The Discoverer (39 page)

On the way back to town, Leonard told him that some kind soul at the offices of the film’s Norwegian distributor had given him a worn-out copy which was actually due to be scrapped. And a sympathetic person at the Film Institute had let him use the cutting desk there. So? What did Jonas think? There was a note of anxiety in Leonard’s voice. What he had done might well seem like sacrilege. To re-edit
Blow-Up
– it was tantamount to re-editing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Jonas did not know what to say. In time he would come to see that Leonard had possibly been conducting an experiment inspired by genetic engineering. He wanted to prove to Jonas that he could reconstruct himself. That there was hope, despite his little shrimp of a bank teller father. But at the time Jonas could not see anything to suggest that Leonard had succeeded in his venture. All the light seemed to have gone out of his friend’s dark eyes. There was not a spark. Only blackness. As if a shutter had dropped down for good and all.

Then Leonard Knutzen disappeared. Someone said that he had gone to India, that he took LSD and had long since blown his mind out completely. Others claimed to have seen him, or someone who looked like him, in the centre of Copenhagen, carrying a sign – or probably a placard – in the shape of a big hand pointing to a dive down a side street, the sort of place where, in the very early seventies, you could see grainy German porn movies.

Jonas thought often of how fragile a life was, how very, very little it took to knock a person off course. Or onto a new course. You bend down to tie your shoelaces and when you straighten up again your life has changed. Jonas himself had been an astonished witness to the moment when Daniel, high on innumerable easy victories, was suddenly brought face to face with the gravity of life. Jonas never really understood his brother, but he would have bet anything in the world that Daniel would never have become anything as outrageously far-fetched as a minister of the church.

That autumn Daniel had little thought for anything but his prospects as a star athlete; he was going through a phase when he was, in many ways, at his most intolerable, a tearaway disguised as a rebel, Daniel X with his black-gloved fist. Almost as if it were a natural extension of stretching his muscles after a tough training session, he started going out with a girl who sang in a Ten Sing choir. When it came to getting into a girl’s pants, Daniel was not fussy; it was okay by him even if the girl in question was a member of something as soulless and unmusical as one of those YWCA choirs: spotty
teenagers singing off-key, backed by a band with badly tuned guitars – a nigh-on blasphemous set-up, in Daniel’s eyes, and about as far from Aretha Franklin’s gut-wrenching, wailful ecstasies as you could get.

It took more than the Queen of Soul and her seductive gospel strains to bring Daniel to the scripture, though. Jonas began to notice that Daniel seemed unusually agitated, then one evening he confessed to his little brother: he had knocked up his girlfriend. He was as desperately certain as you can only be when you are sixteen and have finally ‘done it’, with all the imprudence and raw self-assurance of the first-timer. Jonas could not resist it: ‘Maybe you should have put a black glove on your dick as well,’ he said. His brother, who would normally have flattened him for that, pretended not to hear, and instead went on cursing his spermatozoa, those microscopic champion
swimmers
that could make a woman’s body swell up like a balloon. He
admitted
to Jonas that suddenly he was seeing pregnant women all over the place. Wherever he looked there were people with prams and packs of nappies. He was done for. He could already see the headlines: ‘Grorud’s youngest parents.’

It was in this frame of mind that Daniel attended one of the last athletics meets of the year, and at the Jordal Amfi Arena, more specifically in the
long-jump
pit, he felt a higher power taking a hand in his life.

Daniel was an unusually gifted athlete and had always been particularly good at the long jump. He loved the combination of sprinting and jumping; he revelled in the challenge of hitting the board just right. So he was not at all happy with his first jump of five metres and twenty-seven centimetres – he was used to jumping around six metres. It could not just have been a case of nerves, a slight loss of concentration at the thought of a Ten Sing girl who was alarmingly ‘late’. Something had held him back in the air, he said later. A weight, a heaviness, as if there were some connection between gravidity and gravity. This feeling was even more pronounced on his second jump, when he hit the board perfectly and yet – as if the gravitational force had somehow doubled – jumped a shorter distance than normal. When the measuring crew announced the length – the same as before: ‘Daniel: 5.27’ – he did not give it too much thought. But when, on his third and last jump – the schedule at this meet only allowed for three tries – he jumped exactly five metres and twenty-seven centimetres yet again, he began to wonder. For the first time in his career, Daniel walked away from the long-jump pit without a medal.

