Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

She would be off school for a week. This would surprise him. They had gone out together for a few months, they had talked for hours, played music to one another. And now — it would dawn on him that he had not known anything about her, not a blind thing.

Jonas stood in the National Gallery, where he and Leonard were supposed to be investigating the possibilities of being allowed to film in the sculpture gallery, but where instead Tchaikovsky’s exquisite music had led him up to the first floor, to the room containing J.C. Dahl’s huge painting from Stalheim. He listened to Sarah B. playing the violin, watched her fingers as the orchestra came to the end of ‘Serenade in C-major’. There was a burst of applause, loud and heartfelt. One starry-eyed gentleman, clearly a tourist, possibly American, went up to Sarah and presented her with his ring before bowing gallantly and walking out. She got to her feet, smiling, and came over to him, to Jonas, and said: ‘I didn’t know you were into paintings. Are you into music too?’

Jonas looked from her face to her fingers, from her fingers to her face. She was a closed book. He stood there facing Sarah B. and knew that he would soon be embarking upon an arduous expedition. What should he take with him?

This question, one which was to colour his whole life, stemmed from his summer with Bo Wang Lee and their assiduous endeavours to find the Vegans’ hiding place in Lillomarka. Bo Wang Lee lived in the United States, but was spending a month at Solhaug, in the end block of flats, with his Norwegian mother. His father was at home in the States — he was an American, an archaeologist and his surname was Lee. His mother, surname Wang, was in Oslo to complete a course at the university. The flat belonged to Bo’s mother’s sister. Jonas knew that Miss Wang worked on one of the ships of the Norwegian American Line — that was the sort of fact boys tended to pick up. She was on holiday in Florida with her boyfriend, who also happened to be the man responsible for the model ship which Bo had launched at Badedammen. The flat was sparely furnished and had the air of a place owned by someone who was not at home much. What with all the suitcases and cardboard boxes which Bo and his mother had brought with them, some of the rooms seemed more like ship’s cabins to Jonas, an impression which was reinforced when he went to the toilet and found himself sitting looking at two photographs hung on the wall, just at eye level: the MS Oslofjord and the MS Bergensfjord , two floating palaces. Jonas sometimes thought of that summer with Bo as being like a wonderful cruise through totally uncharted waters.

Since Bo’s mother had to get as much work done as possible during their stay in Norway, Bo had the flat pretty much to himself. Jonas caught only fleeting glimpses of his mother, usually laden with books and papers, on her way down to her sister’s little yellow Citroën 2CV. But there was always a stack of freshly-made sandwiches waiting for them, usually thick, American-style double sandwiches, with ham and a kind of mayonnaise from a big glass jar that you spread on with a knife.

On one of their first days together, when they were sitting eating out on the balcony, Bo told Jonas about the Vegans. It was no accident that Jonas had run into him up at Badedammen. Bo had been on reconnaisance , as he put it. He had been spying out coordinates , as he said. He was trying to find a hidden country, an entire forgotten civilisation. He shot a searching glance at Jonas.

Why were they called the Vegans? Jonas asked, mainly out of politeness, while licking the last of an unbelievably good sandwich filling from the corners of his mouth — it was the first time he had tasted peanut butter.

Because they were a small colony of beings from a planet near the star Vega, Bo said. They had arrived on Earth some years earlier and had hidden themselves away here, in the heart of Lillomarka. This was ‘top secret’ information. Bo had it from a relative who worked for NASA. Again Bo eyed Jonas, as if assessing whether Jonas was worthy of his confidence, before continuing: a special task force within NASA had traced the unknown spaceship’s whereabouts to Norway, more specifically to a spot slightly to the north-east of the capital. According to Bo’s findings — he showed Jonas the map with the two lines forming a cross — the Vegans were located in the area around the little lake. Couldn’t they just go and have a look, Jonas suggested. It was not that simple, Bo said. These beings inhabited another dimension. Bo explained the meaning of ‘dimension’, speaking slowly and solemnly. He described how he imagined this place to be, pulled out the yellow notebook and opened it at an imaginative and highly detailed drawing with, at its centre, a sort of entranceway or passage. Jonas thought it looked a little like Bo’s drawings of the Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. He had started out smiling, but his smile gradually faded as Bo plied him with so many colourful pieces of information that Jonas actually began to believe him .

