A whole so valuable that it could not be measured in terms of money. Half the programmes would only give half a whole. It would be like seeing only one side of the disc on Bo Wang Lee’s chain. A lot of meaningless symbols spinning in mid-air.

Jonas was exaggerating. He knew that a few of the individual programmes would be good. And it was not as if they could be sure of selling the entire series to every foreign television station that had expressed an interest. But the main endeavour, the possibly quite brilliant concept behind the work would come to nothing. The result would not be revolutionary television, in the sense that it changed lives, changed people, opened them out. No one can blame Jonas Wergeland for feeling frustrated. It was tough, it was unbearable to think that this magnificent and utterly original project was in danger of being cancelled by blinkered bureaucrats who did nothing but count the money and pore over administrative jigsaw puzzles; people who lacked the ability to see that, strange though it seemed, it was even possible for out-and-out ‘individualists’ to break onto the scene in Norway, and who were therefore also incapable of cutting the crap, making an exception, investing, in order to ensure a fertile environment for such rare individuals. There was — there is no getting away from it — also a Festung Norwegen within the arts, a cultural Norway which preferred to remain isolated, in all ways.

Jonas knew, however, that despite her battleship bearing, Marie H. was not an anti-visionary bureaucrat, she was among other things a poet. Therein lay his hope. Only she had the power to quash all the other second-rate and to some extent envious programming controllers. Jonas searched frantically for words, for arguments, that might sway the woman sitting across from him, almost wished he had a bowl of oranges handy; he sat at a café table on the Rossio and knew that he had come to a milestone in his life — whatever the outcome. She did not seem all that interested, did not even look at him, but began to leaf absent-mindedly through her book. For Jonas this was an intolerable situation. Like having to turn back just as one sighted a cape, the sea route to a new continent. He had written a long and impassioned report to Marie H., explained the grand artistic concept, the overall structure and the threads linking the programmes to one another. His appeal was turned down. And as if that wasn’t enough, when he looked across the desk in her office at Marienlyst, he noticed that she had also corrected his language, that several sentences were marred by red squiggles. It was like writing an ardent love letter in which you bared your soul, only to have the recipient proceed to correct your spelling.

Jonas looked up at the forest of television aerials rising over the jumble of tiled roofs on the hillside behind the theatre. Not that long ago Norway too had been covered with aerials like that. This sight was a comfort to him, an indication of the many people who were waiting to receive his signals, his series. All the more reason then that the project should not be amputated, left half-done, like so much else in Norway.

‘Did you really come all this way to try to make me change my mind?’ She glanced up from her book. In her eyes he saw laughter and disbelief.

‘I honestly had no idea you were here,’ Jonas said. Then said it again. He may have said it once too often. She was still eyeing him doubtfully. ‘I’m here on holiday. Or rather, ever since I studied architecture I’ve wanted to have a look at the weird Manueline architecture. I often visit cities to look at the buildings.’

She picked up his yellow notebook, as if thinking to catch him in a lie. She studied the sketch of the ornate fountain in the square in front of them. He knew it was good. She raised her eyebrows, genuinely impressed. Or as a sign that he had been accepted.

‘You’ll be going to see the Hieronymite Monastery and the Tower of Belém, then?’ she said. ‘We could go together if you like?’

He nodded, inwardly exulting, but managing to keep a straight face. She was going out to dinner, had to take a train to Sintra from the Rossio station, just around the corner. She had friends who lived out there among the eucalyptus trees, the ruins of Moorish castles and old palaces. But she would be back the following day. They arranged to meet outside the monastery, fixed a time.

That evening he roamed desultorily through the narrow streets of the Bairro Alto, one of Lisbon’s two hills. The strains of commercialised, almost caricatured versions of wistful fado songs drifted out of doorways here and there, but could not entice him in. In any case he was not feeling at all melancholy, he felt hopeful. He ran his fingers over the glazed ceramic tiles on the walls of the houses. He liked this proof that by repeating the pattern in one tile you could turn a large flat surface into a work of wonder. While at the same time nullifying the flatness. Now that, that was how he envisaged his television series: as a string of almost identical programmes which, when set side by side, would create an optical illusion. A form of infinity. Māyā.

He rounded off his stroll with a trip on the old street lifts, the mini Eiffel Towers in the Chiado district. Rode up and down like a kid. He thought about the next day. Things could go up or down. He wondered — possibly because she was a poet — whether there had been a message in the last thing she had said before leaving the café: ‘Remember, television is bad for you.’

After a period of youthful scepticism, Jonas had gradually come to accept the more dubious aspects of television. But only after his own television career was at an end did he find conclusive proof, in the strange story of Viktor Harlem, that TV viewing, even when taken to the extreme, was not necessarily the evil which certain prophets of doom made it out to be.

Viktor Harlem was one of those who died young. During the spring term of his third year at high school, as he was poised, so to speak, on the last step of the school stairway, all set to stride out onto what everyone predicted would be a gilt-edged path, Viktor was hit on the head by a block of ice — as improbable as it was heavy — which fell off a roof as he was walking along a street in Lillehammer arm in arm with Jonas and Axel, at about the same moment as, amid gales of laughter, they were pronouncing him outright winner of the contest to see who could sing ‘I was Born Under A Wandering Star’ in the deepest voice. Viktor was in a coma for a week, but when he regained consciousness he was still not really there. With the minimum of help he was capable of dressing himself, eating or walking about a bit, all in a mechanical, abstracted fashion, but he was, nonetheless, quite helpless. Jonas was afraid that Viktor had finally succeeded in doing what he had striven to do all through high school: to deconstruct everything — the only problem was that he had done it to himself. All of Viktor’s individual components were intact, but they weren’t connecting, they weren’t working as a whole. There was nothing for it but to put him in an institution.

Jonas visited him regularly, even though there seemed little point. Viktor never so much as noticed him. Jonas could not get through to him. His friend seemed to have retreated into himself. It occurred to Jonas — talking of blocks of ice — that Viktor might be the counterpart of certain animals who went into hibernation in order to survive periods of severe cold. Jonas sometimes felt like going up to him and knocking on his skull, asking if there was anyone home. Viktor’s case confirmed the truth of a statement with which Jonas would be confronted many times in the course of his life: there are a lot of things for which medical science cannot account. No one could explain, for example, why Viktor did not seem to get any older. Days, years, passed, while Viktor reclined in his armchair, looking as if he was still in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. Although actually, with his abnormally babyish features he looked even younger.

Every time Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would read aloud to him from Ezra Pound’s poem, for one thing because there was nothing else to do. He read from an edition of The Cantos, the title page of which was inscribed with an all but illegible dedication from the author himself — after some years Jonas succeeded in deciphering the words ‘Roaring madness’ above Pound’s wavery signature. When he eventually closed the book, having decided that he had read enough or because he could not take any more of those unfathomable, lyrical passages, he usually sat for a while quietly staring at the TV screen along with Viktor. The television was always on — Jonas simply turned down the sound when he took out The Cantos — and even when Jonas was reading, Viktor would sit there in his Stressless Royal, the flagship of all armchairs, with his eyes riveted on the screen, as if on it he saw illustrated in minutest detail whatever part of Ezra Pound’s endless poem Jonas was reading.

To Jonas, Viktor gradually came to represent the average Norwegian, a person who sat unfailingly, day after day, in front of the box. When Jonas started making his own television programmes he told himself that it was these people, countrymen like Viktor, he wanted to reach. Like Henrik Ibsen he did not merely want to make them think big, he wanted to waken them. Once his acclaimed television series was finished he had a video recorder installed in Viktor’s room and arranged for all the programmes to be taped for his friend. Jonas gave one of the permanent members of staff instructions to play the tapes regularly. ‘We have to see to it that he gets some good, solid Norwegian fare, and not just American fast food,’ Jonas told the nurse.

This notion of television images as nourishment of a sort had not been plucked entirely out of thin air. Whenever Jonas walked into the room and saw Viktor staring fixedly at the screen he had the feeling that the television set, or possibly the rays from it were keeping Viktor alive. Or that his friend was actually in a large incubator, an idea which Viktor’s babyish looks — his fine, blonde locks and big, heavy head — seemed to bear out. And yet Jonas also believed he detected signs of mental activity. It sometimes seemed to Jonas’s mind as if, his vegetative appearance notwithstanding, Viktor was staring at the screen in search of help, in search of someone who could save him. As more channels came along and Viktor’s only exercise consisted of finger-hopping on the remote control and a bit of wriggling to adjust his Stressless Royal from one comfortable position to another, Jonas noted that Viktor clearly liked some programmes better than others. One could really have been forgiven for thinking that he was looking for, waiting for, a revelation. This observation left Jonas with the disturbing suspicion that Viktor’s mind was perfectly sound, but that he did not feel like letting anyone know this. That it was all an act. Or that Viktor was leading a normal life in a parallel world, a perfectly decent life. Jonas was quite prepared to believe that in this other life his friend, who looked so much like a chrysalis sitting there in his Stressless chair, might be a butterfly. However that may be, Jonas continued to visit Viktor regularly — until, that is, he ended up in an institution himself or, to be more exact: in prison.

And this last circumstance would prove to be a turning point. At first Jonas thought it must have been the shot on Bergensveien in Grorud that had roused Viktor, but he was woken, or rather: brought to his senses, some time later by another shot. Jonas only heard about it. One day, when the nurse who made sure that Viktor got to see Jonas Wergeland’s programmes regularly looked in to check on him, she found Viktor pointing excitedly at the television screen and uttering the first words anyone had heard him say in more than twenty years: ‘Jeeze, who fired that shot?’

What was on the TV? The aforementioned nurse was able to reveal that she had popped in forty-five minutes earlier to put on a video and that, because she remembered it so well herself, she had chosen the episode dealing with Harald Hardråde. She had even stayed to watch a bit of it before having to tear herself away and continue her rounds.

