It’s true, one day the world did grow. Jonas was ten years old, sitting all alone on a rock beside Badedammen — the lake that had been converted into a bathing pond for the residents of Grorud back in the thirties. It was early evening and unusually quiet. No yells from down by the weir, where the boys were given to chucking squealing girls into the water; no shouts, half-fearful, half-gleeful, because Jonas — did he have gills? — was swimming all the way across the pond underwater; no mothers lazing on the grassy slope in distracting bikinis with one anxious eye on the toddlers playing by the water’s edge. A brief shower, a warm drizzle, had only just sent the last bathers home for dinner. Now the park-like surroundings were once more drenched in a warm light. The lifeguards, holders of the most coveted of summer jobs — those white uniform caps alone — had quit the scene, having first emptied the elegant wrought-iron litter bins. The shutters were closed on the kiosk and its rich store of ice-poles and ice-cream cones. Jonas sat with the sun on his back next to the diving board where, only days before, Daniel — clad in his new, tiger-striped bathing trunks — had executed a somersault for the very first time; his triumph marred only by the fact that he forgot to look where he was going and ended up ripping the lilo of a lady who, fortunately, managed to roll off it in time. Jonas stared at a dragonfly which was flitting back and forth across the smooth surface of the lake. A dragon from China. He sat there, hoping that something would happen.
Absently he threw a stone into the water, watched the rings spreading out, further and further out, circle upon circle, a huge target. He was bored, he had no one to play with. The summer holidays had begun, his chums were all away. He cursed the disagreement, instigated by an overbearing uncle, which meant that the summer would be half over before Jonas and his family could go to Hvaler.
He picked up another stone, flung it further out, gazed at the rings which began to spread outwards, felt his thoughts, too, flowing in all directions, fanning out from him in a sort of circle. At that same moment something happened to the ripples on the water. They were broken. Or rather: they ran into rings radiating from some other point. He had not heard a splash, the other stone must have been thrown at exactly the same instant as his own. Jonas’s eyes lingered on the pretty picture in the water, the pattern formed by the waves colliding, intersecting — a much nicer sight than the solitary set of rings.
And then a boat came sailing towards him; it emerged from some bushes to his left and bore in a gentle arc straight towards the spot where he was sitting. He shut his eyes, opened them again. It might have had something to do with the landscape in the background, the absence of people. The boat grew. The whole pond grew. The perspective twisted. The boat became a real ship, a magnificent liner. The pond became the open sea. And suddenly Jonas recognised the vessel, it was the MS Bergensfjord itself, the finest of the American liners. Jonas could not have said how long this vision lasted, an actual ship from the Norwegian American Line on a small lake on the fringes of Lillomarka, but it was dispelled, at any rate, when the model ship rammed into the shore right at his feet. The illusion shattered; his surroundings shrank, reverting once more to the familiar bathing pond.
Jonas fished out the boat: an exact, thirty-centimetre long replica of the splendid Atlantic liner he had more than once seen docked in Oslo harbour. The propeller was battery-driven and you could flick the rudder back and forth. With the ship cradled in his hands he set out along the path leading to the spit of land further up and there, behind the bushes, was another boy of about Jonas’s own age. A Chinaman, was Jonas’s first thought. And the other boy really did have a Chinese look about him. An impression which was only reinforced later when the boy told him his name: Bo Wang Lee. He seemed very secretive, hastily folded up a map. Jonas only caught a glimpse of a couple of lines clearly forming a cross. They must have been made with the stub of pencil stuck behind the other boy’s ear. Underneath the map a yellow notebook came into view. Bo Wang Lee’s trademarks: a pencil stub and a little yellow notebook.
‘Look,’ Bo said, picking something off the ground. It looked rather like a divining rod, one of those forked sticks used to find water. But Bo Wang Lee was never one to content himself with something as simple as finding water. ‘This is a detector which can locate secret underground chambers,’ he said. The word ‘detector’ alone was enough to impress Jonas. ‘We might be able to discover a treasure vault. Or a whole city even.’ Bo spoke Norwegian with a slight accent. Jonas had the feeling that the other boy was trying to divert his attention from the business with the map.
Jonas said he didn’t see how you could find a whole city underneath the ground. He handed the model ship back to Bo, then he picked up a small, flat stone, threw it hard and low and got it to bounce six or seven times across the surface of the pond. Bo was not to be put off. His father was an archaeologist. And Bo’s father had told him about the mighty Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in China, who had ordered the building of a massive underground tomb for himself. Even though Bo was spouting all this information, Jonas did not feel that he was showing off. Again Bo brought out his yellow notebook, and proceeded, while apparently consulting it, to paint a vivid picture of how this mausoleum had looked. Just listening to this description almost took Jonas’s breath away. The Emperor Qin had designed his tomb in the form of a whole city — or no, more than just a city: a miniature replica of his empire, a place in which to live even after death, with palaces and little streams of mercury, mountains sculpted out of copper and a firmament studded with pearls. The Emperor Qin’s obsession with immortality bordered on madness, Bo said. A host of intricate and lethal booby traps were meant to prevent robbers from getting at the wonders within. 700,000 of Qin’s subjects were said to have helped build this vast complex. Bo showed Jonas an astonishingly realistic sketch in the yellow notebook, he claimed it was based on the description by an ancient Chinese historian which his father had read aloud to him. ‘When I grow up I’m going to go to China and find that tomb,’ Bo said with a determined look on his face. ‘It’s in a place called Xi’an. Will you come with me?’ As if in a symbolic attempt to persuade Jonas he started up the MS Bergensfjord again and set it in the water.
‘I don’t see me ever going to China,’ Jonas said as he watched Bo flick a stone across the water too. It skiffed an untold number of times, reaching almost all the way to the other side.
Now Bo Wang Lee was obviously not Chinese, but that is how Jonas would always think of him; he had such an inscrutable air about him, as if he really did belong to some distant, exotic and, above all, tremendously wise civilisation — or as if there was a mysterious buried city inside him too. Later, it struck Jonas that he had felt older during those weeks than he did in all the time spent smouldering with wrath in Leonard Knutzen’s basement.