One day when they were ten years old, a spring day with a gentle rain washing away the last patches of snow outside, Ørn had done something unexpected. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Looking back on it, it occurred to Jonas that he had known it all along. That this was why he was friends with Eagle: that this was his reward, so to speak, for long and faithful service. Eagle had pulled a heavy book from the shelf, a volume that proved to be a fine, tooled leather album with gilded pages. A Bible, thought Jonas, a holy scripture. For is it not the case, Professor, that every person has a story, does something which shows that he is an Ankenaton, a unique human being; the sudden revelation, coming as a shock to everyone around them, that a person worships the sun, is a monotheist, when everyone else is praying to a whole host of gods — that he holds one idea above all others, one which he pursues faithfully and single-mindedly and for which he would willingly wipe out everything else?
Eagle opened the book, or album. It was not filled with photographs or scraps, football or automobile cards, as Jonas had expected, but with stamps: with transparent sheets of paper overlaying tiny, bright-hued miniatures. Jonas looked at Eagle, saw how all at once his face was glowing, as if illumined by a light — not to say a sun — shining out of the album itself, from beneath, like something out of a painting by Rembrandt. Jonas suddenly felt that he was being granted a glimpse of Eagle’s inner being, of a hidden majesty, a unifying vision.
Stamps. The English word is so flat and square, smacking of repression. Not so the Norwegian word: ‘frimærke’ — ‘free marks’, marks that make one free. This must be why nothing could daunt Ørn, even when nothing else was going right for him: when he got inkblots all over his handwriting jotter or scored an own goal at football. Jonas looked more closely at the stamps, understanding and yet not. Because the surprising thing was not that Eagle collected stamps, pored over them with tweezers and magnifying glass. Most boys have collected stamps at some time in their lives, for a week or so, or a couple of years. But Jonas realized that Eagle was the type who would go on collecting stamps all his life, and what was more: that there was a system, a concept of some sort, behind what he was seeing.
Jonas had himself taken a couple of tentative steps into the labyrinth of philately. For a while he had zealously cut up envelopes, filled the bath with water and scattered the corners with the stamps into it, so that the bath looked like a huge pot full of steeped slivers of flat bread, like the dish they ate on Christmas Eve before going to church, ‘mush’ they called it — and that was what this was, a mush. Jonas soon came to the conclusion that such a muddle was more trouble than it was worth: an ocean of stamps and only a bath to put them in. Besides which, there seemed to be no way of getting to grips with such a multiplicity of stamps, not to mention all the duplication: what does one do with two hundred stamps bearing the king’s head; or shoeboxes full of 35-øre stamps depicting whooper swans, all commemorating Nordic Day?
Eagle had understood something that Jonas had not: you had to set limits for yourself. As he leafed through the album Jonas realized that Eagle had discerned a pattern in the chaos, for here the first sheets were covered with stamps depicting the Norwegian landscape, then came stamps featuring flowers, birds and animals, after which Jonas could run his eye over the history of Norway: from miniature images of rock carvings and ancient gods to tiny illustrations of Viking ships and stave churches which, in turn, were followed by stamps dedicated to kings, celebrities, buildings, all meticulously arranged in chronological order right up to the Second World War — a splendid geography-cum-history book, an alternative social history told through stamps. A bit like a comic strip, Jonas thought.
But it was a separate collection at the back of the album that came as the greatest surprise. Jonas stared and stared, but he couldn’t figure it out. ‘A collection of Norvegiana,’ Ørn said. It sounded alien and mysterious, as if he were talking about a dreamland.
‘What’s this?’
‘Stamps from other countries featuring images with some sort of Norwegian connection.’
It had never occurred to Jonas that people in foreign countries might have any interest in Norway. He examined the stamps more closely and found Sigrid Undset on a Turkish stamp issued in 1935. On another page he spied Roald Amundsen’s profile on a stamp from Hungary issued in 1948. And there, on a Cuban stamp, a picture of Armauer Hansen. Henrik Ibsen graced stamps from Bulgaria and Rumania, and Grieg was portrayed on one from the Soviet Union. The most baffling subject of all, though, was Egil Danielsen, honoured for his gold-medal win in the javelin event at the Melbourne Olympics — on a stamp from the Dominican Republic! Who would believe it! What did the peasants in the Dominican Republic think when they stuck this on their letters: Egil Danielsen captured at the very moment that the javelin left his hand? Jonas was dumbstruck. These stamps, all this foreign interest, left him quite bemused; trains of thought wove in and out of one another inside his head. I need hardly stress, Professor, that this was a decisive moment in Jonas Wergeland’s life.
Ørn began to tell him about the postal system and the stamps, about how amazing it all was. This worldwide network. Proof of the possibility of peaceful coexistence. Ørn was all lit up, Jonas hardly recognized his friend. Ørn stumbled over his words, sounding old beyond his years as he breathlessly explained: ‘You see, stamps reflect the soul of a country.’
‘Great,’ Jonas said, slamming the album shut. ‘That’s great, Eagle, but can’t we do something else now? What about going down to the corner shop? I’ve got a couple of empty bottles.’
He could tell that Eagle was disappointed, saw the light in his friend’s face fade. ‘Okay, we could pop down and get some chewing-gum,’ Eagle said, putting the album back on the shelf. Jonas noted its position, between The World of Music and Gone with the Wind.
Although they had many another reading session on Ørn’s living-room floor that spring, Ørn never showed him his stamps again. And Jonas never mentioned them.
Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?
One day Little Eagle didn’t come to school. He wasn’t there the next day either. Jonas called at the house to ask after him. Ørn-Henrik was ill, his mother said. He was off school for a whole week. When at last he returned everyone could see that he must have been really sick: his eyes were a nasty red colour, as if he had spent a long day in the chlorinated water of the Frogner Baths. And he had changed. Not that he was any less scrawny, but there was something else there too now.
Jonas noticed it too. Ørn was moody, withdrawn, he seemed both utterly crushed and mad as hell, turned away huffily when Jonas spoke to him.
One afternoon on the way home from school Eagle finally opened his mouth: ‘My stamp album’s gone,’ he said. ‘Completely disappeared.’
It was springtime, he kicked some sand, stopped, spun round to face Jonas: ‘I can’t understand it. I can’t find it.’
‘Burglars?’ Jonas said.
‘No, that can’t be it,’ Eagle said. ‘I just don’t get it.’
They walked on, said no more about it. Some girls were skipping, smack, smack, a heavy rope, a line lashing the ground.
Over the days that followed, Eagle grew more and more antagonistic, even towards Jonas. Any approach met with a surly, almost abusive, response, as if he wanted to pick a fight.
Then something even more mystifying happened. Just before May 17, that combination of spring rite and gala day, Little Eagle turned up at school with his head shaved, which is to say: with a strip of hair running from the middle of his forehead to the nape of his neck. Like a real Red Indian, a Mohawk or whatever tribe it was that wore their hair like that — a hairstyle which the punks of a later generation would copy and dye orange or bright green. It is no exaggeration to say that this hairstyle, Little Eagle’s hairstyle that is, seemed even more provocative — shocking, in fact — back then. You have to remember that this was before the Beatles grew their hair long. You could say that Little Eagle was one of the first punk rockers in Oslo.