Jonas particularly liked the moment when the sweet-smelling proprietor pumped the barber’s chair, that miracle of hydraulics, high into the air and began the treatment by placing a collar made of stretchy paper around his neck – as if initiating Jonas into a brotherhood. Glee and horror mingled inside Jonas at the thought of putting his appearance for some weeks ahead into the hands of this slick-haired man, but he eased his mind by running his eyes expectantly over the posters hung above the mirror, depicting men with perfectly groomed hair – the Arab stallions of the hairdressing world; at the same time he could not help admiring the barber’s professional talent for making small talk, even with children: remembering certain things about you, asking after your dad, your mum, your sister and brother, your sporting activities, how you were getting on at school, and for the fact that he told the same joke every time: a man pops his head round the door of a barbershop and asks: ‘Doc Willis here?’ The barber says: ‘No, we only cut hair.’ And through it all, Jonas stared and stared at the carton of condoms on the counter, which seemed to say that a haircut also boosted your virility, necessitating, as it were, that one’s next call should be on one’s fancy woman; and this brings me to the most mysterious part of all, namely the wordless sign used to ask for a ‘packet of three’. The boys had taken it into their heads that this consisted of holding up a fifty-øre between the index and middle fingers – a V-sign, possibly anticipating a sexual victory – while dropping the other hand sharply to the thigh. Where did they get that idea, the boys? And what becomes of this marvellous imagination, the ability to read signs in everything: the way a watch sitting squint on a wrist was code for ‘just got screwed’, for instance? I’m simply trying to say something here, Professor, about boys and their love of mysteries, to tie this up with the secret cave, because even if that black crevice really wasn’t all that exciting, woe betide you if you crawled inside it. Such mysteries were no joke.
Jonas left the barber’s looking like a crew-cut Elvis all set to do his military service, with Little Eagle like a shadow right on his heels, to find Petter and the gang waiting outside, arms crossed, gum-chewing in top gear – and Petter looking more like St Peter the Reckoner than a future Sgt Petter. And as if the hour of reckoning truly had come – it was starting to get dark – Jonas was grabbed by the arm and half-carried across Grorudveien and into the Memorial Grove, downhill from the church.
‘So you’ve been up in our den, have you?’ Petter says
Jonas keeps his eyes on the ground. Knows he ought to tell them something, a story so good that it will get him out of this situation, but he can’t think of anything.
‘So you’ve been up in our den?’
Jonas feels everything go black. In his memory this incident would always seem like an eclipse. He could have admitted it, apologized, been given a belt round the ear and that would have been that. But there is nothing but blackness. Jonas discovers that he has a dark cave inside himself, a dragon carved into his head. He says nothing. This is what it comes down to: the art of saying nothing. He has no chance of beating Petter in a fight. But he can keep his mouth shut. A partial victory. Or a partial defeat.
Petter doesn’t punch Jonas. That’s not how boys fight. Petter wrestles Jonas roughly to the ground, just beside the stone monument to the fallen of the Second World War, where a wreath was laid every May 17. Jones sprawls on the grass, nonchalantly, or hopefully even, knows that this is what he wanted, to lie here and see whether what he thought would happen actually would happen, whether life is that predictable. He gazes at the broad, empty steps up to the square in front of the church, where the girls’ choir used to stand and sing like an angelic chorus.
Petter kicks him, not very hard, more as an indication that worse is to come: ‘Admit you were in our den.’
Jonas lies still, playing dead the way you’re told to do if attacked by a bear – something that all boys regard as a not-so-remote possibility. There is something about Jonas’s stubborn silence that makes Petter madder than he had planned to be. He throws himself down onto Jonas’s chest, pins his arms down with his knees and hits him in the face, quite hard. ‘Admit it, you snotty little twerp,’ Petter says, louder now.
