Jonas told the man where he came from. The man nodded, had managed to light his pipe, stood looking out across the city in the same direction as Jonas, his rich enjoyment of the tobacco written large on his features. ‘Do you know what my name is?’ he said at last. Jonas shrugged, how could he possibly know? The only Armenian name he knew was Khachaturian, because as a boy he had played some unusual pieces for the piano by this composer.
‘My name is Nansen Sarjan,’ the man said and eyed Jonas expectantly, as if awaiting a reaction from Jonas, although he could not have known that it was precisely because of Fridtjof Nansen that Jonas had wanted to come here; it was because of him that Armenia, or rather the Armenian people, were so much on his mind.
‘Your first name is Nansen?’ Jonas said.
‘My father was so grateful for what Nansen did for our people that he named me after him,’ the man said. ‘There are quite a number of people in Armenia whose first name is Nansen.’
Jonas was touched; he found this very moving. He had heard of people in Brazil calling their children after national football players, no matter how farfetched their professional names might be. If one admires a person, no name is too improbable. An Armenian boy could well be christened Nansen.
The man seemed gratified by Jonas’s interest and proceeded to tell him about his father, the hardships his father had suffered in the years after the First World War, and about himself. He pointed to the other side of the city. ‘I work in the distillery you can see over there. Have you tried our famous brandy? The very finest quality.’
Jonas was feeling a little chilly; he wouldn’t have minded a small glass of cognac.
‘Troubles or no troubles, you have to learn to enjoy life,’ the Armenian said, pointing to his pipe. ‘Have you read Nansen’s book, First Crossing of Greenland?’ Jonas shook his head, did not dare to mention that in his programme on Nansen he had focused on things that had absolutely nothing to do with skiing.
‘You know,’ Nansen Sarjan said, ‘the truly great achievement, where the Greenland expedition is concerned, is not the actual ski crossing. The real work of art is the book, especially the passages in which Nansen describes the team’s pipe-smoking: how they spun out their Sunday ration of tobacco. Do you remember? First they smoked the tobacco, then they smoked the ash and wood in the bowl of the pipe, and after that they stuffed in tarred rope and smoked that.’ The man laughed. ‘And when they finally reached the west coast and the icecap was behind them… I’ll never forget how Nansen describes the pleasure of feeling earth and rock under his feet again, the glorious smell of grass. And then, to crown it all, how they stretched out in the soft heather and, with the greatest relish, puffed on pipes filled with moss. You have to read it; it’s quite amazing. It must have something to do with the joy of being alive. It was after reading that book that I took up the pipe.’
Jonas smiled. For some reason he found this quite splendid. Standing here. Him and this man. Why had he come to Yerevan? Perhaps to hear a total stranger wax eloquent about a passage from a book that extolled the joys of pipe-smoking or to hear that name, Nansen, to hear that it lived on here, had survived here, hundreds of miles from Norway. Was a part of the language. Flesh and blood. For some unknown reason, Jonas felt a rapport with the man standing next to him, as if, although he didn’t know it, he owed his life to Nansen Sarjan; he stands there surveying the lovely city of red stone, still listening to the sighing all around him: it sounds like the hum of a huge fan, a hum that carried within it a sense of anticipation, of preparing for something big, in exactly the same way as when his father pulled out the stops on the organ before, like a delicious shock, he broke into the prelude. Jonas remembered that there had been a little organ on board Nansen’s ship, the Fram, on the first polar expedition. Was it Nansen himself who had played it? Jonas peered down at the city. It was winter, but there was hardly any snow. He took a deep breath, felt powerful, confident, as if he were at a point in his life when anything, absolutely anything, could happen.
A journey need not be long, in terms of time, to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.
A National Monument
It takes no great stretch of the imagination to spot the connection between this point, a conversation in the Caucasus, and a winter’s tale from long before, in Norway — between two episodes so well-suited to demonstrating that each new moment is only one of many possibilities.
