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 befo
re 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.
It could not be anything but a penalty. As Jonas was coming round, a few metres outside his beloved left touchline, as his mangled leg was being examined, through a haze of pain he saw Leo deposit the ball neatly in the corner of the net.
He had learned how easy it was to achieve his aims. And yet: was it worth the cost? They had beaten Lyn. Nonetheless, this experience had taught Jonas a lesson: he ought to have concealed his gifts. Although he could not have put it into words, Jonas was beginning to understand why his father preferred an anonymous existence on the organ bench at Grorud Church.
Although his painful encounter with Lyn lay in the future, as early as fifth grade Jonas knew that it was best to keep his thought experiments to himself. He did not tempt fate by causing more chaos in the skipping games. But he did still believe that skipping was an absolute prerequisite. He toyed with the term ‘mental gymnastics’, envisaged skipping as a way of building up his thinking muscles. He purchased a good, professional skipping rope, a Lonsdale with ridged hand-grips weighted to give it the right whip and speed. He found a suitable, unfrequented spot in the basement of the block of flats and started skipping all on his own. He liked to switch off the light, skip in the dark, caught inside the invisible bubble formed by the arc of the rope. He had watched the girls skipping, knew that there were lots of different steps. You could skip forwards or backwards, or on one leg, then the other; you could sling the rope out to the side at set intervals, skip with your arms crossed, or a whole host of combinations. But what Jonas liked best was double skips or simply ‘doubles’. His thoughts flowed best of all with those. Maybe it was the swish of the rope that did it, but skipping doubles gave him a feeling of hovering in mid-air, of no longer being subject to natural laws or the laws of causality. And his reflections altered character, becoming more like the mode of thought he experienced when he dove down deep. When he skipped in the dark, he felt as though everything round about him began to glow, that he was like a dynamo, that he created energy, a force field. He was not simply doing mental gymnastics, he was practising for a great battle. He recalled pictures of boxers – fighters like Ingemar Johansson: massive characters, skipping as light as you like. As if they were training for something other than boxing.
Gradually his efforts began to pay off. He became capable of considering more than two thoughts at the same time. He managed to keep first three, then four parallel thoughts in the air. It was an intoxicating feeling. Like being on board a sailing ship with sail upon sail being run up mast after mast and everything moving faster and faster. Sometimes the basement smelled like the air after a violent thunderstorm. Soon, however, he also found that the more widely diverging his thoughts were in subject matter, the more exciting it became. It was like keeping an eye on several separate cogs in the workings of a clock at one time or, more correctly perhaps, several different sets of clock workings in different places in the room. It also seemed to him that time stood still, or went more slowly, the more simultaneous thoughts he managed to set in train. Jonas would not have been surprised had someone told him that he appeared to be skipping in slow motion. And now and again – he could have sworn it – he thought in a way that caused him to see his name written in lights in the darkness before him.
It can surely have been no coincidence that he should at this time have had a crush on the aforementioned triplets, Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis. Although he did not know it, he was also on the brink of one of the great milestones in the life of any individual: the moment when you press your cheek against the cheek of the one you love. For Jonas this would prove to be an even more powerful experience than his first kiss, simply because it came first. If it were possible to talk about a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ in Jonas Wergeland’s life, then it was one which involved skin rather than mucous membranes.
It can hardly have been because their father was a big man in the labour movement that the triplets exhibited such an uncommon degree of mutual solidarity that one could have been forgiven for thinking they lived by the motto ‘All for one, and one for all’. It would, however, have been misleading to call them The Three Musketeers, since they were absolutely identical, at least to anyone who did not know them well. They all looked like troll dolls, or like the Icelandic singer of a future era, Björk Gudmundsdottir. Like the Beagle Boys from the Donald Duck comics they needed placards on their chests to differentiate t
hem from one another. And since Jonas did not make up his mind until late in the autumn that was more or less how he managed to tell them apart – by the different coloured scarves they wore: red, blue and yellow. For Jonas those scarves were a tricolour waving over the land of love. But that still left him faced with a not inconsiderable dilemma: which one should he choose? There was something about the sight of them which made him think of a box of chocolates, the stunning prospect of all that confectionary, a golden tray full of delights, all equally tempting: ‘Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo’.
After the summer holidays he had watched them on the sly when they were hula hooping in the playground, a circus turn that quite took his breath away: three identical girls with their hips gyrating in perfect synchrony. He also had a passport-size photograph of each of them, the sort everybody had to have taken at one of those machines if they wanted to be part of the status-giving and rather frenetic swapping game they played at that age, where the main point was not to have as many photos as possible, but to have the right photos – much in the same way as cards are exchanged in the business world and in diplomatic circles. A few of the girls’ photos had a high exchange value; you could, for example, get both Britt and Kari, maybe even Gerd into the bargain, for one Anne Beate. Jonas studied the pictures of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis through a magnifying glass as if faced here with the equivalent of those seemingly identical cartoons in weekly magazines in which you have to spot the differences; but he really could not perceive any dissimilarity between them. They were absolutely identical. Jonas was struck by an outrageous thought: what if he were able to go out with all three of them at once? What an unbelievably intense experience that would have to be?
The Discoverer Page 12