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The Discoverer

Page 10

by Jan Kjaerstad


  Behind all this there was, of course, a story – and not just any story; a story which Jonas was soon to hear, becoming, as he did, a regular visitor to Karen Mohr’s flat, especially over that first winter. But long before she told it to him, Jonas’s mind had been occupied with trying to guess what sort of story it might be. And even he, child that he was, knew that it had to be a love story. Whenever she disappeared into the kitchen to make omelettes and he was left sipping a glass of real lemonade and fingering the bamboo of a rattan chair, he would try to spin his own stories, inspired, for example, by the ceramic figurines on the bookshelf or the full-length mirror which dominated the wall opposite the window, the kind of mirror which opened onto another, dimmer, room – a mirror which might even have been capable of making time stand still. At such moments, when that mirror also opened his mind, Jonas used to wish that it would be a while yet before his omelette was served.

  That winter he made a big discovery of his own, again concerning a mirror. It happened at home, in Rakel’s corner of the bedroom, one day when she had gone to the cinema. A strong smell of hair lacquer hung around her dressing table. Jonas sat down in front of the oval mirror and examined his face in it. Rakel claimed this was a magic mirror, like the one the queen in Snow White had. His eye went first to the strange scar, or more correctly: two scars on his forehead, just above his eyebrow, which sometimes seemed to form a cross. Making him look like a marked man. Marked out. Gradually, though, he became more aware of something else; he noticed how flat his face looked. Flat, that is, in that his whole face seemed like a mask covering something totally unknown. Not another face, but something indescribable, something beyond thought.

  He could not remember when he had first latched onto his disquieting discovery: the world was flat. Not in the sense that the earth was flat – although Jonas had to admit he had a weakness for the notion that if you dug down deep enough you would end up in China. Everything was flat. Objects were flat, people were flat. The first time he was taken to the theatre – to see ‘The Wind in the Willows’ – not for one moment did it cross his mind that the marvellous characters on the stage were just an act. To him they were every bit as real and true as everything else round about him. He took the play to be a faithful reflection of reality. To Jonas, more than anything else the word ‘flat’ meant ‘simple’, a little too simple. A lack of depth. The fact that he had once saved a child’s life merely by sticking an arm underwater had taught him a bit about the shallowness of existence. The flatness of it. He never dared say this to anyone, partly because he thought he was the only one who knew: we had barely touched the world, we had scarcely begun to scratch the surface of it. The world might be round, but life was still flat.

  To begin with, this did not really bother Jonas, but as time went on he felt a powerful urge to break through, to reach beyond the flatness. To discover something round. Something deep. Or no, not deep: he wanted to get at something else entirely. In his mind he called it ‘Samarkand’. Occasionally he caught himself stamping the ground hard, on impulse, as if convinced that a thin film would shatter, just like the first fragile coating of ice in the autumn. A similar thought occurred to him when he looked into Rakel’s mirror. Again he had a strong sense that there was something more, a certain potential, behind him, within him, which eluded his eye, his comprehension. I am quite different from how I appear in the mirror, he thought to himself. Afterwards, he would blame it on the fumes from the hair lacquer. He rammed his fist into the mirror with a force and a vehemence that surprised even him. He maintained that he had seen a glimmer of orange, of something enticing, in there behind the glass. He had lashed out quick as a flash, as if hoping, by dint of a surprise attack, to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that lay behind, as the mirror shattered, so to speak.

  What this incident – and, not least, his badly cut knuckles – taught him was that using his fists would not help him to come to terms with the flatness of the world. It was, however, becoming increasingly clear to him that he was blessed with a gift which might enable him to penetrate beneath the surface, of objects and of people.