The programme which resulted in Viktor’s miraculous shout, opened with a boy shooting with a bow and arrow in a clearing beside a river, and the scene had been composed in a way which told viewers this was an art, that it took years of training to become such a fine archer. The boy moved as if in a dance, with everything — from the moment he drew the arrow out of the quiver until it left the bowstring and the bow was lowered — executed in one smooth, fluid action; it made viewers think of the moves performed in tai chi, or the katas in karate. Jonas realised later, partly because he had made the sound of the bowstring so pronounced, that he must have been thinking not so much about the glorious games of bows and arrows from his own boyhood — which he had also been fortunate enough to be able to relive with Benjamin — as the Indian epic The Mahabharata and the marvellous tales from it told to him by Margrete: of Drona who trained the Pandava brothers in the use of arms; of Arjuna and his bow Gandiva which was so formidable that it was recognisable to his enemies by its sound alone. The whole of that mesmerising opening sequence, indeed the sound of the bowstring alone — part music, part dangerous threat — spoke of a programme about a heroic warrior. And a brutal death.

At the close of the scene one saw what the boy, Harald Sigurdsson, had been shooting at: a huge sheepskin stretched out on a log wall. Drawn on this golden fleece was a rough map of Europe, with each arrow marking a different place, like a guide to one of the most wide-roving and warlike of all wide-roving, warlike Viking lives. The fifteen-year-long voyage which began after the Battle of Stiklestad, would take Harald, half-brother of Olav II, to places known to us today as Novgorod, Jerusalem, Sicily and, above all, Istanbul. One arrow, embedded at York in England, was broken: a token of the prophecy which says that he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. But also of an ambition unparalleled in the history of Norway.

Indirectly, the programme on Harald Hardråde also served as a reminder of Viking times, an age with which all Norwegians were still secretly in love, which is fair enough when one considers that never since has Norway or any other Scandinavian country left such an indelible stamp on the world. By dint of artful little details, rather like a limning of the biographical account, or a juggling act in the background, Jonas Wergeland managed to say something about the double-edged nature of the Viking culture: bloodthirsty, plundering forays which also acted as cross-fertilising cultural exchanges. Viking raids and trading expeditions rolled into one. One caught glimpses, images neatly and almost imperceptibly inserted, of longships — to the Vikings what the horse had been to the Huns — scabbards, drinking horns, runic inscriptions, amulets in the shape of Thor’s hammer and small bronze statuettes of one-eyed Odin. But also there, if one looked carefully, were furs and lumps of amber, gold spurs and silver jewellery, scales and Anglo-Saxon coins, carved wooden caskets and chess pieces made from walrus tusks, parchments covered in writing. Wergeland used a sign from the main street in modernday York — Micklegate — to illustrate how Nordic words had left an enduring mark on the language and names of England, Ireland and Normandy.

But it was the end of the programme that people remembered best, the original depiction of the Battle of Stamford Bridge. After all, who was Harald Hardråde? Harald Hardråde — or Hardrada — was not only an unscrupulous, power-hungry man, a seasoned and victorious warrior who came home from foreign parts with ships so laden with gold that they listed in the water, he was also the only Norwegian ever to have so much as a little finger in the course of history. When he decided, at the age of fifty, to assert his right to the English throne, he timed it so that Harold Godwinson had to divide his attention between two fronts. Harold, then King of England, was in the south, anxiously awaiting William, later to be called the Conqueror. But when Harald Hardråde and his fellow-conspirator, Tostig Godwinson, Harold’s brother, landed in Northumbria the English king was forced to march north to York with all haste. And the bitter and exhausting Battle of Stamford Bridge had only just been won — with Harold losing many of his best warriors, among them some of his indispensable bodyguards — when he received word that William had sailed across the channel and landed in the south. The man who was at that point still King of England had to rush south again, set out on yet another gruelling forced march. Had Harold Godwinson met William and the Normans with a rested and, above all, undepleted army, the Battle of Hastings — although it would have been fought elsewhere and at an earlier date — would in all likelihood have had another outcome. Harold would not have died when that dreadful stray arrow pierced his eye. And the history of Europe would have looked very different.

But it was not so much this, which can never be anything but speculation, albeit interesting speculation — questions are always more important than answers — as the scenes of the battle which stuck in people’s minds. Earlier, Harald Hardråde and Tostig had beaten the armies of the Earls of Northumbria and Mercia at the battle of Fulford Gate, whereupon York surrendered without a fight and accepted Harald as king. On the morning of Monday, 25 September 1066 — one of the most important dates in Norwegian history, right up there with 17 May 1814 and 9 April 1940 — the Norwegians reached Stamford Bridge, about a mile outside of York, either because they were on their way to the town to hold council or to receive hostages from the villages around the bridge, which stood at a spot where many roads met. The question has been raised as to what would have happened had it not rained before the Battle of Waterloo, but one might just as well ask how history would have turned out if the sun had not been shining before the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Because, since the day was uncommonly hot, Harald’s and Tostig’s men had left their vital coats of mail in the boats, in the over two hundred ships anchored at Riccall, where a third of the seven thousand strong army was gathered.

To begin with at Stamford Bridge all Harald and Tostig could see was a cloud of dust. Then they began to make out the glint of weapons — like a wall of ice in the sunlight, a mirage in the heat — as Harold Godwinson’s vast army advanced on the other side of the little River Derwent. Instead of running back to the ships and putting on their chain mail or making a temporary retreat downriver, the Norwegians sent messengers to summon the rest of the army. Then they took up their positions, shield to shield. Rather than run they would all fall together, one on top of the other as Harald had said on a previous occasion, when faced with another apparently superior foe. In the end, after a long, fierce battle, it was Harold Godwinson’s cavalry which tipped the scales. Only thirty or so Norwegian ships sailed back across the North Sea. Harald Hardråde had meant to win the whole of England, but all he got, in the words of the English king, was six feet of its soil — or a foot more because he was so tall.

The truly unforgettable thing about the programme was the way that Jonas Wergeland depicted that mighty battle, over ten thousand men clashing in a hellish, bloody melee, with just one person, Harald Hardråde himself. No one knows for sure where the battlefield lay, nor whether the wooden bridge of that time crossed the river at Danes Well or somewhere else. But Jonas Wergeland used the present stone bridge which, with its patina, could easily pass for a thousand-year-old bridge. He specifically wanted to feature the bridge because of the classic Viking legend which told of how a giant, a red-haired berserker, had single-handedly defended the bridge for several hours before being killed by a sneak attack from below — an event which is actually pictured on the sign outside the Swordsman Inn at Stamford Bridge today. Wergeland decided to have Harald Hardråde take the swordsman’s place. Actor Normann Vaage, tall and well-built and blessed still with the agility of his young days as a promising gymnast, was perfect in the part.

In the programme Harald Hardråde, clad in a blue tunic and silvery helmet, was seen standing on the parapet at the centre of the bridge, battling on alone with a fearsome two-handed sword that sang as it cut through the air. Jonas Wergeland shot this stylised spectacle from the bank of the river in order to get the whole bridge in the shot. One saw Harald, the universal warrior, executing a kind of sword dance. His actions were as acrobatic as they were measured and balletic — again: like the moves in the more meditative forms of the Asian martial arts. And even though there was no sign of the pennants or the barricades of spears or the rain of arrows or the wall of raised shields or the rocks thrown by slings and catapults, viewers were treated — thanks to the soundtrack, a marvellous recreation of the hideous din of battle, with lots of ringing swords and screams and thundering hooves — to the illusion of a real battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen on television before. Jonas Wergeland made viewers see the horde of adversaries, he had them biting their nails, even though Harald Hardråde was quite alone, hacking and slashing at thin air. The Norwegian king fought in lone majesty on a bridge in England, one which also represented a decisive crossroads in European history, but people at home had a clear, vivid impression of a battle surging nerve-rackingly back and forth, and no one could help but see that Harald Hardråde was a splendid warrior, displaying as he did, with his lithe, supple movements, all the resourcefulness and skill in arms he had developed as commander of the Nordic division of the Varangian guard in Constantinople. Harald Hardråde — or Jonas Wergeland, as Kamala Varma once pointed out — seemed to possess one of those astras spoken of in The Mahabharata: a weapon that can create mighty illusions.

At last, when it actually looked as though Harald Hardråde was gaining ground on the bridge, one of his adversaries, he too invisible, loosed an arrow from his bow. A resounding twang was heard, like a symmetrical echo of the programme’s opening scene. A fateful sound, a sound louder than everything else. There was a shot of the arrow flashing through the air, heading straight for the viewer, so lifelike and deadly, a bloody great arrowhead about to burst right through the screen. In a thousand homes people ducked, threw themselves off their chairs. A moment later, from the floor, they saw the arrow embedded in Harald’s throat and the sword slipping from his hand.

And it was this same pitiless ending, this grisly shot that caused history to take a different turn, so to speak, which also changed the story of Viktor Harlem. It was the shot that woke him, or so he said. He had clutched at his throat, as if to pull out a hurtful arrow, and suddenly he could talk. ‘Well, that was a long trip, I must say,’ he exclaimed. ‘Where am I? Who are all these old folk? Wow, what a great chair, is it mine?’

Jonas read all about it in his cell a few days later. A medical miracle the papers called it. Sadly, though, all was not as it should be. Viktor had woken up, but he could not remember a thing. Where his head might have been designed by the Creator to take a sixty-watt bulb it now seemed to be running on twenty-five watts. He had no idea who he was, and he could remember nothing of his past. He could, however, remember absolutely everything else. He knew that Habakkuk was a prophet, that Ittoqqortoormiit was a region of Greenland and that the birr was the unit of currency in Ethiopia. He knew that Haydn’s mother was Anna Maria Koller and that his wife’s name was Maria Anna Keller. He knew that Galileo died in the year that Newton was born. He knew that B.B. King’s guitar was called Lucille. Everyone was baffled. Not least the doctors. Jonas alone guessed the truth. Viktor had spent a couple of decades watching television, to begin with only NRK and the two Swedish channels, but also the other channels as they came along. For some reason every single bit of what he had seen — snippets of news broadcasts and documentaries, natural history series, soap operas and music programmes — had lodged inside his brain. He remembered nothing from ‘the real world’, but everything from twenty years of television-viewing, from an artificial existence spent with his face turned to the television screen. He also had a rapid, rather staccato way of speaking, as if he were zapping between channels in his head.