Jonas liked ice, especially the ice in late autumn. After the first few days of hard frost he and Little Eagle always ran up to Steinbruvannet to see how the water had somehow stiffened, acquired a film of gleaming crystal. His limbs trembled with suspense as they slid warily out onto the ice, listening all the time, like animals, for a warning snap. Jonas never could understand how ice this thin did not break, not even when it gave underfoot: that this fraction of an inch was enough to bear his weight. Ice always gave him an uneasy sense of being part of the lightness of being.
They tended to stay close to the shore, where the water was shallow, crouched or lay down to scan the pond bottom and the fish beneath them. Jonas and Ørn played that they were lying on top of a gigantic television screen, immersing themselves in it from top to toe. Either that or they felt like Captain Nemo drawing back the curtains on his submarine, the Nautilus, to suddenly be brought face to face with the drama of the deep.
Once the ice was safe and before the first snow had fallen, the lakes in the surrounding countryside became a Mecca for skaters; it was on Steinbruvannet, with the aroma of his parents’ beef tea in his nostrils, that Jonas learned to master the Norwegian national sport, stage by stage, so to speak, working his way from triple-bladed trainer skates to speed-skates. From the very first he loved it, adored the zing of the fresh, clean ice, the vibrant chime each time the blades sliced through. Most of all he loved to spin — not least when he was skating across ice-bound water where no one had been before him — and examine the patterns left by his skates. ‘It’s a sort of secret writing,’ he said to himself. ‘Symbols that have to do with conquest.’
It was on such a day, late in the autumn of the year when he was going with Margrete, that Jonas made his first tentative attempt to build a monument, a monument of glittering ice — an impulse which ought probably to be viewed in the light of the new-won self-confidence with which he had been filled after the incident in the quarry eighteen months earlier. And I really do not think, Professor, that we should attach too much importance to the fact that this monument was founded on frost, on cold.
The way had been paved for this sudden entrepreneurial urge by a bet made by the grownups at Solhaug. Late one night during a gents-only get-together in Five-Times Nilsen’s cosy living room to christen the normally so diffident salesman’s latest acquisition — a magnificent bookcase complete with that last word in luxury: an integral drinks cabinet — Five-Times Nilsen had got a little above himself and announced that he was going ice bathing, so help him he was. And since the others didn’t believe he would do it, they ended up making a bet — with a fair bit of money in the pot, I can tell you, a sum that confirmed the Norwegian people’s strange mania for gambling and penchant for lotteries of any description. Jonas had, in fact, seen the drinks cabinet on one occasion, one time when he was selling flags, which is to say: suffering the torture to which all children are subjected, of having a tray full of flags hung on a cord around his neck and being shooed off to sell or, no, not selclass="underline" beg. Jonas hated this, hated standing on people’s doorsteps with his head bowed, this yoke around his neck, and a ‘Pleasewillyoubuy’ on his lips. It ought to be said, though, that Mrs Nilsen was the saving of every desperate flag-seller, or their victim rather; the textured wallpaper in the Nilsen’s hall was like a pincushion, studded with flowers from the TB Association, Lifeboat flags, pins for Cancer Research and the Children’s Ski Foundation. And it was on one such call, while Mrs Nilsen was fumbling with her small change, that Jonas caught a glimpse of the new marvel in the living room, a proper little Soria Moria Castle, with a lid that folded down, built-in lighting and a mirror at the back, giving the impression of double — nay — infinite enjoyment, not least due to the brightly coloured contents of the various bottles, which reminded Jonas of his father’s extraordinary collection of aftershave lotions, since this too was connected with scents, with men in white shirts and braces getting all het up; and on a shelf at the very top, if it was not a mirage, Jonas discerned the most renowned items of alclass="underline" the highball glasses with the scantily clad ladies on the outside who, when viewed from the inside, were stark naked. So Jonas had no problem, later, in understanding how Five-Times Nilsen could have become a mite loose-tongued after a few highballs — and this was in the days when a highball really was a highball, served in a raffia sleeve which conjured up thoughts of grass skirts, lagoons and warm water — that Five-Times Nilson should declare, possibly while peering through his whisky at the naked lady on the inside of the glass, like an enticing reward in the distance, that he was going ice bathing, so help me, anyone wanna bet that I won’t!