by Dag Solstad
The humanities students were self-confident. Every time Paul ventured over to join Armand, carrying his lunch on a tray, one of them would be sitting there reading Dagbladet and quoting something from the editorial, either offering enthusiastic comments or sarcastic criticism. These were the men of today! They were critical of contemporary Norwegian literature, which they did not read, except for books by Johan Borgen and Tarjei Vesaas, but those guys were getting up there in years. They predicted that soon a new batch of writers would emerge that would engage their interest, writers who would take the new literature in Sweden and Denmark as their role models. Just wait, they said, the time is ripe. Norway can’t continue to lag behind much longer. Or else they discussed philosophy and society, with a flood of references, and everyone put in their two cents, asserting their importance over everyone else’s opinions, except for a few who remained silent, including Paul Buer, but he couldn’t be counted, other than as a good childhood friend of Armand’s. They have the gift of gab, Paul thought, but damn it, how great to be able to talk like that.
Armand had a way with words, he always had, but now he’d come into his own, you might say, and the others received him with open arms. Armand thrived like never before among the humanities students, and not least among the women studying French and art history. He’d confessed in private to Paul that he found them most attractive.
“Why?” Paul asked.
“Because they think mostly about their own beauty, and less about their studies.” This was precisely an answer that somehow seemed more enticing, even exciting, to Paul Buer, and for a moment he was angry at himself for not choosing to study humanities instead of physical sciences. Not merely because Armand had developed an affable personality. That’s why he always let Armand choose the film they were going to see when they went to the movies together, which they did quite often. They would go to the Gimle and see the newest French and Italian and Polish movies.
“That’s the fourth time I’ve seen this one,” Armand said when they came out of the Gimle after seeing Last Year at Marienbad, “and it just gets better every time.”
“I sure hope so,” said Paul, “because honestly I thought it was really boring, except for the part when they acted out a scene from Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.”
“Rosmer, not Rosmersholm,” said Armand. “Didn’t you see the poster? It said Rosmer, not Rosmersholm, although Ibsen never wrote a play called Rosmer.” So based on that detail, he began to interpret the film scene by scene for Paul. Then Paul said he liked Blow-Up better, especially the tennis match where they played with imaginary balls, but well, anyone could think up this stuff, he told Armand afterward.
“It’s dumb to admit that you go to the Gimle to get horny,” Armand replied. “It’ll just backfire on you.”
“But I did like Blow-Up,” said Paul stubbornly, “a lot better than 8½, which was so slow.”
“But 8½ was so intensely white,” Armand exclaimed, appalled at Paul’s lack of development.
He kept recommending books for him to read. “You should read Kafka,” he told him once.
“I’ve read him. He’s good,” Paul replied.
“Which one?”
“The Trial. I really liked it.”
“So you understood it? Well, you must be really smart, because there aren’t many people who admit they do,” Armand responded, referring to the other humanities students. “What did you think of it? I suppose you know that people argue about whether The Trial is a deeply metaphysical work, or whether it was written by a joker.”
“I think it’s a metaphysical work,” said Paul.
“Oh, you’re only saying that because you don’t know what a joke actually is. It’s not what you think, it’s way more complicated than that,” Armand said with disdain.
When Armand scoffed like that, Paul never hesitated to rebut him if they were alone. At least on those occasions when Armand had been going at it for a while. And he wasn’t afraid to take on Armand when he thought his literary friends had been acting too much like Holberg’s Erasmus Montanus, as he expressed it. But then Armand might reply: “Erasmus Montanus was right. The world really is as flat as a pancake.” That response would stop Paul short, but he would good-naturedly agree with Armand — good-naturedly because if he’d contradicted him, which he could have done, based on the fact that you have to say the world is not flat as a pancake, we cannot say that it is, then he would have ended up in an Erasmus Montanus position, so he agreed with Armand, which was as it should be. Odd, he thought, how easy it is to be fooled by this fine world. I’d always heard that Erasmus Montanus was a ridiculous figure, but Armand was right. It was the others who were wrong, which makes them ridiculous. No, it’s important not to make overly hasty conclusions, especially when hanging out with people like Armand’s friends. That’s why Paul said that he thought they were genuinely spiritual, those who gathered at Armand’s table, and that he was actually impressed, so impressed that he didn’t dare say anything himself, even when he thought (rarely) that he had something to say. But then Armand contradicted him.
“Phooey,” he said, “stop trying to pretend you’re dumber than you are. You have to admit that all this is nothing but illusion. It’s just something you’ve learned by heart, all of it. No need to be impressed. It’s a cheap trick, that’s all. Illusion!” he shouted. When Armand called it out as illusion Paul couldn’t decide whether he meant it, or if it was nothing but a show put on for his friend, no matter how serious and intense he looked when he said it.