Although Bo knew where the Vegans were located, there were still a couple of snags. One of these concerned the question of how they were to open up the terrain. ‘Open up the terrain?’ Jonas repeated. ‘You mean we’ll have to chop down trees and bushes and stuff?’

‘We have to open up the landscape, but not with an axe or a shovel,’ Bo said. ‘The Vegans’ land lies hidden, a bit like the treasure in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We have to find something that will work in the same way as saying Open Sesame.’

Jonas tried to picture a grove of trees suddenly ‘opening up’, as if a huge trapdoor of heather and moss had been thrown back only to disclose an alien landscape under the ground. Bo’s story appealed to Jonas, it accorded with a suspicion he had long harboured: that the world could not possibly be as flat as it appeared to be. That there had to be ‘trapdoors’. It had always been a disappointment to Jonas that reality never seemed to match up to his image of it. Consequently he was always on the lookout for a different world. He would have liked to think that it was only a hand’s grasp away, as Bo intimated. A tiny twist and everything would be changed.

Bo never did say how he had figured it out, but he had discovered the key that would open up the landscape. A picklock of sorts. They needed eight things: four crystals and four butterflies. Jonas did not know what he found more surprising: the crystals or the butterflies. And yet it fitted, it struck a nice chord inside him. Something hard and something soft. Something dead and something alive.

Bo took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook. If the black pageboy hairstyle made Bo look like Prince Valiant then these, the pencil and the little yellow book, were his sword and his shield. Swiftly and with a sure hand Bo sketched four crystals on a blank page — ‘from memory’ as he said. What Jonas saw was four differently shaped prisms. ‘I know where I can get hold of something like that,’ he cried eagerly. Bo nodded, as if he had expected nothing less of Jonas.

That left only the butterflies. Why butterflies, Jonas asked. It had something to do with chemistry, Bo said. Jonas barely knew what chemistry was, could not even guess at a future in schoolmaster Dehli’s Indian classroom.

The next week they went butterfly hunting. And not just any specimens of these tiny fluttering creatures would do. Far from it. Bo knew exactly what was needed: a brimstone butterfly, a peacock butterfly, a red admiral and a small tortoiseshell. Again Bo pulled out his notebook and presented a brief rundown of their markings, their flying season, behaviour, the sort of terrain and flowers they preferred — it made Jonas think of the descriptions of wanted criminals, but then Bo showed him the most beautiful, meticulously coloured drawings of all four butterflies in the notebook. Each armed with a net they proceeded to comb the fields around the Ammerud farms and the hillsides along the roads down to the stamp-mill and the quarry; they searched the woods around Monsebråten and, of course, Transylvania. Catching butterflies was not nearly as easy as Jonas had thought. And when they did spot one, on the banks of the stream running down to Grorudsdammen and the ski-jump hill, for instance, it was usually the wrong species. Often, Jonas would simply stand, butterfly net in hand, gazing in wonder at the way some butterflies flew swiftly and purposefully, while others flitted this way and that; he wondered whether there was a conscious navigational strategy governing the inscrutable routes a butterfly could follow across a meadow; it seemed to him that his thoughts travelled in different directions depending on which type of butterfly his eyes were fixed on. Bo had told him a bit about just how remarkable these little creatures were. They tasted with their feet. Jonas tried to imagine what it would be like to taste with your feet, stick your toes into a bowl of chocolate blancmange and custard. Even stranger, Bo said, was the butterfly’s ability to see ultra-violet colour patterns which were invisible to human beings. ‘This fact, that they can see something we can’t, is very important,’ Bo said portentously. ‘Do you think somebody could train their eye to see such things?’ Jonas asked. ‘Ssh, there goes a butterfly,’ said Bo, almost as if he did not like this question.