Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

One night, in the moonlight, she took Jonas by the hand and led him up onto the city wall beside the north gate. And here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she produced a kite she had bought and flew it from the top of the wall in the winter night, steered it expertly, making it swoop low then soar again, a sight which reminded Jonas of something he had seen before, in another life so it seemed. ‘Here, you try,’ she said, standing behind him and helping him, guiding him. ‘Well done,’ she said, as if talking to a child. Jonas stood there, wrapped in his thick, quilted coat, and flew a kite so high that it was just a black dot in the moonlight. It was all about control. About relaxing. Letting things run.

Margrete said not a word. Jonas Wergeland stood atop a city wall in China, flying a kite in the moonlight and he understood.

So why did he do it?

At the airport, on the day of their departure, Jonas took their guide aside. ‘That was so nice, that piece by Grieg you played. Thank you.’ The man was gratified by this, he could see.

‘Yes, Grieg was a great hit-maker,’ the guide said. ‘I know several tunes by him. Next time you come to Xi’an I will play them for you.’

Again that night in the hotel in Beijing Margrete snuggled in to his back, as if wanting not only to warm him, but also to defend him against attack from behind. She lay there, breathing on him. He was dead, a mere form; he had not yet discovered his true potential. He might have created the most famous Norwegian television series of all time, a worldwide success, and be arguably the biggest celebrity in the whole country, but he had not found his way in life.

The rows and rows of terracotta warriors had also given him a sense of déja vu. They reminded him of his youthful endeavours back home in the basement at Solhaug: the skipping, the rope, the thoughts that were unearthed, in serried ranks. Maybe his basement had been just such a subterranean realm, a place where he had tried to do much the same as Emperor Qin: to make time stand still, win eternal life. Build a world of his own, which no one could invade, where he would be safe.

But during that secret basement period of his life, on his journeys of discovery into the world’s most beautiful hemisphere: the brain — to the extent that this is the seat of thought — his objective kept shifting. At one stage all his efforts were focused on mastering a triple skip, what he called a triplet. Gradually, however, he became more and more obsessed with punching a hole in something, breaking down a sort of wall of thoughts, of reaching beyond . He took it into his head that if he could just get enough thoughts turning in his mind simultaneously, something would burst open, all those different reflections would latch onto one another, their united weight rip the surface and they would sink down to illuminate something in the depths, like a bathysphere exploring some hitherto unplumbed fissure in the seabed. Or perhaps the ‘other place’ thus revealed would turn out to be what, in his mind, he called Samarkand. Many a time when he was skipping like a soul possessed in the dark basement, with the rope whirring round him as he did doubles, he felt as if he were caught in a whirl, as if he were a dervish of the skipping world. More and more often, once he had mastered the knack of following four trains of thought simultaneously, he had the impression that he was on the point of making some great find — that something massive, something colossal, was lying in wait, that it could break through at any minute. This reminded Jonas of the thrill of anticipation he experienced with a well-composed pop song the second before the chorus kicked in, or the feeling inside him when his father reached the final chord in a choral prelude and the hymn proper was about to thunder out. But even then, hovering inside the arc of the rope with four thoughts held suspended in the air, that was as far as it went. It was like working his way up to an orgasm, a liberating climax, which then subsided. The world which he sensed was there, remained hidden behind an unopened door, so to speak. It was as if he could hear it knocking, but could not open the door to it.

And speaking of unopened doors, for a long time Jonas had no idea what Karen Mohr did — for a living that is. But she was a great reader, that much he knew. Jonas had a theory that it was tales from warmer climes which had endowed her skin with such a dusky tint — if, that is, it was not her perpetual and powerful memory of the Riviera. Frequently, especially after a glass of Pernod, she would find occasion to quote thoughts on love to him, primarily reflections she had come across in French literature. One Saturday afternoon, one of those Saturdays when she was not due to dine at Bagatelle in Bygdøy allé, she told him about a writer by the name of Stendahl. He had written a whole book solely about love. ‘Would you mind nipping into the bedroom and getting it?’ she asked him. ‘It’s called De l’Amour and it’s just on your left, at eye-level, as you go in.’

Jonas was at a complete loss, did not know which way to turn. She pointed to the wall. Still Jonas was none the wiser, he stood there listening to the tinkling of the little fountain in among the plants, as if hoping it might inspire his imagination. Was he supposed to walk through the wall? Then he spied it. A door. He had never seen anything there before but a rug hanging on the wall, but this — he now noticed — exactly covered the door. The door handle had been there all the time, but it was almost invisible. It wasn’t unlike the secret doors in films set in old country houses or castles. It had never occurred to Jonas that of course there had to be other rooms in the flat.

‘It’s odd,’ Karen Mohr said when Jonas laughed and pointed at the door. ‘We’re always so interested in the room we happen to be in. In whether it consists of still smaller rooms, harbours secrets. We open drawers, peep behind the sofa. We are so intent on this that we don’t notice the secret doors in the room, which could lead us to great wings containing other rooms entirely. We all live in bigger houses than we imagine.’ On a later occasion — as she raised her eyes to her own portrait on the wall, sketched in Mougins before the war — she framed it in other, more personal, terms: ‘Our secret chambers lie not within us, but outside of us.’ For once her voice was husky with emotion.

As with her living room, he was not prepared for the sight which met his eyes when he walked through her bedroom door. In a way this came as an even greater surprise. Jonas came from a home almost devoid of books, although Rakel did own one work entitled My Treasury . This, Karen Mohr’s bedroom, truly was a treasury. Three of its walls were completely covered with bookcases which looked, with all their rows and rows of books, like brightly-coloured panels. Jonas had the impression of stepping into a warm, mystical forest. The bed was under the window. ‘I sleep well in there,’ he heard Karen say in the living room. Jonas could well understand that. This was how a bedroom ought to be: full of stories. Initially he just stood there staring. It immediately struck him that there was a connection between the two rooms, different thought they were. That this bedroom, with all these books, was the roots and the living room was the tree. Or maybe it was the other way round. The bedroom-cum-library was more like an interpretation of the living room. Her book collection had grown, blossomed, out of her thirst for understanding.

Or perhaps — it later occurred to him — all those books dealt with the search for someone who was worthy. It was as complex as that.

It took him a while to find Stendahl. On the left. But at her eye level. De l’Amour . Outside left, Jonas thought to himself. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. But it was wedged in tight: the shelf was crammed with volumes. He tugged and tugged, trying to pry the book free — only to end up working the whole shelf loose and bringing the entire row of books tumbling down on his head like a flock of wrathful birds. The ensuing din brought Karen Mohr rushing in, but she merely laughed when she saw what had happened. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, still laughing. He gave his head a shake, dazed. The shelf must have been loose, she told him. There was something wrong with the screws that held the shelves in place. She should have had those bookcases fixed long ago.