Over the next few days, his mood exacerbated no doubt by growing anxiety over his girlfriend’s overdue period, Daniel started to give some serious thought to his weird result in the long-jump: 5.27 three times in a row – that was more than a coincidence. And with his natural propensity for speculation, it was not long before he consulted the old Family Bible, on
the principle that a long-jump result was like a grain of manna, a little slip of paper that you picked out of a bowl, like a tombola ticket. Although he had never believed a word of it before, at that particular moment he was sure that the scripture would determine the course of his life. In the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 27, once he had managed to decipher the elaborate Gothic lettering, he slowly read to himself, with eyes as wide, surely, as those of King Belshazzar himself: ‘TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.’ The context, together with Gustav Doré’s dramatic illustration, left him in no doubt: the writing was on the wall. Weighed and found wanting.

Daniel knew what this meant. His
soul
was too light. For someone as concerned with the health and well-being of the soul as Daniel was, there could be no harsher verdict. At an early age he had read how certain religions believed that the soul was placed in a scale after death. If it proved too light it was cast into the jaws of a monster which sat next to the seat of judgement waiting to receive it. To Daniel this Bible text could mean only one thing: she
was
pregnant.

Although, there might still be hope. What if this were a final warning from a merciful God? Daniel fell to his knees. Just at that moment Jonas walked in, then pulled up short on the threshold. He could not believe his eyes. Daniel with his back to him, on his knees next to the bed. Daniel the rebel, a pig-headed bugger who had never in his life bowed down to
anything
. Softly and, if the truth be told, a mite fearfully Jonas retreated. What his brother said, what he prayed for, what he promised – because he must have made some sort of deal – Jonas never discovered. But from that day onwards Daniel W. Hansen was a Christian. You might say that he rotated his X forty-five degrees, turning it into a cross. And I hardly need say: there was no pregnancy. Soon afterwards, Daniel’s girlfriend came to see him, all smiles, to tell him that everything was okay. For days afterwards, Jonas could hear Daniel humming to himself when he thought he was alone, and Jonas’s hearing was good enough for him to recognise the hymn: ‘Hallelujah, my soul is free.’

Daniel kept his promise, though. He remained a Christian. It may be that his time as Daniel X had merely been a harbinger of what was to come, as Jonas had thought – an intimation of an unknown x inside him, a religious chamber. If, that is, he did not believe that he had at last found the field which had been there waiting for his rebellious heart. To Jonas it was nothing short of a miracle. Proof that at any moment a person can suddenly change. So when other, normally peaceable individuals suddenly became raging
revolutionaries
, Daniel, with his slumbering, inborn talent for rebellion, was holed up indoors with his nose buried in his Bible, as if he had already started
studying theology, embarked upon his career in the church. He had found his Samarkand. His life had acquired weight.

Leonard Knutzen, too, gained weight. Or at least his wallet did. Years later, when Jonas rarely ever thought of his old friend, Leonard’s name suddenly appeared in the newspapers. Although eventually the headlines spoke simply of Leonardo. In photographs his coat was always slung over his shoulders like a cape, a touch which now seemed elegant rather than affected. And his eyes looked keen again. The first article appeared in conjunction with a much publicised exhibition of works by young Norwegian photographers. Leonard Knutzen had put up the money for the exhibition. A lot of money. Leonard Knutzen was a rich man. Fabulously rich. But no one, not even in media circles had ever come across his name before. He lived abroad. Leonard had quietly made himself a fortune on the stock market. The image of him
presented
in the press was of a shrewd individual much to be admired, a
financial
artist; it was them, the media, who nicknamed him Leonardo, without knowing anything of his heroic past as the Italian-inspired director of a good number of twelve-minute 8 mm films full of scooters and people gazing in different directions. Leonard had done it – done what he had shown he could do with
Blow-Up
in that tiny cinema at Røa. He had actually re-cut his own fate. He had used the art of montage to create a new life for himself. Or perhaps one should simply say that he had enlarged himself.

To Jonas, Leonard seemed the very personification of modern Norway – a nation which led the most anonymous, the most discreet, of existences, alongside the other nations of the world, while the money simply poured into the state coffers. Likewise, Leonard sat in his faraway office, pressing buttons, unremarked by anyone in his native country, while the money pumped into his offshore accounts. The press’s glowing reports of Leonardo’s doings reminded Jonas of a conjuring trick. Leonard was now blowing up money, he could take a
krone
and, by dint of an abstract, magical process, magnify it into ten. Both Leonard and Norway had discovered that you did not need to work – or not, at least, in the old-fashioned physical fashion depicted in
Aktuell
magazine – in order to get rich. Leonard had finally found a use for his keen eye. That was still the key. An eye for where to put one’s money. An eye for the perfect stock. In interviews he said, half in jest, that he supposed he might be a Leonardo when it came to spying investment opportunities which no one else believed possible. To Jonas it seemed more as though Leonard had
determined
to blow the abilities, the genes, of a lousy bank teller into something great. He had produced a happy ending, against all odds, and in spite of the original film.

