The Discoverer

Io

On the way down to Turtagrø he turned back several times to look up at the three peaks behind us. ‘They remind me of the pyramids at Giza,’ he said. Late in the afternoon, down by the car, he stood for a moment regarding Store Skagastølstind, the mountain we had climbed. As if considering something. Then: ‘I’ve seen the Great Pyramid at Cheops,’ he murmured at length, ‘but this is greater.’ To me it sounded as if he were saying: I was dead, but now I am risen.

‘Why did you go so close to the edge?’ I asked.

‘I thought I could fly,’ he said. ‘I thought I had sprouted wings.’

We reached Skjolden that evening. The village lay in shadow, but the sun was still shining on the slopes high on the east side of Lustrafjord and on the snow atop Molden, the peak which formed the cornerstone of a chamber in which the shining water constituted the floor and the mountains the walls. The blossom on the apple trees we drove past seemed luminous. The beauty of it was almost too much.

The Voyager was lying waiting for us at the Norsk Hydro wharf, below the old Eide farmstead; Hanna and Carl had sailed up the day before. We got ourselves settled in the old lifeboat, a genuine Colin Archer, built over a hundred years ago. For the next few weeks it would be our home. A boat that had saved the lives of hundreds of people in distress. A stormy petrel. A vessel designed to put to sea when others were making for harbour. The perfect mobile base.

Martin promptly disappeared into the galley, I heard chinking sounds coming from his tiny, but discriminatingly stocked drinks cabinet. ‘Here you are,’ he said, as he came up again with a glass for our guest. ‘A Talisker from the Isle of Skye, laced with the tang of the ocean. The perfect whisky for drinking at sea. Welcome aboard.’

‘Cheers,’ said our guest. ‘Here’s to a boat fit for an old lifesaver.’

We had to make the most of our days at Skjolden. Carl had been allotted the most important task: the stave church at Urnes. Martin would be concentrating on the natural wonders of the area, particularly the Feigumfossen waterfall and Fortunsdalen. Hanna would be visiting places like Munthehuset at Kroken, where so many painters had stayed. And I was to chart the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s movements in and around Skjolden. In the course of this work I found myself one afternoon on the hill above Eidsvatnet, sitting by the foundations of his cottage, ‘Østerrike’. As I leafed through the fragmentary writings in Philosophische Untersuchungen, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the project on which we were engaged and Wittgenstein’s efforts to eschew the traditional limitations of the book form, where ‘b’ inevitably follows ‘a’. This made me wish that we could insert a ‘link’ to a small display — I envisaged a graphic image inspired by Wittgenstein’s clarinet — illustrating the connection between the fjord as form, as a network of branches, and the composition of his book.

We had been lucky with the weather. In the evening we were able to sit up on deck, exchanging findings and ideas while the sunlight slowly loosened its grip on the top of Bolstadnosi, behind Skjolden. Was there, for example, any correlation between Wittgenstein’s theories and the carvings in Urnes stave church? This was the sort of question we meant to encourage people to ask. Already we had some inkling of what our main challenge would be: of all the information we gathered — what should we take with us?

I think, though, that I spent just as much time observing our passenger, a man who had once had the whole nation in the palm of his hand and almost succeeded in steering it onto a different course, before he was sent to prison for the murder of his wife. Who was this man? I had taken it upon myself to uncover unknown aspects of his life. I had already written a long and elaborate rough draft which I was continually turning over in my mind, in parallel, so to speak, with my actual assignment.

I asked myself who I thought I was, to be undertaking such a task. I was neither a god nor a devil. I was a human being. I was a conjecturing individual. My style — even where my account sounded pretty dogmatic — could not help but be tentative, hypothetical. Full of eventualities and qualifications and reservations. Although I never actually said it, never revealed my scruples, my doubts and my unquestionable shortcomings, not even in parentheses, the whole thing was pervaded by an implicit ‘it may be that …’, or ‘as I see it …’. And yet sometimes, even when I was sitting up on deck, making more notes, I felt like a spirit drifting over the water, an omniscient spirit, a spirit with the power to create light, to separate sea from sky. It was easy to become enamoured of this illusion. I knew a lot, a nuisance of a lot, about the man sitting on a deck chest across from me. And I considered my youth an advantage. I was not interested in adding anything or tearing anything down. I simply wanted to understand: why did he do it?

I studied him surreptitiously. It was a rare privilege to be able to spend some days with one’s subject. Although he looked different after his time behind bars, after his first years of freedom — his hair was grey now, his face thinner, his skin oddly darker somehow — I was surprised to find that he could stroll around Skjolden, check out the goings-on at the Fjordstova community centre — the climbing wall, the library — without being recognised. As far as I could tell, this did not bother him at all. Looked at objectively, though, this was quite something, in fact it was almost unbelievable: his visage had been erased, so to speak, from people’s memories. As if someone had pressed a huge ‘delete’ button.

His slide into oblivion had been a gradual thing, of course: long after he had exchanged the spotlit pedestal of television celebrity for the dim solitude of the prison cell he had remained the object of an interest bordering on mass hysteria. All the newspapers printed special supplements about him, detailing the high points of his career. Both the press and television behaved as if they were suffering from bulimia. They could not get enough of him. It was said that a number of women had tried to kill themselves, that they had been found clutching photographs of Jonas Wergeland. He had been an incandescent, edifying icon to the people of Norway, exalted and inviolable. Many people, I’m sure, can still recall how shocking it was, back in the infancy of television, when a newsreader got a fit of the giggles and thus revealed that he or she was only an ordinary mortal. But the wave of disbelief that swept the country when Jonas Wergeland, a national emblem, the nearest thing to a demi-god, was convicted of murder, was of another order entirely.

Even the most sensational scandals do not last for ever, though. After remarkably few years Jonas Wergeland was no more than a distant legend associated with the best of television broadcasting, He had been reduced to a word, a concept. If his name did crop up it was not uncommonly in the form of a superlative: ‘Wergelandian’. His television series — and other programmes made by him — had, however, a life of their own. The repeats had been running for years. The videos of Thinking Big also sold steadily. The reaction — an almost religious collective response — to the first showing could obviously never be repeated, but for that very reason perhaps, the artistic merits of the programmes came more into their own. Despite the ephemeral, soon to be outdated nature of the medium, Jonas Wergeland’s television series was an indisputable masterpiece. I am not alone in thinking this. A well-known English television critic wrote in his column in The Sunday Times that these programmes possessed the same undeniable quality and brilliance as the paintings of Rembrandt or Matisse. Nonetheless, these works of art had taken on a life of their own, independent of Wergeland’s person. There was no longer any connection between the name and the face. He could wander, unremarked, around a small Norwegian town, even pass the time of day with people without anyone recognising the features which they had idolised ten years previously.

One evening he was standing outside the old Klingenberg family home, where Wittgenstein had stayed during his first winter in Skjolden, when an elderly man happened along. They got talking. After a while I heard the other man say: ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m …’ Wergeland began, then stopped, as if he were trying to say something for which there were no words. ‘I am a secretary.’

Which was true. He was now working as a secretary. And he was clearly proud of it.

On our third and final day in Skjolden harbour, he asked me if I would act as driver for him; he wanted to show me something. When we got to Luster he instructed me to turn down a narrow road immediately after Dale Church. We zigzagged up the steep hillside and eventually emerged on a plateau to be met by the unreal sight of a huge, white crescent-shaped building, four storeys tall. ‘Welcome to Hotel Norway,’ he said. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I learned later that the place was up for sale, and that a lot of interest was being shown by the travel industry.

This ghostly establishment was Harastølen, an old sanatorium from the turn of the century. The fresh air and the surrounding pine forests had made it a perfect spot for the treatment of tuberculosis; there were still some signs, like the low-ceilinged ‘cure porches’ set into the embankment skirting the front of the main building, suggestive of a world of deckchairs and blankets — like that described by Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain. Later on, the premises had been used as a hospital for long-stay psychiatric patients.

I don’t know whether anyone remembers now, it is already so long ago, but it was here in the early nineties that the Bosnian refugees whom the Red Cross succeeded in having released from Serbian concentration camps and who then came to Norway by way of Croatia were interned. There were around 340 of them all told, counting their families. Many of them were severely traumatised; they had been subjected to what psychiatrists term ‘catastrophic stress’, they had witnessed the most appalling violence — ethnic cleansing — and were in a very vulnerable condition, one which could easily escalate into acute crisis. The Norwegian authorities meant well, I’m sure — they called it a transit centre — but it does not take much imagination to see that it was not good for people suffering from this sort of syndrome to live in such isolation — halfway up a mountain, deep inside a Norwegian fjord — for over a year. Things became so bad that the inmates staged a hunger strike. But not until over half of the refugees had applied to return to Bosnia — they actually preferred that war-torn region to Harastølen — did the baffled Norwegian immigration authorities realise just how embarrassing the whole situation was. The refugees received a promise that they would be resettled in the surrounding community.

We stood with our backs to the old sanatorium, a brick colossus honeycombed with long corridors and little rooms. Most of the Bosnians had had to stay at Harastølen for a year and a half, some of them for almost two years. I shot a glance at Jonas Wergeland. I could see that he was moved. He knew what it was like to live in isolation, in degrading conditions. He had no trouble imagining how it would feel to have to live here for any length of time. The refugees’ Norwegian hosts did not, however, have the benefit of this experience or such insight. Here, in what had once been a treatment centre for TB sufferers and the insane, a desolate spot five hundred metres up a mountainside, these poor people had been stashed away, as if they were either dangerously infectious or crazy. As one of them so neatly put it: ‘I feel I have gone from one prison camp to another.’

We stood outside Harastølen, next to the remains of what had once been a cable railway, just the sort to run up to an ‘eagle’s nest’, and gazed across the fjord to the mountains on the other side. In the distance we could hear the sound of sheep bells, like the ones Norwegian supporters ring when cheering their skiers on to more gold-medal victories. Jonas was very quiet. Then, as I was making to leave he said: ‘Is it possible, do you think, to understand everything about Norway from such a marginal position as this, in the grounds of a disused asylum?’

And then he began to talk, to talk eagerly and at great length. It was years since I had heard him speak with such commitment. He spoke of how incredibly lucky he had been to grow up in an age marked by the greatest economic, social and cultural changes since the Stone Age. And in that era of unbelievable prosperity he had also had the good fortune to be living in the most privileged and sheltered corner of the globe. But that was also, he said, why he felt so ashamed.

Readers will, I hope, bear with me here, if I slip in a few thoughts on modern Norway plucked from that monologue, that confused blend of praise and blame, delivered by Jonas Wergeland at Harastølen, near Luster. Because, he said, standing here outside this old TB hospital, this erstwhile mental home and, briefly, refugee centre, he felt compelled to consider the growth of modern Norway. And the conclusion he had reached was that it had all happened too fast. That was why we had become so unsympathetic, so intolerant, so callous and forbidding, all affected by a collective, almost panic-stricken case of tunnel vision which permitted us to see only what we wanted to see and which, in our misguided struggle to safeguard what belonged to us, caused us to lose sight of the need for human solidarity and common decency. He simply could not get his head round the fact that little more than a century ago Norway had been a country so poor, so doomed to scrimp and save, that the few gas lamps in the streets of its towns were not lighted on moonlit nights. Would he ever be able to understand this nation which, in the regatta of history, started out hopelessly far behind at the beginning of the twentieth century as a rot-ridden longboat with moth-eaten sails, and rounded the millennium buoy, suddenly in the lead, as a luxury yacht in a class by itself, all gassed up and bristling with electronic equipment — all of this almost without having to lift a finger, and with no one knowing quite how it had happened. Anyone would think a good fairy had flown over us and with a wave of her wand transformed a draughty log cabin into a chalet-style villa with ten rooms and underfloor heating in the bathroom. What had happened to us? Or rather: was it any wonder we didn’t know how to deal with our wealth? ‘We’re like a nation of stunned lottery winners,’ Jonas Wergeland said. ‘When people get rich too quickly they almost always lose their perspective. In this case a whole society was hit.’

So what did we do? That’s right, we cut ourselves off. Suddenly we had become so stinking rich that we could afford to shut out the rest of the world. For although the Harastølen story is not all black and white — things had had to be organised at very short notice and so many people had arrived at one time — Jonas Wergeland found it a disgraceful and highly symbolic tale. ‘Think about it,’ he said to me. ‘It took over fifty years for Norway to take in as many refugees as we ourselves produced — Norwegians who fled to Sweden — during the five years of the Second World War. What’s happened to our memories? What’s happened to our capacity for fellow-feeling? Why didn’t we so much as blush when the UN’s high commissioner felt obliged to point out that it was more difficult to gain asylum in Norway, the birthplace of Fridtjof Nansen, than in most other countries in Europe.’

Jonas scanned the deserted hillsides on the other side of Lustrafjord as he pointed to the most paradoxical thing about Norway: such wide-open spaces and such closed hearts. We could, it is true — had they been Europeans, and had their sufferings been given enough television exposure — have taken in thousands in almost no time at all. It was the least we could do. If we were to divide the country up among us every Norwegian would have 70,000 square metres of land all to himself. And yet deep down inside we wanted to keep ourselves to ourselves. Stay a rich man’s reserve. The accumulated value of our national costumes alone, complete with all their silver ornaments, would exceed the gross national product of many a Third World country. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, modern Norway was suffering from the King Midas syndrome. Everything we touched turned to gold. But we could no longer embrace our fellow men. We kept our mouths shut and walled ourselves in, applauding the government’s efforts to build a Great Wall around our borders, constructed out of what were — by its lights — unassailable legal niceties. To Jonas it was a sad fact: what Adolf Hitler could not do, we had managed for ourselves. We had built our own Festung Norwegen.

Bearing in mind what happened at the tail end of the millennium, when the Norwegian people were given the chance to respond spontaneously and unselfishly to the new stream of refugees from the devastation of the Balkans at least, I have thought a lot about the impassioned monologue which Jonas Wergeland delivered at Luster. Because even though he was right in what he said about Norwegians and their long-standing mistrust of asylum seekers, I have the suspicion that in talking about this he was, in fact, talking about something else. The Norwegian government’s unfortunate consignment of Bosnian refugees to Harastølen was effected during Jonas’s first months in prison, which is to say at a time when he was taking a harder look at his own life than ever before. Although I cannot express this very clearly, I am convinced that in his monologue at Harastølen — his condemnation of such isolationism — Jonas Wergeland was actually talking about himself.

I started walking towards the car and when he did not follow, I looked back. I turned just in time to see him kneeling on the steps leading up to the building, outside what he had described as a monument to our brutish attitude towards everything that was not Norwegian. I was instantly reminded of the German chancellor, Willy Brandt, going down on his knees on behalf of the German people before the monument to those who died in the Warsaw ghetto in the Jewish uprising of 1943. I believe Jonas Wergeland felt the need to do something similar here, albeit on a smaller scale: to beg forgiveness for his nation’s foolishness, for its eagerness to turn Norway into an impregnable fortress. Although, when you get right down to it, it could be that this, too, was done for personal reasons.

Jonas had first encountered this mistrust of strangers when just a little boy. In elementary school he had had a very strict, very proper, headmaster who, due to the fact that his initials were HRH, was simply referred to as His Royal Highness. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman with an aquiline nose and eyebrows like canopies, who walked with chest out and chin up. He was notorious for reciting never-ending poems at the drop of a hat, poems that no one could understand a word of, or at least none of the pupils on whom he kept such a strict eye and whom he punished so zealously for the slightest misdemeanour.

