Then came the great revolution. Or the great loss. The loss of wrath. If, that is, it had not been lost long before. Jonas and Leonard had missed seeing Antonioni’s new film Blow-Up at the cinema, having been on their summer holidays at the time, but just over a year later they found themselves in the Oslo Cinematographers’ screening room in Stortingsgaten along with the Film Club study group, for a showing of this unforgettable movie, so steeped in the London of the sixties, steeped in the music and design of the sixties and, above all else, steeped in metaphysical overtones. It was about a photographer who had taken some pictures of a couple, eventually just the woman, in a park and when he enlarged the photographs discovered that on film he had also – possibly – caught a crime being committed in the background, in the bushes, a man with a gun and a body on the ground. Amazing, thought Jonas. You take pictures of what you think is a love scene, and it turns out to be connected to a murder. With his heart in his mouth he watched as the main character blew up one section of the photograph, from which he then blew up another section. Jonas and Leonard sat in the dark, eyes glued to the screen, letting themselves be seduced by Antonioni’s visual conjuring tricks. Like the photograph they, too, were blown up, enlarged. For a while after this Leonard regretted having chosen film rather than photography. They felt like borrowing Olav Knutzen’s Leica and Rolleiflex and taking pictures of every bush they saw. What would they find if they enlarged sections of them? For several weeks they were possessed of an urge to blow up everything.
It so happened that the memory of a personal blow-up was still quite fresh in Jonas’s mind. The year before he had been head over heels in love. And blow-up is the word. After all, what is love but one huge exaggeration. And even more so if it hits you during that crazy, mixed-up period known as adolescence. Jonas was constantly aware of how, depending on the circumstances, his eyes would turn into a microscope or a telescope. All of a sudden his ears were as sensitive as the finest microphones; he could readily detect ten different nuances of tone in one ‘Hi.’ He could smell a girl at two hundred metres, and if a feminine shoulder or arm were to nudge against him, his skin felt as tender as a newborn kitten. Just watching a girl sucking on a lolly pop made him want to run amok. The sight of Anne Beate Corneliussen using his bicycle pump to blow up her tyre could send him into inordinate frenzies of excitement. Jonas felt as though his head was becoming human, while his body was still stuck at the animal stage. And maybe it was this same split which gave rise to the tendency to exaggerate everything – if, that is, it was not a last, desperate attempt to hang on to childhood, a state in which reality and fantasy could exist side by side. Later, on the other side of the border, so to speak, it would occur to Jonas that exaggeration was a toll you had to pay when you passed into the realms of adulthood.
For Jonas Wergeland the summer of 1967 was never the Summer of Love. He would have understood, though, if anyone were to describe the following winter as the Winter of Love. Because those were the months when he saw red, which is to say: when his love for Eva N. burned brightest and he made fruitless forays into Lillomarka on skis every single Sunday, hoping to run into her – quite by chance – at Sinober.
Then, on the eleventh Sunday, an exceptionally cold day in the middle of March, Fortune smiled on Jonas. Having taken Daniel’s laughing, but well-meant, advice to apply grip wax to the middle section of his ski soles, he plunged into the forest, where skiing conditions were still decent. He strode out frantically, as if he knew that this was his last chance; conscious, shamefully almost, of how much fitter he was, and that he was really getting the hang of it now, even managing to exploit the give of the skis in the innumerable dips. Yet again he stopped at the foot of the last slope before Sinober to blow a coating of rime over his brows and lashes, and yet again an impressive diagonal stride brought him skimming up to the café. Everything was the same as always, apart from a bright flash of red outside the main café building. At first he thought maybe he was seeing spots in front of his eyes, due to his racing pulse, but no, there she was, there was Eva’s sturdy figure and, not least, her red anorak.
He pretended not to see her, leaned nonchalantly on his poles, as if resting for a second or two, before wheeling round, voracious mile-eater that he was, and scooting off again. He stopped beside the signpost, at a crossroads with lots of arrows pointing to different lives. In the end she came over to him, with half a slice of bread and goat’s cheese cupped in her mittens. She eyed his rime-covered eyebrows curiously. ‘Jonas? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you liked skiing.’ What she did not say was that she fell for him at that very moment.
