Mr Dehli shared Jonas’s weakness for maps; he frequently employed them in his lessons and not only as a means of illustrating one of the most enigmatic words in Sanskrit — māyā. The huge expanses of paper which could be pulled down to cover the wall behind the teacher’s lectern seemed charged with a singular magic. This was partly due to the fact that the maps in junior high were newer than their more tattered and faded counterparts in elementary school. In any case, it was a real treat to see Mr Dehli — while telling them, say, about Xerxes and the ancient kingdom of Persia — send his pointer dancing across a map of Asia half the size of the wall, printed in colours so bright and clear that the topographical features seemed to take on three dimensions and bulge right out into the room. Learning was suddenly brought to life, a connection established between it and the real world. They were halfway into the wonderful reddish-brown massifs of the Zagros Mountains when the bell rang.
The classroom itself altered character completely depending upon which map he had pulled down. The atmosphere in the room was different when savannah-covered Africa hung down over the board than when South America’s rugged Andean spine dominated the field of vision. Sometimes Jonas thought that the maps made the front of the class with the dais and lectern look more like the stage in a theatre. And the sheets of paper hanging rolled up, one behind the other, on that marvellous rack were prospective sets or backdrops. ‘Today we’re going to talk about the Nile,’ Mr Dehli said, loosening his bow tie; and even though it was winter and the classroom was cold, once the wall behind the schoolmaster had been covered by the Middle East and Egypt with their warm green and yellow hues, Jonas was hard put not to remove his jersey. He was transported back to his childhood, to when he had been the owner of an elegant, aromatic cigarette tin with a picture on the lid of the sphinx, the pyramids and Simon Arzt in a red fez.
Many of Mr Dehli’s teaching tours de forces involved maps or globes. By turning the world upside down he taught them the meaning of the word ‘perspective’. On one occasion he actually cut an old map of the world in two, right up the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Why should the Atlantic always been in the centre?’ he asked. ‘Let’s stick it together again with the Pacific in the middle.’ The effect was remarkable. Suddenly Norway was right out on the periphery, up in the far corner — though, to Jonas’s satisfaction, still in a possible Outside Left position. ‘What if so-called Western supremacy was no more than a parenthesis in history?’ Mr Dehli said, thereby anticipating those prophecies made towards the end of the millennium to the effect that the balance of economic power would shift to the east. During another lesson he held up a globe at a particular angle: ‘What do you see?’ They were looking straight at the Pacific Ocean. They could just make out the edges of the continents around the rim of the circle. Jonas had had a globe of the world for years, but had never realised that it could be viewed from such an angle. ‘Nothing but sea,’ Mr. Dehli said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that seventy-five per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water?’ This was during a history lesson, on Vasco da Gama. Mr Dehli then went on to tell them about the great voyages of discovery and the background to them, about sailing ships and navigation. You never forgot it. It seemed to Jonas that this was the whole point of lessons: to teach them how to navigate. Through life.
Mr Dehli’s use of maps to illustrate māyā had its sequel in a Christmas show put on by the pupils in the classroom. It was actually during this same show that Leonard — or Leonardo, rather — despite restless rumblings from his classmates, showed his first 8 mm cine film, a bleak drama in which Jonas and Pernille played a boy and a girl in black polo-neck sweaters, standing back to back in an open field with a huge bulldozer in the background.
Jonas was a much bigger hit on his own and in the flesh. He did an impression of Mr Dehli, wearing a jacket and a bow tie deliberately and hilariously askew. ‘Today I am going to tell you about Maya,’ he said, getting a laugh right away by playing on his own misapprehension and pronouncing māyā like the girl’s name. All the maps had been pulled down beforehand — and at the very back hung an affectionate caricature of Mr Dehli himself. Gesticulating wildly and brandishing his pointer Jonas worked up to his big conjuring trick. But just as he was about to tug on the first cord, acutely aware that all eyes were upon him, he suddenly began to feel very self-conscious, was struck by a terrible fit of shyness, with the result that he tugged too hard; he thought the map was stuck, so he yanked as hard as he could, the map rack came away from the wall and the whole kit and caboodle came crashing down on top of him, to the riotous glee of the class. Jonas must have lifted the pointer on instinct, in an attempt to defend himself against this avalanche of countries and continents, because he came round to find himself sitting on the floor like an emperor draped in a many-layered cloak, with the pointer stuck through the map of Asia. ‘That was the day when the world came tumbling about my ears,’ he was fond of saying.
Mr Dehli showed that he had appreciated this performance by laughing louder than anyone else. ‘I think you’re going to be a great discoverer,’ he said, straightening Jonas’s cock-eyed bow tie on the way out. I should perhaps add that the pointer had not pierced the map just anywhere. Jonas had actually run it right through Samarkand. Thus providing, you might say, the perfect illustration of māyā. In any case, from that day on, Samarkand stood for him as a reality behind reality, he developed a belief that there was a Samarkand behind Samarkand.
The memory of those maps and his attempt to demonstrate the concept of māyā cropped up more than once during the making of his televised portrait of Edvard Munch, a programme which also showed quite clearly how intent Jonas Wergeland was on challenging people’s deeper awareness, or the way they saw things — what Mr Dehli would have called their philosophy of life. Although Thinking Big attracted record-breaking audiences, Wergeland was less interested in viewing figures than in the imprint which the series might leave on people’s minds. In this respect he was a true programme-maker; he wished to programme, or reprogramme, the Norwegian people’s way of thinking.
Owing to his own unforgettable encounter with the wall decorations in one of Oslo’s public buildings — an experience to which we will return — Jonas was seriously tempted to focus on Munch’s popular murals for the Oslo University assembly hall, but he eventually came down in favour of an early phase in the artist’s life. In the key scene, the young Munch was shown standing in a large circular room with many windows. Viewers saw him walking slowly from one window to the next; gazing, clearly moved, out of each of them in turn, as if looking out onto a bewildering and troubling world. Thereafter he sat down on a bench in the centre of the room, his elbow propped on his thigh and his chin resting on his fist, like Rodin’s celebrated sculpture ‘The Thinker’. Here was a man at what was arguably the most crucial stage of his life; a man who had just lost his father, a man who had had the benefit of a couple of inspiring sojourns in France, in St Cloud and Nice, a young man who had only just begun to see what he wanted to do in his art, to find his own style. And underpinning the images of this man deep in thought, nothing but the sound of a brush on canvas. To the viewers it must have seemed as though the deep musings, or memories, around which his thoughts revolved had generated the vision or metamorphosis that now occurred, with first one, then another window, one prospect then another — still accompanied only by the rasp of a brush — turning first into a translucent panel, not unlike a transparent map, and then into a painting, until the circular room was seen to be a gallery, its walls hung with works recognisable as Munch’s own, canvases covered with lines and colours which — one could tell — Munch had seen in his mind’s eye. The world had become art.