The Discoverer (14 page)

One of the triplets had jumped into the rope in front of him. Behind him he had another triplet. At one point he was skipping in the loop flanked by two almost identical individuals. Jonas detected a touch of the supernatural in this. He was quite certain that the two triplets had had something to do with the way his thoughts had split in two, and towards the end, before the accident, he had the feeling that he was on the verge of unearthing a third, parallel, image, one relating to the teacher on playground duty, who also taught handwork – a subject which triggered a whole host of thoughts with its sharp knives and
stupefying
glue fumes. So intrigued did Jonas become with this phenomenon, this possibility, this pleasure, that he went on skipping, even after he had skipped
his forty times and was supposed to jump out. Kids were piling up behind him, among them the third triplet; there was some muttering, shouts for him to get out of there, but Jonas went on skipping in his own two-fold, and soon – if the others would just leave him alone – three-fold world, because he instinctively knew, or thought, that skipping, and possibly this whole complex of people, including two triplets, jumping up and down inside the ellipse formed by the smacking rope, was what was needed in order for him to keep two, close to three, thoughts in the air at one time. And sure enough: when an impatient Hjørdis or Helga or Herborg or whoever went so far as to shove him out of the rope, he lost not just one, but both, all of his thoughts. They burst like bubbles. He went rolling across the tarmac as if he had been hurled out of a massive centrifuge. He hurt himself quite badly, he was bleeding from a cut to his brow, where it had rammed into a sharp stone. But it had been worth it. And in a way it seemed only reasonable that such a discovery should send you flying flat on your face. He walked home from school that day with an ugly scab forming on his forehead where he would bear a scar for the rest of his life, feeling as though he had been ennobled, or that he had found the badge of mankind’s nobility: the potential to think more than one thought at the same time. The rope, which was once again slung over his shoulder and across his chest was no longer a rope, but the sash of a noble order.

He never tried to repeat this exploit, partly because he didn’t want to annoy the others, and partly because he realised that this was something he could experiment with on his own. He may also have been afraid that the faculty of which he had caught the merest glimpse might disappear. That great care would have to be taken with any further experiments. Oddly enough, Jonas made his new discovery around the time of Esso’s first major advertising
campaign
, when everywhere you went you saw the slogan ‘Put a tiger in your tank’. Jonas had done just that, put a tiger in his think-tank. That, at least, is how it felt, and with the same hint of danger. His prospective gift might just as easily bring him bad luck as good, something far worse than a cut brow.

He was to make this same discovery again and again: if you did not keep your exceptional talent to yourself, you had a much greater chance of being laughed at, or even penalised, than of being applauded. It was the same with football. But when his team’s fiercest rivals for the top position in the league, the west-side team Lyn, came to Grorud, hubris got the better of Jonas; he could not contain himself. The whole Grorud team was more than usually keyed-up, balefully eyeing the fancy cars which pulled up outside the
clubhouse
, bringing the Lyn players and their trainers. ‘We’re going to hammer you lot black and blue,’ one slick-haired Lyn player remarked blithely as he hopped out; referring, with this dig, to the colours of the Grorud strips.
‘Bloody snobs,’ Leo hissed through his teeth as he stood there with Jonas, glowering at these boys who seemed to come from another stratosphere, who dressed differently, who had different haircuts, who seemed, in short, more grown-up than them, as if the whole bunch could, at any minute, turn round and become lawyers, company directors and stockbrokers. Lyn supporters will have to excuse this mythologising of their team, this is simply a
description
of the way in which Jonas Wergeland and his teammates saw it.

For a long time during this crucial match, too, Jonas was able to charge more or less unhindered up the left wing, but unlike the other teams they had come up against that season, Lyn had a trainer who spotted Jonas’s
uncommon
ability and shouted some instructions to his defence, mainly to one of the right-backs who looked, to Jonas, a bit like King Kong. Jonas became the brunt of some really dirty tackling. During one such foul he must have cracked a rib; the pain was almost unbearable, but he played on. He should have known. He should have stopped, kept his talent hidden. But at that moment he just couldn’t. He got too carried away. There was something about Lyn, Lyn on Grorud’s home ground, something historic, symbolic. It was the Right against the Left.

Jonas scored two goals, even with his chest hurting like mad he scored two very simple, but very sweet goals with little chip shots off the side of the foot, one into either side of the net, well out of reach of the Lyn keeper, he was so taken aback he didn’t even have a chance to make a dive for the ball. The Lyn defenders were clearly rankled by the utter prosaicness of these goals, their cheeky nonchalance. Jonas saw the dirty looks they sent him. A curving shot skimming under the crossbar from twenty metres out, that they could have stomached, a superb lob or a lethal half-volley shot, but these soft, ruthless shots to the foot of the post were just too demeaning. This was socialism in practice: painfully simple.

