Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
Jonas fished out the boat: an exact, thirty-centimetre long replica of the splendid Atlantic liner he had more than once seen docked in Oslo harbour. The propeller was battery-driven and you could flick the rudder back and forth. With the ship cradled in his hands he set out along the path leading to the spit of land further up and there, behind the bushes, was another boy of about Jonas’s own age. A Chinaman, was Jonas’s first thought. And the other boy really did have a Chinese look about him. An impression which was only reinforced later when the boy told him his name: Bo Wang Lee. He seemed very secretive, hastily folded up a map. Jonas only caught a glimpse of a couple of lines clearly forming a cross. They must have been made with the stub of pencil stuck behind the other boy’s ear. Underneath the map a yellow notebook came into view. Bo Wang Lee’s trademarks: a pencil stub and a little yellow notebook.
‘Look,’ Bo said, picking something off the ground. It looked rather like a divining rod, one of those forked sticks used to find water. But Bo Wang Lee was never one to content himself with something as simple as finding water. ‘This is a detector which can locate secret underground chambers,’ he said. The word ‘detector’ alone was enough to impress Jonas. ‘We might be able to discover a treasure vault. Or a whole city even.’ Bo spoke Norwegian with a slight accent. Jonas had the feeling that the other boy was trying to divert his attention from the business with the map.
Jonas said he didn’t see how you could find a whole city underneath the ground. He handed the model ship back to Bo, then he picked up a small, flat stone, threw it hard and low and got it to bounce six or seven times across the surface of the pond. Bo was not to be put off. His father was an archaeologist. And Bo’s father had told him about the mighty Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in China, who had ordered the building of a massive underground tomb for himself. Even though Bo was spouting all this information, Jonas did not
feel that he was showing off. Again Bo brought out his yellow notebook, and proceeded, while apparently consulting it, to paint a vivid picture of how this mausoleum had looked. Just listening to this description almost took Jonas’s breath away. The Emperor Qin had designed his tomb in the form of a whole city – or no, more than just a city: a miniature replica of his empire, a place in which to live even after death, with palaces and little streams of mercury, mountains sculpted out of copper and a firmament studded with pearls. The Emperor Qin’s obsession with immortality bordered on madness, Bo said. A host of intricate and lethal booby traps were meant to prevent robbers from getting at the wonders within. 700,000 of Qin’s subjects were said to have helped build this vast complex. Bo showed Jonas an astonishingly realistic sketch in the yellow notebook, he claimed it was based on the description by an ancient Chinese historian which his father had read aloud to him. ‘When I grow up I’m going to go to China and find that tomb,’ Bo said with a
determined
look on his face. ‘It’s in a place called Xi’an. Will you come with me?’ As if in a symbolic attempt to persuade Jonas he started up the
MS Bergensfjord
again and set it in the water.
‘I don’t see me ever going to China,’ Jonas said as he watched Bo flick a stone across the water too. It skiffed an untold number of times, reaching almost all the way to the other side.
Now Bo Wang Lee was obviously not Chinese, but that is how Jonas would always think of him; he had such an inscrutable air about him, as if he really did belong to some distant, exotic and, above all, tremendously wise civilisation – or as if there was a mysterious buried city inside him too. Later, it struck Jonas that he had felt older during those weeks than he did in all the time spent smouldering with wrath in Leonard Knutzen’s basement.
As time went on Jonas also came to think of Bo as a prince. With his
coal-black
hair, cut in an odd pudding-bowl style – later Jonas would associate it with the Beatles’ hairdos on the cover of
Rubber Soul
– his friend was almost the spitting image of Prince Valiant, whom Jonas had come across in the only comics which Rakel, his sister, deigned to read; she had a whole pile of them under her bed.
