After a while — though not soon enough to prevent total chaos, with a tailback stretching all the way to Malmøya, several kilometres to the south — the law did of course arrive, four squad cars plus mounted police, to disperse the demonstrators. A number had to be carried away, but Jonas and Viktor were the only ones to put up a fight — Jonas was almost happy to feel an old rage stir inside him again. Both were taken to the police station. In a brief item on the Evening News Jonas was seen being carted off, still holding aloft the placard bearing his message written, thanks to the kind offices of the Indo-Iranian Institute, in Marathi: ‘Destroy not the Gateway of Norway!’ — with a clear allusion to the Gateway of India, Bombay’s most famous landmark. The irony of it was not lost on Jonas: the first time he managed to achieve his goal in life, to make his name publicly known, it was in the form of an alias, as Vinoo Sabarmati, a famous film director from Bombay. In due course a newspaper photograph was even said to have reached India, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that people there really did take Jonas for a film-maker from Bombay who had accidentally strayed into an unknown corner of the world called Norway, a place overrun by police and cars.
Life is full of mysterious coincidences. Jonas had earlier seen how rings could meet and intersect, and not only in water. Still, though, he was startled to read, in prison, that the Town Hall Square — at long last free of cars again — had been paved with flagstones from India. You could almost be said to be walking on the bedrock of India right in the centre of Oslo. This news brought back rather painful memories of his valiant youthful protest, and also revived a thought which had come to him as he was being led down to the harbour area in Montevideo, in far-off Uruguay, by a young, politically-aware woman called Ana: there has been too little iconoclasm and too much orthodoxy in my life. I need to be more of a rebel.
Together with Ana, whom he had got talking to thanks to a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter displayed in a window, Jonas reached the main gathering point in the old town. Here, in the shadow of the Customs House, lay the Mercado del Puerto: no longer a market, but a bustling, noisy collection of restaurants, a score or more under one roof, in something resembling an old railway shed; a ferment of barbecue fumes, accordion music and newspaper vendors with grotesque, piercing voices. It was like a cross between an infernal snack bar and a dark, poky pub with long, long bars. With the ease of familiarity Ana led him around open fires, casting a critical eye over the dripping cuts of meat laid out on sloping grill racks. She found a place, ordered food and drinks for them both. ‘This is on me,’ she said.
Maybe it had something to do with the atmosphere in the bar, Jonas did not know, but Ana started talking again about Sigrid Undset and Kristin Lavransdatter, in fact Jonas had the feeling that this was why she had invited him to lunch. She had read the three books as a teenager, she said, and had been absolutely fascinated by Kristin, or Kristina as she was called in the Spanish translation. Jonas simply could not understand it: how could this dusky beauty with amethysts in her ears, a modern woman, a student of sociology who had actually lived in political exile, be so besotted with what was, as far as he was concerned, a stodgy Norwegian novel about a woman in the Middle Ages. And as if to explain, she began alluding, wide-eyed and animated, to different episodes from these books about Kristin Lavransdatter — keen, or so it seemed to Jonas, to share them with him, to revive a pleasure they had both had. She mentioned the part when the child Kristin meets the elf-maid, and the incident when her poor little sister, Ulvhild, has her back broken by a falling log, and what did Jonas think of Bentein trying to rape Kristin, and Arne being stabbed and killed, wasn’t that awful? Jonas, who had not read one word by Undset, found it all pretty hard to follow, but at the same time he could not help being intrigued by the young woman’s anecdotes which tended, because she got so caught up in them, to become little stories in themselves.
Eventually he felt compelled to admit that he did not know the story at all. She clapped her hands in disbelief, then burst into ripples of laughter. Fortunately their lunch appeared just at that moment: a bottle of wine and chivitos: a thin slice of steak together with bacon, cheese, tomato, egg and a salad of sliced peppers and onions, all served between two huge chunks of bread and held together by toothpicks. She carried on laughing as they ate, could not help it; she seemed to find it hard to believe: a Norwegian who had not read Kristin Lavransdatter. And for this very reason, perhaps, she started once again, with redoubled enthusiasm, to relate episodes from the book, as if anxious to show him what he was missing; there she sat, Jonas thought in amusement, pleading a Norwegian writer’s case to a Norwegian. Or maybe she simply got so carried away that once she started she could not stop. In any case, she tried to describe to him how wrapped up she had been in the passionate first meetings between Kristin and Erlend, with what trepidation she had read about them dancing together, about Kristin sleeping in his arms, and of how Erlend had kissed her above the knee, thus ‘disarming’ her, and could then lay her down in the hay. Jonas listened with interest, in suspense in fact, and although he did have to interrupt now and again to inquire about some detail, and once to protest at Kristin’s wilful behaviour, for the most part he remained silent throughout the rest of the young woman’s very elaborate narration of everything from the lightning that struck St Olav’s Church at Jørundgård and set it on fire to Kristin on her deathbed acknowledging God’s plan for her. Jonas sat there like a priest in the confessional, one big, hearkening ear, and saw these scenes form a long fresco in his mind’s eye. He found it hard to believe, that he could be here in a foreign country, wreathed in the fumes from barbecue coals and grilled meat, with the sound of an accordion in his ears, listening to a young woman recounting extracts from a book by a Norwegian author with such feeling that from time to time she actually blushed.
‘And now,’ Jonas asked when she was done, with the last sliver of olive on his fork, ‘how do you feel about those books now?’
She smiled almost apologetically. ‘Well, obviously I feel differently about them today,’ she said. ‘I find the sombre, rather humourless, view of life which underlies the whole novel hard to take now.’ Ana raised her glass and looked at him, the amethysts in her ears flashing a strange purplish-blue in the glow of the nearby fire. ‘But I won’t let that spoil what they meant to me when I was young,’ she said. ‘The experience of reading a story which told me love is a primal force that breaks all laws.’
He was back on the white sands, slumped in his deckchair under the blue-striped parasol, listening to the roar of the breakers. He raised his eyes to the horizon. Suddenly he saw things more clearly. It all came down to a woman. To his relationship with a woman. It was possibly Ana who had given him the clue. As he lay there in his chair, thinking, he realised that in searching for a unifying theme for a groundbreaking television series, he had also been trying to discover the driving force behind this ambition. And this driving force — he flushed with shame, his cheeks burning even though he was alone, even though it was only a thought — was love. All he wanted, deep down, was to come up with the makings of a work of art which would show Margrete just a fraction of what she had meant to him. It was not a matter of performing some great feat in order to prove himself worthy of her love, as he had once rather childishly imagined; it was a matter of a gift, an unreserved tribute, a way of saying thank you for reawakening a half-dead aspiration and thereby also his neglected creativity. He wanted to show her what she had made of him. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say one day, placing the cassettes containing the programmes before her, ‘I could never have done this without you.’ Yet again, it was her he had been thinking about when he did not know what he was thinking about.