He thought and thought on into the evening and, indeed, into the night, in dreams. For the record I ought to mention that this was before Sofitel opened their hotel in the town, and Jonas was therefore staying at one of those hostels to be found all over this part of Africa, primarily geared towards travelling civil servants.
During the day he would be out walking again, and of all the images I have of Jonas Wergeland, this is possibly the one of which I am most fond; the one which I wish the people of Norway could set alongside his rather more glamorous public image because this, too, is Jonas Wergeland: a young man walking up and down the run-down streets of Timbuktu, utterly absorbed in his own thoughts. Jonas strolls from the main market to the meat market while thinking about Norway, what sort of a country Norway is; he wanders from the old fort to the camels’ watering-hole, wondering what sort of a person he is; he meanders through the Tuareg quarter and down to the town well, wondering what he should do next, after graduating from high school; he walks from the Djinguereber Mosque to the famed Sankoré Mosque, which looks like a gingerbread tower studded with cloves, thinking of Axel and how he wants to study biochemistry; he saunters from a group of ramshackle huts, little more than termite-hills, to the house in which René Caillié, the first European to come out of Timbuktu alive, had stayed, and thinks of Margrete, always Margrete; wondering what has become of her; he wanders from the coffee house where a little group is playing some board game, to the ‘palaver tree’ under which the old men sit, chewing cola nuts and passing the time of day; for one second, just one second, he also thinks of the EEC. At night he lies in the cool hostel room, a bowl of dates next to the divan, and lets his thoughts mingle with his dreams.
One night, when he had woken up and could not get back to sleep, he pulled on his jacket, draped a blanket over his shoulders and went outside. He took the path leading into the desert and soon found himself some way to the north of Timbuktu, out among the sand dunes that rolled in towards the town like ocean waves.
On a whim he plonked himself down in the sand, thoughtfully scooped up a handful of the fine grains and put them down on another spot. Behind him he could make out the low, featureless skyline of Timbuktu. A heap of mud in the middle of a desert. A gingerbread town. Not that it gave one any reason to feel superior. This part of the world had seen governments come and go long before the birth of Christ — while Norway still languished in the obscurity of the Stone Age. And Timbuktu, older than Oslo, had once been the first city of Mali and the Songhai Empire, vast states that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sudan. At the end of the fifteenth century this bustling metropolis was said to have been ringed by trees and have a population of some 50,000. It was also commonly acknowledged to have been a centre for Muslim scholarship, boasting three universities and several collections of priceless manuscripts. Timbuktu’s story told of greatness one day, a sand-hill the next.
He sat in the desert, wrapped in a blanket, looking up at the stars; he could hardly believe his eyes, there seemed to be so many of them, so close and so bright. He gazed out across the sand dunes, was struck by how quiet it was, how overwhelmingly … empty, how … endless. With his hand he moved sand from one spot to another, thinking to himself that in terms of the big picture he was changing the desert, changing the world.
Then, all of a sudden, as if in answer to a question he had never managed to ask, he was lying flat out on the sand — with a sword at his throat. Terror-stricken though he was, this somewhat absurd concrete manifestation of an existential choice was not lost on him; he even had time to wonder that anyone could move that quietly, make themselves so invisible. He realized that they were Tuaregs, three of them, recognized them by the lengths of cloth wound round their heads, leaving only their eyes visible.
They dragged him to his feet and led him further into the desert, until they came to a camp nestling between two high sand dunes. It is easy to see how Jonas, whose knowledge of deserts had for the most part been gleaned from Carl Bark’s comic strips, could have imagined that these Tuaregs must be attached to one of the caravans that brought in salt from Taoudénit, when in fact they belonged to the Kel Intasar tribe, nomads who had gravitated towards Timbuktu because of a drought of Old Testament proportions which would come to a head over the next two years and which was already taking its toll on their way of life.
Jonas had no idea what his crime might be. He wondered whether he had desecrated one of their holy places. Or worse: that they took him for one of those idealistic aid workers who drilled wells to develop the deserts, thus ruining the ecological balance, or forced them to settle in one place and become farmers instead of nomads. Or worse stilclass="underline" they thought he was French and were out to take their revenge for almost half a century of ruthless oppression.
The man who still had his sword out of its leather sheath and pointed at Jonas motioned to him to stop next to a fire on the outskirts of the camp. Jonas noticed a number of small fires dotted here and there in the sand, also some cattle, some goats and, of course, camels lying here and there, although not very many. People were sitting outside the entrances to their tents. The general impression was one of poverty, of a myth exploded. Where were the dark lords of the desert, riding high on their white camels, rulers of the wind, the very epitome of dignity and pride? Jonas could tell that something was very wrong when such people as these huddled on the fringes of the desert over which they had reigned for thousands of years.
He held out all the banknotes he had on him as if begging some sort of indulgence. Three pairs of eyes merely looked him through the slits in their headdresses, looked, full of contempt. The cloth wound round their heads seemed glossy, metallic. They said something, evidently asking him a question. Jonas had not the foggiest notion what they were jabbering on about, knew only that he was in a tight spot, a very tight spot. Suddenly he remembered that Alexander Gordon Laing, one of the first Europeans to reach Timbuktu in the nineteenth century, was killed by Tuaregs. One of the men was armed with a dagger embossed with silver and brass. It might well be that these three were of noble blood, members of the warrior caste. Again they said something, their tone aggressive. What language were they speaking — Tamashek, Arabic, Hausa? Or just such bad French he could not understand it? Or maybe it was Bambara? Weren’t there any teenagers here who spoke French?
How, he wondered, as two scrawny dogs came over to sniff at him, could he explain to them that he had come to gain a little leeway for himself in terms of time and space; that he wanted to find out what it was like to be Jonas Wergeland stuck in the middle of Timbuktu’s mud heap: that he had left Norway and 1972 because he had suddenly found that country and that time so unutterably claustrophobic, stifling in its imperative insistence on what was important. He was looking for an angle in the sand, a filter of stars. Right then it occurred to him what a fitting view of the EEC this offered — here, in the desert, with a double-edged sword at one’s throat: How much did the EEC matter, really? Or Europe as a whole, come to that?