The other guests were Nina and Bernt’s friends, but for that reason they had also become close acquaintances of Professor Andersen. Per Ekeberg he remembered well, as a psychology student from the early Sixties, and also Trine Napstad he remembered from the dozy reading rooms at Blindern, where she, like him, had studied the arts and humanities. Small and animated, she had talked non-stop in a far-too-loud, piercing voice the moment she escaped the silence of the reading room. That had grated on his nerves somewhat, he remembered, even though he had thought she was attractive enough. When he had met her again, at Nina and Bernt’s, as Per Ekeberg’s new partner, and thus, in reality, his second wife, he on occasion found himself wondering about Per Ekeberg’s first wife, since Per had settled down, found solace, with this woman on his journey through life, which also for him, Per Ekeberg, has an unavoidable conclusion, as we all know, and which, at least for brief periods of time, cannot fail to cause us concern. Per Ekeberg was a senior psychologist. It was a title he took with him when he moved from the public sector into private enterprise to be a director in the Norwegian branch of an international advertising agency. He appeared to be just as content in the private sector as he had been in the public one, and in addition he earned a lot more money, and it’s possible he also set greater store by the creative side of his new profession, which, among other things, was such that he didn’t need to call himself Director, but could continue to present himself as senior psychologist, which undoubtedly seemed more intriguing when the title was used in an advertising context.
If he were to choose, then he had greater respect for Jan Brynhildsen and Judith Berg than Per Ekeberg and Trine Napstad. Jan Brynhildsen had, as a newly divorced 45-year-old (after being married to a female colleague who at that time was far more successful than he was), fallen head over heels in love with an air hostess. A rather weary-looking beauty in her forties, who was a single mother with a teenage daughter from a short-lived affair with an Italian business magnate. Jan Brynhildsen was at the time a typical second-rate actor and his falling in love with a faded air hostess undeniably had a strong element of comedy to it, of the more malicious kind that Professor Andersen, for his part, couldn’t claim to be entirely innocent of being partial to. But in this amorous project Professor Andersen had been Jan Brynhildsen’s secret admirer. He had looked up to him, and inwardly urged him on, Jan Brynhildsen, the walk-on actor at the National Theatre, to follow the convictions of his heart. ‘The person who is unable to be fascinated by his youthful dream of the Air Hostess has lost the ability to love,’ he inwardly urged, ‘even if she, Judith Berg, doesn’t resemble the dream of the Air Hostess, but is a tired, middle-aged woman with a bad back and swollen feet and bitter wrinkles round her painted mouth, she nevertheless represents the Air Hostess, for whom we just have to fall, Jan Brynhildsen and I,’ thought Professor Andersen, then as now. ‘Jan Brynhildsen is ingenuous in his love, and for that I admire him, and he will surely be rewarded,’ Professor Andersen had thought. And he had been rewarded. On stage. On the main stage at the National Theatre. That was where he now had his success. First in small roles, which all of a sudden were played with a comic talent that aroused interest among theatregoers. Very minor roles from the pens of great playwrights often have great comic potential which is seldom exploited, either because minor roles are played by minor actors or, if they are given to good actors, they can easily overshadow major roles and more important scenic events, and thus damage the dramatic unity of the piece. But Jan Brynhildsen succeeded, and that was because he didn’t play the comic parts like a great actor, but like a minor one. He stood there in his minor role, completely devoid of dreams and ambitions. He didn’t try to show the comic nature inherent in the character by stealing the scene. He stood there on the fringe, playing the minor role as a minor actor, but with luminous, raw, indeed hoarse, comedy, which many in the audience experienced as a magic moment of silence and laughter. Soon he was getting larger comic roles, and now he was one of the theatre’s leading comic talents, who came to mind for a main part every time the theatre was to stage Molière, Holberg or a light comedy by Shakespeare. But although he gave a good performance in these classic comic roles — not least by continuing to preserve the minor actor in the garb of the leading role — it was the sweet (in the original meaning of the word) element of the character that was really touching, and one ought to be touched when seeing a comedy performed, but it was nevertheless Professor Andersen’s opinion that it was in the minor parts that Jan Brynhildsen had carried out remarkable feats, and there were many people who were of the same opinion, even if this wasn’t expressed publicly or privately by Professor Andersen, because he didn’t want to hurt Jan Brynhildsen, even though Jan Brynhildsen himself wouldn’t have heard what he said.
They ate rakfisk. Drank beer with a chaser. Skolled and laughed, and chatted cheerfully. They all belonged to the same generation, and they were linked to each other by strong ties, even Professor Andersen, who, tonight in particular, struggled with a disturbing feeling that he had now parted from them for good. He still felt bowled over at being unable to confide in his friend Bernt, their host, when he had come to this dinner party an hour and a quarter early for the sole purpose of doing so. He now sensed that he was not just about to be, but already was tangled up in something which had consequences he couldn’t imagine, and which were such that they threatened for one thing to leave him friendless, since it was now impossible for him to deny that the strong urge he had felt to confide in a friend, frankly, baring his soul, in reality couldn’t be fulfilled when standing face to face with Bernt. This distracted Professor Andersen somewhat, and in this distracted frame of mind it would have been easy for him not to take part in this dinner group and to regard it from the position of an outsider, as if it were a remote event which didn’t concern him, with gestures and rituals performed by strangers who didn’t concern him, but that wasn’t the outcome. Whether he wanted to or not, he belonged in the company of these successful intellectuals in their fifties in the capital of Norway towards the end of the twentieth century. They were linked to each other by such strong ties that, for instance, Professor Andersen, who wasn’t a close friend of either Per Ekeberg or Trine Napstad, knew both of them from the university at Blindern in the Sixties, and that at a time when Per Ekeberg and Trine Napstad hadn’t the foggiest notion of each other’s existence, though she, Trine Napstad, easily remembered Per Ekeberg’s first wife, who had been a childhood friend of Nina Halvorsen, at the time when her name was Nina Hellberg, which was still her name when Trine Napstad came to know her. Thus one could look back to the early Sixties, and the random, but strong and active, ties created at the university, where all of them had studied (apart from Judith Berg, who was at the time unattainable, an Air Hostess), and each in some way had become a radical student. None of them, apart from Jan Brynhildsen, had ever ended up on the far left, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, in the legendary — or notorious, if you prefer — Marxist-Leninist Workers Front known as AKP (M-L); they were, in fact, slightly too old for the likes of that, and too set in their ways when it came to the fore, but they had been anti-NATO and voted against the Common Market, relatively early in the Sixties, and early in the Seventies, and Per Ekeberg had demonstrated against apartheid at Madserud during a tennis tournament between Norway and South Africa, and had been carted off by the police, and Nina and Bernt had been anti-nuclear demonstrators and worn Ban the Bomb buttons on their duffle coats. The nuclear badge, as Andersen, still an undergraduate, had called it, alluding to the swimming badge so popular in their schooldays. ‘I see you’ve earned your nuclear badge,’ he would say, but neither Nina nor Bernt had laughed, for some things were too serious to make jokes about, and thus he had been left standing there with his silly joke, feeling silly himself as well when the others didn’t laugh, for he was radical, too, in his way. However, as an undergraduate, Andersen’s radicalism was mainly expressed through his interest in and his support of people who attacked either in speech or in writing the empirical school of thought, which was then the prevailing approach within philosophy and the social sciences, not to mention his preoccupation with all kinds of avant-garde trends in art and literature.