Daniel kept his promise, though. He remained a Christian. It may be that his time as Daniel X had merely been a harbinger of what was to come, as Jonas had thought — an intimation of an unknown x inside him, a religious chamber. If, that is, he did not believe that he had at last found the field which had been there waiting for his rebellious heart. To Jonas it was nothing short of a miracle. Proof that at any moment a person can suddenly change. So when other, normally peaceable individuals suddenly became raging revolutionaries, Daniel, with his slumbering, inborn talent for rebellion, was holed up indoors with his nose buried in his Bible, as if he had already started studying theology, embarked upon his career in the church. He had found his Samarkand. His life had acquired weight.
Leonard Knutzen, too, gained weight. Or at least his wallet did. Years later, when Jonas rarely ever thought of his old friend, Leonard’s name suddenly appeared in the newspapers. Although eventually the headlines spoke simply of Leonardo. In photographs his coat was always slung over his shoulders like a cape, a touch which now seemed elegant rather than affected. And his eyes looked keen again. The first article appeared in conjunction with a much publicised exhibition of works by young Norwegian photographers. Leonard Knutzen had put up the money for the exhibition. A lot of money. Leonard Knutzen was a rich man. Fabulously rich. But no one, not even in media circles had ever come across his name before. He lived abroad. Leonard had quietly made himself a fortune on the stock market. The image of him presented in the press was of a shrewd individual much to be admired, a financial artist; it was them, the media, who nicknamed him Leonardo, without knowing anything of his heroic past as the Italian-inspired director of a good number of twelve-minute 8 mm films full of scooters and people gazing in different directions. Leonard had done it — done what he had shown he could do with Blow-Up in that tiny cinema at Røa. He had actually re-cut his own fate. He had used the art of montage to create a new life for himself. Or perhaps one should simply say that he had enlarged himself.
To Jonas, Leonard seemed the very personification of modern Norway — a nation which led the most anonymous, the most discreet, of existences, alongside the other nations of the world, while the money simply poured into the state coffers. Likewise, Leonard sat in his faraway office, pressing buttons, unremarked by anyone in his native country, while the money pumped into his offshore accounts. The press’s glowing reports of Leonardo’s doings reminded Jonas of a conjuring trick. Leonard was now blowing up money, he could take a krone and, by dint of an abstract, magical process, magnify it into ten. Both Leonard and Norway had discovered that you did not need to work — or not, at least, in the old-fashioned physical fashion depicted in Aktuell magazine — in order to get rich. Leonard had finally found a use for his keen eye. That was still the key. An eye for where to put one’s money. An eye for the perfect stock. In interviews he said, half in jest, that he supposed he might be a Leonardo when it came to spying investment opportunities which no one else believed possible. To Jonas it seemed more as though Leonard had determined to blow the abilities, the genes, of a lousy bank teller into something great. He had produced a happy ending, against all odds, and in spite of the original film.
On the other hand, Jonas also had the definite impression that for Leonard the driving force was still wrath. That Leonard had rediscovered some of the Italian temperament from those evenings in the Red Room, a little of the bite of all those spicy sauces they had spooned over their pasta. The fiery grindings of the pepper mill. Either that or he had accomplished something which only very few ever manage: to preserve some of the indignation which we tend and nurture so carefully in our youth. Jonas could not help thinking that one should possibly take this as a lesson. Maybe everyone should have a little placard stuck to the fridge door of their settled, routine existences, a slip of paper saying: SAVE THE WRATH.
All the write-ups on Leonard Knutzen did, however, also lead Jonas to immerse himself in much more serious reflections. He was reminded of another time. He had, he recalled, not only been mad at the world. Once he had actually tried to open up the world. In junior high he had met a master, a schoolmaster, and before that Bo Wang Lee.
Uranus
In his youth Jonas Wergeland had the ability to follow several lines of thought at once. For long periods of time he also had the feeling that he was living parallel lives. While he may have spent some parts of the day in a basement, seething with rage, for other parts of the day he was, for example, at school — where he came across as a rather shy, polite and, not least, inquisitive young man.
The first time Jonas Wergeland saw the slogan ‘The real thing’ he thought, not of Coca-Cola, but of realskolen — junior high. For him, this truly was ‘real school’. It is not the case, as certain influential branches of psychology would have it, that our characters are formed by the time we are around seven. Things are not, I am glad to say, as dire as all that. Like the mighty banyan tree, human beings too can put down roots from branches high above. Jonas Wergeland received his ‘upbringing’, his most crucial stimuli, at junior high.
If it is true that from the cradle to the grave, from childhood games with stones to the puffing and blowing of old age, man lives out, as it were, the whole history of the species, then junior high was, for Jonas, a Renaissance, a revival of age-old learning, and particularly of the elementary knowledge instilled in him in ‘antiquity’, those three glorious first years at school. Not because he spent so much time with his chum Leonard, known as Leonardo, but because he came under the wing of a person, a teacher, who fully merited the epithet applied to individuals of exceptionally wide-ranging talent and cultivation: a Renaissance man.
Who was this person? Well it was certainly not the Iron Chancellor, who drummed the litany of German prepositions into their heads, nor was it Dr Jekyll, whom they had for English: on the surface a gentleman to his fingertips, dressed from top to toe in tweed and corduroy, but capable of exploding into the most pyrotechnical fits of rage, to which the snapping of a pointer was but the mildest prelude. Nor was it their enigmatic maths teacher, Miss Pi, who could stir a boy’s blood simply with the circular motions of her arms, or the Weed, their natural history teacher, who swooned at the very mention of the word ‘dissect’. And for any favour: forget PE teacher, Tamara Press. At an age when they positively oozed disrespect, only one person slipped through the needle’s eye of their tolerance. He was even exempt from the usual fiendish practical jokes, such as balancing the teacher’s lectern on the very edge of the dais or breaking off matchsticks in the lock of the classroom door. It is a mark of his standing that he did not even labour under a nickname. He was, quite simply, Mr Dehli. Jonas had him for Norwegian and history. In ancient myths and legends one often hears tell of inspired masters, the sort who teach the hero to fence or shoot with bow and arrow. Mr Dehli was such a master. Although the ‘e’ in his surname was actually sounded as ‘ay’ and the ‘l’ and the ‘h’ were the wrong way round, Jonas always pronounced it like that of the capital of India — for reasons which will later become apparent. ‘We’re not going to have Norwegian now,’ Jonas would think before his classes, ‘we’re going to have Indian.’