The Discoverer (30 page)

Maybe she would be alive today if I had not had such a weak heart.

I am on board an old lifeboat once called the
Norway
, now renamed
Voyager
. I have long had the feeling that I am on a journey, making my way out of something. I say this because for so many years I was motionless, shut off. I cannot shake off the memory of Harastølen at Luster, that ludicrous
one-time
refugee centre halfway up a mountainside. For some days I have had the suspicion that this may also say something about me personally. That this problem:
Festung Norwegen
, the fear, and my own problem, the one which has dogged me all my life, are one and the same: an unwillingness to open oneself to one’s full potential. I sometimes think of myself as a fertile egg which has put up an effective barrier against all the spermatozoa that have sought me out, that I have, metaphorically speaking, inserted a coil into the womb of my thoughts. I have been aware of my exceptional gifts, known that I might even be a wonder, but I have baulked at using these gifts. So too with love: I never dared to accept it. Like Norway I suffered from the Midas syndrome. I was a gold-plated celebrity, but I could not embrace other people, I could not return the affections of the woman who loved me.

We are out sailing again. I find myself far up the longest fjord in the world. 
Dead ahead looms Haukåsen, covered with a white cape of snow. Gulls hover motionless on the wind, level with the boat, almost as if they were tame.

I feel a bit like an apprentice with the OAK Quartet. I am particularly interested in the way they communicate. Initially I was surprised to find how little of their work involved computers. The boat is of course packed to the gunnels with the latest digital aids – it is like a Noah’s Ark for our
technological
society – but they seem to prefer large notepads and coloured pencils. Either that or they just talk and jot down key words. Dialogue, that is the key. Occasionally, through the skylight, I can observe them down in the saloon, deep in discussion, making obscure squiggles on whiteboards. And yet – much of what they do and say reminds me of my own efforts to simulate, to make believe when I was small. Is this what it all comes down to:
rediscovering
the realms of imagination, the childhood belief in the impossible?

The smell of
chicken korma
drifts from the galley. A gimballed Primus stove with two burners is no hindrance to Martin. My thoughts turn to Kamala. She will be joining us at Fjærland. I miss her. My meeting Kamala was – how can I put it – an undeserved gift. Kamala saved me. She saved my life, it is as simple as that.

Sometimes I have the notion that I must have acquired a new identity in prison. No one recognises me. I have been forgotten. Not my name, but my appearance. I ought to be pleased, look upon this as cover of a sort. Because in people’s minds my name is linked as much with a crime as with my
television
celebrity. Everyone believes that I killed my wife. It was on the front page of every newspaper, it was proclaimed on the television and radio, and it was established by judge and jury in a court of law.

Why did she do it? I need to write more. 

While there could, of course, be several explanations for Jonas Wergeland’s fantastic flair for picture-making, his success in television should come as no surprise to any of those who know that in his youth he associated with such greats as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many people can boast of having attended the French school in Oslo, but very few have, like Jonas Wergeland, belonged to the Italian school.

Jonas and Leo became chums towards the end of their time at elementary school, but did not become really close friends until both started at the local junior high school, Groruddalen Realskole, only a couple of stone throws from the railway station. Jonas’s new road to school took him past the church and down the steep slope of Teppaveien, and in one of the old villas on this road lived Leonard Knutzen. Leonard always stood and waited for Jonas, or rather: sat waiting on the satchel which they used in those days instead of a rucksack and which, in the winter, they would send skimming down the hill like a curling stone. At one point during the eighties, after Leonardo’s
sensational
activities became public knowledge, Jonas received a number of
tempting
offers from the tabloids to speak out on the subject of their boyhood friendship. He turned them all down. But he could just see the headlines, what a story, full of details which no one could have guessed at.

Leonard’s family belonged to the bastion of the district’s working-class; for generations they had walked at the head of the local 1st of May parade. Aptly enough, their house rested on a solid granite plinth, as if in tribute to the valley’s proud stonemason tradition. Not only that, but they also
overlooked
the area where the first mills had been built, beside the falls at Alna. Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father was a big, burly, majestic-looking man with a backswept mane not unlike that of the writer and Nobel prize-winner
Bjørnstjerne
Bjørnson. It was quite obvious to Jonas that Leonard adored him. In the summer, father and son would go off on long walks in the hills together, and in the winter they would sleep out in snow holes. Leonard, too, was tall and well-built, and he had his father’s flashing eyes. Leonard liked to joke that he and Jonas were of royal blood, since both their fathers – Haakon and Olav – were called after kings. ‘We’re both princes,’ he declared, thumping Jonas on the back.

Jonas would later think of this time in his life as the Age of Wrath. Because what did they do? They sat in the Knutzens’ basement, whipping themselves
up into a fury. I yell, therefore I am – that was their watchword. They joined the endless ranks of young men who are filled with pent-up rage in their late teens – a wrath which may simply stem from disgruntlement over the fact that there are no changes taking place in the world around them to match the revolutions that have suddenly broken out in their heads and bodies. But for Jonas there was more to it than that: these furious verbal outbursts also acted as a safety valve, a way of giving vent to his frustration at not being able to turn his parallel thoughts, his feeling of being in possession of exceptional gifts, into something concrete – some extraordinary deed, for example.