  Jonas had always been a great one for fantasising – and by that I do not mean the sort of daydreaming in which many people indulge. For a boy of his age Jonas had an exceptional aptitude for thinking. He had detected the first signs of this ability – though he knew right away that it ought to be regarded as a gift – in his Aunt Laura’s flat in Tøyen, in that world of Oriental rugs and brocade, precious metals and Lebanese cooking. Aunt Laura looked like an actress, or a diva, but she was a goldsmith, highly skilled and sought after, who had her workshop – a veritable Eldorado to a child – set up in a corner of her living room. One day when, for the umpteenth time, Jonas had begged her to tell him something about the ‘greatest journey’ she had ever made as a rug collector, her trip to Samarkand, she said, in order to distract him: ‘Why don’t I teach you to play chess instead.’ The discovery he was about to make did not, however, have anything to do with the game of chess, or with anecdotes about famous matches, it concerned the pieces. ‘I played chess, silver against gold. No wonder I never became a master,’ he said later.

  As a young woman Aunt Laura had made a chess set, with gold and silver plated miniatures of famous sculptures for the pieces. For the bishop she had chosen the Ancient Greek statue of the discus thrower, for the knight, Marcus Aurelius on horseback; Brancusi’s slender Bird was the rook, Michelangelo’s David the pawn and to Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman fell the honour of being the queen. Jonas learned a bit about art history along with the rules of the game. So for him chess was not so much a game as a story consisting of criss-crossing tales; tales, what is more, which dated from different times, since the pieces reflected the styles of a wide variety of eras. Not even the fact that his aunt wore a silk dressing gown which made her appear more naked than if she had been wearing nothing at all could divert Jonas’s attention from all those different sculptures. Brancusi’s bird was particularly intriguing. The artist seemed almost to have caught what lay behind the bird’s flight.

  But the main point here is this: the first time Jonas laid eyes on Aunt Laura’s king, namely August Rodin’s The Thinker, he lapsed into reverie. That’s me, a voice inside him cried; that’s mankind, that’s how we are. Aunt Laura would always mean a great deal to Jonas, but above all else he loved her for making The Thinker the king. From that day in his aunt’s flat at Tøyen he was sure: his talent had, in some way, to be related to thinking. Jonas would promptly have applauded René Descartes, had he known of that gentleman’s attempt to establish one thing for certain, with his celebrated statement concerning the relationship between thinking and being.

  Nobel prize-winners are often to be heard describing how as children they took old radios apart or built little laboratories in which they carried out chemical experiments. Jonas made do with his own thoughts. His mind was all the laboratory he needed. He took to meditating. In the most literal sense: he sat himself down and proceeded, quite resolutely, to reflect on things, letting observations run into one another while at the same time endeavouring to be aware of what he was doing, to map out where his thoughts were taking him. The average human being is said to have fifty thousand thoughts a day and it was as if Jonas meant to scrutinise every one of his – make a record of them, just as he would sit by the roadside, noting down car registrations. After a while he discovered that, oddly enough, his thoughts flowed best when he assumed the same position as Rodin’s figure: with his chin resting on his fist, his elbow propped on his thigh. From this point onwards his teachers and his chums would automatically resort to the same words to describe Jonas: ‘He’s a thoughtful character.’

  Of all the many aspects of contemplation, the one at which Jonas really excelled was make-believe. Before too long he had become a master of pretence. He had the ability to create whole worlds inside his head, experience them with all his senses. Before leaving elementary school he had visited some of the most exotic coun
tries on earth, really thought himself there with the aid of odd bits of information he had heard or had gleaned from school books. He had even visited Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. All you needed was a little piece of something and your imagination would do the rest, like Sherlock Holmes finding a scrap of clothing. Thanks to his powers of imagination Jonas had been a lion and a flower, not to mention a pencil and the gas helium. As for women: he had kissed Cleopatra – she had smelled of milk – before he had his first kiss. By the age of eleven, Jonas Wergeland was afraid that the world had been used up. He suspected, in other words, that he had reached a dead end where the possibilities of thought were concerned. He was also well aware that he was quite alone in appreciating his gift. At the start of a new school term, when the teacher asked where they had spent their holidays, Jonas had replied: ‘In the Kalahari desert. With the pygmies.’ Everybody had laughed. They had fallen about. They did not see that a fabrication could be as real as reality could be fabricated. Or, to put it another way: that the fiction could be less flat than the real thing.

