“You want to be the only maniac?” Radar asked.
“I hate you.”
“I hate you, too,” said Radar, smiling.
The three of them approached Horeb.
Lars cleared his throat. “You will not be our guide.”
Horeb nodded, looking defeated.
“We can’t pay you anything, either,” he said.
“I told you. I don’t want money,” said Horeb.
“I know. That’s why we’d like to invite you to be the fourth member of our troupe.”
Horeb’s eyes lit up. “Really? Not joking?”
“Really. Welcome to Kirkenesferda.”
He bowed. “I am very honored.”
“Radar will catch you up on what we do during the drive.”
It was time to go. Horeb ran to his moto and picked out a small bag and his prayer mat. Radar looked around for Ivan, but there was still no sign of him. He wrote a quick note and went over to the chief mate.
“Please give this to Ivan,” he said. “Tell him ‘Thank you, from Radar.’”
Akaki nodded.
“Tell him I will never forget him or his songs.”
“Yes,” said Akaki. “I tell him.”
Radar was not convinced he would, but there was nothing more to do except pile into Moby-Dikt. He looked in vain one last time for his friend, and then the doors were latched and closed. The truck shifted into gear and they bade farewell to the dream of Matadi.
• • •
FOR THE FIRST HOUR of the drive, Radar descended into a swarthy melancholy, no doubt encouraged by the liquor still lingering in his body. He would never see Ivan again. He had betrayed Ana Cristina. He had abandoned his mother. And for what? He glanced around their little hovel. Otik and Lars had settled down to their respective workstations. Horeb had carved out a space for himself among several great spools of wire and was reading from a book. He had been a part of the team for less than an hour, and already he appeared as if he belonged, in a way that Radar had never managed.
Radar closed his eyes and tried to sleep but could not. One of the generators had been fired up to provide them with electricity, and though a little exhaust fan whirred away in the corner, the room quickly became stuffy and uncomfortably hot.
Otik’s motion sickness returned, and he began the now familiar routine of quietly puking into a bucket. Lars and Radar had grown so accustomed to this that they did not bat an eye, but Horeb grew concerned. He went over to the electric kettle and busied himself brewing some tea from several small bags of spices he produced from his knapsack.
“Here,” he said, presenting a mug to Otik. “For the stomach.”
Otik eyed the mixture skeptically but took the mug and gruffly mumbled a word of acknowledgment.
Horeb came over to Radar with a second mug of the tea.
“Thank you,” said Radar, accepting the offering.
“How do you feel, my friend?” said Horeb.
“I’ve been better. I’ve also been worse.” Radar sipped the tea. It was bitter and peppery, but it reminded him of Charlene and home. “What is this?”
“Búku oela. A pan-African tea. I made it up myself. One could say it is post-traditional. Rooibos from South Africa, grains of paradise from Nigeria, calumba from Mozambique, ginger from Morocco. It heals the body and brings peace to the soul.”
Radar wished he could hear his mother give her olfactory report on the tea. He wondered if she would be able to smell all those countries.
“How did you learn to make it?”
“If I’m being honest with you. . the Internet,” he said, smiling. “The Internet will save Africa.”
Horeb glanced over in Lars’s direction. He leaned in close.
“I’m very honored to be part of your team,” he said quietly. “But I’m not really sure I understand what your team does. Can you explain this to me, please?”
Radar was baffled about why Lars had nominated him to be purveyor of information, particularly because he was the newest member and least qualified to describe what the group did. He barely understood it himself.
“I can try. But I can’t promise it will make sense,” he said, sitting up. He took another sip of the tea. He already felt better. The post-traditionalism was working.
As soon as Radar started talking, however, he found he had a lot to say. Much more than he thought he knew. At first he was worried that the history he was relating was not quite right — that he was leaving out critical details or shifting dates or mispronouncing names. He kept waiting for Lars or Otik to intervene and take over the role of storyteller. When they did not, he began to gain confidence, and there came a point at which he was no longer worried about whether he was getting it right or not. The story had become his. The story had become more than itself.
Fig. 5.5. Selected diagrams (1–5)
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler
Using the book his mother had given him as a springboard, he pointed to the diagrams as he told Horeb the history of the group, beginning with the labor camp for teachers in Kirkenes during World War II. The pictures, in their realness, in their little bordered truth, gave him courage.
“They were kept in two camps,” he said, pointing at the map of Kirkenes. “Here and here. This was where the idea for the group formed, in the breaks between heavy labor. The science teachers got together and began talking about science, and war, and theater, and they found they had a lot in common. When they were not working, there was nothing to do but talk. And out on the edge of the world like that, ideas can become big things. Ideas can become bigger than reality. And that’s why they went through with it. It was also desperately cold that winter. You can see the average temperature was minus twenty. The mind slows to a crawl when it’s that cold outside. But they knew it would one day be spring again. That one day the war must end.”
He waited for Lars to tell him he was full of crap. That he was making all of this up. But Lars stayed quiet, and so he went on. He described the creation of the Bjørnens Hule in the middle of the wilderness, pointed to the map of grass-roofed huts revolving around the Wardenclyffe tower.
“Do you know what a Wardenclyffe tower is?” Radar asked.
Horeb shook his head.
“Nikola Tesla invented it. He was a Serb. . one of my people. My father used to go on and on about him. Tesla came up with an idea that all electricity could be free. .” And so on. He talked about the experiments with electricity and nuclear physics, the preparations for the elusive performance on Poselok Island that was only discovered by two Russian fishermen many years later. He described the look of amazement on the fishermen’s faces. He recounted the Gåselandet show, destroyed by the massive Tsar Bomba, and the mysterious films of the exploding theater wagon that surfaced and were played at various underground parties to psychedelic soundtracks. He described the films even though he had never seen the films, even though he had seen only a series of stills in the book. But maybe this was enough. Maybe telling a story of the event was more powerful than witnessing it yourself.
“This was their theater wagon,” he said. He talked about the symbolism of the wagon at length, what it represented, its history in Europe first as a religious beacon, then as a satellite of safety against the state, then as a vessel of narrative transmigration. He did not know he knew all of this. He did not know he knew the term “narrative transmigration,” but out it came with all the rest.