He rang the bell, just in case anyone was home. No one came to the door. He let himself in, left his bag of duty-free and his suitcase in the hall before wandering into his office and sifting through the considerable pile of mail that had accumulated. Many of the letters were from people he did not know. Fan mail. He picked up the bundle of letters to read in the living room, to enjoy them, have a good laugh and roll his eyes at the weird notions that people had, their clumsy questions, then it occurred to him that he had better play back the messages on his answering machine. The first was from Axel Stranger: ‘If your Grace would be so good as to call me. Concerning a trivial matter which cannot wait: namely the future of mankind.’
Jonas could not help but laugh, switched it off, he could listen to his messages later, now he just wanted to relax, open some of the precious booty from his duty-free bag, stretch out on the sofa, listen to music, look at a couple of letters, let his mind wander. He glanced towards the door of Kristin’s room. The bed was neatly made, cuddly toys and dolls all in a row; he concluded that she must still be with her grandmother, down at Hvaler.
Jonas headed for the living room with a smile on his lips, flicking through the bundle of letters in his hand, inspecting the handwriting on one while wondering what sort of music he should play. He was relieved to be back home, he was filled with a great sense of contentment: a feeling that might be described, to use a rather lofty word, as peace.
So there he stood, with one hand on the handle of the living-room door, Jonas Wergeland, the first artist of note in his field in Norway, the man with a silver thread running down his spine, balls of gold and, as someone put it in a newspaper article, a brain as sharp and polished as a great diamond; Jonas Wergeland stood there, feeling well pleased. Behind him lay a successful trip, one which had, what is more, given rise to a number of original ideas of which the people of Norway would reap the benefit in the not-too-distant future. And he had every reason to feel pleased with himself, no one could blame him for that; anyone in his shoes would have been pleased with themselves. Jonas Wergeland did not only have everything, he was everything, one might even go so far as to say that he ranked second only to the king. No wonder then that for many years he had referred to himself, in his head, as the Duke.
Jonas Wergeland stood with his hand on the handle of the living-room door in his own home and was instantly conscious of the metal itself, its coldness; he contemplated the brass, the little scratches on the surface. Again he was aware of that vague but distinct nausea, a surge of nausea. Suddenly he remembered the three loaves lying on the kitchen worktop, the fact that there had been no smell of new-baked bread when he walked in.
Jonas Wergeland stood with his hand on the door-handle and was filled all at once with a desire to stay just there for a long, long while, had no wish to enter the room, stood there knowing, like someone who has stepped on a mine, that he would be blown sky-high the moment he raised his foot. But he had to. He took stock as it were, recapitulating the whole of his remarkable career in the blink of an eye as if he knew he was about to suffer a dreadful loss of memory, before turning the handle, opening the door and pulling up short on the threshold. The first thing he noticed was a distinct smell, the sort that hangs in a room where the television has been left on for days on end. Then his eye fell on the picture of Buddha, before alighting on the figure lying on the living-room floor, a woman. She looked as though she was asleep, but Jonas knew she was not sleeping.
So there he stood, Jonas Wergeland, as so often before, at the end of a long, hard journey, a wave of nausea building up inside him, on the threshold of his own living room, in the most famous villa in Grorud. And I might as well reveal right here and now that here lies the heart of my story: Jonas Wergeland, standing in a room with a dead woman, caught in the colossal psychological big bang that gave birth to the universe which, in the following account, I intend to explore.
For those who do not know, I ought perhaps to add that the woman on the floor was none other than his wife.
Everything Flows
Once more he was thrown into the vortex, as they picked up speed and were drawn relentlessly onwards into the next stretch of rapids to suddenly find themselves caught up in an inferno of white water and whirlpools as if they were riding a tidal wave or had been swept away by an avalanche, and it was all happening too fast, Jonas felt, far too fast, he had no time to latch onto the details and already had that feeling of nausea, that ghastly nausea that always hit him when he had flown too high, when everything was reduced to the grotesque. Jonas Wergeland sat, soaked to the skin, in a frail rubber dinghy with more or less sheer walls of rock flying past on either side: concentrating, amid all the thoughts whirling around in his head, solely on keeping a tight grip on the rope running around the rim, while flattening himself against the bottom like a terrified bird in the nest. Everybody has to die sometime, he thought to himself, and now it’s my turn.
Jonas cursed himself for being there, crouched on his knees as if in prayer, hanging on for dear life on this ride with death, at the bottom of a narrow gorge with only a thin layer of rubber between him and the rapids’ seething embrace, when he could have been lounging on the hotel terrace, sipping a highball and contemplating the weird assortment of hotel guests from every corner of the globe, maybe picking out an Ellington number on the piano, drawing applause from lethargic Swedish aid workers in desperate need of a bit of R and R. Or he could have done something sensible and, above all, perfectly safe, and taken a walk up to the dusty, neglected museum to gen up on the geology and history of the region, in a room right next door to Livingstone’s letters and measuring instruments and his partially mauled coat.
But instead, on an October morning in the mid-eighties, he had dutifully presented himself at the pool along with the others, to be briefed by a sun-bronzed smart-arse who took full advantage of the rather tense atmosphere, dishing out flippant bits of advice and telling macabre jokes, about the fearsome ‘stoppers’, for instance: a sort of vertical wave, usually occurring at the bottom of a stretch of rapids, which could drag a man under and keep him down there for ages. So it was with some misgivings that Jonas had filed along behind the others later on, as they clambered down the steep path to the bottom of the gorge through which the Zambezi continued its seething progress after the falls, zigzagging through deep and uncannily narrow canyons. The light was dazzling, the air as full of powerful odours as a chemist’s shop and humming with insect life. Halfway down the native bearers made tea for them and even sang a few songs, seeing to it that the party acquired a little local colour into the bargain.
Down by the river itself, at the point where they were to board the rafts, Jonas stood for a moment listening to the roar of the falls farther up, millions of litres per second thundering downwards into an inferno of a chasm, a phenomenon so daunting and yet so fascinating that he could see why some of the natives imbued it with divine significance, believing this to be the wellspring of the world. And indeed they were surrounded by a strange almost unreal landscape which left one with the very distinct impression that man had no business here, that this was a paradise for plants and animals and the little lizards in particular.
After yet another nerve-racking pep talk, delivered in the calmer part of the basin, they slipped slowly into the mainstream. ‘No way back!’ some wit called out as the raft picked up speed, heading down the river, which closed in relentlessly as they approached the first stretch of rapids, and right then and there Jonas knew, as one often does in the seconds after making a fatal decision, that he should not have done this, that this trip was bound to end in disaster.