Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

He held out all the banknotes he had on him as if begging some sort of indulgence. Three pairs of eyes merely looked him through the slits in their headdresses, looked , full of contempt. The cloth wound round their heads seemed glossy, metallic. They said something, evidently asking him a question. Jonas had not the foggiest notion what they were jabbering on about, knew only that he was in a tight spot, a very tight spot. Suddenly he remembered that Alexander Gordon Laing, one of the first Europeans to reach Timbuktu in the nineteenth century, was killed by Tuaregs. One of the men was armed with a dagger embossed with silver and brass. It might well be that these three were of noble blood, members of the warrior caste. Again they said something, their tone aggressive. What language were they speaking — Tamashek, Arabic, Hausa? Or just such bad French he could not understand it? Or maybe it was Bambara? Weren’t there any teenagers here who spoke French?

How, he wondered, as two scrawny dogs came over to sniff at him, could he explain to them that he had come to gain a little leeway for himself in terms of time and space; that he wanted to find out what it was like to be Jonas Wergeland stuck in the middle of Timbuktu’s mud heap: that he had left Norway and 1972 because he had suddenly found that country and that time so unutterably claustrophobic, stifling in its imperative insistence on what was important. He was looking for an angle in the sand, a filter of stars. Right then it occurred to him what a fitting view of the EEC this offered — here, in the desert, with a double-edged sword at one’s throat: How much did the EEC matter, really? Or Europe as a whole, come to that?

Jonas tries to say ‘Norway’, that he is Norwegian as if this fact alone would automatically result in the removal of the sword tip from his throat; as if Norway were synonymous with innocence, harmlessness, neutrality. Jonas Wergeland sits in the desert, under the stars, outside the town of Timbuktu in Mali and says ‘Norway … I am Norwegian’ in every language he knows, slowly, distinctly, while the eyes that stare at him through the slits in the indigo headdresses remain impassive; the Tuaregs have never heard of Norway.

Jonas shoots a glance at one of the tents, sees a woman busying herself with a brass pot, sees another woman crushing something in a mortar. At that same instant he has a vision of Norway cut off from the world, as Mali was in the seventeenth century. The previous day in a coffeehouse, his musings had been interrupted by an eager young African who had told him something of Mali’s history, how Timbuktu had hung on to its position of power for as long as it remained a crossroads for the trade in salt and gold, for the caravans and the ships travelling up and down the Niger, and how its decline owed less to open hostility from neighbouring countries than to the shifting of the trade routes. Long-distance trading declined drastically with a drop in the demand for gold on the other side of the Sahara, following the Spanish colonization of South America — added to which, the Portuguese had switched to trading across the Atlantic. Both these factors effectively strangled trade in the Sahara. Once again Mali was closed-off. A backwater. The final blow, delivered by the ever-greater influence of the French in that region, came with the rerouting of the last remnants of trade to Senegal and the towns on the coast. In a coffeehouse in the mud-hut city of Timbuktu, Jonas Wergeland learned something about relativity, about the mighty hand of history and how important it was not to become isolated, not to wind up on the fringes of international trade. Today, he thought, Norway is a wealthy country. Tomorrow, or a few hundred years from now, it could be another Mali, or as poor as Norway itself was just a few hundred years ago.

The camels kneeling in the sand started to growl, signalling, so it seemed, that the situation was coming to a head. A hand fumbled at Jonas’s throat as if searching for an identity tag, still taking him for a French mercenary. One of the other Tuaregs went through his jacket pockets and pulled out a battered paperback, Aku-Aku , Thor Heyerdahl’s book about Easter Island. Jonas’s travel reading. The Tuareg obviously knew the Roman alphabet. He sounded out ‘Hey-er-dahl’.

This one word worked like a charm, like Sinbad’s ‘Open Sesame’. Jonas heard the name spoken and saw a new light come into the eyes surrounding him. The book and the name Heyerdahl were like salt, worth their weight in gold. The sword was slipped back into the leather scabbard.

‘Kon-Tiki,’ said one.

‘Ra,’ said another.

They repeated the names ‘Aku-Aku’, ‘Kon-Tiki’, ‘Ra’ and ‘Heyerdahl’. Again and again the words were murmured like mantras: ‘Ra … Ra … Ra’. To Jonas it sounded like they are giving three cheers: ‘Hip, hip, hur-rah!’

At last they had hit upon a common language. It was as if the name Heyerdahl had also given the nomads back their hope, as if for a moment their dignity, their innate pride had been restored to them.

I know it seems incredible, that Thor Heyerdahl’s name should have been known here, in the heart of the wilderness of the Sahel, by men who had probably never seen the sea, even though the caravans might well have brought kinsmen of theirs to the Moroccan coast, starting-point for the voyage of the Ra . It is true, nonetheless, and says more about Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits and how widely known, how unbelievably well known, he is than about the curiosity of the Tuaregs. To some degree this can, of course, be put down to the fact that Heyerdahl is, like them, a nomad: a man with an instinct and an eye for the great travel routes, for the connections in which no one else believes.

This put a whole new slant on things. All of a sudden Jonas was their guest, and he was led, amid loud proclamations, to a fire in front of one of the goatskin tents where he was served a glass of sweet mint tea from a silver jug. Jonas sat there holding the warm glass, and it came to him: he was a nomad, would always be a nomad. Everything had changed, was suddenly beautiful. Orange flames in an inky landscape silhouetted against a deep-blue sky. Stars right above his head. He still could not understand what they said, but he could tell that they were giving him the VIP treatment and that he ought to return the compliment in some way. He wished he had his mouth organ with him so he could have played something for them: Duke Ellington’s ‘Morning Glory’, for instance. What he did have in his pocket, however, was a crystal prism, a good-luck charm given to him by a friend, a dear childhood friend who had shown him how light turned into something quite different when it struck the facets of the prism. He handed the piece of glass, a symbolic gift, to the Tuareg whom he took to be the leader before being escorted back to the town by two boys.

When Jonas Wergeland returned to Timbuktu on the morning of Tuesday 26 September 1972 the bread ovens were already lit. He stood for some time watching the flames dancing inside the ovens, shivering slightly as he breathed in the smell of the bread. He had always liked the smell of fresh-baked bread. Back home in Norway, the people had pronounced their verdict on the matter of the EEC, quite oblivious to the trials to which Jonas Wergeland had been subjected.

They were on the steamship jetty when it happened, one of those summer days filled with the sound of a thousand seagull cries, low tide and a dead calm, and a sea so smooth that the skerries could be seen mirrored in it. Colours were at their most intense in the afternoon light: the white of the houses, the red of the sheds along the quayside, the green of the lyme-grass; and the planks of the yawls gleamed like burnished gold. The air smelled of seaweed, of blue clay, of salt water. Jonas was six years old and had just learned to swim.