Jonas is admitting nothing. This is his only weapon: to keep his mouth shut, deprive them of that pleasure. Although he knows it would be smartest to own up, since this would entail a symbolic and not too unbearable punishment: Chinese burns, maybe, or something of the sort. But now the big boys are losing face, and big boys don’t like to lose face: still less do they like being defied by brats three years their junior. Such things get out. Besides which, Jonas senses that something he has not foreseen may be about to happen, a possibility that almost gives him hope. Petter is capable of anything; on one occasion he locked some poor sod in the cold-storage room at the shopping centre for so long that the guy almost snuffed it.
‘D’you give in?’ Petter grunts. ‘Just say you give in.’ Jonas understands that Petter is holding out his hand, offering the chance of a compromise. Jonas does not even meet his eye.
Jonas lies on his back in the church grounds. The grass is cold and damp. Just across from him is Trygve Lie’s tombstone. Petter punches him in the face. Jonas says nothing. Petter punches him again, harder this time, Jonas says nothing, Petter punches him again and again, harder and harder, Jonas says nothing, Petter hits him so hard that Jonas begins to bleed, first from a split lip, then from his nose, but he does not open his mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jonas, can’t you just say you were in there?’ Petter all but begs, staying a final, dangerously hard blow.
Last chance. Jonas is admitting nothing. They know he’s been there, but he’s not going to admit it, so he hasn’t been there. That’s the way of it. That’s the law.
Petter crouches over him, his fist clenched. Jonas can taste blood, but he’s not so much frightened as curious.
There is something unresolved about the situation. Ørn is standing there. The other big boys are standing there. The expression ‘lost honour’ hangs in the air. Petter gets up. They know they’ll have to come up with something else, something dreadful, something that will show the world, show all the other brats, that it did not pay, it most certainly did not pay, to climb up and sniff around in the secret dens of big boys.
‘Let’s chuck ’im into a grave,’ somebody volunteered. Not really meaning it seriously. More as a threat, a terrible threat. A hair-raising threat. An impossibility. The very thought made Jonas go rigid. Suddenly this was no longer fun. He longed for a return to predictability.
Petter noted Jonas’s reaction, seized his chance: ‘Yeah, let’s dump him in a grave. I know where there’s one.’
They trailed Jonas across the ground, which was strewn with chestnuts – Ørn and he always made believe that the green shells were oysters and the nuts were pearls – dragged him between them to an area roughly in the middle of the graveyard, where it sloped downwards. One of the other boys chased Ørn off home, forcibly, much as one would shoo away a crow. They reached a spot where a fresh grave had been dug for a funeral the following day. The pile of earth was covered with a tarpaulin; the grave was framed by wooden boards, the hole itself covered by planks. The day was growing steadily darker, the headstones cut adrift from the ground, swam menacingly towards them. Jonas didn’t really think they would go through with it, but he was scared all the same, more scared than he had ever been in his life.
One of the boys stepped up and pulled away a plank, shrank back from the black hole. ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ he said. ‘Come one,’ said Petter. Jonas felt like pleading with them, was suddenly willing to lick the soles of their shoes, eat worms, anything. But his willpower had a life of its own, refused to let him open his mouth. His body on the other hand, his body reacted. From somewhere he found incredible strength, wriggled like mad, while the tears gushed uncontrollably and little whimpers issued from his throat. They managed to hold onto him, shoved him down into the grave, may even have been a
little surprised themselves at how deep it was, at least six feet – and only three feet wide. Jonas hurt himself as he hit the bottom, thought he might have twisted his ankle. They dropped the plank into place. Jonas heard them dragging something heavy on top of it, a park bench.
The boys went off. Jonas could not move. Not because of his foot, but because he was numb – his whole body was numb, numb from sheer terror. He had never actually been afraid of the dark, he liked the autumn, games of hide and seek, cones of light cutting through the gloom like lighthouse beams, but this impenetrable blackness, the association with death and the total absence of anything for the eye to fix on, scared the shit out of him. And his fear seemed to make the darkness even blacker. He was sitting in a chamber that was closing in around him. Or stretching out into infinity. It was so dark that his scream was strangled at birth. Then, all at once, time and space were no more. He could not tell up from down, was plunged into a kind of vertigo, he was weightless, floating around, or maybe he was just falling so slowly that he thought he was floating, falling down into a black hole, down through a fissure leading to an unknown physical space, maybe he was in another galaxy, maybe he…yes, maybe he was actually already dead.
