The Discoverer (45 page)

Even as a child, Jonas understood that the words in books, particularly works of fiction, could be addictive, and read therefore only as much as was absolutely necessary. He did, of course, have to look at those volumes used in school, but even these he merely skimmed, with all his mental defences raised. He knew that at any minute he might be carried off to some
Lambaréné
, that a slightly unfortunate choice of book could result in him selling up on the spur of the moment and going off to Calcutta to help the poor. But since the works on the school syllabus were usually ruined for ever by one zealous teacher or another, Jonas escaped unscathed.

He never forgot, though, the lesson which Daniel had thumped into him: books
were
a weapon. They were dangerous. And like wolves, they were at their most dangerous in packs – as he discovered when a shelf full of books came crashing down on him in Karen Mohr’s bedroom. Only rarely did Jonas venture into a bookshop or a library – it was almost as if he half-expected that at any moment the bookshelves would come tumbling down on his head again, and bury him, or that the books themselves, seeing that he was alone, would attack him and tear him to shreds. The unease which Jonas felt in a well-stocked bookshop was not unlike Tippi Hedren’s dread of the crows and gulls perched on tree branches and railings all around her in Alfred
Hitchcock’s
horror film
The Birds.

And yet – one day, of his own free will, Jonas picked up a book. Why? Because he was in love. And because he wanted to kill a fly.

This was in the days between Christmas and New Year, barely a year after Jonas, now a young man, had met Margrete again. They were spending the holiday somewhere on the outskirts of Jotunheimen, in a cottage owned by Margrete’s parents. Jonas had been working for a short time as an announcer with NRK, he was just beginning to notice the first signs of his growing fame. Beyond the rough log walls it was bitterly cold, more than twenty below zero. They went only for short ski trips in the middle of the day, their shadows long in the almost horizontal rays of the low sun. The rest of the time they made love. They made a bed for themselves in front of the fireplace in the living room so that they would at all times have a view of the landscape outside. They lived on love and hot cocoa. Jonas had never felt so contented, so blissful, so inexplicably happy. He was, you might say, laid wide open to new impulses.

Sometimes Margrete would read. On one such occasion Jonas was lying staring into space, limp from lovemaking and intense conversations. All was quiet. No wind. A fly, wakened by the heat in the cottage, began to buzz; it was like the hiss of a snake in Paradise. Jonas glanced round for something to hit it with and his eye lighted on a paltry shelf of dog-eared paperbacks. He pulled out a copy at random and flattened the fly at the first attempt. Without looking up, Margrete murmured from her chair: ‘Books are not weapons.’

What was the greatest danger to which Jonas Wergeland was ever exposed? Not an easy one to answer, one would think. He had reefed sail in a gale in the middle of the night. He had ignited fury in an English pub. If anyone had asked Wergeland himself he would, however, have had no
hesitation
in replying: ‘The biggest risk I ever took was to read a book.’

He stood there holding the old paperback, weighing it in his hand. He was feeling a little reckless. He sank down into a chair, opened the book at the first page and began to read. Margrete and he sat each in their chair, with the mountain right in front of them if they raised their eyes: a slope so steep that the snow did not lie there, a normally black rock face to which the
freezing
cold and the low sun now lent a pinkish cast, a view which seemed almost to belong to another country, another planet. Jonas thought fleetingly of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, of the possibility of opening up the terrain. He dropped his eyes to his book again. He did not know that with this seemingly harmless act he had let a wolf out of its cage and that all unknown to him this wolf was now sneaking up on him from behind. For a few fateful seconds Jonas Wergeland forgot all about his ingrained sense of mistrust. He forgot what a profound impact a novel can have on one. He forgot that every work
of fiction, even a flimsy paperback, is a Bible, a sacred text, containing layer upon layer of meaning. In opening a book you could be putting your whole view of the world to the test.

He should have remembered, because in junior high they had also had Mr Dehli for a third subject, one which the schoolmaster himself maintained, with all the enthusiasm and inspiring authority at his command – which is saying something – to be the most important subject of them all: Bible studies, or religion, as the students called it. ‘Choose religion and you choose everything,’ Mr Dehli asserted.