On the other hand, Jonas also had the definite impression that for Leonard
the driving force was still wrath. That Leonard had rediscovered some of the Italian temperament from those evenings in the Red Room, a little of the bite of all those spicy sauces they had spooned over their pasta. The fiery grindings of the pepper mill. Either that or he had accomplished something which only very few ever manage: to preserve some of the indignation which we tend and nurture so carefully in our youth. Jonas could not help thinking that one should possibly take this as a lesson. Maybe everyone should have a little placard stuck to the fridge door of their settled, routine existences, a slip of paper saying: SAVE THE WRATH.

All the write-ups on Leonard Knutzen did, however, also lead Jonas to immerse himself in much more serious reflections. He was reminded of another time. He had, he recalled, not only been mad at the world. Once he had actually tried to open up the world. In junior high he had met a master, a schoolmaster, and before that Bo Wang Lee.

In his youth Jonas Wergeland had the ability to follow several lines of thought at once. For long periods of time he also had the feeling that he was living parallel lives. While he may have spent some parts of the day in a basement, seething with rage, for other parts of the day he was, for example, at school – where he came across as a rather shy, polite and, not least, inquisitive young man.

The first time Jonas Wergeland saw the slogan ‘The real thing’ he thought, not of Coca-Cola, but of
realskolen
– junior high. For him, this truly was ‘real school’. It is not the case, as certain influential branches of psychology would have it, that our characters are formed by the time we are around seven. Things are not, I am glad to say, as dire as all that. Like the mighty banyan tree, human beings too can put down roots from branches high above. Jonas Wergeland received his ‘upbringing’, his most crucial stimuli, at junior high.

If it is true that from the cradle to the grave, from childhood games with stones to the puffing and blowing of old age, man lives out, as it were, the whole history of the species, then junior high was, for Jonas, a Renaissance, a revival of age-old learning, and particularly of the elementary knowledge instilled in him in ‘antiquity’, those three glorious first years at school. Not because he spent so much time with his chum Leonard, known as Leonardo, but because he came under the wing of a person, a teacher, who fully merited the epithet applied to individuals of exceptionally wide-ranging talent and cultivation: a Renaissance man.

Who was this person? Well it was certainly not the Iron Chancellor, who drummed the litany of German prepositions into their heads, nor was it Dr Jekyll, whom they had for English: on the surface a gentleman to his
fingertips
, dressed from top to toe in tweed and corduroy, but capable of exploding into the most pyrotechnical fits of rage, to which the snapping of a pointer was but the mildest prelude. Nor was it their enigmatic maths teacher, Miss Pi, who could stir a boy’s blood simply with the circular motions of her arms, or the Weed, their natural history teacher, who swooned at the very mention of the word ‘dissect’. And for any favour: forget PE teacher, Tamara Press. At an age when they positively oozed disrespect, only one person slipped through the needle’s eye of their tolerance. He was even exempt from the usual fiendish practical jokes, such as balancing the teacher’s lectern on the very edge of the dais or breaking off matchsticks in the lock of the classroom
door. It is a mark of his standing that he did not even labour under a
nickname
. He was, quite simply, Mr Dehli. Jonas had him for Norwegian and history. In ancient myths and legends one often hears tell of inspired masters, the sort who teach the hero to fence or shoot with bow and arrow. Mr Dehli was such a master. Although the ‘e’ in his surname was actually sounded as ‘ay’ and the ‘l’ and the ‘h’ were the wrong way round, Jonas always pronounced it like that of the capital of India – for reasons which will later become
apparent
. ‘We’re not going to have Norwegian now,’ Jonas would think before his classes, ‘we’re going to have
Indian
.’

