The Discoverer (12 page)

As a young woman Aunt Laura had made a chess set, with gold and silver plated miniatures of famous sculptures for the pieces. For the bishop she had chosen the Ancient Greek statue of the discus thrower, for the knight, Marcus Aurelius on horseback; Brancusi’s slender
Bird
was the rook, Michelangelo’s
David
the pawn and to Henry Moore’s
Reclining Woman
fell the honour of being the queen. Jonas learned a bit about art history along with the rules of the game. So for him chess was not so much a game as a story consisting of criss-crossing tales; tales, what is more, which dated from different times, since the pieces reflected the styles of a wide variety of eras. Not even the fact that his aunt wore a silk dressing gown which made her appear more naked than if she had been wearing nothing at all could divert Jonas’s attention from all those different sculptures. Brancusi’s bird was particularly intriguing. The artist seemed almost to have caught what lay
behind
the bird’s flight.

But the main point here is this: the first time Jonas laid eyes on Aunt Laura’s king, namely August Rodin’s
The Thinker
, he lapsed into reverie. That’s me, a voice inside him cried; that’s mankind, that’s how we are. Aunt Laura would always mean a great deal to Jonas, but above all else he loved her for making
The Thinker
the king. From that day in his aunt’s flat at Tøyen he
was sure: his talent had, in some way, to be related to thinking. Jonas would promptly have applauded René Descartes, had he known of that gentleman’s attempt to establish one thing for certain, with his celebrated statement
concerning
the relationship between thinking and being.

Nobel prize-winners are often to be heard describing how as children they took old radios apart or built little laboratories in which they carried out chemical experiments. Jonas made do with his own thoughts. His mind was all the laboratory he needed. He took to meditating. In the most literal sense: he sat himself down and proceeded, quite resolutely, to reflect on things, letting observations run into one another while at the same time
endeavouring
to be aware of what he was doing, to map out where his thoughts were taking him. The average human being is said to have fifty thousand thoughts a day and it was as if Jonas meant to scrutinise every one of his – make a record of them, just as he would sit by the roadside, noting down car
registrations
. After a while he discovered that, oddly enough, his thoughts flowed best when he assumed the same position as Rodin’s figure: with his chin resting on his fist, his elbow propped on his thigh. From this point onwards his teachers and his chums would automatically resort to the same words to describe Jonas: ‘He’s a
thoughtful
character.’

Of all the many aspects of contemplation, the one at which Jonas really excelled was make-believe. Before too long he had become a master of
pretence
. He had the ability to create whole worlds inside his head, experience them with all his senses. Before leaving elementary school he had visited some of the most exotic countries on earth, really thought himself there with the aid of odd bits of information he had heard or had gleaned from school books. He had even visited Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. All you needed was a little piece of something and your imagination would do the rest, like Sherlock Holmes finding a scrap of clothing. Thanks to his powers of
imagination
Jonas had been a lion and a flower, not to mention a pencil and the gas helium. As for women: he had kissed Cleopatra – she had smelled of milk – before he had his first kiss. By the age of eleven, Jonas Wergeland was afraid that the world had been used up. He suspected, in other words, that he had reached a dead end where the possibilities of thought were concerned. He was also well aware that he was quite alone in appreciating his gift. At the start of a new school term, when the teacher asked where they had spent their holidays, Jonas had replied: ‘In the Kalahari desert. With the pygmies.’
Everybody
had laughed. They had fallen about. They did not see that a fabrication could be as real as reality could be fabricated. Or, to put it another way: that the fiction could be less flat than the real thing.

So it took Jonas a while to get to the stage where he wanted, or dared,
to properly acknowledge his almost unnerving talent for thinking. But this new sense of self-awareness triggered a chain reaction: he discovered that he was also gifted in other areas; discovered also how alarmingly simple it is to distinguish oneself, how easy to score cheap points.

