‘I bet you can’t,’ Jonas said.
‘What d’you bet?’ retorted Gabriel, quick as a flash.
‘My soul!’ said Jonas, quite carried away, as if he were on a stage.
The following day after school Jonas was walking along Universitetsgata. He was just passing the point where the Studenten ice cream parlour cast its tantalizingly aromatic Banana Split lasso across the street, when he caught sight of Gabriel outside the National Theatre, standing between the statues of Ibsen and Bjørnson, as if the old thespian had no qualms about setting himself up against these verdigris-coated intellectual giants. With all the finesse of a major-domo he had rigged up a small puppet theatre, not much more than a board with a square hole cut in it, no bigger than a television screen, and this he had placed on a folding table with a little Oriental rug draped over it, behind which he could sit on his suitcase, invisible to people directly in front of the stage. He’s mad, Jonas thought. They’ll laugh in his face. But no one laughed when Gabriel Sand took up his stand in that heavily symbolic corner of the city — between parliament and palace, university and theatre. He was ready for combat; a failed actor in his ancient, dark, chalk-striped suit, with waistcoat and watch-chain and all, and on his head a bowler hat which endowed him with a look of bygone nobility. Or Charlie Chaplin.
To begin with Gabriel did nothing. He stood stock-still beside the tiny stage, and still he attracted attention. There was something about his stance, his face, his eyes that made passers-by stop and stare expectantly at the man standing to attention there between Ibsen and Bjørnson.
Jonas reaches the square just as Gabriel begins upon a scene from the fourth Act of Peer Gynt, the high point of the play, in which Peer arrives in Egypt. Gabriel, or Gabriel’s hand, makes the puppet playing Peer look up at the statue of Ibsen as if it were the Sphinx outside of Cairo: ‘Now where in the world have I met before something half-forgotten that’s like this hobgoblin? Because met it I have — in the north or the south. Was it a person? And if so who?’ And immediately thereafter: ‘Ho! I remember the fellow! Why of course it’s the Bøyg that I smote on the skull.’ From that moment on Gabriel had the audience in the palm of his hand.
Unlike the people who crowded around the little stage, Jonas stood back a little, in order to keep an eye on Gabriel where he sat on a suitcase plastered with scuffed labels, with a puppet on each hand, acting out the meeting between Peer Gynt and Begriffenfeldt, which ended with Begriffenfeldt saying that the interpreters’ kaiser had been found, before leading Peer into the madhouse.
It was as with all great theatre: something invisible was made real. By some magical means Gabriel transformed Oslo, the surrounding streets and buildings into Cairo, and the spectators — Bjørnson and Ibsen included — into the inmates of an insane asylum. More and more people stopped to watch, even though they really didn’t have the time; they were caught and held by Begriffenfeldt, which is to say the puppet on Gabriel’s hand proclaiming to the insane, which is to say the audience: ‘Come forth all! The time that shall be is proclaimed! Reason is dead and gone. Long live Peer Gynt!’ For a moment, because of the two hands inside the puppets, Jonas was reminded of another drama: the spectacle of two snakes twining themselves around one another.
A small crowd now filled the square in front of the National Theatre, forming a semicircle that spread far out onto the street, all eyes fixed on a puppet theatre no bigger than a television screen; people jostled one another to get a better look, as if the oriental rug underneath the stage was a magic carpet that could carry them anywhere. Gabriel would later say again: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them. Everyone has this longing inside them for something that’s a bit different.’
Jonas stood there thinking. Above all he was struck by how simple it seemed, with what uncanny ease Gabriel had hypnotized this host. Jonas found himself despising the general public, the folk round about him, not only because they had caused him to lose the bet — or rather, make a mistake — but because they could fall for something so transparently false: puppets with hands stuck inside them. Then he remembered how quickly he had allowed himself to be taken in by Gabriel. If I’m honest with myself, I’d probably be the first to stop in front of something like this, he thought, incredulously witnessing the way in which Gabriel Sand held more and more passers-by spellbound, it was quite a crowd for a normal weekday.
Later, Jonas himself would enjoy the goodwill of the public at large. Right at the start of his television career, when he was working as a television announcer, he discovered how the public could credit him with qualities he did not have. Just before he was due to announce a harrowing programme produced by the NRK foreign affairs department, he had got something in his eye and had to blink more often than normal. Viewers thought the programme had moved him to tears. Which meant he must be a sensible, soft-hearted person. Big splash in newspapers and magazines: ‘The announcer who dared to show his feelings.’ People showered him with sympathy. It was brought home to him then: you don’t win your uncommonness, you have it bestowed on you as a gift.
As he watched, Gabriel showed Peer meeting and listening in turn to Huhu the language reformer, the fellah with the royal mummy on his back and the Minister Hussein — Gabriel swiftly slipping one puppet after another onto his one hand; really beautiful puppets which Jonas realized he must have made himself — with Peer’s words of advice having increasingly bloody consequences, though in the end he is, nevertheless, wreathed by Begriffenfeldt with the words: ‘Long life to Self-hood’s Kaiser!’ Just at that moment the police appeared, as if they were guards in a madhouse, an asylum in total uproar.
It was a memorable sight. The little theatre and the crowd of people. That was all it took: a piece of wood with a square hole cut in it, two arms and a voice. And to top it all off: the police. As if a dangerous crime were being committed.
The policemen ask Gabriel — very politely, it must be said — to pack up and leave because he is causing an obstruction. Gabriel, for his part, starts winding them up, making fun of them, doing a sort of Charlie Chaplin turn, imitating the way the policemen are standing, crawling between their legs, miming a plea for help to the statues of Bjørnson and Ibsen. When, as the police see it, he refuses to comply with their request, he is driven off in the patrol car to Møllergata police station — amid a chorus of booing from the crowd. People have forgotten that they ought to be getting home, that they have to catch the bus or the train or the Nesodden ferry. They want to see more playacting.
Jonas sat in a dinghy in a bay just north of Drøbak, rowing slowly towards the shore. Without its mainmast, the old lifeboat looked like a floating chest, or a bin, a real loony bin. He saw how Gabriel, this man who had once stood on Karl Johan’s gate and seduced a crowd of people with nothing but his voice and a bit of hand-waving, had been caught in his own net, become entangled in the ropes of the sabotaged rigging. Jonas remembered his grandfather’s lovely model of the Colin Archer lifeboat, and with that thought came the realization that this too resembled a puppet theatre. And Gabriel’s sleep-sodden cries reinforced this illusion: ‘I am all that you will, — a Turk, a sinner, — a hill-troll —; but help; there was something that burst! I cannot just hit on your name at the moment; — help me, oh you — all madmen’s protector!’
Jonas knew he would never see him again. ‘You bastard,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll never forget you. More’s the pity.’
Gabriel was standing stock-still on the deck now, looking like the ghost from Hamlet in his white underwear. What a noble mind is here o’erthrown, Jonas thought. Gabriel Sand. An impostor. And yet: how long had it taken for Jonas to see through him? A man who ate his meals on board a boat every day, at a table fitted with a fiddle rail, with a bookshelf constructed in such a way that the books would not fall off in heavy weather — and who had never put to sea in his boat. Who kept a logbook for the lifeboat Norge, even though he had never tethered up to a buoy, had never been south of Drøbak, had never been to any of the places or done any of the things he had described so vividly: killer whales off the Canadian coast, Princess Aroari of the Marquesa Islands, the plums of the Azores, storms around Cape Horn. It was all a bluff. The stupid idiot couldn’t even swim. Jonas rowed away, still annoyed with himself. How could he have been fooled, and for so long, by such a character?