He had read a novel about a woman who knew how to appreciate the perfection of the moment — small everyday miracles. To be able to say, merely of the light on the sea: It is enough! And if he thought about it: Margrete was the same. But what was to become of his life now? What of the ambitions that drove, or had driven, him?
He thought he knew: when he closed Virginia Woolf’s book, he salvaged his faith in his project, or the vestiges of this project. But he also closed the door on his chance of ever understanding Margrete. Who knows, maybe To the Lighthouse would have been the very device that would have opened her up, afforded him some insight into her, just as Bo’s butterflies and crystals could lay open a stretch of terrain in Lillomarka.
Late that night when Jonas was sitting in the outdoor privy in the dark, peering up at Orion, which seemed remarkably close, it was with a sense of having both lost and won. He sat there on the ice-cold toilet seat, gazing up at the stars and thinking of a distant summer, of a friend who looked like Prince Valiant, and who presaged the existence of people like Margrete.
Bo Wang Lee came, in fact, as a foretoken of just about everything. During that brief summer with Bo, Jonas was confronted with a whole bunch of life’s challenges. And possibly the greatest of these took the form of a question. Because, just when he thought that they were all set for the expedition to the Vegans’ hiding place, Bo placed his hands on his hips and said: ‘That just leaves the most difficult question. What should we take with us?’
To begin with Jonas thought that Bo meant something that would guarantee their safety. He remembered the pass which Kubla Khan had given to Marco Polo, a gold tablet covered in strange characters which said that Marco Polo was a friend of the Great Khan and enjoyed his mighty protection. If the Vegans were as intelligent as Bo believed, then it was no use trying to fool them; you could not go to meet a race from another solar system carrying little mirrors, copper wire or beads in eleven different colours — the sort of gewgaws that Stanley took with him to Africa. ‘It has to be something which will show them that we are worthy envoys,’ Bo said gravely. He pronounced the word ‘worthy’ exactly as Jonas would later hear Karen Mohr pronounce it, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.
Bo’s mother was studying social anthropology, or ethnography as it was then called — so Bo knew a little bit about what other explorers had taken with them, people from Europe and America, that is, who set out to visit tribes which might never have seen a white man before. It was a fascinating idea — to think that you could be eaten if you brought little bells, but crowned as an honorary chief if you handed out marbles. Bo told of explorers who had, for example, taken salt to the highlands of New Guinea. Others leaned more towards practical items: pocket knives or watches. Liquor had also been a popular gift among some primitive tribes. But they had to bear in mind, Bo said, that things also carried a message. ‘What about a record by Jim Reeves?’ suggested Jonas, off the top of his head. “I Love You Because”. Then they would know we come in peace.’
What should they take with them? Jonas considered little gifts epitomising Norway — a bar of Freia milk chocolate or a box of Globoid aspirins, a can of sardines from Bjelland. Too local, maybe. What about a kaleidoscope? One of his father’s metronomes, a pyramid with its own hypnotic, in-built pulse? He could always ask Wolfgang Michaelsen if he could borrow one of his Märklin locomotives. The forthcoming expedition induced Jonas to ransack his surroundings and his life as he had never done before. Did he have in his possession anything good enough to merit a place in his rucksack when he set off into the woods to meet the Vegans? What on Earth was at all worth collecting?
There was something Aunt Laura had once told him. During the Renaissance, palaces were sometimes built with a small, windowless room at their centre, a chamber which did not even appear on the architect’s drawings of the building. This was known as the studiolo or guarda-roba. In this the prince kept the most widely diverse objects, all of which had just one thing in common: they inspired wonder. Here one might find rarities from the animal and plant kingdoms together with a whole gallimaufry of other things, all with nothing to connect them except whatever the viewer himself could detect. The German princes called this room a Wunderkammer. Jonas had always thought that Uncle Lauritz must have had just such an inner chamber to which he could withdraw in order to meditate. All he needed were two inexhaustible objects: a box of Duke Ellington records and a tiny portrait of a woman.
The day before their departure Jonas at last found the article which he would take with him: Rakel’s slide rule, with its movable Perspex panel and a centre section which could be pushed out and in. He was always left speechless by the sight of this, a device which could help you to work out difficult maths problems. In his mind he saw himself, Jonas W. Hansen standing face to face with a being the like of which no man had ever seen, in a small clearing in the woods, with the sunlight slanting through the trees; saw how he, Jonas, held out the slide rule, pi signs and all, whereafter the alien accepted this gift and immediately made a gesture which said that he, she, it understood everything — in other words, that he, Jonas, standing there bathed in the slanting sunlight, had somehow saved the Earth by finding the one thing which carried the right message: here you are, our civilisation in a nutshell.
He was surprised to see what Bo had chosen. A book. A book! What sort of thing was that to bring? Huckleberry Finn. Why this one? Jonas asked. Because it was the best book Bo had ever read. ‘One hundred per cent wisdom,’ Bo said. ‘Pure, compressed power. Mightier than an atom bomb.’
They began to get ready for the next day, packing their things into two small rucksacks. ‘Have you got the crystals?’ Bo asked. He had not yet seen them. Jonas pulled out the handkerchiefs containing the four prisms he had collected from his grandmother. She had had no hesitation in lending them to him once he had told her what it was for. ‘The Vegans — I see,’ she had said. ‘Ah yes, it’s always best to stay on the right side of them.’
Where had he got them, Bo wanted to know, holding first one, then another prism up to the light like a master jeweller.
It was a secret, Jonas said. Why did they need the crystals anyway?
Because they contained the whole world, Bo told him.
Jonas said nothing, he knew Bo was right. Jonas had seen for himself some of the pictures a prism could contain. A yellow cabinet. A palace ball with hundreds of guests. The question of ‘keys’, of what to take with one, was possibly the same as asking: how small a piece of the world do you need in order to see the whole world? That was why Bo had brought a book.
His friend was sitting in one of the rooms in his aunt’s flat which reminded Jonas of a ship’s cabin and almost made him believe that if he looked out of the window he would see the entrance to New York harbour. Bo was studying the map of Lillomarka and looking up various entries in the yellow notebook. Jonas noticed that more lines had been drawn on the map. Some contour lines of equal elevation had been coloured in. ‘Tomorrow it is, then,’ Bo said happily. ‘Tomorrow we’re off to find the Vegans.’
Jonas had always been fascinated by maps. Despite their indisputable two-dimensionality they made him feel that the world could not be flat after all. Not because of the swirling lines denoting elevation and gradient, but because they appealed so strongly to his imagination. He never forgot the pleasure of his first atlas, the thrill of discovering that Norway and Sweden together looked like a lion, while Norway on its own resembled a fish. Little did he know that an imaginative way with maps could also lead to the world coming tumbling about your ears.