Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Rings in water, spreading outward, touching other rings, far, far out.

He had already made up his mind. He would not be pursuing the matter. The radiologist might not know what it was, but Jonas did. A new organ. Or the rudiments of a new organ. Inside his body, inside the chest cavity, a third lung was starting to develop. The way he saw it, it might even have been this new, little lung that had saved him when he had come close to dying, committing suicide, in the early days of his imprisonment. Later he was also inclined to give this organ the credit for the fact that he had been open to a new and overwhelming acquaintance: Kamala Varma.

He viewed his life in another light. He had become aware at an early age of his rare gift — the ability to think several thoughts in parallel. Which made it all the more frustrating not to be able to put these skills into practice. Because the extraordinary, the truly amazing things of which he felt himself capable were of a quite different order to the highly acclaimed television series which he had eventually managed to produce. As far as he was concerned all his projects had been failures. Like producing scrap iron when he possessed the formula for making gold. Now, though, he saw that there had been a purpose to these fiascos. All his mental powers, the talent he feared he had abused, had been converted into something physical, corporeal. His incessant cerebral exertions, all his grandiose, unrealised plans had prepared the ground for the growth of this new organ.

During his years in prison, his cell would become many things to Jonas. But if it is true that every person has their Samarkand, a place in which they find the essence of life, a place where one can see what lies beyond everything else — then yes, that prison cell was Jonas Wergeland’s Samarkand.

Jonas was allowed to take one of the X-ray pictures — the one showing his chest cavity from the front — for his cell. He hung it at the window and would lie gazing at it morning and evening. In a way he had always known it: that inside every person there was an Organ X, or at any rate the potential to form such an organ. We could never stand far enough back from ourselves in time. Even though we knew that mankind was constantly evolving. Time was when we had had gills. There in his cell, Jonas saw his youthful conviction confirmed: there is more life in us than we think. We are unfinished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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