The two boys got so caught up in skiffing stones that they did not notice until it was too late that the
MS Bergensfjord
was on a steady course towards the gap in the weir where the water flowed out. Again Jonas felt the perspective twist, felt that the model boat had turned into a real ship and that this slit
represented
a rift in existence, that the boat was not headed for America, but into another reality, at the back of this one. He did not have time to follow these thoughts to their conclusion. They took off along the path, past the diving board and down to the car park next to the weir. They got there just in time
to see the
MS Bergensfjord
come sailing over the falls on a cascade as thin and bright and clear as a curved glass panel, before being dashed inexorably against the rocks in the shallow stream below. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Bo cried, lifting out the model boat which, luckily, was not too badly damaged. As Bo bent down, Jonas noticed a chain with a little disc attached to it fall out of the neck of his shirt. Later he would have the chance to study this disc more closely. There were marks and dashes engraved on either side. ‘It’s cuneiform writing,’ Bo joked. But when he flicked the disc and it spun round fast, Jonas saw the words: I love you. Jonas found this much more impressive than Daniel’s somersault.
Jonas and Bo did not find any treasure under the ground around
Badedammen
that evening, but they did find one another; they found one another with a force that almost made Jonas feel uneasy. He could tell with half an eye that this was someone with whom he would become best friends, that this was the sort of person who would send ripples spreading far into his life. The four weeks which lay ahead of him would seem like one long, breathless journey of discovery, in which simply picking globe-flowers along the banks of the stream became an expedition into the least explored reaches of the Amazonian rainforest, and to sit in Charlie’s Chariot, the wreck of an ancient Volkswagen down at the dump, was to be driving in the arduous Paris-Dakar rally with Bo as navigator and multilingual interpreter. Bo Wang Lee was like a tropical butterfly which, for a brief and unforgettable time, fluttered into Jonas’s life.
‘I’m telling you, we
can
find a whole city,’ Bo said, looking like a giant with the sparkling waterfall, a tiny Niagara Falls, behind him and the Atlantic liner under his arm. And as if to prove the truth of his words he pulled out the yellow notebook and waved it in the air. ‘Are you coming?’
And Jonas went. It is probably safe to say that he would have followed Bo anywhere. In the course of those weeks they undertook an expedition which would stand forever in Jonas’s memory as the most important journey he ever made. They went in search of the Vegans.
After this, Jonas did not hear of Vega again until junior high, when Mr Dehli gave a short, but enthusiastic lecture on the Swedish writer Harry Martinson’s
Aniara
– neither in Norwegian nor history class, but during a
lunch break
, right outside the staffroom door with, beyond it, the packed lunch which Mr Dehli never got to eat. Without once having to straighten his bow tie he told them how the spaceship in this poem cycle was bound for the constellation of Lyra, whose brightest star was called Vega. Oddly enough, modern astronomers believed that there might be life in that very area, the schoolmaster said, hinting with a raised eyebrow at the prophetic gifts of the writer. Then the bell rang.
The last period of that same day finished, incidentally, with this tireless mentor of so many young and angry, but enquiring, minds running an
uncommonly
chalky hand through his hair and making the following
announcement
: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to tell you about Maya. This may change your lives.’ Now
that
was how a school day ought to end. Jonas could hardly wait, he imagined that this Maya had to be some really extraordinary girl. But despite Mr Dehli’s warning he was in no way prepared for the fact that she truly
would
change his life.
Girls frequently took Jonas by surprise. He was, for example, most
definitely
not out girl hunting one Saturday morning two years later when he wandered into the National Gallery and heard music playing. He and Leonard Knutzen were there to check whether it might be possible to use the Antiquities Room, a gallery claustrophobically full of sculptures, in one of Leonard’s – or rather: Leonardo’s – new cine films, a work which, at the
manuscript
stage, was looking exceptionally promising, wanting only just such an unusual location to make it absolutely superb. Jonas was at high school, the Cath, by this time; he did not see as much of Leonard any more, but he still lent a hand with shooting films when the occasion arose – films which, according to Leonard, would do for Oslo what ‘the new wave’ had done for Paris and, before that, the ‘neo-realists’ had for Rome, thanks to his
discriminating
choice of locations. So now and then Jonas would accompany Leonard on his walks around the Norwegian capital in search of symbolic advertising signs on gable ends, dockland areas populated with particularly grim-looking cranes, decoratively tiled entranceways, statues which looked good in pouring rain, parks lit by lamps with metaphysically dull surfaces, staircases which split into two. According to Leonard, the Antiquities Room at the National Gallery was the perfect place with which to illustrate the weighty legacy of history. But Jonas did not join him among the Greek and Roman statues, because he had caught the strains of beautiful – or sweet – music filtering down from the first floor, and followed the sound. It was coming from the room containing the best-known paintings from the National Romantic period: works by Fearnley and Cappelen, Balke and J.C. Dahl – and back then also Tidemand and Gude.
