Jonas Wergeland had never sailed — to sea, that is — on Gabriel’s boat, and yet his visits onboard the old lifeboat, securely tethered to its buoy not far from the shore, riding at its moorings as they say, represented a voyage of sorts around the world and, in terms of enlightenment, an endless continuation of the journey to inner Østfold. Just to sit below decks there in the saloon was enough, in a room the air of which was unlike that of any other, as if you could smell the scents of all the places at which that boat had docked or dropped anchor. ‘From Drøbak I circled the globe a dozen times,’ Jonas used to say.
The chief feature of that room was Gabriel Sand himself, in his ancient dark suit, complete with waistcoat, watch-chain and all, an outfit so totally out of date that it actually lent him a style all his own, a dash of a bygone nobility which went well, in a way, with his gift of the gab. Gabriel could talk and talk about everything and anything, all night long, non-stop, his flow of words punctuated only by the odd slice of tomato or a chunk of corned beef, or Jonas chucking another log into the stove; Gabriel could produce some object — a shell from the Society Islands, say, and spend hours telling the story of it. Jonas leaned back on his bench and listened, fascinated as much by Gabriel’s gold eye-tooth glinting in the gloom as he talked, like a sort of beacon in this ocean of yarns and assertions, predictions and curses, because in between his yarns Gabriel would suddenly start to rant and rave, usually in English, so that Jonas never knew whether he was quoting lines from some play or what; although he did learn the correct pronunciation of a host of rare and not always quite proper English words which would later earn Jonas much baffled admiration when he come out with them in English class. As a rule, though, Gabriel tended to do his grousing in Norwegian, and what the devil was he doing in this pettifogging little country anyway and why in hell’s name wasn’t he in Martinique or on the Charing Cross Road.
Gabriel Sand was going to have more reason for complaint, seeing that he was now onboard a boat which was about to set out, that evening, on a most dramatic and quite unintentional voyage, inasmuch as someone was very shortly going to cut its moorings and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Skipper Clement, the ferry which at that time used to set sail for Fred-erikshavn at 10 p.m., was just pulling out of Oslo harbour.
There was no end of curiosities onboard the Norge. On one bulkhead hung a barometer which always read ‘fair weather’ and next to the bookshelf, in the place of honour, hung a weathered playbill from the twenties advertising a performance at the Regent Theatre, King’s Cross with Gabriel’s name right up there alongside John Gielgud’s, no less. Sitting in state in the for’ard cabin, in a corner which Jonas could see from the saloon, was what Jonas had first taken to be a puppet theatre but which proved to be an old television, or at least the outer shell of one, with a skull sitting inside it, like a test card for death or some obscure sacred relic. ‘News, that’s the religion of today,’ Gabriel was fond of saying, ‘especially when it has to do with war or death.’ Gabriel sniffed at people who thought religion had died out, people who could not see that its significance was steadily increasing; that the age of crusades was only just beginning. And here he was: talking, mark you, about genuine religious conflicts and not the shite that went on in Northern Ireland, where religion was no more than a cover for something else. No, what he was talking about was the bizarre tension between Christians and Muslims that everybody seemed to think belonged to the Dark Ages, not realizing that Muhammad’s boys were only warming up and would soon be making their comeback, more terrible than ever before. ‘Here, Jonas, have another drop of whisky, won’t do you no harm, lad.’
Next to the gold tooth, what Jonas noticed were Gabriel’s eyes, they had such a heavy look about them, almost as if he were drugged. Not only that, but one of his eyes contrasted sharply with the other due to an ugly scar running along the underside of the eyebrow.
In Gabriel’s opinion, the anti-metaphysical attitude of the Norwegian socialists was particularly risible. Their thinking seemed to stop at the bridge over Svindesund, at the border with Sweden, they simply could not conceive of the possibility that the yen for some divine element in everyday life might well up again, more strongly than at present, even in Norway. And what did Jonas think of these Marxists, setting the agenda with their extreme views these days? You’d think that’d be enough to make everybody realize that religion wasn’t dead. ‘These Norwegian Marxist-Leninists, they’re no better than any of those religious cults with their head-shrinkin’,’ said Gabriel. ‘The only difference bein’ that it’s their own heads they’re shrinkin’.’
As you can see, Gabriel Sand was a talker — ‘blabbermouth’ would be too flippant a word. When Gabriel talked it seemed always to be a necessity, like the shark which has to keep on swimming and swimming to save from sinking, because it has no air sacs. Not that Jonas had anything against Gabriel’s talking. He loved to sit there listening to him, occasionally helping himself to some more corned beef and tomatoes or pouring himself another drop of whisky, well watered down, while at the same time taking in the creak of the rigging, of the gaff, and the occasional gentle wallow as they were nudged by the wash from boats out in the channel. But first and foremost there was Gabriel and Gabriel’s talk of everything under the sun, all night long, because it was at night that they had their talks; at best, Jonas would manage a couple of hours sleep in one of the bunks before Gabriel rowed him back to the shore the next morning and Jonas headed back, dozy, and yet somehow elated, on the Nesodden ferry. And on the way in to Oslo harbour and the Town Hall; on the way to the Cathedral School and classes that all but lulled him to sleep — if, that is, Axel was not all geared up for some madcap turtle hunt — Jonas thought about the things Gabriel had talked about, such as the tenability of the doctrine of predestination or dinosaur skeletons in Colorado; or else the drift of the continents towards and away from one another, or the eclectic ideology of ancient Chinese philosophy.
What Jonas learned onboard Gabriel’s boat was not facts. When you came right down to it, Jonas learned just one thing: to feel wonder. But if, when sitting below decks in the saloon, Jonas felt himself to be down in the depths of the ocean, his very first university was situated on high, in a loft, in fact. And the person who really introduced him to the art of make-believe, that gift which was to set its stamp most clearly on his career and on which, like a turtle, his creativity rested was, of course, Nefertiti.
All of the two- and three-storey blocks of flats on the Solhaug estate had their own communal loft. This was in the days when, naïvely perhaps, people would happily store their belongings alongside those of their neighbours. The loft belonging to Jonas’s staircase was a real Aladdin’s Cave and a favourite hangout of Jonas and Nefertiti, not least because of an old gramophone which played seventy-eights and which really came into its own again after an overjoyed Nefertiti discovered the box of Duke Ellington records which Jonas’s mother had inherited from Uncle Lauritz and simply stowed away in the loft. Nefertiti was, of course, well acquainted with Duke Ellington and his intricate opus and as good as insisted that Jonas listen to and learn from these discs, which showed how even the simplest of melodies could be turned into a pyrotechnical display of tonal variations and rhythmic finesses. ‘It was Duke Ellington who taught me that the arrangement is all,’ as Jonas said in one interview. After playing through the whole pile several times, Jonas discovered that there were some numbers which swung more than others, swung to set you rocking from top to toe, and Nefertiti informed him that this was the 1940 band in which the man who made all the difference, from ‘Jack the Bear’ onwards, was bass player Jimmy Blanton, working away like a propeller under all the rest, driving the whole thing forward with a reckless and unprecedented energy.