Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The very next day the Three Wise Men were outside the Winge waxing their skis: because if there was one thing they were sure of it was that Bohr’s vision somehow had to be connected with skiing. Norway was skiing. ‘Ski’ is one of the few words that Norway has given to the world. Even the Norwegians’ most traumatic national experiences are ski-related. In the United States they ask you where you were when Kennedy was shot; in Norway they ask where you were when Oddvar Brå broke his ski pole.

They followed the most commonly used track — a track which Bohr must also have taken — from the Winge, through the forest up to Musdal Saeter. It was a steep climb. And already here Viktor was propounding his first hypothesis: could it simply have been sheer exhaustion, or light-headedness, that had brought the idea of complementarity to the surface.

This suggestion was withdrawn, however, when, puffing and panting after all the uphill stretches, they reached the snow fences below Musdal Saeter — or rather, the tops of the fence posts marking out their course like channel markers in a sea of snow — and then, a little further up, found the splendour of the mountains spreading out before them, with Bjørga’s almost bald summit in the west and in the distance, over by Valdres, Synnfjell shimmering like a pearly mirage. Could it have been this, they whispered in unison, something about this suddenly expanding vista that appealed to Bohr? Or something to do with those vast expanses unmarked by skis making him think of white sheets of paper, a blank page? ‘Or maybe Bohr’s ch’i was actually changed by the mere fact of his breathing this air,’ said Viktor.

They pressed on, much heartened; cutting between the saeter buildings, using their eyes like detectives, fine-combing the terrain for clues, signs. They climbed so high that they could see the imposing profile of Skeikampen on the other side of the valley. The sky was cobalt blue and the snow-laden trees were like something straight out of a postcard entitled ‘Winter in Norway’. But what — what in all of this scene before them — could have acted as a springboard for Bohl’s mental, championship-winning jump? They squinted up at the sun, asking themselves, as the Danish physicist himself might have done, whether the light was hitting them as waves or particles? They imagined Bohr, standing where they were now: how he might even have made some neat drawings with his pole, symbolic attempts, as porous as the snow itself. ‘One thing we don’t know, but which may have been of vital significance,’ said Axel gravely, ‘is whether Niels Bohr also smoked his pipe when he was out skiing.’

They turned north and headed across the marshes beyond Musdal Saeter and before too long had Killiknappen and its marginally smaller counterpart, Roåkerknappen, straight ahead of them. ‘Like Great Ararat and Little Ararat,’ Viktor murmured. Taoists could never get enough of mountains. They rested on their poles and feasted their eyes on the twin peaks, which looked not unlike a pair of white breasts. ‘Who wouldn’t be able to dream up a notion of complementarity when faced with such a sight?’ Jonas said, his thoughts going to his brother Daniel. Viktor broke into an impromptu rendering in faultless English of some lines from Bohr’s speech at Como: ‘In fact, here again we are not dealing with contradictory, but with complementary pictures of the phenomenon, which only together offer a natural generalization of the classical mode of description.’

‘Amen,’ said Axel and Jonas.

Back at the Winge they pursued their speculations in their room, fortified by an excellent trout dinner. Their hostess had put them in the west wing, so they could at least have the experience of living on the site of the old, burned-out Winge. And even if the walls were orange and fitted with green sconce lamps, to them this was a shrine — like one of those garish little Hindu temples — a place over whose lakes the spirit of Niels Bohr hovered. Nevertheless, and despite the festive mood: they were stuck. ‘Things are moving too slowly,’ Axel said, digging a bottle of Linie Aquavit out of his rucksack. ‘It’s time to set sail.’

The next morning they put on their skis again, determined to look under every bush on the slopes above Musdal Saeter. ‘If you think about it, cross-country skiing is in itself a form of complementarity: gliding and walking,’ said Axel, this thought striking him as they were sitting with their backs against the wall of one of the rickety saeter outbuildings, eating oranges. ‘And if you look back you’ll see the continuous line of our tracks and the dots made by our poles, waves and particles! Can there be any doubt?’

‘No, I think Bohr must have set off a harmless little avalanche,’ Viktor said. ‘Experienced an instance of non-locality, seen how with one innocent step he affected something in an entirely different spot.’

They racked their brains incessantly, for three days they racked their brains. On their last evening they stayed in their room, firing off suggestions that got wilder and wilder as the stock of aquavit in Axel’s rucksack dwindled. What if he ran into a tree, and this made him see double? Viktor ventured. Could it have been something to do with his skiing gear? Axel wondered. His poles would have been of bamboo and of a thicker sort than today’s. Axel made a long, impassioned speech on the bamboo as a possible source of inspiration — a typical five-aquavit argument.

They were growing more and more desperate. ‘Say it was misty,’ Jonas said, already in a fog of his own. ‘Just think: all that whiteness. Like walking through nothingness. Or being on another planet.’

‘That’s it! Another planet,’ said Viktor. ‘It’s an image you often find in the work of revolutionary artists. Arnold Schönberg said something similar when he devised the dodecaphonic technique. One feels the air of another planet. Maybe that’s how it was for Bohr.’

Axel suddenly remembered the tracks of a hare seen down by Abbot Tarn, at the foot of Killiknappen. ‘It made me think of formulae written in the Sirian alphabet.’

Deep down inside they were all afraid that the whole thing was just a coincidence, that the idea could have come to Bohr anywhere, but they refused to accept this. It had to have something to do with Norway.

They drank on and had reached the stage where Axel was dead set on having a contest to see who could sing ‘I Love You Because’ in the deepest voice, when Viktor started flicking through a book he had borrowed at random from the bookcase in the smoking room, which also functioned as the ‘library’. The minute he saw the blessed Christian Winge’s name written neatly in ink on the flyleaf he guessed that in his hand he held a key, and when he realized that the book was Aasmund Olavsson Vinje’s Memoir of a Journey , or at least his Selected Writings Volume 2 from 1884, he felt even surer. This book must have been rather like the baton in a relay, passed from owner to owner, a cornerstone which had survived the Luftwaffe’s presence here during the war and subsequent fires: a true memoir of a journey, the perfect travel account.

Viktor leafed through it and came to the part where Vinje writes about ‘Capital People’. ‘Listen to this,’ he cried, jumping to his feet with his glass in his hand in his excitement: ‘“Were I to name some differences between we people from the capital and other city folk, then the greatest would have to be that we are more liable to see everything with a kind of double vision, at one glance we seem to see both the right side and the wrong of life’s tapestry…”’ Viktor stopped, went on reading to himself and then as this same thought crystallized inside his head into a single word: ‘That’s it!’ he cried. ‘Duality!’