Branching Out
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then it is Sunday, a holiday – holy day – in the true sense of the word, and Jonas is reverently at work in a room that smells of wood-shavings and beeswax. He is standing at a bench in the little workshop in the Villa Wergeland, working on his seventh dragon’s head – a new version but still inspired by the old prototype in the Viking Ship Museum, those sinuous coils which posed the eternal challenge. For Jonas, the Academic’s masterpiece was testimony to duality: a head capable of embodying both a fearful dragon and four beautiful swans – and only when you could see it as both did it look right, did it look good. At a desk next to him Kristin is sitting drawing, as he had once sat drawing in Aunt Laura’s rug-clad living room. It is summer, afternoon, and outside the window the trees shine brightly in the grove of trees, the spot that, as a boy, Jonas had called Transylvania.
You might accuse me of leaving out all the ordinary days, Professor. But no occurrence, no day in a person’s life is so trivial that it might not be crucial. Important things happen all the time. And so this day too, like the others I have described, can be regarded as being the centre of Jonas Wergeland’s life. All days are, in a way, holy days.
So it is very appropriate that it should be a Sunday, that Jonas should be in the workshop that is his sanctuary, his temple. As Margrete took refuge in the kitchen and ransacked the well-stocked spice rack when she wanted to relax, Jonas came here, to his bits of wood and the cupboard containing all his carving tools. It was in here, while he was sawing the wood, a crude three-dimensional form, while he was wielding knife, file or rasp in an effort to get closer to the form of the creature’s head, while he was drawing the design and while he was making a start on the actual carving – that he did his best thinking, was aware of how his head simply teemed with ideas, like echoes of, or parallels to, the patterns he was coaxing out of the wood which, no matter how stylised they might be, took on the appearance of a living thing. It often struck Jonas that his pleasure in this was the same as he had felt in nursery school, the first time he was allowed to work with a fretsaw and some plywood, and cut out a big heart, a heart that beat in his hand.
He went over to Kristin, stood and watched her. She was drawing a tree, sat there in a world of her own, drawing with a stick of charcoal on a large sheet of paper – there was charcoal on her cheek, too. Her hair glinted in the light falling through the window. It came to Jonas: she, his daughter, was a diamond; she was him, metamorphosed into diamond. Kristin almost always drew trees. He did not know why, but he liked it. They were both working with trees, with wood. He stood for a long time just watching her, a little girl with branches growing under her hand, charcoal, dust, coming alive. He noticed how big she was getting, it didn’t seem any time since she had been lying in her cradle while he played ‘I Have a Little Lass with Eyes of Blue’, lay there in her cradle smelling of milk and encouraging him to search out new harmonies on the piano, create a tree of notes in each chord, while at the same time varying the melody, playing it in every key, endeavouring to make the verses stretch out, each in its own direction. She always inspired him; he never worked better than when she was with him in the workshop. And in the living room Margrete would be lying on the sofa, reading, trees turned into books. From one kind of leaf to another. Sunday was a holy day.
Jonas stood behind Kristin, studying the sheets of paper covered in finished or half-finished drawings spread in a semicircle round about her. Some showed rows of bare trees, networks of branches converging on a vanishing point. On the sheet in front of her the contours of a strange tree were taking shape, roots and all. Jonas thought of the many times they had sat in the living room talking about trees. Sometimes they had music playing in the background. ‘Listen to this one, it’s about willow trees,’ he might say, putting on Billie Holiday’s ‘Willow Weep For Me’. Or it might be Bach – Bach was perfect for looking at pictures of trees. Jonas brought out art books and showed his daughter how the Chinese painted the leaves of bamboo trees, or how the Japanese drew the branches on the cherry tree. ‘It looks so easy, and yet awfully difficult,’ Kristin said.
They could sit for hours, with the piles of art books growing up around them like a hedge and the music of Bach encircling them with a fretwork of notes. They pored over Caspar David Friedrich’s spiky, romantic trees and I. C. Dahl’s weeping birch; they compared Edvard Munch’s majestic oak with Lars Hertervig’s gnarled pines. Kristin was particularly fond of Claude Monet’s poplar trees painted in different lights and of Piet Mondrian’s apple tree, progressing in stages from a recognizable tree to a totally abstract shape. ‘It’s like a magic trick,’ she crowed, running her eyes over the pictures again and again – but, unlike Jonas as a child, she never tried to copy what she saw, she came up with her own ideas.
