Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

‘I’m here,’ she whispered behind him, in his ear. He felt her warm breath against his skin.

Somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, Jonas suspected that these fancies were nothing but red herrings, meant to distract his mind from something possibly more troubling: the fear that he was not worthy. ‘Worthy’ pronounced with stretched vowels and a rolled ‘r’. From the moment when he had run into Margrete again he had known that she was a more intelligent person than he. Better equipped, in all ways. He had thought — as if he were living in the age of chivalry — that he had to bring her something, as proof that he was, despite all the signs to the contrary, good enough. That he quite simply had to do some great deed. And although he eventually abandoned such notions, he was occasionally inclined to believe that this was why he had never really settled into his cushy announcer job, and was indeed what had moved him to make the whole Thinking Big series. Nevertheless, here he was, in Xi’an, and he was so afraid. Afraid that even that great work was not enough. Afraid that in some way it was too simple. So afraid that he had had to seek refuge in another, more plausible reason for his fear; a non-existent lover. Part of him cosseted the thoughts that raged inside his head, part of him was ashamed of them, of the details which he magnified to the point of unrecognisability, as though he were on the track of a crime far more serious than adultery.

The first thing Margrete did the next morning was to take him to a clothes market down a side street where, for next to nothing, she bought him a green quilted military greatcoat with gold buttons and an imitation fur collar. They climbed into the car and drove for half an hour through Shaanxi province, past bare fields and gardens full of leafless trees, to the district of Lintong, where they pulled up outside what looked like a huge hangar surrounded by smaller buildings and a busy souvenir shop. Margrete knew exactly where to go, she bought tickets then made a beeline for the largest building and led Jonas up a stairway flanked by urns adorned with dragons. Then suddenly, after passing through a dimly-lit vestibule lined with sales booths, they came face to face with what Margrete had brought him halfway round the world to see. And actually this said all there was to say about Margrete Boeck, this was her in a nutshell: you accused her of something and instead of answering you she took you to China.

And so it was here, as they stood at the pale-green railing on a platform overlooking a piece of ground the size of a football pitch, a sort of enormous sandpit, that Jonas, clad in a military greatcoat, discovered himself, or rather: an army of replicas, semblances of himself. Thousands of petrified human forms. He felt himself to be every bit as dead as them. He felt as if he had been baked, burned, by love.

It was the strangest sight. Jonas stood there like a general inspecting his troops of fired clay, terracotta, who looked as though they were marching up out of the ground, ready to do battle. There had to be a couple of thousand soldiers there, row upon row of them, all life-size, and behind them thousands of others, still hidden in the earth and waiting for the archaeologists to dig them out. The whole thing seemed oddly familiar, he must have read about it somewhere or other. Either that, or he had had this feeling inside him for a long time. The feeling that something, an entire world, would rise up out of the ground itself. Ever since that summer with Bo Wang Lee. And he understood, or thought he understood, what Margrete’s purpose had been in bringing him here to see this wonder.

While he leaned on the railing, as if on a boat, gazing at an ocean, Margrete told him about the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, tyrant and reformer, who built with one hand and pulled down with the other; the emperor who was responsible both for the Great Wall and the decree ordering the burning of all scrolls. Less well-known were his paranoid endeavours to safeguard his life even after death. Archaeologists had not yet ventured to explore the burial mound, the mausoleum itself, which lay some kilometres from there, and which Jonas would see on the way back.

Jonas listened, and the more Margrete told him, the more this story seemed to find an echo in his own ambition, his urge to make a name for himself, not least when he thought of the television series into which he had invested such an inhuman amount of work and which he had only recently presented to over a million Norwegians — a Great Wall of images, if you like.

Jonas surveyed the thousand-odd soldiers so far unearthed. He thought he could also descry, like something lying behind them, the over six thousand figures waiting under the ground. They were all part of Emperor Qin’s vast kingdom of the dead. The terracotta army was there to defend his tomb, ensure him of eternal life. Margrete concluded her tale. Jonas looked at her, saying nothing, but with a wordless question on his face: Why are you telling me all this? And at that same moment it dawned on him that in talking about Emperor Qin she was actually talking about him, Jonas; she regarded them, Qin and him, as parallel characters, though not in the way he had first imagined — the real similarity between them had little to do with their ambitious undertakings.

‘Extreme security calls for extreme brutality,’ she said.

Jonas knew what she meant. He stood there inside a huge hangar, as far away from home as he could possibly be, on Earth at any rate, stood there clad in a quilted military greatcoat, like a living, breathing terracotta soldier, and he knew.

She caught and held his eye. ‘Jonas,’ she said. He met the gaze of those dark-brown eyes which did not see through him, but into him, seeming to embrace his whole being. ‘You can never feel secure,’ she said. Or did not say. He read it in her eyes.

They spent some days in Xi’an, in that windy, dusty city which seemed to Jonas to mark a new beginning for Margrete and him, or at any rate a fresh chance. It was also the starting point of the Silk Road, Marco Polo’s Chang’an, once the greatest city in the world. Jonas had spent a whole day walking about on his own amid the fumes of coal fires and baked yams, trailed up and down Xi’an’s four main streets, which ran to the four points of the compass: symbolic, so it seemed, of four alternative paths. His marriage, which had been pretty rocky for some time, suddenly seemed full of possibility again, there was no knowing where it might end. He wandered the streets in his heavy greatcoat like a terracotta soldier resurrected; roamed around Xi’an, his head buzzing with thoughts — and it came to him. No matter what he did — built a wall around her, built a wall for her — he could never feel secure, there was no guarantee that she would find him worthy. All he could do was to trust her. He had been like a lump of clay, set hard, but he had been brought back to life. And he knew why. She had breathed life into him.

He woke up, became a new man. Margrete took him by the arm and showed him around, needed no guide. In an almost tourist-free Xi’an, under a clear, cold blue sky, they visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Green Dragon Temple and the Provincial Museum of History which, as it happened, was also a mosque. Something about her passion for candied plums, which they bought threaded onto a stick, and the way she ordered the taxi drivers about, told him that she had been here before. With amazing assurance she tracked down the best herbalists and silk merchants, as well as the most out-of-the-way restaurants, hidden down backstreets, in gardens where carp and mandarin fish swam in glass tanks and snakes coiled in cages with reassuring stones on their lids. Margrete, too, seemed different now, somehow relieved, or hopeful; she came out with all sorts of information about China, smiled and pointed at little children with knitted Gagarin helmets on their heads, but bare bottoms showing through the slits in the backs of their trousers even in the biting cold. At night she lay and looked at him, reminded him of things they had done when they were going out together in sixth grade. Of the weighing machines at the Eastern station that dispensed wise sayings along with a note of their weight. Of the time when Jonas won a ski race because the weather suddenly changed and all the other competitors’ skis got clogged up. They laughed. Laughed together as they had not done in ages. Her eyes were golden, deep and smouldering. And like gold they only really came into their own in the twilight.