‘This is for you,’ Axel said rather solemnly, when the food had once more become the centre of attention, handing Jonas a fine, later edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos. ‘You can always see if you can find any sign of Pluto in there.’
Jonas, too, had dutifully purchased a book. About the South Pole. Oddly enough it was in Nansensgade that he had come upon Ernest Henry Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic. Jonas was perpetually on the hunt for arguments concerning the South Pole.
Jonas Wergeland had never run from his social responsibilities, even though he had soon discovered that any exercising of these would often have to be more symbolic than actual, as witness his more or less successful efforts to show solidarity with the remote island kingdom of Les Comores. Jonas knew that the choice of a political cause, which in turn was, of course, based on a choice of values that could never be proved, of turtles, if you like, was necessarily something of a lottery — a bit like the books one picked up in a second-hand bookshop. So let me simply state that, even before his more short-lived commitment to the Comorian cause, in fact, Jonas Wergeland’s eye had fallen on a geographical region and hence a political issue that was to concern him for the rest of his life — so much so that each year on April 10th he commemorated the birthday of the great humanist and natural rights theorist Hugo Grotius, the only person in Norway to do so.
Jonas Wergeland came down, in other words, in favour of the Antarctic — a somewhat opportunist choice, one might think, and not particularly original these days, when everyone from Greenpeace to conservative politicians is trying to cash in on this poor corner of the world, but I would just like to remind you that Jonas made his choice over twenty-five years ago. Of the few books he owned, nine out of ten had to do with the South Pole. Thus, Jonas Wergeland was one of the first people in Norway to recognize that this mysterious seventh continent was under threat, partly from the more or less covert lust for power of certain countries, and the front they provided for good old-fashioned imperialism, and partly by the ecological consequences of the modern technology that was now coming into use.
Jonas Wergeland was critical, not least, of his own country’s position in the Antarctic. He simply could not see why, just because some stubborn and vainglorious Norwegian had made it to the pole by dogsled and because other Norwegians had conducted a pretty ruthless whaling operation down there — the last thing anyone wanted to talk about now — Norway could lay claim to such an outrageously large slice of this colossal ice-cake, an area seven times greater than Norway itself.
As time went on, Jonas Wergeland developed a genuine fascination for the Antarctic, once part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, the way one always becomes interested in a subject if one only reflects on it for long enough, even if it has been chosen at random and even, indeed, if one has a dread of snow and ice. Jonas became more than simply fascinated — he eventually came to regard this paradoxically barren continent as a key, as an angle on the entire global situation at the end of the twentieth century. It was a laboratory not only for the forces of nature, but also for the forces of society, inasmuch as it represented a point of intersection, a mishmash of scientific, economic and political problems. The Antarctic was quite simply a gigantic and valuable prism of ice. Which is also why there was nothing Jonas feared more than that this fragile continent, its transparency, as it were, would be polluted by airports, waste and, worst of all, mine workings since, according to the experts, Antarctica was bursting with minerals. And despite the fact that the Antarctic Treaty painted an ostensible picture of sheer, harmonious idyll, with all its fine talk about peace and research, Jonas was keenly aware that this was nowhere near good enough. Because it was an indisputable fact — and this formed the very cornerstone of his commitment to the South Pole — that we in the West still inhabited a society where profit-oriented production was the governing corporate principle in the world of finance. That much socialism he had managed to absorb.
Although the term ‘environmental protection’ had not yet become all the rage, Jonas realized that this, the coldest, driest, highest continent on Earth, almost totally covered by an icecap measuring roughly 2000 metres thick, ought to be regarded much as a work of art, that it ought to be protected in the same way as the Taj Mahal. The Antarctic was the cleanest, most untouched place on Earth, ‘still a virgin in a global brothel’ as a future comrade-in-arms was to put it. The way Jonas saw it, it was obvious that the uninhabited South Pole — not counting the hundreds of millions of penguins, that is — should belong to all mankind and not merely to the seven countries with a claim to sovereignty, and hence he firmly believed — as a number of poorer countries would later suggest — that the Antarctic ought to be administered by the UN. Jonas was pretty certain that Trygve Lie would have supported such an idea.
So Jonas Wergeland not only celebrated Michelangelo Day in grand style; for many years, every April 10th — on ‘Grotius Day’ as he called it — you would find Jonas Wergeland on Karl Johans gate in Oslo, handing out fliers which he had personally paid to have printed, bearing such headings as ‘Give the Antarctic To The Penguins’, ‘Let Amundsen Rest In Peace’ and ‘Queen Maud’s Dubious Honour’. These relatively entertaining days on Karl Johan’s gate also taught Jonas something about how staggeringly little the average Norwegian knew about the South Pole, despite the fact that they were natives of a country that had placed an unbelievable seventh part of this vast region under Norwegian dominion, according it the status of a ‘dependency’.
On one occasion, thanks to these agitprop activities, Jonas was even invited to visit the office of the polar advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there were rumours that Jonas’s expert knowledge and his warning that a minerals convention would not be ratified, nor prove in the long run to be a viable option, had carried some weight — and this I can corroborate. So Jonas Wergeland was in fact a pioneer and opinion-shaper as far as the South Pole was concerned and can in fact take no small share of the credit for the Antarctic, in due course, being accorded a new protocol on environmental protection — as long as it lasts, say I: because no one should be fooled into thinking that the Antarctic, cold though it may be, is not still a very hot, not to say piping hot, potato. All you have to do is mention the word ‘platinum’.
But such triumphs lay far in the future. For now, Jonas Wergeland was with the other Nomads in Copenhagen, in Vesterbrogade, in the Taj restaurant, tucking into dessert — Mango halves and kulfi-e-heer, ice cream. ‘What the hell’s that?’ Thomas asked Axel, sounding out the legend on the spine of a book picked up in an ordinary bookshop. ‘De la … Grammatologie? Jacques Derrida? Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘He’s going to be big,’ said Axel. ‘Derrida — sounds like a swearword to me,’ said Trine. Everybody laughed at Axel’s bad buy, thumped him on the back. Alva raised her glass to the statues of Parvati and Lakshmi further down the room.