There was a raw smell, like clay, the thought of pottery, modelling, flashed through his mind. He felt that he was fighting: that he was sitting motionless, benumbed, or floating free, but that he was fighting, fighting something evil, the Devil, and they were battling for command of his wits. He got it into his head that at any minute skeletal hands would come squirming out of the sides of the hole and fasten on him, skulls would be grinning at him. He remembered all those horror stories about being buried alive, films the bigger boys had talked about, scenes in which people were dug out with their fingertips in tatters and the coffin lids covered in scratches from their attempts to claw their way out.
He was terrified. To be perfectly straight – and this should come as no surprise – Jonas Wergeland was afraid of the dark from that day onwards. Down in the grave, the darkness crept over him, usurped him, left a black mark on his cerebral cortex, a hole he would never quite be rid of.
But in the midst of his terror, a terror which was like a physical pain, like having a needle stuck into the spinal cord itself, he learned something, just as Dante’s character in The Divine Comedy learns something from his visit to Hell: the darkness showed him that it was not the eyes, but the brain which was the wellspring of all the images that really count. And in the depths of that awful terror he had caught an inkling – I say an inkling because it was the merest glimpse of something which he would later have confirmed – that in some cases the darkness is necessary if one is to experience, or perceive, something important.
Later he was to link this experience to one of the stories his grandfather had told again and again, although Jonas had no idea why – unless it was because this story was the key to the tale, the Story of Stories, which underlay everything; the story which his grandfather was constantly feeling his way towards. Once, when he was sailing the seas, Omar Hansen had witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. At first, as he stood on the deck, in some far-off harbour, gazing through soot-blackened glass at the moon slowly slipping across the sun, like a lid, he felt afraid, as people in ancient times were horror-struck when the sun’s light was extinguished. But then he noticed something else, something that completely took his mind off the black hole which, for some minutes, took the place of the sun: all of a sudden he could see the stars. He saw something else, something he normally didn’t see during the day. His grandfather told Jonas that he did not remember that day for the solar eclipse, but for the fact that, in the middle of the day, he saw the stars twinkling. The momentous thing was not that one light went out, but that thousands of others came on.
This association lay, however, some years in the future. Right now, Jonas was sitting in a grave, shivering, with cold and with fear. The thought of rats came into his mind, the thought that there had been several sightings of rats in the graveyard. They fed off the bodies, it was said. What if they picked up his scent, suddenly started digging their way through the walls, a whole pack of them, hundreds of eyes in the darkness.
He was very close to losing his mind. But he knew it was up to him, to his powers of imagination. He could make this black hole into a heaven or a hell. He felt something in his pocket: the box of matches he had taken from the big boys’ den. As proof that he had been there. He fumbled with the box, hands trembling, managed to strike a match, flinched at the sound and was taken by surprise at what good light a single match could give, it was as though he had come out of an endless swoop through endless space to find that he was sitting in a narrow grave with damp, clay sides. The light brought him a moment’s comfort – warmth too, in fact. He gazed into the flame, seemed to see visions within it, distinct images, a film. Then the match went out, he burned his fingers.
Darkness again. Deeper than before. Vertigo. Once more that vast, black space which knew no bounds. Swooping. Falling, even as he sat there motionless.
He lit another match. Wanted to wait, but couldn’t. How many did he have? Twenty-odd? How long was he going to be here? He shuddered at the thought of having to stay in the grave until midnight, when the dead rose up.
He sat in the dark until his nerves were so frayed that his limbs shook with pain before he lit another match.
How long did he sit there? An hour? Two? He did not know.
He had used up all the matches.
The darkness. A darkness that wormed its way inside him and became a part of him. A darkness that never left him.
