by Dag Solstad
It was this sort of argument that Jan Brosten might occasionally voice. Aside from the great clarity of his thoughts, what was most striking was the fact that he didn’t seem particularly enamored of what he said. He actually seemed indifferent whenever he put forth these carefully conceived arguments of his. Sounding a little weary, as if he personally didn’t think there was anything special to discuss, but since they happened to be talking about this particular topic, and since he had so thoroughly considered the matter, then this was his opinion. Yet, in spite of everything, he had spent a large part of his life in situations which necessitated that what he talked about also affected his own life, so he must have had a serious relationship to these thoughts of his. After all, he had carefully considered these ideas, such as the importance of regime changes in a democracy, and most likely he would have been infuriated if anyone had challenged him.
Jan Brosten and Paul Buer played chess together, privately, in Paul’s room in the student dorms in Sogn. Jan often went home with Paul after classes were over at the university, and they would play chess, usually two games, until late at night. Sometimes Jan would show up at the dorms unannounced and ask whether they could have a game. He didn’t live in the dorms but rather with an aunt on Hegdehaugsveien. Paul had never been there; he didn’t think Jan ever invited anyone home to his aunt’s place, so he didn’t even know exactly where on Hegdehaugsveien she lived. Maybe it was because he lived with his aunt that Jan liked to go out to the dorms in Sogn, maybe it was one way for him to take part in student life, maybe he experienced there a freedom that you can’t have when living in the maid’s room in the home of your mother’s sister while you’re studying at the university in Oslo. At any rate, Jan seemed to thrive when taking part for a brief time in the dorm life in Sogn.
So Jan Brosten and Paul Buer played chess together. They were an odd pair, especially since Jan was a much better player than Paul. If Jan had focused his attention on chess by joining a chess club, he probably would have gone far; the same could not be said of Paul. Yet both were happy amateurs, except that Jan was a much better player. What we can say is that Jan almost always won, and when he didn’t, it was a stalemate. Once in a while Paul would fight his way to a stalemate, and he was proud of that. And let’s be honest, sometimes Paul did win, on occasions when Jan had squandered most of his pieces in a battle with his own fascinating intuition. Because Jan played in a way that was directly contrary to how many would have thought he’d proceed. He opened with great daring, what many might call a foolhardy opening, and took chances; it seemed as if he were moving randomly and taking a certain pleasure in doing so. But gradually a plan would materialize in his mind, which he would then, but only then, follow mercilessly, yet the whole time making use of diversionary maneuvers to mislead his opponent. Only when his opponent, i.e., Paul, had no possibility of evading what was bound to come — checkmate — did this plan become apparent. Now and then it might seem as if Paul had the upper hand in the game, at least on those occasions when Jan’s too bold and unorthodox openings had led to certain serious losses, for instance squandering a knight in exchange for nothing, but that was actually not the case, and Paul knew it, because he never (or almost never) won; the best he could do was to fight hard for a stalemate.
Considering that Jan Brosten was such a brilliant person, he made a strikingly bland impression. This blandness was also much in evidence when he rang the bell at Paul Buer’s dorm in Sogn, and Paul let him in, and he dumped his bag of workout clothes in the shared entryway, since he was coming straight from a practice for the 400-meter hurdles at the field of the new sports college in Kringsjå, and he asked, perhaps with a slightly expectant smile, whether they could play a game of chess. But the smile quickly disappeared as soon as he set up the board and began his brash and risky opening moves, after which he concealed his covertly deliberate plan. It ought to be possible to compare his way of playing chess with his general, readily acceptable attitudes toward “reality,” in order to understand, or at least to be astounded by, the difference, as well as the astonishing and perhaps also crystal clear perspectives to which his chess game pointed, considering that what he expressed through chess was just as much in his capacity as an amateur as the opinions and convictions he espoused about society and daily life in Norway during his student years; and you have to assume that his way of playing chess was more in line with his serious, impassioned work as a gifted student and professor’s assistant in theoretical physics than with his opinions about “reality,” seeing as there was an almost incomprehensibly vast leap from one activity (as a professor’s assistant in theoretical physics) to the other (his opinions).
As a chess player he could accept losing, in fact it might seem as if he possessed a certain inner drive that challenged him to end up in the losing position. When on rare occasion he did lose, he behaved like a proper loser, meaning slightly pissed off, which is how a winner wants a loser to behave so that he can bask in the fruits of his victory. He took risks, real risks, which he actually seemed to enjoy taking within the parameters of the game. Yet he also thought deeply, pondering countermoves well in advance without revealing his intentions, trying to put up a smoke screen via misleading moves that would make his opponent sense danger from a completely different direction on the board than where it was actually coming from. But when he expressed himself in such excellent Norwegian regarding “reality,” as a young Norwegian citizen, a promising student, a flower, he had undoubtedly carefully considered what he chose to say; to call these thoughts of a risky nature would be utterly wrong. When he spoke of “reality,” he had no tolerance for losing; in that instance he disliked taking risks or making any of the sort of great leaps in his thought processes that bore a similarity to the way he conducted his deliberate onslaught toward a spot on the chessboard where his opponent, unaware, would end up fettered for good and which, when the other player had understood his moves and seen where they led, he actually experienced as a demonstration of freedom. When he spoke of “reality,” none of this occurred. He might be both critical and skeptical but not “free” in his thoughts even though he, as the good Norwegian he was, chose freedom as his starting point whenever he judged a phenomenon, and it was on the basis of freedom that he either supported or condemned a particular phenomenon.
