‘Tell me what you found in Samarkand,’ he said at last, just before he left. He always had to try.
‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she said. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’
Rhetorica Norvegica
Now and again, when he was lying among the soft, silken cushions in Aunt Laura’s flat, Jonas had the feeling that there were stories inside him, all packed up tightly in some way, like parachutes just waiting to be released, to unfold; and sometimes he tried to take a peek inside or work loose a corner of these prospective stories, in advance as it were. So it was that later Jonas found on several occasions that he was already familiar with a situation when it occurred, as if somehow he were simply living out a story, a script that he had rehearsed. This was the feeling he had about his acquaintanceship with Anne B.
Jonas Wergeland always maintained — almost as if excusing himself — that he had enrolled in Oslo Cathedral School because Grorud Valley High had become so overcrowded that classes had to be staggered. In actual fact, he changed schools to save having to see his brother Daniel, with whom he had been on less than friendly terms for some time, and in hopes of meeting people from other backgrounds. This latter wish was fulfilled with a vengeance. For Jonas, his years at the Cathedral School amounted more to an encounter with the secret face of Norway than to learning such things as the periodic table or Old Norwegian.
To take one example: one evening Jonas Wergeland attended a party given by one of the girls in his class, Anne B., who lived in an elegant town house in one of the most exclusive streets on the west side, only a stone’s throw from spots Jonas knew well, Majorstua and the streets around Frogner swimming pool, and yet it was another world. In fact the whole experience was vaguely reminiscent of the main attraction at the overcrowded Frogner pool when Jonas was a boy: the windows in the big pool through which the swimmers and divers could be viewed from an unexpected angle — something which, as one might expect, appealed greatly to Jonas. Nor is there any hiding the fact that it was something of a turn-on to see the girls from below, spreading their legs and kicking out, with no idea that they were being watched, even if some of the most audacious did swim down and make faces through the glass, their hair swirling Medusa-like around their heads.
That Jonas found Anne B.’s party to be very different from parties in Grorud, rather like a peek into a strange aquarium, had nothing to do with the material aspect, with which Norwegians tend to be so obsessed, but more with the actual tone of the evening. In other words, what impressed Jonas was not so much the fact that Anne B. lived in a house with a fireplace in the kitchen, five bedrooms and furniture bought from shops he had never heard of, not to mention original works of art on the walls, pictures that actually seemed to give pleasure; Jonas was more impressed by the way Anne B.’s guests — Jonas being the only one from their class — were welcomed, with some formality, by her parents, both of whom were doctors; and not only that, but that her parents joined the party for the first half-hour and conversed — it is the only word for it — with their daughter’s guests quite as a matter of course as if these young people were their equals, their very close friends.
To top it all, early on in the evening Jonas had been complimented — again it is the only word for it — by Anne B. who told him he was looking great, and this she did while he was scanning a bookshelf lined with the standard ‘classics’ and chewing on the first olive he had ever tasted, fished from the bottom of a dry martini. Thereafter, Anne B. gave him a hug which left him in no doubt, nor did she intend to leave him in any doubt, that she was inviting him to more thoroughgoing embraces when he felt ready for it. In other words, she displayed a directness, an ease of manner and, not least, a self-assurance never before encountered by Jonas among girls of his own age.
And finally there was the dinner, or not so much the dinner as the atmosphere around the dinner table. And again I must emphasize that I am not talking here of anything as banal as the fact that they were waited on by a maid or that it was a three-course dinner with a bewildering array of cutlery — phenomena it would be all too easy to joke about and which would really only serve to obscure the main point. It was the actual manner in which the dinner party was conducted that amazed Jonas. The fact that people carried on a conversation. There was no yelling, no loud music; they talked, animatedly, but quite quietly, while records of pieces by Bellman and Taube played softly in the background, as if even the Tafelmusik were designed to add a mildly philosophical note to the proceedings.
And what did they talk about? As far as Jonas was concerned this was the most staggering part of all. For although they touched on most topics, from the theatre to glacier trekking, at all times politics ran like a red thread through the conversation and, even more staggering, it dealt not so much with specific issues of the day but with values and principles. So in between comments on the moon-landing or Woodstock, these teenagers discussed politics as a concept, neither more nor less. Jonas was all ears. Not that he felt inferior — Jonas Wergeland never felt inferior — but this was something different, almost unheard of: teenagers sitting at a table, discussing how social democracy could avoid becoming just another form of totalitarian regime, while the courses were served and cleared away and their glasses were kept topped up with wine and mineral water, a product new to Jonas. Even after a break, during which one of the boys rose to his feet and made a speech to Anne B., and a very original and witty one, at that; a speech which he rounded off by reciting a poem, and not just any old rubbish, but a poem by a relatively obscure writer called Charles Bukowski, a most unusual poem about what it was like to make love to a panther — even after that, the red thread of socialism as a concept was picked up yet again. Just before the dessert, a couple of these young people, neither of whom had seemed anything out of the ordinary to Jonas, presented a somewhat tentative but perfectly lucid discussion of the pros and cons of democratic socialism: ‘a system based on compromises between different sets of mutually restrictive values’ as one of them put it. Both were taken up with the idea that freedom and equality could not exist side by side. Eventually, the discussion, or conversation, crystallized into a candid question as to whether a social democracy along Scandinavian lines, with its almost fanatical obsession with equality, would render a society epitomized by its diversity impossible and hence, in the end, stifle the growth of new ideas.
Jonas loved it. He loved the crossfire of long, searching arguments mingled with poetry about lovemaking and panthers, all to the hushed accompaniment of Carl Michael Bellman; Jonas loved it not least because these animated expositions were leavened with just the right degree of uncertainty and, most importantly: irony, elements which saved them from seeming pretentious. Nor did Jonas have any problem holding his own. On a couple of occasions he even came up with paraphrased quotations from his little red book, including one from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, from the very last page as it happens, as to how a state that dwarfs its citizens so that they will become more docile instruments, even in order to do good, will find that no great thing can be accomplished with small men. This sparked off a pretty fierce debate on the question of unduly far-reaching state control, concern for the underprivileged as opposed to new industry and the need to take responsibility for one’s own life, a discussion in which the girls were the most vehemently vocal and took the greatest exception to Jonas’s indirect criticism — unintentional though it was — of the welfare state.