Apart from Armand, Paul didn’t know anyone at the university in the early days. In engineering there was a guy from his hometown that he chatted with now and then, but otherwise he just hung out on his own, without feeling lonely. It wasn’t until he’d been there a year that he found his spot at a table by the wall in the Frederikke student cafeteria. That’s when he got to know Tor Erik Paulsen, who was in the same group with him, taking a math course. Tor Erik mentioned that his last name was Paulsen, and Paul was Paul, which he said with a grin, as if there should be some automatic connection, and Paul Buer got a little embarrassed. Some time later he was passing through the chess room in the basement of Frederikke, glancing at the games that were in progress, when he spied Tor Erik laying out chess pieces on a board. Tor Erik noticed Paul and waved him over. Now Paul and Paulsen were going to play a match, he said, as if he’d been sitting there waiting for him, and Paul again felt a bit embarrassed. In fact, Tor Erik hadn’t been waiting for him specifically; he liked to come in here, find a table, set up the chessmen, and call over someone who came in, usually someone he knew. Because of the embarrassment that Paul felt, he ended up getting to know Paulsen, who in turn invited him to join his group of “realists,” and Paul spent much of his free time with them in subsequent years.
In a way there was nothing special about this particular group. It was like a lot of other groups of friends among the science and engineering students at Blindern in those years. They would sit at the west end of Frederikke eating their bag lunches at noon, and then come back a few hours later, between three and four, to line up for dinner and wait their turn to eat meatballs with stewed red cabbage, or boiled cod with carrots.
They were serious and industrious students, goal-oriented, and most of them got good grades. They were largely introverted and taciturn, but in every group there was always one, or often two, who played the role of life of the party, telling jokes that they all laughed at, appreciating the humor. During the seven years Paul spent at the university among them, he hardly ever heard a serious conversation about life. It was a lively group that cultivated the lighthearted, witty, and trivial, in both cultural and social matters. At the same time there was something sad about these students that was hard to ignore. There was something stagnant about them, as if they were caught in a swamp that was sucking them down, and they couldn’t get out. They were good at their studies, and several were
quite gifted, but even they couldn’t escape. Something was clinging to them. When it came right down to it, the most distinctive thing about them was that they were so ordinary. Why were they here, anyway? That’s a question that had to be asked if you wanted to understand anything about Paul Buer and his like-minded cohorts, including the talented Jan Brosten.
So, why were they here? Or: Why weren’t they someplace else? Like in Trondheim, at the NTH, the Norwegian Technical College, for example. That’s where the civil engineers were usually trained. The ones who built bridges, skyscrapers, jumbo jets, automobiles, roads, and machines, and who sat on the boards of the companies that made all these things based on mathematics and physics. In other words, the subjects that the “realists” at Blindern were studying. Why weren’t they all there, at the NTH? Several of them in Paul’s circle had passed the examen artium (entrance exam) with scores high enough to be admitted to the NTH, but they hadn’t bothered to apply. They wanted to stay here. As for those who hadn’t had good enough grades to be admitted, why didn’t they do like so many of their contemporaries and study abroad to be civil engineers? Because they didn’t want to be civil engineers. They didn’t want to study math and physics with the goal of taking their place as key performers in the midst of pulsating life. That’s not what they wanted. Though they never wasted time speculating over this decision, we may establish that much. Their studies offered so many opportunities that could be developed in life, but they had rejected them all because they lacked the desire to participate in dynamic feats that society admired so highly. Instead they wanted to stay here, at Blindern. Studying the sciences. Which would probably turn them into math and physics teachers for lanky kids of seventeen before they were even thirty, and people would still regard them as teachers when they were well past fifty, or even sixty-five.
So that is the key question. Why did they want to stay here instead of there? It was their own peculiar nature, from which they would never be able to escape. For some reason they discovered they weren’t suited to be civil engineers. For some reason they found they were more suited to be math teachers. It’s obvious that Paul Buer and his cohorts had scant affinity for power. They possessed little of that kind of ambition. Power, and the gleam of it, did not tempt them at all, at least not enough to get them moving. And as a result you could say that they had no goals for their lives.
This did not mean that indifference was lodged deep in their souls. It didn’t mean that everything was fluid in their lives, and they were merely floating with the stream. On the contrary. They were all so ordinary. Few had qualities that they openly presented to the world. Rather they seemed to be trying to conceal their traits. They preferred to remain as anonymous as possible. Paul Buer got along well with them. They were boring young men, viewed from the outside. They didn’t live exciting lives, but that’s what they enjoyed. They didn’t look forward to anything particularly great, and they enjoyed that too. They liked sports and games, and if they won some insignificant victory in an insignificant game, or in an unimportant sports match, they would exult over their victory. Above all they wanted to live a good life, but without having to deal with excessive expectations. Unlike most other students they even thought the food at Frederikke was good, though they complained to each other that there was probably saltpeter in it, if only the others knew (the language majors, the social scientists, and the theologians, etc.).
