Mechanically you press the buttons that bring the black boxes to life, you savour the vibrant thud from the loudspeakers, like a heartbeat, you think, and you flick through the row of CDs, more or less at random and pull out a CD, and you lift it out of its holder, you study the disc, seeing how it shines, like a miniature sun you think, or no, it strikes you that it looks like a wheel, shot with rainbows, you think and you lay it in the tray in the CD player and pick up the remote control, select the track you want and fall into a more abstract reflection on the feel of the tiny rubber button on the remote control, its perfect pressure on the thumb, and you try to isolate this pleasure and you think also of something else, something vague, a cordless connection, but it eludes you and you hear, or listen intently to, the electronic whisper for the tenth of a second it takes the CD player to aim the laser beam at the correct spot, a bit like a memory at work, you think, as now, you think, faced with a dead body, you think, and you hear the music pouring out, Johann Sebastian Bach, you think, as if surprised by the organ music which fills the room, a fugue, you think, and you sit down in the armchair and shut your eyes, and your throat feels as if someone were squeezing it gently while subjecting your eyes to a dose of teargas and you have to swallow and you have to wipe your eyes, more than once, and you listen to the music, not because it is the antithesis of the thing on the floor, a dead wife, but because you are trying to identify that inexplicable something which links the notes together, if it is not the swell of the organ, you think, the very breath of life behind the music, you think, feeling in acute need of oxygen, as if you had just surfaced after almost being drowned in a whirlpool.
So there you sit, Jonas Wergeland; Norway’s answer to Dick Fosbury, turtle hunter, one of the few people to have played the biggest organ in the world, and you are listening to this fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach because you have to stop your body from falling apart and you gaze round about you, your mind a blank, and you cannot remember who you are, and you would not believe it if anyone, at this moment, were to come up to you and tell you that you were a big celebrity, you would deny it, no way, you would shout, you’re Jonas Hansen, an ordinary man from Grorud, except that you are not, because you are Jonas Wergeland, a top-notch actor, and you stand up, to be met by your own reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite, a gift from Aunt Laura, you think, an antique mirror in an exquisite frame, you think, with a glass that distorts the features, making you wonder who owns this face with the lost eyes, and this prompts you instantly and quite automatically to make a face, as you sometimes do when you catch yourself in the monitor in the studio, and the sight of this contorted expression on your own face lifts you out of the situation so that you are viewing it from the outside, as if from a new angle, you think, because even now, at this moment, you cannot help looking for new angles, because outside it is spring, late evening and mild, with an enchanting deep-blue sky, not to mention a pale-yellow band on the horizon, you think, and you can see that there are many sides to this situation, that it may even deal a cut to the eye that could put all of your life in a new light, you think, and you stand outside yourself, seeing yourself from a distance, as shocked, grief-stricken, bewildered to the point of breakdown, and seeing yourself from the outside like this, in the mirror, you see your grief laid bare and suddenly you see the funny side of the situation, in the midst of this tragedy you see yourself in absurd caricature, and you contort your features again, make another face and, as you do so, unconsciously you do something else, with your little finger, a sign of profound emotional upheaval, you think, a trick you picked up, something a great actor once did during a performance at the National Theatre, as a way of showing that his world was tumbling down about his ears. And this puts you in mind of Gabriel, and your thoughts stay with Gabriel as your eye returns to the body on the floor, and you think of Gabriel, and you think of the question that has been niggling at you: did he really believe such things?
The Turtles
Gabriel had been there to meet him, as usual, on the beach and rowed him out, with long, practised strokes to the boat. A stiff breeze was blowing from the south-east. Jonas had a suspicion that Gabriel had been at the bottle already since, instead of going below to the saloon, he immediately proceeded to climb the rigging like a strip of a lad: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ he bellowed across the water, his coat flapping about him. ‘You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’ Jonas sat down on one of the deck lockers, not taking his eyes off Gabriel, who was now standing on a ratline far above. ‘Once, in the China Sea, I shot a pirate right where you’re sitting,’ Gabriel yelled down at him. ‘By the way, did I ever show you the teeth marks left in the jib boom by that killer whale we ran into off the west coast of Canada?’
When he eventually came down, Gabriel decided to walk the manrope. Jonas rushed across to support him. ‘Are you going to come away with me next summer?’ Gabriel asked. He was always going on about it. ‘Let’s leave this bloody, stick-in-the-mud country behind,’ he said, just about falling overboard — though a nice cool dip might have done him good. Gabriel Sand belonged to that quite unique breed of hot-headed dreamers who are dead set on following the route taken by Ulysses around the Mediterranean or sailing to Vinland, via Greenland, in the wake of the Vikings, and it went without saying that he had a mind to solve the mystery of the Bermuda triangle. ‘At least come as far as the Galapagos Islands,’ he said. ‘I’ve always dreamed of being able to prove that Darwin made a fatal error out there. Let’s go back to that crossroads and find the other path, the one Darwin could have taken but didn’t. Two hundred years from now, m’lad, Darwin’ll be as out-of-date as those idiots who thought the Earth was flat!’
‘But what would take its place?’ Jonas felt obliged to ask.
‘That’s what we’ve got to find out, you great ninny!’ Gabriel’s gold tooth flashed. ‘Maybe we’re descended from sea horses. I’ve always had a soft spot for sea horses. In any case we could take a look at the turtles down there, big as VW Beetles they are.’
It was a real tonic to be onboard Gabriel’s boat. Jonas was in, or rather: yawning his way through, his second year at high school. At least once a week he took the ferry across to the Nesodden peninsula, going on from there by bus, then by rowboat to the Norge, as Gabriel had been presumptuous enough to name his boat because, in his eyes at least, it was indeed a royal barge. It was moored to a buoy far out in Vindfanger Bay, due north from Drøbak, on a level with Oscarsborg, and just the sight of it was enough to make Jonas relax, to breathe out: its graceful lines and splendid rigging, the intricate and yet eminently practical tracery of rope, block and tackle. The Norge was an old lifeboat, and Jonas felt that it had saved his life, too.
That Jonas Wergeland always maintained that Oslo Cathedral School where, then as now, you virtually had to fight for a place, was a highly overrated and uninspiring school, says more about Jonas Wergeland than it does about the school. The way Jonas saw it, in all of his time at high school there was only one bright spot: Axel Stranger, a kindred spirit who made it, psychologically at least, easier to yawn one’s way through classes. Strange as it may seem, Jonas did not learn a thing at high school and yet his marks were excellent, a fact which in everything except the science subjects could largely be attributed to a little red book, the fragmentary contents of which he had memorized inside and out. From this he could quote, in writing or verbally — and only rarely let it be known that he was, in fact, quoting — provocative opinions on just about everything: realism as viewed by the painter Eugène Delacroix, for instance; and thus, by paraphrasing briefly or at length or, if necessary, juggling quotations about to create the most unexpected and explosive combinations, he contrived to both impress and startle his teachers.