But Viktor Harlem was to make the headlines again later. It so happened that his awakening occurred around the same time that the Norwegian version of the popular American quiz programme Jeopardy! was first screened. Viktor, who was now back living with his mother — not that he remembered her, he simply accepted that she was who she said she was — was persuaded to apply for the show and passed the tough and pretty extensive audition with almost daunting bravura. As a contestant he was unbeatable. It was clear that he could answer just about anything, that is to say: answer in the form of a question. He had the most unbelievable fund of knowledge on everything from Ananga Ranga to orang-utans, and could differentiate without blinking between Lee Marvin, Hank Marvin and Hank Williams, not to mention Pasteur and Patorius. After becoming the all-time greatest Jeopardy! champion five times in a row, he was accorded the title of Grand Champion, as if he had suddenly joined the upper echelons of some mysterious brotherhood. Never before had a winner scooped up such breathtakingly large cash prizes or provided such stunning entertainment. Viktor’s popularity soon reached such heights, helped along by all the press coverage, that the TV2 management decided, after consultation with the company which produced Jeopardy! for them, to break with the rules of the game just this once, to bow to public demand — with one eye on the advertising revenue, naturally — and invite him back on to the show. With equally fabulous success for Viktor and equally gratifying viewing figures for the channel. Viktor, who had reverted to his black polo necks and who, with his baby face and longish, wispy hair, looked rather like a seven-year-old Einstein, became something of a national hero. His staccato voice was soon to be heard on every talk show and his zap-zapping comments could be read in every newspaper and magazine. Jonas followed his friend’s Jeopardy! escapades from his cell, shaking his head in disbelief. This Viktor was almost the very opposite of the boy he had been when they were knocking back his illicit absinthe in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka and calling themselves The Three Heretics. The Viktor whom Jonas saw on television had a head bursting with facts, but his mind was a blank. He could answer any question on the most trivial subject, but he did not know who he was.

Viktor was now proclaimed Norway’s only Double Grand Champion, but the story does not end there. Once there were enough Jeopardy! Grand Champions — twelve in all — a special tournament was held. For weeks beforehand the papers were full of it, with hundreds of column inches devoted to what might have been a showdown between the gods on Olympus. On an Easter weekend in the latter half of the nineties the scene was set for the actual final between the remaining Grand Champions — and a record viewing figure. With Viktor in the last three it seemed certain that everyone was going to get what they were hoping for: a tremendous fight. And a battle it was — with Napoleon playing a starring role.

Although Jonas very rarely watched the television in his cell, for obvious reasons he did follow Viktor’s bizarre career on Jeopardy! with ever-increasing wonder. To Jonas it seemed so ironic: you could be considered an expert on the world without having been consciously present in that world. On the other hand, he had to admit that he enjoyed the programme, and not only because it tended to suggest that the questions were more important than the answers. Like his countrymen Jonas had been fascinated by quiz shows of this sort ever since the first series of Double Your Money was broadcast in the early sixties — that same Double your Money which had played and would play such a curious part in Viktor Harlem’s life.

Before the much publicised Grand Champions Final that Easter, Jonas decided to take a hand in things. Not to spoil anything, but to try, if possible, to shake Viktor awake. Fully awake. Because Jonas knew something known only to a few. Viktor had a complex. Which is to say: a complex of which he had no recall. As a child, in the days when everybody, absolutely everybody, watched the same programmes, especially on Saturday evenings, Viktor had been bullied terribly and had had to watch his father go seriously downhill after the latter, as a contestant on Double Your Money answering questions on the multi-faceted subject of Napoleon, had failed to answer one of the last parts of the 10,000-krone question. The fateful question was: What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz? The answer, which his father could not remember due to a mental block as freakish as it was unfair, was of course Jean Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte. In other words, the man later to be known as Karl Johan, the king who lent his name to Oslo’s main thoroughfare.

The memory of this gave Jonas an idea. He called the producer of Jeopardy!, a former colleague at NRK who now worked for the company responsible for the quiz show. Jonas knew that this man could pull a few strings with the compilers of the questions for the Jeopardy! Grand Champions Final with no one being any the wiser. Despite the impropriety of the request, Jonas’s former colleague had immediately agreed to help. ‘Remember, we’re dealing with a sick man here,’ Jonas stressed. ‘We have to try everything.’

And so it came about that in this extraordinary final between the Grand Champions, in front of a million viewers, in the ‘Final Jeopardy!’ round in which the answer also had to be written down, Viktor suddenly heard the quizmaster announcing that the subject was Napoleon and the clue was: ‘The marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz.’

Even though Jonas knew the outcome, since the programme was recorded, he sat on the edge of his seat, his eyes glued to the screen, much the way we sometimes watch a suspenseful film again, even though we know how it ends. In his cell, Jonas held his breath as Viktor, in a studio in Nydalen in Oslo, stiffened when this tricky ‘answer’ was read out, as though, despite its name, only now did he understand that the programme was all about taking risks. For the viewers this was a dramatic moment. They saw Viktor Harlem put his hands to his large, babyish head, as if in pained confusion. This reaction lasted, however, only a matter of seconds and did not prevent him from writing down the question and reading it out, when his turn came, in a soft, tremulous voice: ‘Who was Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte, who later took the name Karl Johan?’ Strictly speaking this last part was not necessary, but Viktor had obviously wished to include it. Jonas never did find out whether this was just another fact which he had gleaned from watching the box, or whether it was a memory so traumatic and so powerful that it had broken through the wall from a past which he had forgotten.

Whatever the case, Viktor had outclassed his rivals, and now boasted the title of Supreme Grand Champion. There is also a little coda to the story. Afterwards, at an emotional press conference, Viktor recounted his traumatic childhood experience with his father and Double Your Money so movingly that the journalists presented him in their fulsome reports as a hero twice over. His father’s bitter defeat had finally been turned to victory.

In due course, Jonas also got to hear what had happened in the contestants’ room after the show. Viktor had sat down and started asking questions, delving and probing as if his whole life were suddenly a gigantic game of Jeopardy!, the only difference being that now the subject was anything but trivial. Because he had remembered who he was. He had come to his senses in two stages. After the arrowshot in the programme on Harald Hardråde he could only remember what he had seen on TV, which is to say over the past twenty-odd years. But after the Napoleon question he could remember everything about his life from his childhood up to the March day in 1972 when he had been strolling through the streets of Lillehammer with his two chums, Axel Stranger and Jonas W. Hansen; that was why he had put his hands to his head: in some way he had been feeling the pain of the blow from that block of ice, over twenty years delayed. Where were his two chums now? was the first thing he asked. And after that the questions came pouring out. What had happened to poor Krystle in the last episode of Dynasty. Why did he look so young? And why had no one given him the latest model of the Stressless Royal, with additional lumbar support and a neck rest that adjusted automatically? Thanks to all his television viewing, Viktor did not suffer from any sort of Rip van Winkle syndrome, he knew what a computer was and how the new Volvo looked. People, including the doctors, still did not know what to think. And they never would.

As far as Viktor’s physical condition was concerned time appeared to have stood still. When he woke up he was not pushing forty, he was nineteen. He not only looked nineteen, he also seemed to have the mind of a nineteen-year-old. When Jonas met Viktor in the visiting room at the prison shortly after the Easter holidays he felt as though he was shaking hands with, hugging, Viktor’s son. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Viktor said, with that hundred-watt bulb back in his head. ‘I know it was you who arranged for that question to come up, who else could it have been?’ And then, puzzled: ‘But what are you doing here, Jonas? You’re no murderer? And it’s not like a chunk of ice struck you on the head.’

‘That’s my business,’ Jonas said, making it clear that he did not wish to talk about it. Although he almost said: ‘A block of ice struck at my heart.’

It was a strange, and emotional, reunion. Jonas could not help feeling, possibly because of Viktor’s disconcertingly youthful appearance, that it was only a day or so since they had parted in Seilduksgata and that they could simply pick up the threads of a conversation they had broken off twenty-five years earlier. ‘Over the past few days I’ve been reading The Cantos,’ Viktor said as he was leaving, with his old, familiar hundred-watt enthusiasm. ‘And do you know what? I understand it all now. Do you remember Venice? Ezra Pound was so wrong. I’ve waded through the whole thing again. It is a masterpiece. I actually think I have Pound to thank for the fact that I could answer so many questions on Jeopardy!’

‘I thought the TV might have had something to do with it,’ Jonas said cautiously, almost afraid that Viktor might have a relapse.

‘Oh, that too of course, but I’m sure I picked up a lot of those nonsensical facts from The Cantos,’ Viktor answered with a laugh. And added, serious now: ‘Pound really has written a work of genius. I think that when you started to read it aloud to me, somewhere in my subconscious I must have connected those extracts with all the books I studied in order to understand Pound’s verses — the books I built so many shelves for.’ Viktor’s baby face was shining, almost as if he felt this longed-for insight into The Cantos was worth the price he had paid: twenty years in hibernation — or perhaps one should say of education.