A month later Jonas asked himself, for several reasons, why a girl like Eva N. should have fallen for him. From a subjective point of view, flushed with love as he was, he had of course been sure that he would win her, but objectively he knew that she was unattainable. He could execute all the best Gjermund Eggen moves and it would make no difference. He could not know that what Eva, like a couple of dozen other women, had fallen for was, quite simply, the look in his eyes. Or an expression which was written large on his face, as clear as the scar over his eyebrow. They immediately perceived that he, Jonas Wergeland – although he did not know it – was restlessly searching for something great, something important, and every one of them believed that they were the key to this great and important thing for which he was searching. Jonas’s conscious or unconscious urge to discover things and the indefinable talent from which it derived was as obvious to these women as a set of antlers on his head would have been. In their eyes he was one in a billion. The bearer of different thoughts, a man whose eyes, whose face, testified to the fact that he was obsessed with the desire to achieve a goal, an outer limit, possibly even a backside, with the power to expand reality. And this, they thought – while at the same time thinking that he must sense it too – he could only do through a woman. To them, that handful of women, this was irresistible, more powerful than any aphrodisiac. They were not attracted by good looks or power or money – and most certainly not by skiing skills – but by a curiosity which was focused on an impossibility.
Jonas looked at her from under the crust of rime on his eyelashes, which was now starting to melt. He was about to say something, but his voice cracked, everything cracked. She looked so strong. Invulnerable. She was the sort of person who could withstand anything. Sleep out in temperatures of forty below. Drink urine and eat reindeer moss. But Jonas saw something else too. He saw what was written all over her: Danger. High Voltage.
‘Fancy going on a bit further?’ she asked, bending down and picking up a fistful of snow, squeezing it, examining it, as if debating whether to rewax. Rewax life, Jonas thought. This was not part of the plan. He had never been further than Sinober. Places such as Varingskollen or Kikut were only vague names. He glanced up at the arrows. The signpost looked like a many-branched tree, it called to mind the ones found at certain tourist attractions, with signs showing the direction and the distance to various capital cities. Here the signs pointed out across the winter landscape, towards Movatn, Nittedal, Snippen, Grefsen, Sørskogen. He could ski like a champion – as long, he hoped, as he didn’t have to ski down to Movatn, or to Tømte. Might as well ask: Do you want to take a run down to Hell?
‘Fancy a run down to Tømte?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he said, quick as a wink. Knowing this was sheer lunacy.
Now Jonas had, for some time before this, associated women with a certain amount of risk. He was well aware that in giving a girl the eye you also laid yourself open to the possibility of losing your head. Jonas was by no means a stranger to the idea that, when you came right down to it, women were dangerous.
All of this had its roots in the first death which Jonas could remember. A death which was, in the words of the grown-ups, ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, had been killed in an accident – not on a scheduled flight, a cataclysmic, catastrophic crash in a Caravelle, but in his little Piper
Cub. It so happened that Jonas’s mother had to take him with her on the day when she had to go through her brother’s things. His grandmother could not face it. The accident had clearly brought back painful memories. When the news was broken to her she had gone to lie in the bath and listen to the BBC. This was always a bad sign. ‘He was an excellent pilot,’ she murmured, chewing on the butt of a cigar. ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’
Jonas was glad of the chance to visit the flat. Lauritz had been his hero, although his uncle was hardly ever around. He was like a knight who rode into Jonas’s life from time to time and dropped off a toy from Paris or a box of Quality Street from London. Once, when some bigger boys were threatening to beat Jonas up for puncturing their football, a taxi pulled up and Uncle Lauritz got out, dressed in his navy-blue uniform with the four gold stripes on the cuffs. The other boys just stood there, awestruck, outside Jonas’s building. At that moment, in Jonas’s eyes, his uncle was an angel.