The score was 3–3, with five minutes of the game to go. Jonas was alone out on the left flank, received a pass from Leo in their own half, ran up the wing, wincing at the pain in his ribs, but crossing the halfway line
nonetheless
, no one in his way; all the players were starting to flag, Jonas had a free run up that side of the pitch, and on he ran, hugging the touchline and
registering
, out of the corner of his eye, Leo running parallel with him, like a neighbouring idea in his mind: two thoughts, utterly dissimilar, but with a common goal. And it may have been at that very moment that he made up his mind to stay out here for the rest of his life, on the left wing. Because, despite his short-lived career in football, from that day onwards Jonas saw himself as belonging to the ‘outside left’. No matter what cause he was fighting for, he would always try to find an outsider position, a sideline along which he
could dribble the ball while everybody else clustered together in the centre, and although where Jonas was concerned, it was more a psychological than a political appellation, he would have had nothing against being a founding member of a new party, to be called the Outside Left.

This also sheds some light on his later attempt to expose the opposite wing for what it was. As an adult – not least in prison – Jonas Wergeland spent a lot of time trying to analyze the most disturbing watershed in the history of modern Norway, a sort of collective fall from grace. 1973 is fixed in the global consciousness as the year when the oil crisis gave a serious
indication
of the state the world was in, and of its grave economic problems. In Norway, however, where they had only started pumping out their black gold a couple of years earlier, the situation in 1973 was almost the very opposite: in Norway they were having trouble coping with their nascent wealth. This fact manifested itself most clearly, if indirectly, at a public meeting in the Saga cinema in Oslo in April of that year. The choice of venue was most apt, since it would be quite true to say that a new saga had its beginnings here. A saga of the grimmer sort. On the stage stood a seasoned public speaker: an eccentric dog lover in a suit and a bow tie, with a bottle of egg liqueur to oil his vocal chords. Anders Sigurd Lange was his name, and he made a speech which was interrupted by bursts of applause over a hundred times. This meeting led to the founding of a political party which initially went by the curious name of ‘Anders Lange’s party for the drastic reduction of taxes, duties and state intervention’. Later it acquired another and possibly even more curious
appellation
:
Fremskrittspartiet
– the Progress Party.

Much has been said about that strange organisation, the Norwegian Maoist Party – the AKP in its Norwegian abbreviation – which ran rampant in Norway in the seventies. But as far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, the most significant political movement of the day, in the long run at any rate, was not the AKP, but the ALP. Anders Lange was not, in himself, a bad man; Jonas did not have the slightest interest in him as a person, what fascinated him was the society which had raised an individual like Anders Lange to prominence, which is to say: Norway. Lange was a symbol, the carrier of alarming symptoms, in the same way as Harastølen, the refugee centre at Luster. He was, among other things, one of the first examples of a growing trend among politicians to become solo performers. And proof that they could get away with this, not to mention actually build up a following, even when they were little short of utter buffoons. Everything hinged on the individual concerned. It was no longer a matter of a political party, but of a skilled demagogue, surrounded by a crowd of whingeing Norwegians who could, what is more, be replaced at regular intervals.

None of this would have been possible, however, had it not been for certain requisite factors, the most important of these being the media and, not least, the television broadcasting service of which Jonas Wergeland himself would one day become a part. With Anders Lange’s Party – not the man, but the phenomenon: the combination of rapacious media and one figure as catalyst, began the decline of civilised politics. Within just a few months a handful of individuals succeeded, with the help of the media, in totally vulgarising the Norwegian political scene. It did not take long for every politician to realise that presentation was more important than substance, that one might as well master the rhetoric of advertising right at the start. The politicians, press and TV entered into a symbiosis of sorts: each ensuring the other of publicity, however short-lived, and whatever the cost.

Anders Lange himself declared that they had reached a turning point in Norwegian history, and he was to be proved right. In the election held in the autumn of 1973, in a Norway in which, for three decades, everyone had pulled together to build up the country, marching shoulder to shoulder behind the banner of solidarity, more than 100,000 Norwegians voted for Anders Lange’s Party. Its founder and three other members won seats in
parliament
. Jonas Wergeland saw this as the beginning of a period in which the proud, time-honoured tradition of May 1st soon gave way to the egocentric celebration of Me 1st.

