Jonas was often to think that the roots of his best and most famous television programmes were to be found here, in a tiny cinema in the Oslo suburb of Røa. He sometimes thought of the Thinking Big series as being just one film, cut in different ways.
On the way back to town, Leonard told him that some kind soul at the offices of the film’s Norwegian distributor had given him a worn-out copy which was actually due to be scrapped. And a sympathetic person at the Film Institute had let him use the cutting desk there. So? What did Jonas think? There was a note of anxiety in Leonard’s voice. What he had done might well seem like sacrilege. To re-edit Blow-Up — it was tantamount to re-editing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
Jonas did not know what to say. In time he would come to see that Leonard had possibly been conducting an experiment inspired by genetic engineering. He wanted to prove to Jonas that he could reconstruct himself. That there was hope, despite his little shrimp of a bank teller father. But at the time Jonas could not see anything to suggest that Leonard had succeeded in his venture. All the light seemed to have gone out of his friend’s dark eyes. There was not a spark. Only blackness. As if a shutter had dropped down for good and all.
Then Leonard Knutzen disappeared. Someone said that he had gone to India, that he took LSD and had long since blown his mind out completely. Others claimed to have seen him, or someone who looked like him, in the centre of Copenhagen, carrying a sign — or probably a placard — in the shape of a big hand pointing to a dive down a side street, the sort of place where, in the very early seventies, you could see grainy German porn movies.
Jonas thought often of how fragile a life was, how very, very little it took to knock a person off course. Or onto a new course. You bend down to tie your shoelaces and when you straighten up again your life has changed. Jonas himself had been an astonished witness to the moment when Daniel, high on innumerable easy victories, was suddenly brought face to face with the gravity of life. Jonas never really understood his brother, but he would have bet anything in the world that Daniel would never have become anything as outrageously far-fetched as a minister of the church.
That autumn Daniel had little thought for anything but his prospects as a star athlete; he was going through a phase when he was, in many ways, at his most intolerable, a tearaway disguised as a rebel, Daniel X with his black-gloved fist. Almost as if it were a natural extension of stretching his muscles after a tough training session, he started going out with a girl who sang in a Ten Sing choir. When it came to getting into a girl’s pants, Daniel was not fussy; it was okay by him even if the girl in question was a member of something as soulless and unmusical as one of those YWCA choirs: spotty teenagers singing off-key, backed by a band with badly tuned guitars — a nigh-on blasphemous set-up, in Daniel’s eyes, and about as far from Aretha Franklin’s gut-wrenching, wailful ecstasies as you could get.
It took more than the Queen of Soul and her seductive gospel strains to bring Daniel to the scripture, though. Jonas began to notice that Daniel seemed unusually agitated, then one evening he confessed to his little brother: he had knocked up his girlfriend. He was as desperately certain as you can only be when you are sixteen and have finally ‘done it’, with all the imprudence and raw self-assurance of the first-timer. Jonas could not resist it: ‘Maybe you should have put a black glove on your dick as well,’ he said. His brother, who would normally have flattened him for that, pretended not to hear, and instead went on cursing his spermatozoa, those microscopic champion swimmers that could make a woman’s body swell up like a balloon. He admitted to Jonas that suddenly he was seeing pregnant women all over the place. Wherever he looked there were people with prams and packs of nappies. He was done for. He could already see the headlines: ‘Grorud’s youngest parents.’
It was in this frame of mind that Daniel attended one of the last athletics meets of the year, and at the Jordal Amfi Arena, more specifically in the long-jump pit, he felt a higher power taking a hand in his life.
Daniel was an unusually gifted athlete and had always been particularly good at the long jump. He loved the combination of sprinting and jumping; he revelled in the challenge of hitting the board just right. So he was not at all happy with his first jump of five metres and twenty-seven centimetres — he was used to jumping around six metres. It could not just have been a case of nerves, a slight loss of concentration at the thought of a Ten Sing girl who was alarmingly ‘late’. Something had held him back in the air, he said later. A weight, a heaviness, as if there were some connection between gravidity and gravity. This feeling was even more pronounced on his second jump, when he hit the board perfectly and yet — as if the gravitational force had somehow doubled — jumped a shorter distance than normal. When the measuring crew announced the length — the same as before: ‘Danieclass="underline" 5.27’ — he did not give it too much thought. But when, on his third and last jump — the schedule at this meet only allowed for three tries — he jumped exactly five metres and twenty-seven centimetres yet again, he began to wonder. For the first time in his career, Daniel walked away from the long-jump pit without a medal.
Over the next few days, his mood exacerbated no doubt by growing anxiety over his girlfriend’s overdue period, Daniel started to give some serious thought to his weird result in the long-jump: 5.27 three times in a row — that was more than a coincidence. And with his natural propensity for speculation, it was not long before he consulted the old Family Bible, on the principle that a long-jump result was like a grain of manna, a little slip of paper that you picked out of a bowl, like a tombola ticket. Although he had never believed a word of it before, at that particular moment he was sure that the scripture would determine the course of his life. In the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 27, once he had managed to decipher the elaborate Gothic lettering, he slowly read to himself, with eyes as wide, surely, as those of King Belshazzar himself: ‘TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.’ The context, together with Gustav Doré’s dramatic illustration, left him in no doubt: the writing was on the wall. Weighed and found wanting.
Daniel knew what this meant. His soul was too light. For someone as concerned with the health and well-being of the soul as Daniel was, there could be no harsher verdict. At an early age he had read how certain religions believed that the soul was placed in a scale after death. If it proved too light it was cast into the jaws of a monster which sat next to the seat of judgement waiting to receive it. To Daniel this Bible text could mean only one thing: she was pregnant.
Although, there might still be hope. What if this were a final warning from a merciful God? Daniel fell to his knees. Just at that moment Jonas walked in, then pulled up short on the threshold. He could not believe his eyes. Daniel with his back to him, on his knees next to the bed. Daniel the rebel, a pig-headed bugger who had never in his life bowed down to anything. Softly and, if the truth be told, a mite fearfully Jonas retreated. What his brother said, what he prayed for, what he promised — because he must have made some sort of deal — Jonas never discovered. But from that day onwards Daniel W. Hansen was a Christian. You might say that he rotated his X forty-five degrees, turning it into a cross. And I hardly need say: there was no pregnancy. Soon afterwards, Daniel’s girlfriend came to see him, all smiles, to tell him that everything was okay. For days afterwards, Jonas could hear Daniel humming to himself when he thought he was alone, and Jonas’s hearing was good enough for him to recognise the hymn: ‘Hallelujah, my soul is free.’