‘Have you ever chopped down any trees?’ she asked him once.
‘Only one,’ he said. ‘It was on a boat.’
Kristin seemed almost bewitched by trees. Jonas always envied her that childish knack of picking a maple leaf off the ground and becoming genuinely lost in wonder: staring at her hand, her fingers, then back at the leaf, placing them against one another. Or the gift for stopping short and standing rooted to the spot, nostrils vibrating, when she passed a lilac bush in bloom. She was a great climber too. Now and again, when she was big enough, she would go off with Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales under her arm to sit up among the branches and read about the hollow tree in ‘The Tinder Box’ or ‘The Old Oak Tree’s Last Dream’. ‘She has to be a distant descendent of the druids,’ Margrete always said. ‘Those Celtic priests who held certain groves of trees to be sacred. ‘Hm,’ said Jonas. ‘Either that or she’s living proof of what it says in Norse mythology: that mankind was born out of the trees, like Ask and Embla.’
Sometimes he and Kristin would sit together in the old apple tree in the garden, a hardy Sävstaholm which had been growing there when Jonas’s parents bought the ground. It was like entering another dimension, another element, like water – he could see why the Chinese called trees ‘the fifth element’. And as they sat there listening to the sighing of the leaves, he would tell Kristin stories about how important trees were to people; he told her about the bodhi tree under which Buddha was sitting when he finally achieved enlightenment, or about the apple tree which prompted Isaac Newton’s contemplations on gravity. Jonas suddenly discovered – as if their botanical surroundings were also having an effect on him – that he knew a whole lot of stuff about trees, that he must have been picking up bits and pieces all through his life: that sitting here in a fork in the tree trunk seemed to call them to mind, and he found that he was able to weave these snippets of knowledge together again. He told Kristin about trees in North America which were thousands of years old, or about the cedar trees of Lebanon King Solomon had ordered for the temple in Jerusalem; about the baobab trees of Africa which were used as houses, and the two trees whose branches entwined over the grave of Tristan and Isolde. ‘Old trees are like dragons,’ he said, after describing the Nine Dragon Tree, an ancient cypress he and Margrete had stumbled upon in Beijing, or the dragon’s blood trees they had seen on Tenerife. Kristin, for her part, might make some comment about the sounds trees made, they breathed, she said, or about their bark, that it smelled better than perfume, as well as asking questions which he could not answer: ‘What does “achieve enlightenment” mean?’ she would say. Or: ‘Are there trees inside our heads?’
Jonas turned away from the drawing child and crossed to the high bench where the piece of wood sat ready and waiting in the vice. He would spend a couple of years working on a dragon’s head; with this one he was past the first, roughing-out, stage and had shaped and smoothed the surface with one of the bigger U-gouges. The face was also completed – eyes, nose, jaws – and he had long since begun on the actual decoration, first of all by ‘grounding out’, which is to say: cutting down to the deepest points in the relief – a painsta
king process calling for lots of different gouges. He was now faced, in other words, with the demanding task of carving the fine detail; he carefully examined the tracing paper on which, once and for all, he had copied the Academic’s exquisite design on a scale of 1:1, the patterns formed by the stylised swans. He had to take care of the contours first, get the main lines right. That done, he could move on to the outermost edges of the bands, then the ornamented surfaces. He studied it at length, knew that an understanding of the motif as a whole, its lines, was half the battle. He could hardly wait, took down a big No. 2 gouge, whetted and polished it, needed to get it as sharp as possible, felt a thrill of apprehension run through him as he put the steel to the wood and cut away the first sliver, like an archaeologist setting his spade in the ground, about to unearth sensational discoveries.
