The Pursuit of Immortality
The natural thing would, therefore, be to proceed to the trip to Jerevan, but if we’re to follow the sequence I have in mind — that sequence that will, I hope, explain everything — then this is not the place for it. Nor for the story of the stamps, which another — dare I say? — less seasoned narrator might have presented at this point. Here, instead, we must turn to another island. This same thought had also occurred to Jonas Wergeland himself while he was in Samoa: that all the seashells around him reminded him of the large, burnished shells in the parlour of the house on Hvaler, souvenirs of his paternal grandfather’s seafaring days, shells which, when Jonas held one to each ear, brought him the sound of the sea in stereo.
Jonas was not always alone with his grandfather on the island at the mouth of the fjord. His cousin, Veronika Røed, was often there too, especially in the last summers before they both started school, the house being just as much the childhood home of her father, known as Sir William because of his way of dressing and his aristocratic leanings. There were the two of them, Jonas and Veronika, and their grandfather. Just them and a storybook island abounding with treasure and dragons, with hedgehogs and kittens and bowls of milk, with baking hot rocks and jetties where you could spend half the day fishing for a troll crab only, when you finally caught it, to let it go again.
They often went out in the rowboat. Jonas loved to watch his grandfather rowing, loved to hear the rasp of skin on wood, the creak of the rowlocks; Jonas would sit on the thwart, admiring his grandfather’s technique, noting how he flicked the blades of the oars and rested on each stroke, rowing with a rhythm that seemed to take no effort and made Jonas feel that they could go on rowing for ever. Actually, it was a funny thing about his grandfather’s rowing: he didn’t row forward, as was usual, he backed the oars, rowed backward so to speak, or rather, the reverse — he said it was easier that way.
Jonas’s grandfather had once built a model of a Colin Archer lifeboat, an exact replica with the red Maltese Cross ringed in blue on the bow and all, and sometimes they would gently set this in the water. When the wind filled the tiny sails it would sail so well that, seen against the right bit of the background, it could have been taken for a real boat. They would row alongside it, and Jonas played that they were gods, watching over it, that his grandfather was Poseidon and he and Veronika his attendants. Which was not so far from the truth, because to Jonas his grandfather really was a god.
It was also while pottering about on the boats that their grandfather taught the children to tie knots: first a half-hitch and a bowline, then more complicated rope techniques such as splicing. He even showed them how to tie a double Turk’s Head, the sort of boy-scout knot that Daniel tied in his Cubs neckerchief. Veronika slipped the knotted rope onto her finger and gave Jonas a funny look: ‘Now we’re engaged,’ she said. Jonas had nothing against that. They were the same age, and Veronika was prettier than anybody else he knew, even darker and sultrier than Little Eagle’s mother.
That summer Jonas was often to be found sitting against the sunbaked wall of the shed, looping bits of rope together. There was one particularly tricky knot which he never mastered: a clove hitch which, had he got it right, would have been almost as intricate in appearance as the drawings that Aunt Laura, the family’s artistic alibi, had shown him, with Arabic characters intertwining in such a way that it looked like a labyrinth. Far easier, and really just as lovely was the square knot. Jonas could not understand how two simple loops could produce something so strong. He never forgot how to do a square knot, not after his grandfather taught him how to tie it by telling him a story about two wrestlers and how the one wrestler won both times.
But then Omar Hansen told stories almost non-stop, more often than not in the blue kitchen, in that room as full of gleaming copper as an Oriental bazaar. And sometimes when his grandfather was telling a story Jonas was allowed to pound cardamom pods in a brass mortar: spice to be added to the dough for buns. There was nothing quite like it, those thrilling tales combined with the knowledge that they would soon be having freshly baked buns. On his arm, his grandfather had a tattoo of a dragon, done in Shanghai, so he said, and before starting a story he always rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘The dragon has to have air under its wings if the imagination is to soar freely,’ he said. And whether it was the dragon’s flight that helped him or not, Omar Hansen never ran out of stories, he could go on telling them for as long as he could row; he seemed to have lived all his life for only this: to sit one day in a blue kitchen with saucer-eyed grandchildren sitting opposite him. And as he span his yarns, each one more amazing than the one before, he peered at a point that seemed somehow beyond time and space, in such a way that fine wrinkles fanned out from his eyes to his temples, as if he were also, actually, endeavouring to twine these tales into one enormous clove hitch, into the story, the crucial knot, that lay behind all the others and bound them together.
One day, when old Arnt had been left to keep an eye on Jonas and Veronika, Omar Hansen came back home from Strömstad — which is to say, all the way from Sweden — with a new treat, a wondrous thing: a peach. These days, when tropical fruit is taken for granted in Norway, when you can buy anything from mangoes to kiwis just about anywhere, no one would give it a second thought, but in those days peaches were a rarity — Jonas had certainly never seen one, nor had Veronika; they had eaten canned peaches with whipped cream on one occasion, but this was something quite different, this was the real thing. Their grandfather laid the peach on a silver platter. ‘This peach is from Italy,’ he said. ‘But originally the peach comes all the way from China.’
It was one of the most beautiful things Jonas had ever seen: that groove in the flesh, the golden skin blushing pink on the one side. Their grandfather let them touch it, and Jonas held it tenderly, savouring the feel of the velvety surface; it reminded him of the fuzzy-felt pictures in Sunday School. From that day onwards he had no problem understanding how a complexion could be described as ‘peachy’. Grandfather said it had to sit a while longer, it wasn’t absolutely perfect yet. ‘We’ll share it tomorrow,’ he said and solemnly placed the peach back on its silver platter.
They sat round the oilcloth-covered table, gazing at the fruit, which seemed almost to hover above the silver platter, while Omar Hansen outdid himself with a story featuring Marco Polo as its central character and Jonas and Veronika as his armour-bearers — or perhaps it was the other way round — and this peach as one of the props; it had something to do with a city in China called Changlu and a bit about the pursuit of immortality, a thrilling adventure, almost as thrilling as the peach itself.
Late that night — a warm, almost tropical night — after they had gone to bed, Veronika padded upstairs to where Jonas lay in the old bed in a small room in the attic. It’s not easy to describe the relationship between two children, but there was something between Jonas and Veronika, something which caused their lips automatically to bump together when they played hide-and-seek in the dark in the barn, or when they came face to face in the tunnels formed by the dense tangle of juniper bushes on Tower Hill.
Outside of Jonas’s room, the wide loft extended like a wilderness beyond the bounds of civilization. Here, old clothes hung over battered trunks plastered with labels from exotic cities, and weather-beaten chests from Zanzibar full of faded copies of Allers Family Journal and The Illustrated Weekly. And in one corner, under some nets, stood the most mysterious thing of alclass="underline" an old safe, heavy and forbidding. An unopened treasure.