Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

And which book was this? It was To the Lighthouse . He read on, conscious of how the author, Virginia Woolf, made him think about thinking, how she could almost catch a thought before it was born. At last, a kindred spirit, his heart exulted; someone who succeeded in showing how thousands of thoughts criss-crossed in one’s mind in the course of a day. Someone who made thought the protagonist. Jonas was bursting with excitement and delight. He did not think that Margrete had read this book. But then he came to a passage which she had marked, he recognised her handwriting in the margin, or a youthful version of it. On the next page he was pulled up short by a metaphor to the effect that in the heart and mind of a woman there could stand tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, like treasures in the tombs of kings. Then came a question which Jonas had also asked himself: was there some art known to love or cunning, by which to push through to those sacred chambers? In the margin he saw a ‘Yes!’ in Margrete’s girlish hand. Again Jonas’s heart began to pound palpably.

He carried on reading, even more engrossed, if that were possible. Little did he know that he was risking his life. He had the feeling that he was not looking down at a book, but down into a brain, a body, a landscape far, far greater, deeper, wider than the scene, Jotunheim, which lay before him when he raised his eyes. Jonas felt the world’s flatness threatening, thanks to a measly book, to give way to hitherto unseen depths. Later he was to believe that he had, for a couple of endless seconds, been only a hair’s breadth away from discovering the true nature of life; it was so clear and concrete that he could almost have reached out and touched it, and said: ‘Here it is!’

Then something happened. He came to a new chapter, totally different. Time sped past, year after year and people departed. All of a sudden things were happening with bewilderingly rapidity and this transmitted itself to his thoughts, they were jammed nose to tail, causing pile-ups. He felt as though he had been sucked into a corridor and God knew what awaited him at the other end. And then — it was like being brutally robbed — the central character died, in a parenthesis, for God’s sake, wise Mrs Ramsey, this was too much, how could the author let her die like that, just by the bye; and then a few pages further on Prue, the eldest daughter, died — this, too, by the bye. When Jonas came to the part where the son Andrew died as well, in yet another bloody parenthesis, he had to stop. He could not take it. That these people to whom, though he did not know why, he had begun to feel attached, should die just by the bye, while that blasted abstract time flowed callously onward, filling page after page.

He had to stop. He could not breathe. The insight was too much to bear. He was in imminent danger of being concussed again. He was being hunted by some monster that he could only escape if he closed the book. Jonas slammed it shut, in desperation almost, smack in the face, so it seemed, of something — something deadly. He remembered how as a boy he had run away from Daniel and only just managed, we’re talking millimetres here, to lock the door against him and his murderous rage. The faint smile still played around Jonas’s lips, as if his body had not yet caught up with his horror-stricken mind. But then: he realised that he was terrified. It was as though a whole pack of wolves had crept up on him unawares and were all suddenly breathing down his neck. Jonas stared out of the window at the rock face, the wintry Norwegian landscape. He was covered in goosebumps. He had almost lost his life. His old life. Had he finished it, that book would have changed his life. He knew it. And he did not want a novel changing his life.

He had closed To the Lighthouse . In the middle of the chapter entitled ‘Time Passes’. He pressed a palm against each cover, as if to stop it from falling open again. It actually took some effort. The bang made Margrete look round, a question on her face. He made the excuse of a sudden headache. ‘I’ll read the rest some other time,’ he said, trying to smile. But he knew he would never pick it up again. He knew that he had come close to making a fatal blunder. He swore to himself that he would never open another novel.

And yet, even though he had put the book down, something had happened. He noticed it later that evening when he got up, still trembling slightly, to light a candle on the dining table. As he struck the match and his hand edged towards the wick, it occurred to him that all life could be contained in that movement, that a person could write hundreds of pages about this simple action and what was going on in his mind at that moment. He had been changed. Not much, but a bit. He was marked for life. Why do you have a scar over your eyebrow? I got it in a fight with Virginia Woolf.

He had read a novel about a woman who knew how to appreciate the perfection of the moment — small everyday miracles. To be able to say, merely of the light on the sea: It is enough! And if he thought about it: Margrete was the same. But what was to become of his life now? What of the ambitions that drove, or had driven, him?

He thought he knew: when he closed Virginia Woolf’s book, he salvaged his faith in his project, or the vestiges of this project. But he also closed the door on his chance of ever understanding Margrete. Who knows, maybe To the Lighthouse would have been the very device that would have opened her up, afforded him some insight into her, just as Bo’s butterflies and crystals could lay open a stretch of terrain in Lillomarka.

Late that night when Jonas was sitting in the outdoor privy in the dark, peering up at Orion, which seemed remarkably close, it was with a sense of having both lost and won. He sat there on the ice-cold toilet seat, gazing up at the stars and thinking of a distant summer, of a friend who looked like Prince Valiant, and who presaged the existence of people like Margrete.

Bo Wang Lee came, in fact, as a foretoken of just about everything. During that brief summer with Bo, Jonas was confronted with a whole bunch of life’s challenges. And possibly the greatest of these took the form of a question. Because, just when he thought that they were all set for the expedition to the Vegans’ hiding place, Bo placed his hands on his hips and said: ‘That just leaves the most difficult question. What should we take with us?’

To begin with Jonas thought that Bo meant something that would guarantee their safety. He remembered the pass which Kubla Khan had given to Marco Polo, a gold tablet covered in strange characters which said that Marco Polo was a friend of the Great Khan and enjoyed his mighty protection. If the Vegans were as intelligent as Bo believed, then it was no use trying to fool them; you could not go to meet a race from another solar system carrying little mirrors, copper wire or beads in eleven different colours — the sort of gewgaws that Stanley took with him to Africa. ‘It has to be something which will show them that we are worthy envoys,’ Bo said gravely. He pronounced the word ‘worthy’ exactly as Jonas would later hear Karen Mohr pronounce it, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.

Bo’s mother was studying social anthropology, or ethnography as it was then called — so Bo knew a little bit about what other explorers had taken with them, people from Europe and America, that is, who set out to visit tribes which might never have seen a white man before. It was a fascinating idea — to think that you could be eaten if you brought little bells, but crowned as an honorary chief if you handed out marbles. Bo told of explorers who had, for example, taken salt to the highlands of New Guinea. Others leaned more towards practical items: pocket knives or watches. Liquor had also been a popular gift among some primitive tribes. But they had to bear in mind, Bo said, that things also carried a message. ‘What about a record by Jim Reeves?’ suggested Jonas, off the top of his head. “I Love You Because”. Then they would know we come in peace.’