What became of Viktor after that Easter? He received masses of tempting offers, and one of these he accepted. In many ways the most logical one. Viktor did not only wake up, he also began to think big. He decided to help sell the Norwegian Encyclopedia. He took a job with its publishers, Kunnskapsforlaget, one of the country’s foremost promoters of knowledge — a post in their marketing department created just for him — and was involved in the launching of a new edition of a work which was to reference books what the Stressless Royal was to armchairs. Viktor also signed a lucrative contract in which he gave the publishing house permission to use him in their advertising campaign. He became, quite simply, the public face of Kunnskapsforlaget. ‘Learning keeps you young,’ Viktor announced from huge posters on walls all over the city where scantily clad models for H&M normally reigned supreme. For some time Viktor Harlem’s smiling and indecently youthful Einstein countenance was to be seen everywhere: ‘You too can be a champion!’ he declared. The campaign was, of course, a stroke of genius. Sales of the encyclopedia broke all records. Seeing Viktor, the Jeopardy! king, the Supreme Grand Champion, associated in this way with the Norwegian Encyclopedia, people automatically assumed that this was why he was so good at answering questions. Or asking them. The majority of Norwegians regarded Viktor as living proof that it paid to own a sixteen-volume encyclopedia. It appeared to be conducive both to a healthy body and a healthy bank balance. So it was in large part thanks to Viktor Harlem that Norway in the nineties had no trouble defending its ranking as one of the top countries in the world when it came to the number of encyclopedias per head of population.

Viktor started visiting Jonas as Jonas had visited him and one day at the prison, when they were chatting about television, Viktor said that he had recently watched the Thinking Big series again. He understood now what an impact it must have had on him, how much of it he could remember, even though at the institution he had watched the programmes, regularly, in a very different, abstracted frame of mind. ‘I hope you won’t be annoyed if I say I like the programme on Harald Hardråde best,’ he said to Jonas. ‘That arrow didn’t just kill Harald Hardråde, it saved my life.’

I could not help thinking of both Viktor Harlem and the aforementioned programme when we were in Eivindvik, in Viking country, where there are traces dating back even further than Harald Hardråde. Outside the churchyard gate stood an ancient stone cross, and on a green hillside nearby we found a similar cross, carved in a slightly different style. Both could have been erected around the time when Christianity came to Norway, by kings such as Håkon the Good, Olav I or Olav II. The ground on which the Gulatinget, the first regional moot, was held had also lain somewhere in these parts, possibly in Eivindvik first, then at Flolid, where a stone now marked the site of the moot ground.

From Brekke we had sailed out into the fjord estuary, bore south, then made our way into Eivindvik’s nice, sheltered harbour, where we were assigned a berth alongside the local shop. Eivindvik was the perfect place in which to review our findings on Sognefjord and Viking times: with the pictures we had taken and the plethora of notes regarding rune stones and burial mounds — and the battlefields, like the bay off Fimreite where King Sverre won such a decisive battle over King Magnus in 1184. And only a little to the north of here, at Solund, Harald Hardråde had assembled his fleet before the disastrous expedition to England. Carl thought we should insert clips from Jonas Wergeland’s television programme into our presentation of Solund. I saw a circle being closed, I saw my two projects being juggled together to form a whole. I saw how, simply by being there, Jonas Wergeland had moved us to take a more radical approach to the OAK Quartet’s products, to wonder whether it was possible for us to transcend our medium, as he had once expanded the television medium.

From Jonas’s own ramblings it was clear that he was more interested in Dean Niels Griis Alstrup Dahl, of whom there were traces at every turn in Eivindvik. I could see why Jonas Wergeland would identify with someone like Dahl: a Prometheus, a popular enlightener in the true sense. Dahl was an individual who wanted to think big, a man who squeezed ‘bread from stones’, who instilled culture in farmers and fishermen. Jonas said he liked the thought that his mother’s family came from around here, most likely from Verkland Farm, not far from Brekke.

Just before we were due to leave I was sitting alone in the saloon on board the Voyager, making a note of things to add to my manuscript. It was here in Eivindvik that I decided to write a frame story about the sail along Sognefjord, because I saw that the inclusion of this voyage would make a difference — all the difference — to the picture of Jonas Wergeland’s life presented in the final draft. Here, too, I realised that by observing him so closely I had come to see myself in a new light. In writing this account I had also changed my own life. I think this must have been what I had in mind all the time. That deep down this was why I had done it. I now knew, what is more, how I felt about Martin.

The previous day I had taken myself off to a bench outside the old church to read through the big notebooks which Jonas Wergeland had come up and handed to me with a smile, just like that, as we were sailing up Prestesundet towards Eivindvik. ‘I’d better add my pittance,’ he said, ‘my contribution to the collective epic.’ I sat there, reading the handwritten pages, surrounded by the scent of cherry blossom, and I make no secret of the fact that I was so moved that I frequently had to stop, as my emotions got the better of me. Here, at long last, I had the answer to my question as to why he had done it, why he chose to go to prison. I had known. But I had not known in quite this way. I realised right away that I would have to weave these stories into my own book. With his permission. I would probably have to synchronise our accounts of some events. In other cases the contradictions would be allowed to stand.

But still: even our joint efforts offered no guarantee. It struck me that I might have been writing with a confidence that was quite unwarranted. The true story about Jonas Wergeland might just as easily be the sum of all the untold stories about him. Even at that point, sitting outside the church, I began to have some doubts about his own version of events. What bothered me most were the passages in which he described all his ventures, even his television series, as failures. I could not agree with him. As I rested my eyes on the old vicarage, once the home of Niels Griis Alstrup Dahl himself, a memory surfaced. Things get a bit more personal here, there’s no way round it: the truth is, you see, that I not only think, I am quite positive, that Jonas Wergeland once saved me, and possibly even my life.

This incident occurred on a beautiful autumn day, the sort of day that sharpens all the senses, a day so ineluctably clear that you suddenly become sensible to the element air. It was no coincidence that I should have been inspired to conduct my experiment, or seen that it could be done, on such a day.

I was working at the time for an advertising agency, among bright, young things with hip lighters and slick business cards: a milieu in which the right sunglasses counted for more than moral backbone. It had been a hectic week: the Advertising Association’s gala dinner and awards ceremony on the Friday followed, on the Saturday, by a party to mark the fifth birthday of our distinctive little agency; a pretty riotous affair at which we fêted ourselves as if we were the very lynchpin of society. The latter do was held at one of the city’s rock clubs, one of those dingy venues which make you feel as if you’ve landed in a disused factory or the hallway to hell. The only decorative element in the vast, totally black hall were the television sets dotted around the room on little trolleys, each one hooked up to a video recorder. On these monitors we had our own ads running non-stop without the sound. I had been responsible for setting this up, it was also up to me to make sure that all the equipment was returned to the suppliers. On the Sunday, after only a few hours of fitful sleep, I went for a walk on my own, and that’s when the idea came to me. I don’t know why. It may have been the wistfulness encapsulated in such crisp, clear autumn hours, the detachment from life that they bestow. As I watched a maple leaf drifting gently to the ground, the thought settled in my mind, as crisp and clear as the air around me.

I ought to say that this was also a special day in another respect. I had woken that Sunday morning with a feeling of listless melancholy, of body and spirit, which I had long feared was going to engulf me completely. All I wanted was to stay there in bed with the curtains drawn for days. I had just come out of a relationship, so maybe that had something to do with it. Or maybe it was all the partying I had been doing, two bashes as vacuous and frenetic as only such gatherings can be. But even that could not explain it all. I knew my mother had suffered from depression; I had always been scared, terrified, that I might succumb to something similar. In my teens I had sometimes caught glimpses of a darkness that frightened me, but I had never felt anything like this vague numbness, this weight which was pressing down on me when I opened my eyes that Sunday. All my senses told me that I was in danger, that at any moment I could be hurled into some indefinable darkness. For the first time it occurred to me that my life might go the same way as my mother’s. The thought made my heart pound with dread.

So even as I tried to make the most of this clear autumn day, the keen, invigorating air, inside I felt gloomy and angst-ridden. It is hard to put it into words, but I walked along beneath the flaming yellow leaves on the trees with an uneasy feeling that the world was grey. Grey and flat. It must have been this that rendered me so receptive. An idea that should have occurred to me before was forced to the surface by a semi-conscious sense of desperation, a vague horror that all the colour and depth would drain out of life.

When I got home I got out the tapes of Dad’s — or no, I had better maintain, still, the distance I have tried to observe throughout: Jonas Wergeland’s — television series. I kept them on the same shelf as Knut Hamsun’s collected works, since I happen to believe that this series ranks alongside the great works of Norwegian literature. I drove into the city, back to the club. As soon as I set foot in that vast, empty space and saw the television sets scattered about like basic forms of basalt or black marble I knew I was on the right track.

The smell of the party still hung over the barren, black-painted hall: cigars and booze, the whiff of expensive perfumes mingled with the indeterminate, aromatic odour of the somewhat disappointing food we had had. There were still a few bottles sitting about. The floor was sticky. Purely by chance I was dressed all in black and for a moment I had the feeling that I was merging with the room, that the massive hall was going to swallow me up. I shrugged it off and began to arrange the trolleys holding the TV sets and video recorders in a big circle. I thought of Stonehenge, that enigmatic arrangement of megaliths in England. On reflection, I seem to remember a newspaper photograph from the time when the Thinking Big series was first shown on NRK TV: a pensive-looking Jonas Wergeland pictured in his office, like an inventor in his laboratory. My eye had been caught not so much by his facial expression as by the screens in the background, flat panels arranged in a semi-circle. On them one could see large sheets of paper covered in writing, squares with lines running between them. It looked as though he was standing in a many-sided room packed with ideas.