How does one become a murderer? Or, to put it another way: in that ‘sacred’ room, in the selfsame cupboard in which he kept his precious woodcarving tools, could Jonas Wergeland also have hidden an old Luger? I refuse to believe it. That is why I am sitting here, Professor: I refuse to believe it.
Jonas makes a rhomboid cut, a tricky device, then an oblique hatch; he has to strain his eyes to the utmost, it is the eyes that tire first; he is working on a small patch, but using a large gouge – ‘Always try to work with as big a gouge as possible, to get the cleanest cut,’ old Sundbye had told him – Jonas loves the resistance offered by the wood, loves the smell, loves the thought of how good it will be, better than the last head anyway, always a little better, bands running under and over one another, four birds and yet something else entirely. He knows, he has always known, that woodcarving is not merely a hobby: that it has something to do with the world, with all of his problems. That this might even be his purpose in life: in the end, not only to master the craft itself, but also the thought behind this intricate tracery. There were times, even at the height of his television series’ success, when Jonas Wergeland had the feeling that nothing mattered but this: to carve the perfect dragon’s head. ‘I don’t make programmes,’ he said, ‘I make dragons.’
After an intense bout of carving, he looked up, became aware that Kristin was still sitting at the desk next to the window, drawing with coloured pencils now. It was very quiet – the quiet of a forest. The light slanting through the window formed a halo around her. He was filled with love at the sight of this child with her head bowed over the paper, her face rapt with concentration, her whole mind focused on just one thing: the drawing of a tree. Jonas stood there with his gouge in his hand, looking at her, a child drawing, a perfectly normal sight, but at the same time, what a sight, an everyday situation which shone with a timeless beauty, a kind of blinding revelation of the miracle of existence, akin to the ineffable light of mysticism. Why do we give up drawing? Why do we do all those drawings as children, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, covering sheet after sheet of paper, revelling in it, and then all of a sudden one day it stops?
He crosses to the desk, glances down at her paper, notes how she too has created something that coils and twines, a large tree, a tree unlike any he has ever seen before. She has done something odd with the branches, sort of plaited them together, and the tree is half fire, glittering, and half green – it looked, more than anything else, like a piece of jewellery. ‘It’s a tree with leaves that are wet with dew, in the sunshine,’ she said, without turning, knew that he was standing behind her.
He was filled with a sudden sense of dread. A fear that something might happen to her. Or to him. He placed a hand on her head. ‘How lovely,’ he said. ‘You’ve drawn…lots of things at once.’
He knew she was practising for something – this thing with the trees, all these sheets of papered covered in networks of branches – but he didn’t know what.
‘What was he called, that painter who cut off his ear?’ Kristin asked as she was getting out a fresh sheet.
‘Van Gogh.’
‘Why did he cut off his ear?’
‘Nobody knows,’ Jonas said. ‘Some people say he was in love, but I think maybe he was afraid of the dark.’
‘Or maybe he thought he was a tree,’ Kristin said.
They had devoted a whole day to the Dutch painter the Christmas when Aunt Laura gave them the book on him. He had shown Kristin Van Gogh’s chestnut trees and bluish-green conifers, the twisted olive trees and, not least, the cypress trees like green flames against the sky. They had studied the pink and white gardens of Arles with their pear and peach trees and, best of all, the little almond tree in bloom – and afterwards Jonas had taught Kristin the verse by Nikos Kazantzakis which Margrete had once taught him: ‘I said to the almond tree,/“Sister, speak to me of God.”/And the almond tree blossomed.’
It is Sunday, holy day. Jonas returns to his bench, sets to work on the dragon’s head again, on the piece of wood into which he means to carve life, cover it in an intricate play of lines. He glances out of the window, towards Ravnkollen’s granite wall, spies a crack in the middle of the cliff face, a black hole that can still make him shiver in horror. He turns to where Kristin sits with her head bowed, still drawing – drawing with wax crayons now, possibly inspired by Van Gogh’s thick daubs of paint. He knows that some day this child will be the saving of him. That this is why he had her, to be the saving of him.
Living Death
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must focus on the challenge facing Jonas Wergeland. Because, while his woodcarving concerned seeing swans on a dragon’s head, Jonas Wergeland’s problem was rather the opposite: whether you could be a swan even if you were carved with dragons. Can you be composed of dragons and still be good?
