While we are on this subject, it might be tempting to air a few home truths about psychologists, but since they are after all no greater charlatans than anyone else, I will confine myself to lamenting the fact that members of this profession have ruined many people’s chances of understanding what I am now about to tell you about Jonas Wergeland. I could, of course, be underestimating the average Norwegian, but I fear that not a few of them have gone along with the speculative and oft-repeated old bromide about sexual insecurity springing from some suppressed fear conceived in childhood. If this is true, then I would just like to say that on this score Jonas Wergeland was more fortunate than other children of his age — and that is a gross understatement. Not only did he have a sister who deemed it her almost sacred calling to enlighten her brothers when the first sweet itch made its puzzling presence felt in their groins — he also had parents who, one year later, were responsible for dispelling any last shreds of doubt planted by all the scaremongering that surrounded sex. Thanks to his parents, Jonas followed the development of his genitals with eager anticipation.
Jonas Wergeland experienced something that many another child before him has experienced, and this incident so crucial to his relaxed — some might say profligate — attitude to sex, occurred on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday evening. Until that day, Jonas had never given much thought to his mother’s and father’s private life, far less their nocturnal activities; as far as he was concerned, his parents were two regular individuals, much loved of course, but nonetheless just normal people living the usual sort of Norwegian life, their days made up of a combination of factors that could be counted on the fingers of both hands.
As I say, plenty of people have had the same experience; it was late, after 11.00 and all the children were asleep. Jonas woke up bursting for the toilet. He shinned down from his bunk-bed by dint of an impressive technique not unlike a fireman sliding down his pole or, according to Rakel, asleep in the next room, like Elvis in the scene where he sings ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in the film of the same name. The biggest hindrance was posed by Daniel’s collection of revolvers and rifles and accompanying belts, as well as cowboy hats and waistcoats adorned with gleaming sheriff’s stars, all slung around the bedpost, enough equipment to fit out a whole Western. Jonas tiptoed across the room, the walls of which were adorned with pennants, a dartboard, Jonas’s drawings and Daniel’s innumerable diplomas, not to mention the best of all — the cards from Uncle Lauritz: during his lifetime, Uncle Lauritz had sent them postcards from all the destinations flown to by SAS, with the result that eventually half of one wall was papered with brightly coloured cards from such cities as Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Cairo, to name one route of which Uncle Lauritz was especially fond — and these, both the scenes they depicted and the terse notes on the back, whetted the imagination and the wanderlust of Jonas in particular, as much as the copies of the National Geographic in the toilet did. Dotted here and there among the cards were also photographs of the planes with which Uncle Lauritz had conquered the world, the fourengine, propeller-driven DC-6B and DC-7C and, Jonas’s favourite, a plane which Uncle Lauritz unfortunately barely had the chance to try out: that quite indescribably elegant jet, the Caravelle, with lines that left a tingling sensation between the shoulder-blades.
Jonas trod softly across the room, almost without opening his eyes, as if reluctant to leave slumber behind, groped for the door-handle; aware, even with his eyes closed, of the object lying on the chest of drawers right next to the door, more because of the energy it gave off. Jonas had found a ball-bearing from the hub of a bicycle wheel and for reasons he did not quite understand it had become something sacred to him, a sort of portable altar, not because the ball-bearing looked so nice with its little circle of little steel balls, almost like a piece of jewellery, but because there was a mystique about it which in some unaccountable way exerted a strong attraction on him.
Jonas opened the door, softly still, moving more or less by feel; crept through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where he did the needful. It was when he was on his way back, in the hall, that he heard a vague murmur from the living room, the door of which was standing slightly ajar, so he stopped, because something was wrong, but what was it that was wrong? There was too little talking, almost no sound at all, and the words being murmured were too soft.
One of the things which Jonas Wergeland liked best about his parents and which he came to admire even more when he reached adulthood himself, indeed regarded as something of a mystery, was their supreme talent for quiet conversation, their unbelievable mastery of ‘the fine art of small talk’. This was Åse and Haakon’s fondest pursuit: to sit each in their chair in the living room and talk the evening away, which is to say: those evenings when both were at home, since Jonas’s father had his church duties, and his mother was active in any number of societies that Jonas never could make head nor tail of, although he could tell that his mother had a greater need for social contact than his father. But those evenings together truly were special occasions, something his father underlined by shaving again after dinner and splashing a few drops of foreign aftershave on his cheeks. On the wall of the living room hung a cuckoo clock, a source of much amusement to the children, until the day when Daniel, possibly in a premature act of rebellion against paternal authority, shot off both the cuckoo and the little man who played ‘O mein Papa’ with his catapult. Jonas’s mother was in the habit of setting this cuckoo clock an hour slow, something which Jonas was sure she did out of principle, so that she and his father could talk on for an extra hour every evening with a clear conscience.
As Jonas grew older and was allowed to stay up longer, he used to sit between them, on the rug, building with Lego. He loved to sit there surrounded by the hum of their conversation, constructing buildings out of Lego bricks, endeavouring to exhaust all the possibilities for the sorts of houses you could build with the same number of bricks, as if he had already tumbled to the fact that you only had a limited number of basic forms to play with, and that life consisted of shuffling these about. In a way he felt that his mother and father were engaged in something similar, because they talked a lot about the same things, over and over again, but always in new patterns and variations, thus ensuring that the conversation was always interesting and exciting, and — the banal subject matter notwithstanding — rather like an everyday version of Plato’s dialogues. Only when he let Nefertiti help in with the building, did this theory collapse, because even with the same Lego bricks as he had, she could build houses he would never have dreamed possible, lifting them up to the lamp to show him how the secret of the construction derived from light and shade; houses which, if anyone should be wondering, helped sow the seeds of Jonas Wergeland’s ambition to become an architect.