When the Nomads stepped off the ferry in the morning, right next to Sankt Annæ Plads, they immediately set out on their wanderings from one watering-hole to the next, which is to say from one second-hand bookshop to the next; they combed all of those wonderful, chaotic, dust-laden treasure-houses with such fine-sounding addresses as Fiolstræde and Nørregade, Studiestræde and Nansensgade.
Jonas Wergeland was never a great book man, but he had nothing against second-hand bookshops. He like the lottery of it, the fact that you could stick your hand into any bookshelf at random and suddenly find yourself clutching some totally unexpected prize — let’s say a book by Carsten Niebuhr, astronomer and explorer: a well-thumbed copy of Beschreibung von Arabien.
And that was the whole point. For the Nomads, the idea was to track down books that were not to be had in Norway, different books — books which the Others did not read. What they wanted — for reasons which they themselves obstinately maintained lay in their genes — was to be different. Which is why, true to tradition, the Nomads had also chiselled out their own tablet of Commandments: 1. Thou shalt wander the streets. 2. Thou shalt eat as much exotic food as possible. 3. Thou shalt transcend thine own limits. 4. Thou shalt not discuss the death of God. 5. Thou shalt not cite the names of Marx, Nietzsche or Freud.
Thanks mainly to this last commandment they were always on the lookout for alternative thinkers, books which were not ‘in’ at that time. They read, for example, Richard Burton’s brilliant and wildly speculative ethnographic studies; they read Paul Valéry’s razor-sharp essays and Erwin Panofsky’s perceptive history of art. They read Georg Simmel rather than Marx, William James rather than Freud, and they read Paul Cézanne’s Correspondance rather than anything whatsoever of Nietzsche’s overrated, contradiction-ridden tirades.
So the lion’s share of the day was spent straining their eyes to read names and titles on jam-packed shelves and it did happen, of course, usually just before closing time, that one of them would fall for a fata morgana; that Axel’s eye would light exultantly on the spine of a much coveted volume which would promptly disappear — melt into thin air — as he reached out his hand. Then, at the appointed time, they would meet in Rådhusplads and march in a body, absolutely famished, to number 38 Vesterbrogade. I doubt if many Norwegians in the early seventies associated anything whatsoever with the first floor of number 38 Vesterbrogade — nor yet today, come to that — but for Jonas Wergeland and the Nomads, with their fondness for exotic food, this was a place of pilgrimage. Having once reached Copenhagen you didn’t go satisfying your hunger with Danish smørbrød or flæskesteg med kartofler — that’s roast pork with potatoes to you and me — nor yet by running a relay from one of the wealth of hot dog stalls to the next. Oh, no — you saved your appetite for number 38 Vesterbrogade.
Because at number 38 Vesterbrogade you found the Taj, one of the very first Indian restaurants in Scandinavia. In those days, of course, there was not a single Indian eating-house in Oslo. And as far as I am concerned, the fact that the first Indian restaurant did not open there until well into the eighties says more than any number of anthropological treatises about the Norwegian national character, about Norway’s astonishing isolation, about Norway’s lack of appeal to other nationalities — and, not least, the limited culinary curiosity of your average Norwegian.
For this reason the Taj, and not forgetting the proprietors, Saba and Promila, was actually the main objective of their visit — more than the bookshops, although naturally they could not restrain themselves, but fell to scrutinizing one another’s literary booty the minute they had plonked themselves down at the table. And there, in that L-shaped room lit by oil lamps, with its walls of exquisitely carved walnut, they consumed various dishes ordered from a lavish menu glued onto sheets of copper, while they leafed through books with faded spines and covers flecked with mildew, notes scribbled in their margins by avid readers and forgotten bookmarks of the strangest descriptions — and you can take it from me, the atmosphere in the Taj on the evenings when the Nomads ate there, surpassed even that of the Restaurant Krølle in Oslo in its intellectual heyday. The hot spicy food seemed to set fire to their conversation, or perhaps it was the books lying higgledy-piggledy among the plates and bowls and glasses that created an uncommonly propitious mood, thereby taking their discussions to quite unwonted and explosive heights, to moments of almost ecstatic joy and an instinctive understanding of even the most hair-raisingly complex issues.
As I say, Jonas was not all that interested in books — or not their content, at any rate, he preferred the actual hunt — but he loved sitting in that restaurant, with sitar music playing in the background, popping paper-thin morsels of crisp poppadom into his mouth, while Ganesh, the great scribe, rendered in brass, gazed down on him from the wall. It was as if, at long last, he found himself in that India to which he had first been introduced in his boyhood copy of the Kama Sutra.
The others, however, alternated between uttering blissful sighs and reading aloud from the day’s antiquarian finds. Alva, who had dreams of becoming a playwright, had stumbled upon the memoirs of the Danish actress Johanne Luise Heiberg, A Life Relived in Memory; and look at this, she said, helping herself to some more paneer chat masaladar, an exotic vegetable cocktail, believe it or not she had actually obtained a book containing Denis Diderot’s marvellous polemic on acting: Paradoxe sur le Comédien. ‘To feel or not to feel, that is the question,’ she declaimed, holding the book theatrically at arm’s length. And what about Trine? Trine sat wreathed in smiles, both because she was halfway through a bowl of mulligatawny, that celebrated soup, and because she had finally managed to track down the manuscript, in book form, of the film that Carl Theodor Dreyer never managed to make: Jesus of Nazareth.
‘What’s that there?’ Axel asked, pointing to one dish. He was in great good spirits, a huge stack of books under his protective eye. ‘Shahi korma rampuri, lamb cooked in a curry sauce,’ Jonas told him. ‘Right, give me some of that. Now folks, who wrote this? “Her body was moving in great surging billows under him. For one fearful moment they listened to each other’s gasping breathing and she whispered into his ear: ‘Yes.’ The darkness in front of his eyes was lit by myriads of tiny twinkling, singing stars. In cruel rapture mingled with pain and fear he let it happen.”’
‘Nabokov?’ suggested Thomas. ‘Miller,’ said Trine. ‘It has to be an Englishman,’ said Alva. ‘D.H. Lawrence.’ Axel grinned, shaking his head as the guesses rained down upon him, each one wilder than the one before.
‘Agnar Mykle,’ he said. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have removed it. Axel had only one Norwegian literary hero: Agnar Mykle. ‘It’s from a translation of Lasso rundt fru Luna. An outrageously bad one, I’m sad to say. Stupid bastards have cut at least ten sentences from that short extract alone. It’s a disgrace.’
Kashmir pullao, fried rice, and nan mahiwal, bread baked in a tandoori oven, were passed round along with bowls containing different relishes, wine bottles and jugs of water. They were sitting not far from the door and a model of the Taj Mahal faithful in every detail, lit from within. Over their table hung a large painting of Krishna dancing.
‘Here we are,’ said Thomas triumphantly, brandishing a copy of Theodor W. Adorno’s heavyweight contribution to the philosophy of modern music, unearthed in the deepest recesses of Grubbs Antikvariat in Nørregade. ‘Just you wait till I read what Theo W. has to say about the difference between Schönberg and Stravinsky,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come up with the definitive argument for proving that, compared to Beethoven, Mozart is a gnat.’ Upon which, predictably enough, another huge and vociferous argument broke out, causing people at the surrounding tables to prick up their ears, because even though all sorts of verbal hogwash might be served up at the table round which the Nomads sat over their mumtaz tikka and tandoori gobi, the odd pearl did also fall from their lips.