He was surrounded by screaming. So loud that it sounded like silence. Or like a hum, a transformer. And in the midst of all this, in the midst of the terror – as the cold pinched his pee-soaked groin – he thought about revenge.
He heard a light footfall. And something that sounded like sluggish, scrabbling claws on the wood above his head. Someone was struggling with the bench. A plank was lifted away. Jonas saw the sky, a night sky studded with stars, and the outline of an animal’s head.
‘Are you there? Are you alive?’ It was Ørn. And Colonel Eriksen.
Jonas was overjoyed, felt like laughing. But instead he said: ‘What took you so long?’
Ørn merely slid the bench down into the grave until it wedged fast, giving Jonas something to climb up. ‘They followed me all the way home,’ Ørn said. ‘And I didn’t dare come back to the graveyard on my own in the dark. Then I had the idea of bringing the dog. It took a bit of time.’
Jonas finally managed to clamber out. Colonel Eriksen the old elkhound stood there wagging his tail. ‘Flippin’ heck,Ørn, I could’ve been a goner,’ Jonas said.
‘Thought you were Houdini,’ said Ørn. Jonas looked at him. Little Eagle had a sly, lopsided grin on his face, clearly he thought humour would be good medicine right now. Jonas gave him a clout round the ear, harder than he intended, but didn’t succeed in wiping the smile off his friend’s face.
There was something about the expression on Ørn’s face that Jonas couldn’t quite fathom. A look that said he thought Jonas had deserved this punishment, that he saw nothing wrong with it. As if Ørn, without saying a word, was openly admitting that he had deliberately waited as long as possible.
Jonas won a certain respect from Petter and the big boys after this incident. Simply for having survived perhaps. Or because he didn’t tell on them. Petter even stopped tormenting Jonas, became almost friendly towards him.
Jonas, for his part, thought of only one thing: revenge. For over six months he puzzled over how to get his own back. Just you wait, Petter, he thought. I’ll put out your light, so I will, you slimy, rotten, low-down sadist.
Little did he know that he would, in fact, manage to do just that on the Saturday evening when the Radio Theatre broadcast the final episode of Dickie Dick Dickens.
And if you think his time in that grave made a murderer of Jonas Wergeland, Professor, then you’re wrong. It would be tr
uer to say that this was what made a television producer of him.
The Loop
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then I must ask yet again: why did Jonas Wergeland travel? I know it sounds strange, but this does actually tie in with his fear of the dark. There was a period, after his hours in that grave, when Jonas suffered real torments, dreading the moment each evening when the light had to be put out, because Daniel – merciless as always – refused point blank to have a lamp burning all night. But one Christmas Aunt Laura gave the boys a globe – a rarity at that time – a glass sphere on which a wonder of topographical details, mountain ranges and wide plains, the various depths of the ocean, stood revealed in rich, warm colours when the light inside was switched on. In a fit of compassion Daniel agreed that this could be kept on at night. ‘What did you get for Christmas?’ the teacher asked after the holidays. ‘The whole world,’ Jonas replied.
After that the nights were not so bad. Seen from his bed at night, the globe must have been as beautiful and comforting to Jonas as this blue planet seemed to the first astronauts viewing it from space. Jonas might wake with a start in the middle of the night, and when he sat up in fright he saw the world shining at him. Sometimes after a particularly upsetting nightmare, in which rats’ eyes stared at him from the cold, damp clay walls, he would get out of the bottom bunk and hug the luminous globe, hold the warm sphere to his breast. It gave him what a certain Norwegian musician would later teach all the people of Norway to experience: ‘lots of light and lots of warmth’.
So when Jonas Wergeland became a globetrotter, he was in fact only doing the same thing on a larger scale: he embraced the world. Jonas Wergeland did not travel to distant lands in search of thrills and excitement like so many others; he set off in search of security. Which is why he never felt anxious but dared to let things happen. When he landed in Bombay and, as usual, thought to himself ‘Where will chance take me this time?’ he could never have guessed that his trip to India would lead him into a living loop, a loop capable of squeezing the life out of him in a single second.
The Conqueror Page 43