  So it took Jonas a while to get to the stage where he wanted, or dared, to properly acknowledge his almost unnerving talent for thinking. But this new sense of self-awareness triggered a chain reaction: he discovered that he was also gifted in other areas; discovered also how alarmingly simple it is to distinguish oneself, how easy to score cheap points.

  Like most children, Jonas liked kicking a football around. At Solhaug, they played on the grass or on small, rough patches of waste ground. Any car park could be Ullevål stadium, or Wembley. They had next to no interest in tactics, or formations, ‘line-ups’ as they are now called. It was basically a big free-for-all, with everybody going for the ball at the same time, and everybody taking a shot at goal as soon as they got it. It was as much like wrestling or rugby as it was football.

  Jonas did not take football too seriously: it was a game, a way of killing the odd half-hour until dinner was ready. And although he clearly had a way with the ball and was quick on his feet, he did not take up the game seriously until quite late on. It was Jonas’s best friend, Leonard Knutzen – Leo for short, later to be better known by his professional name, Leonardo – who persuaded him to overcome his shyness and join the Grorud under-15s team. And here I should perhaps say that schoolboy football in the sixties was not such a serious and competitive business as it is today; nor was there any great fight for places on the team. So, since they were short of a forward on the left side of the field and since Jonas was equally good with both feet this was the position he was given. Back then it was called the ‘left wing’ – which sounded as if you were in the air force – or ‘outside left’. Jonas immediately felt at home there.

  Two things surprised Jonas once he started playing football more seriously. The first had to do with the fact that he was now playing on a proper pitch. The new pitch at Grorud sports ground had only just been laid; it looked so beautiful and, more importantly, it was absolutely massive. To Jonas, used to the narrow mazes around the garages and blocks of flats, this was undreamt-of freedom. Here you could really kick up your heels. He was all the more astonished to find, therefore, that even at this level players had a tendency to crowd together in the centre of the field. And it did not take Jonas long to discover – speaking of wings – that he had a whole runway to himself on the left-hand side.

  Nonetheless, he played it canny. He held back, as if knowing intuitively that this discovery – like all significant discoveries – could have fateful consequences. He started with a few trial runs, as if to check whether it was true – had the other team really not realised that from here he could stroll unhindered all the way up to their goal line? No, it was right enough. Again and again he was able to sprint in lone majesty up to the visitors’ corner flag. He took more and more delight in this: dribbling the ball, kicking it up the touchline, sometimes all the way to the goal line. It had a demoralising effect on the other team. Jonas felt as though he had discovered an unknown side of football. Sometimes he wished he could have gone even further, tried running off the pitch, along the strip between the chalked line and the gravel; transcended the possibilities of the game.

  Even though Jonas Wergeland’s cheeky raids on the left wing cannot be compared to the so-called ‘Flo pass’ used so much by the Norwegian national team in the 1990s – a long lob from Jostein Flo’s own half of the pitch to one of the forwards, who would then knock the ball on with his head – these two phenomena had one thing in common: both were examples of bold strategies, staggeringly simple moves which produced good results.

  Jonas grew more and more daring and Leo, who had caught on quickly, spotted that Jonas was alone out there on the left wing, sent the sweetest crossballs flying straight to his toes. Jonas would charge up the touchline, all the way to the other team’s goal line, then chip the ball neatly into the box – where, not infrequently Leo ran in to put the ball in the net.

  If, that is, he did not score himself. Because the other discovery he had made also had to do with the scale of things. With the goal. At home in Solhaug they had played with narrow goalmouths and no keepers: two bricks a metre apart or two jerseys for posts, possibly with one of the little kids standing between them as an excuse for a goalkeeper. But here he had a proper goal. A huge cage. Designed for giants, so it seemed. A huge expanse of sky between the ground and the bar. A barn wall between the posts. Jonas did not get it: how could you not score, at least if you were inside the sixteen metre line and not actually unconscious at the time? Later in life – and knowing what he knew – he could hardly stand to watch a football match, to see so-called professional players who were being paid millions, sending the ball flying over the bar from only five metres outside an open goal. They were obsessed with the need to impress. They couldn’t just score, they had to make the back of the net bulge. So they shot too hard, or were so intent on doing something spectacular that they miskicked completely. Jonas found it painful to watch, proof as it was of the male’s eternal problem: lack of control.

