Inasmuch as the bathroom in many ways was the flat’s holy of holies, a chamber of dreams both for his mother and his father, Jonas had the great satisfaction of feeling that with this gesture of protest he had killed two birds with one stone. Years of National Geographics lay scattered across the floor, littered with broken glass and spattered with a good few decilitres of scent. Jonas, on the other hand, was safe; the crisis had passed: his destructive energy had, as it were, been burnt off.
How heavy is love? At least 150 kilos I would say. For some days afterwards, Jonas was painfully aware that he had strained himself badly. But better to have aching kidneys than an aching heart. And in any case: it is not every day one has the satisfaction of killing seven lovers with one lethal blow.
What Price Beauty
The bathroom in the new villa was of course quite a different story. It had a red fired-brick floor complete with under-floor heating, gleaming white tiles on the walls with a chequered border in ultramarine designed by Aunt Laura and copied, according to her, from the dome of a mosque in Samarkand. Everything was bigger — the bath, the washbasin, the whole room in fact — which meant that there was also space for a shower cabinet and this, together with the ferns, quite a little rain-forest of them, lent the bathroom an air of sheer luxury, an impression which Jonas crowned by installing a bidet when he took over the house. There were times, sitting on the toilet, when Jonas fell to contemplating the astonishingly rapid rate of social change in twentieth-century Norway: the leap from his grandfather’s naturally aromatic outside privy on Hvaler, by way of the tiny bathroom in the block of flats at Solhaug, to this sumptuous, one might almost say international, chamber in the new house with its generous expanse of mirror and fittings worthy of any number of design awards — the equivalent of making the leap from Stone Age to Atomic Age within a couple of generations. It should be said, however, that they did retain the shelf of National Geographics, the only difference being that the old scent-spattered copies had been replaced by newer issues. Theodor Kittelesen’s picture of Soria Moria Castle also hung in its place on the wall, clearly visible from the toilet seat. Which reminds me that I never did finish the story of Jonas and his grandmother and their activities within the Norwegian fine-art market: a story which has both a moral and a happy ending.
Åse and Haakon Hansen had been on the look-out for some time for a bigger house, although they still had ample room where they were even after Buddha came along, Rakel having left home around the same time. But they had fallen prey to that dream common to all Norwegians: the dream of a house of one’s own, as if the fact of no longer having to live through the wall from anyone else represented the last lap on the road to happiness, a legacy of sorts from the days when every Norwegian inhabited his own valley with high hills between him and his nearest neighbours. Which is why, when a plot of land on the other side of Bergensveien came their way, only a stone’s throw from the block of flats in which they lived, they jumped at the chance and hence — typically — were only just starting to realize their dream of having their own house as Jonas and Daniel, too, were about to leave the nest.
Jonas’s parents hired an architect to draw up plans for a simple house, a house they could afford, but even this proved to be beyond their means. The building, which extended upwards and outwards and would later be dubbed ‘Villa Wergeland’, looked like remaining as out of reach as Soria Moria Castle, to stick with Kittelsen for the moment, the building costs proving to be far greater than anyone had expected — double in fact. Unlike the men behind a number of subsequent, much publicized Norwegian building projects, however, Åse and Haakon Hansen discovered this at an early stage. They obtained a number of estimates from an obliging builder, at no obligation, and very quickly figured out that such an outlay was more than they could afford.
One Sunday when the whole family was, for once, having dinner together in the flat at Solhaug — cold roast pork as usual on such occasions — Jonas’s father explained the situation to the children, with a lot of fiddling and fidgeting, and announced that sadly they would have to shelve their plans for a house of their own. At that very moment, while all of them were feeling pretty glum and even Åse’s crooked smile had been wiped off, the doorbell rang and there stood Jonas’s grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, who had long since read the signs in telephone conversations with her daughter.
It had been a while since any of them had seen her. Jørgine had gone through a lengthy spell of being Winston Churchill — a magnificent Winston Churchill, I might add — but the word was that in recent years she had gone back to being herself, which is to say an ordinary, one-time farmer’s wife from Gardermoen sitting reminiscing in the kitchen in Oscars gate or down by the pond in Slottsparken, chatting away quite normally to other old folk.
‘Dearie me, you’re a right cheery-looking lot!’ Jonas’s grandmother wasted no time. She asked them to sit themselves down in the sofa nook, she asked for a glass of port, she asked them all to relax.
Then she laid a cheque on the table, made out to Jonas’s mother, Åse Hansen.
‘There you go, and good luck to you.’ She raised the glass of port, winked at them all, even Buddha, who was gazing in wonder at the three deep creases in her forehead.
Jonas’s mother was completely nonplussed. ‘That’s an awful lot of money,’ was all she said.
‘True, but then what would I do with it?’ said his grandmother.
‘But how did you come by it, mother? You haven’t been doing anything illegal, have you?’
So Jørgine told them the story of ‘the young businessman’ who had rung her doorbell one day and asked to see her pictures. Jonas had all but forgotten the paintings that he had helped to collect. As recently as his first year in high school he had called in on his grandmother a couple of times after classes; he particularly remembered one visit to the Art Centre, occasioned by a biennale of works by young Nordic painters which had caused quite a stir, when he had persuaded his grandmother to buy a couple of early works by painters as diverse as Bjørn Carlsen and Odd Nerdrum, before celebrating a job well done not, as previously, with a visit to the Studenten ice cream parlour but with dinner — meatballs and stewed cabbage — at Restaurant Krølle, where his grandmother, clearly very much at home, impressed on Jonas the importance of only buying pictures by artists who were endeavouring to break new ground. ‘Like Knut Rose,’ she said, thinking of the boldly coloured paintings by him which she had acquired in the late sixties, prompted, needless to say, by that unerring tingling between Jonas’s shoulder-blades.