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.
Jonas fished out the boat: an exact, thirty-centimetre long replica of the splendid Atlantic liner he had more than once seen docked in Oslo harbour. The propeller was battery-driven and you could flick the rudder back and forth. With the ship cradled in his hands he set out along the path leading to the spit of land further up and there, behind the bushes, was another boy of about Jonas’s own age. A Chinaman, was Jonas’s first thought. And the other boy really did have a Chinese look about him. An impression which was only reinforced later when the boy told him his name: Bo Wang Lee. He seemed very secretive, hastily folded up a map. Jonas only caught a glimpse of a couple of lines clearly forming a cross. They must have been made with the stub of pencil stuck behind the other boy’s ear. Underneath the map a yellow notebook came into view. Bo Wang Lee’s trademarks: a pencil stub and a little yellow notebook.
‘Look,’ Bo said, picking something off the ground. It looked rather like a divining rod, one of those forked sticks used to find water. But Bo Wang Lee was never one to content himself with something as simple as finding water. ‘This is a detector which can locate secret underground chambers,’ he said. The word ‘detector’ alone was enough to impress Jonas. ‘We might be able to discover a treasure vault. Or a whole city even.’ Bo spoke Norwegian with a slight accent. Jonas had the feeling that the other boy was trying to divert his attention from the business with the map.
Jonas said he didn’t see how you could find a whole city underneath the ground. He handed the model ship back to Bo, then he picked up a small, flat stone, threw it hard and low and got it to bounce six or seven times across the surface of the pond. Bo was not to be put off. His father was an archaeologist. And Bo’s father had told him about the mighty Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in China, who had ordered the building of a massive underground tomb for himself. Even though Bo was spouting all this information, Jonas did not feel that he was showing off. Again Bo brought out his yellow notebook, and proceeded, while apparently consulting it, to paint a vivid picture of how this mausoleum had looked. Just listening to this description almost took Jonas’s breath away. The Emperor Qin had designed his tomb in the form of a whole city – or no, more than just a city: a miniature replica of his empire, a place in which to live even after death, with palaces and little streams of mercury, mountains sculpted out of copper and a firmament studded with pearls. The Emperor Qin’s obsession with immortality bordered on madness, Bo said. A host of intricate and lethal booby traps were meant to prevent robbers from getting at the wonders within. 700,000 of Qin’s subjects were said to have helped build this vast complex. Bo showed Jonas an astonishingly realistic sketch in the yellow notebook, he claimed it was based on the description by an ancient Chinese historian which his father had read aloud to him. ‘When I grow up I’m going to go to China and find that tomb,’ Bo said with a determined look on his face. ‘It’s in a place called Xi’an. Will you come with me?’ As if in a symbolic attempt to persuade Jonas he started up the MS Bergensfjord again and set it in the water.
‘I don’t see me ever going to China,’ Jonas said as he watched Bo flick a stone across the water too. It skiffed an untold number of times, reaching almost all the way to the other side.
Now Bo Wang Lee was obviously not Chinese, but that is how Jonas would always think of him; he had such an inscrutable air about him, as if he really did belong to some distant, exotic and, above all, tremendously wise civilisation – or as if there was a mysterious buried city inside him too. Later, it struck Jonas that he had felt older during those weeks than he did in all the time spent smouldering with wrath in Leonard Knutzen’s basement.
As time went on Jonas also came to think of Bo as a prince. With his coal-black hair, cut in an odd pudding-bowl style – later Jonas would associate it with the Beatles’ hairdos on the cover of Rubber Soul – his friend was almost the spitting image of Prince Valiant, whom Jonas had come across in the only comics which Rakel, his sister, deigned to read; she had a whole pile of them under her bed.
The two boys got so caught up in skiffing stones that they did not notice until it was too late that the MS Bergensfjord was on a steady course towards the gap in the weir where the water flowed out. Again Jonas felt the perspective twist, felt that the model boat had turned into a real ship and that this slit represented a rift in existence, that the boat was not headed for America, but into another reality, at the back of this one. He did not have time to follow these thoughts to their conclusion. They took off along the path, past the diving board and down to the car park next to the weir. They got there just in time to see the MS Bergensfjord come sailing over the falls on a cascade as thin and bright and clear as a curved glass panel, before being dashed inexorably against the rocks in the shallow stream below. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Bo cried, lifting out the model boat which, luckily, was not too badly damaged. As Bo bent down, Jonas noticed a chain with a little disc attached to it fall out of the neck of his shirt. Later he would have the chance to study this disc more closely. There were marks and dashes engraved on either side. ‘It’s cuneiform writing,’ Bo joked. But when he flicked the disc and it spun round fast, Jonas saw the words: I love you. Jonas found this much more impressive than Daniel’s somersault.