One Friday evening, not all that late on, it so happened that Jonas was making his way from the Grønland district of Oslo to Tøyen with his aunt — his aunt Laura. And who should he see come staggering out of the Olympus restaurant — something of a drinking den and not exactly known as the haunt of deities — but his dear headmaster, His Royal Highness himself. And not only that, but the headmaster was merrily carolling a popular hit of the day. It was not a pretty sight, or at least: it may have been pretty, but it was hardly designed to induce respect — to see one’s school’s moral guardian, an elderly man with eyebrows like canopies, rolling down the road burbling: ‘Let me be young, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah yeah!’ He did not notice Jonas, he did not look as if he was aware of his surroundings at all. He probably thought he was safe, so far away from his realm.

Such ‘revelations’, or whatever you want to call them, never made any impression on Jonas. In the case of his headmaster, it seemed that only after this did Jonas begin to feel some sympathy for him and actually acknowledge him as an authority. There was something about this phenomenon, perhaps the very negativity of this way of thinking, this conviction that behind every beautiful façade there lay something rotten, that left him cold. Because that was the rule. Slash through a rich tapestry and you would find a rat’s nest. All through his life, Jonas Wergeland was more interested in the exceptions, in the other side of the coin.

Solhaug, the housing estate where Jonas grew up and which, in all essentials, contained a genuine cross-section of the Norwegian population, also had its share of eccentric individuals. Take, for example, Mr Iversen, a timid, nigh on invisible father of four who lived for just one thing: to fire off thousands of krones’ worth of rockets every New Year’s Eve. Once a year he would appear, out of nowhere almost, with a cigar between his teeth and his arms full of fireworks, and for a few moments he was everybody’s hero. Then it was as if he went back to earth, not to be seen again until the following New Year. Another was Myhren at number 17, who would not have hurt a fly, but who, when he heard that Jonny Nilsson had beaten Knut Johannesen to set a new world record in the 5,000 metres at the World Speedskating Championships in Japan, had chucked every Swedish product the family owned out of the window: an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, a Stiga ice-hockey game and the collected works of Selma Lagerlöf. When Jonas was growing up, the test of one’s manhood was to creep up to Myhren’s door and yell ‘Jonny Nilsson!’ through the letterbox.

But this is the story of a certain lady. She had lived at Solhaug for years, but not even Mrs Five-Times Nilsen knew much about her. Usually you could form quite a good picture of people’s characters, gain a peek into the deepest recesses of their souls by keeping the removal van under observation — ‘Did you see that wall lamp? Talk about hideous!’ — but this woman must have moved in one evening, all unnoticed; no one could remember seeing so much as a rag rug. Her skin had a dusky tint to it which gave her an alarmingly exotic appearance, the look of someone of foreign origin. ‘She may have nice skin,’ declared Mrs Agdestein, the first person in Grorud to own a sun lamp, which she used twice a day, sitting in front of the mirror, in order to look like Jacqueline Kennedy, ‘but I’ve never seen such a frumpy little mouse. She might at least treat herself to a visit to the hairdresser.’

Naturally, all sorts of rumours circulated about what lay hidden within this white patch on the housing estate’s carefully mapped-out world. Nilla, who actually lived in the same building, firmly maintained that her flat was full of snakes and lizards and that she got food for them from an acquaintance who worked as a rat catcher. Others swore they had seen a blue light shimmering behind her curtains at night, and took this as a sign that she held seances in there. She also smelled funny. Of spices. Or alcohol. ‘Poor little soul, she’s a secret drinker,’ Mrs Agdestein whispered at the sewing bee. But most people simply thought she could not be very well off — judging, at least, by the drab, grey outfits she always wore, and the glimpses she occasionally vouchsafed of an exceptionally spartan hallway. Her sunbronzed skin notwithstanding, she was nicknamed the Grey Eminence. Jonas had always felt that the greyness was necessary camouflage, that this woman dealt in something secret and dangerous. He knew what it was too: precious gems. ‘It’s the sparkle from all those jewels that gives her skin that healthy glow,’ he whispered to Daniel.

There was one thing, however, on which several of Solhaug’s mothers had remarked. On one Saturday in the month, the Grey Eminence left the block dressed up and made up beyond all recognition and took the bus into town. More than one had, from behind their curtains, seen her come home at an indecently late hour. This behaviour gave rise to the categorical assertion that she had ‘a bit on the side’, an expression which to Jonas’s ears sounded as mysterious as ‘hocus-pocus’, with the same magical associations.

There came a day in early December when Jonas found himself standing outside her front door. He was out selling raffle tickets, having lost a bet with Daniel. Jonas could usually guess how generous people were likely to be just by doing a quick scan of their nameplates — what they were made of, the lettering — before ringing the doorbell. As he eyed up the Grey Eminence’s anonymous sign: clear plastic with ‘Karen Mohr’ in a blue script, he suddenly realised that he was less interested in whether she would buy a raffle ticket than in whether he would get a peek inside her flat. He stood at the entrance to King Solomon’s Mines. Inside — he could feel it in his bones — lay mounds of glittering sapphires and rubies.

Jonas barely heard the doorbell ring, it might almost have been muffled, or waking from age-long slumber. But she immediately answered the door, opened it a little way. He glimpsed the corner of a small, grey-carpeted hall. Proper grey. With not a single thing on the walls, not even a three-year-old calendar. But he could smell something. Something unusual, something good. ‘Will you support Grorud scout troop by buying a ticket for the Christmas raffle? First prize is a side of pork.’

She frowned, possibly at the thought of having to carve up a side of pork on her kitchen table, all the mess, all the packing, the bother of having to rent a freezer down at the Centre. Then the unexpected happened. Instead of saying yes or no, she invited him in. The thought of Hansel and Gretel flashed through Jonas’s mind, but he did not hesitate for a moment, he understood that he was being shown a rare trust. Once he was inside the grey hallway she smiled. ‘I like your eyes,’ she said. ‘They’re so big. And so brown. You remind me of someone. Are you a good observer? Do you draw?’ She stood for a while simply considering him, even ran a finger over the scar on his forehead, as if trying to guess at the story behind it.

This close to her Jonas could see that she was good-looking, very good-looking. Not only her skin, but her face as well. Her features. She had a face which — what was it about it, he wondered — yes, in that face were many faces. He should perhaps have been on his guard, but it was a pleasure to be admired by Karen Mohr. To be the object of her regard. He liked the fact that she saw something which no one else could see.

All people are special, but Jonas knew that he was more than special. He was unique. He was an exception. From the day when he had learned to tie his shoelaces — not that there is necessarily any connection — every now and again he had been aware of a hidden power welling up inside him. He could not have said what it was. Only that something, something of sterling worth lay pulsating in there. Some rare gift. When the American Marvel comics appeared on newsstands in Norway, Jonas instantly identified with several of their superhero characters, although obviously he did not possess any of their powers. No, it was the certainty that there was more to him. Jonas had no trouble believing that a person could walk up walls, have X-ray vision or fly fast as lightning: all of these were really just variations on, or a slight exaggeration of, this thing he felt slumbering inside him. What it was he was soon to discover.

Years later, when he was working on his programme on Svend Foyn, a colleague happened to notice Jonas Wergeland late one night alone in a conference room at Television House in Marienlyst. There was nothing so surprising about that, apart from the fact that Wergeland was skipping, and that he was doing it in the dark. ‘It was actually quite spooky,’ his colleague had said. ‘He wasn’t jumping so much as flying. Anyone would have thought he had supernatural powers.’

The woman who uttered these words was working with Jonas on the Thinking Big series. She knew that as far as Svend Foyn was concerned he was stuck, well and truly stuck. After all, how were they supposed to produce a programme, a heroic epic, saluting a man who so strongly personified a whaling industry which by then had almost virtually destroyed Norway’s international reputation. Whaling had once given rise to the first oil age, an industrial adventure which had filled the Norwegian people with confidence; now it was an extremely embarrassing business altogether. For various reasons, some more logical than others, many people felt that killing a whale was somehow different from killing a pig or a cow — or a cod, come to that. It was like shooting a brother, a distant relative. Some regarded the whale as the one creature on earth best able to communicate with possible extra-terrestrial beings. Svend Foyn had long since been demoted from national hero to national villain. No one wanted to be confronted with all that gory documentary footage of the flaying and cutting up of a whale carcase, no one wanted to be told that the growing prosperity experienced by Norway at the end of the nineteenth century was founded on a mindless slaughter which almost wiped out an entire species. No one wished to be reminded that their Stressless armchairs were covered, so to speak, in whaleskin.

Jonas Wergeland refused, however, to duck the issue; he wanted, he said, to make a programme in which the killing of a whale formed the key scene. But how to do it?

Much has been said and written about the television series Thinking Big. Younger generations may find it difficult to imagine that anyone could have taken a television programme so seriously, that it could have gained such control over people’s minds, taken up so many column inches in the press. And yet all those articles and critiques went only a small way towards explaining the exceptional nature of the phenomenon that was Jonas Wergeland. Take, for example, the reasons for his remarkable viewing appeal — Jonas Wergeland himself was a standard feature, the presenter, of every programme. Not one expert had wit enough to see that his inimitable, charismatic screen presence was actually born of shyness. Simply by always appearing so wary and diffident, Wergeland excited as much attention and interest as a stranger in a place where everybody knows everybody else.

And despite all that was said about Wergeland’s innovative style, no one saw fit to mention the most amazing thing of all: here was a television series that came close to transcending its own boundaries. The best thing Jonas Wergeland ever did was to realise, very early on, what an inadequate medium television was, that its days were numbered, that he was working with an outmoded and hopelessly limited art form. In his programmes he clearly endeavoured to discover or to anticipate new — possibly even hybrid — forms. There was, for instance, something about the camera-work in the Foyn programme, the filming, the composition of the shots, the different, but evenly balanced aspects which prompted people to use the term ‘virtual reality’ in connection with television for the first time — even though anybody could turn round and say that the screen itself was still only two-dimensional. In juggling so radically with opposing elements, Jonas Wergeland was working towards another medium. And in point of fact this had nothing to do with technique, it had to do with a new way of looking at things, or better: of thinking about things, a different form of awareness.

The woman who accidentally witnessed Jonas Wergeland’s weird skipping session became so intrigued, or so worried rather, that she returned to the conference room almost an hour later and through the open door saw Jonas still skipping in the dark, barely visible in the faint light falling through the windows from the street outside, skipping at breakneck speed, this woman reported. ‘I’m almost sure he was hovering in mid-air,’ she declared. ‘And there was a kind of aura about him.’

Then he had suddenly stopped and raced out of the room. His colleague had observed him later, in his office, engrossed in a mass of papers, with different coloured felt-tips in either hand. It was on this night that the programme on Svend Foyn was conceived, a programme in which apparently unrelated elements were united within the framework of an explosive and deadly cannon shot.

Skipping was a method which Jonas Wergeland had sworn by for years, although what really mattered was not the skipping itself, but what it sparked off. You see, at a certain point in his boyhood, Jonas had discovered what his hidden talent was: a much more important gift than that of being able to hold one’s breath: the ability to think. And again one has to ask: how could anyone have failed to see it? Hundreds of individuals have commented on Jonas Wergeland’s story, but not one of them has ever mentioned his attitude towards the most elementary of all things: the relationship of one thought to the next. And to a third. And a fourth.

This may sound surprising, but there are not many people who can really think, who are conscious of the process of thinking, and certainly not in the way that Jonas Wergeland could. He wasn’t all that good at it at first either, he had a particularly poor mastery of the mental discipline which involved imagining what lay behind closed doors. When, for example, he was invited into Karen Mohr’s flat, he felt sure — since he had already been there lots of times in his thoughts — that he was soon to behold her well-guarded and brilliantly camouflaged secret: her diamond-cutting workshop. But when she opened the living-room door he realised how wrong he had been. He stepped into another world. A world within the world, he was later to think. Although it was snowing outside and quite dark, he felt as if suddenly it was summer, in fact he almost caught a distant whiff of salt water, the sound of waves washing the shore. It was as if he had been looking at a map of the Sahara and someone had pulled it up to reveal a map of the French Riviera underneath. Here, in the middle of Grorud, deep in the suburban desert of Grorud, he had stepped into Provence.

The living room had a warm, an intimate, a — yes, that was it — a French feel to it. The floor was tiled in black and white, like a café. On the white walls hung a couple of plants with bright red blossoms, some photographs in woven raffia frames and an unusual and very striking picture. All along one wall, under the window, grew tall, green plants, miniature palm trees. After a while he thought he heard sounds coming from this jungle and when he looked more closely — wonder of wonders — what did he find but a little fountain. On the stippled glass top of the coffee table stood a vase of fresh flowers and, next to it: an elegant glass containing a milky-white liquid. On either side of the French windows onto the veranda hung blue, slatted wooden shutters which — Jonas later learned — could be pulled across the windows to shut out the realities of Norway. There was a faint odour of what might have been liquorice in the room. For this he soon received an explanation: ‘Every evening, after work and before dinner, I have a glass of Pernod,’ Karen Mohr told him. ‘Here, have a sniff, doesn’t it smell wonderful?’

Who would ever have guessed that in the heart of the estate, in the midst of all those square, solid blocks of flats through whose doors filtered the smells of stewed lamb with cabbage and fish balls in white sauce, there was a room like this — Pernod-scented, and with shutters on the insides of the windows? If I look out of the window, Jonas thought, in the distance I will see, not Trondheimsveien, but the Mediterranean.

Considered from a broader perspective, however, maybe all of this was not so strange after all. You have to remember that this was in the days when lots of flats were being radically transformed: fashions were changing, people were better off. Suddenly they were chucking out all their old junk and opting instead for living rooms decorated with Japanese minimalism; either that or they were turning doorways into white Spanish arches and converting spare corners into Costa del Sol-type bars with seating for ten. Especially where wallpaper was concerned, your average Norwegian lost all inhibition; some covered their walls with designs that gave you the impression of being surrounded on all sides by rough-hewn logs, others went the whole hog and transformed their walls into gigantic landscape scenes which made you feel as if you were living in a tent, right out in the wilds.

‘Would you like a bite to eat,’ Karen Mohr asked. ‘I was just about to make an omelette, it won’t take a minute.’

Jonas took a seat. The living-room furniture was of light, bright rattan with floral cushions. In one corner was a large cage containing two white doves. Jonas never told anyone about this visit or his subsequent visits. As far as he could tell, no one else knew what the inside of Karen Mohr’s flat looked like. He came to think of this as a secret discovery; he had found a source — not of the Nile, but of a spate of rumours. But it was also something of a mystery: after all, how could this woman have such a living room without anyone in the sixty other flats knowing a thing about it? Or, to put it another way: how could so many people be so wrong?

The plate on which his omelette came was a memorable experience in itself, with a pattern of vine leaves running round the rim. This was the first time Jonas had ever tasted an omelette, eggs folded into a surprise package. It was also softer and creamier than any omelette he would be served later in life. If the truth be told, Karen Mohr set a standard for omelettes to which no future omelette could hope to aspire. ‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked, raising her wine glass. ‘Could you tell that I had added a dash of nutmeg and cardamom?’ Along with it they had a baguette: a long, thin loaf of bread which she had baked herself. She took a chunk from the basket: ‘You simply break off a piece, like this,’ she said brightly.

