And finally: the explosion. The back of Jonas’s head slams into the ice so hard that a myriad shards of light, a whole universe of starbursts, come racing towards him and through him, a bit like the effect used in a film to give the illusion of travelling faster than the speed of light. When he emerges on the other side he is convinced that his spine has been shattered and that the silver thread — although what bloody good is a silver thread to him now, anyway? — has been severed.
For a long time Jonas just lies there, as if he were dead, he is dead, his eyes closed, while the chill from the ice spreads throughout his body, a not unpleasant sensation. He only wishes that he could put himself into deep-freeze and that someone would wake him up when the world has become less crazy and bewildering.
For a long time Jonas lies there, chilled to the marrow, listening to the mawkish strains of ‘Yesterday’ pouring out of the loudspeakers right above his head with the result that he would come to hate that song, felt like crying every time heard it. And, as most of you will no doubt appreciate, he had to endure listening to that song many a time over the years. To cut a long story short: Jonas Wergeland was never a great Beatles fan.
Margrete was gone. Margrete was the first and the last. And it was on account of Margrete that Jonas Wergeland killed his mother’s seven lovers.
Beyond the EEC
What do you do when you are desperate?
Jonas Wergeland blamed the American cartoonist Carl Barks for his trip to Timbuktu. As a child there were few things Jonas loved more than the final frames of Barks’s inimitable stories, in which Donald Duck, alone or, for instance, with his friend Gyro Gearloose the inventor — usually drawn in silhouette — would be seen hightailing it to Timbuktu, or quite simply find themselves in Timbuktu after the most hair-raising scandals and disasters have become a fact. The whole point is to get as far away as possible, to someplace where no one knows you.
There are times when we all yearn to be far, far away and in the autumn of 1972, Jonas Wergeland yearned to be far, far away. This was due not so much to Carl Barks as the need to get away from the circus surrounding the EEC referendum, which, to Jonas’s mind, not only dulled the wits but also turned the heads of the Norwegian people for several months; suddenly the derogatory term ‘parish-pump politics’ seemed to cover the reality of the situation perfectly. The country was bursting at the seams with loudspeakers and public meetings; there were stands on every street corner, demonstrations at every turn, leaflets through letterboxes, posters on every telegraph pole, bad political ditties on the radio and hysterical debates on television. Ideologies became muddled up, and no one noticed; in the same breath candidates could profess both radical politics and conservative values or vice-versa. As far as Jonas was concerned there was nothing to choose between the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ camps for stupidity, so when he made his escape, it was not from yes or no but from dogmatism, or perhaps he was acting on an intuition that, despite all the shouting, the issues which these people were debating were of little consequence, as would later be confirmed. While the full battery of spotlights and microphones was trained on the tackling and hard play that surrounded any standpoint taken on the EEC, the crucial decisions, the ones which would really determine Norway’s immediate future, were made in the shadows and on the quiet, under the direction of people like Sir William. The foundations of Norway the oil nation were being laid without anyone asking the Norwegian people.
It is easy for me, who can indulge in the luxury of being a disinterested party, to say that Norway in the late summer of 1972 was an admirable example of a democracy in full flower. For Jonas Wergeland, however, this was a time when an entire country was stage-managed like a media event and, what was worse, one that wasn’t even entertaining. Where others saw a debate, Jonas saw only a welter of emotions camouflaged as rational argument, where they would have done better to dish out clubs instead of pamphlets. In actual fact, the thought of travelling to Timbuktu had never entered Jonas’s head before, but once it was there it had become almost a compulsion. And thanks to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species he could simply pack his bag and go.
I suppose I ought to mention in parenthesis here that travelling to Timbuktu nowadays is, of course, no big deaclass="underline" not like it was for the first Europeans who actually paid with their lives, either on the way there or merely because they were unfortunate enough to reach there, travellers who suffered the most appalling hardships and only survived the desert by slitting open their veins and drinking their own blood, eating lizards and chewing on their leather belts. A trip to Timbuktu today, on the other hand, is not that arduous or dramatic and requires little more in terms of organization than taking the underground from Oslo’s Central Station to the suburb of Stovner, the main difference being the need for a visa and a couple of vaccinations. So I do not intend to waste any space on the journey as such but simply let Jonas Wergeland follow David Attenborough’s example and pop up on the scene.
When Jonas Wergeland arrived in Timbuktu, in Mali, a country where people die earlier and earn less than just about anywhere else on Earth, he was, unlike the first Europeans to reach the place, not disappointed. Those explorers had been expecting to find a pulsating city awash with gold and ostrich feathers and leopard skins, with rulers who surrounded themselves with seductive dancers and jesters whose voices emanated from their armpits. Instead, what they found was a tiny huddle of mud huts, about as rich and exciting as the remains of a sand castle once the tide has come in; a town which had nothing left of its legendary past but its name.
But Timbuktu fulfilled all of Jonas’s expectations simply because he had none. Added to which, for some hours, as they were driving out to it from Kabara, the town was enveloped in a cloud of sand because of the wind. Timbuktu was not even there. Jonas was over the moon. He was travelling into a mist, an uncharted nebula. The cloud of sand reinforced his conviction that he was not visiting a town, but a word, a name which marked the limits of the real world.
And he was not disappointed, not even when the wind died down, and the sand settled. Timbuktu gave the impression not only of utter disillusionment with the myths that surrounded it but also of a bleakness and a monotony unlike anything Jonas had ever come across before with its stark light and its homogeneous low, square buildings linked together in a way that put him in mind of a Cubist painting or gave him a feeling of having landed in the middle of an experiment, at some outer limit (or on some far frontier). No doubt about it, he thought, here was a place, a spot, where it must be possible to come up with a new angle. On Norway, on his own life. Because this was of course, for anyone who has not yet figured it out, the subconscious motive for his trip to Timbuktu: the search for enlightenment. If Timbuktu were the hub of the world — how would the world look then?
So what Jonas did in Timbuktu was think, or search. He wandered up and down the sandy streets lost in thought, back and forth between sun-baked mud huts that changed colour in the course of the day, turning from white and beige to brown and ochre; he did not notice the children who gave him funny looks, the chickens and the goats, the donkeys and the camels, the stench of their droppings; he was so thoroughly engrossed in an attempt to push his thoughts as far as he humanly could. Only occasionally did he seem to come to himself, surrounded by flies, outside one of the massive dark-brown wooden doors, intricately carved and studded with nails and hung on heavy iron hinges, running his fingers over a gash left there, although he did not know it, by a Tuareg sword. The door itself seemed to give him some inkling of both the difficulty and the possibility of reaching new domains of perception.