He never tried to repeat this exploit, partly because he didn’t want to annoy the others, and partly because he realised that this was something he could experiment with on his own. He may also have been afraid that the faculty of which he had caught the merest glimpse might disappear. That great care would have to be taken with any further experiments. Oddly enough, Jonas made his new discovery around the time of Esso’s first major advertising campaign, when everywhere you went you saw the slogan ‘Put a tiger in your tank’. Jonas had done just that, put a tiger in his think-tank. That, at least, is how it felt, and with the same hint of danger. His prospective gift might just as easily bring him bad luck as good, something far worse than a cut brow.
He was to make this same discovery again and again: if you did not keep your exceptional talent to yourself, you had a much greater chance of being laughed at, or even penalised, than of being applauded. It was the same with football. But when his team’s fiercest rivals for the top position in the league, the west-side team Lyn, came to Grorud, hubris got the better of Jonas; he could not contain himself. The whole Grorud team was more than usually keyed-up, balefully eyeing the fancy cars which pulled up outside the clubhouse, bringing the Lyn players and their trainers. ‘We’re going to hammer you lot black and blue,’ one slick-haired Lyn player remarked blithely as he hopped out; referring, with this dig, to the colours of the Grorud strips. ‘Bloody snobs,’ Leo hissed through his teeth as he stood there with Jonas, glowering at these boys who seemed to come from another stratosphere, who dressed differently, who had different haircuts, who seemed, in short, more grown-up than them, as if the whole bunch could, at any minute, turn round and become lawyers, company directors and stockbrokers. Lyn supporters will have to excuse this mythologising of their team, this is simply a description of the way in which Jonas Wergeland and his teammates saw it.
For a long time during this crucial match, too, Jonas was able to charge more or less unhindered up the left wing, but unlike the other teams they had come up against that season, Lyn had a trainer who spotted Jonas’s uncommon ability and shouted some instructions to his defence, mainly to one of the right-backs who looked, to Jonas, a bit like King Kong. Jonas became the brunt of some really dirty tackling. During one such foul he must have cracked a rib; the pain was almost unbearable, but he played on. He should have known. He should have stopped, kept his talent hidden. But at that moment he just couldn’t. He got too carried away. There was something about Lyn, Lyn on Grorud’s home ground, something historic, symbolic. It was the Right against the Left.
Jonas scored two goals, even with his chest hurting like mad he scored two very simple, but very sweet goals with little chip shots off the side of the foot, one into either side of the net, well out of reach of the Lyn keeper, he was so taken aback he didn’t even have a chance to make a dive for the ball. The Lyn defenders were clearly rankled by the utter prosaicness of these goals, their cheeky nonchalance. Jonas saw the dirty looks they sent him. A curving shot skimming under the crossbar from twenty metres out, that they could have stomached, a superb lob or a lethal half-volley shot, but these soft, ruthless shots to the foot of the post were just too demeaning. This was socialism in practice: painfully simple.
The score was 3–3, with five minutes of the game to go. Jonas was alone out on the left flank, received a pass from Leo in their own half, ran up the wing, wincing at the pain in his ribs, but crossing the halfway line nonetheless, no one in his way; all the players were starting to flag, Jonas had a free run up that side of the pitch, and on he ran, hugging the touchline and registering, out of the corner of his eye, Leo running parallel with him, like a neighbouring idea in his mind: two thoughts, utterly dissimilar, but with a common goal. And it may have been at that very moment that he made up his mind to stay out here for the rest of his life, on the left wing. Because, despite his short-lived career in football, from that day onwards Jonas saw himself as belonging to the ‘outside left’. No matter what cause he was fighting for, he would always try to find an outsider position, a sideline along which he could dribble the ball while everybody else clustered together in the centre, and although where Jonas was concerned, it was more a psychological than a political appellation, he would have had nothing against being a founding member of a new party, to be called the Outside Left.
This also sheds some light on his later attempt to expose the opposite wing for what it was. As an adult — not least in prison — Jonas Wergeland spent a lot of time trying to analyze the most disturbing watershed in the history of modern Norway, a sort of collective fall from grace. 1973 is fixed in the global consciousness as the year when the oil crisis gave a serious indication of the state the world was in, and of its grave economic problems. In Norway, however, where they had only started pumping out their black gold a couple of years earlier, the situation in 1973 was almost the very opposite: in Norway they were having trouble coping with their nascent wealth. This fact manifested itself most clearly, if indirectly, at a public meeting in the Saga cinema in Oslo in April of that year. The choice of venue was most apt, since it would be quite true to say that a new saga had its beginnings here. A saga of the grimmer sort. On the stage stood a seasoned public speaker: an eccentric dog lover in a suit and a bow tie, with a bottle of egg liqueur to oil his vocal chords. Anders Sigurd Lange was his name, and he made a speech which was interrupted by bursts of applause over a hundred times. This meeting led to the founding of a political party which initially went by the curious name of ‘Anders Lange’s party for the drastic reduction of taxes, duties and state intervention’. Later it acquired another and possibly even more curious appellation: Fremskrittspartiet — the Progress Party.
Much has been said about that strange organisation, the Norwegian Maoist Party — the AKP in its Norwegian abbreviation — which ran rampant in Norway in the seventies. But as far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, the most significant political movement of the day, in the long run at any rate, was not the AKP, but the ALP. Anders Lange was not, in himself, a bad man; Jonas did not have the slightest interest in him as a person, what fascinated him was the society which had raised an individual like Anders Lange to prominence, which is to say: Norway. Lange was a symbol, the carrier of alarming symptoms, in the same way as Harastølen, the refugee centre at Luster. He was, among other things, one of the first examples of a growing trend among politicians to become solo performers. And proof that they could get away with this, not to mention actually build up a following, even when they were little short of utter buffoons. Everything hinged on the individual concerned. It was no longer a matter of a political party, but of a skilled demagogue, surrounded by a crowd of whingeing Norwegians who could, what is more, be replaced at regular intervals.
None of this would have been possible, however, had it not been for certain requisite factors, the most important of these being the media and, not least, the television broadcasting service of which Jonas Wergeland himself would one day become a part. With Anders Lange’s Party — not the man, but the phenomenon: the combination of rapacious media and one figure as catalyst, began the decline of civilised politics. Within just a few months a handful of individuals succeeded, with the help of the media, in totally vulgarising the Norwegian political scene. It did not take long for every politician to realise that presentation was more important than substance, that one might as well master the rhetoric of advertising right at the start. The politicians, press and TV entered into a symbiosis of sorts: each ensuring the other of publicity, however short-lived, and whatever the cost.