Behind all this there was, of course, a story — and not just any story; a story which Jonas was soon to hear, becoming, as he did, a regular visitor to Karen Mohr’s flat, especially over that first winter. But long before she told it to him, Jonas’s mind had been occupied with trying to guess what sort of story it might be. And even he, child that he was, knew that it had to be a love story. Whenever she disappeared into the kitchen to make omelettes and he was left sipping a glass of real lemonade and fingering the bamboo of a rattan chair, he would try to spin his own stories, inspired, for example, by the ceramic figurines on the bookshelf or the full-length mirror which dominated the wall opposite the window, the kind of mirror which opened onto another, dimmer, room — a mirror which might even have been capable of making time stand still. At such moments, when that mirror also opened his mind, Jonas used to wish that it would be a while yet before his omelette was served.

That winter he made a big discovery of his own, again concerning a mirror. It happened at home, in Rakel’s corner of the bedroom, one day when she had gone to the cinema. A strong smell of hair lacquer hung around her dressing table. Jonas sat down in front of the oval mirror and examined his face in it. Rakel claimed this was a magic mirror, like the one the queen in Snow White had. His eye went first to the strange scar, or more correctly: two scars on his forehead, just above his eyebrow, which sometimes seemed to form a cross. Making him look like a marked man. Marked out. Gradually, though, he became more aware of something else; he noticed how flat his face looked. Flat, that is, in that his whole face seemed like a mask covering something totally unknown. Not another face, but something indescribable, something beyond thought.

He could not remember when he had first latched onto his disquieting discovery: the world was flat. Not in the sense that the earth was flat — although Jonas had to admit he had a weakness for the notion that if you dug down deep enough you would end up in China. Everything was flat. Objects were flat, people were flat. The first time he was taken to the theatre — to see ‘The Wind in the Willows’ — not for one moment did it cross his mind that the marvellous characters on the stage were just an act. To him they were every bit as real and true as everything else round about him. He took the play to be a faithful reflection of reality. To Jonas, more than anything else the word ‘flat’ meant ‘simple’, a little too simple. A lack of depth. The fact that he had once saved a child’s life merely by sticking an arm underwater had taught him a bit about the shallowness of existence. The flatness of it. He never dared say this to anyone, partly because he thought he was the only one who knew: we had barely touched the world, we had scarcely begun to scratch the surface of it. The world might be round, but life was still flat.

To begin with, this did not really bother Jonas, but as time went on he felt a powerful urge to break through, to reach beyond the flatness. To discover something round. Something deep. Or no, not deep: he wanted to get at something else entirely. In his mind he called it ‘Samarkand’. Occasionally he caught himself stamping the ground hard, on impulse, as if convinced that a thin film would shatter, just like the first fragile coating of ice in the autumn. A similar thought occurred to him when he looked into Rakel’s mirror. Again he had a strong sense that there was something more, a certain potential, behind him, within him, which eluded his eye, his comprehension. I am quite different from how I appear in the mirror, he thought to himself. Afterwards, he would blame it on the fumes from the hair lacquer. He rammed his fist into the mirror with a force and a vehemence that surprised even him. He maintained that he had seen a glimmer of orange, of something enticing, in there behind the glass. He had lashed out quick as a flash, as if hoping, by dint of a surprise attack, to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that lay behind, as the mirror shattered, so to speak.

What this incident — and, not least, his badly cut knuckles — taught him was that using his fists would not help him to come to terms with the flatness of the world. It was, however, becoming increasingly clear to him that he was blessed with a gift which might enable him to penetrate beneath the surface, of objects and of people.

Jonas had always been a great one for fantasising — and by that I do not mean the sort of daydreaming in which many people indulge. For a boy of his age Jonas had an exceptional aptitude for thinking. He had detected the first signs of this ability — though he knew right away that it ought to be regarded as a gift — in his Aunt Laura’s flat in Tøyen, in that world of Oriental rugs and brocade, precious metals and Lebanese cooking. Aunt Laura looked like an actress, or a diva, but she was a goldsmith, highly skilled and sought after, who had her workshop — a veritable Eldorado to a child — set up in a corner of her living room. One day when, for the umpteenth time, Jonas had begged her to tell him something about the ‘greatest journey’ she had ever made as a rug collector, her trip to Samarkand, she said, in order to distract him: ‘Why don’t I teach you to play chess instead.’ The discovery he was about to make did not, however, have anything to do with the game of chess, or with anecdotes about famous matches, it concerned the pieces. ‘I played chess, silver against gold. No wonder I never became a master,’ he said later.

As a young woman Aunt Laura had made a chess set, with gold and silver plated miniatures of famous sculptures for the pieces. For the bishop she had chosen the Ancient Greek statue of the discus thrower, for the knight, Marcus Aurelius on horseback; Brancusi’s slender Bird was the rook, Michelangelo’s David the pawn and to Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman fell the honour of being the queen. Jonas learned a bit about art history along with the rules of the game. So for him chess was not so much a game as a story consisting of criss-crossing tales; tales, what is more, which dated from different times, since the pieces reflected the styles of a wide variety of eras. Not even the fact that his aunt wore a silk dressing gown which made her appear more naked than if she had been wearing nothing at all could divert Jonas’s attention from all those different sculptures. Brancusi’s bird was particularly intriguing. The artist seemed almost to have caught what lay behind the bird’s flight.

But the main point here is this: the first time Jonas laid eyes on Aunt Laura’s king, namely August Rodin’s The Thinker, he lapsed into reverie. That’s me, a voice inside him cried; that’s mankind, that’s how we are. Aunt Laura would always mean a great deal to Jonas, but above all else he loved her for making The Thinker the king. From that day in his aunt’s flat at Tøyen he was sure: his talent had, in some way, to be related to thinking. Jonas would promptly have applauded René Descartes, had he known of that gentleman’s attempt to establish one thing for certain, with his celebrated statement concerning the relationship between thinking and being.

Nobel prize-winners are often to be heard describing how as children they took old radios apart or built little laboratories in which they carried out chemical experiments. Jonas made do with his own thoughts. His mind was all the laboratory he needed. He took to meditating. In the most literal sense: he sat himself down and proceeded, quite resolutely, to reflect on things, letting observations run into one another while at the same time endeavouring to be aware of what he was doing, to map out where his thoughts were taking him. The average human being is said to have fifty thousand thoughts a day and it was as if Jonas meant to scrutinise every one of his — make a record of them, just as he would sit by the roadside, noting down car registrations. After a while he discovered that, oddly enough, his thoughts flowed best when he assumed the same position as Rodin’s figure: with his chin resting on his fist, his elbow propped on his thigh. From this point onwards his teachers and his chums would automatically resort to the same words to describe Jonas: ‘He’s a thoughtful character.’

Of all the many aspects of contemplation, the one at which Jonas really excelled was make-believe. Before too long he had become a master of pretence. He had the ability to create whole worlds inside his head, experience them with all his senses. Before leaving elementary school he had visited some of the most exotic countries on earth, really thought himself there with the aid of odd bits of information he had heard or had gleaned from school books. He had even visited Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. All you needed was a little piece of something and your imagination would do the rest, like Sherlock Holmes finding a scrap of clothing. Thanks to his powers of imagination Jonas had been a lion and a flower, not to mention a pencil and the gas helium. As for women: he had kissed Cleopatra — she had smelled of milk — before he had his first kiss. By the age of eleven, Jonas Wergeland was afraid that the world had been used up. He suspected, in other words, that he had reached a dead end where the possibilities of thought were concerned. He was also well aware that he was quite alone in appreciating his gift. At the start of a new school term, when the teacher asked where they had spent their holidays, Jonas had replied: ‘In the Kalahari desert. With the pygmies.’ Everybody had laughed. They had fallen about. They did not see that a fabrication could be as real as reality could be fabricated. Or, to put it another way: that the fiction could be less flat than the real thing.

So it took Jonas a while to get to the stage where he wanted, or dared, to properly acknowledge his almost unnerving talent for thinking. But this new sense of self-awareness triggered a chain reaction: he discovered that he was also gifted in other areas; discovered also how alarmingly simple it is to distinguish oneself, how easy to score cheap points.

Like most children, Jonas liked kicking a football around. At Solhaug, they played on the grass or on small, rough patches of waste ground. Any car park could be Ullevål stadium, or Wembley. They had next to no interest in tactics, or formations, ‘line-ups’ as they are now called. It was basically a big free-for-all, with everybody going for the ball at the same time, and everybody taking a shot at goal as soon as they got it. It was as much like wrestling or rugby as it was football.

Jonas did not take football too seriously: it was a game, a way of killing the odd half-hour until dinner was ready. And although he clearly had a way with the ball and was quick on his feet, he did not take up the game seriously until quite late on. It was Jonas’s best friend, Leonard Knutzen — Leo for short, later to be better known by his professional name, Leonardo — who persuaded him to overcome his shyness and join the Grorud under-15s team. And here I should perhaps say that schoolboy football in the sixties was not such a serious and competitive business as it is today; nor was there any great fight for places on the team. So, since they were short of a forward on the left side of the field and since Jonas was equally good with both feet this was the position he was given. Back then it was called the ‘left wing’ — which sounded as if you were in the air force — or ‘outside left’. Jonas immediately felt at home there.

Two things surprised Jonas once he started playing football more seriously. The first had to do with the fact that he was now playing on a proper pitch. The new pitch at Grorud sports ground had only just been laid; it looked so beautiful and, more importantly, it was absolutely massive. To Jonas, used to the narrow mazes around the garages and blocks of flats, this was undreamt-of freedom. Here you could really kick up your heels. He was all the more astonished to find, therefore, that even at this level players had a tendency to crowd together in the centre of the field. And it did not take Jonas long to discover — speaking of wings — that he had a whole runway to himself on the left-hand side.

Nonetheless, he played it canny. He held back, as if knowing intuitively that this discovery — like all significant discoveries — could have fateful consequences. He started with a few trial runs, as if to check whether it was true — had the other team really not realised that from here he could stroll unhindered all the way up to their goal line? No, it was right enough. Again and again he was able to sprint in lone majesty up to the visitors’ corner flag. He took more and more delight in this: dribbling the ball, kicking it up the touchline, sometimes all the way to the goal line. It had a demoralising effect on the other team. Jonas felt as though he had discovered an unknown side of football. Sometimes he wished he could have gone even further, tried running off the pitch, along the strip between the chalked line and the gravel; transcended the possibilities of the game.

Even though Jonas Wergeland’s cheeky raids on the left wing cannot be compared to the so-called ‘Flo pass’ used so much by the Norwegian national team in the 1990s — a long lob from Jostein Flo’s own half of the pitch to one of the forwards, who would then knock the ball on with his head — these two phenomena had one thing in common: both were examples of bold strategies, staggeringly simple moves which produced good results.

Jonas grew more and more daring and Leo, who had caught on quickly, spotted that Jonas was alone out there on the left wing, sent the sweetest crossballs flying straight to his toes. Jonas would charge up the touchline, all the way to the other team’s goal line, then chip the ball neatly into the box — where, not infrequently Leo ran in to put the ball in the net.

If, that is, he did not score himself. Because the other discovery he had made also had to do with the scale of things. With the goal. At home in Solhaug they had played with narrow goalmouths and no keepers: two bricks a metre apart or two jerseys for posts, possibly with one of the little kids standing between them as an excuse for a goalkeeper. But here he had a proper goal. A huge cage. Designed for giants, so it seemed. A huge expanse of sky between the ground and the bar. A barn wall between the posts. Jonas did not get it: how could you not score, at least if you were inside the sixteen metre line and not actually unconscious at the time? Later in life — and knowing what he knew — he could hardly stand to watch a football match, to see so-called professional players who were being paid millions, sending the ball flying over the bar from only five metres outside an open goal. They were obsessed with the need to impress. They couldn’t just score, they had to make the back of the net bulge. So they shot too hard, or were so intent on doing something spectacular that they miskicked completely. Jonas found it painful to watch, proof as it was of the male’s eternal problem: lack of control.

As a boy, Jonas discovered that you could get away with a remarkably soft shot, as long as it was well placed. If you were ten metres away from the goal and aimed to place the ball just inside the post it would get past most keepers. While the other boys were busy practising juggling with the ball, Jonas came up with a new training exercise for himself. Following the example of tennis player Bjørn Borg, he hit the ball up against a wall or a garage door at home. He worked on his marksmanship, shooting at the same spot again and again. And although he had a lot of different shots at his disposal he tended mainly to practise the simplest and the safest: a chip off the inside, the broad side, of the foot. Sometimes he used a tennis ball, to make it more difficult. And it paid off. Grorud’s under-15s began to move up the league. And Jonas was their top scorer. Jonas was not your typical Norwegian. He was best with a ball.

He was careful, though, not to make too big an impression. Tried not to score more than two goals in any match, preferably none at all if he could see that Grorud was going to win anyway. Because there was something else to which he had soon become alive: the hostility of the opposing team. Their rancour if humiliated more than was necessary. Jonas did not like rough play, hard tackling — especially since in those days hardly anyone wore shin guards, certainly not Jonas. He was, both on and off the pitch, an extremely peaceable character. Only once did he ever hit anyone: when some guy declared that the Beatles’ Rubber Soul was a rotten album. This unsuspecting individual was knocked flat; Jonas was so mad that it was all Leo could do to calm him down. Aside from this one incident, though, Jonas was never involved in any trouble in his teens.

But then came the day of their home game against Lyn — the Lyn under-15s team, top of the league and a team which boasted some very good players, lads who might well make it onto the Lyn first division team, maybe even the national squad. Lightning by name and lightning by nature, that was Lyn; a club from the middle-class west side of Oslo, from the Outside Right, you might say. Grorud versus Lyn — talk about a class war. Before the match, Jonas spent hours honing his dribbling technique on the green at home. Watch out, he told himself; this is going to be a helluva battle, a momentous match.

In the years prior to this Jonas had been more given to dribbling thoughts. The more intricate the contemplative pattern the better. While other people tried to put their thoughts in order, Jonas attempted to do the opposite. He did not shy away from the really big questions in life, deliberations worthy of Immanuel Kant himself: ‘What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?’, but would also throw himself, with just as great a will, into the consideration of lesser, but just as pressing questions, such as why the yellow chewing gum in the Kip pack tasted better than the pink or the pale-green. It was not unknown for him to speculate until his head spun. The way Jonas saw it, there was only one valid reason for passing out: because you had overtaxed your mind.

Even before he started playing football — possibly in consequence of his life-saving fiasco — Jonas knew that he was not destined to imitate any of the standard, archetypal success stories: winning an Olympic gold for skiing, becoming a company director, opening the finest restaurant in Norway. Others might lock themselves away in their rooms with guitars for years, to then emerge as stars. Somehow Jonas felt that this was too simple. He was cut out for other things. He wanted to be thinking’s answer to soccer-great Roald Jensen. His talent lay in his grey matter. Which made it the perfect endowment for a rather reserved young man. He would be free to perform his deeds, break new ground, without being surrounded by crowds of people.

Jonas grew more and more inclined to regard the mental raids he carried out and the networks he formed inside his head as being real. It occurred to him that the most dramatic, the most significant event in his life could be a thought. As a small boy he had often dreamt of making a name for himself by discovering something — an unknown mineral, an unknown flower or, best of all, an unknown land — and having it called after him. It made him sad to hear the grown-ups say that there were no white patches left on the map of the world. Now, however, he realised that he could discover a new continent, but that it would lie within him.

His visits to Karen Mohr in her herb-scented Provençal flat confirmed this belief. You could actually live inside a thought. For quite some time Jonas had had the notion that she had taken an idea and furnished it, turned it into a home, a suspicion which was only reinforced when she eventually got round to telling him, in her quiet way, the story behind her extraordinary living room.