In all the heated debate which constantly rages around education reforms and books and buildings and grades, it is astonishing how people forget what a difference a teacher can make. You snore your way through years of deadly dull history lessons, then you have a reserve teacher for two periods and you’re hooked on the Thirty Years War or the books of Marguerite Yourcenar for life. Ask anybody – what they remember from school are the teachers. There is nothing to beat an inspiring teacher. There is no substitute – absolutely none – for the charisma of an enthusiast. And if anyone radiated infectious enthusiasm, it was Mr Dehli. He was never seen in the duster coats worn by some teachers in those days; he always came to school looking spruce and dapper in a white shirt, a jacket and a bow tie which was always hopelessly askew by the end of a zestful lesson, as if he had just been in a fight, or on a wild airplane ride. Jonas Wergeland said more than once that he had had only one real teacher in twelve years of schooling. It was also, and not
unimportantly
, Mr Dehli who introduced him to Maya.

It sometimes seemed to Jonas that it was not actually people who made him feel embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the world. Or for the world. Because of its alarming flatness. But thanks to Mr Dehli, after only a few months at junior high Jonas again began to discern a suggestion of depth, little glimpses of something
behind
the flatness. Through a fruitful process of repetition Mr Dehli also succeeded in reawakening the round-eyed joy of the first years at school; the delight of drawing a cow’s four stomachs, the pride in managing to construct a ninety-degree angle with the aid of compasses, the wonder aroused by a word like ‘accusative’. And suddenly Jonas understood the full magnitude of things: the purpose of the meridian concept, the
consequences
of Caesar’s statement when he crossed the Rubicon, the wealth of associations contained within a word like ‘stamen’. Mr Dehli got them to write whole stories in the pluperfect, or the past-future-perfect tense.

‘What is this?’ he asked during their first Norwegian period, writing a large H on the board so emphatically that chalk flew everywhere – Mr Dehli could pull a stick of chalk out of his jacket pocket quicker than any gunslinger.
The whole class looked blank. ‘Take a good look,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see that it’s a ladder? Every letter in the alphabet is a ladder. Use them well and you’ll be able to climb wherever you please.’

Mr Dehli set out to
elevate
his pupils. Provide them with ladders to enable them to reach a higher plane. He never brought a pupil down. Instead, as an educator in the truest sense of that word, he drew out the best in them, drew from them things they did not even know they knew. He was not unlike a personage who would later appear on Norwegian television, the charismatic presenter of the musical quiz programme
Counterpoint
, Sten Broman who, like Mr Dehli, performed his duties dressed to the nines, in suits he designed himself, and had a knack for eliciting the correct answers from teams who, to begin with, seemed totally stumped; he seemed to take pride in bringing out the contestants’ subliminal knowledge.

Schoolmaster Dehli employed a number of unorthodox methods. When they were studying Ibsen, he turned up for class with a pocket mirror in one hand and his chest covered in medals. ‘It is impossible to understand Ibsen without also taking into account his vanity and his ambition,’ Mr Dehli declared. Who could forget something like that?

Often he would turn things on their heads. ‘There are any number of
possible
futures, everybody knows that,’ he said during one history class. ‘But did it ever occur to you that there also exists a wealth of possible pasts? For tomorrow I want you to write a couple of pages on what the Second World War would have been like for someone from Japan. Don’t just sit there gawping. Make a note in your homework books.’

Mr Dehli’s main interest lay, however, in impressing upon them the way in which the different subjects were all interconnected, as in an organic system of learning. He showed them how just about everything can be set into a fresh context. He told them about poets in history class and religion in
Norwegian
classes. It came as a shock to Jonas to hear his teacher say that there was nothing to stop them introducing elements from the Weed’s or Miss Pi’s domains, from natural history and maths, that is, into their essays. Mr Dehli advocated a viewpoint which would hold sway in the universities a decade later: if you wanted to do something original with your life then you needed to have both feet on the ground, firmly planted in at least two different realms of study. The more remote from one another the better.

Although Mr Dehli could not know it, in his mind Jonas likened this idea to a necklace he had seen as a child. On it hung a disc engraved on both sides with obscure strokes and dashes which, when you spun the disc round, spelled ‘I love you’.

Despite his conviction that he was special, despite his gift for thinking, up
until now Jonas had not done particularly well at school. Or at least, he had not been interested. With the advent, in fifth grade, of the more soporific, factually oriented lessons, he fell behind. Not even the weird and often funny sentences which their teacher made up to help them remember the names of towns in southern Norway or the fjords of Finnmark could enliven his interest. Particularly when it came to writing Norwegian essays Jonas had a problem: he tended to lose himself in the ramifications of his own mental associations. His essay for the exam in eighth grade was a disaster, rewarded, or punished rather, with a P for Poor.

