He had sensed it the moment he reached the square and sank down onto the ground.
Jonas sat there gazing at the three façades. Like three gigantic oriental rugs. They almost seemed to cancel one another out, to generate a void of sorts, concentrated nothingness. He could lose himself in those walls, in the ornamentation, disappear into them. Get to the back of them, he thought. If he stared at them for long enough he might even be able to step out into Aunt Laura’s bazaar of a flat, where he had played as a child, with a torch in the dark.
Samarkand was more than a place. Jonas was conscious of a Samarkand beyond Samarkand, something which was not a city, but a crucial insight. This feeling was confirmed as he sat cross-legged on Registan Square. Because if there was any truth in his suspicion, that the world was flat, then here, in Samarkand, he had found the edge. Samarkand had to be a good place for an outsider. An outside-left position from which one could open up the game, change the rules almost. Not for nothing had Samarkand’s greatest ruler invented a variation on chess using twice as many pieces. For an instant, Jonas had a sense of being back in the world as it was before Copernicus, before people knew that the earth was round. Of being able to start afresh. Follow another fork in the road than that which humanity had so far taken.
And then, just as he felt that something vital was about to rise to the surface, that Samarkand beyond Samarkand, much in the way that one feels a sneeze building up, suddenly it slipped away and in its place was another thought, or a cluster of thoughts, as impenetrable and manifest and rich in nuance as one of the glowing façades before him: Margrete. He had come to this place because he thought he would meet Margrete here. Or at least that there was a possibility of meeting her here. If there was the slightest chance of meeting her anywhere in the world it had to be here, in Samarkand. After all, what was Margrete like? Margrete was the sort of person who could easily take it into her head to go to Samarkand. He realised, although he had never come anywhere close to formulating such a thought before, that he was sure he would meet Margrete here. It was the same sensation, albeit greatly intensified, which he had occasionally experienced as a lovesick teenager: you would go a long way out of your way, or ski for miles, if there was even the most microscopic chance of running into the girl you loved, as if by pure accident. And Jonas saw that, unconsciously, this was exactly what he had been thinking this time too. If he went to Samarkand, the most unlikely place in the world, he was bound to run into her. It was a simple as that.
And with thoughts of this nature running through his head, he realised how much she had been on his mind all the years since she had left, how much he missed her, what an indelible impression those months with her had made on him. This was the story which he had come here to uncover. This was the Samarkand beyond Samarkand. The story of Margrete’s absence, the gaping void she had left inside him. Unbeknown to him, the memory of Margrete had bulked larger and larger in his mind. Maybe, he thought to himself, he was more deeply, more devotedly hers here, now, than when they were going out together.
Jonas rested his eyes on the blue dome of the Tillya Karis, let his mind dwell on a blue found nowhere else in the whole world. Wasn’t blue the colour of hope?
He felt that he was ready. Ready for something. The world was flat and he was sitting on its edge. He knew that something was going to happen, but he was not prepared for the fact that it was already happening. He was just getting to his feet, and then it happened. He felt a hand being placed lightly on his shoulder. There was someone behind him.
Why did he do it?
During his years with Leonardo, in the epoch of the Italian school and more especially at the height of their Grorud filming fervour, Jonas imagined that he had forgotten Margrete. One might even say that Michelangelo Antonioni helped him, or consoled him, by making films which showed that love today was an extremely tricky, and possibly downright impossible, business. Only once did the thought of Margrete crop up, like a wound, in his mind — when they were hunting for a leading lady. They were looking for a girl who would be as ravishingly beautiful as Jeanne Moreau or Monica Vitti. ‘Whatever happened to that Bangkok chick of yours,’ Leonard asked. ‘Shut up,’ Jonas retorted. It was one of the few occasions when he felt like punching his pal.
In the end they picked Pernille, mainly because she was a year older and had a scooter, a Vespa, which was the perfect prop for a film as heavily influenced by the Italians as Leonard’s. Jonas could not deny that Pernille was disconcertingly attractive, with a dark and rather sulky beauty reminiscent of Claudia Cardinale; secretly he dreamed of being kissed by her the way Cary Grant was kissed by Ingrid Bergman in Notorious: for three whole minutes, the most famous kiss in the history of the cinema, or the most groundbreaking at any rate, in the way it so cunningly got round the censors.
But Leonard wanted them back to back. A good many weird ten-minute tales were shot in open countryside, with a lot of wandering past one another, far apart, a lot of staring into space. ‘Look anxious,’ Leonard would yell at Jonas, ‘look as though you’re feeling guilty about something, although you don’t know what.’ Nothing happened and everything was a mystery. Nonetheless, Jonas was often amazed by the way in which what, to him, was simply a succession of obscure scenes could, when shuffled around and spliced together in the final, grainy short films which Leonard showed on a sheet in the Red Room to the accompaniment of the projector’s hum, suddenly appeared to have a vague plot. He once asked his friend what he enjoyed most about film-making and was not at all surprised when Leonard replied: ‘The editing.’
Then came the great revolution. Or the great loss. The loss of wrath. If, that is, it had not been lost long before. Jonas and Leonard had missed seeing Antonioni’s new film Blow-Up at the cinema, having been on their summer holidays at the time, but just over a year later they found themselves in the Oslo Cinematographers’ screening room in Stortingsgaten along with the Film Club study group, for a showing of this unforgettable movie, so steeped in the London of the sixties, steeped in the music and design of the sixties and, above all else, steeped in metaphysical overtones. It was about a photographer who had taken some pictures of a couple, eventually just the woman, in a park and when he enlarged the photographs discovered that on film he had also — possibly — caught a crime being committed in the background, in the bushes, a man with a gun and a body on the ground. Amazing, thought Jonas. You take pictures of what you think is a love scene, and it turns out to be connected to a murder. With his heart in his mouth he watched as the main character blew up one section of the photograph, from which he then blew up another section. Jonas and Leonard sat in the dark, eyes glued to the screen, letting themselves be seduced by Antonioni’s visual conjuring tricks. Like the photograph they, too, were blown up, enlarged. For a while after this Leonard regretted having chosen film rather than photography. They felt like borrowing Olav Knutzen’s Leica and Rolleiflex and taking pictures of every bush they saw. What would they find if they enlarged sections of them? For several weeks they were possessed of an urge to blow up everything.