At the age of twenty, after completing her schooling, Karen Mohr had set out to travel around Europe. This was in the years just before the Second World War. One summer day in the south of France she came to a small place called Mougins, a few kilometres outside of Cannes, that town later to become so famous for its film festival. And it was here, while sitting all unsuspecting in a café, that the incident occurred which would change — Jonas did not know whether to say open up or lock down — her life.

She had been eating an ice-cream cone when she sensed that she was being watched, keenly observed, although she could not have explained what gave her this impression — not until a striking looking man approached her table. He must have been about fifty, balding and short of stature. He asked most politely if he might sit down. She was not sure, but after looking into the big, dark eyes fixed on her own, she nodded. ‘I’ll never forget those eyes,’ she told Jonas. ‘I know what they spoke of. You see it in children’s eyes. The light of imagination. Irrepressible curiosity and irrepressible creativity.’

He was a painter, he said. She had an extremely distinctive face. Would she allow him to paint her? Would she come back to his studio with him? Karen Mohr found this quite funny: artists like him probably said the same thing to all the ladies. And yet — she was tempted. There was something about this man which told her he was not just another artist. That he was more than that. That what she was being offered here was not the chance to visit his studio, to pose as a model, but a turning point in her life. She sat for a while, thinking it over as she licked her ice cream. He played with a couple of croissants from a basket on the table, stuck them on either side of his head, pretended he was a bull about to ravish her. He made a lovely sailboat out of a fork and a napkin; he looked as if he had trouble sitting still, always had to be doing something. But from time to time he would stop and just look at her with the blackest pupils into which she had ever gazed.

She indicated that she was in a quandary. He asked where she was from, asked if she was enjoying her visit to this part of France, asked if she had been to any art exhibitions, whether she was fond of animals, whether — this was important — she had tasted lavender honey. She was filled with a sense of tranquillity. Of gravity. Of light. Felt that she was being lit from within. Suffused with life. ‘I grew as he watched me. I felt as though I was being lifted up, that I sprouted wings,’ she told Jonas. ‘My head was perfectly clear. All of a sudden I could see through everything. See how everything was connected.’

That’s how it should be, Jonas was ever afterwards to believe. But just at that moment he was growing impatient: ‘What did you say?’

She had paused, deliberately taking her time, because she wanted the moment to last, wished she could sit there, under that probing gaze, and be discovered, be beheld with this same intensity, for all eternity. She felt as though, with those eyes, those senses, he discerned a multiplicity, saw things in her that no other man had ever perceived. He saw, she felt, her hidden beauty, all her potential for love. ‘The feeling of it was stronger than any kiss, if you know what I mean,’ she told Jonas. ‘I’m sure that not even … you know what, could compare with it.’

Jonas felt his heart pounding, though he could not have said why. ‘So what did you do?’ he asked.

‘I thanked him, but declined. Politely.’

She could tell that the man was disappointed, genuinely disappointed. Sad, even. He asked if it would be alright for him to draw her portrait as she sat there in the café. She nodded. He pulled out pencils and some sheets of paper, sat facing her, totally absorbed; covered a couple of blank sheets with black strokes. ‘I drew you before you were born,’ he murmured. She stayed perfectly still. Again she wished that time could be suspended. That she could sit like this and be studied, drawn, by this enigmatic, this dynamic man, for ever. ‘I felt as though he was unveiling me,’ she told Jonas, ‘really unveiling me, stripping away veil after veil.’

‘Until you were naked?’ Jonas flinched at the boldness of his own remark.

‘More than naked.’

When the stranger was finished, he stood up and handed her one of the sheets of paper. ‘Would you like me to sign it?’ he asked. She instinctively knew that this was more than the offer of an autograph; that it was meant as a gift, something which she could possibly trade in for a lot of money. ‘No, you don’t need to do that,’ she said, not even glancing at the sketch. He made ready to leave. ‘Would you come to the beach with me tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘If it is too hot for you, I can hold a parasol over your head while we walk along the shore.’ She shook her head. Although she was not really there, her body shook her head without her being aware of it. He walked away, stopped in the doorway and sent her one last searching, almost mirthful look.

Not until later, in her room, did she take out the sketch and examine it. She saw her own face. It definitely looked like her, that she could see, but it was a likeness that went far deeper than any photograph, although it was a very simple drawing, more like something a child would do. And he seemed to have drawn her face three times, as if he had been viewing her from three different angles at once. She sensed that, simply by being in his company for those minutes — and perhaps by being drawn by him — she had been given fresh eyes. He had transfigured her purely by observing her. She had been blind and his regard had been like a healing hand. She walked over to the window and opened the shutters. The countryside, the light, the people — everything had looked different. She had met a man, and the world was as new.

Jonas thought, but did not say out loud: that place, Mougins, was Karen Mohr’s Samarkand.

‘That’s it there,’ she said to Jonas, pointing to a framed drawing on the wall, next to one of the plants with the scarlet blossoms. Jonas went over to have a look at it. He had never seen anything like it. It was the sort of picture which, once seen, is never forgotten. A drawing that gave off sparks. Jonas remembered every line of it for the rest of his life. It could easily have been Egyptian, he thought to himself. Face on and side on at the same time. Although maybe he had seen something similar before, in real life: triplets.

Triplets were a rare sight in the fifties. But only months after Jonas came into the world, at the same hospital, three girls, identical triplets were born — a sensation which was duly reported in the press; in fact some papers actually gave more space to this than to the climbing of Mount Everest — an order of priority at which no one should wrinkle their nose, since the feat performed by every woman during childbirth is every bit as awesome as the conquest of the highest mountain in the world; you only have to look at print-outs from the latest CTG machines, the patterns of contractions like the silhouetted peaks of the Himalayas.

Jonas remembered the first time he had ever laid eyes on them; he must have been about four or five and he was in the grocer’s shop with his mother. No one had told him about the triplets. He just stood there staring at them, exactly as one is always told not to gawp at people who have something wrong with them. They were standing next to the crates of fruit and to Jonas they seemed as exotic as the bananas from Fyffes — a name which you always ended up spraying rather than saying. They stood in a huddle, staring back and sticking out their tongues at him in such perfect sync that he was sure there had to be only one girl, that he had been dazzled, was seeing double, triple. He had to shut his eyes several times before coming to the stunned conclusion that there actually were three of them.

These triplets grew up in Grorud, they lived at the bottom of Trondheimsveien, but he seldom saw them and on those occasions when he did run into them he tended to regard them more as bringing a touch of carnival to the neighbourhood, like some sort of freak show, or like April, May and June, Daisy’s three nieces in the Donald Duck comics. Seeing them swimming and diving together at Badedammen was tantamount to a preview of the synchronised swimming which Jonas was to see on television years later.

It wasn’t until school, though, that he really discovered them, more specifically in fifth grade, when suddenly it was okay to look at girls — when, indeed, this had become the boys’ favourite pastime. Jonas was tempted to don a pair of those special glasses he had seen people wearing in the cinema, with one red lens and one green, to see if the three of them would merge into one mind-bogglingly three-dimensional girl. He started taking more and more notice of them, to the point where he realised that he was in love — in love with all three of them at once. He was faced, in other words, with an apparently insoluble problem: which one should he choose? Or, as Bo Wang Lee would have said: ‘What should you take with you?’

Actually, it was thanks to the triplets that Jonas — so he believed, at any rate — made his big breakthrough in terms of his gift, his powers of thought. He knew, as I have said, that this talent of his had its own inherent potential, that there was more to it than merely being able to make believe, to pretend that he was an anaconda, or that he had crossed the Gobi desert with Sven Hedin. The problem was, how was he supposed to invoke it, how to find the password that would allow him access to the treasure.

Along with the triplets, a rope played an important part. In later years this would, for Jonas, acquire an air of mystery, rather like the one in the Indian rope trick. It belonged, naturally, to Wolfgang Michaelsen, but Jonas was often given the honour of carrying it to school, slung over one shoulder and across his chest, as if he were the leader of an expedition to the top of Tirich Mir. A comparison which is not as far off the mark as it might seem, since this, too, was a case of an epoch-making drive forward in life.

It was springtime, the high season for skipping games in the playground. It was still permissible to play with the girls, even though those days were gone when one child would skip while the rest of the gang chanted ‘Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground’ and other such instructions to perform bizarre, and occasionally comical, actions while jumping the rope. The only possible option when boys and girls played together was ‘joining in’, as they called it. ‘Join in, three and nine,’ the caller would shout, which meant that the next person in line had to jump in after the first person had jumped three times. And since the first person had to jump nine times before running out, this meant that three kids were jumping at the same time. It could be a lot of fun, and the more kids you had skipping in time, the more fun it was: a whole tribe of leaping Masai warriors.

Such a game required a certain sense for timing. You soon heard about it if you muffed it and hit the rope on your way in or out. The aim was to build up a smooth, steady stream of jumpers in constant vertical and horizontal motion. The rope was long and thick and called for plenty of muscle power on the part of the kids holding the ends and doing the turning; it smacked hard against the tarmac at every turn, emitting a deadly whiplash crack. Now and again someone would take a nasty tumble and end up with badly skinned knees, having come in too late and had their feet knocked from under them by the rope.

A few of the kids had been known to try somewhat more advanced moves, executing intricate interlacing patterns, coming in from opposite sides, jumping in from the wrong side or, harder still: jumping two shorter ropes swung in opposite directions. There weren’t many who could manage this last, it could easily give you the claustrophobic feeling of being whipped up by a giant egg whisk. The simplest version, the one everyone could join in, was also the most popular: jumping in one after another, while the rope formed a beautiful, elongated ellipse around them. The usual order was boy, girl, boy, girl all the way down the line. It just worked out that way. It was great to jump up and down in a cracking circle of rope with a girl to front and back, the crisp ting-a-ling of bicycle bells in your ears, the sight of coltsfoot growing on the grassy banks and the scent of freshly lit bonfires in your nostrils. It released a tension in them. Or whipped them up, to puberty.

On the day of this particular incident, the caller shouted ‘Join in, four and ten’, which is to say: four people jumping together in the loop at any given time. And on this occasion, just as he jumped in, Jonas was unwittingly struck by a powerful thought. It had been triggered a split-second earlier by something he had seen out of the corner of his eye: the teacher on playground duty, wandering around with his hands behind his back; or at least, what had actually caught Jonas’s eye was the big bunch of keys dangling from the teacher’s finger. And as he was jumping, and gradually working his way towards the other end, a new thought occurred to him, one which involved a group of little girls from second grade who were chalking out a hopscotch grid over by the bike shed, and not only that, but he realised that he could hold onto that first reflection, the one about the teacher and the bunch of keys on which, not least, the sight of the whistle that was blown whenever anyone got into a fight, spurred on his imagination while he carried on considering the other thought, the one concerning the little girls and their game of hopscotch and the numbers they were chalking inside the squares; he could hold them both in the air at once, as it were. Now Jonas, like all children, had, of course, already had some small taste of this same phenomenon, this knack of being able to do several things at once: read a book, listen to music, maybe even watch TV with the sound turned down, but taking everything in, and on top of all that, at the back of all that, responding to some question from his mother — that same mother who, by the way, regularly palmed the boys off with a: ‘Don’t bother me right now, I can only think of one thing at a time!’ But this phenomenon, these thoughts he carried with him into the rope, were different, much stronger; his mind could be said to have been totally focused on both images; he could enter into them completely, be in two places at once, he could see every single key on the teacher’s keyring, as if they were keys which would open an endless succession of rooms, while at the same time dwelling on, really giving thought to the little girls’ hopscotch grid over by the bike shed, contemplating a pattern of squares which led to thoughts of a plane, or of marble, which in turn transported him to Athens and the Acropolis.

One of the triplets had jumped into the rope in front of him. Behind him he had another triplet. At one point he was skipping in the loop flanked by two almost identical individuals. Jonas detected a touch of the supernatural in this. He was quite certain that the two triplets had had something to do with the way his thoughts had split in two, and towards the end, before the accident, he had the feeling that he was on the verge of unearthing a third, parallel, image, one relating to the teacher on playground duty, who also taught handwork — a subject which triggered a whole host of thoughts with its sharp knives and stupefying glue fumes. So intrigued did Jonas become with this phenomenon, this possibility, this pleasure, that he went on skipping, even after he had skipped his forty times and was supposed to jump out. Kids were piling up behind him, among them the third triplet; there was some muttering, shouts for him to get out of there, but Jonas went on skipping in his own two-fold, and soon — if the others would just leave him alone — three-fold world, because he instinctively knew, or thought, that skipping, and possibly this whole complex of people, including two triplets, jumping up and down inside the ellipse formed by the smacking rope, was what was needed in order for him to keep two, close to three, thoughts in the air at one time. And sure enough: when an impatient Hjørdis or Helga or Herborg or whoever went so far as to shove him out of the rope, he lost not just one, but both, all of his thoughts. They burst like bubbles. He went rolling across the tarmac as if he had been hurled out of a massive centrifuge. He hurt himself quite badly, he was bleeding from a cut to his brow, where it had rammed into a sharp stone. But it had been worth it. And in a way it seemed only reasonable that such a discovery should send you flying flat on your face. He walked home from school that day with an ugly scab forming on his forehead where he would bear a scar for the rest of his life, feeling as though he had been ennobled, or that he had found the badge of mankind’s nobility: the potential to think more than one thought at the same time. The rope, which was once again slung over his shoulder and across his chest was no longer a rope, but the sash of a noble order.

He never tried to repeat this exploit, partly because he didn’t want to annoy the others, and partly because he realised that this was something he could experiment with on his own. He may also have been afraid that the faculty of which he had caught the merest glimpse might disappear. That great care would have to be taken with any further experiments. Oddly enough, Jonas made his new discovery around the time of Esso’s first major advertising campaign, when everywhere you went you saw the slogan ‘Put a tiger in your tank’. Jonas had done just that, put a tiger in his think-tank. That, at least, is how it felt, and with the same hint of danger. His prospective gift might just as easily bring him bad luck as good, something far worse than a cut brow.

He was to make this same discovery again and again: if you did not keep your exceptional talent to yourself, you had a much greater chance of being laughed at, or even penalised, than of being applauded. It was the same with football. But when his team’s fiercest rivals for the top position in the league, the west-side team Lyn, came to Grorud, hubris got the better of Jonas; he could not contain himself. The whole Grorud team was more than usually keyed-up, balefully eyeing the fancy cars which pulled up outside the clubhouse, bringing the Lyn players and their trainers. ‘We’re going to hammer you lot black and blue,’ one slick-haired Lyn player remarked blithely as he hopped out; referring, with this dig, to the colours of the Grorud strips. ‘Bloody snobs,’ Leo hissed through his teeth as he stood there with Jonas, glowering at these boys who seemed to come from another stratosphere, who dressed differently, who had different haircuts, who seemed, in short, more grown-up than them, as if the whole bunch could, at any minute, turn round and become lawyers, company directors and stockbrokers. Lyn supporters will have to excuse this mythologising of their team, this is simply a description of the way in which Jonas Wergeland and his teammates saw it.

For a long time during this crucial match, too, Jonas was able to charge more or less unhindered up the left wing, but unlike the other teams they had come up against that season, Lyn had a trainer who spotted Jonas’s uncommon ability and shouted some instructions to his defence, mainly to one of the right-backs who looked, to Jonas, a bit like King Kong. Jonas became the brunt of some really dirty tackling. During one such foul he must have cracked a rib; the pain was almost unbearable, but he played on. He should have known. He should have stopped, kept his talent hidden. But at that moment he just couldn’t. He got too carried away. There was something about Lyn, Lyn on Grorud’s home ground, something historic, symbolic. It was the Right against the Left.

