Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I noticed how my thoughts on the Sognefjord project were increasingly coloured by my interest in Jonas Wergeland. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Ought we to design our product, this service, as a ‘biography’ of the fjord? Ought I to write about him as if I were describing a place? He was sitting right there on the deck in front of me. At any minute I could go over to him and touch him, talk to him. What I most wanted to do was to hug him, to just sit beside him with my arms around him. More and more often I found myself thinking: if he lay flat out and spread his limbs he would look like a piece of the Norwegian landscape — or, why not: a fjord.

I had taken a particular liking to Fjærland. Not merely because of the almost unbelievable scenery around us: Skeisnipa with the dazzling Flatbreen glacier rearing up at the head of the valley, the green waters of the fjord, the surrounding fields, the roads fringed with dandelions. I believe it may have had more to do with the fact that in this small place one was so aware of branches reaching out into the world. And here I am thinking not so much of the migration as of all the books. Fjærland was full of books. Fjærland was positively awash with books. Inwardly and outwardly. There were bookcases ranged along the roadsides. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the glacier had retreated, leaving behind a moraine of books. Hen-houses and old shops, disused ferry terminals and hotel lounges had all been turned into second-hand bookshops. Byres still complete with pig troughs and slurry channels running down the middle of their floors now held shelves and shelves of books. Fjærland had a name for being Norway’s book town. It was part of a network of other book towns — Hay-on-Wye in Wales, Montolieu in France, Bredevoort in Holland; when you walked the streets of tiny Fjærland you were, in a way, also in touch with book towns in Germany and Switzerland, in Canada and America, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. It was a beautiful idea. Almost too beautiful. I kept my fingers crossed as I walked around. Long may Fjærland endure as Norway’s book town.

I was particularly taken with the bookcases by the roadsides, crammed with books, surrounded by the humming of bees and the smell of seaweed. It was something like this that we were trying to do: to put information out on the streets, set it down in a landscape; wrap knowledge in an experience; show that our product, this apparently inexhaustible source of learning, was only one small part of the great narrative that was the world. Occasionally I spotted Jonas Wergeland prowling about, looking into second-hand bookshops, albeit circumspectly, as if he were afraid of running into a ghost, one of those spiteful biographies of his person. Might his thoughts have gone to his old neighbour, Karen Mohr, with the library in her bedroom? One morning when the whole eastern side of the fjord and the hillsides were in shadow and the other bathed in golden sunlight, I came across him sitting on the hatch above the companion-way to the for’ard cabin, reading a slim volume he had purchased. This surprised me. He was not a reader. I noticed that the book was Victoria by Knut Hamsun. He spent the whole morning sitting there reading it. Reading it while unconsciously running a finger over the cross-shaped scar on his forehead. Now and again he would look up, close his eyes and move his lips, as if he already knew the passage by heart. Once or twice I could have sworn he wiped away a tear. When he did that he looked like a little boy.

Why did he do it?

On our second last day at Fjærland, Kamala Varma came to join us. She had hitched a ride with Jonas’s sister Rakel. Benjamin, the brother with Down’s syndrome was there too. They had driven up in Rakel’s trailer-truck, or at least, there was no trailer attached to the black tractor — or juggernaut as Kamala called it — when it pulled up, rumbling and bulldog-like. Benjamin was bursting with pride, he tooted the horn before jumping out of the massive rig. Later he let me hear the wheezing air brakes and showed me the impressive hi-fi system and the bunks in the cab, the fridge and the TV. He babbled on about how wonderful it was to sit so high above all the other traffic — like being on a horse galloping through a flock of sheep. And with ABBA playing full blast. ‘The favourite right now being “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme”,’ Rakel chipped in, rolling her eyes. Usually Benjamin slept in a tent, but he agreed to stay the night at the Hotel Mundal when Jonas promised that he could have the room the queen slept in when she was there. Benjamin straightened his shoulders at the prospect of sleeping in the same bed as a queen. And an American vice president. Not only that but the place was said to be haunted. Benjamin broke into ‘Dancing Queen’ and walked off with his brother.

I could not help thinking that this was a rather solemn, an almost historic gathering. Here we were, three women, all of whom had written, or were in the process of writing about Jonas Wergeland, telling his story; each coming from our own corner of the world to meet, as it were, at a crossroads. We were like three sisters. And it seemed only fitting that we should rendezvous in a place that was full of books.

Kamala was already enthusing about Fjærland. They had stopped at the Glacier Museum, designed by Sverre Fehn. Straight away she had noticed how the building, lying there on the plain underneath the glaciers, looked like some weird astronomical instrument, of the sort found at Jantar Mantar, the old Indian observatory in Jaipur. Carl and Hanna, who had made several visits to the inspiring Glacier Museum, each time with a feeling of boarding a ship, were gratified to hear her make this comparison. Kamala was even more bowled over by the fjord, or what she had seen of it so far. ‘Sognefjord has more pairs of arms than Shiva,’ she exclaimed.

While Jonas drove off with Rakel to Boyabreen, the fastest moving glacier in Norway, to let Benjamin see the almost phosphorescent blue light emanating from the glacier face and hear the noises it made — cracks like rifle shots — Kamala strolled around Fjærland with a dumbfounded expression on her face, looking at the book displays; hen-houses, boathouses, cafés offering literature of every description. She spent a long time reverently observing a gull sitting on a nest above the entrance to one of the smallest antiquarian bookshops, an ochre-coloured sheep cot. When she came to the bookcases set out along the roadside she stopped short. Kamala Varma, a woman of Indian descent and herself a writer, stood there gazing at the rows of books against that stunning panorama, the mighty mountains and the glaciers, then she suddenly whispered: ‘ Māyā . This is pure māyā.’

Although Jonas found it interesting to roam around Fjærland, and even went so far as to buy a novel by Knut Hamsun, he actually had a somewhat fraught relationship with books. One of his nastiest boyhood experiences dated from an encounter with a book and, as one might expect, it involved his big brother. At home, under the telephone table of all places, as if it were a phone book, lay a fat Family Bible. This treasure had lived out at Hvaler, but after Jonas’s paternal grandmother died, his grandfather could not bear to have it in the house. In Åse and Haakon Hansen’s nigh on bookless home this Bible was something of a museum piece, and the boys used it as a prop in the most bizarre games. The hefty clasps made it look like a chest, a proper little piece of furniture. Only after Daniel had run up against the gravity of life in the long-jump pit did this volume come to serve its rightful purpose: as the revelation of God’s word.

It was, though, the illustrations which first captured Daniel’s interest. He could spend hours studying Gustav Doré’s marvellous pictures, as if he had grown out of the Illustrated Classics and wanted to try something more edifying. He was especially fond of the dramatic etchings depicting the Flood, the tiger on the cliff with its cub in its mouth; or David and Goliath, the blood streaming from the neck of the headless giant. ‘Have you read the Bible?’ people today ask and back comes the answer: ‘No, but I saw the film.’ Daniel, on the other hand, would have said: ‘No, but I’ve seen the pictures.’ As a grown man, Jonas was inclined to think that his brother’s image of God owed more to Gustav Doré than to all the sophistic theological text books he later read.