In fact, Jonas’s anger had actually burst into full flame on the day when he was brought down and hurt so badly by that Lyn player on the football pitch. He made a secret vow to stay way out on the sidelines for the rest of his life. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had founded their own republic, the Republic of the Outside Left, in Leonard’s basement. Jonas espied the
glimmering
of an alternative mission in life: to become the greatest Norwegian outsider of all time. He had not yet abandoned his dream of making a name for himself, but as yet he had come no closer to it than when, in eighth grade, he found himself in the headmaster’s office, standing stiffly to attention in front of HRH – His Royal Highness – himself, having to explain why he had committed an act of vandalism by carving his initials into his desk in large capital letters.

So when Leonard announced that they were going to work up an
indignation
towards society and an aloofness from it which would make the
airy-fairy
Kristiania Bohemia of another age look like a sweet little kindergarten, Jonas was with him all the way. It was the two of them, Jonas and Leonard, against the rest of the world. Against the rest of the universe. They would spend hours sitting in the basement, that breathing space from their
otherwise
intolerable and stiflingly inane surroundings, in a world which seemed even flatter than before, pouring curses and gall on the heads of moronic teachers, gormless girls, overrated sporting heroes, brainless television
presenters
, talentless Norwegian pop groups, the rat-faced hotdog seller at the stall next to the taxi stance; even Kjell Bondevik, the Minister for Church and Education, whom they had never met, nor seen, and about whom they knew very little, came in for his share of abuse. Not even the stupid old moon was safe from them. What was it doing, hanging about up there, enticing
rocket-mad
men with its cheesy face? In short, they showed no mercy. Towards anything or anybody. The word happiness, which cropped up at every turn, was taboo. ‘Get mad!’ was their motto. If, during this period, some brave soul had confronted them with the Bo Wang Lee question ‘What should you take with you?’ they would have had no hesitation in replying: ‘Nothing!’ Had it
been up to them, the Ark could have been torpedoed out of the water any time. In the end, though, the incident on the football pitch was not enough of an explanation; Jonas did not know where all the resentment, the
boundless
contempt sprang from, or the unstoppable stream of sarcasm. He had heard that colours could affect people’s moods and for a long time he
wondered
whether the walls in the basement might actually have had an effect on their subconscious minds. Because the basement walls were painted bright red. Leonard’s father called it the Red Room after the café immortalised in Strindberg’s novel of that name, the Bohemian haunt of artists and literati. Whatever the case, since they were now possessed of this fiery temperament, Jonas realised – after a while, at least – that what mattered was to give it direction.

He was in a fortunate position, having for years been able to observe his brother’s demonstrations of different possible plans of attack. Daniel – who in Jonas’s mind was always not just one, but ten years his senior – had proved very early on to have a talent for playing the outsider. This was made perfectly clear, if it had not been before, one time when he had the mumps. He had come swaggering into the living room, all puffy-cheeked and wearing Rakel’s cigarette-fumed biker jacket – the resemblance to a very young Marlon Brando was staggering. ‘The wild one,’ he growled with feverish relish before staggering back to bed.

Jonas never knew where his brother found his inspiration, where he picked up his knowledge of Marlon Brando, for example, or other ‘rebels’ who were not particularly well-known at that time, or certainly not to boys of Daniel’s age. When asked, usually at large family gatherings, to speak about his plans for the future, he did not get flustered and stammer, as other teenagers might; Daniel would get quietly to his feet, his eyes burning, and commence by intoning: ‘I have a dream …’ He once went on a hunger strike for several days – he was actually capable of such a thing – in protest against his parents ‘strict’ ruling that he had to be in by nine o’clock in the evening. He solemnly declared that he was acting in the spirit of Mahatma Ghandi, and Haakon and Åse Hansen, inwardly smiling, were forced to relent. An attempt to mount a
demonstration
to demand that the whole estate be allowed to pick the apples in Wolfgang Michaelsen’s garden came, however, to nothing. Daniel had a failing. Just as Jonas wavered between various projects in life, so Daniel wavered between different rebel role models. One day he was to be found wearing a funny black cap, nasally whining ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the next he would be driving his mother to despair by charging about with a bucket in one hand, splattering paint onto huge sheets of paper spread out on the floor. He simply could not discover what his field of rebellion should be.

Jonas had always been convinced that his brother would end up as a soldier, become a sort of guerrilla leader. As a child, Daniel had loved everything to do with war and fighting and had evinced the most tireless inventiveness when it came to weapons. He very quickly discovered that it was best to load a cap gun with a strip of caps four layers thick, and by making an adjustment to the workings of the battery-driven machine guns which later appeared on the market he could produce a noise that left the little kids stunned. There was something special about the rubber bands and scraps of leather from which Daniel’s catapults were constructed that made his stones fly further; he refined peashooters to the point where the other kids feared him as much as an Amazon Indian with a blowpipe and poison darts. He was forever coming up with better materials for his bows, and fixed the lead tips from real bullets to his arrows. If not on the military front then Jonas certainly expected his brother to make a name for himself within the field of weapon technology. Instead Daniel, who also happened to be a hell of a ladies’ man, became a man of the cloth. So what happened?