  As a boy, Jonas discovered that you could get away with a remarkably soft shot, as long as it was well placed. If you were ten metres away from the goal and aimed to place the ball just inside the post it would get past most keepers. While the other boys were busy practising juggling with the ball, Jonas came up with a new training exercise for himself. Following the example of tennis player Bjørn Borg, he hit the ball up against a wall or a garage door at home. He worked on his marksmanship, shooting at the same spot again and again. And although he had a lot of different shots at his disposal he tended mainly to practise the simplest and the safest: a chip off the inside, the broad side, of the foot. Sometimes he used a tennis ball, to make it more difficult. And it paid off. Grorud’s under-15s began to move up the league. And Jonas was their top scorer. Jonas was not your typical Norwegian. He was best with a ball.

  He was careful, though, not to make too big an impression. Tried not to score more than two goals in any match, preferably none at all if he could see that Grorud was going to win anyway. Because there was something else to which he had soon become alive: the hostility of the opposing team. Their rancour if humiliated more than was necessary. Jonas did not like rough play, hard tackling – especially since in those days hardly anyone wore shin guards, certainly not Jonas. He was, both on and off the pitch, an extremely peaceable character. Only once did he ever hit anyone: when some guy declared that the Beatles’ Rubber Soul was a rotten album. This unsuspecting individual was knocked flat; Jonas was so mad that it was all Leo could do to calm him down. Aside from this one incident, though, Jonas was never involved in any trouble in his teens.

  But then came the day of their home game against Lyn – the Lyn under-15s team, top of the league and a team which boasted some very good players, lads who might well make it onto the Lyn first division team, maybe even the national squad. Lightning by name and lightning by nature, that was Lyn; a club from the middle-class west side of Oslo, from the Outside Right
, you might say. Grorud versus Lyn – talk about a class war. Before the match, Jonas spent hours honing his dribbling technique on the green at home. Watch out, he told himself; this is going to be a helluva battle, a momentous match.

  In the years prior to this Jonas had been more given to dribbling thoughts. The more intricate the contemplative pattern the better. While other people tried to put their thoughts in order, Jonas attempted to do the opposite. He did not shy away from the really big questions in life, deliberations worthy of Immanuel Kant himself: ‘What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?’, but would also throw himself, with just as great a will, into the consideration of lesser, but just as pressing questions, such as why the yellow chewing gum in the Kip pack tasted better than the pink or the pale-green. It was not unknown for him to speculate until his head spun. The way Jonas saw it, there was only one valid reason for passing out: because you had overtaxed your mind.

  Even before he started playing football – possibly in consequence of his life-saving fiasco – Jonas knew that he was not destined to imitate any of the standard, archetypal success stories: winning an Olympic gold for skiing, becoming a company director, opening the finest restaurant in Norway. Others might lock themselves away in their rooms with guitars for years, to then emerge as stars. Somehow Jonas felt that this was too simple. He was cut out for other things. He wanted to be thinking’s answer to soccer-great Roald Jensen. His talent lay in his grey matter. Which made it the perfect endowment for a rather reserved young man. He would be free to perform his deeds, break new ground, without being surrounded by crowds of people.

  Jonas grew more and more inclined to regard the mental raids he carried out and the networks he formed inside his head as being real. It occurred to him that the most dramatic, the most significant event in his life could be a thought. As a small boy he had often dreamt of making a name for himself by discovering something – an unknown mineral, an unknown flower or, best of all, an unknown land – and having it called after him. It made him sad to hear the grown-ups say that there were no white patches left on the map of the world. Now, however, he realised that he could discover a new continent, but that it would lie within him.

 

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