Jonas scored two goals, even with his chest hurting like mad he scored two very simple, but very sweet goals with little chip shots off the side of the foot, one into either side of the net, well out of reach of the Lyn keeper, he was so taken aback he didn’t even have a chance to make a dive for the ball. The Lyn defenders were clearly rankled by the utter prosaicness of these goals, their cheeky nonchalance. Jonas saw the dirty looks they sent him. A curving shot skimming under the crossbar from twenty metres out, that they could have stomached, a superb lob or a lethal half-volley shot, but these soft, ruthless shots to the foot of the post were just too demeaning. This was socialism in practice: painfully simple.

The score was 3–3, with five minutes of the game to go. Jonas was alone out on the left flank, received a pass from Leo in their own half, ran up the wing, wincing at the pain in his ribs, but crossing the halfway line nonetheless, no one in his way; all the players were starting to flag, Jonas had a free run up that side of the pitch, and on he ran, hugging the touchline and registering, out of the corner of his eye, Leo running parallel with him, like a neighbouring idea in his mind: two thoughts, utterly dissimilar, but with a common goal. And it may have been at that very moment that he made up his mind to stay out here for the rest of his life, on the left wing. Because, despite his short-lived career in football, from that day onwards Jonas saw himself as belonging to the ‘outside left’. No matter what cause he was fighting for, he would always try to find an outsider position, a sideline along which he could dribble the ball while everybody else clustered together in the centre, and although where Jonas was concerned, it was more a psychological than a political appellation, he would have had nothing against being a founding member of a new party, to be called the Outside Left.

This also sheds some light on his later attempt to expose the opposite wing for what it was. As an adult — not least in prison — Jonas Wergeland spent a lot of time trying to analyze the most disturbing watershed in the history of modern Norway, a sort of collective fall from grace. 1973 is fixed in the global consciousness as the year when the oil crisis gave a serious indication of the state the world was in, and of its grave economic problems. In Norway, however, where they had only started pumping out their black gold a couple of years earlier, the situation in 1973 was almost the very opposite: in Norway they were having trouble coping with their nascent wealth. This fact manifested itself most clearly, if indirectly, at a public meeting in the Saga cinema in Oslo in April of that year. The choice of venue was most apt, since it would be quite true to say that a new saga had its beginnings here. A saga of the grimmer sort. On the stage stood a seasoned public speaker: an eccentric dog lover in a suit and a bow tie, with a bottle of egg liqueur to oil his vocal chords. Anders Sigurd Lange was his name, and he made a speech which was interrupted by bursts of applause over a hundred times. This meeting led to the founding of a political party which initially went by the curious name of ‘Anders Lange’s party for the drastic reduction of taxes, duties and state intervention’. Later it acquired another and possibly even more curious appellation: Fremskrittspartiet — the Progress Party.

Much has been said about that strange organisation, the Norwegian Maoist Party — the AKP in its Norwegian abbreviation — which ran rampant in Norway in the seventies. But as far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, the most significant political movement of the day, in the long run at any rate, was not the AKP, but the ALP. Anders Lange was not, in himself, a bad man; Jonas did not have the slightest interest in him as a person, what fascinated him was the society which had raised an individual like Anders Lange to prominence, which is to say: Norway. Lange was a symbol, the carrier of alarming symptoms, in the same way as Harastølen, the refugee centre at Luster. He was, among other things, one of the first examples of a growing trend among politicians to become solo performers. And proof that they could get away with this, not to mention actually build up a following, even when they were little short of utter buffoons. Everything hinged on the individual concerned. It was no longer a matter of a political party, but of a skilled demagogue, surrounded by a crowd of whingeing Norwegians who could, what is more, be replaced at regular intervals.

None of this would have been possible, however, had it not been for certain requisite factors, the most important of these being the media and, not least, the television broadcasting service of which Jonas Wergeland himself would one day become a part. With Anders Lange’s Party — not the man, but the phenomenon: the combination of rapacious media and one figure as catalyst, began the decline of civilised politics. Within just a few months a handful of individuals succeeded, with the help of the media, in totally vulgarising the Norwegian political scene. It did not take long for every politician to realise that presentation was more important than substance, that one might as well master the rhetoric of advertising right at the start. The politicians, press and TV entered into a symbiosis of sorts: each ensuring the other of publicity, however short-lived, and whatever the cost.

Anders Lange himself declared that they had reached a turning point in Norwegian history, and he was to be proved right. In the election held in the autumn of 1973, in a Norway in which, for three decades, everyone had pulled together to build up the country, marching shoulder to shoulder behind the banner of solidarity, more than 100,000 Norwegians voted for Anders Lange’s Party. Its founder and three other members won seats in parliament. Jonas Wergeland saw this as the beginning of a period in which the proud, time-honoured tradition of May 1st soon gave way to the egocentric celebration of Me 1st.

With Anders Lange, populism came to Norway for good and all. The responsible, ideological, considered style of politics had had its day. Opinions, votes, were no longer founded on vision, but on discontent, not least with an overly high rate of income tax. Anders Lange — an indefatigable writer of letters to the press, had a nose for the mood which lay dormant in many Norwegians, a mood which can best be compared to the sulkiness of spoiled adolescents. This may well be the least sympathetic and most incomprehensible aspect of modern Norway: the fact that the wealthier the country became, the more it was possible to play on this feeling of discontent, this collective ‘gimme more’ frame of mind. From the mid-seventies onwards Norway rode towards the millennium on the wave generated by its new ideology of Self: self-righteousness, self-centredness and self-sufficiency. For decades, the most prevalent catchword in Norway was ‘self-determination’. And there is, in fact, a shadowy and little recognised connection between that meeting in the Saga cinema in 1973 and Norway’s vote against joining the EEC the previous year. Where the initial focus had been on general political self-determination, the demands were now to be extended to cover the right to individual and — worst of all — ethnic autonomy, with all decisions being made independent of the international community.

And here, in this worrying development, we have the crux of Jonas Wergeland’s monologue at Harastølen: xenophobia. The most ominous aspect of the new populistic movement founded in the Saga cinema was its latent racist tendencies. Anders Lange could hardly be accused of being a racist, despite a bunch of somewhat dubious remarks and an unconcealed fondness for South Africa. But many of his supporters were, and contempt for people of a different skin colour has always dogged this party like a shadow. Even before the election in 1973, that ignominious year, one of the party’s members openly expressed a sentiment which had not been voiced in decades: Norway for the Norwegians. The future leader of the party, Carl Ivar Hagen gradually gained a lot of ground by ingeniously, discreetly and, not least, impunibly fuelling the flames of people’s intolerance and their antipathy to foreigners. To Jonas Wergeland, the ban on immigration which was introduced only two years after the meeting in the Saga cinema simply seemed to be the logical next step. Thanks to the far-right Progress Party and the knock-on effect its success had on the political scene in general, the whole of Norway was transformed into another Lyn: a privileged and pampered team, desperately on the defensive. Or, as Kamala Varma so neatly put it during one heated discussion: ‘Modern Norway is a society founded on the seven deadly sins.’ It was the Progress Party which propagated the notion that has taken root in far too many Norwegians: that every person who comes to Norway seeking asylum is only here for the money and is merely out to defraud the Norwegian welfare state. For Jonas, this had always been the most notable feature of the Outside Right: its prejudice against foreigners, its lack of solidarity with people outside the chalked line marking the geographical bounds of Norway.

But now, to use an expression from the football broadcasts: over to Grorud sports ground, because out there on the pitch, the Grorud under-15s are playing at home to Lyn and Jonas Wergeland is running unhindered up his beloved left wing. To anyone who had been following the Lyn team all season it must have been agony to watch these normally excellent players, known for their lightning attacks, having to adopt what was for them an unwonted defensive strategy, putting their name and their reputation to shame; they now looked as if they would be very happy to settle for a draw, the whole team had pulled back into their own half, suddenly the very embodiment of the Outside Right, displaying a dogged defensiveness which refused to accept that anyone could be as good as them; in fact they were boiling mad, ready to break the legs of anybody who tried to get through their wall, especially anyone sly enough to try a shot from the wing. Jonas ought to have sensed the change in atmosphere, but he was too caught up, and a bit groggy from the pain in his ribs; he was almost level with the box, cut across towards the Lyn goal, heading for the corner of the sixteen metre line, and as the aforementioned King Kong from the Lyn backs charged at him, a gorilla in red and white, Jonas passed the ball smoothly to Leo and received it back from him as he jinked round the big back and crossed the sixteen metre line. But Lyn’s colossus of a defender had had enough, he dashed off in murderous pursuit, mainly because he realised that a goal was in the offing; he could see Jonas considering into which corner of the net he should place the ball, softly, but in the net nonetheless, as sure as death, so he rammed the toe of his boot into Jonas’s calf with all his might, from behind — Jonas felt as though his leg had been knocked from under him by a leaden skipping rope: the Lyn back had lashed out at him partly in desperation, partly out of pure malice; he didn’t even try to go for the ball, he went for Jonas’s leg, with the result that the casualty department had to deal with a broken fibula which the doctor on call described as one of the nastiest he had seen in a long time — a fracture which, by the way, also paved the way for Jonas Wergeland’s subsequent career as an angry young man in the Red Room, but that is another story. Jonas crashed to the ground with a howl, just had time to register the scent of grass, earth, to observe that the world was flat, too simple; you thought you had a clear run, only then to slam straight into an invisible barrier, a wall of thick glass. Everything went red, then white and finally blue. He passed out.

It could not be anything but a penalty. As Jonas was coming round, a few metres outside his beloved left touchline, as his mangled leg was being examined, through a haze of pain he saw Leo deposit the ball neatly in the corner of the net.

He had learned how easy it was to achieve his aims. And yet: was it worth the cost? They had beaten Lyn. Nonetheless, this experience had taught Jonas a lesson: he ought to have concealed his gifts. Although he could not have put it into words, Jonas was beginning to understand why his father preferred an anonymous existence on the organ bench at Grorud Church.

Although his painful encounter with Lyn lay in the future, as early as fifth grade Jonas knew that it was best to keep his thought experiments to himself. He did not tempt fate by causing more chaos in the skipping games. But he did still believe that skipping was an absolute prerequisite. He toyed with the term ‘mental gymnastics’, envisaged skipping as a way of building up his thinking muscles. He purchased a good, professional skipping rope, a Lonsdale with ridged hand-grips weighted to give it the right whip and speed. He found a suitable, unfrequented spot in the basement of the block of flats and started skipping all on his own. He liked to switch off the light, skip in the dark, caught inside the invisible bubble formed by the arc of the rope. He had watched the girls skipping, knew that there were lots of different steps. You could skip forwards or backwards, or on one leg, then the other; you could sling the rope out to the side at set intervals, skip with your arms crossed, or a whole host of combinations. But what Jonas liked best was double skips or simply ‘doubles’. His thoughts flowed best of all with those. Maybe it was the swish of the rope that did it, but skipping doubles gave him a feeling of hovering in mid-air, of no longer being subject to natural laws or the laws of causality. And his reflections altered character, becoming more like the mode of thought he experienced when he dove down deep. When he skipped in the dark, he felt as though everything round about him began to glow, that he was like a dynamo, that he created energy, a force field. He was not simply doing mental gymnastics, he was practising for a great battle. He recalled pictures of boxers — fighters like Ingemar Johansson: massive characters, skipping as light as you like. As if they were training for something other than boxing.

Gradually his efforts began to pay off. He became capable of considering more than two thoughts at the same time. He managed to keep first three, then four parallel thoughts in the air. It was an intoxicating feeling. Like being on board a sailing ship with sail upon sail being run up mast after mast and everything moving faster and faster. Sometimes the basement smelled like the air after a violent thunderstorm. Soon, however, he also found that the more widely diverging his thoughts were in subject matter, the more exciting it became. It was like keeping an eye on several separate cogs in the workings of a clock at one time or, more correctly perhaps, several different sets of clock workings in different places in the room. It also seemed to him that time stood still, or went more slowly, the more simultaneous thoughts he managed to set in train. Jonas would not have been surprised had someone told him that he appeared to be skipping in slow motion. And now and again — he could have sworn it — he thought in a way that caused him to see his name written in lights in the darkness before him.

It can surely have been no coincidence that he should at this time have had a crush on the aforementioned triplets, Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis. Although he did not know it, he was also on the brink of one of the great milestones in the life of any individual: the moment when you press your cheek against the cheek of the one you love. For Jonas this would prove to be an even more powerful experience than his first kiss, simply because it came first. If it were possible to talk about a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ in Jonas Wergeland’s life, then it was one which involved skin rather than mucous membranes.

It can hardly have been because their father was a big man in the labour movement that the triplets exhibited such an uncommon degree of mutual solidarity that one could have been forgiven for thinking they lived by the motto ‘All for one, and one for all’. It would, however, have been misleading to call them The Three Musketeers, since they were absolutely identical, at least to anyone who did not know them well. They all looked like troll dolls, or like the Icelandic singer of a future era, Björk Gudmundsdottir. Like the Beagle Boys from the Donald Duck comics they needed placards on their chests to differentiate them from one another. And since Jonas did not make up his mind until late in the autumn that was more or less how he managed to tell them apart — by the different coloured scarves they wore: red, blue and yellow. For Jonas those scarves were a tricolour waving over the land of love. But that still left him faced with a not inconsiderable dilemma: which one should he choose? There was something about the sight of them which made him think of a box of chocolates, the stunning prospect of all that confectionary, a golden tray full of delights, all equally tempting: ‘Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo’.

After the summer holidays he had watched them on the sly when they were hula hooping in the playground, a circus turn that quite took his breath away: three identical girls with their hips gyrating in perfect synchrony. He also had a passport-size photograph of each of them, the sort everybody had to have taken at one of those machines if they wanted to be part of the status-giving and rather frenetic swapping game they played at that age, where the main point was not to have as many photos as possible, but to have the right photos — much in the same way as cards are exchanged in the business world and in diplomatic circles. A few of the girls’ photos had a high exchange value; you could, for example, get both Britt and Kari, maybe even Gerd into the bargain, for one Anne Beate. Jonas studied the pictures of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis through a magnifying glass as if faced here with the equivalent of those seemingly identical cartoons in weekly magazines in which you have to spot the differences; but he really could not perceive any dissimilarity between them. They were absolutely identical. Jonas was struck by an outrageous thought: what if he were able to go out with all three of them at once? What an unbelievably intense experience that would have to be?

But by the winter he had come to the conclusion — although he could not have said why — that he liked the triplet with the yellow scarf best, and the one with the yellow scarf was Hjørdis. By following the standard ritual of using middlemen to gauge the other party’s interest before making tentative overtures — a procedure which suited a shy boy like Jonas perfectly — before too long Hjørdis L. was officially his girlfriend. And only days later, when they had barely got to the stage of daring to hold hands, with gloves on, Jonas was to make contact, for the first time, with a girl’s skin.

