As a young woman Aunt Laura had made a chess set, with gold and silver plated miniatures of famous sculptures for the pieces. For the bishop she had chosen the Ancient Greek statue of the discus thrower, for the knight, Marcus Aurelius on horseback; Brancusi’s slender Bird was the rook, Michelangelo’s David the pawn and to Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman fell the honour of being the queen. Jonas learned a bit about art history along with the rules of the game. So for him chess was not so much a game as a story consisting of criss-crossing tales; tales, what is more, which dated from different times, since the pieces reflected the styles of a wide variety of eras. Not even the fact that his aunt wore a silk dressing gown which made her appear more naked than if she had been wearing nothing at all could divert Jonas’s attention from all those different sculptures. Brancusi’s bird was particularly intriguing. The artist seemed almost to have caught what lay behind the bird’s flight.
But the main point here is this: the first time Jonas laid eyes on Aunt Laura’s king, namely August Rodin’s The Thinker, he lapsed into reverie. That’s me, a voice inside him cried; that’s mankind, that’s how we are. Aunt Laura would always mean a great deal to Jonas, but above all else he loved her for making The Thinker the king. From that day in his aunt’s flat at Tøyen he was sure: his talent had, in some way, to be related to thinking. Jonas would promptly have applauded René Descartes, had he known of that gentleman’s attempt to establish one thing for certain, with his celebrated statement concerning the relationship between thinking and being.
Nobel prize-winners are often to be heard describing how as children they took old radios apart or built little laboratories in which they carried out chemical experiments. Jonas made do with his own thoughts. His mind was all the laboratory he needed. He took to meditating. In the most literal sense: he sat himself down and proceeded, quite resolutely, to reflect on things, letting observations run into one another while at the same time endeavouring to be aware of what he was doing, to map out where his thoughts were taking him. The average human being is said to have fifty thousand thoughts a day and it was as if Jonas meant to scrutinise every one of his — make a record of them, just as he would sit by the roadside, noting down car registrations. After a while he discovered that, oddly enough, his thoughts flowed best when he assumed the same position as Rodin’s figure: with his chin resting on his fist, his elbow propped on his thigh. From this point onwards his teachers and his chums would automatically resort to the same words to describe Jonas: ‘He’s a thoughtful character.’
Of all the many aspects of contemplation, the one at which Jonas really excelled was make-believe. Before too long he had become a master of pretence. He had the ability to create whole worlds inside his head, experience them with all his senses. Before leaving elementary school he had visited some of the most exotic countries on earth, really thought himself there with the aid of odd bits of information he had heard or had gleaned from school books. He had even visited Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. All you needed was a little piece of something and your imagination would do the rest, like Sherlock Holmes finding a scrap of clothing. Thanks to his powers of imagination Jonas had been a lion and a flower, not to mention a pencil and the gas helium. As for women: he had kissed Cleopatra — she had smelled of milk — before he had his first kiss. By the age of eleven, Jonas Wergeland was afraid that the world had been used up. He suspected, in other words, that he had reached a dead end where the possibilities of thought were concerned. He was also well aware that he was quite alone in appreciating his gift. At the start of a new school term, when the teacher asked where they had spent their holidays, Jonas had replied: ‘In the Kalahari desert. With the pygmies.’ Everybody had laughed. They had fallen about. They did not see that a fabrication could be as real as reality could be fabricated. Or, to put it another way: that the fiction could be less flat than the real thing.
So it took Jonas a while to get to the stage where he wanted, or dared, to properly acknowledge his almost unnerving talent for thinking. But this new sense of self-awareness triggered a chain reaction: he discovered that he was also gifted in other areas; discovered also how alarmingly simple it is to distinguish oneself, how easy to score cheap points.
Like most children, Jonas liked kicking a football around. At Solhaug, they played on the grass or on small, rough patches of waste ground. Any car park could be Ullevål stadium, or Wembley. They had next to no interest in tactics, or formations, ‘line-ups’ as they are now called. It was basically a big free-for-all, with everybody going for the ball at the same time, and everybody taking a shot at goal as soon as they got it. It was as much like wrestling or rugby as it was football.
Jonas did not take football too seriously: it was a game, a way of killing the odd half-hour until dinner was ready. And although he clearly had a way with the ball and was quick on his feet, he did not take up the game seriously until quite late on. It was Jonas’s best friend, Leonard Knutzen — Leo for short, later to be better known by his professional name, Leonardo — who persuaded him to overcome his shyness and join the Grorud under-15s team. And here I should perhaps say that schoolboy football in the sixties was not such a serious and competitive business as it is today; nor was there any great fight for places on the team. So, since they were short of a forward on the left side of the field and since Jonas was equally good with both feet this was the position he was given. Back then it was called the ‘left wing’ — which sounded as if you were in the air force — or ‘outside left’. Jonas immediately felt at home there.
Two things surprised Jonas once he started playing football more seriously. The first had to do with the fact that he was now playing on a proper pitch. The new pitch at Grorud sports ground had only just been laid; it looked so beautiful and, more importantly, it was absolutely massive. To Jonas, used to the narrow mazes around the garages and blocks of flats, this was undreamt-of freedom. Here you could really kick up your heels. He was all the more astonished to find, therefore, that even at this level players had a tendency to crowd together in the centre of the field. And it did not take Jonas long to discover — speaking of wings — that he had a whole runway to himself on the left-hand side.
Nonetheless, he played it canny. He held back, as if knowing intuitively that this discovery — like all significant discoveries — could have fateful consequences. He started with a few trial runs, as if to check whether it was true — had the other team really not realised that from here he could stroll unhindered all the way up to their goal line? No, it was right enough. Again and again he was able to sprint in lone majesty up to the visitors’ corner flag. He took more and more delight in this: dribbling the ball, kicking it up the touchline, sometimes all the way to the goal line. It had a demoralising effect on the other team. Jonas felt as though he had discovered an unknown side of football. Sometimes he wished he could have gone even further, tried running off the pitch, along the strip between the chalked line and the gravel; transcended the possibilities of the game.