Penalty Kick
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must concentrate once again on a thread which winds to the surface so often that it may well lie under everything. I am referring, in other words, to the story of the great shipwreck in Jonas Wergeland’s own life. And as in the war, here too a villain stood behind the torpedoing.
Although Jonas escaped miraculously unscathed from the crash on the E6, it left him walking about like a wounded man. He considered kicking up a fuss, making one hell of a scene, but decided in the end not to say anything to Margrete, not even in the way of veiled accusations regarding what had finally dawned on him, something so obvious that he ought to have tumbled to it long before. In any case, Margrete was not the crux of the problem. Somewhere in his mind Jonas had always harboured a fear, prompted by her inherent unreliability, or by something he could not put into words, that there would come a time when she would betray him. Even though he wished he did not love her half so much, there were times when he saw a witch in her, a supernatural side which was most evident in her constant insistence on freedom, a freedom which also included the right to behave unpredictably, or respond to motives he could not fathom. He had caught a glimpse of this way back in seventh grade, before she left Norway, in the ruthless way in which she had broken up with him. I never want to see her again, he had thought, with something close to relief.
The problem, as far as Jonas was concerned — the shock — was Axel.
He went around in a daze, went to work as usual — although he didn’t do anything there except sit and brood — but was always on the lookout for clues, signs that might give them away, lead him to a place where he would, as it were, catch them red-handed. It was here that the underside side of his creative genius was revealed: one and one made three — here, in his private life, as in his programmes. He rummaged through Margrete’s closet, disgusted with himself for doing so; rooted around in a wardrobe drawn from all over the world: colourful kangas for the beach, black Thai silk for evening; even Margrete’s soiled panties were turned inside out and examined for suspicious stains; he went through her diary, looking for coded appointments, hunted through her handbag for a letter, a note, some item that ought not to be there, if only a strand of hair. And incessantly, a wormball in his head: one and one makes three, had to make three. He found himself admiring them, the whole affair, how clever they were, this web of lies which they had spun and arranged so brilliantly, this triangle which they had constructed, as perfect and intricate and yet as jaw-droppingly simple as Pythagoras’s theorem about the square of the hypotenuse. What annoyed him most of all was his helplessness. He stood there shamefaced amid a heap of dirty washing with a metallic taste in his mouth, born of fear, or spite, a psychosomatic secretion from the organs of jealousy, and when he pulled off his shirt that night a sour, unfamiliar smell wafted up to him from his armpits, as if his body were trying to tell him that — if not physically, then mentally — he had been infected. He could understand, and even agree with, those who said that jealousy was a sickness, a chemical reaction in the brain; he didn’t give a toss, he knew he was sick, wanted to be that way, he nursed this state of green madness, viewing it, through the fog, with a certain curiosity even, as if he had just discovered new sides to himself, had sniffed out the darkest springs in the human heart. He peered, fascinated, into this hallucinatory chasm, astonished, almost impressed by the monster of hate which he saw taking shape, growing more and more terrible, day by day.
Until the evening in June when he stood outside the door of Axel’s apartment, unannounced and a lot more breathless than the several flights of stairs could warrant. He notes the Trio lock, rings the bell. Axel opens the door, opening also onto muted jazz and a faint whiff of garlic. Jonas had expected Margrete to be standing there, had been coiled and ready to spring, lithe as a wild beast, push the door wide open, squash the louse, before storming through every room, but he could tell straight away that she was not there. Axel let him in, looking surprised, pleased, expectant. And perhaps — in the suspicious eyes of Jonas Wergeland at least — a shade nonplussed.
‘Can you hear what that is?’ Axel asked once they were standing in the living room. ‘The Oscar Pettiford Trio, “Bohemia After Dark” — just like in the old days at Seilduksgata,’ he said, answering his own question, pleased by this coincidence: this music, and Jonas suddenly turning up on his doorstep. He is already on his way over to the drinks cabinet, across a pinewood floor strewn with little rugs, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, studiedly asymmetric. He could bake some potatoes, he joked, but he was all out of aquavit. Instead he returned with glasses and a rare malt whisky, a name Jonas had never heard before, a name that was hard to memorize, get one’s tongue round.
It was a bright summer evening, not a cloud in the sky, and yet standing in that room Jonas felt an ominous darkness stealing in. Three of the walls in the room were filled, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves; the fourth was dominated by windows and some paintings that looked like windows. Filmy white curtains fluttered gently over the deep window embrasures, casting shifting patterns over the rugs in a sort of double-exposure. In one corner stood the double bass. Jonas had a painful, recurring fantasy, in which Axel was making love to Margrete in the same way that he played the double bass, standing behind her, with his hands on her breasts, passionately intent on turning her into an unusual bass line under those probing fingers of his: Oscar Pettiford, ‘Bohemia After Dark’. Jonas had always wondered why Axel, such an attractive man, had never married. Now he knew. There was nothing Axel needed: he had Margrete. And any man who had Margrete had no cause to ask for more.
‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ Axel says, pouring some whisky. ‘Water? Ice?’
‘No, nothing,’ Jonas mumbled, knowing he ought to have asked for ice, take something to cool him down. There was a tinkle as Axel dropped ice cubes into his own glass. Jonas observed his friend’s clothes, the same old ‘uniform’: the tweed jacket draped over a chair, the white cotton shirt, baggy trousers and thick-soled shoes, as if he were still a boy who walked the streets at night, a nomad as in his student days — a person who had never grown up, a man who still lived in a world of fanciful chatter and airy-fairy dreams of being able to rock the Milky Way on its axis. Irresponsible bastard.
‘Sit down, please,’ Axel pointed to an armchair, a Stressless Royal identical to the one that Viktor used to sit in, staring at a blank television screen, there and yet not there.
Jonas put out a hand, as if to ward off such a fate, or as if realizing that for a very long time he had been as insensible and distant as Viktor.
‘Something struck me the other day when I was watching a repeat of your programme on Nansen,’ Axel said in his usual quick, intense fashion. ‘D’you remember the time after that mock exam when Viktor gave Napoleon what for, when we were sitting talking? I said there were no heroes any more, and you quoted something by Carlyle, from that rag of his which you’d probably never read, Heroes and Hero Worship or whatever it was called; something to the effect that history was simply the biographies of great men — I think maybe that was more or less what you were trying to say with your television series. Or am I wrong?’