Like most children, Jonas liked kicking a football around. At Solhaug, they played on the grass or on small, rough patches of waste ground. Any car park could be Ullevål stadium, or Wembley. They had next to no interest in tactics, or formations, ‘line-ups’ as they are now called. It was basically a big free-for-all, with everybody going for the ball at the same time, and everybody taking a shot at goal as soon as they got it. It was as much like wrestling or rugby as it was football.

Jonas did not take football too seriously: it was a game, a way of killing the odd half-hour until dinner was ready. And although he clearly had a way with the ball and was quick on his feet, he did not take up the game seriously until quite late on. It was Jonas’s best friend, Leonard Knutzen – Leo for short, later to be better known by his professional name, Leonardo – who persuaded him to overcome his shyness and join the Grorud under-15s team. And here I should perhaps say that schoolboy football in the sixties was not such a serious and competitive business as it is today; nor was there any great fight for places on the team. So, since they were short of a forward on the left side of the field and since Jonas was equally good with both feet this was the position he was given. Back then it was called the ‘left wing’ – which sounded as if you were in the air force – or ‘outside left’. Jonas immediately felt at home there.

Two things surprised Jonas once he started playing football more seriously. The first had to do with the fact that he was now playing on a proper pitch. The new pitch at Grorud sports ground had only just been laid; it looked so beautiful and, more importantly, it was absolutely
massive.
To Jonas, used to the narrow mazes around the garages and blocks of flats, this was
undreamt-of
freedom. Here you could really kick up your heels. He was all the more astonished to find, therefore, that even at this level players had a tendency to crowd together in the centre of the field. And it did not take Jonas long to discover – speaking of wings – that he had a whole runway to himself on the left-hand side.

Nonetheless, he played it canny. He held back, as if knowing intuitively that this discovery – like all significant discoveries – could have fateful
consequences
. He started with a few trial runs, as if to check whether it was
true
– had the other team really not realised that from here he could stroll unhindered all the way up to their goal line? No, it was right enough. Again and again he was able to sprint in lone majesty up to the visitors’ corner flag.
He took more and more delight in this: dribbling the ball, kicking it up the touchline, sometimes all the way to the goal line. It had a demoralising effect on the other team. Jonas felt as though he had discovered an unknown side of football. Sometimes he wished he could have gone even further, tried running off the pitch, along the strip between the chalked line and the gravel;
transcended
the possibilities of the game.

Even though Jonas Wergeland’s cheeky raids on the left wing cannot be compared to the so-called ‘Flo pass’ used so much by the Norwegian national team in the 1990s – a long lob from Jostein Flo’s own half of the pitch to one of the forwards, who would then knock the ball on with his head – these two phenomena had one thing in common: both were examples of bold strategies, staggeringly simple moves which produced good results.

Jonas grew more and more daring and Leo, who had caught on quickly, spotted that Jonas was alone out there on the left wing, sent the sweetest crossballs flying straight to his toes. Jonas would charge up the touchline, all the way to the other team’s goal line, then chip the ball neatly into the box – where, not infrequently Leo ran in to put the ball in the net.

If, that is, he did not score himself. Because the other discovery he had made also had to do with the scale of things. With the goal. At home in Solhaug they had played with narrow goalmouths and no keepers: two bricks a metre apart or two jerseys for posts, possibly with one of the little kids standing between them as an excuse for a goalkeeper. But here he had a proper goal. A huge cage. Designed for giants, so it seemed. A huge expanse of sky between the ground and the bar. A barn wall between the posts. Jonas did not get it: how could you not score, at least if you were inside the sixteen metre line and not actually unconscious at the time? Later in life – and knowing what he knew – he could hardly stand to watch a football match, to see so-called professional players who were being paid millions, sending the ball flying over the bar from only five metres outside an open goal. They were obsessed with the need to impress. They couldn’t just score, they had to make the back of the net bulge. So they shot too hard, or were so intent on doing something spectacular that they miskicked completely. Jonas found it painful to watch, proof as it was of the male’s eternal problem: lack of control.

