Possibly it was because of the exalted frame of mind induced by his visit to the BBC’s headquarters that he was caught so much off guard by the sight that awaited him when he got off the train in South Kensington. He was in his usual shop on the corner of the arcade in the old station building, taking receipt of a bag containing two chicken sandwiches and two bacon-and-egg sandwiches for the evening’s television marathon, when he started, actually jumped about three feet in the air. Somebody he knew had just walked by outside. His aunt. Aunt Laura. Flamboyantly dressed and looking, from her make-up, as if she had come straight from a stage on which she was playing the lead in an Egyptian romance. And she was not alone, with his aunt was another woman, similarly dressed. Both wore the sort of hats you saw on women at Royal Ascot. Jonas heard them speak to one another in English. They were followed by a man wheeling a goods trolley. Propped up on it was a rug. Jonas had noticed that there was a shop between the two flights of stairs leading down to the platforms. The man lifted the rug into an estate car sitting right outside the arcade; it had British plates and obviously belonged to the woman with his aunt. As if that wasn’t enough, Jonas got the definite impression that these two women were more than friends, they were lovers. Jonas was on the point of calling out, but something stopped him.
Standing there in the sandwich shop he wished he could see the pattern on the rug that Aunt Laura had had wheeled out to the car. Something about the cylinder on the trolley reminded him of a piece of paper — a message — in a bottle, he was sure that everything would be explained if he could just unfold it.
He stared after the car as it drove away. It was blue — blue as the tiled domes in a distant city. Jonas stood outside of himself, saw himself standing there with a black-and-blue eye, a souvenir from the Zetland Arms. It was true. He had been his aunt’s blue-eyed boy, but he had also been blind. He hailed the man when he came past pushing the empty trolley. ‘Excuse me, but do you know that lady, the one who was wearing the bigger hat?’ The carpet dealer stopped, eyed him pleasantly, or with genteel courtesy, adjusted his glasses for a better look at Jonas and his shiner. ‘Why do you ask?’ Jonas hesitated, did not want to say that he was her nephew. ‘I just thought I had seen her before. Is she somebody famous?’ The man motioned towards his shopfront. ‘I couldn’t say,’ he replied, ‘I only know that she’s a good customer. She must have bought fifty rugs from me over the past twenty or thirty years. My shop is one of the oldest in England. She orders rugs from particular regions, specific patterns. And I give her a call when I find one.’ Before disappearing into the shop, the man told Jonas that the two women had a big old house with a luxuriant garden outside of London. He occasionally had to deliver something to them. The house was full of rugs and antiques. ‘Funny thing, though,’ the man said, ‘they call the place “Samarkand”.’
Back at the hotel, Jonas switched on the TV and opened his notebook. He filled a whole page with notes on the first programme he saw, about a trip to Titicaca: the sort of documentary that made you want to race off to the nearest travel agent. And while in his eyes he was on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in his mind two and two slowly flowed together. And did not make five. The Samarkand with which Aunt Laura had presented him was māyā. She had never been to Samarkand. She had never been outside of Europe. She had bought her rugs here, in London, every single one of them. London was the world centre for the Oriental rug trade. This, London, was Aunt Laura’s Samarkand. That grimy little passage in the arcade next to the station was her bazaar. And why was he surprised? Jonas had always known: Samarkand could be anywhere on Earth. Samarkand was the home of our dreams and longings.
He lay on the bed in a hotel room in London. He closed his eyes, left the programme on Titicaca running, as if it inspired long cruises in his mind. Aunt Laura, this too he realised now, had never been with a man. Not one. All of her sketchbooks — like the one in which he himself was now making notes — in which she had drawn penises in all shapes and forms and in every conceivable state, had been nothing but flights of fancy. Jonas lay on the bed, with a voice in his ears talking about the fauna around Lake Titicaca, and thought about Aunt Laura, and he realised that he was not disappointed. It was not a lie that had led him to Samarkand. It was another kind of truth.
So there could be something to the rumour: although Jonas Wergeland was most certainly in London, one could say that his revelation on the secret of good television came to him in Samarkand. In the Samarkand behind Samarkand.
It often struck Jonas that all of the journeys he made had their beginnings in the expedition into Lillomarka with Bo Wang Lee to find the secret hiding place of the Vegans. On the ‘right’ day — Bo consulted a complicated diagram in his little yellow notebook and mumbled something about favourable constellations — they set off from home in the afternoon, each with their small rucksack on their back. Jonas was carrying the jam jars containing the brimstone butterfly and the peacock butterfly, two prisms and the slide rule; Bo bore the jars containing the red admiral and the small tortoiseshell, the other two crystals and Huckleberry Finn. Jonas’s suggestion that they take along a couple of little kids as ‘bearers’ was rejected. ‘You still don’t get it, do you,’ Bo snapped. ‘This is serious.’
The hill up to Badedammen smelled of fresh tarmac, the road might have been resurfaced specially for them. They headed out along the old Bergen road, built at the end of the eighteenth century. Jonas was not sure exactly where they were going, but Bo purposefully proceeded along a blue-flashed path which brought them to the northern end of Romstjern Lake. Shortly afterwards he struck off again, onto a barely visible, unmarked track. Jonas had never been here before. The hillside was a mass of yellow crested cow-wheat. The vegetation grew lush and dense all around them; it was like walking through a greenhouse with the sun filtering through green windows in the roof. The scents were remarkably strong, rising from the ground like fragrant gases. Bo stopped. Thought for a moment. The birdsong sounded unnaturally intense, Jonas thought. Only now did he realise how nervous he was. Bo swivelled around, as if he were listening, using all his senses. ‘Watch out for that rock!’ he cried suddenly, pointing. Jonas jumped as if he were standing next to a landmine. Bo took out his notebook, scribbled something down with the stub of pencil. Nodded. ‘This is good,’ was all he said and walked on.