He had on his skating cap, or Hjallis cap as they called it, after their speed-skating hero Hjallis Andersen. He was standing with a bunch of kids from his class in the cul-de-sac next to their building when Hjørdis came out wearing just an open anorak over her blouse, and her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. She said she was home alone. Everybody knew what that meant. Jonas’s chums slapped him blokeishly on the back, egging him on; they were all but shouting ‘Go for it, Jonas!’, as if this were a speed-skating race — ‘two insides and leave ’im standing’, ‘silver is failure’ and all that. He went up to their flat with her, discovered that the sisters’ rooms lay side by side down a corridor; he would have liked to have taken a peep into each of them, just to see if they were all decorated identically, but Hjørdis quickly pulled him through her door, into her room, which smelled faintly of Yaxa deodorant and had a bookshelf containing a fair selection of Gyldendal’s Girls’ Classics; a perfectly ordinary girl’s room, apart from the tennis racket in the corner and a large glossy poster of the American group The Supremes, also triplets of a sort, who had just had their first big hit. They sat next to one another on the bed-settee and proceeded to flick through a copy of New magazine — appropriately enough, since all of this was new to Jonas. She edged imperceptibly closer to him and he felt the warmth from her shoulder and her arm spreading through his body. A breathtaking scent emanated from her. She read out something from an agony column and laughed, he hadn’t heard a thing, but he laughed anyway to be on the safe side, it must have been funny; he laughed as he took in her fingers, her bare forearm, the pale skin with its fine bloom of golden hair. They went on leafing through the magazine, he turned the pages too, kept brushing against her hand. It felt as though someone was whipping a rope around them, generating a magnetic field. Suddenly she looked straight at him. Her eyes had a dewy look to them, the expression ‘eyes to drown in’ flashed into his mind. Or perhaps it was the actual thought of drowning, that this had to do with life-saving. Purely on instinct he laid his cheek against hers, gently. The touch immediately sent shivers running through him. It was such a surprise. The softness. And the warmth even more so. Added to which there was the smell, a girl smell which was even stronger at such close quarters and induced an uncontrollable tightening of his throat. He steadfastly maintained later that his first chemistry lesson began here, sitting cheek to cheek with a girl. She was still holding the magazine. He saw the golden hairs on her arm rise up, stand on end, as if electrified. The magazine slid to the floor. Her hands found his body, felt their way around him. They sat with their arms round one another, cheek to cheek, for a long, long time. Held each other and hugged. There were lots of variations on a hug, gentle or firm, quiet or energetic. Even the quiet hugs left them breathless and flushed. Jonas liked it best when his cheek barely grazed hers. He wished he could maintain this contact with her skin for ever, sitting like this with his nose close to the nape of Hjørdis’s fragrant neck. She pulled away, her eyes glassy, muttered something about homework, saw him out. The others were still hanging around in the cul-de-sac, like spectators waiting for an athlete to cross the finishing line. He gave them the thumbs-up, a victory sign, making sure that he could not be seen from the window.

He had not even had a chance to answer the other kids’ eager questions when Hjørdis also came out. But she only stayed for a moment before slinging the yellow scarf round her neck and pulling him back inside. His chums whooped and whistled, impressed by Jonas’s way with the girls. ‘She can’t keep her hands off you, you lucky dog!’ Once more, Hjørdis led him to her room. ‘What about your homework?’ he asked. She just had to have one more hug, she said with eyes one could drown in and pressed her cheek to his. Jonas seemed almost to have forgotten already how shockingly soft and warm it felt. Again the touch of her skin sent an electric charge running through him and the scent of her left him breathless. She managed to push him away just before he lost control.

As he was making his way back downstairs to his mates — who were still waiting impatiently for his report — Hjørdis came running after him, as if she had had second — or third — thoughts; she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him, laughing, back up to the flat. His chums’ shouts sounded more envious than acclamatory now. Jonas was proud of having such an effect on her. He followed her inside yet again; this time they simply stood hugging in the hall, but this was, if possible, even more exciting; he just could not get over the wonderful softness of it, the warmth. These hugs gave rise to the same ecstatic thrill inside him, and the scent of her took his breath away. She managed to prise herself loose the second before he lost his head and started pawing at the more forbidden parts of her anatomy. Jonas stood there, feeling this glorious sensation coursing through him. Did he think of Melankton? It was good, no matter what. It was like being a child and never tiring of hearing the same story over and over again.

Minutes later, as he was making his way across to the gang, to finally take his bow, so to speak, all three triplets appeared on their balcony. They were almost faint from suppressed giggling. The other two had been home all the time. Helga and Herborg had simply borrowed Hjørdis’s yellow scarf. Jonas’s chums were in stitches, they were almost rolling on the ground with laughter, they called him a bigamist and worse. As I said, the triplets might seem to have adopted the Musketeers’ motto: ‘One for all and all for one’. They shared everything, even boyfriends. Or maybe they had been trying to make him accept a package deal. Jonas hardly dared show his face at school the next day. But deep down he was really quite chuffed. When it came to the archetypal story of ‘My First Hug’, he won hands down with his ‘My First Three Hugs’. And he had, in fact, come close to realising his impossible dream: of being with them all at once. Jonas, in his skating cap, felt as though he had won gold, silver and bronze in the same race.

He was still puzzled, though, especially by the fact that every hug had felt equally good to him. Was it, then, something about himself he had discovered, rather than something about girls? He had thought the fact of being in love was an infallible Geiger counter, when maybe it was nothing but an animal response, a simple reflex, a bio-zoological process which had blithely picked out three different girls, each with equal certainty, to be the one for him. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that they had not each given him their own passport photo, they had given him three pictures of Hjørdis. He felt a vague twinge of fear. It was almost as if he had unintentionally discovered that there was no difference between one girl and another, they could all fill you with the same delight, were distinguishable only by the colour of their scarves. He had a mental picture of his future: a succession of women wearing different scarves, but otherwise absolutely identical. This led him, in turn, to imagine how impossible it would be to find what New magazine called ‘Miss Right’. If love endowed you, as Karen Mohr had implied, with fresh eyes, then he was definitely on the wrong track. She, Hjørdis, or the three of them, had shown him, rather, that love is blind. He shuddered. He thought of Melankton. Thanks to the triplets, Jonas was beginning to believe that it was not only the world and people which were flat, but possibly love, too. Was there such a thing as round love?

This was Jonas Wergeland’s first experience of the female sex. Right at the start he was made aware of how unpredictable they were, how different. The next day, Hjørdis came up to him in the playground to say she was sorry. Jonas shrugged it off as if it was no big deal. Actually, he had lost interest, he ‘broke it off’ shortly afterwards. And even if he was not exactly mad at her, this may have been an instinctive rejection of girls who did not take love seriously. Who did not consider it absolutely central. The fact is, though, that Jonas himself did not know whether he had been moved by pride or fear. After all, if she could fool him with a hug, who could say where it might end.

Jonas often thought of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis, three girls so alike that you could take them for one. The funny thing was that in the years to come they began to branch out in different directions — became so unlike one another that they were known to some as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. More than anyone, it was the triplets who taught Jonas that nature and nurture did not necessarily say everything there was to know about a person. And although all three were passionate climbers, possibly because their births had coincided with the conquest of Mount Everest, it can be revealed that only one of them became a public figure, an eminent diplomat and expert on the Middle East. In interviews she always said the same thing: ‘As one of triplets you have to be a good mediator.’

It seems only reasonable that Jonas should have been torn between three girls at a time when he was also something of a mental bigamist — in making, that is, his first clumsy attempts to pursue several streams of consciousness at the same time. For months it became a regular routine with him to go down to the basement where, in the darkness, with the aid of the skipping rope he conducted his exhausting, but felicitous mental workouts. After a while, however, a new challenge presented itself: what was he to do with it, this discovery that he was capable of thinking multiple thoughts? So far it had simply been something beautiful, like sparkling crystals, like walking on air — a kick in itself. His dream of becoming a lifesaver, his first serious undertaking, having ended in a miserable anticlimax, he had become more and more convinced that the power of thought might hold the key to a worthy alternative, a possible new goal in life.

Could these parallel reflections save him from the flatness? Skipping gave him a reassuring sense of being inside a sphere, thanks to the arc of the rope. His observations, the layers of ramifying thoughts, could perhaps help him to get to the other side of things. What if he could plumb his own true depths through thought? Prove that reality was round. Even if the world was flat. If he was to be a discoverer, he would have to be the type who made discoveries with the mind, not with the eyes.

Or rather: Jonas suspected that his powers of imagination would make him good at a game such as chess, possibly very good, but then people would think he was a run-of-the-mill genius and he did not want to be a run-of-the-mill genius, he wanted to be an extraordinary human being. There were plenty of minor geniuses around, but few exceptional individuals. He aimed to be an exception.

Karen Mohr was clearly an exception. The more visits Jonas paid to her, the more he talked to her in that Provençal-style living room in the middle of an otherwise drab Norwegian housing estate, the more sympathy he had for this woman who believed that a moment could constitute a whole life. The way Jonas saw it, the reason she maintained her glowing complexion was that she lived under a mental sun lamp. He had the feeling that Karen Mohr also skipped, that she had succeeded in doing something which he had unconsciously been striving to do for some while: she had stopped time, she hung suspended in a permanent double skip.

‘I thought you worked with precious stones,’ Jonas said on one occasion as he stifled a contented belch, having just consumed one of her superb omelettes, a golden half-moon with a filling which was a delight to the palate.

That was not such a bad guess at that, she said, stroking one of the shells on the shelf. She probably could be regarded as a diamond-cutter of sorts. She was in the process of cutting a very big diamond, endeavouring to bring out the light in it. ‘I have spent years, many, many years on extracting every ounce from that day,’ she said. Jonas suddenly felt that he could discern different facets to her countenance, or that he was observing her from three sides at once, just as in the sketch on the wall. One thing, at least, was for sure: Karen Mohr did not have ‘a bit on the side’, what she had lay in the centre.

During his visits Jonas often noticed Karen Mohr run her fingers over a ceramic figurine or a smooth, round pebble on the shelf, with an absent-minded smile. Or she might pause beside the green plant which Jonas liked best because its leaves looked as though someone had taken the scissors to them — a mónstera, she told him later. Sometimes she would fall to fingering those elaborate leaves as if, through them, she was suddenly transported into reminiscences in which she relived certain inexhaustible seconds.

‘Did you leave right away?’ Jonas asked.

‘I stayed for some weeks,’ she said. ‘But I never saw him again, if that’s what you’re wondering.’ She poured herself a glass of Pernod. Jonas loved to watch the clear liquid turn greyish and semen-like when she added water. He had conceived the notion that this might be what fertilised her imagination.

Jonas’s eyes also lingered on the objects in her living room, as if he were understanding more and more of what he was seeing. At first he had thought that she was sad, hurting somehow, but he soon realised that she was happy; she was one of the most contented people he would ever meet. Karen Mohr taught Jonas that happiness could be something other than he had imagined.

‘It may be that we only live once during the years when we walk the earth,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘In which case we really have to cherish this time.’ She cleared the table. ‘I was lucky. I had those weeks by the Mediterranean. Some people, a great many, I think, have never experienced life — raw, vibrant life — in such a way.’

A lot of folk would, nonetheless, automatically have construed that eccentric living room of hers as being an escape from something. Jonas — possibly because he was a child — never thought of it that way. He understood, although he could not have put it into words, that even though Karen Mohr might retreat into a parallel world from time to time, she never lost sight of the ‘normal’ world. It was more as if that other world, her memories of Provence, was forever filtering through to enrich her life in Oslo. She said it herself: ‘I don’t live in another world. I live in two worlds. Compared to most other people, who inhabit just the one, I am twice as happy.’ It would be no exaggeration to say that Karen Mohr was one of the greatest teachers Jonas Wergeland ever had. A true educator. Someone who brought out the best in him. Broadened his mind. Raised his consciousness. She taught him that it was possible to live in two places at once.

In due course, Jonas received an explanation for her mysterious outings on that one evening each month. One Saturday afternoon when he happened to be there, she suddenly said: ‘It’s time you were going. I have to get changed. I’m going into town.’ It turned out that she was going to a restaurant at the bottom of Bygdøy Allé by the name of Bagatelle, commonly known as Jaquet’s Bagatelle, after the owner Edmond Jaquet — although actually by this time it was being run by his son Georges. The Bagatelle was still a colourful and popular restaurant when Jonas was at university, not least because Georges Jaquet kept his food and wine prices low enough that even Jonas and his friends could afford to eat there. And since they were studying astrophysics, they gave Georges Jaquet many more stars than the latter-day Bagatelle could ever boast.

On one Saturday evening in the month, Karen Mohr dressed in her best and dined alone at Bagatelle on Bygdøy Allé. She described to Jonas what a pleasure it was to be welcomed by the unfailingly charming Georges in his dark suit and be seated at a white-clothed table under a drawing by Le Corbusier himself, who also happened to be a cousin of Edmond Jaquet’s. Jonas’s mouth watered when she told him what a treat it was to read the menu — different every day and written in both French and Norwegian; the thrill of running an eye over such tempting offerings as turbot au vin blanc and riz de veau grand duc. And she always had a word with the head chef or the sous-chefs, often in French. Georges set great store by regular patrons like Karen Mohr; she could even take the liberty of nodding discreetly to journalist Arne Hestenes or Robert Levin the pianist. Jonas never asked her why she frequented Bagatelle, but he fancied that he knew the reason. She went there to contemplate her life. To consider the fact that she had turned down one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. Perhaps the name of the place helped her to reduce the whole episode to a mere bagatelle. Or maybe she was actually celebrating it. Whatever the case, it was not a nostalgia trip, but a salute to a moment. Jonas imagined her having snails as a starter, to check the speed of her reminiscences, ensure that they slid through her very slowly.

On another occasion in her flat, when Jonas was enjoying freshly baked croissants and Karen was drinking what she called café au lait, not from a cup but from a bowl, Jonas had asked her why she had turned down that painter, because he understood that she had rejected him, had said no to more than just having her portrait painted. Karen had thought for a moment, most likely because she was not sure whether Jonas would understand. Then she had said: ‘Even though I had only met him minutes before I knew that he was, how shall I put it, too simple. I could tell that he was a genius, and yet — perhaps for that very reason — he was too simple. Most men are too simple.’ To Jonas it sounded as if she were saying: too flat. Karen Mohr raised her bowl to her lips and took a sip. Jonas suspected that she was concealing a smile.

The worst of it was that she had no regrets, she said. Despite the intensity of the moment, those few charged seconds, the pleasure of being the object of his searching gaze, and despite the fact that she may well have been saying no to living with him, to sharing the luxury of his fame. And she had made the right decision.

‘Even though you could have made a name for yourself?’ Jonas asked.

She looked at him as if she did not understand the question, then went on talking about something else — if, that is, it was not the same thing: ‘I did not deem him … worthy,’ she said. That word ‘worthy’ was to become a catchword in Jonas’s life.

‘Did you ever find someone who was worthy?’ he asked, doing his best to pronounce the word with the same gravity as Karen Mohr, stretching the vowels and rolling the ‘r’.

‘No, I never did.’ And then, anticipating Jonas’s next question. ‘But I have never reproached myself.’

Jonas could not know that many times in the future his eyes would fill with tears at the memory of her face as she spoke of this. She had provided him with a mainstay, one that would stand within him forever; she taught him something about the uncompromising nature of love, the solemnity of it — a solemnity which made him feel a little uneasy, gave him a sense of the heavy responsibility which rested on his shoulders whenever he was faced with a woman. Karen Mohr had received an offer from a man admired by half the world, but had not deemed him worthy. Love is no mere bagatelle, that’s for sure, was Jonas’s first thought.

The memory of Karen Mohr would come into his mind in the oddest places, such as the time, decades later, when he found himself confronted by a desert of sorts, and saw thousands of warriors marching towards him, soldiers in full battle gear, rank upon rank. For a few seconds he had thought that they were coming to get him, to punish him; that this vast army had been mobilised because he, Jonas Wergeland, had been unfaithful in love, had shown himself unworthy.