Jonas and Bo did not find any treasure under the ground around Badedammen that evening, but they did find one another; they found one another with a force that almost made Jonas feel uneasy. He could tell with half an eye that this was someone with whom he would become best friends, that this was the sort of person who would send ripples spreading far into his life. The four weeks which lay ahead of him would seem like one long, breathless journey of discovery, in which simply picking globe-flowers along the banks of the stream became an expedition into the least explored reaches of the Amazonian rainforest, and to sit in Charlie’s Chariot, the wreck of an ancient Volkswagen down at the dump, was to be driving in the arduous Paris-Dakar rally with Bo as navigator and multilingual interpreter. Bo Wang Lee was like a tropical butterfly which, for a brief and unforgettable time, fluttered into Jonas’s life.
‘I’m telling you, we can find a whole city,’ Bo said, looking like a giant with the sparkling waterfall, a tiny Niagara Falls, behind him and the Atlantic liner under his arm. And as if to prove the truth of his
words he pulled out the yellow notebook and waved it in the air. ‘Are you coming?’
And Jonas went. It is probably safe to say that he would have followed Bo anywhere. In the course of those weeks they undertook an expedition which would stand forever in Jonas’s memory as the most important journey he ever made. They went in search of the Vegans.
After this, Jonas did not hear of Vega again until junior high, when Mr Dehli gave a short, but enthusiastic lecture on the Swedish writer Harry Martinson’s Aniara – neither in Norwegian nor history class, but during a lunch break, right outside the staffroom door with, beyond it, the packed lunch which Mr Dehli never got to eat. Without once having to straighten his bow tie he told them how the spaceship in this poem cycle was bound for the constellation of Lyra, whose brightest star was called Vega. Oddly enough, modern astronomers believed that there might be life in that very area, the schoolmaster said, hinting with a raised eyebrow at the prophetic gifts of the writer. Then the bell rang.
The last period of that same day finished, incidentally, with this tireless mentor of so many young and angry, but enquiring, minds running an uncommonly chalky hand through his hair and making the following announcement: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to tell you about Maya. This may change your lives.’ Now that was how a school day ought to end. Jonas could hardly wait, he imagined that this Maya had to be some really extraordinary girl. But despite Mr Dehli’s warning he was in no way prepared for the fact that she truly would change his life.
Girls frequently took Jonas by surprise. He was, for example, most definitely not out girl hunting one Saturday morning two years later when he wandered into the National Gallery and heard music playing. He and Leonard Knutzen were there to check whether it might be possible to use the Antiquities Room, a gallery claustrophobically full of sculptures, in one of Leonard’s – or rather: Leonardo’s – new cine films, a work which, at the manuscript stage, was looking exceptionally promising, wanting only just such an unusual location to make it absolutely superb. Jonas was at high school, the Cath, by this time; he did not see as much of Leonard any more, but he still lent a hand with shooting films when the occasion arose – films which, according to Leonard, would do for Oslo what ‘the new wave’ had done for Paris and, before that, the ‘neo-realists’ had for Rome, thanks to his discriminating choice of locations. So now and then Jonas would accompany Leonard on his walks around the Norwegian capital in search of symbolic advertising signs on gable ends, dockland areas populated with particularly grim-looking cranes, decoratively tiled entranceways, statues which looked good in pouring rain, parks lit by lamps with metaphysically dull surfaces, staircases which split into two. According to Leonard, the Antiquities Room at the National Gallery was the perfect place with which to illustrate the weighty legacy of history. But Jonas did not join him among the Greek and Roman statues, because he had caught the strains of beautiful – or sweet – music filtering down from the first floor, and followed the sound. It was coming from the room containing the best-known paintings from the National Romantic period: works by Fearnley and Cappelen, Balke and J.C. Dahl – and back then also Tidemand and Gude.
In the centre of the room was a string orchestra. They were playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Serenade in C-major’. But even more captivating, for Jonas, than the music was the sight of a girl sitting in the front row, playing the violin and, in the absence of a conductor, directing the others with nods of her head and raised eyebrows. She was in the parallel class to his at the Cath. She had caught his eye mainly because he had seen her carrying a square guitar case. And if this surprised him, then he had been even more impressed to find that it contained a red and white twelve-string Rickenbacker, identical to the one which George Harrison had played in the first Beatles film. At a meeting of the school debating society she had rigged up an amp and played a couple of instrumental numbers so brilliantly and with such feeling that everyone there had been completely knocked out. He asked around after this, found out a bit about her. Sarah B. was her name and she played in a girl band, one of the few which would, in fact, attract some – well-merited – notice at the time; and in later years she would become even better known as an ambassador for the arts in Norway with her electric twelve-string guitar, a pioneer within what became known as world music, a blend of folk airs, jazz and timeless melodies – an echo perhaps of the house in which she had grown up, designed by an eccentric father: a mansion bristling with spires and turrets and stylistic features drawn from every corner of the globe. Jonas had only ever seen her playing an electric guitar, he was not at all prepared for the sight of her sitting here in a gallery, dressed in a long, elegant dress, rather like a throwback to the previous century, and with a violin in her hands. It would be some years yet before she came down in favour of the guitar as her first instrument.