Daniel was what Jonas would have called a tiresomely high achiever. He just kept forging ahead, as if on some endless red carpet, did not know the meaning of the word ‘opposition’. It was the same with sport, which also looked like being the one area in which Daniel could give his rebellious tendencies full play. Daniel had always been a fitness fanatic. He had, for example, been Grorud’s first proud owner of a Bullworker, a piece of equipment not unlike a telescope or a bazooka for which ads had suddenly started popping up
everywhere
and which just as quickly became the word on every boy’s lips, because it could give you a bull-like physique in no time flat. Jonas could not compress the cylinder by so much as a centimetre. Daniel, on the other hand, pumped it in and out with ease, while at the same time – as if the masturbation-style action automatically led his thoughts in that direction – holding forth on his latest girlish conquest.

It was, however, in athletics that Daniel was expected to do great things. He meant to walk – or rather, run – in the footsteps of the Kvalheim brothers who hailed from the flats down by Grorud station. Jonas had always admired Daniel’s alarming gift for self-abuse; it could be snowing buckets and still his brother would be out running; he practised interval and tempo training until he collapsed or threw up. And through it all he remained a rebel. Where Jonas, more by accident than design, had a scar in the shape of a little x above his eyebrow, there came a day when Daniel put a large X after his name. This came in the wake of the summer Olympics in Mexico City. Daniel insisted on being known only as Daniel X and that autumn, at an athletics meet at which he had won every event, he mounted the podium wearing dark sunglasses
and a black glove on his right fist which he held demonstratively in the air. It all went so well and was so outrageously provocative until some aggrieved soul asked him what he was protesting against. At first Daniel was lost for an answer. It was one thing to protest against curfews and high garden fences, quite another to stick one’s fist in the air, and a black-gloved fist at that. He saved the situation with a watertight reply: ‘Everything!’

But in protesting against everything you protested against nothing. And when it came to the crunch Daniel’s anger, too, lacked direction. So maybe that was why he put an X after his name, to indicate that he was searching for a particular, but hidden, field which lay there waiting for him and his
rebellious
urges. To Jonas, the letter X seemed more indicative of a mysterious, unknown side to Daniel’s character. This suspicion was soon confirmed. His big brother finally met with opposition: a nerve-wracking experience which brought him down to earth with a bump. Daniel ran, as it were, smack into the gravity of life. And, of course, it involved a girl

Prior to this event and parallel with Daniel’s more harmless excesses, Jonas and Leonard conducted their passive protest in the Red Room. They were rebels without a cause. For months at a time, against all good advice, they let the sun go down on their anger. After a while, though, there was not much to be got out of whiling away their time down in the basement, nursing their seething contempt for everything and everyone. It was like sitting next to a pot of boiling water with nothing to put in it. For a time, therefore, their anger looked set to take a socially conscious turn. They decided to follow in the footsteps of Leonard’s father. And Leonard’s father was not just anybody.

One forenoon on board the
Voyager
, as we were about to bear due south into Aurlandsfjord, I came upon Jonas Wergeland sitting on a bollard. He was writing in a book which he must have bought in Lærdal, a big thick
notebook
with blank pages and stiff covers. We were just sailing past the
Frønningen
estate with its fine, white manor-house and the pine forest behind – we already knew that this was the family home of a famous painter, that the place even had its own art gallery. Martin was on the foredeck, on the lookout for killer whales – a school had recently been spotted in the area. The smell of the loaves he was baking in the old wood oven was already drifting up from the galley. Jonas Wergeland made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was writing, he merely looked up, smiled. I noticed that he wrote in a big, neat script. Like a beginner, someone who has not had much experience of writing by hand. It occurred to me that he might have been inspired by the surrounding scenery, by Sognefjord. If, that is, it was not the suspicion, or the knowledge, rather, that I was writing about him.

I had not meant to write anything. I do not know when the idea came to
me. Maybe it was when he spoke about his
auto-da-fé
. He had spent several years working on a manuscript. As far as I know I was the only one to have seen it. I thought of Nehru, who wrote a history of the world for his daughter while he was in prison. For some years I regularly received envelopes
containing
twenty or thirty pages which I, in turn, handed back when I went to visit him – or rather, they had to pass through security control before getting to him. I read it like a serial. He did not ask for my comments. Sometimes I would say something, other times not. Had I known that he would destroy it, I might have made a copy. Although I don’t know. It was so – how can I put it – clumsy. Or, at least: there was so much of it, it was such a muddle. As if he was forever trying to get everything down. Even so, now and again he would write a passage which completely bowled me over, something so dazzlingly astute and original. And poignant. I read it with a mixture of confusion and gratitude. He also wrote about people and events that no one else had ever mentioned. About Mr Dehli the schoolmaster, about Bo Wang Lee, about a breathtaking kiss on Karl Johans gate. Nonetheless, I always had the feeling that he was circling around something, a central point which he could not capture in words.