You stare and stare, endeavouring to spin out this feeling, but it does not last because the music has come to an end and the cobweb, the imperfect safety net woven by the organ music, snaps, not even the biggest organ in the world can help you now and once more you find yourself, after a far too foolhardy leap, a hard fall, standing in the middle of the living room in your own home, stunned, blank, desolate, and you gaze around the room in despair, searching for some detail, like the little chunk of reddish sandstone on the bookshelf, something capable of lifting you out of all of this, taking you on an imaginary journey, you think, to Ayers Rock, Australia, you think, anywhere at all, you think, and again you glance down at the second hand, as if this were your only fixed point, the only spoke in a fragile wheel, you see the second hand suddenly transformed into a propeller, a propeller slicing into your body, cutting you up, carving you into tiny chunks that float, drift off, going their separate ways, and you have been tortured by this sensation long enough, your body is racked by convulsive sobs, and you try to think, but you cannot bear to think and so for the moment you will have to postpone a vague idea of going through to the dining-room to see how many paintings the burglars have taken.
The Connoisseur
Jonas was eight years old. It was late April, one of those classic, longed for April days buzzing with regenerative energy. The pavements were dry and inviting and one could almost see, or feel in one’s bones, that the trees in Studenterlunden were working fit to burst to rid themselves of their black, spiky appearance; that the green, that mentally invigorating green, was straining against its thin sheathes. It was hardly coincidental that Jonas Wergeland should have discovered his gift on just such an incomparable spring day, a day simply zinging with light and latent colour.
Jonas and his grandmother were walking from Oscars gate down through Slottsparken. Jonas had swapped his winter boots for thin-soled shoes and had the same delightful sensation of lightness which he imagined a creature must have when it sheds its skin. Feeling as though he had hundreds of tiny springs in the sole of each shoe he headed straight for that magical spot on the corner of Karl Johans gate which went by the name of Studenten, where they sold ice creams in every imaginable form and colour; a place heavy with the tropical aromas of vanilla and bananas and the most obvious point to make for when one had just switched from winter boots to light spring shoes, so much so, in fact, that Jonas could tell that his shoes themselves were all set on going there, but his grandmother was resolutely pulling him in the opposite direction, towards Fridtjof Nansens plass and the twin towers of the town hall. ‘Business before pleasure,’ she said firmly.
Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland’s life?
Shortly afterwards they found themselves inside the Society of Artists building, in a bright, white room, its four walls lined with paintings, and the room itself crowded with people not only because it was a Saturday but because this was the opening of the first exhibition by a young Norwegian painter. Jonas stood quite still, listening to the hum of voices and watching the people circling the room expectantly, as if this — their clothes, their facial expressions — were more interesting than the works of art. ‘What do you think?’ his grandmother whispered. Jonas had been expecting to be bored out of his skull, but as he ran an eye more or less unconsciously over the walls it was caught and held by one painting, as if some sort of visual glue were preventing his eye from moving on.
‘It was a royal-blue egg cup that made me aware of the silver thread running down my spine,’ Jonas was later to say.
Standing there, looking at this picture, Jonas felt a shiver run through him — or, not a shiver, but a faint and yet quite distinct tickling sensation that worked its way slowly from his tailbone to the nape of his neck; a very pleasant, almost erotic, sensation which finally concentrated at a point between his shoulder-blades.
‘That one over there is … nice,’ he said, pointing.
I would ask you to bear with me for dwelling for a moment on this painting, seeing that it does, after all, represent a watershed in Jonas Wergeland’s life. This was far from being anything in the nature of ‘Bridal Procession in Hardanger’ or any of those other large-scale, hyper-realistic canvases to which children are usually so readily drawn; this was an unassuming little picture, a still life: a bright-blue egg cup sitting on a blue table set against a green wall, with a pear lying next to it on a yellow napkin. So simple and yet so complex. Jonas moved a little closer, thinking that it must be the violet field, a triangle stretching out — cryptically — behind the eggcup, that had seized his attention, or maybe it was the pale-blue brushstroke directly below the pear. Jonas stood there, growing more and more fascinated, endeavouring to take in the very palpability of the picture, the thick layers of paint, the play of light and shade on the yellow napkin and, as he let his eye wander over the picture as a whole, how all of the colours fell into the same scale, most of them broken by white, rendered lighter: a tonal effect which caused the canvas to come alive and glow with a tremendous — and here he searched for a word he never used but which now, confronted with this picture, seemed perfectly natural — beauty.
‘I’ll buy it,’ said his grandmother, already making towards the office. Which is how Jørgine Wergeland became one of the first people in Norway to acquire a painting by Jens Johannessen, an artist who would in years to come be highly esteemed and frequently described as one of the foremost painters, if not the foremost painter of his generation and who, on several occasions — and I admit he has a point — has asserted that the railings surrounding Norwegian art need to be torn down, and soon. Not only that, with this purchase Jonas’s grandmother sparked off a veritable landslide, with Johannessen’s paintings selling unexpectedly well, so well in fact that the elderly painter Henrik Sørensen, who would sometimes buy a picture in order to encourage a young artist, had to go home empty-handed, having turned up somewhat late in the day, clad in his ubiquitous grey coat.
As far as Jonas Wergeland’s grandmother and her background is concerned, I regret that I needs must confine myself to presenting a few facts. Jonas’s maternal grandmother and grandfather came from Gardermoen in Ullensaker county, but after the death of his grandfather, Oscar, during the war, Jørgine Wergeland moved to Oslo where she took up residence in Oscars gate, for no other reason than that she felt this was something her husband would have appreciated. I should perhaps also mention that this flat in Oscars gate was a fair-sized one, his grandmother having arrived in the city with a tidy sum of money in her handbag, although thereby hangs another tale entirely. The main point, so far as this story is concerned, is that in the years immediately after the war, as well as being an erstwhile smallholder or, as she herself used to say, a country bumpkin, Jonas’s grandmother adopted two other personalities. She quite simply became Winston Churchill, just as she also became a patron of the arts and collector, with the result that every time Jonas visited her, he was filled with the same sense of eager expectation. When she opened the door would she be an ordinary grandmother, given to talking about the old days at Gardermoen, tending the cattle, his grandfather’s shoemaking skills; or would she be Winston Churchill, making the V-sign and mumbling on about his dramatic escape from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War, an account peppered with a host of colourful words, although where she had picked those up Jonas had no idea; or would she, as she ushered him into the long hallway of the flat, get straight to the point, asking him, all businesslike, whether he had seen any paintings by a young man called Håkon Bleken? ‘With such a washed-out name,’ she would say, ‘that man must have a terrible hankering for colour!’