Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It was worth it all for that instant of intense closeness. Jonas had the feeling that they did not need to do any more than that. That this brief, electrified moment more than justified all the ski trekking, the months of red-hot expectation, the pictures of her which he had blown-up almost to the point of unrecognisability and caressed in his dreams.

They got to their feet, brushed off the snow. His leg hurt. She turned to run her fingers over the marks his ski binding had made in the tree trunk, as if he had carved their names inside a heart. Although he tried not to, eventually he had to meet her eye and as he held her gaze he saw it all, as in a red haze, a darkroom in which pictures were developed at lightning speed. Up to this point you might say that he had merely loved her with his eyes, and only now did his mind seem to catch up with his vision and compel him to perceive her in another way, forced him to consider whether his eyes might have been wrong. Again he was made aware of what a blessing and a curse it was to be able to extract all he could from a girl at their first meeting, or from the moment when he understood that things could get serious. He was unable to stop the thoughts that flew off into the future, there to branch out in all directions, as if he were standing at a crossroads, covering every possible ski route at the same time — and all in order to determine whether she was the person he hoped she would be. Within a matter of seconds he found himself delving, despite his youth and lack of experience, deep into the exhausted possibilities of wedded life, into the petty arguments of a fifteen-year-old marriage; and not only that, he also explored all of the alternative forks in the road, the various, hypothetical paths in life he encountered at different points along the way. He stood there gazing into her eyes, and in his mind he saw their first kiss, actually saw quite vividly how he caught the taste of raspberry jam, then saw them going to the cinema and, weeks later, how he touched her breasts — from outside a flannel shirt, it’s true; how he had dinner at her house, not only that, but that they had grouse, shot by her father, and then how, late one evening, in front of a roaring fire he slipped his hand between her legs; how they got engaged, the mad, passionate lovemaking in a sleeping bag; how they got married, the speech she made at the wedding, their first child, buying a house — log-built — dinners with friends, the general wear and tear, the quarrels over lopsided cheese-cutting. Everyone knows the expression ‘to undress her with his eyes’. Jonas carried on where others left off. Not only was Jonas Wergeland capable of simulating an orgasm, he could simulate an entire marriage.

They struggled back up the hillside to Sinober. She kept her body pressed close against his the whole time, acting almost as a crutch. They phoned from the café. Haakon Hansen drove up through Nittedal to collect him. As Jonas shut the car door she stared at him through the window with eyes that made him quake. He was hers, those eyes said, or so Jonas imagined. And she wanted him as he was now, hurt, an invalid of sorts, someone on whom she could take pity, care for, help. Jonas did not know whether he was misinterpreting all this. His mother had once hinted that maybe he took life too seriously. Sometimes Jonas thought that he also took love too seriously. Or was too scared. Scared of being disappointed. Scared of finding that not only the world but love, too, was flat. In other words: scared of catching Melankton’s syndrome.

When he returned to school a couple of days later, she came straight over to him at the morning break, wanting to hold his hand, to show that they were going together, although there had been no talk of this between them. He refused, but again she had looked at him with that feverish expression on her face which told him that any rebuff would be lost on her. At every break that day she came running happily up to him and groped eagerly for one of his hands. He kept them in his pocket.

By the last interval of the day the penny had finally dropped. ‘I can’t go out with you,’ he said, barely managing to get the words out before she grabbed him roughly and threw him to the ground, hard, right down into the slush. More in desperation than in anger. Several of the others saw it, whispered. She walked off. She sounded as though she was crying. Jonas could not understand how someone so apparently robust and strong-minded could react in such a way.

Then, one night in March when Jonas was just on his way to bed, the whole family heard someone shouting out on the flag green. They went to the windows. In the centre of the patch of lawn between the blocks of flats stood Eva N. in her red anorak, calling his name. Loudly and clearly. And broken-heartedly. Daniel almost killed himself laughing, but his mother shushed him sternly.

No one would ever forget that night. Eva had brought something with her. It looked like a cartridge-case. She did something to the top before holding the tube straight up above her head. For a moment Jonas was afraid that she was going to set light to herself, like those Buddhist monks in Vietnam. Up shot a rocket, a coruscating streak, hundreds of metres long, accompanied by a whistling sound. It was a distress flare. Jonas remembered that her father had a boat. The flare exploded high in the sky above the flats. People had come out onto their balconies, they stared up at the bright red ball slowly descending on a tiny parachute. Falling gently and gracefully, burning with a strange intensity. The whole of Grorud seemed to be bathed in red light. And in the scant two minutes for which it lasted, the girl on the grass called Jonas’s name, just his name, helplessly almost, as if she was crying out to be saved, rather than loved. As if she was saying: ‘Look, I am bleeding.’

It was all very embarrassing, of course. That the family, the whole estate, should have been witness to this drama. Mr Iversen was cursing under his breath about people turning a March night into New Year’s Eve, robbing him of his once-a-year shot at the limelight. ‘It’s against the law,’ he muttered. ‘It’s sheer madness.’

At the same time Jonas could not help feeling rather proud. Here was this girl, in the middle of the flag green, and so in love with him that she did not care two hoots whether she was making a fool of herself in front of the whole estate. It was almost as though, standing there on that March night in the red glow from the flare — in a vast darkroom, if you like — she thought that she could develop love. It may well have been madness. But, looked at another way: she had nothing to lose. She was in distress. She did it in order to save herself, Jonas thought to himself. She wanted to maximise the crisis, so to speak, get the heartache over and done with. From that point of view the red light was the saving of her. And who knows, maybe she recalled this episode, in many ways a heroic deed, years later — by which time she was a famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions — when she saved her own life by sending up a similar parachute flare in Antarctis after her kayak was wrecked and she was left drifting on a large ice floe.

But to get back to the red thread of our story: Jonas was well-equipped to identify with Blow-Up — a film that revolved around a room suffused with red light in which an individual produced more and more blurred enlargements of smaller and smaller sections of a photograph. It was a film about the mystery of the image, all images. It was a film which quite simply questioned the nature of reality. Do we see what we see? Or, in Jonas Wergeland’s version: Are you in love when you are in love?

Somewhat against their will, both Jonas and Leonard were drawn further and further into Michelangelo Antonioni’s universe. Something was happening to them. Very gradually. Jonas began to feel unwell. His wrath turned to perplexity. They were looking for answers, but were given nothing but questions. They wanted to train their eye, hone it, but instead found themselves losing confidence in it. Leonard did not know that he was soon to lose confidence in everything, including his own origins.