Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

What should they take with them? Jonas considered little gifts epitomising Norway — a bar of Freia milk chocolate or a box of Globoid aspirins, a can of sardines from Bjelland. Too local, maybe. What about a kaleidoscope? One of his father’s metronomes, a pyramid with its own hypnotic, in-built pulse? He could always ask Wolfgang Michaelsen if he could borrow one of his Märklin locomotives. The forthcoming expedition induced Jonas to ransack his surroundings and his life as he had never done before. Did he have in his possession anything good enough to merit a place in his rucksack when he set off into the woods to meet the Vegans? What on Earth was at all worth collecting?

There was something Aunt Laura had once told him. During the Renaissance, palaces were sometimes built with a small, windowless room at their centre, a chamber which did not even appear on the architect’s drawings of the building. This was known as the studiolo or guarda-roba . In this the prince kept the most widely diverse objects, all of which had just one thing in common: they inspired wonder. Here one might find rarities from the animal and plant kingdoms together with a whole gallimaufry of other things, all with nothing to connect them except whatever the viewer himself could detect. The German princes called this room a Wunderkammer . Jonas had always thought that Uncle Lauritz must have had just such an inner chamber to which he could withdraw in order to meditate. All he needed were two inexhaustible objects: a box of Duke Ellington records and a tiny portrait of a woman.

The day before their departure Jonas at last found the article which he would take with him: Rakel’s slide rule, with its movable Perspex panel and a centre section which could be pushed out and in. He was always left speechless by the sight of this, a device which could help you to work out difficult maths problems. In his mind he saw himself, Jonas W. Hansen standing face to face with a being the like of which no man had ever seen, in a small clearing in the woods, with the sunlight slanting through the trees; saw how he, Jonas, held out the slide rule, pi signs and all, whereafter the alien accepted this gift and immediately made a gesture which said that he, she, it understood everything — in other words, that he, Jonas, standing there bathed in the slanting sunlight, had somehow saved the Earth by finding the one thing which carried the right message: here you are, our civilisation in a nutshell.

He was surprised to see what Bo had chosen. A book. A book! What sort of thing was that to bring? Huckleberry Finn . Why this one? Jonas asked. Because it was the best book Bo had ever read. ‘One hundred per cent wisdom,’ Bo said. ‘Pure, compressed power. Mightier than an atom bomb.’

They began to get ready for the next day, packing their things into two small rucksacks. ‘Have you got the crystals?’ Bo asked. He had not yet seen them. Jonas pulled out the handkerchiefs containing the four prisms he had collected from his grandmother. She had had no hesitation in lending them to him once he had told her what it was for. ‘The Vegans — I see,’ she had said. ‘Ah yes, it’s always best to stay on the right side of them.’

Where had he got them, Bo wanted to know, holding first one, then another prism up to the light like a master jeweller.

It was a secret, Jonas said. Why did they need the crystals anyway?

Because they contained the whole world, Bo told him.

Jonas said nothing, he knew Bo was right. Jonas had seen for himself some of the pictures a prism could contain. A yellow cabinet. A palace ball with hundreds of guests. The question of ‘keys’, of what to take with one, was possibly the same as asking: how small a piece of the world do you need in order to see the whole world? That was why Bo had brought a book.

His friend was sitting in one of the rooms in his aunt’s flat which reminded Jonas of a ship’s cabin and almost made him believe that if he looked out of the window he would see the entrance to New York harbour. Bo was studying the map of Lillomarka and looking up various entries in the yellow notebook. Jonas noticed that more lines had been drawn on the map. Some contour lines of equal elevation had been coloured in. ‘Tomorrow it is, then,’ Bo said happily. ‘Tomorrow we’re off to find the Vegans.’

Jonas had always been fascinated by maps. Despite their indisputable two-dimensionality they made him feel that the world could not be flat after all. Not because of the swirling lines denoting elevation and gradient, but because they appealed so strongly to his imagination. He never forgot the pleasure of his first atlas, the thrill of discovering that Norway and Sweden together looked like a lion, while Norway on its own resembled a fish. Little did he know that an imaginative way with maps could also lead to the world coming tumbling about your ears.

Mr Dehli shared Jonas’s weakness for maps; he frequently employed them in his lessons and not only as a means of illustrating one of the most enigmatic words in Sanskrit — māyā . The huge expanses of paper which could be pulled down to cover the wall behind the teacher’s lectern seemed charged with a singular magic. This was partly due to the fact that the maps in junior high were newer than their more tattered and faded counterparts in elementary school. In any case, it was a real treat to see Mr Dehli — while telling them, say, about Xerxes and the ancient kingdom of Persia — send his pointer dancing across a map of Asia half the size of the wall, printed in colours so bright and clear that the topographical features seemed to take on three dimensions and bulge right out into the room. Learning was suddenly brought to life, a connection established between it and the real world. They were halfway into the wonderful reddish-brown massifs of the Zagros Mountains when the bell rang.

The classroom itself altered character completely depending upon which map he had pulled down. The atmosphere in the room was different when savannah-covered Africa hung down over the board than when South America’s rugged Andean spine dominated the field of vision. Sometimes Jonas thought that the maps made the front of the class with the dais and lectern look more like the stage in a theatre. And the sheets of paper hanging rolled up, one behind the other, on that marvellous rack were prospective sets or backdrops. ‘Today we’re going to talk about the Nile,’ Mr Dehli said, loosening his bow tie; and even though it was winter and the classroom was cold, once the wall behind the schoolmaster had been covered by the Middle East and Egypt with their warm green and yellow hues, Jonas was hard put not to remove his jersey. He was transported back to his childhood, to when he had been the owner of an elegant, aromatic cigarette tin with a picture on the lid of the sphinx, the pyramids and Simon Arzt in a red fez.

Many of Mr Dehli’s teaching tours de forces involved maps or globes. By turning the world upside down he taught them the meaning of the word ‘perspective’. On one occasion he actually cut an old map of the world in two, right up the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Why should the Atlantic always been in the centre?’ he asked. ‘Let’s stick it together again with the Pacific in the middle.’ The effect was remarkable. Suddenly Norway was right out on the periphery, up in the far corner — though, to Jonas’s satisfaction, still in a possible Outside Left position. ‘What if so-called Western supremacy was no more than a parenthesis in history?’ Mr Dehli said, thereby anticipating those prophecies made towards the end of the millennium to the effect that the balance of economic power would shift to the east. During another lesson he held up a globe at a particular angle: ‘What do you see?’ They were looking straight at the Pacific Ocean. They could just make out the edges of the continents around the rim of the circle. Jonas had had a globe of the world for years, but had never realised that it could be viewed from such an angle. ‘Nothing but sea,’ Mr. Dehli said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that seventy-five per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water?’ This was during a history lesson, on Vasco da Gama. Mr Dehli then went on to tell them about the great voyages of discovery and the background to them, about sailing ships and navigation. You never forgot it. It seemed to Jonas that this was the whole point of lessons: to teach them how to navigate. Through life.