Perhaps it’s not so strange that Jonas Wergeland, after working on Abel, had an even greater hatred of all things French, from the guillotine to their pompous, incomprehensible post-structuralism with its obscure terminology, all those arrogant Frenchmen, in fact, who, God help us, couldn’t even see that their own composer, Berlioz, was a genius; although Jonas Wergeland did possibly go too far in declaring in a promotional interview that the French were the most cynical and arrogant of races, that it was hardly any wonder they were the most detested and corrupt of all colonialists, or that they had no qualms about carrying out nuclear tests anywhere, as long as it wasn’t their own country. ‘And if you’re a corrupt dictator in the market for arms,’ he was reported as saying, ‘you can be sure that France will be happy to oblige, in their eyes no tyrant is too rotten.’ One of the film crew later maintained that, during the regular spot in which Wergeland himself entered the scene, he had spat on the Institut building — a shot which was edited out of the final version. Jonas Wergeland was sure he was right: France had killed a Norwegian, one of the greatest Norwegians of all time.
In the programme’s closing scene, Jonas Wergeland showed his hero standing just beyond the Pont Neuf, at that triangle where the two channels of the Seine run into one, gazing at the Institut de France. As a viewer, one senses Abel’s feeling that he is faced here with two choices in life, that he stands at a crucial parting of the ways. And yet one also sees what an ocean separates this coughing, shivering, starving figure by the bridge from those blind, self-righteous, shameless men shaking their heads outside the Institut de France. For the whole of the final minute Jonas showed fragments of Abel’s calculations projected onto various shots of Paris, not least of the Scientific Society building, televised images which made it look as though the buildings of Paris, the entire city, were covered in mathematical formulae, in Abel’s equations and elliptical functions, almost like graffiti, a rebellion, vandalism. An algebraic conquest.
Disoriented
One thing that comes to no one as a matter of course is love, far less that hormonal jitterbug inside us so feebly termed ‘being in love’. After Jonas’s dream, that somewhat morbid dream of getting his hands under Anne Beate Corneliussen’s bulging Setesdal sweater was, as it were, squeezed to bits, he suffered for some time from feelings of unfulfilled desire, and certain girls in the parallel class — this was before mixed classes became the norm — were the object of many a long look. Not unnaturally, it was one of these girls who eventually caught his attention or, more accurately, grabbed Jonas’s attention. Henny F. was a pretty ordinary girl, and Jonas did not take any real notice of her until the class trip in eighth grade, in March of that year — and, I should add, with the entire class in the throes of puberty — when they spent a whole tremulous week up in the hills near Vinstra, where the attraction between the sexes was strong enough to start an avalanche and a number of new pairings saw the light of day or rather, the dark of night. There was one dinner in particular at which Henny F. made a big impression by displaying her talent for tying knots of spaghetti in her mouth with her tongue. What would it be like to kiss such a girl, Jonas mused.
The big breakthrough came on May 17, on the morning of Constitution Day itself, after they had been running amok with firecrackers for hours, destroying diverse bike handlebars and postboxes, as well as scorching the stockings of some of the mothers quite badly with the more capricious ‘jumping-jacks’, which shot dangerously this way and that — exploding, as they did, several times. Jonas attended the traditional ceremony in the Memorial Grove, where the Grorud School girls’ choir arranged themselves on the steps of the church and sang — at the top of their voices, as they say — ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, no more, no less, and there stood Henny F., wreathed by green birch leaves, along with the other girls in their thin white sweaters and red skirts and, not least, red bonnets which looked so totally out of place and yet utterly irresistible, especially on Henny F., and they sang, they sang so beautifully that Jonas felt his body go numb with delight. For there was something mystical about songs sung in harmony, he had discovered this for himself in first grade, when their teacher had taught them to sing ‘All the Birds’ in two-part harmony. With tireless patience she had taken half of the class out into the corridor and rehearsed the second part with them one by one. And when they sang this song that they had been practising and practising, ‘All the Birds’, for the first time altogether, it went surprisingly well, it didn’t merely sound twice as beautiful, it sounded ten times as beautiful, so beautiful that it made Jonas’s scalp tingle. This was an aesthetic milestone and a preparation for the day when Jonas would discover how much finer things became when you simply wove two of them together. But here was the girls’ choir, not the world’s best girls’ choir perhaps, but they were singing in harmony, singing ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, a song Jonas had heard many times but which now, because of Henny F., standing there with a look of such fervour on her face, all-aglow in the midst of the group of girls, Henny F. with her throat straining eagerly and Jonas’s eyes fixed on her larynx, sensing as he did that this was the seat of her magic, acquired the semblance of pure beauty and gave Jonas a musical experience that not even Wagner at his most grandiose and extravagant could top. Standing there in the Memorial Grove, Jonas felt a pressure on his spine, felt something seizing hold of him body and soul, even though he had not yet deciphered the signals from the dragon-horn button he had swallowed as a little boy; and for the first time — or the second if one counts Margrete, a relationship which Jonas himself had pushed to the back of his mind — he understood that girls were different, that what he was now feeling, this longing, this throbbing, all-consuming desire, was something other than the more limited randiness triggered by Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pneumatic allurements. This was not the ABC of Sex; this was the Alpha and Omega of love.
He started walking home from school with Henny F., liked to hear her talk, this in itself enough: her voice caressing his ears, making him go all funny inside. Although these were the days of colourful, almost psychedelic, Flower-Power garb, she often wore more theatrical clothes than other girls, as if for her the world was a stage. On one occasion she invited him to her house, and he was introduced to her father, a violinist who, as one might expect, looked kindly on a son of the organist from Grorud Church. Jonas also got to see her room where, apart from a couple of diplomas for ski jumping, the walls were completely covered in pictures of pop groups cut from the countless music magazines that flourished during these years: groups Jonas knew next to nothing about, even though many of the same pictures were also stuck up on Daniel’s wall — and on the ceiling — at home. He noticed that the Hollies were much in evidence, a group which — as I’m sure even you are aware, Professor — was, not surprisingly, particularly strong on the vocals. She played him some singles: ‘Look Through Any Window’, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, ‘Bus Stop’, songs in which Allan Clark, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash created their distinctive harmonies, and to which Henny F. added an upper part, even higher than Graham Nash’s — no small achievement, had Jonas but known it. ‘Maybe you’ll be a star too one day,’ he said and pointed to a picture of Cilla Black sporting long, false eyelashes, ‘I mean, you’re so musical.’ She shook her head shyly: ‘Who me? No!’