It was almost dark when they left the tea house. Yuri pulled Jonas towards a bus. ‘I want to show you something that far too few people know about,’ he said. They alighted in the north-eastern quarter of the city and walked up a hill. Jonas thought they must have come there for the view, but Yuri headed towards a small building. A man was just locking up. Yuri spoke to him, beckoned to Jonas. They could go in. It transpired that hidden away inside this building, a simple vaulted structure, was something extraordinary: a hollow cut out of the rock face. This was all that was left, Yuri told him, of Ulug Beg’s massive observatory; a circular building thirty-five metres high. They were standing next to the remains of a gigantic instrument. Yuri explained that this was part of a narrow meridian arc, two parallel rails covered in polished marble slabs. He pointed to incisions in the stone, marking the degrees. This instrument had been used to make various astronomical observations. Jonas looked at the arc, tried to imagine the rest of it extending towards the heavens. It looked like a ramp.
They were back on the square outside. The weather was clear. The points of light in the darkness above their heads seemed unusually close. ‘I am going to use the television camera like a telescope,’ Yuri said. ‘I mean to find the stars on earth, among my own people.’ He said this lightly, but something in his voice spoke of serious intent.
They both stood with their heads tilted back. This place, the remains of the observatory, inspired them to assume this position. ‘Did it ever cross your mind that we could give the constellations new names, start from scratch, if you like?’ Yuri asked. When Jonas did not reply Yuri went on talking, but his voice began to fade, as if Jonas were being picked up, carried off. Which was only natural. Because, having achieved what was just about the most impossible thing on earth and made it to Samarkand, to the edge of a flat world, there was only one way to go and that was out. Samarkand was one big launch pad. With his head tilted back, his eyes fixed on the stars, Jonas realised that he would have to go beyond Samarkand; he had to get out there — out into space — to find the spot for which he was searching.
So, for anyone who still has not grasped it, it was here, on a little hill in Samarkand, that Jonas Wergeland decided to study astrophysics, to take the step, so to speak, from the Silk Road to the Milky Way. Here, in Uzbekistan, possibly due to the limpid blue his eyes beheld on the domes of the mosques, or because of the stars in the mosaic patterns of the Ulug Beg madrasah doorway on Registan Square, suddenly, although never before, not for one moment, had he considered such a move, he took the first step into a realm of red dwarfs and supergiants and black holes and hundreds upon mind-blowing hundreds of billions of galaxies. It struck him that astronomy could be his Samarkand. A standpoint from which he would be able to see everything, including the world, from the outside. After all, it goes without saying really: there is only one reason for taking up astrophysics: a desire to understand the Earth. Or, to be more precise: a desire to understand oneself.
And Margrete was probably still there at the back of his mind, in the form of a belief that concealed within science there was alchemy, that there was, nonetheless, a link between astronomy and astrology. Jonas may have been hoping, through research, through some grandiose project, to influence future occurrences, alter predestined chains of events. In other words: if he could make his name shine, quite literally, all across the sky, maybe she would see it. Come back.
Later, when Aunt Laura asked him, what he had found in Samarkand, Jonas answered without a second thought: ‘In Samarkand I met myself.’
After his hike around Aurlandsdalen Leonard had made a similar discovery, though of a more down-to-earth nature, more brutal and shocking. And sitting, battered and bruised, you might say, in a basement no longer redolent with delicious pasta sauces, he told Jonas all about it. Jonas always felt that the moment of Leonard’s revelation should have been illustrated with a slow-motion sequence like the one at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, the climax of the film, when a building blows up and we see the explosion replayed thirteen times from different angles and distances. To cut a long story short, Leonard had found out that his father, Olav Knutzen, was not in fact his father. Leonard had been every bit as blind as the central character in Blow-Up; he had not seen what was going on in the bushes, as it were.
So who was his father? Leonard met Jonas one Friday afternoon on Youngstorget — which, by the way, standing as it now does as a monument to a sacred, bygone ideal, is the closest one comes in Oslo to Samarkand’s Registan Square. They hung around on the corner of the Trade Union building for half an hour. Jonas thought they were waiting for Leonard’s mother, who worked there. Leonard said nothing, just hopped up and down impatiently. Suddenly he pointed to a man coming out of a bank across the street which was now closed for the day. ‘That’s him,’ Leonard sobbed. ‘That’s my father.’ Jonas refused to believe it. A smarmy little git, a dark, skinny guy in a blue suit, with slicked-back black hair. He could actually have passed for an Italian, maybe even a film director, but he was just about the very opposite of Olav Knutzen with his weighty, Nobel laureate presence. His name was Dale and Leonard was one jump ahead of Jonas in himself acknowledging the irony of the legend on the placard he was holding up in the by then published photograph from that summer: SAVE THE DALE. ‘And shall I tell you what the worst part is?’ Leonard said. ‘He works in a bank, on the cash desk.’ Jonas remembered Leonard’s vituperative, indignant rants against bankers and banking, prompted by the story of how Antonioni had had to earn his living early on in his career. From the way Leonard spoke it sounded to Jonas as though his friend were pronouncing his own death sentence. Leonard had such a morbid obsession with heredity that one look at that little shrimp, his biological father, was enough to tell him that those genes offered no hope whatsoever. Such a man could not possibly sire a prince.
Jonas never did learn how Leonard had found out about it. Whether it was just that his mother had finally got round to telling him, or whether he had, quite by accident, caught something going on in the background while filming the everyday doings on Youngstorget; something which he had blown up, enlarging it until he could make out a detail — a clue. Or whether it should simply be put down to a keen-honed eye. What if a young bank clerk had lodged with the Knutzens when they were just setting up house together, what if the basement really had been a darkroom, a red-lamped love nest.
Whatever the case, this discovery fairly took the wind out of Leonard’s sails. The way he saw it, he no longer had the letters OK, Olav Knutzen’s initials, stamped on him. And in losing the ’z’ in his name, he seemed also to have lost a vital chromosome — that lightning bolt, that flash — the guarantee of a good eye. All Leonard’s grand, elaborate plans were quashed. That ’z’ now seemed more emblematic of sleep. He dropped out of school, shelved his cine camera and the outline for a twelve-minute 8 mm film on reduction, and away he went.
Or at least, before he disappeared he asked Jonas to please meet him at the Film Institute at Røa. Jonas had duly shown up, fearing the worst. They were alone. Jonas was ordered to take a seat in the screening room, and there he sat, surrounded by forty-six other, empty, seats while Leonard ran the film. Which film? Blow-Up. But this was a new version. Leonard had re-edited it. Jonas sat all alone in the screening room, watching the film. He was impressed. And intrigued. Because this was a totally different story. Less confusing. As if the gap between art and reality had been edited out. And as far as Jonas could tell, the murder was actually solved. The film, or rather: Leonard’s version of it, ended with the central character going to his studio to photograph, and more or less seduce Verushka, the fabulous fashion modeclass="underline" a scene which, in the original film, came right at the beginning. It was pretty close to a happy ending.