It was an impressive sight. These young people, in the most fascinating of all the fascinating rooms in the National Gallery; romantic music performed in a gallery full of marble busts and gilded frames, glistening oil paintings of moons half-hidden behind dramatic cloud formations and wrecks being relentlessly beaten against sharp rocks. All the members of the orchestra were elegantly dressed, the boys in dark suits, the girls in long dark-blue frocks of various design, and with their hair up. All were possessed with that elation and ardour only found in young musicians who have just reached the stage where they can master any piece of music. There was an exuberance and a passion in their playing, in the tossing of their heads, the flaring nostrils, the glances they exchanged, that you never saw in an established orchestra consisting of older, experienced musicians. To Jonas they all looked as though they were in love. As though this wholehearted, fiery performance was merely the foreplay to some steamy, feverish lovemaking. He could not tear his eyes away from Sarah. She made a natural focal point with her theatrical, but at the same time natural arm movements. Jonas felt particularly drawn to her hands and fingers; one had the impression that she could have done anything with them, produce sound from a stone. And as he watched, as she kindled and sustained a wonder in him and in the other museumgoers who stopped short then sank down, entranced, onto the chairs set round about, he thought what a rare delight it would be to feel those graceful fingers on the back of his neck, running through his hair.
The paintings gave added resonance to Tchaikovsky’s serenade, the music lent a new glow to the canvases on the walls. Balke’s pale images of the North Cape and the lighthouse on Vardø positively shimmered. Jonas ran his eye over motif after motif, over mountains, glaciers and waterfalls, cog-built farmhouses and milkmaids in traditional costume, menhirs and herds of wild reindeer. It may even have been that Jonas saw the twenty-odd paintings in the room as forming a frieze illustrating Norway itself: an impression so powerful that – yes, why not – he actually began work on his television series Thinking Big right here.
And speaking of that mammoth television production: we have already touched on Jonas Wergeland’s schooldays, so something ought also to be said about the final and by far the most surprising phase of his education, a brief, but momentous apprenticeship on which he embarked towards the end of his time as an announcer on NRK television.
Having abandoned his original, high-flying plans – behind him lay several disheartening years at university and college – Jonas Wergeland considered himself lucky to have found a job in which his talent did not trouble him, where he could, in fact, in all likelihood, have buried it for good and all. But since he and Margrete had been together – he was inclined to say: because of Margrete – an ambition had begun to stir in him once more. He wanted to make television programmes himself. In the early eighties, Jonas Wergeland made the leap from announcer to programme-maker, moved by a desire to try to dive, as it were, from the surface down into the depths. When the NRK bosses agreed to his request he packed his suitcase, with Margrete’s blessing, and left the country. If one did not know better, one might think that he had had second thoughts, that he was running away from his big chance.<
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Later, all manner of rumours went the rounds – prompted mainly by the acrobatic, televisual feats Wergeland performed – about where he had been and what he had done. Some people affirmed that the original idea discernible behind all of Wergeland’s programmes could only be ascribed to his having been inspired by Sufism during a visit to Samarkand – an assertion which also appeared in print in a serious article. Others maintained, with all the confidence of insiders, that he had been sitting at the feet of the celebrated film director Michelangelo Antonioni. There were even a few who, in the wee, small hours in some bar, could be heard to mumble something about a Mexican woman by the name of Maya. None of these more or less mythical accounts came anywhere close to the truth. Over the years, to the question regarding what had led up to his epoch as a programme-maker, Wergeland honed an honest, if cryptic reply which not uncommonly so nonplussed his interlocutor that he or she asked no more questions: ‘I got to the top by lying on my back.’
In going abroad, Jonas was making a virtue of necessity. Timewise, his trip fell exactly midway between the two referendums which led to Norway saying no to Europe. Although Jonas Wergeland often viewed his homeland as an unscrupulous Festung Norwegen, there were times when he was more inclined to liken the Norwegians’ tendency to shut themselves off to a mentality he found reflected in René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s hilarious Asterix comics. For while their Gallic neighbours allowed themselves to be conquered by the Romans, Asterix and his kinsmen stood their ground. One small village still held out, as it said at the beginning of each story. The same could have been said of Norway. The way Jonas saw it, the wealthy land of Norway had surprisingly many things in common with Asterix’s indomitable community. Norway, too, shielded itself from the world around it, while raising menhirs to its own excellence and having its praises sung by unspeakable bards. Like Asterix’s Gauls, the Norwegian people considered themselves invincible, and the oil was their magic potion. Jonas Wergeland did not find it at all hard to envisage Norway as the world’s largest village, surrounded, and almost driven into the sea, by the mighty civilisation of the Roman Empire.
The Discoverer Page 33