It’s possible that, if presented with the problem, Jan Brosten himself might have claimed that the way he thought of “reality” was more in keeping with his scientific ingress into the spheres of theoretical physics than with the rash way he played chess, and the approach he used to express his ideas about “reality,” and regarding scientific encroachment, retained an adherence to the small, trivial principles upon which both a societal judgment and a scientific judgment (or formula) rely, something that cannot be ignored without disastrous results. In that case, we have to view his chess game as an uninhibited and time-constrained surrender to both his own and many others’ yearning for the intoxicating sense of freedom that is the very essence of gambling.
In that case, the astonishing and almost incomprehensible difference in perspectives exists exclusively on an aesthetic level. You’d have to be someone who shared Jan Brosten’s opinions to a fanatical degree in order to assert that his societal ideas, in spite of their admirable clarity, were particularly “beautiful,” but few, if any, would deny that a mathematical formula used in theoretical physics can in fact be unbelievably beautiful. For an outsider it might be difficult to accept that something extremely attractive and something rather plain might have the same source and be fundamentally two aspects of the same thing.
On the other hand, it’s easy to focus on the unnecessary gamble involved in Jan Brosten’s opening moves, which obviously gave him a great deal of satisfaction, especially because they were unnecessary and served no purpose. He would actually have been a much better chess player without this tendency. But he chose, with open eyes, to weaken his position as a player in this way. Why? Sometimes th
is “why?” also occurred to his opponent, Paul Buer, in a flash of insight. At those moments he might feel a certain embarrassment, and once, on one of those rare occasions when he’d actually won the game, he said, after the initial giddy pride at having won subsided, that he wouldn’t have won if Jan Brosten had played with the intention of beating him.
Jan was clearly upset, Paul could see that, but he quickly recovered and replied: “How typical of you, Paul, to think that way.”
Paul shrugged, still feeling a bit embarrassed, and suggested they go to the kitchen (which he shared with three other students, all of whom had rooms that opened onto it), and fry some eggs as a victory celebration, the way they always did, no matter who won the game. So that’s what they did. They sat down at the kitchen table. Paul fried four eggs, and Jan buttered several thick slices of bread. Then they sat there and wolfed down the food, youthfully minded, in a way, in the late 1960s, perhaps while the sports bag of the previous year’s Norwegian champion in the 400-meter hurdles lay in a corner where it had been tossed.
Jan Brosten also took Paul Buer to the gymnasium in Velferdsbygget in Blindern, where they joined a bunch of guys playing handball. Several of the others from the group who sat at the table in Frederikke were there too, brought in by the quiet and serious Jan Brosten. Andersen and Per Arne Pedersen were there. As well as a guy named Gloer. They played one or two afternoons a week. For Jan, this was a great diversion from his real training as a track-and-field athlete. Paul was the goalkeeper; growing up he’d been a soccer goalie, and now he was the handball goalie. What he liked least about being a handball goalie was the fact that the ball was so fucking hard that it stung his fingertips, or the palms of his hands, whenever he made a save or blocked a shot, to say nothing of how much it hurt to get one in the face. It had been quite different to be a soccer goalie, and he recalled with nostalgia the round form and soft leather of a soccer ball. The handball was also round, but the hard leather covering the compact and diminutive ball made any attempt to regard the ball as really round impossible. Yet by playing handball Paul became a member of OSAA, which stood for the Oslo Student Athletic Association, and it meant that on Saturdays, along with a bunch of like-minded cohorts, after the lectures were over and the reading rooms were closed, around two or three o’clock, he would head up to Nordmarka to the OSAA cabin, hiking in the fall and skiing there in the winter. In winter they would spend the night, ski all day Sunday, and then return to the OSAA cabin to pack up their rucksacks and sleeping bags to return to the city, where some of them would go out and eat dinner together at one of Oslo’s “better restaurants,” as they called it (rather misleadingly, it should be noted).