His mother had never been to the flat before. Her brother had never invited her or any other members of the family over. If he asked them out it was always to Restaurant Skansen or the Moorish Salon at the Hotel Bristol. ‘Lauritz lived his own life,’ she explained apologetically to Jonas. He was seldom home either, what with him being a pilot. Jonas could tell that, grief-stricken though she was, his mother was also a little curious. ‘He was actually very shy. Bashful. A bit like you. It must run in the family,’ his mother remarked to Jonas. She and Lauritz had not had much to do with one another since their childhood days at Gardemoen. Even as a boy her brother had been obsessed with the desire to get away: ‘I want to fly high. And far.’
In the end, though, his flight was short. And low. The general view – and the one also expressed in the coroner’s report – was that it was unthinkable for a pilot as experienced as Lauritz to have flown into a high-voltage cable by accident, or certainly not the cable in question, which was a known hazard. It wasn’t as if the weather had been bad, nor had it been particularly windy. No one actually came out and said it, but it was there between the lines: suicide. Jonas preferred the words ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Rakel said the whole thing reminded her of what had happened to a legendary French flier by the name of Saint-Exupéry – Jonas liked the name the moment he heard it – who had disappeared on a mission towards the end of the Second World War. Neither he nor his plane had been found.
Some said he had crashed in the Alps, others that he went down in the Mediterranean. No explanation for the accident was ever forthcoming. Which was just how it should be, Jonas thought. The death of a knight, not to mention an angel, ought to be shrouded in mystery.
‘It must have been a woman,’ Jonas heard his mother say to his father. His uncle had worn a locket around his neck, the sort with a compartment for a small picture. But when they were preparing for the funeral and his mother opened it, it was empty. Still she stuck to her theory. ‘It’s the only possible explanation,’ she said. ‘An unhappy love affair.’ Jonas pondered this expression. It was the first time he had heard a negative word used in conjunction with the one word which he held to be the most positive in life. He sampled this pairing: ‘unhappy’ and ‘love’. This was the first intimation Jonas was given of the gravity of love, and different in nature from what he would later derive from Karen’s Mohr’s story from Provence. This one spoke of the possible consequences of love. Love did not only make you fly high, it could just as easily make you fly low. Too low. Maybe love was not something one should reach out for without thinking. Jonas had the wild idea that all girls ought to wear signs around their necks saying: ‘Danger. High voltage.’ Love was like electricity. It could give warmth and light, but it could also black out a life, short-circuit it.
‘What do you think his flat looks like?’ Jonas asked on the way over there.
‘I’ve no idea. He’d only been living there for three or four years. Probably just the same as anyone else’s. Perfectly ordinary.’
Jonas guessed that his mother was hoping to find some clue there to her brother’s decision to end his life by embracing a high-voltage cable. A solemn declaration on his desk, maybe. A box of passionate love letters. Jonas, on the other hand, was thinking that he was soon going to be entering the flat of one who had loved, a man who had been a victim of love. In short, he was about to see the chamber of love itself. It started out well enough. As far as Jonas was concerned at any rate. A door with three big, burglar-proof locks. No one had keys to it. There had been no keys in his pockets. ‘There are no keys to a human being,’ his father had said softly from the piano bench, having declined to come with them. His mother had called a locksmith, made an appointment, the man had arrived at the same time as them. ‘Lauritz didn’t open up to anyone,’ his mother muttered when the door was finally breached. Jonas’s first thought was that this place must harbour some great – and possibly dark and scandalous – secret. After all, you didn’t have three huge locks on your door for nothing.
They stepped inside. Jonas tried to conceal the hope he felt. He remembered the first time Wolfgang Michaelsen had invited him into his room and he walked in to find lots of model warplanes hanging in the air, at least fifty of them, and every one painted in the right colours. It had come as such a shock, it made you start; it was like opening a door and walking straight into the middle of World War II.
