Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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.