Then, one night in March when Jonas was just on his way to bed, the whole family heard someone shouting out on the flag green. They went to the windows. In the centre of the patch of lawn between the blocks of flats stood Eva N. in her red anorak, calling his name. Loudly and clearly. And broken-heartedly. Daniel almost killed himself laughing, but his mother shushed him sternly.
No one would ever forget that night. Eva had brought something with her. It looked like a cartridge-case. She did something to the top before holding the tube straight up above her head. For a moment Jonas was afraid that she was going to set light to herself, like those Buddhist monks in Vietnam. Up shot a rocket, a coruscating streak, hundreds of metres long, accompanied by a whistling sound. It was a distress flare. Jonas remembered that her father had a boat. The flare exploded high in the sky above the flats. People had come out onto their balconies, they stared up at the bright red ball slowly descending on a tiny parachute. Falling gently and gracefully, burning with a strange intensity. The whole of Grorud seemed to be bathed in red light. And in the scant two minutes for which it lasted, the girl on the grass called Jonas’s name, just his name, helplessly almost, as if she was crying out to be saved, rather than loved. As if she was saying: ‘Look, I am bleeding.’
It was all very embarrassing, of course. That the family, the whole estate, should have been witness to this drama. Mr Iversen was cursing under his breath about people turning a March night into New Year’s Eve, robbing him of his once-a-year shot at the limelight. ‘It’s against the law,’ he muttered. ‘It’s sheer madness.’
At the same time Jonas could not help feeling rather proud. Here was this girl, in the middle of the flag green, and so in love with him that she did not care two hoots whether she was making a fool of herself in front of the whole estate. It was almost as though, standing there on that March night in the red glow from the flare — in a vast darkroom, if you like — she thought that she could develop love. It may well have been madness. But, looked at another way: she had nothing to lose. She was in distress. She did it in order to save herself, Jonas thought to himself. She wanted to maximise the crisis, so to speak, get the heartache over and done with. From that point of view the red light was the saving of her. And who knows, maybe she recalled this episode, in many ways a heroic deed, years later — by which time she was a famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions — when she saved her own life by sending up a similar parachute flare in Antarctis after her kayak was wrecked and she was left drifting on a large ice floe.
But to get back to the red thread of our story: Jonas was well-equipped to identify with Blow-Up — a film that revolved around a room suffused with red light in which an individual produced more and more blurred enlargements of smaller and smaller sections of a photograph. It was a film about the mystery of the image, all images. It was a film which quite simply questioned the nature of reality. Do we see what we see? Or, in Jonas Wergeland’s version: Are you in love when you are in love?
Somewhat against their will, both Jonas and Leonard were drawn further and further into Michelangelo Antonioni’s universe. Something was happening to them. Very gradually. Jonas began to feel unwell. His wrath turned to perplexity. They were looking for answers, but were given nothing but questions. They wanted to train their eye, hone it, but instead found themselves losing confidence in it. Leonard did not know that he was soon to lose confidence in everything, including his own origins.
For them this was a time of confusion. They ate their spaghetti with an ever growing repertoire of sauces: tuna with olives and tomatoes, a cream sauce with ham and leeks, while their discussions became more and more woolly. As their uncertainty and sense of alienation grew, so the Red Room underwent a metamorphosis. Leonard — now simply Leonardo — had started replacing the familiar photographs from Aktuell, hung on the walls by his father, with others. He removed from its frame the picture from Norsk Hydro of workers stacking bars of aluminium and in its stead put a still from Fellini’s 8½. A photograph of miners on Svalbard was supplanted by a shot from The Red Desert of Monica Vitti in an industrial wasteland. Reality was giving way to fiction. They hardly ever left the basement now; day after day they sat in the Red Room eating pasta and discussing films they had seen, films they had not seen and films which Leonardo envisaged making. Jonas would not emerge from this state of confusion and woolliness until he rediscovered both his wrath and a focus for it through taking part in a spectacular demonstration in the Town Hall Square. By then Leonardo was long gone.
Later, Jonas would think it only natural that their almost parodically artificial existence should explode into pitiless reality. He was spending less time with Leonard by then, having started at Oslo Cathedral School. And there was no way that Leonard, or even a befuddled Leonardo, was going all the way into the city to attend some toffee-nosed school. ‘You’re a traitor to your class,’ he muttered to Jonas, in a brief flashback to their early, neo-realistic glory days in the Red Room. Leonard went on to a high school in the Grorud Valley. Though with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape.
Leonard’s dreadful discovery was made shortly after his last hike with his father. It was years since they had gone hill-walking together, but it may be that Leonard was making an effort to shake himself awake, thinking that the Norwegian mountains and fresh air would form a counterbalance to the Red Room and the flickering images of individuals incapable of making contact with one another. In the summer of 1970 he and his father went walking in the hills around Aurlandsdalen and it was here that Olav Knutzen took a picture which would eventually find its way into a host of yearbooks and reference works. Because by this time a new trend had long been apparent in the media: they would all — every last news outlet — descend on one spot. Everyone covering the same story. And even though at one time there had been some debate about Aurlandsdalen and the question of inalienable natural heritage versus energy needs, in the press as well as in an uproarious edition of television’s Open to Question chaired by the Grand Panjandrum himself, Kjell Arnljot Wig, the focus shifted away from Aurlandsdalen with the advent of the Mardøla affair. That summer, the eyes of the nation were on the great falls in the Møre og Romsdal region and a demonstration during which protesters, including professor of philosophy Arne Næss, were gently and politely carted off by the police. Meanwhile, in Aurlandsdalen, the Oslo Electricity Board could quietly get on with the work of damming Viddalsvatn and the waters beyond to form one huge lake, without anyone blocking the broad construction road with so much as a twig. So, with the accuracy of a Zen master, Olav Knutzen took the only photograph from Låvisdalen recording the merest hint of a demonstration, a faint protest, at least, against the development which got under way here in June of the same year as the Mardøla project. It was an important piece of documentary evidence, this picture, which is also why it has been reproduced so often; because in Norway it is Aurlandsdalen, and not Mardøla, which represents a watershed in the history of nature conservation; the Aurlandsdalen controversy was proof that an element of reflection had bored its way into all views on constant progress, heedless growth — something which led, among other things, to the establishment a couple of years later of an environmental protection agency. Olav Knutzen took his snap at the point when work had just begun on a structure of pyramid-like dimensions, a dam 100 metres in height and 370 metres in length and as broad at its base as it was tall. This photograph — in the background of which one can see the building contractor, Furholmen’s, massive construction machines at the foot of the dam, as well as some summer steadings which would soon be under water — shows Leonard with a wry little grin on his face — whether of confusion or anger Jonas could never decide. In his hand he holds a placard bearing the legend: ‘SAVE THE DALE’. Although perhaps what it should have said, or so Jonas would later think, was ‘Save the illusion’.