Paul was glad that he’d found a group of like-minded students to hang out with after only a year of studying at Blindern. The group consisted of ten to twelve young men who were loosely associated because they would take their trays and hurry over to this table after they’d stood in the cafeteria line, and they always knew someone sitting there. Tor Erik Paulsen was usually the life of the party in the group, its bright light. Otherwise either Andersen or Pedersen took the lead. Or Hans Brun, who could be said to be a sort of leader, or chairman, because whenever he was present he influenced the mood with his boring way of speaking. Yet he came from a renowned family of academics, and he was himself a top student, so his words carried a certain weight. Not least because Jan Brosten, with whom Paul would eventually become strongly linked, seldom took the lead, speaking only if directly addressed, and then his words made the biggest impression.
Hans Brun often used to interrupt Paulsen’s witticisms with an incisive remark, usually taken from some proverb. By this he intended to show that he had a good grasp of language and was able to counter Paulsen’s rather cheap jokes, which the rest of the group frequently tired of hearing ad infinitum. Hans’s humor was of the type that led to pronouncements like: “high they hang and pissed they are,” “don’t sell the pelt before you shoot the bear,” and “it’s only temporary, said the fox as he was being skinned.” He was very good at inserting these proverbs at the appropriate place, and always as a pointed commentary to something someone else had said, usually Paulsen. Sometimes Paul Buer was the target of these remarks, and then he’d feel so embarrassed that it would be a while before he’d dare offer his opinion, or say anything at all instead of just sitting there and waiting, as he felt was his duty, and most of the others felt the same.
Eventually Paul Buer understood that the group had largely been recruited by Hans Brun and Jan Brosten. It was Paulsen, the “life of the party,” and not Hans Brun or Jan Brosten, who had brought in Paul, and that was largely an exception; yet oddly enough he was accepted, probably in the name of tolerance. At any rate this led to Andersen and Pedersen bringing in a couple of friends who became loosely associated with their table. But the main thing was that it was everyone’s connection to Hans Brun or Jan Brosten that brought them all together. And this relationship was based on knowledge, or a longing for knowledge. They were keenly aware that they were here to study, and to take their exams. They all wanted the best grades possible. They were industrious students, all of them, working to understand the laws of the outside world, in which they had absolutely no desire to participate. They had gotten to know each other in study groups. Hans Brun, for example, had offered to help Andersen with a math problem that was baffling him, and Jan Brosten had patiently shown Pedersen how to understand a problem in theoretical physics, while a third person had displayed a solid mastery regarding the use of a mathematical formula for a certain problem in methodology, and Hans Brun or Jan Brosten had sought out this third man, who may have been Paulsen or Gunnar Ingebrigtsen, and in this way gratitude and kindness developed into a mutual yet shy openness, a sympathetic gesture that might turn into a friendship, expressed in the sentence, “Now I get it,” or “Now I understand,” connecting the listener, that is, the one who revealed his objective insight, to the one who received it. In conjunction with all this, it shouldn’t be ignored that the symbology of mathematics points to the farthest reaches of space, conveying a meaningful interpretation of such, and that ever since the earliest times a preoccupation with mathematics has been associated with the search for, and even the worship of, “God.” “God?”
That’s not what you would think if you listened to the conversations around that table, not even when the talk turned to professional matters. You would get the impression that above all they were looking forward to finishing their studies and obtaining positions as schoolteachers of math and physics and doing a lot of joking around with their pupils. They pictured their future teaching jobs as an endless series of bright days during which they entertained their future pupils with fun experiments. They indulged in imagining how they would tell amusing stories, for example the one about an egg. If you hurl a raw egg with all your might into the air, it will fly very high before falling back down. And when it does fall, it won’t shatter, incredibly enough (provided the surface is flat and not sharp). Knowing about this, and also knowing that they would be demonstrating it for coming generations, was one of the countless joys of that group, and everyone concurred, even Hans Brun, especially him, but also Jan Brosten, right from the start, much to Paul Buer’s astonishm
ent (Paul himself was the only one who didn’t contribute to collecting these fun experiments).
As far as that goes, Paul occasionally had a feeling that the main focus of the science departments was in viewing mathematics and physics as a game. A diversion. It protected the students from real life; in fact they used it to hide not only from themselves but from the reality in which, in spite of everything, they found themselves. This fixation could be seen as related to the eagerness displayed by this same group for measuring time and height, calculating points, noting the lap times in skating races, and studying the change in soccer schedules from one week to the next. Paul shared the group’s interest in schedules, scores, and records to the highest degree; in fact many people might call him a sports nut, and yet he thought this was a profane or unacceptable reduction, even a perversion, of the very nature of mathematics and physics, somewhat in the same vein as the intense feeling of joy which he personally might experience — though finding himself still at a low level on the endless rungs of mathematics that had to be climbed to achieve greater clarity with each rung — whenever he solved an equation or suddenly produced a formula all on his own, and the numbers would appear, shining and simple, exact and irresistible. Of course it was impossible to sit at that table in Frederikke every day and talk about such an intense joy, which they had all experienced, and yet they felt compelled to try and hide it, transforming it into boisterous enthusiasm, an intense but empty zeal, for sports, and an obstinate emphasis on amusing natural phenomena, all of which could sometimes provoke in Paul, once again, a deep embarrassment.