I slotted one tape, one programme from the series, into each video recorder. The machines were all of the same make and hooked up to one another in such a way that I could start them all at the same time with just one remote control. I pressed the button and there I stood, all at once, in the centre of a vast hall, in the centre of a circle of television screens, each showing a programme from Jonas Wergeland’s television series. The sets seemed almost to form an electronic membrane around me, as if I were inside a massive, life-giving organ, a breathing entity. Let me put it this way: I would not have missed it for the world. It was like being touched, caressed almost, by something, a quality, which was light-years away from the universe I ordinarily inhabited and by which I was surrounded in this room, in the shape of mementos of a meaningless party: the dregs of wine in plastic cups and the reek of stale smoke, a slip of paper scrawled with headings for a pretentious speech tramped into some sticky gunge on the floor.

I tried to take in as much as I could, but at one point, possibly because I found it so overwhelming and needed to rest my eyes, I stood and watched the programme on Harald Hardråde, the king who had tried to do the unthinkable, to conquer England. I remembered my reaction, one time when the programme was being repeated, to the final scene: the bloody battle of Stamford Bridge represented solely by Harald himself, a king fighting an army which we could not see, yet did see. I had sat up, wide-eyed, thinking to myself that this was him, Jonas Wergeland, it was a self-portrait, an assertion that one man could have the width to populate a whole world. It was also a picture of Jonas Wergeland battling alone with a Titanic task, invisible to all but him; an attempt to achieve the impossible.

I stood in that black, party-fumed club with its dead echoes of here today, gone tomorrow music and inane adverts. I looked. I began to move my eyes from one screen to the next, as if they were different parts of a circular mosaic. The thought occurred to me that if all of the programmes were in the nature of self-portraits then Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in fulfilling an old dream: of living several lives at once. Standing there in that dark, factory-like space I slowly let my eyes travel round, feeling a little dizzy, but also amazed that I could actually manage to watch so many screens at once. It was an enthralling, almost unearthly, experience. At one point it crossed my mind that this must be what it was like to stand with one’s head inside a crystal chandelier, inside a circle of light.

I had seen every programme several times over, but never — obviously — at the same time. Suddenly — after twenty minutes or so — my subconscious told me that they were all connected, that if I could just manage to look at all the screens at once I would have the sensation of watching just one programme. I found an office chair on which I could spin round; I rewound the tapes, restarted them all simultaneously. And it was when I sat down on the chair and began slowly to rotate that the revelation came to me. The sum of the images I saw on each screen metamorphosed into a stupendous juggling act; I witnessed the way in which, throughout all these programmes, Jonas Wergeland kept so many images, impressions, in the air at once, as an expert juggler does with balls.

I spun myself round, a warm thrill running through me. These flat screens offered me a peek into wonderful depths, and filled me with an unfailing certainty that reality was round. In this almost vacuum-black hall, in which only hours earlier I had attended a superficial party, heard the stupidest things being said, and made the silliest remarks myself, I was now having my life’s epiphany, an insight which filled my every smallest cell. At some point — although I had no sense of time — I developed the strong suspicion that the lines in each programme also fell in a very specific order, such that if I were to join together the pieces of the separate lines I would hear quite different sentences; a sentence ending in one programme would continue, like an elaboration of a statement, in another programme, while in a third programme it might be the music which picked up the thread, or added another dimension to the argument. At other times I had the idea that the whole thing evolved into a dialogue, that the programmes were speaking to one another. To me, in the state I was in and precisely because I was confronted with this incomparable work of art — stories subtly bound together to form a magnificent fresco — in a hall that stank faintly of leftovers and vomit, that reeked of adverts and commercialism and facile kitschiness, the screens, the programmes surrounding me seemed almost to come to life. I sat in a circle of pictures and sound which gradually expanded until it encompassed everything. I remember what I thought. I thought: this is my Samarkand. This black room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did he do it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story of how Melankton had become something of an attraction had been told to him by his father. The way people saw it, Melankton had conducted a successful rebellion against the islanders’ limited options — and, what is more, given some intimation of certain hereditary traits in the otherwise unexceptional Hansen family. When just a young lad Melankton had vowed to do something that no one before him had ever done, and instead of becoming a fisherman or a sailor, or something in trade, he had, against all the odds, taken the university entrance exam over at Fredrikstad then gone on to Oslo to study. After that the trail went dead. No one knew what he had read at university, or how he had lived, but one day there he was, back on the steamship wharf, wearing the same — albeit odd-looking — clothes he had had on when he left twenty years earlier. The only luggage he had with him was a big wooden crate and a remarkably battered suitcase.

Melankton Hansen did not say much. He took a job on the pilot boat as if nothing had happened. During the holidays he kept his lip buttoned even tighter than usual, not to shatter the idyll for the summer visitors from the capital, or holidaymakers as the locals, and in due course Jonas too — his father had been born on the island, after all — called them somewhat condescendingly. Because there was nothing the city folks liked better than to be on speaking terms with one of the locals. This carried as much prestige as, later, Norwegian aid workers derived from saying that they knew a Negro. One could, for example, be forgiven for thinking that Mr Wilhelmsen the shipping magnate flew over in his seaplane every Friday evening, then exchanged his suit for an old sweater and jeans with holes in the knees, purely in order to pass the time of day with Melankton Hansen down by the harbour and listen, in the lags in the conversation, to the clip-clip of an oystercatcher skimming the waves at their feet. The holidaymakers loved to be able to come back from the shop in the morning and tell the rest of the family: ‘I ran into

Melankton. He had a pail full of flat fish, heaped up like pancakes. He netted twenty-odd plaice out at Ekholmsflua.’ It was all part of the joys of summer: you wrote postcards to friends in the city about the Simple Life and Getting Back to Basics. Melankton could not only show the city folk a freshwater spring on a tiny islet, or take them out to a stretch of water where porpoises often popped up like spluttering wheels, he could also teach them the words, the essential words, the ones which, when the holidaymakers repeated them, sent shivers of pleasure running down their spines, as if they were not on a small island in the Norwegian skerries, but on a foreign continent where they had managed the prodigious feat of learning the native language. They rocked back and forth on their heels, bursting with pride, when they used the correct terms for different types of boat or reeled off the names of islets or reefs — or better still, a fishing ground, or a skerry which was good for torching crabs. ‘Hue,’ they repeated to themselves after a conversation with Melankton about the headland across from the steamship wharf. ‘Rokka,’ they would murmur, almost reverently, with reference to the narrow strait leading to the open sea.

But Melankton was not always able to contain himself, and less and less as the years passed. Occasionally he would let fall a remark which — and on this all the islanders were agreed — betrayed his vast knowledge and experience of life. Stories started to circulate about weird conversations he had had with holidaymakers, of words and phrases such as ‘the Pre-Raphaelites’, ‘Ernest Hemingway’ or ‘Cartesian philosophy’. One summer visitor, a teacher from Oslo, told the island postmaster that for the first time he now understood the theory of relativity, after having had it explained to him by Melankton Hansen. Some people said that the crate Melankton had brought back to the island with him contained a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a massive work of reference, and that he had worked his way through this in much the same way as other people read Gone with the Wind. Secretly they called him ‘the walking encyclopedia’. The islanders were proud of Melankton Hansen. But he was also something of a mystery to them. He looked like someone who had miraculously managed to escape from East Germany to Western Europe and then, having seen all the delights of its countries, had inexplicably and quite voluntarily, returned to the East as if nothing had happened.

Jonas’s father had told him how proud he had been of his uncle — his father who, as a boy, would willingly give up anything to go trolling for mackerel with Melankton. There was nothing to beat sitting in a motor-boat as it chugged gently across a sea which in Haakon Hansen’s memory was always calm and shimmering, with half an eye on your lines. Once every fifteen minutes or so his uncle might come out with a word, or a sentence, or a whole little story — about the names of the clouds, about life in the rainforests, about the Hindu belief in karma or the big earthquake in Lisbon; fragments which to Haakon — the way he told it to Jonas — went far beyond what any one person could pick up in the way of learning. Not even the mackerel’s rainbow-hued sheen could match his uncle’s sparse utterances; not even the thought of dinner: crisp, fried mackerel and rhubarb soup.

And yet. There were things which Melankton had seen and done which he never spoke of to anyone — that much even Haakon gathered. ‘Something bad happened to Melankton,’ people on the island whispered. One of the lads on the pilot boat claimed to have heard Melankton mumbling something about ‘a lost ruby’. He had been hurt, folk said. It must have been something to do with a woman. And Jonas’s father realised that there might be a grain of truth in these rumours because sometimes Melankton would take a deep breath and let it out again in an eloquent sigh, shaking his head, as if Haakon were not there. Then he would come to himself, fix his eyes on the boy and declare: ‘When you get right down to it, lad, there’s only one thing to say: “Watch out for Venus!”’

As he bounced up and down on the seat of the old bus in his freshly ironed shirt, on his way to meet Uncle Melankton, Jonas was thinking to himself that now at long last he was going to learn what had happened to this man, the pride of the family and, even more exciting, the story behind a lost ruby.

The thought of Venus, a warning to watch out, may also have crossed his hopeful and mildly inebriated mind as Marie led him into the Belém Tower in Lisbon. But at that particular moment he had no will of his own, and he was curious; it was like waiting for a verdict which he could do nothing to change. She paid for their tickets and led the way to the first floor, an open platform from which they could admire — of all things — a statue of the Virgin Mary. They were alone. It was just before closing time, they had seen people leaving. Again Jonas was conscious of the way her eyes kept flickering across him, as if she were seeing him in a new light, as another person almost. She grabbed his hand and drew him through a narrow doorway, then up the stairs to the bottommost room in the tower itself. She located another opening, a door leading to a dim, tight spiral staircase. She had to let go of his hand and precede him up the stairs. The thin stuff of her dress fluttered like bait in front of his eyes. The smell of her filled his nostrils and reinforced the sense of intoxication. On the steep stairway he could see right up her legs to the edging of her underwear. She wants me to see that, he thought. She climbed quickly, all but running up the smooth, worn stone steps. He followed on her heels, his head spinning, had to put one hand on the rough wall for support, stared at the play of muscle in her legs, at her ankles; he was surprised to discover how lovely and sexy an ankle could be, thought what an underrated part of the female anatomy it was, or perhaps he was thinking about the Achilles tendon, his own Achilles tendon, his weak spot, that he was about to tear it, that something bad was about to happen, which is to say something good, but at the same time bad. They passed through several rooms, met no one, carried on up the stairs until they reached the top; stood there, dazzled by the strong, late-afternoon light. Jonas lifted his face to the refreshing breeze, but his head felt no clearer for it. Again he had the impression, although he could never be sure, that she had been here before. If she had a plan then it had to have been a spur-of-the moment thing, a combination of common sense and madness.

