One day Nefertiti came with a parcel for Jonas. Inside he found a red box which he opened, to lay eyes for the first time on his Hohner chromatic mouth organ, nestling in gleaming blue velvet, its plate beautifully engraved. Nefertiti could already play the mouth organ and, thanks to her enthusiasm and fantastic flair for teaching the right way to hold the instrument, how to play the individual notes, use the slide button and generally get the hang of the instrument, as well as the breathing technique and a pretty neat hand vibrato, it was not long before Jonas, too, could carry a decent tune, enabling them to perform several of Ellington’s catchy melodies together, the pièce de résistance in their repertoire being ‘Concerto for Cootie’, with the one instrument answering the other, just like the orchestra on the record. There was only one number which they never really mastered, the mind-blowing ‘Cotton Tail’ which called for the sort of technique not even Nefertiti could command. They tried and they tried, and it became a sort of goal in life for them, one day to get it right.
Thanks to Nefertiti, Jonas did not become a cellar sort of person, though he might have been so inclined. Instead, psychologically speaking, he became a loft person. That loft was a props cupboard in which every single object could be a springboard for the most breathtaking flights of fancy. It was in this loft, in a block of flats in Solhaug, Grorud that Jonas Wergeland learned to see the potential in the little details; realized that every object, even the very smallest, was full of possibilities around which the imagination could weave a tale. There was nothing to beat those imaginary journeys in the loft. All Nefertiti needed was a suitcase, some old clothes, an earthenware vase, a Christmas-tree stand, a spade — and hey presto! — they could be anywhere. The only things they ever took from the outside were provisions in the form of dried apricots, nomad food as was only right and proper, drawn from Nefertiti’s apparently endless supply at home. Other than that they had all they needed. Some sheets served for Tibet, starting point for a gruelling hunt for the Abominable Snowman; one solitary tarnished mirror became the great glittering palace of Versailles; a shattered pot was enough for the momentous discovery of ancient scrolls hidden in sealed clay jars at the back of deep grottoes; a small rug and a brass pot sparked off an intrepid visit to Mecca disguised as Muslims — all of this to the accompaniment of Duke Ellington’s magical orchestra, more particularly the 1940 band with Ben Webster and that wizard Jimmy Blanton: ‘Ko-Ko’, ‘Conga Brava’, ‘Sepia Panorama’, ‘The Flaming Sword’. The way Jonas saw it, it was no accident that Duke Ellington would later release records that spoke of journeys, albums such as Far East Suite and Latin American Suite. One particular day, when ‘Echoes of the Jungle’ was making the dust in the loft dance, Nefertiti unearthed a moth-eaten fox-fur stole, which provided the inspiration for a lengthy safari. Along the way she taught Jonas, among other things, that chimpanzees have a language all their own and that ‘Nn ga kak’ meant ‘I’m hungry’, a phrase which she had actually tried out on a visit to Copenhagen Zoo, whereupon the chimp had promptly handed her a banana. Again, up there in the loft, a pair of sandals had taken them to Ancient Rome, to warn Caesar, and I need hardly say that this was long before American film director Steven Spielberg showed all children that time-travelling of this sort can have the direst consequences. And in the evenings, in the autumn especially, all they had to do was open the trapdoor in the roof to observe the full moon through a pair of binoculars with shattered lenses, though this did not hinder their loft, now metamorphosed into a space ship, from making a nice soft landing, shortly afterwards, on the surface of the moon.
Nefertiti’s imagination knew no bounds; where she was concerned even a cowpat could represent an entire universe, be translated into pearls of wisdom, pure gold. As I said, Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius was to choose Nefertiti as his best friend. He knew all along that it could not last, that she was clearly too good for this world.
To some extent Jonas felt that his nights on board the Norge, Gabriel’s boat, constituted a continuation of that first university, of those travels among linen bags and mothballs and all the old magazines, their subject matter as antiquated and absorbing as any Codex Sinaiticus. The loft had been replaced by the saloon in which Gabriel lit the paraffin lamp when the light filtering through the skylight began to fade and, instead of dried apricots, there were now corned beef and slices of tomato like little red wheels. Besides emitting a fine soft light, the paraffin lamp hanging from the ceiling also gave off a particular smell, and this odour mingled with the scent of the tar used for impregnating the hull, a scent which pervaded the boat; like incense, stimulating the memory, reminding Jonas of one of the best parts of his life: his grandfather — his father’s father, that is — and the stories he told.
In many ways, all of Gabriel’s yarn spinning came down to just one long story. No matter what he happened to be talking about it was liable to end up as the ‘Tale of the Chance of the Unlikely’. Gabriel could open a newspaper and in just about every column he would come upon grotesque examples of inanity and narrow-mindedness. ‘People just can’t see further than their own noses,’ he said. ‘Here’s some so-called expert stating categorically that unemployment is a thing of the past in Norway. I ask you! Chuck another log in that stove will you, Jonas. That sort of senile stupidity fair makes my blood run cold. How can people go around thinking that the world just stands still? Every bloody time somebody or other sets another world record, in speed-skating or athletics or whatever, we’re told that this one’ll never be broken. Where’s the historical perspective in that? And now heaven help me if they aren’t running down that poor sod of a composer again. I’ll bet you anything those same people will be writing articles praising him to the skies ten or fifteen years from now, the day he’s given the key to some grace-and-favour residence. It’s a bloody disgrace, so it is. Oy! Wake up, lad!’
What Gabriel did not know was that, under cover of darkness, someone had glided soundlessly up to the buoy and sliced through their mooring, setting the boat adrift. There were plenty of people who had no time for Gabriel and his ranting, especially not when he stood on the deck, and certainly not in the middle of the night, roaring his opinions to the four winds.
‘What’s wrong with the world?’ Gabriel asked, his gold tooth gleaming, while Jonas lay back, enthralled, drinking in this phantasmagorical display, worthy of another Don Quixote; to him these tirades were a thing of beauty in themselves, like exercises in inventiveness, stretching the mind. ‘People don’t believe in the improbable. That the most unlikely things can happen,’ said Gabriel, turning his rather heavy eyes on Jonas, the one rendered different by the scar under the brow seeming to gaze into another world. ‘For instance, if I were to say that a second-rate movie star might one day become president of the United States, people would kill themselves laughing. Damn right, they would. Even though it’s only a matter of time. The society they have over there, that’s the way things are going. We see the most unlikely things happening round about us all the time and yet somehow we manage to negate that such things could happen again. Pretty good, eh? Take the Berlin Wall, for instance, and all the people who think that that’s always going to be there.’