That was one way of getting through a class. The other was by going hunting for turtles. Jonas had taken the idea from an intriguing feature which crops up again and again in a number of ancient mythologies: the idea that the world rests on the back of a huge turtle. Hunting for turtles therefore involved seeking out the foundations upon which their teachers’ theories rested, the hub around which all their teaching revolved, for always, beneath the plainest, most solid facts, there lay a fiction, a turtle as big as a VW Beetle.
So let us sit in on a lesson with form 2MFb at Oslo Cathedral School. The class is in the middle of a history lesson and the teacher is Mr Osen, a newly-appointed member of the teaching staff, straight out of university, young and cocky, with a first-class degree and a brand spanking new PhD gained on the strength of a thesis entitled Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921. Girls in bulky white Aran sweaters had a particular tendency to fall like flies for Mr Osen, and, I might add, there were a whole lot of girls in bulky white Aran sweaters at Jonas’s school in those days. Rumours that during the same year in which he had defended his thesis, in the glorious year of 1968, Osen had been living in Paris did no harm either, since this made him what would later be termed a true-blue sixty-eighter, or ‘sixty-niner’ as Axel re-christened them due to their insistence on free love, their substantial contribution to the divorce statistics and, as Axel saw it, their preferred position when it came to sex and, later on, in their various positions in daily life in which they continued, as it were, to suck up to one another and lick one another’s arses.
But to return to Mr Osen. Osen was a smart teacher: a bit wet behind the ears, maybe, but very, very smart. Our lesson deals with the subject of 1848, another great revolutionary year, and Osen has come up with a teaching ploy that, to his mind at least, is little short of brilliant. Although this class is bright enough, they are simply far too dependent on the textbook; what they lack, Osen feels, is understanding, by which, without realizing it, he actually means belief. But how to give these pupils, and not least these girls in white Aran sweaters, some insight into the mighty wheels that drive history forward?
Mr Osen begins not by sitting down at, but casually draping himself over, his lectern and asking, deadpan, whether anyone can cite the reasons for the revolution of 1848, whereupon the pupils, and in particular the girls in white Aran sweaters, several of whom are disturbingly sweet, reel off stock phrases from the textbooks on everything from population overspill and urbanization to a lack of democratic influence and unemployment, all of which is fair enough, thinks Olsen, but dear, oh dear, so generalized, so abstract, so devoid of any fundamental understanding — and, I might add: belief. So what does Osen do? Osen gets down, no, he doesn’t get down, he vaults down off the lectern, as pumped full of adrenalin as a gymnast completing his routine on the pommel horse, and proceeds to rummage in his briefcase. Then he sets up one of those little steam engines, the sort of toy which Jonas remembers from his childhood and which are usually found in the homes of children whose fathers are engineers or something of the sort, Wolfgang Michaelsen, of course, had one, and now here is Osen rigging up his little steam engine on the top of the lectern, as eagerly as any child, and indeed this was his own old plaything, so Osen is a dab hand at this, dropping small fuel tablets into the drawer underneath the gleaming boiler which he has filled with water and firing it up, a hectic flush in his cheeks, forgetting all about his PhD because this is a brilliant idea, thinks Osen, as he straightens up, something this class will never forget; the little steam engine chuffing along while he, Mr Osen, Dr Osen, delivers a lecture on the driving forces behind historical events and on 1848, pumping, so to speak, the information into those sponge-like brains, causing a totally fresh insight into history to permeate like steam through porous walls. It would have been an unmitigated triumph, had it not been for those two blasted know-it-alls sitting one behind the other in the row nearest the wall. Axel Stranger and Jonas Wergeland were sniggering, and if there is one thing a teacher hates it is pupils sniggering like that.
Axel and Jonas most certainly are sniggering. They had soon figured where all this was leading, as had the rest of the class come to that, so when Osen eventually reaches his conclusion that the steam engine was the main driving force behind the revolution of 1848; referring to the steam engine as ‘quite literally, one of the wheels upon which history ran’, it comes as an anticlimax, despite the fact that Osen, as he makes this pronouncement, gestures with a flourish, rather like a conjuror, at the steam engine, the wheels of which, thanks to a piston mechanism, are now whirring and running across the top of the desk, so perfect in every detail that it is all Osen can do not to blow the whistle.
Axel turns to Jonas with a look of exasperation. Jonas nods and raises his hand.
Now it ought to be said that Mr Osen was a tough nut. There were times when their teachers’ assertions were so utterly lacking in any well-reasoned foundation that they presented no sort of challenge whatsoever. As when their physics teacher had the effrontery to state that it would never be possible to prove whether quarks did or did not exist, or their chemistry teacher obdurately maintained that no one would ever succeed in mapping out the human genome. This testified to such an infinite disdain for the inherent potential of human beings, for good or ill, to be forever expanding their knowledge that Jonas and Axel could respond in only one way: by getting up and leaving the class, pleading a sudden — joint — attack of depression.
They occasionally had to resort to other tactics to save themselves from falling asleep, as when, instead of demanding exactly what was laid down in the syllabus, they insisted on more than the set syllabus, thus sending many a teacher just about round the bend. ‘Please sir, could you tell us a bit more about Gödel?’ asked Axel when the maths teacher was careless enough to let slip a remark about that scholar, perhaps simply wanting to impress them. And if the poor teacher did happen to know a little about the, if I may say so, extremely interesting and notable mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel; if he, for example, vaguely remembered something about Gödel’s proof, some recollection from his long distant days at university and possibly went so far as to resort to the blackboard, Axel would simply keep on at him, asking Sir please to elaborate on everything he said or wrote on the board, much as an analyst will latch on to the last few words a patient utters and ask him to tell him more about that, until the teacher was standing there stuttering and stammering and having to admit that this was beyond his grasp: a fact which, ironically enough, in this instance illustrates Gödel’s statement that fundamental questions are impossible to determine. To which Axel solemnly replies: ‘Yes but sir, this is important. I believe I speak for the whole class in asking you to provide us with more information on Gödel in our next maths period.’ The majority of teachers weighed their words very carefully when teaching 2MFb.