It possibly bears repeating, since teachers of this calibre are the
exception
: Mr Dehli saw himself not just as a teacher, but also as a guide and mentor. His pupils had to learn facts, but they also had to bear in mind that something bound these facts together. Even in subjects such as Norwegian and history. Mr Dehli dared to bandy that inflammatory word ‘meaning’. ‘And nowhere is the attempt to establish meaning more apparent than in the
religions
of the world,’ he said. Over a couple of years, Jonas was introduced to the main principles of Islam, Hinduism, Shinto and Buddhism; in other words, he was made aware that there were other philosophies of life besides the Christian one. This may seem obvious, but it was not obvious to Jonas – he belonged, after all, to the last generation in Norway which had to learn Luther’s little catechism by heart.

How could so many fail to see it? Page upon page has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s years at elementary school and high school. But no one has looked at the two years in between. Nevertheless, it was here in junior high that Jonas’s curiosity about the world, not to say life, was truly awakened. It would not be too far from the truth to say that, during this time, Jonas came very close to becoming a Hindu.

Mr Dehli – who did not turn up for classes in a duster coat, but in his best bib and tucker, so to speak – told them even more than usual about
Hinduism
, possibly because he was especially interested in this religion himself, or because this was the late sixties, when the fascination with all things Eastern was at its height and celebrities were flocking to India to sit at the feet of more or less genuine gurus. All of a sudden it was orange robes, Hare Krishna, sitars and incense at every turn.

It was through Hinduism that Jonas was introduced to Maya. Although this was, of course, not a girl called Maya as Jonas had first thought, but
māyā
, a concept. Mr Dehli, sporting an exceptionally colourful bow tie for the occasion and with a snowy-white silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket, explained to them that there were many different interpretations of
māyā
, but that
māyā
, roughly speaking, was a principle which prevented us
from seeing the world as it really was. You mistook something for something else. A coiled rope became a snake.
Māyā
worked mainly in two ways: it could conceal something, or it could present something false. The concept of
māyā,
the great cosmic illusion, may have grown out of an ancient weaving symbol, an image representing creativity. Mr Dehli produced a strip of gauze bandage and covered his eyes with it: ‘With my sight thus masked there would be things in the room which I would not notice, on the other hand my eyes could perhaps be confused or deluded into seeing certain other things that are not there. I might, for example, think that Pernille was a statue. Having a little snooze, Pernille?’

Due to our ignorance we apprehended only the material world and not the real world behind it. We could not cope with the idea of infinity and so we created something finite for ourselves: the world. But it was only because we were as if hypnotised that we mistook this mirage for reality.
‘Māyā
can be compared to a cloud covering the sun, the moon and the stars,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘And this cloud is there because our consciousness is not clear enough. There is a veil before our eyes. But not everything is an illusion. There is something behind the cloud. Without it there would be no illusion.’

It occurred to Jonas that Leonard had been on the right track: it all came down to honing the eye. The Hindu view of the world, with its assertion that the power of
māyā
concealed the true nature of existence proved in many ways to be a lifeline for Jonas, a ray of hope. It confirmed his firm belief that there had to be something
behind
the flatness – of both the world and people, including himself – which was a constant vexation to him. Because, if there were several planes, veil upon veil, might they not even form a chamber, create some sort of depth?

The first time Jonas heard his teacher speak of
māyā,
he was reminded of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, but later he came to think of another, more infamous episode. Those who are familiar with life at Grorud around that time will not be surprised to hear that this drama centred around a boy by the name of Ivan. Ivan – a problem child, to put it mildly – had long had a crush on the daughter of Arild Pettersen, or Arild the Glazier as he was known, after his business: he was the local Grorud glazier, and most people were acquainted with him through no choice of their own, thanks to accidents great and small. His slogan was: Life is a smash. The best bit, as far as the kids were concerned, was his van, a Volkswagen truck with a flat bed and a rack shaped like an upside-down V on which the plates of glass were carried. One day Ivan took his courage in both hands – in such circumstances even Ivan had to steel himself – and asked Britt, as the object of his affections was called, if she would go out with him, a request which, with the perverse,
heartless temerity that girls can display, she flatly rejected. Why didn’t he just run on home, cheeky sod – who the hell did he think he was?

