Ørn — nicknamed Little Eagle — usually tagged along with Jonas’s family. The forest was a fabulous place in which to play. Cowboys and Indians no taller than your finger looked perfectly lifelike if you just found the right slope, little ledges that played the part of cliff-top villages in Arizona or Utah. And if Little Eagle brought along his plastic animals, half the fauna of Africa, they could create a savannah among the tufts of grass. Just a box of used matches was enough. Tip the contents into a tiny stream and they had an arduous and perilous log-run that could keep them occupied for hours.
Ørn wasn’t with them on this particular day. Little Eagle was sick. At least they said he was sick. The thought of Ørn bothered Jonas. The forest wasn’t the same without Ørn.
What sort of sound does a dragon make?
It was a hot day, hotter than the day before, and while one of the fathers was telling off a couple of the bigger boys for setting light to a clump of heather — ‘Fire is dangerous, boys; remember what just happened at the Coliseum cinema!’ — Jonas wandered about on his own, first playing at Robin Hood, with a long staff in his hands, then Tarzan: Tarzan heading deeper and deeper into the jungle. But he missed Little Eagle, and this niggled at him, turned him into a very destructive Tarzan, a king of the jungle who made ferocious swipes with his staff, knocking the top off bush after bush — gorillas, actually — while trying to find a suitable heroic deed to commit. And then there it was, his chance, dead ahead of him: a weeping woman in a ripped safari suit with her foot caught between the roots of a fir tree and a large rock. Jonas — or rather, Tarzan — had to roll the rock away, and there was no time to waste: for a lion, or better still, a fearsome dragon with slavering jaws was closing in on the woman. ‘Courage, noble maid,’ Jonas muttered and set his hip against the rock, it wobbled back and forth, but he still couldn’t budge it, or only very little. He took his staff, stuck one end well under the stone and rested the other on a nearby hummock, to act as a lever, and when Jonas bore down on the other end he was quite surprised to find how easily the rock allowed itself to be dislodged, along with a fair amount of soil, a great clump, before rolling thunderously down the south-facing slope, leaving behind it a gaping hole.
Jonas knew right away: he had unearthed hidden treasure just as Oscar Wergeland, his maternal grandfather, had done in his youth. There was a smell of gunpowder, a smell of raw earth, a smell of gold.
He got down on his knees and peeked into the hole — possibly half-expecting to be disappointed — then he started back, just as he would do later in life when unexpectedly confronted with television footage of operations, shots of the brain or glistening intestines staring him in the face. A dragon’s lair, that’s what it must be: the thought flashed through his mind. There was an infernal roaring in his ears, but he wasn’t sure that he had heard anything roar.
After the initial shock he simply kneeled there, staring. He could see deep into the heart of the tree root. Eventually, he realized what it reminded him of, this thing down in the depths: it reminded him of his mother’s brooch. And I really ought to say a few words here about this jewel, since it played such an important part in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Children have a unique capacity for being fascinated by things, for regarding — for inexplicable reasons — certain objects as magical. For an Albert Einstein, it was a compass, for others it might be a special stone. For Jonas Wergeland, it was a silver brooch.
There may well be a simple explanation for his fondness for this piece of jewellery: it was the first thing he remembered. His mother must have worn it a lot when he was little. She had been given the brooch, a so-called ‘round brooch’, as a wedding present from Aunt Laura, the goldsmith. The surface was completely covered in an intricate tracery of ribbons that twined around one another, interlacing and seeming to form lots of S’s or figure eights. ‘It looks like a gigantic knot that hasn’t been tightened,’ Jonas would say, fingering it. This silver brooch was absolutely the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen — much more beautiful than the aforementioned clock workings on top of the chest of drawers. That little shield glowed, not outwardly, but inwardly, with a secret and powerful lustre. In his imagination he thought of it as a weapon, a disc that, if one were to hurl it out into the cosmos, would set momentous processes in motion. For Jonas, in terms of latent power the brooch was a miniature atom bomb.
Jonas is on his hands and knees, gazing down into the hole laid bare by the dislodged rock. And what he sees there resembles the design on his mother’s brooch: a coiling mass of ribbons. It’s like looking down into the nerve centre of the Earth, he thinks. Which is not so surprising, since Jonas is staring straight down onto a huge ball of snakes, nestling between the roots of the fir tree, possibly as much as five feet down. He can see it quite clearly, though, as if at the end of a narrow tunnel; an exceptionally large winter nest, containing at least fifty, maybe a hundred, adders — probably ring-snakes and slow-worms too, and even lizards and toads. All twined together in an enormous, tangled ball. Nature’s very own clove hitch.
Jonas thought they were still deep in their winter sleep, but then he noticed that some of them were moving ever so slightly: this was obviously the day when they were going to wake up, now that the temperature had risen enough for the warmth to seep as far down as the snakes. Fascinated, Jonas knelt there, observing the ball of reptiles slowly coming to life. Just for a moment he considered running home to fetch the canister of petrol that was kept in the caretaker’s shed, pour it over the nest and set light to it: create a living ball of fire. But why would he do that? These were timid creatures; they wouldn’t do him any harm.
For ages Jonas sat there, seized by a sort of awe, watching this tangle of reptiles gradually stirring. He could make out the zigzag stripe along the backs of the adders, a pattern within a pattern. Some, presumably males, began to break away from the ball, wriggled sluggishly and silently up the tunnel, along passages that Jonas could not see. And at that same moment he realized that the ball of snakes reminded him of that recurring dream of his. He tried to pursue this thought but gave up. It fitted and yet did not. As a grown man Jonas Wergeland would be struck by the thought that on that spring day he had been confronted with an image of his own vast multitude of unrealized lives.