As a boy, Jonas discovered that you could get away with a remarkably soft shot, as long as it was well placed. If you were ten metres away from the goal and aimed to place the ball just inside the post it would get past most keepers. While the other boys were busy practising juggling with the ball, Jonas came up with a new training exercise for himself. Following the example of tennis player Bjørn Borg, he hit the ball up against a wall or a garage door at home. He worked on his marksmanship, shooting at the same spot again and again.
And although he had a lot of different shots at his disposal he tended mainly to practise the simplest and the safest: a chip off the inside, the broad side, of the foot. Sometimes he used a tennis ball, to make it more difficult. And it paid off. Grorud’s under-15s began to move up the league. And Jonas was their top scorer. Jonas was not your typical Norwegian. He was best with a ball.

He was careful, though, not to make too big an impression. Tried not to score more than two goals in any match, preferably none at all if he could see that Grorud was going to win anyway. Because there was something else to which he had soon become alive: the hostility of the opposing team. Their rancour if humiliated more than was necessary. Jonas did not like rough play, hard tackling – especially since in those days hardly anyone wore shin guards, certainly not Jonas. He was, both on and off the pitch, an extremely peaceable character. Only once did he ever hit anyone: when some guy declared that the Beatles’
Rubber Soul
was a rotten album. This unsuspecting individual was knocked flat; Jonas was so mad that it was all Leo could do to calm him down. Aside from this one incident, though, Jonas was never involved in any trouble in his teens.

But then came the day of their home game against Lyn – the Lyn
under-15s
team, top of the league and a team which boasted some very good players, lads who might well make it onto the Lyn first division team, maybe even the national squad. Lightning by name and lightning by nature, that was Lyn; a club from the middle-class west side of Oslo, from the Outside Right, you might say. Grorud versus Lyn – talk about a class war. Before the match, Jonas spent hours honing his dribbling technique on the green at home. Watch out, he told himself; this is going to be a helluva battle, a momentous match.

In the years prior to this Jonas had been more given to dribbling thoughts. The more intricate the contemplative pattern the better. While other people tried to put their thoughts in order, Jonas attempted to do the opposite. He did not shy away from the really big questions in life, deliberations worthy of Immanuel Kant himself: ‘What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?’, but would also throw himself, with just as great a will, into the consideration of lesser, but just as pressing questions, such as why the yellow chewing gum in the Kip pack tasted better than the pink or the pale-green. It was not unknown for him to speculate until his head spun. The way Jonas saw it, there was only one valid reason for passing out: because you had
overtaxed
your mind.

Even before he started playing football – possibly in consequence of his life-saving fiasco – Jonas knew that he was not destined to imitate any of the standard, archetypal success stories: winning an Olympic gold for skiing,
becoming a company director, opening the finest restaurant in Norway. Others might lock themselves away in their rooms with guitars for years, to then emerge as stars. Somehow Jonas felt that this was too simple. He was cut out for other things. He wanted to be thinking’s answer to soccer-great Roald Jensen. His talent lay in his grey matter. Which made it the perfect endowment for a rather reserved young man. He would be free to perform his deeds, break new ground, without being surrounded by crowds of people.

Jonas grew more and more inclined to regard the mental raids he carried out and the networks he formed inside his head as being real. It occurred to him that the most dramatic, the most significant event in his life could be a thought. As a small boy he had often dreamt of making a name for himself by discovering something – an unknown mineral, an unknown flower or, best of all, an unknown land – and having it called after him. It made him sad to hear the grown-ups say that there were no white patches left on the map of the world. Now, however, he realised that he
could
discover a new continent, but that it would lie within him.

His visits to Karen Mohr in her herb-scented Provençal flat confirmed this belief. You could actually
live
inside a thought. For quite some time Jonas had had the notion that she had taken an idea and furnished it, turned it into a home, a suspicion which was only reinforced when she eventually got round to telling him, in her quiet way, the story behind her extraordinary living room.