What was the greatest danger to which Jonas Wergeland was ever exposed? Not an easy one to answer, one would think. He had reefed sail in a gale in the middle of the night. He had ignited fury in an English pub. If anyone had asked Wergeland himself he would, however, have had no hesitation in replying: ‘The biggest risk I ever took was to read a book.’
He stood there holding the old paperback, weighing it in his hand. He was feeling a little reckless. He sank down into a chair, opened the book at the first page and began to read. Margrete and he sat each in their chair, with the mountain right in front of them if they raised their eyes: a slope so steep that the snow did not lie there, a normally black rock face to which the freezing cold and the low sun now lent a pinkish cast, a view which seemed almost to belong to another country, another planet. Jonas thought fleetingly of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, of the possibility of opening up the terrain. He dropped his eyes to his book again. He did not know that with this seemingly harmless act he had let a wolf out of its cage and that all unknown to him this wolf was now sneaking up on him from behind. For a few fateful seconds Jonas Wergeland forgot all about his ingrained sense of mistrust. He forgot what a profound impact a novel can have on one. He forgot that every work of fiction, even a flimsy paperback, is a Bible, a sacred text, containing layer upon layer of meaning. In opening a book you could be putting your whole view of the world to the test.
He should have remembered, because in junior high they had also had Mr Dehli for a third subject, one which the schoolmaster himself maintained, with all the enthusiasm and inspiring authority at his command – which is saying something – to be the most important subject of them all: Bible studies, or religion, as the students called it. ‘Choose religion and you choose everything,’ Mr Dehli asserted.
It possibly bears repeating, since teachers of this calibre are the exception: Mr Dehli saw himself not just as a teacher, but also as a guide and mentor. His pupils had to learn facts, but they also had to bear in mind that something bound these facts together. Even in subjects such as Norwegian and history. Mr Dehli dared to bandy that inflammatory word ‘meaning’. ‘And nowhere is the attempt to establish meaning more apparent than in the religions of the world,’ he said. Over a couple of years, Jonas was introduced to the main principles of Islam, Hinduism, Shinto and Buddhism; in other words, he was made aware that there were other philosophies of life besides the Christian one. This may seem obvious, but it was not obvious to Jonas – he belonged, after all, to the last generation in Norway which had to learn Luther’s little catechism by heart.
How could so many fail to see it? Page upon page has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s years at elementary school and high school. But no one has looked at the two years in between. Nevertheless, it was here in junior high that Jonas’s curiosity about the world, not to say life, was truly awakened. It would not be too far from the truth to say that, during this time, Jonas came very close to becoming a Hindu.
Mr Dehli – who did not turn up for classes in a duster coat, but in his best bib and tucker, so to speak – told them even more than usual about Hinduism, possibly because he was especially interested in this religion himself, or because this was the late sixties, when the fascination with all things Eastern was at its height and celebrities were flocking to India to sit at the feet of more or less genuine gurus. All of a sudden it was orange robes, Hare Krishna, sitars and incense at every turn.
It was through Hinduism that Jonas was introduced to Maya. Although this was, of course, not a girl called Maya as Jonas had first thought, but māyā, a concept. Mr Dehli, sporting an exceptionally colourful bow tie for the occasion and with a snowy-white silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket, explained to them that there were many different interpretations of māyā, but that māyā, roughly speaking, was a principle which prevented us from seeing the world as it really was. You mistook something for something else. A coiled rope became a snake. Māyā worked mainly in two ways: it could conceal something, or it could present something false. The concept of māyā, the great cosmic illusion, may have grown out of an ancient weaving symbol, an image representing creativity. Mr Dehli produced a strip of gauze bandage and covered his eyes with it: ‘With my sight thus masked there would be things in the room which I would not notice, on the other hand my eyes could perhaps be confused or deluded into seeing certain other things that are not there. I might, for example, think that Pernille was a statue. Having a little snooze, Pernille?’