With Anders Lange, populism came to Norway for good and all. The responsible, ideological, considered style of politics had had its day. Opinions, votes, were no longer founded on vision, but on discontent, not least with an overly high rate of income tax. Anders Lange – an indefatigable writer of letters to the press, had a nose for the mood which lay dormant in many Norwegians, a mood which can best be compared to the sulkiness of spoiled adolescents. This may well be the least sympathetic and most
incomprehensible
aspect of modern Norway: the fact that the wealthier the country became, the more it was possible to play on this feeling of discontent, this collective ‘gimme more’ frame of mind. From the mid-seventies onwards Norway rode towards the millennium on the wave generated by its new ideology of Self: self-righteousness, self-centredness and self-sufficiency. For decades, the most prevalent catchword in Norway was ‘self-determination’. And there
is
, in fact, a shadowy and little recognised connection between that meeting in the Saga cinema in 1973 and Norway’s vote against joining the EEC the previous year. Where the initial focus had been on general political self-determination, the demands were now to be extended to cover the right to individual and – worst of all – ethnic autonomy, with all decisions being made independent of the international community.

And here, in this worrying development, we have the crux of Jonas
Wergeland’s
monologue at Harastølen: xenophobia. The most ominous aspect of the new populistic movement founded in the Saga cinema was its latent racist tendencies. Anders Lange could hardly be accused of being a racist, despite a bunch of somewhat dubious remarks and an unconcealed fondness for South Africa. But many of his supporters were, and contempt for people of a
different
skin colour has always dogged this party like a shadow. Even before the election in 1973, that ignominious year, one of the party’s members openly expressed a sentiment which had not been voiced in decades: Norway for the Norwegians. The future leader of the party, Carl Ivar Hagen gradually gained a lot of ground by ingeniously, discreetly and, not least, impunibly fuelling the flames of people’s intolerance and their antipathy to foreigners. To Jonas Wergeland, the ban on immigration which was introduced only two years after the meeting in the Saga cinema simply seemed to be the logical next step. Thanks to the far-right Progress Party and the knock-on effect its success had on the political scene in general, the whole of Norway was transformed into another Lyn: a privileged and pampered team, desperately on the defensive. Or, as Kamala Varma so neatly put it during one heated discussion: ‘Modern Norway is a society founded on the seven deadly sins.’ It was the Progress Party which propagated the notion that has taken root in far too many Norwegians: that every person who comes to Norway seeking asylum is only here for the money and is merely out to defraud the
Norwegian
welfare state. For Jonas, this had always been the most notable feature of the Outside Right: its prejudice against foreigners, its lack of solidarity with people outside the chalked line marking the geographical bounds of Norway.

But now, to use an expression from the football broadcasts: over to Grorud sports ground, because out there on the pitch, the Grorud under-15s are playing at home to Lyn and Jonas Wergeland is running unhindered up his beloved left wing. To anyone who had been following the Lyn team all season it must have been agony to watch these normally excellent players, known for their lightning attacks, having to adopt what was for them an unwonted defensive strategy, putting their name and their reputation to shame; they now looked as if they would be very happy to settle for a draw, the whole team had pulled back into their own half, suddenly the very embodiment of the Outside Right, displaying a dogged defensiveness which refused to accept that anyone could be as good as them; in fact they were boiling mad, ready to break the legs of anybody who tried to get through their wall, especially anyone sly enough to try a shot from the wing. Jonas ought to have sensed the change in atmosphere, but he was too caught up, and a bit groggy from the pain in his ribs; he was almost level with the box, cut across towards the
Lyn goal, heading for the corner of the sixteen metre line, and as the
aforementioned
King Kong from the Lyn backs charged at him, a gorilla in red and white, Jonas passed the ball smoothly to Leo and received it back from him as he jinked round the big back and crossed the sixteen metre line. But Lyn’s colossus of a defender had had enough, he dashed off in murderous pursuit, mainly because he realised that a goal was in the offing; he could see Jonas considering into which corner of the net he should place the ball, softly, but in the net nonetheless, as sure as death, so he rammed the toe of his boot into Jonas’s calf with all his might, from behind – Jonas felt as though his leg had been knocked from under him by a leaden skipping rope: the Lyn back had lashed out at him partly in desperation, partly out of pure malice; he didn’t even try to go for the ball, he went for Jonas’s leg, with the result that the casualty department had to deal with a broken fibula which the doctor on call described as one of the nastiest he had seen in a long time – a fracture which, by the way, also paved the way for Jonas Wergeland’s subsequent career as an angry young man in the Red Room, but that is another story. Jonas crashed to the ground with a howl, just had time to register the scent of grass, earth, to observe that the world was flat, too simple; you thought you had a clear run, only then to slam straight into an invisible barrier, a wall of thick glass. Everything went red, then white and finally blue. He passed out.