In the centre of the room was a string orchestra. They were playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Serenade in C-major’. But even more captivating, for Jonas, than the music was the sight of a girl sitting in the front row, playing the violin and, in the absence of a conductor, directing the others with nods of her head and raised eyebrows. She was in the parallel class to his at the Cath. She had caught his eye mainly because he had seen her carrying a square guitar case. And if this surprised him, then he had been even more impressed to find that
it contained a red and white twelve-string Rickenbacker, identical to the one which George Harrison had played in the first Beatles film. At a meeting of the school debating society she had rigged up an amp and played a couple of instrumental numbers so brilliantly and with such feeling that everyone there had been completely knocked out. He asked around after this, found out a bit about her. Sarah B. was her name and she played in a girl band, one of the few which would, in fact, attract some – well-merited – notice at the time; and in later years she would become even better known as an ambassador for the arts in Norway with her electric twelve-string guitar, a pioneer within what became known as world music, a blend of folk airs, jazz and timeless
melodies
– an echo perhaps of the house in which she had grown up, designed by an eccentric father: a mansion bristling with spires and turrets and stylistic features drawn from every corner of the globe. Jonas had only ever seen her playing an electric guitar, he was not at all prepared for the sight of her sitting here in a gallery, dressed in a long, elegant dress, rather like a throwback to the previous century, and with a violin in her hands. It would be some years yet before she came down in favour of the guitar as her first instrument.
It was an impressive sight. These young people, in the most fascinating of all the fascinating rooms in the National Gallery; romantic music performed in a gallery full of marble busts and gilded frames, glistening oil paintings of moons half-hidden behind dramatic cloud formations and wrecks being relentlessly beaten against sharp rocks. All the members of the orchestra were elegantly dressed, the boys in dark suits, the girls in long dark-blue frocks of various design, and with their hair up. All were possessed with that elation and ardour only found in young musicians who have just reached the stage where they can master any piece of music. There was an exuberance and a passion in their playing, in the tossing of their heads, the flaring nostrils, the glances they exchanged, that you never saw in an established orchestra
consisting
of older, experienced musicians. To Jonas they all looked as though they were in love. As though this wholehearted, fiery performance was merely the foreplay to some steamy, feverish lovemaking. He could not tear his eyes away from Sarah. She made a natural focal point with her theatrical, but at the same time natural arm movements. Jonas felt particularly drawn to her hands and fingers; one had the impression that she could have done anything with them, produce sound from a stone. And as he watched, as she kindled and sustained a wonder in him and in the other museumgoers who stopped short then sank down, entranced, onto the chairs set round about, he thought what a rare delight it would be to feel those graceful fingers on the back of his neck, running through his hair.
The paintings gave added resonance to Tchaikovsky’s serenade, the music
lent a new glow to the canvases on the walls. Balke’s pale images of the North Cape and the lighthouse on Vardø positively
shimmered
. Jonas ran his eye over motif after motif, over mountains, glaciers and waterfalls, cog-built farmhouses and milkmaids in traditional costume, menhirs and herds of wild reindeer. It may even have been that Jonas saw the twenty-odd paintings in the room as forming a frieze illustrating Norway itself: an impression so powerful that – yes, why not – he actually began work on his television series
Thinking
Big
right here.
And speaking of that mammoth television production: we have already touched on Jonas Wergeland’s schooldays, so something ought also to be said about the final and by far the most surprising phase of his education, a brief, but momentous apprenticeship on which he embarked towards the end of his time as an announcer on NRK television.