Due to our ignorance we apprehended only the material world and not the real world behind it. We could not cope with the idea of infinity and so we created something finite for ourselves: the world. But it was only because we were as if hypnotised that we mistook this mirage for reality. ‘Māyā can be compared to a cloud covering the sun, the moon and the stars,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘And this cloud is there because our consciousness is not clear enough. There is a veil before our eyes. But not everything is an illusion. There is something behind the cloud. Without it there would be no illusion.’
It occurred to Jonas that Leonard had been on the right track: it all came down to honing the eye. The Hindu view of the world, with its assertion that the power of māyā concealed the true nature of existence proved in many ways to be a lifeline for Jonas, a ray of hope. It confirmed his firm belief that there had to be something behind the flatness – of both the world and people, including himself – which was a constant vexation to him. Because, if there were several planes, veil upon veil, might they not even form a chamber, create some sort of depth?
The first time Jonas heard his teacher speak of māyā, he was reminded of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, but later he came to think of another, more infamous episode. Those who are familiar with life at Grorud around that time will not be surprised to hear that this drama centred around a boy by the name of Ivan. Ivan – a problem child, to put it mildly – had long had a crush on the daughter of Arild Pettersen, or Arild the Glazier as he was known, after his business: he was the local Grorud glazier, and most people were acquainted with him through no choice of their own, thanks to accidents great and small. His slogan was: Life is a smash. The best bit, as far as the kids were concerned, was his van, a Volkswagen truck with a flat bed and a rack shaped like an upside-down V on which the plates of glass were carried. One day Ivan took his courage in both hands – in such circumstances even Ivan had to steel himself – and asked Britt, as the object of his affections was called, if she would go out with him, a request which, with the perverse, heartless temerity that girls can display, she flatly rejected. Why didn’t he just run on home, cheeky sod – who the hell did he think he was?
Ivan slunk off, but everybody knew that the matter would not end there. This was, after all, Ivan. A bunch of boys dogged Ivan’s footsteps at a safe distance for the rest of the day, to act as chroniclers of an event which they knew would become legendary. Suddenly the central character announced: ‘I’ll bloody well smash her window in, so I will.’ Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, Ivan set out, cool as you like, to do the deed – only to find, on reaching the house, that Arild the Glazier’s little truck was parked right in front of Britt’s ground-floor bedroom, which looked onto the driveway. Ivan was not one to be put off by a little thing like that. ‘I’ll just have to smash my way through then,’ he muttered, loud enough for the others to hear.
He went for a walk round about and returned with his hands and his pockets full of stones. Afterwards the other lads would try to outdo one another with their descriptions of what happened next. Ivan had thrown the first stone with convincing ferocity and a huge pane of glass had shattered and landed in a tinkling heap on the bed of the truck. Ivan hurled another stone, as surely as the first and another pane of glass disintegrated. And so he continued, unleashing a never-ending avalanche of glass. He threw and he threw as the sheets of glass came cascading down one after another. But he never did break through to Britt’s window, or, as he saw it: to Britt’s heart, behind
all the sheets of glass. Britt’s Dad must have had more panes than usual on the back of the truck that day, layer upon layer of them. Ivan was growing desperate. He was breaking sheets of glass as fast as he could, if only to get her at least to show face, but there seemed to be no end to it – or not, at any rate, until Arild the Glazier himself finally came out and belatedly, but effectively put a stop to the vandalism with a headlock invested with more than mere upset at the shattered window panes.
That, thought Jonas, that is how it must be with māyā. An endless succession of windows. We would never be able to break through to the truth. Māyā spoke, quite simply of gaping holes in our knowledge. When Jonas pictured the world as being flat, this was exactly what he was getting at. Everyone was well aware that our view of the world, our view of human nature, would be totally different in a few hundred years, in a thousand years. And yet we believed, surprisingly often at least, that we knew just about everything there was to know. Māyā showed us that we knew very little.
