We stayed longest in a class of five- and six-year-olds, who were just learning to read. There were three achromatopic children in this class – they had not been placed, as they should have been, in the front row; and it was immediately apparent that they could not see the letters on the blackboard where the teacher was printing, which the other children could see easily. ‘What’s this word?’ the teacher would ask – everyone’s hands would shoot up, including the achromatopes’, and when another child gave the answer, they echoed it in unison. If they were asked first, though, they could not answer – they were just imitating the other children, pretending to know. But the achromatopic children seemed to have developed very acute auditory and factual memories, precisely as Knut had developed in his own childhood:
Since I could not actually discern the individual letters even in ordinary book print…I had developed a very keen memory It was usually enough if a class-mate or someone in the household read my home-assignment to me once or twice, in order for me to remember and reproduce it, and to perform a rather convincing reading behaviour in class.
The achromatopic children were oddly knowledgeable too about the colors of people’s clothing, and various objects around them – and often seemed to know what colors ‘went’ with what. Here again Knut was reminded of his own childhood strategies:
A constantly recurring harassment throughout my childhood, and later on too, was having to name colors on scarves, ties, plaid skirts, tartans, and all kinds of multicolored pieces of clothing, for people who found my inability to do so rather amusing and quite entertaining. As a small child I could not easily escape these situations. As a pure defence measure, I always memorized the colours of my own clothes and of other things around me, and eventually I learned some of the ‘rules’ for ‘correct’ use of colours and the most probable colours of various things.
Thus we could already observe in these achromatopic children in Mand how a sort of theoretical knowledge and know-how, a compensatory hypertrophy of curiosity and memory, were rapidly developing in reaction to their perceptual problems. They were learning to compensate cognitively for what they could not directly perceive or comprehend.[29]
‘I know that colors carry importance for other people,’ Knut said later. ‘So I will use color names when necessary to communicate with them. But the colors as such carry no meaning for me. As a kid, I used to think that it would be nice to see colors, because then I would be able to have a driver’s license and to do things that people with normal color vision can do. And if there were some way of acquiring color vision, I suppose it might open a new world, as if one were tone deaf and suddenly became able to hear melodies. It would probably be a very interesting thing, but it would also be very confusing. Color is something you have to grow up with, to mature with – your brain, the whole system, the way you react to the world. Bringing in color as a sort of add-on later in life would be overwhelming, a lot of information I might not be able to cope with. It would give new qualities to everything that might throw me off completely. Or maybe color would be disappointing, not what I expected – who knows?’[30]
We met Jacob Robert, an achromatope who works at the school, in charge of ordering books and supplies. He was born in Pingelap, but emigrated to Mand in 1958 to finish high school. In 1969, he told us, he had been flown, with Entis Edward and a few others, to the National Institutes of Health in Washington for special genetic studies associated with achromatopsia – this was his first glimpse of life outside Micronesia. He was particularly intrigued, when he was there, to hear about the island of Fuur, in Denmark. He had not known there were any other islands of the colorblind in the world, and when he returned to Pohnpei, his fellow achromatopes were fascinated too. ‘It made us feel less alone,’ he said. ‘It made us feel we had brothers somewhere in the big world.’ It also started a new myth, that there was ‘a place in Finland, which gave us the achromatopsia.’ When we had heard this myth in Pingelap, we had assumed it was a new one, generated by Knut’s presence; now, as we listened to Jacob, and how he had brought back news of a place in the far north with the maskun, it became evident that the myth had arisen twenty-five years earlier and, perhaps now half forgotten, had been reanimated, given a new form and force, with Knut’s arrival.
He was intrigued to hear the story of Knut’s own childhood in Norway, so similar in many ways to his – and yet different, too. Jacob had grown up surrounded by others with the maskun and by a culture which recognized this; most achromatopes around the world grow up in complete isolation, never knowing (or even knowing of) another of their kind. Yet Knut and his brother and sister, by a rare genetic chance, had each other – they lived on an island, a colorblind island, of three.
The three of them, as adults, all achromatopic, all highly gifted, have reacted and adapted to their achromatopsia in very different ways. Knut was the firstborn, and his achromatopsia was diagnosed before he started school – but it was felt that he would never be able to see well enough to learn to read, and recommended that he (and his siblings, later) be sent to the local school for the blind. Knut rebelled at being regarded as disabled, and refused to learn Braille by touch, instead using his sight to read the raised dots, which cast tiny shadows on the page. He was severely punished for this and forced to wear a blindfold in classes. Soon after, Knut ran away from the school, but, determined to read normal print, taught himself to read at home. Finally, having convinced the school administrators that he would never make a willing student, Knut was allowed to return to regular school.
Knut’s sister, Britt, dealt with her loneliness and isolation as a child by identifying with, becoming a member of, the blind community. She flourished at the school for the blind as much as Knut hated it, becoming fluent in Braille; and she has spent her professional life as an intermediary between the blind and sighted worlds, supervising the transcription and production of books into Braille at the Norwegian Library for the Blind. Like Knut, Britt is intensely musical and auditory and loves to close her eyes and surrender herself to the nonvisual domain of music; but equally, she relaxes by doing needlework, using a jeweller’s loupe attached to her glasses, to keep her hands free.
It was now three in the afternoon – time to set back for Kolo-nia – and despite our altitude, burningly hot. While Knut sat under a shade tree to cool off, Bob and I decided to dive into the beautifully clear stream which ran nearby. Finding a flat rock under the surface, shaded by ferns, I clung onto this and let the cool waters stream over me. Downstream, a quarter of a mile or so, some of the women were washing dark, heavy clothes – the formal Sunday wear of Mand.
Refreshed by our swim, Bob and I decided to walk down the trail from the village; the others would meet us at the road below in the jeep. In the afternoon light, we were dazzled by the brilliance of oranges hanging in the trees – they seemed almost alight in the dark green foliage, like Marvell’s oranges in his poem ‘Bermudas’:
He hangs in shades the Orange bright,
Like golden Lamps in a green Night.
I felt a sudden sadness that Knut, that the achromatopes around us, could not share this startling Marvellian vision.
We had gone a couple of hundred yards when we were overtaken by a twelve-year-old boy running at top speed, fearlessly, looking like a young knight with his new sun visor. He had been squinting, looking down, avoiding the light when we saw him earlier, but now he was running in broad daylight, confidently making his way down the steep trail. He pointed to the dark visor and gave a big smile. ‘I can see, I can see!’ and then he added, ‘Come back soon!’