It was at the OSAA cabin that the ladies awaited. Actually, most of them waited first at Majorstua, where they met on the platform, took the tram up to Frognerseteren, and from there headed to the cabin, on skis in the wintertime. Some were the steady girlfriends of guys in the group, and they might bring along their dearest friends. Because some in the group had actually acquired steady girlfriends, such as Pedersen and the guy named Gloer. But most of them had not, not at that time, and for that reason they set off, on skis, for the OSAA cabin, where the ladies awaited. No one knew where they came from, but they had some sort of association with OSAA, most were university students, at any rate, or nursing students who knew someone who was a member of OSAA. But we have to assume that Jan Brosten went there because it was simply a fine means of relaxation, and maybe Paul Buer felt the same way. Maybe Andersen too. It definitely was a fine means of relaxation to find themselves, after long days of studying, out in the white forest of Nordmarka, on skis, in the midst, or even at the very back of a group of friends, moving in a long line, cross-country through Nordmarka, along trails and over hills, down flat stretches, at dusk, which turned to pitch dark before they even reached the OSAA cabin.
And there the ladies were waiting. Now those serious-minded and extremely ordinary students of science, who were so happy to play handball twice a week, met the ladies. “The opposite sex,” which they undoubtedly called the weaker sex, at least that’s what they all said out loud; though for them it was also the opposite sex they were now meeting, and they may have been looking forward to this moment all week. A charged atmosphere was brewing, that cannot be denied, and Paul Buer felt shy. Only the fewest of these science students — who played handball twice a week and who went up to the OSAA cabin on weekends — were or considered themselves any kind of Don Juan. And most would have silently agreed if anyone told them they weren’t especially good-looking, though they would have defiantly and in most cases truthfully added that they weren’t particularly distinctive in terms of the other end of the spectrum either. But the atmosphere had become so strangely charged. Everyone pretended to ignore it, but everything had changed. Eroticism had entered the picture, but evidently in a nonerotic sort of way. They became competitors. Even though each of them individually concluded that there wasn’t much competition, they were indeed competing for the favor of the lovely ladies. Each offered himself to the opposite sex, not directly, not as a seducer, but they did offer themselves in a general sense.
It was striking how sociable these taciturn and reserved science students actually were when it came right down to it. When in the presence of ladies. They made a point of not behaving in an affected manner. They made a point of being themselves, even when they weren’t talking but merely listening and laughing at what someone else had said. It was through their own inner resources that they sought happiness, even when they kept in the background and only their contented laughter revealed that they were glad to be there. They offered their sense of confidence, their lighthearted temperament, and their self-assurance. Their firm shoulders and the silent crooks of their arms, you might say. Quite unlike the way they behaved at the table in Frederikke where each sat in splendid isolation with his Andersen-ness, his Brosten-ness, and his Gloer-ness (even his Buer-ness, you might say, although no, not here, not now, Paul is shy, he watches the whole scene from outside and hardly manages to say a word, he feels sick whenever, for some reason, he has to get up and walk across the floor in his thick wool socks). They showed off. Quite openly, they showed off, in a perfectly ordinary context. A cabin weekend. Sitting in front of the fireplace. Sitting around the table. Good stories. Quiet conversations. They showed off with all their might. Chopping wood. Carrying wood. Lighting a fire in the fireplace. Displaying a pleasant charm. Carving a leg of mutton with a sheath knife and handing slices to the girl sitting closest. A humorous glint in their eyes. They all acted so strangely self-confident. Not for a second did it look as if they were desperately searching for happiness.
“Desperately searching for happiness.” You could have tried out this statement on them, and you would have been met with indulgence, at best. Shouldn’t a person be allowed to spend a weekend up at the student cabin without “desperately searching for happiness?” Who said that? Would he mind repeating it? But no one would have volunteered. So it might as well have not been said at all. Good heavens, a person should be allowed to get acquainted with a sweet member of the opposite sex without “desperately searching for happiness.”
And maybe they were not desperately searching for happiness. Even Paul Buer was probably not. Although he might have been the one to say those unfortunate words about all of them if he hadn’t known what a poor reception the words would have provoked. But above all else, Paul Buer felt shy about what he was seeing. And about the game itself. The fact that they were showing off. And why was he shy? Well, because he had nothing to show off. He didn’t have confident shoulders or arm crooks to offer one of those creatures who were present in the same room with him. Paul felt invaded, now as always, by the insidiousness of existence, and he wished he could escape from that room where the charged erotic atmosphere was surfacing, in looks of the eye, gestures of the hand, and strange innuendos laden with promises for the recipient. And Jan Brosten, can it really be said that he
was “desperately searching for happiness?” If so, all he had to do was hold out his hand, because there it was, the happiness that he was supposedly so desperately searching for. Because the female eyes were turned toward Jan Brosten, they were almost all looking at him, though he hardly noticed. (No, he did notice; whenever Jan and Paul shared a meal in Paul’s student lodgings, after having played chess, they sometimes started talking about women they knew from the OSAA cabin who had come on to Jan by staring at him adoringly, usually with their chin resting on their hand, which was supported in turn by a slender elbow. Jan often talked about them to Paul, discussing them and recounting what sort of impression they had made on him. Visual impressions, both good and bad. Good qualities that were immediately apparent, as well as less-good qualities that were immediately apparent. He might say that he liked the way a particular girl walked. Her “gait,” as Jan Brosten called it. But he might also mention her voice, which in the long run could seem a little too pushy.)