Schoolmaster Dehli had another, possibly even better, way of illustrating this. He positioned himself next to the map rack. ‘Just as maps are like masks of the world, so the world is merely a mask covering something else, something more real,’ he said. Sitting at his desk, Jonas thought of Karen Mohr’s flat, the grey hallway concealing a Provence in the middle of Grorud. Mr Dehli had pulled down all of the maps, about ten altogether. Then he sent them whipping up, one after another, tugging and releasing with superb precision, as if he had had a lot of practice at this. The maps snapped and cracked in a sort of chain reaction, pure pyrotechnics. It made Jonas think of roller-blinds shooting up to disclose an endless succession of different prospects, different worlds, until they, the pupils, were almost shaking in their shoes, half expecting something horrendous to stand revealed at the very back, Reality itself, in all its awfulness or beauty. But at the very back – and this Mr Dehli left as it was – hung an enormous map of the solar system, of the cosmos as it were, and of all the hovering jewels here displayed, the one on which Jonas fixed was the planet Uranus, a shimmering green eye. What a show – perfect, like a conjuring trick rounded off with one final mind-boggling sleight of hand.
There are too few teachers like Mr Dehli. There are too few teachers who pull such original, inventive educational stunts. Who charge their classrooms with electricity and the smell of chalk dust.
Such sessions were not easily forgotten. Not for nothing did three members of this class go on to become religious historians, while two became ministers of the church. And, even more noteworthy perhaps: five ended up in the Oslo Stock Exchange. As for Jonas, in the first instance they would result in the world coming tumbling about his ears.
The Hindu concept of māyā occupied a central place in Jonas’s memory. It instinctively sprang to mind, for example, when he was lying in a hotel room in London, zapping back and forth between the best television channels in the world. Occasionally he even had the notion that each new channel caused the previous one to disappear, like a map being pulled up – that he disclosed a new world each time he pressed the remote control.
To the question as to how he had learned the ropes of television production, Jonas Wergeland had been known to reply – as if to denote how difficult it had been: ‘I swam the English Channel.’ By rights he should have said ‘the English Channels’, because there were four of them; he arrived in London on the very day that Channel 4 was launched, a channel which aimed to be innovative and experimental and to win viewers by appealing to their good taste. So he was lucky enough to catch many of the exceptionally fine programmes scheduled for Channel 4’s first weeks on the air, productions which, regardless of genre – soap opera or science documentary, sit-com or arts magazine – oozed intelligence at all levels of production. Even the sports broadcasts were bearable, thanks largely to the civilised British commentators. Jonas felt like a guest in the TV equivalent of a gourmet restaurant.
But he could not stay in that room all the time – although if he had, he would have avoided a rather unpleasant confrontation which left him with a nasty bump on the back of his head and a black eye. Jonas followed the same routine every day. He slept till around twelve, then went out for breakfast, or rather, lunch. Within a very small radius, in the streets around South Kensington tube station, Jonas found restaurants serving food from every corner of the globe – the culinary equivalent, if you like, of the British television which he was studying: around the world in eight minutes. During his weeks there he could choose between French, Italian, Indian, Thai, Chinese and Japanese restaurants. His favourite, he eventually decided, was Daquise, a little Polish dive with dingy walls and oilcloth-covered tables, serving shashlyk and chlodnik soup, as well as eight different brands of vodka.
On the way back to the hotel he always picked up a good-sized stack of sandwiches from a shop in the arcade next to the station. He ordered a pot of coffee at reception and his working day could begin. He settled back on the bed, with an appetising tuna fish sandwich within easy reach, and switched on the television.
