“Did you have long hair?” She fingered the doll’s braid.
“Yes.”
“And did you wear it in braids, with ribbons?” She was grinning.
It took us ninety minutes to reach the massive wrought-iron gates of Vigeland Park. Julia stood there for a while, just looking. “I’d like to look at this on my own for a while, I think.”
She was wearing a peach shirt; easy to keep track of in all the green. “An hour, then. Back here.”
The centrepiece of the park is the monolith. Standing before it, I understood why, when Vigeland was first working on these monuments, half of Oslo hated him. It is huge, made of whitish granite probably sixty-five feet tall, and depicts more than a hundred human figures twined and writhing about each other, some standing on and others clambering over their neighbours to reach the top. Not a very Norwegian sentiment. Around its base, on plinths on the steps leading up to it, are Vigeland’s vision of humanity teaching, playing, fighting, loving, eating and sleeping: a woman combing another’s hair; a man with children; a child having a tantrum. Massive figures, all naked, all gazing down at Norwegians with truth in their eyes.
I was still there when Julia climbed the steps. “I’ve just read in the museum that that piece of granite weighed two hundred and sixty tons and in 1926 took three months to transport to here from the harbour through the streets of Oslo.”
“Another reason for them to hate it.”
She gazed up at the figures, shading her eyes from the sun. “Hate it?”
“The primary tenet of Norwegian social life is something called the Jante Law: Don’t believe you are better than anyone else. We’re all equals.”
“I don’t see what’s so bad about egalitarianism.”
“You didn’t go to school here in the early seventies. They were ruthless: Don’t do better than anyone else. Coming here was such a relief to my eleven-year-old self. Vigeland may have been an egotistical monster, but at least he sometimes showed the truth.”
We studied it silently for a while. “The earlier work in the museum is quite different,” she said. “There’s one particular wall relief of emaciated figures. It’s disturbing, very powerful.”
“I like this better. You can see emaciated, tormented people anytime, in any city, especially the civilized ones.”
“Why do you suppose his work was so large?” she said to herself as we descended the steps slowly. She stopped before the woman washing another woman’s hair. “It’s intimate, almost sexual, and yet quite ordinary. I suppose that’s what he was trying to say: everything is ordinary.”
“He was saying everything in life is special. Every moment is a gift.”
She looked at me for a long, long time. Her eyes were sunlit, the colour of bluebells, and still shadowed very faintly with fatigue. She turned away. “We should get moving.”
We caught the number 2 tram back down Bogstadsveien.
The meeting with Edvard Borlaug of Olsen Glass was on the ninth floor of their new corporate building in the heart of the revitalized eastern side of Oslo. I briefed her on the way up.
“Don’t ask about his family. That will be seen as intrusive. He probably won’t indulge in small talk but will want to get right down to business. He will speak English, but may not always understand what you’re saying, though he’ll be too proud to admit it. I’ll do my best to step in when I think that’s happening.”
It was an austere office, good furniture but quite plain. Borlaug was younger than I had expected. Even though she had been warned, I think his briskness took Julia aback. He strode out from behind his desk, shook Julia’s hand firmly, and announced in basic English that he was a vice president of the corporation and fully empowered to make final decisions and that the corporation hoped to open the park next spring. I suspected he had been made vice president last week.
Julia introduced me as her “associate.” He stepped back behind his desk and gestured at the two chairs in front of it. I sat between Julia and the window, and turned my chair to have a view of the door.
Now it was Julia’s turn. She became grave and deliberate. “I don’t know if it’s possible to open the park by spring. A lesser project, perhaps, but if as you indicated in previous communications you want a lasting monument to the corporation’s importance and achievement, it may take longer.”
He seemed to relax: she was not some silly American out to make impossible promises. “How much longer?”
“I think we should leave estimates about time and money until later in the discussion. Right now, we need to know what ideas you have had about what you want.”
He pulled out a file folder. Opened it, closed it. Nervous behaviour, for a Norwegian.
Julia became even more steady and deliberate. “Why don’t we run over several possible avenues of approach and see if any of them seem appropriate?” He assumed the half smile people do when they don’t want anyone else to know they’ve missed something, especially when they think others might think they are too young for their job.
I cleared my throat. “Perhaps,” I said in Norwegian, “you will allow me to translate the more abstruse concepts.” He appreciated “abstruse.” No one would speak to him that way if they thought he was stupid. I repeated it in English. They both nodded. I translated.
The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Julia was very patient. She explained to Edvard Borlaug the various options: monumental outdoor parks, like Vigeland; indoor installations; traditional or interactive; representational or abstract.
A great deal depended, she said, upon their client base. “Who is it that you want to come and see the sculpture?”
“Everyone. All of Oslo.”
“Fine, very commendable. But let’s start from the beginning. We’ll need information on who uses your building—corporate clients, the general public, others?—and how they use it—which doors and so forth. Where would the most natural installation be? How would we funnel people there? How long would you like them to stay? We’ll need to know if the park is intended purely for enjoyment or whether its proposed function is more educational. For example, would you like to see schools bringing busloads of children to trample through the installation”—her prejudices were showing; I changed “trample” to “wander”—“or would they be under the feet of your corporate clients?”
I translated with half my mind, and used the rest to assess the room. The chairs were solid Norwegian pine; awkward as weapons, not strong enough for a shield. The desk, though, was probably a good inch of heart-of-pine, which would offer some protection from a small-calibre handgun.
He pulled pieces of paper from his folder: plans, columns of figures. Julia read them with approval. He started to warm up. After forty minutes he seemed quite enthusiastic. They started to talk about glass—how a vitreous sculpture might hold up under the extremes of the Oslo climate. They got into maintenance questions: long-term care of the individual items of the installation; short-term care, such as keeping the grass mowed—if they decided they wanted grass because they could, of course, go with gravel. With glass and granite sculpture a gravel surface would be very evocative of the ruggedness of the Norwegian landscape. If he wanted representation of Norwegian sculpture, then, naturally, he would want something from the abstract pioneer Haukeland. And what did he have in mind for children?
He became almost animated. Perhaps representations of figures from myth and legend—a bridge, complete with troll and billy goats Gruff; Sampo Lappelil, the little Lapp boy who defeated the king of the trolls, with his reindeer; The Woman Against the Stream. I obligingly gave Julia condensed versions of each tale. Edvard drew sketches. They were surprisingly strong-lined and clean.