Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

He clambered down to the water, fished out the bottle. The cork was only half-in, so there was little chance of it having come from Buenos Aires. ‘Bound for World’s End’ it said on the piece of paper he pulled out. Nothing else. In a neat hand. He turned to look back — towards the southern tip of the island, known as World’s End — only to be blinded by sunlight. Someone was bouncing it off a mirror at him. He could see nothing except this tiny, dazzling sun dancing in the hand of a person on a jetty a little way off. Then the light went out. Through the binoculars which had, the previous autumn, enabled him to see the moons of Jupiter for the first time he spied a figure, a girl, waving to him. He picked up his book, strolled ashore and along to her jetty. Why did I do it? he would ask himself later. Because I let myself be dazzled?

By the time he reached the girl he had managed to get a pretty good look at her: T-shirt, shorts, bare feet — the only unusual touch was her hat, a white cap with a black skip like the ones worn by naval officers. She was laughing. ‘Nice one,’ he said, nodding at the mirror she still held in her hand. ‘I usually let people know when I want them to give me the sun. So, what was that note about?’

‘I heard you were looking for a berth.’

‘I’m going further than World’s End,’ he said.

‘I like a boy with ambition,’ she said, pointing at the binoculars round his neck. ‘I’ll take you wherever you want to go.’

‘Across the fjord?’

‘I’ll be getting under way in a minute.’

‘Now?’ he said. ‘But it’ll be night soon.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off her navel. Her T-shirt stopped shy of the waistband of her shorts, exposing her belly button: a small, mesmerisingly black hollow in her midriff, but one which was, nonetheless big enough for Jonas to feel that he could get lost in there. It struck him that he was more attracted to this hollow than to her. He gazed and gazed at it as if he had just discovered an unknown planet, here on Earth. He felt as if he was swirling round and round, as if everything — his eyes, his reason — was being drawn into a deliciously prurient vortex.

‘Don’t tell me you’re scared,’ she said. To Jonas it sounded like downright ventriloquism. Her words issued straight from her navel.

‘It’s too windy,’ he said.

‘Who’s afraid of a bit of a blow,’ she said.

‘It’s blowing pretty hard, I’d say,’ he replied. He knew he shouldn’t have said this. She smiled, lowered her eyes to his crotch. He was a little embarrassed by her directness. He looked up at the pennants smacking against their flagpoles. These and the swaying trees further up the beach gave plenty of cause for concern.

‘What have you brought with you?’ she asked.

‘I own no more than I can carry, I am a nomad.’ He jabbed a thumb at the rucksack slung over one shoulder, then realised that might not be what she meant. That this could be an existential question. That she was actually asking: ‘Who are you? Show me something from your civilisation.’ He handed her the book he was carrying, a textbook on the planetary system; he was reading up in preparation for the new term and course A 106 at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. She riffled through it briefly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There’s no knowing when this sort of thing might come in handy at sea.’ She shot a glance skywards. ‘You’ll see stars tonight, alright.’ Everything she said still seemed to him to have a double meaning.

Beside them lay a Knarr, a thirty-foot wooden boat, sturdy and reassuring, but at the same time slender and graceful. It stood out, it had a regal, a noble, air about it, as did she. ‘São Gabriel,’ Jonas read. She saw him start. ‘Didn’t you pay attention in school? Vasco da Gama’s flagship?’ she said.

But he was beyond paying attention now; he had been bewitched by a belly button, tossed into a whirlpool. They left Hvasser behind so quickly that he scarcely realised what was happening. Half an hour later it was all he could do just to hang on tight, they were moving too fast for his liking, the waves were too high, there was altogether too much foaming and frothing and surging and sighing going on round about him. Not only that, but it would be dark soon. Instinctively he held his breath, as if he were already under water. He knew that he had embarked upon an undertaking which he might well regret, or might never have the chance to regret, since he was in fact going to die, out here, in the middle of a storm-tossed sea.

‘Death is simple,’ his father had once told him. ‘You breathe out. You don’t breathe in. That’s all there is to it.’ After a while he had added: ‘Do you know why organ music is so beautiful? Because it’s a sustained act of dying, pure expiration.’

Jonas had noticed the piece which his father had been rehearsing when he died. Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in A minor. It seemed so apt: to be playing a prelude at the moment of your death, an overture as postlude.

Bo Wang Lee was the first to ask the question which Jonas Wergeland would later consider to represent the very crux of existence: what should you take with you. It was a question which could be applied at all levels. What, for example, should one take to one’s death? The day before the funeral, Jonas had lingered by his father’s open casket long after the rest of the family had gone. There his father lay, in a dark suit, as if he were taking a nap before a party, or prior to some important engagement. A journey. What should he take with him? Somewhere in Africa, so Jonas had heard, coffins were designed as tributes to the deceased. A fisherman was given a coffin shaped like a blue tuna fish, a chief was laid to rest in a golden eagle. Haakon Hansen deserved more than a neutral white coffin. A kayak, perhaps. Jonas placed his father’s worn organ-playing shoes in the coffin, along with a book containing Bach’s six trio sonatas. A volume of the National Geographic also found favour in Jonas’s eyes.

What should you take with you? What was life?

The last notes of ‘Thine be the Glory’ faded away. The woman in orange had yet to make her appearance. Daniel began his address to the bereaved. Jonas crept over to the corner of the gallery from which, as a child, he had so often dropped bits of paper onto people’s heads. His eye went to the front pew, to his mother who seemed remarkably small all of a sudden, shrunken. Jonas had three decades of living behind him, but only now did he see it. He had got it all wrong. He had always regarded his mother as the more active of the two; she was the one who saw to the social side of things, who invited people over, organised parties, while his father was the quiet, reserved one, with few friends. Not for nothing had Jonas at a certain point in his life taken his mother’s maiden name, Wergeland. His mother was high days and holidays, his father was the bedrock and the humdrum. Jonas had the impression that his father would have liked to be alone, that he longed to lead a monastic life. He was, at any rate, an out-and-out individualist, a man who wanted to be his own symphony orchestra. Now and again it had even crossed Jonas’s mind that his father was, to some extent, a loser. Secretly, Jonas felt sorry for him. Which was also why he loved his father so much. But now. All these people. Over a thousand of them. This day showed that he might have been totally mistaken about his parents and their respective roles.

And then, as his thoughts drift off down their own path, his eye is drawn to something, a hub, something inescapable, which he does not at first see, then suddenly spies: Margrete. A large M on a black wall. He starts, amazed that her magnetic attraction should be so strong even when he is seeing her from behind. She is sitting right below the pulpit with Kristin, their daughter. Margrete was wearing one of her strings of pearls. ‘I think your father would like it,’ she had said when Jonas had wrinkled up his nose at the gleaming white necklace. At first he couldn’t think why he had started at the sight of his wife. He looked at the nape of Margrete’s neck, noting how clearly it testified to this woman’s uncommonly upright carriage. But at the same time he noticed something else, so plainly that he would never be able to dismiss it. He saw how vulnerable it looked. More vulnerable when viewed from here than at close quarters. All at once he understood why he had been so startled: if he knew so little about his father, how much did he really know about Margrete? Later, it would seem to Jonas that things had been arranged thus for just this purpose: that he should be up in the organ loft and catch sight of Margrete’s long neck, adorned with pearls; as if he would never have discovered it, that tremendous vulnerability, had he not been observing her from so far away, and on such an occasion, with his father lying in his coffin, dead. Jonas was struck by a feeling — which he promptly fended off — that it all came down to her, even this funeral; that the centre lay here, at the nape of her neck, not up at the altar, not at his father’s coffin.