In each corner of the square platform was a small domed watchtower. She pulled him into the one overlooking the river. From it, they could see due west, to the mouth of the Tagus and the ocean stretching out beyond it. He had to turn sideways to get through the door and into the tiny white chamber — there was just room enough for them both. She leaned through the peephole in the wall, leaned far out. Her dress slid up, exposing her thighs, the soft skin; her bottom arched towards him, the pattern on the thin fabric stretched over it making him think of a globe. ‘Look,’ she said, without turning, as if wanting Jonas to bend over her. He tried, moved in close to her. The sea air wafted past him, but did not dilute the smell of her, a heavy scent of patchouli and perspiration. The sun hung low in the sky straight in front of them. She pointed across the glittering sea. ‘This is where they sailed from, the great discoverers,’ she said. Her voice rang hollow in the narrow chamber. For some time nothing was said. Then: ‘Do you feel a bit … peculiar too?’ she asked. Long pause. They both stared at a container ship gliding past. The Nuova Africa, a black hulk heading out to sea. He heard her breathing, every sound amplified under the small domed roof. The water sparkled beneath them, before them. His heavy breathing was bound to sound, to her, like panting. Like a rhinoceros. He swallowed and was about to say something when he felt her hand curl round his buttock and draw him closer, right up against her. Aroused though he was he could not help seeing the funny side of it. To be standing inside a work of art, a building on the unesco World Heritage List; to be inside a monument to the triumph of civilisation — and to feel like a beast, so horny that the two halves of one’s brain have shrunk to two testicles. All thought of his project even, the television series he was trying to save, disappeared, sliding as it were from his brow and down through his body, as if rather than life, rather than anything, he would take sex life. He feared — he knew — that he was succumbing to Melankton’s syndrome, but he didn’t bloody well care; he had long since realised, believed he had long since realised, that for far too many years he had held back in such situations because in his mind he had created a dilemma for himself, one which did not really exist.

Jonas aged seven, in the freshest of freshly ironed white shirts and on his way to meet the family’s learned treasure, was blissfully unaware of these future deliberations. Jonas’s father was a conscientious man who made a point, every summer, of visiting his surviving relatives on Hvaler. It was a couple of years, however, since he had last seen Melankton Hansen, his uncle having moved into an old folks’ home on one of the neighbouring islands. And since Jonas was now old enough he was given the honour of accompanying his father. He knew Haakon was looking forward to introducing him to this unique uncle who would prove to Jonas, once and for all, that they were not descended only from simple, fishy-smelling folk, rough, loose-living machinists or the keepers of general stores with paintbrushes hanging from the ceiling, outdated advertising posters on the walls and a spittoon still set discreetly in the corner. ‘In our family, son, we also have some real, live geniuses. Just you wait and see.’

And Jonas, bumping up and down on the bus seat in his white shirt, could hardly wait. Soon he was going to hear words he had never heard, the words. He might even — if he were lucky — get to hear more about ‘the lost ruby’, or about Venus. He had heard the story many times: when Melankton returned from his unknown adventures he moved into one of the little white cottages on the south side of the island, a property which he gradually turned into a star attraction. While his neighbours toiled over dry lawns covered in molehills, Melankton’s garden was a riot of exotic blooms and every sort of fruit tree — he was even said to have succeeded in growing apricots. It was like coming to another place, another country, visitors said.

The final proof that something bad had happened to Melankton came on the day that the steamship pulled into the wharf with a very strange object standing in the bow, rather like a figurehead. Jonas’s father had also been there that day: Haakon Hansen, soon to leave the island himself to go over to the town, later the capital, and become an organist. It was a naked woman, a divinely beautiful creature holding aloft a pitcher. Melankton stood proudly on the quayside, like a groom waiting for his bride. He told people that it was a statue of Venus, the goddess of love. He meant to put it in a fountain he was planning for his garden. No one dared to say anything, but secretly they shook their heads: Melankton had gone too far this time, this was hubris. And they were right. Very carefully the crew began to hoist the marble statue ashore, having almost bashfully refrained from laying hands on her bare breasts — and just at the moment when she hung suspended between the bow and the wharf, as everyone was secretly admiring the lines of this divine figure, the rope gave way and the statue plunged into the deep with a white, frothing sigh.

From that day on Melankton said not one word to the locals. Whatever they did hear about him they got in dribs and drabs from the summer visitors. But no one forgot that story. Any time children, including those just there on holiday, swam off the wharf, the grown-ups would shout: ‘Watch out for Venus!’ They were worried that the marble goddess would be sticking out of the blue clay like a white lance, ready to spear anyone who dived too deep, or that she would drag them into the mire if they tried to swim down to her. Despite all the warnings a lot of boys did dive, trying to catch a glimpse of Venus; they may even have been excited by the thought of stroking those smooth breasts, sticking a hand into her pitcher.

Haakon Hansen was in a good mood as he and Jonas rattled along the narrow road in the old bus. Jonas had brought a bag of King of Denmark aniseed balls, which he thought might be just the gift for Uncle Melankton. He knew intuitively, although back then he could not have put it into words, that he was to be offered a glimpse of his own potential. He was about to have his fortune told.

Jonas would never forget that warm summer day and the visit to the old folks’ home: the large, white wooden building set amid copper-coloured pines with swaying tops, the blue sky with clouds scudding across it. He and his father walked along a path, over a soft carpet of pine needles, surrounded by the scent of resin and salt water. He was going to meet the family genius, the ‘walking encyclopedia’.

A nurse in a pristine white uniform showed them up the worn stairs to a room in which they found Uncle Melankton sitting by the window in a mouldering spindleback chair; a room with flaking paintwork, a room that stank of piss and sweet, half-rotten bananas. ‘Someone to see you, Melankton,’ she cried, as if talking to a child. Jonas noticed that the room was completely bare except for a bed and a chair. Not a picture. Not a book. The old man was wearing a shirt that had once been white, but which was now almost yellow, and most definitely not freshly ironed. He was looking out at the garden. He’s dreaming of apricots, Jonas thought. He sees Venus standing in the middle of a fountain, encircled by laden apricot trees.

‘Hello, Uncle Melankton,’ Haakon Hansen said a little too cheerily and rather uncertainly. Even at that point he must have known.

Slowly the old man turned round. Jonas had been expecting a countenance that spoke of matchless sagacity, but this face looked blank. Still, though, Jonas was sure that Uncle Melankton had an amazing memory, that he could come out with nuggets of nigh on divine wisdom at any minute. His face was bathed in sunlight and the furrowed skin had the same warm cast to it and the same deep criss-crosses as smooth, weathered rocks by the sea at the end of a quiet, sunny day. Jonas stood there in his white Sunday-best shirt, hair neatly combed, waiting for some pearls of wisdom, for something close to the essence of life itself to be revealed.

‘Cunt,’ said Uncle Melankton-

For a few seconds there was total silence.

‘Uncle, it’s me, Haakon,’ Jonas’s father said patiently. ‘We brought you some grapes and a bag of aniseed balls.’

‘Cunt, cunt, cunt,’ babbled old Melankton, with a trickle of drool running from the corner of his mouth.

‘Totally senile,’ Jonas’s father murmured softly, half to himself, half to Jonas. ‘Totally gaga.’

Jonas liked the fact that his father did not seem embarrassed, and did not try to smooth things over. Although he could not have said why, he felt an immediate sympathy for this family member. He opened the bag of aniseed drops and slipped a couple into Melankton’s hand. The old man promptly popped them into his mouth and a blissful expression spread across his face, as if he suddenly remembered that he had once shaken the hands of kings or dallied with beautiful women in distant harbours. Haakon Hansen sat down heavily on the bed and lifted Jonas onto his knee. They sat there for a while, as if they had to stay for a set length of time so as not to offend convention’s invisible timekeeper. They sat there with Uncle Melankton, the pride of the family, as he rocked back and forth in his chair, muttering ‘Cunt, cunt,’ every now and again, sucked on another sweet and stared out of the window at the clouds sailing swiftly, like Flying Dutchmen, across the sky, above pine-tree tops which, with a little stretch of the imagination, could be likened to luxuriant pussy hair.

Jonas did not know what to think. He was not disappointed, though. Some profound truth about life had been revealed. Later it would occur to him that this man’s words had given him his first sight of mankind’s strange ability, for good or ill, to simplify complex concepts. It was a phenomenon he would later encounter again and again, in the most unexpected areas of life: the Encyclopedia Brittanica boiled down to one word.

As they were leaving, Uncle Melankton winked at Jonas and stuck out his tongue, on which an aniseed drop lay moist and glistening — almost as if his words had taken the shape of a sparkling, polished ruby.

In time, this experience would give rise in Jonas to a certain anxiety. He became wary where girls were concerned. It might even be that part of the reason Jonas was so slow in making his sexual debut lay in his boyhood meeting with Melankton Hansen. Senile old man or no, Jonas could not help interpreting that slavering ‘cunt, cunt’ of his great-uncle’s as an explanation of sorts for his return to the island at the mouth of the fjord, for why his gifts were never allowed to burst into full bloom. The path from cultivating one’s genius to cultivating one’s genitalia could be appallingly short. For a long time, Melankton represented for Jonas the living embodiment of a dilemma, the question of either-or. Not until he met Margrete again was Jonas able to see, thanks to her, that the one did not necessarily exclude the other. By then he had for years been labouring under a sad misapprehension, been afraid that he would go the same way as Melankton: that the yearning for life would be forced to give way to the yearning for sex life.

