Of all Carl Barks’s fantasies, there were few which Jonas liked better than those involving journeys to faraway places, to virtual Utopias no one knew existed: for example, that famed epic of the trip to Tralla La in the Himalayas, where money was unheard of, or the expedition into the forests of the pygmy Indians who talked in rhyme; or the trek into the mists of the Andes, where they stumbled upon the weird geometric universe of the square people. But Jonas also had a penchant for some of the shorter traveller’s tales, especially those that took Carl Barks’s trouserless ducks to the isles of the South Seas, to islands where the people sang ‘Aloha oe!’ and wealth was measured in coconuts. He particularly enjoyed the hair-raising trip to Tabu Yama, a volcanic island, where Uncle Scrooge had gone to search for black pearls in the lagoon.
I think, therefore, it is safe to say that Jonas Wergeland went — albeit unwittingly — to Polynesia to look for Carl Barks or to compare Carl Barks’s creations with the real thing, although I’m sure this is not the reason he would have given. On this, one of his first long trips in the seventies, his prime aim was to visit a place that was as unspoiled as possible, relatively speaking at least. And when he stood by the rail of the boat, looking towards Apia and those green hillsides, the landscape really did seem to have a virginal air about it, the air of some last remaining paradise: ‘Upolu, Apia, Utopia. But no sooner had that ostensible goal been achieved than he realized that he did not, in fact, have any idea why he had come here. In a way — and this is how Jonas Wergeland regarded most of his travels — he went there to discover why he had gone there.
Samoa may seem a long way away, Professor: very far, at any rate from everyday life in Norway. But we live in an age when all countries have become a part of all other countries. So I would just like to mention here that Samoa was, of course, not as unspoiled as Jonas Wergeland had thought or hoped: that Samoa has also had its part to play in the history of Norway. For it was here that a Norwegian by the name of Erik Dammann came to stay with his family for a while in the sixties, for much the same reason that Uncle Scrooge went to Tralla La, and to some extent it was here that he gained the insight which, not long afterwards, inspired him to write a book and, prompted by the overwhelming response to this book, to found a popular movement calling itself The Future In Our Hands, one of the oddest phenomena in the history of post-war Norway, a movement which, at its height at any rate, seemed to suggest that a surprisingly large number of Norwegians were receptive to the idea of another way of life and a very different global distribution of commodities. So Samoa could, in fact, be seen as the starting point for this movement; it might not be going too far, either, to say that Erik Dammann was actually trying to turn the whole of Norway into another Samoa. Jonas’s brother Daniel got particularly carried away — as was his wont — by such prospects for a couple of years, a phase which more or less overlapped with his involvement with the more extreme and far more puritanical and ascetic variant of these same ideals, namely, the Marxist-Leninist movement. Daniel subscribed to the more practical aspects of Dammann’s credo with a fanatical fervour; he even gave up drinking Coca-Cola, something which, considering the amount of Coke he consumed at that time, must be regarded as the doughtiest of all his doughty feats in life and indeed one of the few times when, opportunistic bastard that he was, he actually made a sacrifice.
Jonas Wergeland was, however, blissfully ignorant of Erik Dammann’s links with Samoa as he strolled along Beach Road, the main thoroughfare in Apia, looking for somewhere cheaper to stay than Aggie Grey’s Hotel. It was hot and humid, and a sweet scent filled the air — not from spices, but from flowers. Apia itself was not much more than a large village: the church towers and spires rising above the white, two-storey wooden houses with their corrugated iron roofs the only sign that this was, in fact, a town. Just five or ten minutes’ walk from the town centre the wooden houses gave way to fale, open-sided huts thatched with palm branches. The only familiar thing that Jonas could see was the bamboo, which called to mind his boyhood ski poles. He walked along Beach Road, clad in a neutral — one might almost say universal — tropical suit, glorying in the feeling of being a total stranger, a person whom none of the inhabitants of ‘Upolu or Apia knew anything about. For all they know, I could be a young scientist, he thought, or the rebellious son of a billionaire, or — why not? — a writer looking for romantic inspiration, an excuse to get sand between his toes.
This sense of absolute anonymity was to some extent ruined the very next morning as he was eating breakfast at the guesthouse. When a young, hippie-looking man from New Zealand who, it transpired, had a neighbour of Norwegian descent, heard that Jonas was Norwegian, he immediately started blethering on about Ole Bull, wanting to know why in hell Ole Bull didn’t establish Oleanna, his Utopian colony, on Samoa. It would have had a much better chance of success here than in America, of all the stupid, bloody places. ‘Can’t you just hear it?’ he said. ‘Ole Bull’s violin interwoven with those lovely Samoan harmonies.’
As a way of escaping from this conversation, later that day Jonas walked down to the market and took a bus out of town, a bus that looked more like a gaily decorated, open-sided shed on wheels. He got off at a random spot next to a banana grove, not far from a village, but these he skirted around and walked through breadfruit trees and bushes covered in exotic scarlet blooms, down to the sea, three to four hundred yards beyond the village. The beach was just as it ought to be, with palms bending over a crescent-shaped ribbon of golden sand. Jonas stopped to gaze in wonder at the lagoon, the seabirds sailing over the bands of foam where the Pacific broke against the reef. The sky was overcast. He discerned the top of a volcano beyond the hills, shrouded in mist, almost unreal.
Jonas feels a faint pinching of his testicles and turns around: a group of men are walking towards him. All are clad in lava-lavas, gaily-patterned sarongs, most are bare to the waist, a couple are wearing shirts. Some of them are carrying palm-leaf baskets on poles across their shoulders. Several are clutching sapelu knives, the kind used for splitting coconuts. Jonas’s first thought is that his life is in danger, that he must have committed some dire offence against something or someone — thoughts of broken taboos flash through his mind — but he quickly realizes that the men seem happy to see him, that they aren’t just happy, they look as if they can hardly believe their luck, they are all talking at once, pointing excitedly and yet respectfully, as if he were a stranded emperor. They keep up a constant stream of chatter, smiling broadly. He doesn’t know what to make of it all. He says something. None of them speak English. They point to the sand, the palms, the reef offshore, nod their heads. They point to his tropical duds, laugh, point to his sunglasses, his hat. ‘Matareva,’ they say again and again. And then, pointing to him: ‘Mr Morgan.’
Jonas introduced himself, pronouncing his name slowly, said that he was from Norway, repeated this in all the languages he knew, said that he studied the stars: this was at a little-known period in his life when Jonas Wergeland was attending classes at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. He pointed to the sky, pronounced the words ‘Southern Cross’, and wasn’t it true, he said, or tried to say, that these islands were home to master navigators who sailed by the so-called ‘star paths’, the kaveinga? They merely laughed, not understanding a word, smiled, bowed, went through the motions of embracing an imaginary woman, mimicking romantic scenes. ‘Mr Morgan,’ they insisted. Jonas waved his hands in protest, but it made no difference; their expressions said he couldn’t fool them, they knew who he was. So when Jonas heard the sound of a bus in the distance he jabbed at his watch and excused himself, then jogged off through the grove and up to the road. The men followed him, beckoning, as if inviting him to come with them to the village. He mimed a polite no, but this did not stop them from staying with him until the bus drew up, and when he waved goodbye, it was clear from their gestures that they were urging him to come back soon.