In fact, Jonas’s anger had actually burst into full flame on the day when he was brought down and hurt so badly by that Lyn player on the football pitch. He made a secret vow to stay way out on the sidelines for the rest of his life. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had founded their own republic, the Republic of the Outside Left, in Leonard’s basement. Jonas espied the glimmering of an alternative mission in life: to become the greatest Norwegian outsider of all time. He had not yet abandoned his dream of making a name for himself, but as yet he had come no closer to it than when, in eighth grade, he found himself in the headmaster’s office, standing stiffly to attention in front of HRH — His Royal Highness — himself, having to explain why he had committed an act of vandalism by carving his initials into his desk in large capital letters.
So when Leonard announced that they were going to work up an indignation towards society and an aloofness from it which would make the airy-fairy Kristiania Bohemia of another age look like a sweet little kindergarten, Jonas was with him all the way. It was the two of them, Jonas and Leonard, against the rest of the world. Against the rest of the universe. They would spend hours sitting in the basement, that breathing space from their otherwise intolerable and stiflingly inane surroundings, in a world which seemed even flatter than before, pouring curses and gall on the heads of moronic teachers, gormless girls, overrated sporting heroes, brainless television presenters, talentless Norwegian pop groups, the rat-faced hotdog seller at the stall next to the taxi stance; even Kjell Bondevik, the Minister for Church and Education, whom they had never met, nor seen, and about whom they knew very little, came in for his share of abuse. Not even the stupid old moon was safe from them. What was it doing, hanging about up there, enticing rocket-mad men with its cheesy face? In short, they showed no mercy. Towards anything or anybody. The word happiness, which cropped up at every turn, was taboo. ‘Get mad!’ was their motto. If, during this period, some brave soul had confronted them with the Bo Wang Lee question ‘What should you take with you?’ they would have had no hesitation in replying: ‘Nothing!’ Had it been up to them, the Ark could have been torpedoed out of the water any time. In the end, though, the incident on the football pitch was not enough of an explanation; Jonas did not know where all the resentment, the boundless contempt sprang from, or the unstoppable stream of sarcasm. He had heard that colours could affect people’s moods and for a long time he wondered whether the walls in the basement might actually have had an effect on their subconscious minds. Because the basement walls were painted bright red. Leonard’s father called it the Red Room after the café immortalised in Strindberg’s novel of that name, the Bohemian haunt of artists and literati. Whatever the case, since they were now possessed of this fiery temperament, Jonas realised — after a while, at least — that what mattered was to give it direction.
He was in a fortunate position, having for years been able to observe his brother’s demonstrations of different possible plans of attack. Daniel — who in Jonas’s mind was always not just one, but ten years his senior — had proved very early on to have a talent for playing the outsider. This was made perfectly clear, if it had not been before, one time when he had the mumps. He had come swaggering into the living room, all puffy-cheeked and wearing Rakel’s cigarette-fumed biker jacket — the resemblance to a very young Marlon Brando was staggering. ‘The wild one,’ he growled with feverish relish before staggering back to bed.
Jonas never knew where his brother found his inspiration, where he picked up his knowledge of Marlon Brando, for example, or other ‘rebels’ who were not particularly well-known at that time, or certainly not to boys of Daniel’s age. When asked, usually at large family gatherings, to speak about his plans for the future, he did not get flustered and stammer, as other teenagers might; Daniel would get quietly to his feet, his eyes burning, and commence by intoning: ‘I have a dream …’ He once went on a hunger strike for several days — he was actually capable of such a thing — in protest against his parents ‘strict’ ruling that he had to be in by nine o’clock in the evening. He solemnly declared that he was acting in the spirit of Mahatma Ghandi, and Haakon and Åse Hansen, inwardly smiling, were forced to relent. An attempt to mount a demonstration to demand that the whole estate be allowed to pick the apples in Wolfgang Michaelsen’s garden came, however, to nothing. Daniel had a failing. Just as Jonas wavered between various projects in life, so Daniel wavered between different rebel role models. One day he was to be found wearing a funny black cap, nasally whining ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the next he would be driving his mother to despair by charging about with a bucket in one hand, splattering paint onto huge sheets of paper spread out on the floor. He simply could not discover what his field of rebellion should be.
Jonas had always been convinced that his brother would end up as a soldier, become a sort of guerrilla leader. As a child, Daniel had loved everything to do with war and fighting and had evinced the most tireless inventiveness when it came to weapons. He very quickly discovered that it was best to load a cap gun with a strip of caps four layers thick, and by making an adjustment to the workings of the battery-driven machine guns which later appeared on the market he could produce a noise that left the little kids stunned. There was something special about the rubber bands and scraps of leather from which Daniel’s catapults were constructed that made his stones fly further; he refined peashooters to the point where the other kids feared him as much as an Amazon Indian with a blowpipe and poison darts. He was forever coming up with better materials for his bows, and fixed the lead tips from real bullets to his arrows. If not on the military front then Jonas certainly expected his brother to make a name for himself within the field of weapon technology. Instead Daniel, who also happened to be a hell of a ladies’ man, became a man of the cloth. So what happened?
Daniel was what Jonas would have called a tiresomely high achiever. He just kept forging ahead, as if on some endless red carpet, did not know the meaning of the word ‘opposition’. It was the same with sport, which also looked like being the one area in which Daniel could give his rebellious tendencies full play. Daniel had always been a fitness fanatic. He had, for example, been Grorud’s first proud owner of a Bullworker, a piece of equipment not unlike a telescope or a bazooka for which ads had suddenly started popping up everywhere and which just as quickly became the word on every boy’s lips, because it could give you a bull-like physique in no time flat. Jonas could not compress the cylinder by so much as a centimetre. Daniel, on the other hand, pumped it in and out with ease, while at the same time — as if the masturbation-style action automatically led his thoughts in that direction — holding forth on his latest girlish conquest.
It was, however, in athletics that Daniel was expected to do great things. He meant to walk — or rather, run — in the footsteps of the Kvalheim brothers who hailed from the flats down by Grorud station. Jonas had always admired Daniel’s alarming gift for self-abuse; it could be snowing buckets and still his brother would be out running; he practised interval and tempo training until he collapsed or threw up. And through it all he remained a rebel. Where Jonas, more by accident than design, had a scar in the shape of a little x above his eyebrow, there came a day when Daniel put a large X after his name. This came in the wake of the summer Olympics in Mexico City. Daniel insisted on being known only as Daniel X and that autumn, at an athletics meet at which he had won every event, he mounted the podium wearing dark sunglasses and a black glove on his right fist which he held demonstratively in the air. It all went so well and was so outrageously provocative until some aggrieved soul asked him what he was protesting against. At first Daniel was lost for an answer. It was one thing to protest against curfews and high garden fences, quite another to stick one’s fist in the air, and a black-gloved fist at that. He saved the situation with a watertight reply: ‘Everything!’