Ivan slunk off, but everybody knew that the matter would not end there. This was, after all, Ivan. A bunch of boys dogged Ivan’s footsteps at a safe distance for the rest of the day, to act as chroniclers of an event which they knew would become legendary. Suddenly the central character announced: ‘I’ll bloody well smash her window in, so I will.’ Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, Ivan set out, cool as you like, to do the deed – only to find, on reaching the house, that Arild the Glazier’s little truck was parked right in front of Britt’s ground-floor bedroom, which looked onto the driveway. Ivan was not one to be put off by a little thing like that. ‘I’ll just have to smash my way through then,’ he muttered, loud enough for the others to hear.

He went for a walk round about and returned with his hands and his pockets full of stones. Afterwards the other lads would try to outdo one another with their descriptions of what happened next. Ivan had thrown the first stone with convincing ferocity and a huge pane of glass had shattered and landed in a tinkling heap on the bed of the truck. Ivan hurled another stone, as surely as the first and another pane of glass disintegrated. And so he continued, unleashing a never-ending avalanche of glass. He threw and he threw as the sheets of glass came cascading down one after another. But he never did break through to Britt’s window, or, as he saw it: to Britt’s heart,
behind
all the sheets of glass. Britt’s Dad must have had more panes than usual on the back of the truck that day, layer upon layer of them. Ivan was growing desperate. He was breaking sheets of glass as fast as he could, if only to get her at least to show face, but there seemed to be no end to it – or not, at any rate, until Arild the Glazier himself finally came out and belatedly, but effectively put a stop to the vandalism with a headlock invested with more than mere upset at the shattered window panes.

That, thought Jonas, that is how it must be with
māyā
. An endless
succession
of windows. We would never be able to break through to the truth.
Māyā
spoke, quite simply of gaping holes in our knowledge. When Jonas pictured the world as being flat, this was exactly what he was getting at. Everyone was well aware that our view of the world, our view of human nature, would be totally different in a few hundred years, in a thousand years. And yet we believed, surprisingly often at least, that we knew just about everything there was to know.
Māyā
showed us that we knew very little.

Schoolmaster Dehli had another, possibly even better, way of
illustrating
this. He positioned himself next to the map rack. ‘Just as maps are like masks of the world, so the world is merely a mask covering something else, something more real,’ he said. Sitting at his desk, Jonas thought of Karen
Mohr’s flat, the grey hallway concealing a Provence in the middle of Grorud. Mr Dehli had pulled down all of the maps, about ten altogether. Then he sent them whipping up, one after another, tugging and releasing with superb precision, as if he had had a lot of practice at this. The maps snapped and cracked in a sort of chain reaction, pure pyrotechnics. It made Jonas think of roller-blinds shooting up to disclose an endless succession of different
prospects
, different worlds, until they, the pupils, were almost shaking in their shoes, half expecting something horrendous to stand revealed at the very back, Reality itself, in all its awfulness or beauty. But at the very back – and this Mr Dehli left as it was – hung an enormous map of the solar system, of the cosmos as it were, and of all the hovering jewels here displayed, the one on which Jonas fixed was the planet Uranus, a shimmering green eye. What a show – perfect, like a conjuring trick rounded off with one final mind-
boggling
sleight of hand.

There are too few teachers like Mr Dehli. There are too few teachers who pull such original, inventive educational stunts. Who charge their classrooms with electricity and the smell of chalk dust.

Such sessions were not easily forgotten. Not for nothing did three members of this class go on to become religious historians, while two became ministers of the church. And, even more noteworthy perhaps: five ended up in the Oslo Stock Exchange. As for Jonas, in the first instance they would result in the world coming tumbling about his ears.