The aforementioned unpleasant incident was something of an intermezzo. It occurred on an evening when, for once, there happened to be a gap between two programmes he wanted to see. Instead of doing a bit of skipping, as he sometimes did, he went for a walk around the neighbourhood and on the way back he was tempted to pop into a pub, The Zetland Arms in Old Brompton Road. He had to stand for a minute just inside the door until his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the interior which, like most English pubs, was all dark mahogany and oriental-style fitted carpets – as if deep down every Briton longed for a return to Victorian times. Jonas meant just to have a quick whisky at the horseshoe bar, but he soon got chatting to an Englishman who invited him over to his table; he had ordered so many pints that Jonas had to help him carry them. Thus Jonas suddenly found himself in the midst of a vociferous group of men around his own age, and as the mood grew even livelier and the conversation turned, quite naturally, to television – as all conversations at that time eventually did – Jonas put in his three-ha’pence worth, commenting on aspects of everything from Coronation Street to The South Bank Show. His companions were impressed, wanted to know how come a Norwegian, a snowed-in Viking, was so well-informed on such matters. ‘I’m writing a thesis on the new British era of world supremacy,’ Jonas said. ‘Cheers!’
He did in fact feel rather like a researcher as he lay on the bed in his hotel room, combing the two weekly TV magazines. Each day he would find masses of programmes he wanted to see; the pages in both magazines gradually became covered in red circles; many a time there would be a clash between a couple of the delights on offer and he would have to choose; either that or he ended up switching back and forth between two, or even three, programmes – a documentary, a music broadcast, a film made for television – trying to catch the gist of each one.
And as he watched he made notes: a couple of words maybe, a sentence, or some hieroglyphics, a framework, an original idea. After close-down he would make other notes in the margins alongside those he had jotted down earlier in the evening, sketchy associated ideas scrawled in an Outside Left area, a fertile borderline in which the writing became more and more closely packed. Jonas had never written so much at one go. He would lie there, eating a corned-beef or turkey sandwich and writing, scribbling down words that only he could read, in those books with the marbled covers. They were the same as the ones in which Aunt Laura made her almost obscene erotic sketches – male members depicted as the most weird and wonderful creatures – on her travels in the Middle East and Central Asia in search of new rugs for her collection. Jonas believed that he filled his four books, collectively referred to by him as ‘the golden notebook’, with what might be called ‘bed art’. However that may be, he certainly regarded them, together with the eight copies of the TV Times and Radio Times from that month, covered in red circles and marginalia, as lecture notes from the greatest university he ever attended. Later in his career he would still
take those fat notebooks out every now and again, looking for tips or inspiration. Those four books were for him what the little yellow notebook was for Bo Wang Lee.
Jonas was, in other words, well qualified to air his views on British television at that table in The Zetland Arms, raucously toasting with his effusive, open-handed drinking cronies, and as if to boost the spirit of camaraderie still further – after his fourth pint – he declared Not the Nine O’Clock News to be the funniest thing ever shown on a television screen. Several of the guys round the table began to clap, while others broke into a chorus of ‘We are the champions’, and it may have been this, or possibly a desire to pursue his winning line in witty repartee that prompted Jonas to declare, a little too loudly, that that wasn’t always the case, though, was it? That the English were the champions, that is. Well, nobody could say – he plucked an example out of thin air – that Captain Scott had done all that well; Jonas laughed, but this time he laughed alone, and conscious though he was of the sudden, not to say ominous, hush that had fallen over the table, still he continued to hold forth, all undaunted, on that prize idiot, Captain Robert Scott, who had actually gone so far as to take ponies, ponies God help us, to the South Pole, and not only that, but – would you believe it – motor-driven vehicles, I’m sorry guys, but I can’t see any good reason to sing ‘We are the champions’ for Robert Scott. Here’s to Roald Amundsen!”
One burly character rose to his feet with demonstrative nonchalance, hoiked Jonas out of his seat on the sofa – as if deeming it cowardly to hit a man when he was sitting down – then slammed his fist smack into Jonas’s eye, the obvious target for his indignation. Jonas toppled backwards, smashing his head into the large ornamental mirror above the sofa, and slid to the floor in a shower of broken glass. And even as his legs gave way he had time to think that it was not only him, but also the image of a hero that had been shattered; it dawned on him that there were other ways of looking at Roald Amundsen than the one which had been instilled in him at school. A hero in one land could be a villain in another. The point might be to come first, but not at any price.
The Discoverer Page 37