But now — he had been cured, believed himself to have been cured, ages ago of such stupid ideas. The Jonas who stood in that small corner tower in Belém had long since dismissed any possibility of suffering the same fate as Melankton; of setting the highest goals for oneself, of meaning to do something that no one else had ever done, only to have to settle for less. Right now, though, he had only one thought in his head, the one which has, down through the ages, formed a common bond between most men: a constantly churning ‘cunt, cunt’. He had had a hard-on for some time. Marie felt it, but did not turn round, still seemed totally absorbed in scanning the bend of the river and the sea below. And then, with one foot — he had to admire her technique — she flipped shut the two narrow, red flaps which served as a door, while at the same time lifting up her skirt, positively offering herself to him, and not only that — offering the confirmation of a possibility to which he had closed his eyes for far too long: he could bring his grand and noble project to fruition while at the same time satisfying his basest desires. The enticing backside before him could be viewed as a globe, and the crack in it as a strait into which he could sail. All at once she seemed more impatient than him, as if she did not wish to give him time to think; she started fumbling for the zip on his fly, an unmistakable sign which gave him the courage to carry out this operation himself, to take out his swollen member, pull down her panties and then, almost without having to push at all, let his erect penis be piloted into her, up inside her, by the slippery fluids which were already present in abundance. And he knew, although he would not admit it to himself, that he had reached his goal, that this had always been his goal. This was why he had left Oslo so quickly, barely stopping to pack, when he heard that she was here. Margrete had been furious, it had not fitted in with her work schedule at all, but he had not listened to her, simply had to jump on a plane, knew it was his only chance. He found out which hotel she was staying at and on the very first morning he stationed himself a little way off, to watch the entrance. He hardly recognised her, though, when she came swinging through the door in her almost frivolously girlish outfit. He had lost sight of her down in the maze-like gridwork of Baixa when she walked out of a stationer’s in the Rua do Ouro, but had spotted her again, thank heavens, outside the café on the Rossio. He may, for one resolute moment, have thought that he could actually manage to talk her round, but deep down he had always known that it would end here, with him driving into her from behind like a — yes, exactly what they called women who slept their way to the top in NRK: a telly tart.

He heard the waves breaking against the bank behind the tower, heard seagulls crying. He saw himself from the outside, saw himself standing there like a panting rhino, a primeval, galloping beast. He stared at the shining sea. Discovered nothing. Only that intense light. I was dazzled, he told himself, as if memorising something to use later in his defence, an answer to the question as to why he did it. And all the time she just stood there, seemingly unfazed, gazing out across the Tagus and the countryside on either side of the river, and perhaps it was the fact that he could not see the look on her face, had no way of knowing what she was thinking, which worked him up to such pitch that he knew he was going to come at any minute, that for once he would not be able to control himself and that this was the aim: not to control oneself, but simply to succumb to a fateful moment of ecstasy in which all else was forgotten; surrender to the madness, a madness much worse than banging one’s head off a wall, because there can be seconds when your life is turned upside down, when you do something that can never be altered, something which will have the greatest conceivable consequences. And behind this thought again he knew that he would never be able to blame it on a fit of madness, because underneath the frenzied, and to some extent, false excitement, lay a cynical, crystal-clear and quite deliberate plan.

He climaxed, so violently that it seemed to come all the way from his toes, but as he came, in a complete daze and yet one hundred per cent aware of what he was doing, she pulled away from him, held onto his penis with one hand and let his semen spill into the other. Afterwards his thoughts would keep returning to this action; he could not help marvelling at how, by some instinct, she had had the presence of mind, or sensitivity of muscle to detect the final engorgement preceding his first convulsions, and had managed to draw away in time. And he never forgot how, in full view of him, she slung the semen she had caught in the palm of her hand out over the river, in a sowing action, and how, still bent over her, he was sure he saw the drops of sperm fall through the air, glittering, truly sparkling in the light before striking the water far below, like a shower of pearls. He thought: that’s a life being tossed out there, the life I really ought to have chosen.

Afterwards — he did not remember much of what happened afterwards — she had turned and looked at him. She put a semen-drenched finger to the scar on his forehead, the wound from that time when he had been thinking too much during a skipping game, as if wondering what it was, or as if she were saying: Now you’re marked for life. And he could not help thinking that what he considered the badge of his nobility, the proof that it was possible to think parallel thoughts, was now smeared with semen. Then she had quickly tidied herself up, opened the door of the tower and smiled — a smile that was neither accusing nor rueful; a smile which said that she would neither belittle nor make too much of what had happened. And, whether because of that smile or what, he saw that this, this act, even though it was not all that immoral, and even though it was the sort of thing that millions of people did every day without blinking and without it having any serious repercussions — that in his, Jonas Wergeland’s, case this was the one thing in life he should not have done. He knew that from the instant his semen touched the palm of her hand, or from the second the drops of sperm hit the water below, his life was spilt, ruined, as strangely and inexorably as tearing a tendon — only a tiny tendon but still enough to make one collapse in absolute agony. I’m going to fertilise the whole world, he thought, but I am dead.

They walked down the stairs and took a taxi into town, drove past the vast Comércio Square down on the waterfront, before ending up at a small restaurant, a tasca, in Alfama, not far from the cathedral. He remembered very little of that meal. The food was probably excellent. The wine too. He stared at a building on the other side of the street, faced with glazed tiles so begrimed that the pattern on them could only just be made out, like another world, behind the dirt. He sat as if in a trance. Remembered only that she appeared to be having a nice time, that she revealed a charming — surprisingly charming — side of herself, that there was a smell of grilled sardines, that darkness fell outside, that the tile-covered building front took on a deeper and deeper glow; lots of small, identical tiles combining to produce a mesmerising effect, rather the way kiss upon kiss can do. He had a vague idea that they had talked about many things, that someone had sung, possibly the proprietrix, and that she, Marie, had suddenly got up and said she had to go. But before she left, this he remembered quite clearly, she had leaned over him and whispered in his ear, as if it were a big secret, that he shouldn’t worry any more about his series, it would be okay. ‘We’ll figure something out,’ she whispered, as if she really cared. ‘We might be able to dip into the DG’s kitty.’ Then she made her way out, waving to their hosts, flashing him a smile, one of those rare smiles that sticks in the memory. ‘See you in Oslo,’ she said from the door. ‘And go easy on those Brazilian soap operas. Take a ride on a tram-car instead.’

He completed his television series. And it was good — some said brilliant. A substantial additional injection of funds made it possible for the remaining programmes to be made. He would be hailed as an artist who did not prostitute himself — this was the very word used in several reviews. He had read them and hung his head. But still he could not rid himself of the thought that Marie H. had done it out of genuine sympathy for his project. That the incident at the Belém Tower was neither here nor there as far she was concerned.

He was left sitting dejectedly in a tasca in Alfama, staring at the fish bones on his plate with no memory of having eaten fish. There was just one thought racing around his head: of Margrete. Daniel had been right. The soul did lie in the seed. To anyone else this would have been a mere bagatelle. Only he perceived the true gravity of it. Because he was married to an extraordinary woman, there was no telling how she would react to a ‘bagatelle’. At some point she would ask him what he had done in Lisbon. She would spot right away, however well he washed himself, that he had come back with a smear of semen on his forehead. He knew even then, as he sat in that tasca in Alfama, that one day he would stand over Margrete’s dead body and ask himself why she had done it. And he knew that he would be forced to answer: Because I didn’t think about her here in Lisbon. Or rather: for the first time, with this act, he had given open expression to his lack of empathy, his unforgivable blindness. He knew what Margrete was like, that he ought to have considered the labyrinthine turnings of her mind, but he pretended not to know.

He had been confronted with his exceptional blindness back in the summer he spent with Bo Wang Lee. He was never quite sure when he discovered it — the truth about Bo, that is. Or whether he had actually known right from the start, but had simply chosen to ignore it. Bo was more than he seemed. More than a Chinese even.

It may have started with the little electronic organ in one of the rooms in Bo’s aunt’s flat. Bo said his aunt was keeping it for her boyfriend, who also worked with the Norwegian American Line. Bo had been given strict instructions not to touch it, but he thought he could at least demonstrate the hypnotically pulsating rhythm box. Simply by pressing a few buttons Bo conjured up the sensuous rhythms of the rumba, the samba, the cha-cha-cha. Jonas thought it was pretty smart. But it was more than smart to Bo, he turned up the sound and began to dance, and Jonas saw, to his amazement, horror almost, that Bo knew the basic steps, and not only that: something weird had happened to his body, there was something a little too graceful and supple — voluptuous — about it as he swayed around the floor with an invisible Latin American partner, sending Jonas a strangely enigmatic, zig-zag smile, as if he were feeling both proud and a bit sheepish.

Even more thought-provoking, though, was what happened when Jonas showed Bo one of Daniel’s ballpoint pens, purchased in Strömstad. On it was a lady in a black bathing-suit and when you turned the pen upside down the bathing-suit slid off. Jonas thought it was kind of sexy. But when he looked at Bo, expecting to be complimented on the stripper in his pen, he saw that Bo was not the least bit impressed. If anything, he looked as if he was disappointed that Jonas should fall for something so appallingly cheap and vulgar.

There had been more of such incidents, but they had been evenly dispersed and only later was Jonas able to view them all together as one long clue to something he should have noticed right away. If, that is, he had not, in fact, seen it but — busy as they were with their games — had chosen not to see it.