As a little boy, Jonas had thought that the cave in Ravnkollen’s sheer face was a dragon’s lair. As time went on it was reduced to being the big boys’ secret den – which was daunting enough, in its own way. It wasn’t actually a cave as such, but a deep fissure directly above the bomb shelter. It may well have been this last which had given Petter and his gang the idea, because the Civil Defence Corps’s exercises were such a mystery: days when the massive steel doors in the hillside were opened, and the kids got to peek inside that hidden labyrinth, an enormous tunnel with narrow passageways running off it; trucks and jeeps driving in and out, fathers suddenly appearing in grey uniforms and yellow helmets, as if all at once real life had been turned into science fiction.
How does one become a conqueror?
It was of course absolutely forbidden for anyone else to go in there: into the big boys’ secret den, that is. Getting up to it was also a tricky business and not a little risky. No one of Jonas’s age knew what the cave looked like inside; some nurtured fantasies of a temple of sorts, with an array of ghastly objects at the very back; others whispered of crossbones on the floor and signs written in blood on the walls.
Jonas had wondered just as much about the cave and what it contained as he had about the canvas bag which he and Daniel had found in the safe on Hvaler, but which their grandfather had snatched away from them before they had a chance to lift it out of the lacquer casket. They often lay in bed at night trying to guess what was in it. ‘Pearls, for sure!’ said Daniel. ‘No, I think it was probably a bundle of love letters,’ said Jonas. Because, of course, they hadn’t been able to weigh the bag in their hands. It could have contained anything.
One autumn afternoon, Jonas braved his fear of heights and stole up to the den. He simply had to find out what lay beyond that black cave mouth, even if it turned out to be something indescribably nasty. But as so often happens in such cases, it was a disappointment: apart from a primitive cave painting on one wall – not of an elk or a wolf, I grant you, but of what Jonas took to be a girl with no clothes on – the den was totally bare. A couple of bits of plank served as a table. On a natural shelf in the granite lay a box of matches. Jonas looked about, but all he could find was the paper off a bar of chocolate, some orange peel, a few stumps of candle and four sparkplugs. Nothing really e
xciting. Not even a Swedish porn mag.
Down on Bergensveien once more, he did not know whether to feel let down or relieved. At any rate he was glad that no one had seen him. But someone had seen him, in such situations someone always sees you, and this ‘someone’ tattled. So Jonas discovered the very next day, during the lunch break; he could tell by the looks they sent him, Petter and his chums. They were three or four years older than him, and three or four years is an awfully big gap at that age, like the difference between Goliath and David – at least.
Jonas was going to get his hair cut that afternoon, and Little Eagle accompanied him to the shop down by the bend in the road, to a hairdresser who bore a striking resemblance to David Niven, with his pencil moustache and hair slicked back like a South American bandit. Although, of course, they didn’t say ‘hairdresser’, they said ‘barber’, possibly because they liked the word’s manly connotations, the associations with facial hair. I ought perhaps to say something here about boys and their hair, since the history of the sixties could probably also be written as the saga of parents’ constantly nagging at their sons to get a haircut. But these events took place in the time before the Beatles, when the length of a boy’s hair had not yet become a source of domestic conflict; the barber employed his clippers as much as his scissors in order to produce such drastic works of art as the ‘buzz-cut’ and the ‘flat-top’. In those days a mother’s main concern was for the need for thrift, a virtue that also led to the buying of clothes and shoes that were invariably too big. The aim, therefore, when going to the hairdresser, was plain: that haircut had to last as long as possible.
Nonetheless there was something special about these visits; even before you stepped inside, the sign flashing in the salon window conjured up thoughts of ritual acts, of guilds or the Freemasons; the brass basin was actually a leftover from the days when the barber did far more than cut hair and shave faces, when he was, in fact, a ‘barber-surgeon’. The barber’s emblem was actually a bleeding bowl, and from this the boys knew, right from the start, that a visit to the hairdresser was a deadly serious matter.
The Conqueror Page 42