For several terrible weeks Jonas had laboured under the delusion, as nightmarishly vivid as only the mind of a jealous man could produce, that his wife was having an affair with one of his closest friends. It is tempting to recount all his suppositions and mental agonies, his occasionally churlish behaviour and pathetic accusations, but while the whole notion of being a cuckolded husband is not nearly as old hat as many would have it — the sort of thing that only befalls the Strindbergs of this world — these aspects must take second place to the account of how the other party, Margrete that is, dealt with the situation and, not least, with her husband’s need for a bulwark of promises and assurances, in short: his desperate longing for security. And when one considers what Jonas himself had created in the way of problems some years earlier — with his fateful escapade in Lisbon — it is hard to see how Margrete managed to muster the patience she displayed; it says a lot about originality and forgiveness, about a woman who in so many ways had no equal.

For months Jonas inhabited two worlds, one of which — the delusional one — gradually gained the upper hand. In his imagination, he was constantly witness to every detail of Margrete’s infidelity, her rendezvous and sexual gymnastics with a man whom, till then, he had counted his friend. And every night in bed when, shamefully but nonetheless belligerently, he confronted her with accusations based on his delusions, lengthy tirades which always ended with him asking how else she could explain why she was no longer interested in him, sexually, she would hear him out, then repeat what she had said the night before, and the night before that: ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, you won’t listen anyway.’

Then one December day she came home from work and asked him to take the following week off from his job at NRK. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Just do it,’ she said. ‘Make some excuse about illness in the family,’ she said. ‘But why?’ he said again. ‘Because I want to show you a world as unreal as the one you’re living in right now,’ she said. Later Jonas was to think that what she had actually been saying was: ‘Because you are dead. Because I want to bring you back to life.’

A week later they were at the airport. Jonas wanted to ask where they were going, but some foolish sense of pride prevented him from doing so. Margrete did not say anything either, not about their destination anyway, otherwise she was quite chatty, making comments about the other passengers, relating funny incidents from her many travels as a girl. Not until they were in the transit hall at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport, when Margrete indicated to him that their flight was now boarding, did Jonas see the name of their destination on the display: Beijing! Beijing, China. Margrete slept through most of the long flight, but Jonas was so agitated that he was not even capable of enjoying the deluxe in-flight service. But when they landed, she said, as if referring to his recent uncivilised behaviour: ‘Here, in these people’s eyes, we are both barbarians, here — on neutral ground — we might be able to talk to one another.’

As it turned out, though, Beijing was merely a stopover point, they still had a bit to go. Once again Jonas was amazed by what a woman of the world Margrete proved to be in such situations. She obviously knew a smattering of essential Chinese words and phrases — she could certainly make herself understood — and while they were waiting for their domestic flight, she managed to get hold of some sort of fast food: bulky, white polystyrene boxes whose contents Jonas dared do little more than pick at, but which she, Margrete, gobbled down with every sign of genuine relish, aided by chopsticks which she plied as if they were natural extensions of her fingers. With her faintly oriental features one could have been forgiven for thinking that these were her natural surroundings.

Throughout the flight, on board a domestic aircraft which reminded him of a run-down flat, reeking of grease and stale cooking smells, Jonas sat stiff with fright. Most of the passengers were soldiers, all clad in heavy overcoats which they kept on and which gave off an odour of sun-warmed rubbish bins. Jonas kept an anxious eye on the emergency exits — he could feel a distinct draught from the one closest to him. In all the confusion he had not caught the name of their destination, so he swallowed his pride and asked Margrete. ‘Wait and see,’ she said. ‘Why can you never just enjoy a surprise?’

But when they landed, late in the afternoon, Jonas still had no idea where they were. There was no snow, but it was bitterly cold and it was getting dark. They were met by a driver and a man who was obviously some sort of guide. Margrete had arranged everything in advance, more as a matter of form than out of necessity. It very quickly became plain to Jonas that she was every bit as well-informed as their guide. They drove through a broad, monotonous landscape. Jonas recalled a film he had once seen, Yellow Earth by Chen Kaige. ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me where we are?’ Jonas asked the guide. The man turned to look at him in some surprise: ‘Welcome to Xi’an, one of the oldest cities in China,’ he said with a smile.

At the hotel, a showy but characterless modern building right next to the old clock tower in the heart of Xi’an, they ate a silent supper in the restaurant. Their guide, a middle-aged man whom Margrete had invited to join them, sensed that something was up and in an effort to lighten the mood, as they were finishing their meal he went over to an ancient, out-of-tune piano and began to play a piece which at first — and mainly because that was what he was expecting — Jonas took to be a traditional Chinese melody, some old chestnut, a worn-out tune, but suddenly he recognised it. It was not very well played, but it was, nonetheless, ‘Morning’ by Edvard Grieg. The other diners applauded enthusiastically. The guide was all smiles when he returned to Jonas and Margrete. Jonas knew he ought to say something, that he owed it to the guide to ask how he came to know that tune, since the answer would no doubt reveal a lot about the man and his background, his life, but Jonas had been poisoned by his own thoughts, his own worries, by the underworld which at all times existed alongside the one he inhabited: a phosphorescent green stalactite cave in which Margrete committed the most obscene acts with another man, one of Jonas’s friends, at that; an ice-cold basement which, by means of some sort of osmosis, had seeped into his Xi’an world. He was so bewildered that he proceeded once again, in the hotel room, as if it were the only thing of which he was capable, to ask Margrete what the other man was like in bed, whether he took her from in front or behind? He knew he ought to be feeling more enthusiastic, show some interest in the place and the sights they would be seeing there, but his mind was clouded, as they say. The thought of Margrete’s supposed affair bulked larger for him than the whole amazing existence of China. Margrete did not answer him. But she talked, chatted about other things, reassured him indirectly, as it were. And at night she snuggled up to him, she did not get mad; at no time over the past six months had she avoided him, not even when he had hurled the most appalling accusations at her, even though it was possible — he did not dare to pursue this thought to its conclusion — that she had problems of her own; every night she lay down behind him, snuggled in close to his back, as if to warm him. Or as if he were a child, a little creature that did not know what was best for it, that had to be protected from itself. It was bitterly cold in Xi’an that December: ‘I’m freezing,’ he said.

‘I’m here,’ she whispered behind him, in his ear. He felt her warm breath against his skin.

Somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, Jonas suspected that these fancies were nothing but red herrings, meant to distract his mind from something possibly more troubling: the fear that he was not worthy. ‘Worthy’ pronounced with stretched vowels and a rolled ‘r’. From the moment when he had run into Margrete again he had known that she was a more intelligent person than he. Better equipped, in all ways. He had thought — as if he were living in the age of chivalry — that he had to bring her something, as proof that he was, despite all the signs to the contrary, good enough. That he quite simply had to do some great deed. And although he eventually abandoned such notions, he was occasionally inclined to believe that this was why he had never really settled into his cushy announcer job, and was indeed what had moved him to make the whole Thinking Big series. Nevertheless, here he was, in Xi’an, and he was so afraid. Afraid that even that great work was not enough. Afraid that in some way it was too simple. So afraid that he had had to seek refuge in another, more plausible reason for his fear; a non-existent lover. Part of him cosseted the thoughts that raged inside his head, part of him was ashamed of them, of the details which he magnified to the point of unrecognisability, as though he were on the track of a crime far more serious than adultery.

The first thing Margrete did the next morning was to take him to a clothes market down a side street where, for next to nothing, she bought him a green quilted military greatcoat with gold buttons and an imitation fur collar. They climbed into the car and drove for half an hour through Shaanxi province, past bare fields and gardens full of leafless trees, to the district of Lintong, where they pulled up outside what looked like a huge hangar surrounded by smaller buildings and a busy souvenir shop. Margrete knew exactly where to go, she bought tickets then made a beeline for the largest building and led Jonas up a stairway flanked by urns adorned with dragons. Then suddenly, after passing through a dimly-lit vestibule lined with sales booths, they came face to face with what Margrete had brought him halfway round the world to see. And actually this said all there was to say about Margrete Boeck, this was her in a nutshell: you accused her of something and instead of answering you she took you to China.

And so it was here, as they stood at the pale-green railing on a platform overlooking a piece of ground the size of a football pitch, a sort of enormous sandpit, that Jonas, clad in a military greatcoat, discovered himself, or rather: an army of replicas, semblances of himself. Thousands of petrified human forms. He felt himself to be every bit as dead as them. He felt as if he had been baked, burned, by love.

It was the strangest sight. Jonas stood there like a general inspecting his troops of fired clay, terracotta, who looked as though they were marching up out of the ground, ready to do battle. There had to be a couple of thousand soldiers there, row upon row of them, all life-size, and behind them thousands of others, still hidden in the earth and waiting for the archaeologists to dig them out. The whole thing seemed oddly familiar, he must have read about it somewhere or other. Either that, or he had had this feeling inside him for a long time. The feeling that something, an entire world, would rise up out of the ground itself. Ever since that summer with Bo Wang Lee. And he understood, or thought he understood, what Margrete’s purpose had been in bringing him here to see this wonder.

While he leaned on the railing, as if on a boat, gazing at an ocean, Margrete told him about the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, tyrant and reformer, who built with one hand and pulled down with the other; the emperor who was responsible both for the Great Wall and the decree ordering the burning of all scrolls. Less well-known were his paranoid endeavours to safeguard his life even after death. Archaeologists had not yet ventured to explore the burial mound, the mausoleum itself, which lay some kilometres from there, and which Jonas would see on the way back.

Jonas listened, and the more Margrete told him, the more this story seemed to find an echo in his own ambition, his urge to make a name for himself, not least when he thought of the television series into which he had invested such an inhuman amount of work and which he had only recently presented to over a million Norwegians — a Great Wall of images, if you like.

Jonas surveyed the thousand-odd soldiers so far unearthed. He thought he could also descry, like something lying behind them, the over six thousand figures waiting under the ground. They were all part of Emperor Qin’s vast kingdom of the dead. The terracotta army was there to defend his tomb, ensure him of eternal life. Margrete concluded her tale. Jonas looked at her, saying nothing, but with a wordless question on his face: Why are you telling me all this? And at that same moment it dawned on him that in talking about Emperor Qin she was actually talking about him, Jonas; she regarded them, Qin and him, as parallel characters, though not in the way he had first imagined — the real similarity between them had little to do with their ambitious undertakings.

‘Extreme security calls for extreme brutality,’ she said.

Jonas knew what she meant. He stood there inside a huge hangar, as far away from home as he could possibly be, on Earth at any rate, stood there clad in a quilted military greatcoat, like a living, breathing terracotta soldier, and he knew.

She caught and held his eye. ‘Jonas,’ she said. He met the gaze of those dark-brown eyes which did not see through him, but into him, seeming to embrace his whole being. ‘You can never feel secure,’ she said. Or did not say. He read it in her eyes.

They spent some days in Xi’an, in that windy, dusty city which seemed to Jonas to mark a new beginning for Margrete and him, or at any rate a fresh chance. It was also the starting point of the Silk Road, Marco Polo’s Chang’an, once the greatest city in the world. Jonas had spent a whole day walking about on his own amid the fumes of coal fires and baked yams, trailed up and down Xi’an’s four main streets, which ran to the four points of the compass: symbolic, so it seemed, of four alternative paths. His marriage, which had been pretty rocky for some time, suddenly seemed full of possibility again, there was no knowing where it might end. He wandered the streets in his heavy greatcoat like a terracotta soldier resurrected; roamed around Xi’an, his head buzzing with thoughts — and it came to him. No matter what he did — built a wall around her, built a wall for her — he could never feel secure, there was no guarantee that she would find him worthy. All he could do was to trust her. He had been like a lump of clay, set hard, but he had been brought back to life. And he knew why. She had breathed life into him.

He woke up, became a new man. Margrete took him by the arm and showed him around, needed no guide. In an almost tourist-free Xi’an, under a clear, cold blue sky, they visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Green Dragon Temple and the Provincial Museum of History which, as it happened, was also a mosque. Something about her passion for candied plums, which they bought threaded onto a stick, and the way she ordered the taxi drivers about, told him that she had been here before. With amazing assurance she tracked down the best herbalists and silk merchants, as well as the most out-of-the-way restaurants, hidden down backstreets, in gardens where carp and mandarin fish swam in glass tanks and snakes coiled in cages with reassuring stones on their lids. Margrete, too, seemed different now, somehow relieved, or hopeful; she came out with all sorts of information about China, smiled and pointed at little children with knitted Gagarin helmets on their heads, but bare bottoms showing through the slits in the backs of their trousers even in the biting cold. At night she lay and looked at him, reminded him of things they had done when they were going out together in sixth grade. Of the weighing machines at the Eastern station that dispensed wise sayings along with a note of their weight. Of the time when Jonas won a ski race because the weather suddenly changed and all the other competitors’ skis got clogged up. They laughed. Laughed together as they had not done in ages. Her eyes were golden, deep and smouldering. And like gold they only really came into their own in the twilight.

One night, in the moonlight, she took Jonas by the hand and led him up onto the city wall beside the north gate. And here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she produced a kite she had bought and flew it from the top of the wall in the winter night, steered it expertly, making it swoop low then soar again, a sight which reminded Jonas of something he had seen before, in another life so it seemed. ‘Here, you try,’ she said, standing behind him and helping him, guiding him. ‘Well done,’ she said, as if talking to a child. Jonas stood there, wrapped in his thick, quilted coat, and flew a kite so high that it was just a black dot in the moonlight. It was all about control. About relaxing. Letting things run.

Margrete said not a word. Jonas Wergeland stood atop a city wall in China, flying a kite in the moonlight and he understood.

So why did he do it?

At the airport, on the day of their departure, Jonas took their guide aside. ‘That was so nice, that piece by Grieg you played. Thank you.’ The man was gratified by this, he could see.

‘Yes, Grieg was a great hit-maker,’ the guide said. ‘I know several tunes by him. Next time you come to Xi’an I will play them for you.’

Again that night in the hotel in Beijing Margrete snuggled in to his back, as if wanting not only to warm him, but also to defend him against attack from behind. She lay there, breathing on him. He was dead, a mere form; he had not yet discovered his true potential. He might have created the most famous Norwegian television series of all time, a worldwide success, and be arguably the biggest celebrity in the whole country, but he had not found his way in life.

The rows and rows of terracotta warriors had also given him a sense of déja vu. They reminded him of his youthful endeavours back home in the basement at Solhaug: the skipping, the rope, the thoughts that were unearthed, in serried ranks. Maybe his basement had been just such a subterranean realm, a place where he had tried to do much the same as Emperor Qin: to make time stand still, win eternal life. Build a world of his own, which no one could invade, where he would be safe.

But during that secret basement period of his life, on his journeys of discovery into the world’s most beautiful hemisphere: the brain — to the extent that this is the seat of thought — his objective kept shifting. At one stage all his efforts were focused on mastering a triple skip, what he called a triplet. Gradually, however, he became more and more obsessed with punching a hole in something, breaking down a sort of wall of thoughts, of reaching beyond. He took it into his head that if he could just get enough thoughts turning in his mind simultaneously, something would burst open, all those different reflections would latch onto one another, their united weight rip the surface and they would sink down to illuminate something in the depths, like a bathysphere exploring some hitherto unplumbed fissure in the seabed. Or perhaps the ‘other place’ thus revealed would turn out to be what, in his mind, he called Samarkand. Many a time when he was skipping like a soul possessed in the dark basement, with the rope whirring round him as he did doubles, he felt as if he were caught in a whirl, as if he were a dervish of the skipping world. More and more often, once he had mastered the knack of following four trains of thought simultaneously, he had the impression that he was on the point of making some great find — that something massive, something colossal, was lying in wait, that it could break through at any minute. This reminded Jonas of the thrill of anticipation he experienced with a well-composed pop song the second before the chorus kicked in, or the feeling inside him when his father reached the final chord in a choral prelude and the hymn proper was about to thunder out. But even then, hovering inside the arc of the rope with four thoughts held suspended in the air, that was as far as it went. It was like working his way up to an orgasm, a liberating climax, which then subsided. The world which he sensed was there, remained hidden behind an unopened door, so to speak. It was as if he could hear it knocking, but could not open the door to it.