But here he had found a teacher who did exactly the same thing, the
difference
being that Mr Dehli turned it into a strength. ‘What is the opposite of truth?’ he asked on one occasion, and answered before they had time to think: ‘Clarity.’ Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the
thinnest
branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following – heart in mouth, almost – their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and … and … and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but …’, and a sigh of relief would run through the
classroom
, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.

‘Watch this,’ Mr Dehli said in Norwegian class one day, placing a glass beaker of water over a Bunsen burner. ‘Today we’re going to produce an ester.’ He poured equal amounts of ethanol and acetic acid into a test tube and let it sit for a while in the boiling water. ‘See? Nothing happens,’ he announced, absent-mindedly waving a grammar book in the air. ‘In order to instigate a reaction we need something else. Watch carefully now.’ Mr Dehli added a few drops of concentrated sulphuric acid to the test tube and put it back into the boiling water. A lovely smell, like fruit or perfume, filled the classroom. What was going on? Jonas wondered. Chemistry in the Norwegian class? ‘Imagine that those two liquids are two different thoughts,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘Put them together and nothing happens. But then imagine that a third thought
suddenly
comes to me and I think this along with the other two. Abracadabra! A reaction is triggered!’ Mr Dehli pointed triumphantly to the test tube containing the sweet-smelling liquid. ‘These are the thoughts you have to pursue,’ he concluded, thereby making the final link between chemistry and
Norwegian. ‘Those which act as
catalysts
.’ No one understood what he was getting at better than Jonas, who had for years been whipping up parallel thoughts while skipping doubles and – perhaps even more crucially – had seen the world grow, thanks to a real live ‘catalyst’.

It’s true, one day the world did grow. Jonas was ten years old, sitting all alone on a rock beside Badedammen – the lake that had been converted into a bathing pond for the residents of Grorud back in the thirties. It was early evening and unusually quiet. No yells from down by the weir, where the boys were given to chucking squealing girls into the water; no shouts, half-fearful, half-gleeful, because Jonas – did he have gills? – was swimming all the way across the pond underwater; no mothers lazing on the grassy slope in
distracting
bikinis with one anxious eye on the toddlers playing by the water’s edge. A brief shower, a warm drizzle, had only just sent the last bathers home for dinner. Now the park-like surroundings were once more drenched in a warm light. The lifeguards, holders of the most coveted of summer jobs – those white uniform caps alone – had quit the scene, having first emptied the elegant wrought-iron litter bins. The shutters were closed on the kiosk and its rich store of ice-poles and ice-cream cones. Jonas sat with the sun on his back next to the diving board where, only days before, Daniel – clad in his new, tiger-striped bathing trunks – had executed a somersault for the very first time; his triumph marred only by the fact that he forgot to look where he was going and ended up ripping the lilo of a lady who, fortunately, managed to roll off it in time. Jonas stared at a dragonfly which was flitting back and forth across the smooth surface of the lake. A dragon from China. He sat there, hoping that something would happen.

Absently he threw a stone into the water, watched the rings spreading out, further and further out, circle upon circle, a huge target. He was bored, he had no one to play with. The summer holidays had begun, his chums were all away. He cursed the disagreement, instigated by an overbearing uncle, which meant that the summer would be half over before Jonas and his family could go to Hvaler.

He picked up another stone, flung it further out, gazed at the rings which began to spread outwards, felt his thoughts, too, flowing in all directions, fanning out from him in a sort of circle. At that same moment something happened to the ripples on the water. They were broken. Or rather: they ran into rings radiating from some other point. He had not heard a splash, the other stone must have been thrown at exactly the same instant as his own. Jonas’s eyes lingered on the pretty picture in the water, the pattern formed by the waves colliding, intersecting – a much nicer sight than the solitary set of rings.

And then a boat came sailing towards him; it emerged from some bushes to his left and bore in a gentle arc straight towards the spot where he was sitting. He shut his eyes, opened them again. It might have had something to do with the landscape in the background, the absence of people. The boat grew. The whole pond grew. The perspective twisted. The boat became a real ship, a magnificent liner. The pond became the open sea. And suddenly Jonas recognised the vessel, it was the
MS Bergensfjord
itself, the finest of the
American
liners. Jonas could not have said how long this vision lasted, an actual ship from the Norwegian American Line on a small lake on the fringes of
Lillomarka
, but it was dispelled, at any rate, when the model ship rammed into the shore right at his feet. The illusion shattered; his surroundings shrank, reverting once more to the familiar bathing pond.