He woke up, became a new man. Margrete took him by the arm and showed him around, needed no guide. In an almost tourist-free Xi’an, under a clear, cold blue sky, they visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Green Dragon Temple and the Provincial Museum of History which, as it happened, was also a mosque. Something about her passion for candied plums, which they bought threaded onto a stick, and the way she ordered the taxi drivers about, told him that she had been here before. With amazing assurance she tracked down the best herbalists and silk merchants, as well as the most out-of-the-way restaurants, hidden down backstreets, in gardens where carp and mandarin fish swam in glass tanks and snakes coiled in cages with reassuring stones on their lids. Margrete, too, seemed different now, somehow relieved, or hopeful; she came out with all sorts of information about China, smiled and pointed at little children with knitted Gagarin helmets on their heads, but bare bottoms showing through the slits in the backs of their trousers even in the biting cold. At night she lay and looked at him, reminded him of things they had done when they were going out together in sixth grade. Of the weighing machines at the Eastern station that dispensed wise sayings along with a note of their weight. Of the time when Jonas won a ski race because the weather suddenly changed and all the other competitors’ skis got clogged up. They laughed. Laughed together as they had not done in ages. Her eyes were golden, deep and smouldering. And like gold they only really came into their own in the twilight.
One night, in the moonlight, she took Jonas by the hand and led him up onto the city wall beside the north gate. And here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she produced a kite she had bought and flew it from the top of the wall in the winter night, steered it expertly, making it swoop low then soar again, a sight which reminded Jonas of something he had seen before, in another life so it seemed. ‘Here, you try,’ she said, standing behind him and helping him, guiding him. ‘Well done,’ she said, as if talking to a child. Jonas stood there, wrapped in his thick, quilted coat, and flew a kite so high that it was just a black dot in the moonlight. It was all about control. About relaxing. Letting things run.
Margrete said not a word. Jonas Wergeland stood atop a city wall in China, flying a kite in the moonlight and he understood.
So why did he do it?
At the airport, on the day of their departure, Jonas took their guide aside. ‘That was so nice, that piece by Grieg you played. Thank you.’ The man was gratified by this, he could see.
‘Yes, Grieg was a great hit-maker,’ the guide said. ‘I know several tunes by him. Next time you come to Xi’an I will play them for you.’
Again that night in the hotel in Beijing Margrete snuggled in to his back, as if wanting not only to warm him, but also to defend him against attack from behind. She lay there, breathing on him. He was dead, a mere form; he had not yet discovered his true potential. He might have created the most famous Norwegian television series of all time, a worldwide success, and be arguably the biggest celebrity in the whole country, but he had not found his way in life.
The rows and rows of terracotta warriors had also given him a sense of déja vu. They reminded him of his youthful endeavours back home in the basement at Solhaug: the skipping, the rope, the thoughts that were unearthed, in serried ranks. Maybe his basement had been just such a subterranean realm, a place where he had tried to do much the same as Emperor Qin: to make time stand still, win eternal life. Build a world of his own, which no one could invade, where he would be safe.
But during that secret basement period of his life, on his journeys of discovery into the world’s most beautiful hemisphere: the brain — to the extent that this is the seat of thought — his objective kept shifting. At one stage all his efforts were focused on mastering a triple skip, what he called a triplet. Gradually, however, he became more and more obsessed with punching a hole in something, breaking down a sort of wall of thoughts, of reaching beyond. He took it into his head that if he could just get enough thoughts turning in his mind simultaneously, something would burst open, all those different reflections would latch onto one another, their united weight rip the surface and they would sink down to illuminate something in the depths, like a bathysphere exploring some hitherto unplumbed fissure in the seabed. Or perhaps the ‘other place’ thus revealed would turn out to be what, in his mind, he called Samarkand. Many a time when he was skipping like a soul possessed in the dark basement, with the rope whirring round him as he did doubles, he felt as if he were caught in a whirl, as if he were a dervish of the skipping world. More and more often, once he had mastered the knack of following four trains of thought simultaneously, he had the impression that he was on the point of making some great find — that something massive, something colossal, was lying in wait, that it could break through at any minute. This reminded Jonas of the thrill of anticipation he experienced with a well-composed pop song the second before the chorus kicked in, or the feeling inside him when his father reached the final chord in a choral prelude and the hymn proper was about to thunder out. But even then, hovering inside the arc of the rope with four thoughts held suspended in the air, that was as far as it went. It was like working his way up to an orgasm, a liberating climax, which then subsided. The world which he sensed was there, remained hidden behind an unopened door, so to speak. It was as if he could hear it knocking, but could not open the door to it.
And speaking of unopened doors, for a long time Jonas had no idea what Karen Mohr did — for a living that is. But she was a great reader, that much he knew. Jonas had a theory that it was tales from warmer climes which had endowed her skin with such a dusky tint — if, that is, it was not her perpetual and powerful memory of the Riviera. Frequently, especially after a glass of Pernod, she would find occasion to quote thoughts on love to him, primarily reflections she had come across in French literature. One Saturday afternoon, one of those Saturdays when she was not due to dine at Bagatelle in Bygdøy allé, she told him about a writer by the name of Stendahl. He had written a whole book solely about love. ‘Would you mind nipping into the bedroom and getting it?’ she asked him. ‘It’s called De l’Amour and it’s just on your left, at eye-level, as you go in.’
Jonas was at a complete loss, did not know which way to turn. She pointed to the wall. Still Jonas was none the wiser, he stood there listening to the tinkling of the little fountain in among the plants, as if hoping it might inspire his imagination. Was he supposed to walk through the wall? Then he spied it. A door. He had never seen anything there before but a rug hanging on the wall, but this — he now noticed — exactly covered the door. The door handle had been there all the time, but it was almost invisible. It wasn’t unlike the secret doors in films set in old country houses or castles. It had never occurred to Jonas that of course there had to be other rooms in the flat.