But what cheered him most of all was that this spectacle corresponded with — you might almost say, consolidated — an image he had had in his head for a long time, an image or a tactile sensation which stemmed from a feverish dream and which could be compared only to the feeling of running a finger along a corkscrew. Also, he had immediately made the connection between the two snakes in the clearing and the ball of snakes he had stumbled upon the year before. This dance was a continuation of that incident, a clarification of something of which the ball had allowed him a mere glimpse: two spirals intertwined. The principle of leverage, of something that could set mighty things in motion, raise him to undreamed-of heights. He stared at the snakes for so long that they slithered through his eyes and into his head. At any rate, suddenly they were gone, dissolved into thin air so it seemed. The snakes, or a double helix, had taken up residence in his brain. ‘Inside me I carry a new way of thinking,’ his heart sang. ‘I am different.’
At that very moment — believe me, it’s true — Jonas heard a voice, or perhaps something more akin to the deep scale of notes from an organ, which said, or told him, in no uncertain terms that he would be a conqueror. He always maintained that that voice or sonorous peal came from the very granite on which he was sitting, almost oozed from the crystals — so clearly that he could positively feel the vibrations, as from the membrane of a loudspeaker. And at that instant he knew, as if it were an integral part of the experience, what his weapon in this conquest would be: that intertwining form.
I know this sounds a bit high-flown. But everyone experiences — to a greater or lesser degree — mystical moments, when they receive a clear and inescapable message — or whatever you want to call it — and for Jonas Wergeland this was how it happened. From that day onwards he knew for sure. He was not going to be a chef or a pilot, nor even the Father of his Country; he was going to be a conqueror. By the time he stood up and set off for home he had carved out a calling for himself, as solid as a granite church.
You look surprised, Professor, because you have never heard of this, such a pivotal episode. Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I might have done on an earlier occasion, when I said that Jonas Wergeland did not recognize the significance of these events until they cropped up again, thanks to some woman. What if he had not experienced these things at all? What if he had merely imagined them, dreamed them up, during those acts of love, but so vividly and with such powerful conviction that he seemed to have experienced them. Whatever the case, Jonas Wergeland felt that these women somehow enabled him to relive many fundamental stories upon which he was able to draw later, use as springboards to a changed life. It was as if he had been given the chance to travel back in a train and get off at stations he had run past first time round. So you see it could well be that Jonas Wergeland’s later success, his inimitable chain of television programmes was forged from causes — stories — which never were but which could be reconstructed, like Gleipne, the chain in Nordic mythology: it too was made from things that did not exist.
It might be more correct to say that at a certain point — possibly not until that coupling in a dim room in the Museum of Cultural History — it was brought home to Jonas Wergeland that one was not doomed to be the person one was, or at least not only that person. One could become more. We are not, he thought, we form ourselves.
One thing that is certainly true is that when he got home from the quarry he wrote his name on a sheet of paper, and to his amazement he found that his handwriting had changed. On impulse he had also put a ‘W’ between his first and last names, ‘Jonas W. Hansen’ he wrote and discovered that he had made a new name for himself: that one letter could be all it took to change everything, just as the little prefix ‘un’ before the word ‘common’ produces something uncommon. As he contemplated the ‘W’ Jonas could not help thinking of a machine of some kind which could cause him too to stretch himself, much as a leg that is too short can sometimes be made longer. The ‘W’ had the appearance of a coat of arms or a royal emblem — Jonas VI or something of the sort. His initials, too, looked exceptionally powerful, nigh-on divine. There was something about the sight of these three characters which instinctively prompted him to clear his throat and say, in all seriousness, as if carrying out a voice test: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’
The next day he cycled to school, even though he hadn’t passed the proficiency test. He was bursting with newfound self-confidence. At the school gate he collided with Margrete Boeck, the new girl in the parallel class to his own. Turn a ‘W’ on its head and you get an ‘M’. He didn’t know it then, but his life had already changed.
From the Caucasus? Beams my soul from the Caucasus? (Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)
Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? It cannot simply be because he wished to conquer new lands? Or change his life, come to that. Jonas himself believed that he made each journey merely so that he could tuck it away in his memory and bring it out again later, always as a different journey, because it altered character from one time to the next. Viewed at a distance, a journey became something different, often something vague and, above all, pungent, like the aftertaste of a fine cognac.
Jonas sometimes wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing on the hillside outside a remarkable-looking building known as the Matenadaran, looking out across the city. The Armenian Soviet Republic had come as a pleasant surprise, despite the time of year and its strained relations with its neighbour state, the Muslims to the East. Yerevan had proved to be an astonishing oasis after the barren desert of Moscow, with a completely different atmosphere and mentality — and the shops here were full of merchandise. Jonas had walked to the Matenadaran from the Hotel Armenia and the impressive circular Lenin Square in the city centre, so that he — the architect in him, that is — could take in the exceptionally well thought-out and well-executed layout of the city along the way. He nibbled on dried apricots sprinkled with honey and almonds as he strolled along admiring the buildings, many of them — like the hotel — built from the local tufa stone in varying tones of red and pink and decorated with fine carvings: interwoven branches laden with fruit. This, like Grorud, was stonemason country. Jonas felt very much at home here, from the very start he had felt a powerful sense of belonging: here, he thought, here I could actually settle down for good.
He stood on a terrace at the top of a long run of steps leading down to the road. He shut his eyes and listened. Possibly because of his early interest in sounds, listening was one of the first things he did in a new place — as if endeavouring to wring from the background noise some secret about the landscape, some knowledge hidden from the eyes; or he may have thought that, just as the same sound effects can be used in different plays, these sounds could form the background to more memories of the place.
As he was standing there, ears pricked up, just as he was actually thinking that he had heard a sigh, somewhere under or over the ground — a sigh reminiscent of the sound created when his father switched on the organ, which is to say, started up the fan, allowing the air to flow into the pipes — a figure approached him, slowly and with an inquiring look on his face. A man in a heavy, military-style overcoat with a sort of beret on his head. ‘You are a tourist, perhaps?’ he asked hesitantly in French good enough for Jonas to understand him. Jonas was doing a tour of those parts of the Soviet Union that lay close to the Black Sea, under the reassuring auspices of Intourist. The trip was intended as a relaxing break, not to say a reward, after years of working himself half to death on NRK’s prestige project, Thinking Big, which was to be broadcast in the New Year — a television series which may have had its beginnings in a stone quarry, an amphitheatre of reddish granite.