Gabriel’s white form grew smaller and smaller. This was the final scene. Jonas had the impression that he was acting now, too. That he wasn’t really hopping mad. That Gabriel appreciated this stunt, this act of rebellion, this parting. That he had actually been waiting for something like this to happen for three years. That he was pleased, regarded this as a worthy ending, a test-piece that proved that Jonas had completed his apprenticeship.
For Jonas it was, nonetheless, a relief to see the boat’s rigging destroyed. He felt as if a net had ripped apart and he was, at long last, free.
Due East
Perhaps once, perhaps twice in their lives, most people will find themselves undergoing a radical transformation. You could walk out onto a plain and leave that plain as someone else entirely. You have a sudden urge to start anew, with a different set of values, quite different ideals. A war can have that effect on a person. For Jonas Wergeland, who had never been to war, it was a spell in what he was inclined to call a loony bin that did it.
I am talking, in other words, about the year he spent doing his national service, with N Brigade, and more specifically about an incident which took place just after they had completed their ABC survival course at Skjold, up north in the Indre Troms region, a course geared not towards anything as innocent as mastering the alphabet but to learning how to survive under extreme circumstances: in the case, that is, that Norway were to be attacked by atomic, biological or chemical weapons. For two weeks Jonas Wergland dealt, in theory and in simulated practice, with the sort of possible scenarios which few people dare think about; he had, for example, to plot out on a sheet of paper those zones which would be affected by radioactive fallout; he learned how lethal bacteria and viruses could be spread most effectively over the widest possible area, and he tramped about in protective clothing and a mask like a spaceman, pretending to establish the presence of such fiendish inventions as sarin or mustard gas.
Maybe it was the ridiculous skills he learned on that ABC course, this illusion of being able to survive even if the world went due west, that drove Jonas to go off into the wild; as if, after all those staggering, hypothetical possibilities, he sorely needed to scrape about in a piece of concrete Norwegian reality, the soil he was in fact supposed to defend — or maybe he simply wanted to confront the foe that was forever being waved in their faces and at whom they had for so many months been haphazardly firing blanks: an adversary they never saw but who, according to high command, was out there somewhere and might at any minute start making life hell for them. No one could be surprised if a man — frustrated at being charged with an important task, but one which is never clearly defined — suddenly goes off willy-nilly, in hopes of meeting this mysterious foe. In case you have not yet guessed it, Professor, I am once more about to relate the story of the radio theatre.
Jonas had a weekend’s leave. He took advantage of an army recreation scheme and the fact that he was friendly with the officer in charge of transport to borrow a jeep on the excuse that he and another soldier were going to camp out for the night in Dividalen National Park, a little way to the southeast. His mate hopped off, however, a couple of miles down the road, outside his girlfriend’s house in Andselv, with instructions on what to say to the company commander on the Sunday evening. Jonas then headed towards a much more remote destination than Dividalen, namely Alta in the far north which, despite the long drive, he passed right through before cutting south again and arriving, after driving for a couple of hours through mountain birch and rosebay willowherb, at Kautokeino where, on a whim, he made a sharp swing to the left, onto a narrower road which he followed for about six or seven miles, until he came to Av’zi. Jonas parked the jeep, got out, shouldered his rucksack and struck off resolutely into the wild, bearing eastward, as if intent on doing the exact opposite of going due west.
He made his way up onto the bare, open plain at the foot of Muv’ravarri, skirted round Gar’gatoai’vi and eventually, after an unexpectedly tough march over rocks and moss, bogs and streams, reached the eastern side of Stuora Oaivusvarri, where he pitched camp 1,600 feet above sea level. The most incredible thing so far was that he had not encountered the notorious Finnmarksvidda mosquito. All he could hear was a vague humming; there was something there, all the time, but hidden from view.
Having dined on combat rations from his Readiness Support Package, also known as ‘dead-man-in-a-tin’, and boiled coffee, Jonas settled himself outside his tent and gazed at the sun, which was slowly sinking, but which, here in the third week of July, would still stay above the horizon all night. He felt limp. Drained. As if the radiation he had been dealing with in theory had in fact permeated his body. Although he had actually been feeling like this for some time. Ever since Viktor’s accident. That chunk of ice falling out of the blue. Jonas sat there, gazing at the landscape, struck by how remarkably desolate it was. This must be the closest one came in Norway to a desert. And how still it was. Like finding oneself in a world after a nuclear war, he thought. Was this really his country? All of a sudden it seemed so totally alien that Jonas’s interest perked up again. He knew he would encounter something of crucial importance out here, but not what form it would take. It merely lay there, latent, like a hum, behind everything else. In his heart of hearts he may have been hoping to stumble upon some inconceivably massive diamond find. Or better stilclass="underline" a chunk of ice with a pearl ear-stud inside it.
The next morning he wended his way further eastward, through unfamiliar terrain where the ground was covered mainly by moss and heather, dwarf birch and greenish-grey willow, with a scattering of rotting reindeer antlers. He soon mastered the technique of planting his army boots on the tangled roots of the willow trees when crossing streams. Although the landscape seemed monotonous it was not flat, but constantly rose and fell, a fact that made it hard to get his bearings. The soggy peat sapped his strength, and the walk was not made any easier by the heat, with the temperature in the mid-eighties. And yet you’re actually inside the Arctic Circle, Jonas told himself. If you were to follow this same line of longitude you’d be walking across the ice on Greenland, so help me. And that is absolutely true: anyone wanting to see how much Norway owes to the warm embrace of the Gulf Stream need only go for a hike across Finnmarksvidda.
At long last he reached the top of Lavvoai’vi and sat there surveying the view all the way across to the snow-covered peaks on the coast, feeling that he had much the same perspective on things as the rough-legged buzzard swooping over his head. But it was not an outlook he was after: it was insight. He scanned the surrounding scene, feeling that he was at the very centre of the country, that to be sitting here on this hilltop on Finnmarksvidda must be the equivalent of being on Ayer’s Rock, the red mountain in the heart of Australia, a place where it was so forcibly impressed on one that every landscape has a story to tell. Sitting there, staring out across the boundless plain, he realized that it was true what some people said: Norway was one big, protected national park. And it is not a bad idea to pause for a moment here to consider Finnmarksvidda, Professor, because what can you know about Norway unless you have visited Finnmarksvidda? Not Jotunheimen, but Finnmarksvidda is Norway’s primeval home, as well as an outer limit of the imagination, a sort of Timbuktu within the country’s borders. Not until he was sitting on the top of Lavvoai’vi, with a view that ran full-circle, did Jonas really appreciate a fact which he had come across so often in school textbooks: that an incredible ninety-six per cent of Norway was virgin territory. Only now did he see how desolate, how wild Norway actually was, how uncivilized, how fundamentally uninhabited. He surveyed the landscape, feeling for a moment that it exuded an emptiness that his imagination could never hope to fill. ‘Holy shit,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You could dump a small European country here, just on this deserted plain round about me, and all the millions of people in it.’