One Sunday the whole family went for a drive after church. We stopped out on Ekeberg moor where some gypsies had made camp. They were something of an attraction. For ten øre some of the gypsy children would sing, one girl danced. But — and this was far more thrilling — you could also have your fortune told. Some curious onlookers stood in a semi-circle around a young woman seated on a chair outside a caravan. ‘Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a stunner,’ Daniel hissed, and then he shoved me through the circle of people and gave the woman a krone. ‘Now you can find out whether you’re going to end up dumping sewage or washing bodies,’ he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Or whether you’ll get off with Anne Beate Corneliussen.’ The woman smiled invitingly. She really was a stunner. Dark. Genuinely mysterious. She took my hand. She tilted it slightly. I felt her stiffen, almost jerking backwards in her seat. She raised her eyes and looked at me. I do not know how to describe it. As if she were afraid? Overwhelmed? She waved me away, said nothing, simply gave Daniel his krone back. She motioned to me to leave, as if she did not understand, had not been able to see anything.
I was a child. And yet. We have tens of billions of nerve cells in our brains and each of them capable of connecting with hundreds of thousands of other nerve cells. From time to time some expert can be heard to state that we are not even close to utilising the brain’s full capacity. A large proportion of our genetic material is also said to be a mystery: we have no idea what purpose it serves. What if I had detected talents which were in some way associated with those white patches in our knowledge, I would think at heady, almost uneasy moments when I was older. Should I regard this as a blessing or a curse?
I cannot deny it, however. For long periods this was my driving force, my strength and, at the same time, the source of the deepest misgivings: I felt unfinished as a human being. Which is not to say that I was unhappy with myself, with the person I was. But I knew — and this rankled me — that I harboured untapped potential. It lay coiled up inside me. Or packed away in little boxes, like Granny’s chandelier. I was, in other words, less interested in what I was than in what I could be. So one minute I was on the lookout for situations which would help this unknown quality to uncoil, enable me to excel myself. Or, more precisely: become the real me. The next minute I was filled with the need to hide, the wish that these latent gifts might leave me be. Sometimes, I confess, I even hoped they would never come to anything.
In my life, unlike many people, I have never been all that concerned about traumas or evil inclinations, all the things that drag me down. I have been more interested in whatever it is that lifts me up. I have felt something lifting me up. Of all the questions I have had to address, this is the one I hold to be the most cruciaclass="underline" is mankind descended, metaphorically speaking, from the animals or the angels? Or perhaps this is merely a variation on another question: should we let ourselves be ruled by the past or the future? By who we are or who we will become?
It was during a visit to Aunt Laura that I first received some intimation of how radical my potential was. Or at least, I believed that I was given a sign. I must have been about seven. My aunt was a goldsmith, specialising in avant-garde jewellery. In her flat in Tøyen all the walls of the living room and the rooms adjoining it were covered in rugs she had bought on her amazing and, as she told it, not entirely risk-free, travels in the Middle East and Central Asia. This home represented, for me, a source of stimulation that cannot be overrated. And although the name Tøyen actually stems from another word entirely, it always made me think of the word ‘tøye’, meaning to stretch and hence, for me, represented a place where I would be broadened, extended. A feeling which was enhanced by the flat itself; it seemed almost boundless. As if, by some magic, this average-sized dwelling consisted of hundreds of little nooks and chambers.
In the evenings, when my aunt was making dinner, I was allowed to shut the kitchen door and play in the living room. Aunt Laura bound a silk scarf around my head like a turban and lent me a torch. Then I switched off the living-room light and made believe I was a sultan going out in disguise to see how things stood in my realm — just like the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights. I was especially fond of pretending that I was walking around the bazaar, where I envisaged the most arcane occurrences taking place. The platter of oranges on the table was transformed with ease into a cornucopian fruit stall, the bowl of little pistachio cakes turned into an aromatic pastry shop and the coils of silver wire on the workbench in the corner became glimpses of palaces in a distant city. My imagination was given added wing by the delicious smells issuing from the kitchen, often from my aunt’s speciality: Lebanese dishes, including my favourite, machawi, small chunks of meat threaded onto a skewer and grilled — the skewer was a treat in itself. When I shone the torch on the many different oriental rugs they altered character. As with the one in Karen Mohr’s home they, too, concealed doors of a sort leading to new and exciting chambers. Their labyrinthine patterns took on a fascinating depth and revealed an assortment of tableaux; took me on journeys of discovery to cities such as Baghdad and Basra and, if I was lucky: to far-off Samarkand.
One evening, when Aunt Laura spent longer than usual in the kitchen, I fell asleep among the soft cushions on the sofa. I was woken by my aunt shaking me gently. Other children might wake with a start and imagine that they had just grown in their sleep. I tended, instead, to wake with a shudder. As an adult it struck me that this was not unlike the spasms of an orgasm. On this occasion, too, that deep tremor ran through me from top to toe, as if all the molecules in my body were swapping places. I looked around me. Everything was different. The same, but altered. When I had switched out the light there had been a platter of oranges on the table. Now the dish was piled high with lemons, inflamingly yellow and with that little tip which, later in life, always made me think of a girl’s breast. When I had last seen Aunt Laura in the kitchen, she had been wearing a gold sea-horse on a chain around her neck, a piece of jewellery she claimed was made from the wedding rings of men with whom she had slept. But now a dolphin dangled before my eyes.
I said nothing. Not because I was not sure, but because I was scared. The Jonas I had now become had more to him than the Jonas who had fallen asleep — whatever had happened. There was much to suggest that whatever I had, until then, taken to be myself was only a fragment of a much larger whole. Amid all my fear and confusion, however, I also detected another, conflicting emotion: one of wild excitement.
It is tempting to dismiss all of this as no more than a fanciful childish or youthful daydream. Nevertheless, for years it coloured my life; I have no wish to deny it. The same went for my suspicion that the pressure I occasionally felt, that sense of being unfolded, was connected to something else. For, while my brother Daniel had a constant fixation with soul, I let myself be seduced, possibly as a protest, by a rival concept within those same hazy and exalted spheres. Spirit. I would not be surprised if that was why we ended up in such different walks of life, despite having one lowest common denominator: the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin’s impassioned rendering of ‘Spirit in the Dark’, more especially the live version, sung with Ray Charles — Aretha’s ecstatic scream of ‘Don’t do it to me!’ left us both with goosebumps on our inner thighs. This was soul and spirit in perfect harmony.