Tucked away in one of the many cardboard boxes which testified to the fact that Bo and his mother were nomads, residing only temporarily in the flat at Solhaug, was a calligraphy set. Often when Jonas rang Bo’s doorbell in the morning his friend would be sitting writing with elegant pens and real ink which contrasted sharply with the rude pen which Jonas had shown him. Jonas simply did not get it — a boy who just sat there writing. Who liked to write. Not only liked it — Bo loved it, Jonas could tell from the rapt expression look on his face. Bo’s father, the archaeologist who was so interested in China and the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, had taught him some of the Chinese characters which he knew. One day when Jonas arrived earlier than usual, Bo went straight back to a large, white sheet of paper and carried on writing, or drawing I suppose one should say, with a brush and ink as black as his Prince Valiant hair. Jonas stood and watched. They had arranged to go fishing up at Breisjøen — ‘to catch the biggest swordfish in the world,’ as Bo said — but Jonas could not bring himself to disturb his friend, so absorbed was he, sitting at his aunt’s desk writing, or drawing. The sheet of paper bristled with weird brushstrokes; Jonas thought it looked like an octopus, with tentacles going all ways. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered, afraid of breaking Bo’s concentration. ‘The Chinese sign for friendship,’ Bo said. ‘These four strokes in the middle, like four chambers, stand for “heart”.’

Jonas thought it looked difficult. As difficult as true friendship, Bo said. Writing and reality went hand in hand.

Bo picked up a new sheet of paper, wrote the word again. Slowly but surely, better than his previous attempt. This time the character looked more like a woman doing a pirouette with arms outstretched. Jonas stood looking over Bo’s shoulder, watching as the brush was drawn, moist and black, over the white paper, seeing the lovely, damp pattern which took shape. He marvelled at the movements, it was like a dance, except that it was executed with a brush. ‘Why are you doing it again?’ Jonas asked. Bo looked more like a Chinese than ever before. ‘Because I’m practising friendship, or something that’s more than friendship,’ Bo said and suddenly glanced up at him with a penetrating look in his eye that Jonas had never seen before. ‘Here, you can have it,’ he said and handed the paper to Jonas.

So Jonas was prepared, and yet not, when they were playing up at Badedammen one day, just before Bo was due to go back to America. The day was sultry; they got caught in a sudden hail shower. ‘Somebody’s getting married in heaven,’ Bo cried delightedly and did a pirouette with arms outstretched. Jonas knew where they could take shelter, he ran ahead to a small tunnel through which the stream from Steinbruvannet was channelled underneath the road and down to Badedammen. They could barely stand upright in the square concrete pipe, but at least they didn’t get their feet wet — the stream only ran down the very centre of the pipe. They were in a secret chamber.

Outside the hail hammered down. Jonas listened to the lovely, pattering sound mingling with the purling of the stream. Big, white pearls sprayed down and bounced away. Within a couple of minutes the stream was almost white. ‘A farewell present from me,’ Bo said with a smile, fiddling with the chain around his neck.

Jonas was not sure whether it was this hail shower which caused some sort of membrane to burst. At any rate this was when it happened. A moment which branded itself into him. The hail abruptly stopped and the sun came out, bathing everything in a golden light. They heard the loud drone of an engine. Across the patch of sky visible from the tunnel mouth glided a light plane, white with red stripes, like a giant butterfly. At that same moment Jonas became aware that something was happening to Bo. Jonas stood there and watched a person unfold. Bo turned slowly to face him and was someone else. One turn and everything had changed. He was she. And she put her arms around him and hugged him, embraced him in the true sense of the word, wrapped her arms around him, and Jonas felt embarrassed and pleased and confused and happy all at once, as if lots of conflicting emotions were being juggled about inside him and kept in the air at the same time.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ Bo said, she said, close against him and smelling of marshmallows.

Jonas felt a lump in his throat and a pressure behind his eyes, but he bit his lip, swallowed again and again.

‘I love you,’ she said, in such a way and such a tone that ever afterwards, when Jonas heard those words uttered, in a song, in a film, or even in a soap opera, he would remember that moment.

Jonas was lost for words. Outside the hailstones were melting in the sun, sparkling like tiny crystals. He wanted to stay there holding, being held by, this girl for the rest of his life. He wanted her to juggle him into a unified whole. And when she finally let go of him, and he let go of her, he knew that from then on he would always be looking for a girl like Bo. And maybe that was why he had to wait so long. Because girls like Bo, who practised writing the sign for love while pretending that it was the sign for friendship, did not exactly grow on trees. Who knows, Jonas thought, they could be as rare on Earth as Vegans.

Margrete was, however, just such a girl. And she too went away and left him. But he waited. He did not know that he was waiting, but he waited patiently till she returned. After Margrete died he met Kamala Varma.

One day towards the close of the millennium, while Jonas Wergeland was still in prison, Kamala Varma walked into the office of her talented and experienced agent in Holland Park Avenue in London and laid the manuscript of her new novel on his desk. ‘You won’t regret having put your faith in me,’ she said.

As the book’s title — The Tree of Love — suggested, it was a love story. Kamala Varma had been writing for a long time; as she said later in interviews, she had always written. She enjoyed great international respect as a social-anthropologist, but she had also published a couple of novels which had been well received in the English-speaking world; for, although she was a Norwegian citizen and had even written a controversial biographical novel in almost flawless Norwegian — and that despite the Hindi of her childhood — English was her natural first language. But nothing in these earlier works of fiction could have prepared anyone, not even her clever agent, for the impact of the story she had now delivered.

The British publishers knew a good thing when they saw it; they could tell right away that this was something special. Bidding for the rights was unusually fast and furious and the publisher who won the auction — to everyone’s satisfaction the same house which had published her previous books — had not thrown away its money. Unlike Harald Hardråde, Kamala Varma really did conquer England and thereafter the rest of the world. When the novel came out it was instantly welcomed by ecstatic, nigh on infatuated reviewers and readers who had apparently been waiting for, not to say yearning for, such a story for decades. Within just two years The Tree of Love had been translated into over forty languages. Suddenly everybody wanted a piece of Kamala Varma: the press, television, this body and that, and all of them at the same time. She was interviewed everywhere, she was invited to appear everywhere, she was discussed everywhere. There was a period when her name cropped up in every corner of the information society, from Hammerfest to Santiago de Chile.

That Kamala Varma survived that first wave of hysteria, the huge spate of publicity which can inundate and all but drown anyone who achieves international success, was due not so much to her own level-headedness as to the book itself. Because The Tree of Love was — in the words of one reviewer — the sort of story which no one could explain. ‘It is a book that strikes straight at the heart of everyone who opens it,’ he wrote, ‘a story which sinks in and lodges inside the reader like a vital organ.’ Not long ago an American literary critic declared that The Tree of Love had done as much for our view of love as Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species did for our view of mankind. And that may be true. Because readers of Kamala Varma’s novel would like to believe that love can evolve, that love is not necessarily the same today as it was four thousand years ago. That it encompasses hitherto unknown possibilities. So too with the heart, Kamala Varma said: the human heart also undergoes change.

Overnight Kamala Varma became a world-famous woman. And a rich woman. Even in Norway, that fortress of a country which had tried for so long to kick her out, she gained recognition. People would turn and stare blatantly at her in the smallest, most out-of-the-way places, and not merely because of her colour now. Around the time when Jonas was released from prison, Kamala started writing a new novel — one that went beyond Victoria, she told Jonas — while still travelling all over the world, promoting new translations of The Tree of Love.

What did all this have to do with Jonas Wergeland? It had a great deal to do with Jonas Wergeland, even though Kamala Varma’s love story was not about him in any way. You see, The Tree of Love, a work praised to the skies by people all over the world, was dedicated to Jonas Wergeland. At the bottom of one of the very first, perfectly white pages of the original, English edition were the words: ‘For Jonas W.’ That was all: ‘For Jonas W.’

It took him a while to get round to asking her about it, it was almost as if he did not dare. One evening they were sitting by the fire in Kamala’s flat in Russell Square in London, not far from where Virginia Woolf had lived. Neither of them had spoken for some minutes. Then he asked: ‘Why did you do it?’

She had stroked the cross-shaped scar on his forehead with her finger and stared at him, as if surprised that he could not guess. ‘Because it was meeting you, your otherness, that put the idea into my head,’ she said.

Jonas thought about this again and again. What an honour. To have one’s name appear as the first words, as a prelude to, a story which had been printed in millions of copies, a book which would be read by young people sitting on park benches who would turn their faces to the sky every now and again and make sacred vows to themselves. A book which men would buy and quote from at difficult moments, as they knelt before their wives. A book which old folk would read and weep over, because they realised that the insight which this novel had given them and which they had rejoiced over in their youth had been no more than a seed, one which had since sprouted and grown into a mighty tree inside them.

When Jonas got out of prison he became Kamala’s secretary. He took care of the mass of paperwork associated with her books. She would have preferred to give him another title. ‘You’re not my secretary,’ she said, ‘you’re my reader.’ But Jonas insisted on being allowed to call himself a ‘secretary’ — a word which, in its original sense, meant a person entrusted with a secret, a private seal, and that was exactly what he wanted to be.

Jonas often took out The Tree of Love and ran a finger over his name printed on that page, as if he could not believe it was true. When everything was over, all that would be left of him would be this little dedication in a romantic novel. People would always wonder who ‘Jonas W.’ was — some people would even take the trouble to find out. He, Jonas Wergeland, who had held a whole nation in the palm of his hand, who had once ranked second only to the king, would wind up as a footnote, so to speak, in a love story. What a paradox. All his travails with television — only to be remembered because of a book.

The first time Jonas opened The Tree of Love, in prison, and saw those letters on the expanse of white at the very front of the novel, he found it hard to read what they said. The letters seemed to him to be shining, his name seemed to be shining. He sat with the book in his hands and knew that he had made the greatest discovery of his life, a discovery which redefined everything, truly expanded him, made him a new person.

So far I have not understood a thing, he thought. I need to go back to the very beginning.