‘That is why I have come to you, Professor. You see, I cannot write, only recount.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ was the first thing I managed to say.
‘Out of pity,’ my visitor said. ‘Sheer pity.’
I was not sure whether the stranger was thinking of me or of Jonas Wergeland. ‘And your purpose?’ I asked, putting the same question in another way.
‘To save a life. Otherwise there would be no point.’
I still couldn’t tell whether the stranger was referring to Jonas Wergeland or myself. And it took some time for it to dawn on me that this person was actually offering me a job as chronicler of Jonas Wergeland’s story — on two conditions: that I undertook not to deviate from the order in which the story was recounted and that I wrote it by hand.
‘Can’t I use a tape recorder?’ I said.
‘No,’ the visitor replied. ‘I’m old-fashioned. I belong, so to speak, to another age. I do not wish to talk into a machine. I wish to talk to a face, I must have a person — call it a scribe if you like — to whom I can tell the story. I don’t trust machines.’
‘I just thought it might be handy to have the tape as backup,’ I said. ‘In case I missed anything.’
‘You don’t understand,’ the stranger said. ‘That’s the very possibility I mean to deny you. I said I would help you, not write the book for you. I don’t expect you to quote me word for word. I’m not looking for a copy. I want you to interpret what I say as you write. The stories will not be as I tell them but as you perceive them. If you do not get it exactly right, if you have to rely on your memory, then all to the good. And you are, of course, free to add things gleaned from your own material to improve upon it.’
I accepted. I had to accept if the publishers were ever to get their biography. At the back of my mind I thanked my stars for the fact that I had once, in a previous career, been ambitious enough to learn shorthand, had attended a course run by the Norwegian parliament, no less. Although for a long time I could not be sure, I have come to the conclusion that my visitor must have been aware that I was proficient — or at any rate moderately proficient — in this rare skill.
‘Well, we might as well get started right away,’ the stranger said, as if in the habit of giving orders. ‘Hurry up, I have the entire sequence worked out in my head, and mark my words, Professor, in this case the sequence is crucial; only by following it can you hope to understand anything at all. So please do not distract me; just one story out of place and it all falls apart.’
These words, the way they were uttered — with a kind of, how shall I put it, pent-up aggression — gave me the feeling that the stranger had something against Jonas Wergeland, almost hated him, in fact. The figure kept a close eye on me from the chair by the fire as I fetched my spiral-bound notebook and a pen, staring at me as intently as a juggler with twenty balls in the air. Then the stream of stories began, and though during the course of their telling I still felt an urge to cry out, to protest, to pose questions, to ask their narrator to stop, I managed to refrain, to confine myself to taking notes, tried to get down as much as possible. I’m sure I hardly need add that this was the longest and most arduous single bout of writing I had ever undertaken.
Nonetheless, it was a relief to sit there with a blank sheet of paper in front of me, to have the chance, in a way, to start from scratch again. The results of that first evening, of our joint efforts, can be read on the preceding pages. And I believe the stranger was right: there was something about being forced to write, almost without thinking, as my visitor talked, that had a fruitful effect, so much so that I even managed, during short pauses, to jot down brief notes that I could enlarge upon later, points I suddenly recalled from my own research. The stranger created the necessary distance, enabling me to discern things from fresh angles, in a new light. Besides which, I liked the constant use of my title: ‘Professor’ — no one has called me that in fifteen years — as if my unknown visitor was, above all, well aware of my past. This gave me the confidence, at a later stage when I was transcribing my notes, to rework the text, sometimes quite drastically, on the basis of data from my own sources. Sometimes, when I read through the stories I found myself wondering whether this was what my visitor had said. Or whether, in the writing, even in those passages where I believe I have copied down the stranger’s exact words, somehow or other the story has gone from being half-true to being half-false.
The second evening on which the stranger sat down in the chair by the fireplace, rather like a general commandeering my house, this enigmatic character started without any preamble — and with eyes riveted, so it seemed, on the darkness, if not, that is, on the tall pine tree outside the window overlooking the fjord — on a story that was totally new to me.
Outer Land
One day Jonas Wergeland was quite suddenly sent reeling. He knew he was seriously ill but was incapable of doing anything, nor did he feel like doing anything, hardly seemed to care. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky, up at the clouds, up at woolly floes that were forever changing, moving too fast, careening towards him. He was far from all help, far out on the Mongolian steppes, surrounded by nothing but a rippling sea of grass and a sky fraught with wind.
An odd-looking face leaned into his field of vision, a Mongol, but he had something on his head, antlers; he looked like some sort of weird hybrid, a dragon, was Jonas’s first thought, no, a spirit creature, half-elk, half-man, a figure which began to move, dance in a circle around Jonas.
He was ill, dangerously ill, had been suddenly stricken, something to do with his head, his brain maybe, an inflammation of his most vital organ, deep in a foreign country. He was afraid, and yet not. His body had been invaded by worms, ribbons that slithered around, wove in and out of one another, ribbons that slowly tipped him over into an abstract state, a reality in which undulating patterns took over from the known world. ‘Help,’ he cried, or whispered, or thought.
He tried to pull himself together. He recognized the dancer. It was Buddha. He had to hold on to that thought. Buddha. And Mongolia.
Only the day before, everything had been fine. Not just fine. Wonderful. Jonas and Buddha had been stretched out on the heights of Karakorum, as was their wont, peering down into the valley below. ‘Isn’t that a caravan we can see down there?’ Jonas might say. Buddha would gaze long and hard, as if listening for something on the wind, might pluck a blade of grass and proceed to chew on it: ‘No, I think it’s a procession of monks on their way to the temple,’ he would say at last. When Jonas strained his eyes he could catch a glint of gold from the roof of a temple in the distance.