Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

For them this was a time of confusion. They ate their spaghetti with an ever growing repertoire of sauces: tuna with olives and tomatoes, a cream sauce with ham and leeks, while their discussions became more and more woolly. As their uncertainty and sense of alienation grew, so the Red Room underwent a metamorphosis. Leonard — now simply Leonardo — had started replacing the familiar photographs from Aktuell , hung on the walls by his father, with others. He removed from its frame the picture from Norsk Hydro of workers stacking bars of aluminium and in its stead put a still from Fellini’s 8½ . A photograph of miners on Svalbard was supplanted by a shot from The Red Desert of Monica Vitti in an industrial wasteland. Reality was giving way to fiction. They hardly ever left the basement now; day after day they sat in the Red Room eating pasta and discussing films they had seen, films they had not seen and films which Leonardo envisaged making. Jonas would not emerge from this state of confusion and woolliness until he rediscovered both his wrath and a focus for it through taking part in a spectacular demonstration in the Town Hall Square. By then Leonardo was long gone.

Later, Jonas would think it only natural that their almost parodically artificial existence should explode into pitiless reality. He was spending less time with Leonard by then, having started at Oslo Cathedral School. And there was no way that Leonard, or even a befuddled Leonardo, was going all the way into the city to attend some toffee-nosed school. ‘You’re a traitor to your class,’ he muttered to Jonas, in a brief flashback to their early, neo-realistic glory days in the Red Room. Leonard went on to a high school in the Grorud Valley. Though with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape.

Leonard’s dreadful discovery was made shortly after his last hike with his father. It was years since they had gone hill-walking together, but it may be that Leonard was making an effort to shake himself awake, thinking that the Norwegian mountains and fresh air would form a counterbalance to the Red Room and the flickering images of individuals incapable of making contact with one another. In the summer of 1970 he and his father went walking in the hills around Aurlandsdalen and it was here that Olav Knutzen took a picture which would eventually find its way into a host of yearbooks and reference works. Because by this time a new trend had long been apparent in the media: they would all — every last news outlet — descend on one spot. Everyone covering the same story. And even though at one time there had been some debate about Aurlandsdalen and the question of inalienable natural heritage versus energy needs, in the press as well as in an uproarious edition of television’s Open to Question chaired by the Grand Panjandrum himself, Kjell Arnljot Wig, the focus shifted away from Aurlandsdalen with the advent of the Mardøla affair. That summer, the eyes of the nation were on the great falls in the Møre og Romsdal region and a demonstration during which protesters, including professor of philosophy Arne Næss, were gently and politely carted off by the police. Meanwhile, in Aurlandsdalen, the Oslo Electricity Board could quietly get on with the work of damming Viddalsvatn and the waters beyond to form one huge lake, without anyone blocking the broad construction road with so much as a twig. So, with the accuracy of a Zen master, Olav Knutzen took the only photograph from Låvisdalen recording the merest hint of a demonstration, a faint protest, at least, against the development which got under way here in June of the same year as the Mardøla project. It was an important piece of documentary evidence, this picture, which is also why it has been reproduced so often; because in Norway it is Aurlandsdalen, and not Mardøla, which represents a watershed in the history of nature conservation; the Aurlandsdalen controversy was proof that an element of reflection had bored its way into all views on constant progress, heedless growth — something which led, among other things, to the establishment a couple of years later of an environmental protection agency. Olav Knutzen took his snap at the point when work had just begun on a structure of pyramid-like dimensions, a dam 100 metres in height and 370 metres in length and as broad at its base as it was tall. This photograph — in the background of which one can see the building contractor, Furholmen’s, massive construction machines at the foot of the dam, as well as some summer steadings which would soon be under water — shows Leonard with a wry little grin on his face — whether of confusion or anger Jonas could never decide. In his hand he holds a placard bearing the legend: ‘SAVE THE DALE’. Although perhaps what it should have said, or so Jonas would later think, was ‘Save the illusion’.

That same autumn Leonard got in touch with Jonas, and as soon as Jonas entered the basement room he knew that something was badly wrong. The aroma of simmering pasta sauce was noticeably absent. His friend greeted him with a face as deadpan as Buster Keaton’s. ‘I’ve made a horrible discovery,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned something that has changed my life. I’m not the person I thought I was.’

At the time Jonas had merely laughed at him, but much the same thought was to strike him years later, before his trip to Samarkand. The fact is, you see, that Jonas went all the way to Samarkand, to that blow-up in his mind, because he was in something of a dilemma regarding his future. He felt the need, therefore, to find some place far beyond the real world, a place where he could contemplate himself and his life at the greatest possible remove. And without realising it he fell back on Leonard’s choice of words: I am not the person I think I am. In short, Jonas set out on the long journey to Samarkand in order to discover himself.

After having sat for a long time exposing himself, exposing his body to the intricate beauty still discernible in the faded façades on Registan Square, Jonas got to his feet with the vague idea of visiting a nearby museum. It was at this moment that someone placed a hand, very lightly, on his shoulder. Jonas turned round and stared in bewilderment into the face of a man around his own age. He must have been sitting right behind him, in his blind spot, so to speak. The stranger smiled at the way Jonas started. ‘Tourist?’ he inquired, in pretty good English. ‘I did not think I would ever see a tourist here.’

Jonas was in no way prepared for what happened next. Although he ought to have been prepared. He was in a strange state of mind. And he was in Samarkand.

‘And you?’ Jonas asked.

‘I too am a tourist, although I suppose you could say this is my own country,’ the young man said.

Jonas was still feeling somewhat shaken by the sight of the other man. His features seemed disconcertingly familiar. Something about him filled Jonas with an uneasy curiosity. ‘I am from Leningrad,’ the young man said. ‘My name is Yuri.’ He offered his hand, they shook. Jonas also introduced himself, finished by saying ‘Norway’. As if it were a mantra. It never failed. Norway was a word which elicited a response from people, no matter where, as if they immediately associated it with something exotic, even those who did not even know that Norway was a country. The thought struck Jonas: there might be people in the world for whom Norway was a Samarkand, a spot so unreal that it acquired a magical, seductive aura.

Not so with Yuri. When he heard where Jonas was from he pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something down on it with a pencil, so vehemently that the graphite virtually flew in all directions. He handed the slip to Jonas. Then he waited, in evident suspense, as if he had just handed over a passport which would gain him immediate entry into Jonas’s world. On the paper was a fractional equation: figures and letters and infinity symbols. Jonas could make neither head nor tail of it. ‘Abel,’ said Yuri. ‘Abel!’ he repeated, even more emphatically, pointing at the piece of paper. ‘From a proof of convergence criteria.’