More than anything, Jonas was hoping that they would find something valuable. A legacy of some sort. He wished that he had other qualities in common with his uncle, apart from shyness. He saw a secret room. Full of gold ingots. Or unknown paintings by Tidemann and Gude, worth millions. Or at the very least a few volumes of comic books.
But the flat was all bare. And all white. It was like breaking into a massive safe and finding it empty. They wandered through three large rooms. No books, no rugs, nothing on the walls. Nothing in the bathroom, not even a razor or a bottle of aftershave. The kitchen too was empty. The fridge, all the shelves were bare. Maybe he really was an angel, Jonas thought, a being who did not need food, did not need to shave. There was nothing in the bedroom but a bed, perfectly made. In the fitted wardrobe hung a couple of suits and uniforms. Apart from a few spartan pieces of furniture and the requisite electrical appliances they found only one thing of any value: underneath the window sat an imposing, exclusive stereo system, exotic pieces of equipment which gave the living room the look of a large cockpit and, next to them, an orange box full of Duke Ellington records. Jonas was to think later that this was possibly as good as any flight recorder, that if you listened carefully enough to these discs, tried pronouncing their titles, you would find the answer. This thought struck him, of course, only after Margrete had given him Rubber Soul as a farewell present. For all they knew, this box of records could have been the equivalent, for Uncle Lauritz, of a box of love letters – worth more than all the gold ingots in the world.
The bare white walls made Jonas feel as though the whole flat was just one big white room. The opposite of a darkroom. A place where not a single picture could be developed. The more he thought about this, the more reasonable – and right – it seemed to him. Everyone needed a place in which they could feel lonely. In his day-to-day life Uncle Lauritz the SAS pilot occupied a room that encompassed the whole world. So vast. So full of everything. One day Cairo, the next Athens. Which was why he needed this inner space that was all his own. Maybe for him it could never be white enough or empty enough.
Just before they left, Jonas spotted something. A small dark square on one of the living-room walls, like a stamp stuck on Antarctis. A sign of life. Jonas went over to it. It was a portrait, smaller than a passport photo, fixed to the wall with a pin. A woman’s face. His mother was standing next to him. She said nothing. Jonas knew what she was thinking: this was the picture which had once sat in the locket that Uncle Lauritz wore around his neck. ‘I knew it,’ his mother said, sounding almost relieved. ‘It was a woman.’
And yet for Jonas this altered eve
rything. The flat was no longer empty. It was full of love. Unless, of course, that microscopic portrait betokened a desperate wish to minimise things, a frantic attempt to render the greatest thing in life nigh on invisible. However that may be: the flat did have a secret room. That tiny picture, that face.
Jonas had not yet met Bo Wang Lee; nevertheless it did occur to him that this flat also constituted an answer to the question of what you should take with you. You walked for a while on this Earth. What was worth collecting? He liked Uncle Lauritz’s simple answer: the music of Duke Ellington and a face.
On the way home his mother suddenly said, more to herself than to Jonas: ‘She wasn’t good enough for him. If you ask me she was a tart.’
Jonas pretended not to hear, but this comment confirmed his misgivings – paradoxical though they were, considering those white rooms – concerning the darker aspects of love, and the risk of losing one’s head completely.
He was to learn more about what it meant to lose one’s head that day at Sinober when he stood under the ski-trail signpost, those arrows pointing in all directions, staring as if bewitched at a gigantic white room covered in snow. He had agreed without a moment’s hesitation when Eva asked if he wanted to take a run over to Tømte with her, even though he knew that in order to get there they would first have to ski down to Movatn Lake. And Movatn was the main reason that Jonas had never gone beyond Sinobar. The slopes down to the lake were legendary, known for being among the very worst the whole of Nordmarka had to offer in the way of downhill runs. Even Daniel, fanatical skier that he was, referred to them with a faint shudder as the Slopes from Hell. And as if that wasn’t enough, there had been a bit of a thaw, then the surface had frozen hard again: the trails were covered in a lethal layer of ice.
The Discoverer Page 29