Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

But Timbuktu fulfilled all of Jonas’s expectations simply because he had none. Added to which, for some hours, as they were driving out to it from Kabara, the town was enveloped in a cloud of sand because of the wind. Timbuktu was not even there. Jonas was over the moon. He was travelling into a mist, an uncharted nebula. The cloud of sand reinforced his conviction that he was not visiting a town, but a word , a name which marked the limits of the real world.

And he was not disappointed, not even when the wind died down, and the sand settled. Timbuktu gave the impression not only of utter disillusionment with the myths that surrounded it but also of a bleakness and a monotony unlike anything Jonas had ever come across before with its stark light and its homogeneous low, square buildings linked together in a way that put him in mind of a Cubist painting or gave him a feeling of having landed in the middle of an experiment, at some outer limit (or on some far frontier). No doubt about it, he thought, here was a place, a spot, where it must be possible to come up with a new angle. On Norway, on his own life. Because this was of course, for anyone who has not yet figured it out, the subconscious motive for his trip to Timbuktu: the search for enlightenment. If Timbuktu were the hub of the world — how would the world look then?

So what Jonas did in Timbuktu was think , or search. He wandered up and down the sandy streets lost in thought, back and forth between sun-baked mud huts that changed colour in the course of the day, turning from white and beige to brown and ochre; he did not notice the children who gave him funny looks, the chickens and the goats, the donkeys and the camels, the stench of their droppings; he was so thoroughly engrossed in an attempt to push his thoughts as far as he humanly could. Only occasionally did he seem to come to himself, surrounded by flies, outside one of the massive dark-brown wooden doors, intricately carved and studded with nails and hung on heavy iron hinges, running his fingers over a gash left there, although he did not know it, by a Tuareg sword. The door itself seemed to give him some inkling of both the difficulty and the possibility of reaching new domains of perception.

He thought and thought on into the evening and, indeed, into the night, in dreams. For the record I ought to mention that this was before Sofitel opened their hotel in the town, and Jonas was therefore staying at one of those hostels to be found all over this part of Africa, primarily geared towards travelling civil servants.

During the day he would be out walking again, and of all the images I have of Jonas Wergeland, this is possibly the one of which I am most fond; the one which I wish the people of Norway could set alongside his rather more glamorous public image because this, too, is Jonas Wergeland: a young man walking up and down the run-down streets of Timbuktu, utterly absorbed in his own thoughts. Jonas strolls from the main market to the meat market while thinking about Norway, what sort of a country Norway is; he wanders from the old fort to the camels’ watering-hole, wondering what sort of a person he is; he meanders through the Tuareg quarter and down to the town well, wondering what he should do next, after graduating from high school; he walks from the Djinguereber Mosque to the famed Sankoré Mosque, which looks like a gingerbread tower studded with cloves, thinking of Axel and how he wants to study biochemistry; he saunters from a group of ramshackle huts, little more than termite-hills, to the house in which René Caillié, the first European to come out of Timbuktu alive, had stayed, and thinks of Margrete, always Margrete; wondering what has become of her; he wanders from the coffee house where a little group is playing some board game, to the ‘palaver tree’ under which the old men sit, chewing cola nuts and passing the time of day; for one second, just one second, he also thinks of the EEC. At night he lies in the cool hostel room, a bowl of dates next to the divan, and lets his thoughts mingle with his dreams.

One night, when he had woken up and could not get back to sleep, he pulled on his jacket, draped a blanket over his shoulders and went outside. He took the path leading into the desert and soon found himself some way to the north of Timbuktu, out among the sand dunes that rolled in towards the town like ocean waves.

On a whim he plonked himself down in the sand, thoughtfully scooped up a handful of the fine grains and put them down on another spot. Behind him he could make out the low, featureless skyline of Timbuktu. A heap of mud in the middle of a desert. A gingerbread town. Not that it gave one any reason to feel superior. This part of the world had seen governments come and go long before the birth of Christ — while Norway still languished in the obscurity of the Stone Age. And Timbuktu, older than Oslo, had once been the first city of Mali and the Songhai Empire, vast states that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sudan. At the end of the fifteenth century this bustling metropolis was said to have been ringed by trees and have a population of some 50,000. It was also commonly acknowledged to have been a centre for Muslim scholarship, boasting three universities and several collections of priceless manuscripts. Timbuktu’s story told of greatness one day, a sand-hill the next.

He sat in the desert, wrapped in a blanket, looking up at the stars; he could hardly believe his eyes, there seemed to be so many of them, so close and so bright. He gazed out across the sand dunes, was struck by how quiet it was, how overwhelmingly … empty, how … endless. With his hand he moved sand from one spot to another, thinking to himself that in terms of the big picture he was changing the desert, changing the world.

Then, all of a sudden, as if in answer to a question he had never managed to ask, he was lying flat out on the sand — with a sword at his throat. Terror-stricken though he was, this somewhat absurd concrete manifestation of an existential choice was not lost on him; he even had time to wonder that anyone could move that quietly, make themselves so invisible. He realized that they were Tuaregs, three of them, recognized them by the lengths of cloth wound round their heads, leaving only their eyes visible.

They dragged him to his feet and led him further into the desert, until they came to a camp nestling between two high sand dunes. It is easy to see how Jonas, whose knowledge of deserts had for the most part been gleaned from Carl Bark’s comic strips, could have imagined that these Tuaregs must be attached to one of the caravans that brought in salt from Taoudénit, when in fact they belonged to the Kel Intasar tribe, nomads who had gravitated towards Timbuktu because of a drought of Old Testament proportions which would come to a head over the next two years and which was already taking its toll on their way of life.

Jonas had no idea what his crime might be. He wondered whether he had desecrated one of their holy places. Or worse: that they took him for one of those idealistic aid workers who drilled wells to develop the deserts, thus ruining the ecological balance, or forced them to settle in one place and become farmers instead of nomads. Or worse still: they thought he was French and were out to take their revenge for almost half a century of ruthless oppression.

The man who still had his sword out of its leather sheath and pointed at Jonas motioned to him to stop next to a fire on the outskirts of the camp. Jonas noticed a number of small fires dotted here and there in the sand, also some cattle, some goats and, of course, camels lying here and there, although not very many. People were sitting outside the entrances to their tents. The general impression was one of poverty, of a myth exploded. Where were the dark lords of the desert, riding high on their white camels, rulers of the wind, the very epitome of dignity and pride? Jonas could tell that something was very wrong when such people as these huddled on the fringes of the desert over which they had reigned for thousands of years.