And speaking of unopened doors, for a long time Jonas had no idea what Karen Mohr did — for a living that is. But she was a great reader, that much he knew. Jonas had a theory that it was tales from warmer climes which had endowed her skin with such a dusky tint — if, that is, it was not her perpetual and powerful memory of the Riviera. Frequently, especially after a glass of Pernod, she would find occasion to quote thoughts on love to him, primarily reflections she had come across in French literature. One Saturday afternoon, one of those Saturdays when she was not due to dine at Bagatelle in Bygdøy allé, she told him about a writer by the name of Stendahl. He had written a whole book solely about love. ‘Would you mind nipping into the bedroom and getting it?’ she asked him. ‘It’s called De l’Amour and it’s just on your left, at eye-level, as you go in.’

Jonas was at a complete loss, did not know which way to turn. She pointed to the wall. Still Jonas was none the wiser, he stood there listening to the tinkling of the little fountain in among the plants, as if hoping it might inspire his imagination. Was he supposed to walk through the wall? Then he spied it. A door. He had never seen anything there before but a rug hanging on the wall, but this — he now noticed — exactly covered the door. The door handle had been there all the time, but it was almost invisible. It wasn’t unlike the secret doors in films set in old country houses or castles. It had never occurred to Jonas that of course there had to be other rooms in the flat.

‘It’s odd,’ Karen Mohr said when Jonas laughed and pointed at the door. ‘We’re always so interested in the room we happen to be in. In whether it consists of still smaller rooms, harbours secrets. We open drawers, peep behind the sofa. We are so intent on this that we don’t notice the secret doors in the room, which could lead us to great wings containing other rooms entirely. We all live in bigger houses than we imagine.’ On a later occasion — as she raised her eyes to her own portrait on the wall, sketched in Mougins before the war — she framed it in other, more personal, terms: ‘Our secret chambers lie not within us, but outside of us.’ For once her voice was husky with emotion.

As with her living room, he was not prepared for the sight which met his eyes when he walked through her bedroom door. In a way this came as an even greater surprise. Jonas came from a home almost devoid of books, although Rakel did own one work entitled My Treasury. This, Karen Mohr’s bedroom, truly was a treasury. Three of its walls were completely covered with bookcases which looked, with all their rows and rows of books, like brightly-coloured panels. Jonas had the impression of stepping into a warm, mystical forest. The bed was under the window. ‘I sleep well in there,’ he heard Karen say in the living room. Jonas could well understand that. This was how a bedroom ought to be: full of stories. Initially he just stood there staring. It immediately struck him that there was a connection between the two rooms, different thought they were. That this bedroom, with all these books, was the roots and the living room was the tree. Or maybe it was the other way round. The bedroom-cum-library was more like an interpretation of the living room. Her book collection had grown, blossomed, out of her thirst for understanding.

Or perhaps — it later occurred to him — all those books dealt with the search for someone who was worthy. It was as complex as that.

It took him a while to find Stendahl. On the left. But at her eye level. De l’Amour. Outside left, Jonas thought to himself. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. But it was wedged in tight: the shelf was crammed with volumes. He tugged and tugged, trying to pry the book free — only to end up working the whole shelf loose and bringing the entire row of books tumbling down on his head like a flock of wrathful birds. The ensuing din brought Karen Mohr rushing in, but she merely laughed when she saw what had happened. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, still laughing. He gave his head a shake, dazed. The shelf must have been loose, she told him. There was something wrong with the screws that held the shelves in place. She should have had those bookcases fixed long ago.

‘I’m really sorry, but I had to reach up on tiptoe,’ he said.

‘Silly boy,’ she said. ‘You always have to reach up on tiptoe to get at the right books.’ She glanced cheerfully at the volumes that had crashed to the floor as he tried to pull out Stendahl’s De l’Amour. ‘But let this be a lesson to you,’ she said. ‘When you reach out for love you will soon discover that it is bound up with everything else.’

Jonas, on the other hand, was thinking to himself: I’d bet anything there’s a secret chamber behind these bookshelves too. And there was. A veritable palace. One day Karen Mohr would take him there.

‘Come on, we can sort this out later,’ she said, pointing to the mess on the floor. She could tell from his face that he had had enough for one day. ‘It’s time for a ham omelette.’

Karen Mohr’s bedroom, her secret forest, reinforced Jonas’s belief that beyond this world another one lay waiting for him. That the world was not flat. He was still skipping regularly in the basement, in the dark, spinning thought after thought, layers of thoughts, above and below, behind and in front of one another, pursuing, or trying to pursue as many as possible at one time. He skipped and he skipped, but he had still not made any kind of a breakthrough. He had a suspicion that this would only happen if he were to succeed in weaving all of those simultaneous thoughts, at all those different levels, together in his mind, if he could get them to intercommunicate even though, in terms of content and substance, they were all very different. Because that was the really fascinating part: discovering the links between reflections which were worlds apart, which apparently had nothing in common. Was it possible to get these thoughts to chime in unison, like on an organ where the manuals and the stops gave you command, as it were, over several smaller and very different organs, each with its own individual character and unique tone. Jonas had seen how, when his father played, he coupled the Principal to the pedals and the Swell — deep in the background, so to speak — with the Choir to the fore; had heard how, in so doing, he produced the most wonderful sound, in which all the minor parts, all the voices from so many different directions, blended together to produce the most divine music. It might be that his trains of thought could also be regarded as strings of notes, as melodies which he had to weave into concords. Occasionally, if he was lucky, Jonas would hear his thoughts singing inside him, like a choir, exquisite wordless harmonies. And sometimes, if he went on doing doubles for long enough, until he was almost hovering in the darkness of the basement, he felt as though his whole body had turned into an organ.

It was also largely thanks to this sort of approach that, as a grown man, having taken up skipping again, he was able to resolve the problems surrounding his programme on Svend Foyn. Many of the episodes in the Thinking Big series had something of the character of a discovery about them, but with the programme on Foyn one felt more like an inventor, or rather: felt as though one had a front-row seat inside the mind of an inventor. Jonas Wergeland made a programme about Svend Foyn’s moment of revelation, a few seconds which, on television, lasted for forty-five minutes. When viewers got up, their armpits damp from excitement, and looked at the clock, they could not believe the time.

The programme opened with a shot being fired from a cannon in the bows of a whaler and it ended with a bomb-tipped harpoon slamming into the side of a whale — hardly anyone spotted that the latter scene had been filmed on an underwater set. And presented between the shot and the strike were Svend Foyn’s thoughts, his speculations on how to catch a whale, with Wergeland switching every now and again from this to a brief flash of the harpoon — the spearhead of his thoughts, as it were — flying through the air towards the back of the whale in the sea, in much the same way as, in more recent films, we can follow the flight of missiles or Robin Hood’s arrows. By using trick photography Wergeland made it look as though the camera was fixed to the projectile, an illusion so effective that viewers felt almost as though they were being sucked into the picture.

But as I say, what really made the programme was not the special effects, but the way in which Jonas Wergeland succeeded in reflecting a thought process, one which actually continued, with much trial and error, for some years, but which Wergeland condensed into one compact burst of effort. As the outer framework to this one had Svend Foyn — actor Normann Vaage received a great many compliments for his snowy mane and magnificent white beard — slumped pensively in a deckchair on a deserted beach, gazing out to sea. To either side of him were other deckchairs, all empty. The wind made their fabric billow out like sails.

Jonas Wergeland started with images, which is to say with the line of thought which illustrated the first part of what was a multifaceted problem: the question of whether the whale was a good commercial prospect; in other words: Foyn’s reflections on contracts and markets, on how a new industry of this nature should be organised and which products were likely to be the most attractive — oil, for example, and whalebone. The other question which had to be considered, was that of the boat — huge, fast-swimming whales could not be caught from rowboats. This train of thought gave rise to a series of shots, concluding with a scene showing Foyn’s introduction of the steam engine to whaling; he had figured out that what he needed was a small, powerful steamship with good manoeuvrability — the prototype was christened Spes & Fides. This was followed by another reflection, a fresh problem, with Jonas Wergeland continually cutting to shots from the first two lines of thought. The third problem, the trickiest of them all, concerned the harpoon itself, since there was no way, either, that such massive and immensely strong creatures could ever be caught with hand-held harpoons. In this lay the programme’s greatest challenge — to depict the experiments which led to Foyn’s greatest invention, the bomb harpoon: the development of the right sort of explosives and detonators for the right harpoons; the discovery that explosive device and harpoon would need to be combined in the same projectile. And finally, or more correctly, interwoven with the three other visual threads, came the scenes in which television viewers were at long last introduced to the target: the whales, colossi such as the humpback whale, the fin whale and the blue whale, as yet unconquered by man, creatures which did not die easy, but which, when they did, sank. Svend Foyn had spent a lot of time sailing the Arctic Ocean and had invaluable experience of the nature and behaviour of the whale. This made, as one might expect, for some captivating scenes, footage which had been bought-in — there is nothing quite like the sight of a whale, that exotic creature, swimming in the ocean, surfacing, spouting. And then there was the soundtrack, recordings of so-called whale-song played in the background throughout the programme, communicating non-stop with the subconscious. Once or twice, when a number of whales sang out at the same time, Jonas raised their singing into the foreground, this euphonious, enigmatic music forming an accompaniment to Foyn’s branching lines of thought. And apropos this last: as a child, crawling into the organ casing and seeing all the pipes that surrounded him, Jonas had often made believe that he was inside the belly of a whale.

Jonas Wergeland presented the progression of these four main thought processes by showing Svend Foyn sitting in more and more deckchairs until at last — just before all of his thoughts intertwined to give one solution — there were four Svend Foyns, or Foyn quadruplets, sitting side by side on the beach looking out to sea and the waves rolling to shore. Foyn, or the Foyn quads, thought of the whale’s progress through the sea, the whale’s speed and power, the whale’s need to breathe, considered how long the whale stayed on the surface each time it came up; Foyn wrestled with financial forecasts, pondered the question of whale oil and all the uses to be found for whalebone, from corset stays to fishing rods, contemplated the matter of oil residue, and wondered whether the guano could be used as fertiliser; Foyn thought about the boat, about the size of the boat, its manoeuvrability, its crew; and above all Foyn applied his mind to the subject of the whaling tackle: what the line should be like, how many barbs the harpoon should have, how the bomb tip should be constructed, whether it ought to explode when it hit the target or seconds later; he considered the blending of the gunpowder, the fuse, his work with Esmark, the country parson and gifted chemist and the lessons he had learned from previous, unsuccessful, attempts by others: all of them had come up with a piece of the puzzle, but only he, Foyn, would succeed in fitting all the pieces together in his head.

The invention of the bomb harpoon, the absolute sine qua non of the modern whaling industry and cornerstone of Norway’s first oil age, represented the culmination of all these thoughts on the whale as raw material, on the vessel’s construction, on the animal’s behaviour in the sea, on the properties of the harpoon; the result of these thoughts being considered at one and the same time, in concord, inside Svend Foyn’s head. In the last scene but one, at the moment when the solution dawned on Foyn, actually in the form of a series of inventions springing to mind at the same moment, Jonas Wergeland showed him — which is to say all four Foyn quads — jumping up and shouting in unison: ‘I have it!’ From there Wergeland cut quickly to the final scene in which, like an echo of that cry, the harpoon hit the whale and exploded inside its body with a muffled, yet mighty boom — a fanfare, almost; and that this strike should have been regarded by viewers as a great victory, a climactic shout of triumph, at a time when whaling was so unpopular, proves just what a masterpiece this programme was. The viewers did not see the whale’s death as something bad or traumatic, but as something symbolic: it was not a whale that had been caught, but a difficult and complex concept, a leviathan of the imagination. The passage of the harpoon through the air represented the flight of thought, and the impact with the whale signified the explosive moment of insight.

With a little good will Jonas Wergeland could be said to have laid the foundations of this programme when he was just a boy, in a basement — in the darkness of the deep, you might even say — at the time when his skipping fever was at its height. Before too long, however — he could not have said exactly when, but possibly during the transition from boy to youth — he discovered that he could make his thoughts branch out even without skipping, although it still worked best — and would, in fact do so for the rest of his life — when he had a rope whirling through the air around him, as if this gave him a particularly good charge. Whatever the case: by dint of thought Jonas was forever trying — with or without a rope — to become like a tree, to branch out. Most people strive to become pure and upright, to become pillars, poles, the sort of thing from which to fly a flag. Jonas wanted to be a tree. He often wandered around inspecting the different trees of Norway. When he was at the height of his fame he considered, not altogether in jest, writing his autobiography and calling it My Life As An Oak.

Although Jonas believed that he was really on to something, there came a point in his teens when he put his skipping, or rather: his thought experiments, on ice. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed by what he had discovered. On the one hand he felt his gift was a problem. He was afraid that he would never have the chance to use it. That he possessed abilities which would never do anything but confuse him. On the other hand, he hoped that it was only a matter of becoming more mature, gaining more experience. Then he would be able to resume his experiments. In any case, one thing was slowly borne in upon him, the longer he lived: there were possibilities, powers, within the realms of thought greater than anyone could imagine. Sometimes when he was contemplating, ruminating, he was conscious of a kind of mental ‘lift off’, a feeling of acceleration not unlike the ‘boost’ you get in the small of your back in a plane just before it takes off, as it approaches the end of the runway and suddenly picks up speed. In the long process of mankind’s evolution, Jonas knew, we had not got beyond the very beginning. So far, man had only raised his body upright, not his mind. We had no right to our species name. We were Homo erectus and Homo sapiens on the outside, but not on the inside. It was one thing to walk upright, quite another to think upright. To be upstanding in one’s mental life. When it came to awareness, man was still crawling ignorantly around on all fours.

But this line of reasoning was a thing of the future. For many years of his childhood skipping was one of Jonas’s favourite pastimes. He skipped and skipped, as if unconsciously reaching out for something more, reaching upwards. He built shell after shell, layer upon layer around himself with the rope, and one day when he was skipping in the dark in the basement, in the midst of a heart-stopping, minutes-long stint of doubles, just as he felt that something was about to rip wide open, a veil be swept aside, as four or five thoughts which he was pursuing simultaneously began to converge, like the numbers in a combination lock which would suddenly click together to open a set of great, heavy doors — when he was just about there, only an arm’s length away, he passed out.

Jonas came round when his sister switched on the light — having come down to fetch a jar of blueberry jam for pancakes. His forehead hurt, and when he put his fingers up to it they came away with blood on them. He must have struck the brick jamb of the storeroom door as he fell. He would be left with a scar, a pale line intersecting that other scar, his souvenir from the playground skipping game. I’m a marked man, he would think from then on, whenever he looked in the mirror. Although he did not know whether this meant he was damned or that he was to be saved. ‘If you ask me, I think you should do a bit less skipping and eat a few more pancakes,’ Rakel said when she saw her brother’s ashen face and the blood trickling over his brow.

On the way up the stairs, with the aroma of freshly made pancakes making his stomach rumble, Jonas could not help wondering whether there might not be some connection between the two ventures to which he had so far dedicated his life; that there could, in fact, be a link between his ability to hold his breath and his talent for thinking parallel thoughts. Might it be possible to think so well that one could save lives.