The Discoverer

Titan

While there could, of course, be several explanations for Jonas Wergeland’s fantastic flair for picture-making, his success in television should come as no surprise to any of those who know that in his youth he associated with such greats as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many people can boast of having attended the French school in Oslo, but very few have, like Jonas Wergeland, belonged to the Italian school.

Jonas and Leo became chums towards the end of their time at elementary school, but did not become really close friends until both started at the local junior high school, Groruddalen Realskole, only a couple of stone throws from the railway station. Jonas’s new road to school took him past the church and down the steep slope of Teppaveien, and in one of the old villas on this road lived Leonard Knutzen. Leonard always stood and waited for Jonas, or rather: sat waiting on the satchel which they used in those days instead of a rucksack and which, in the winter, they would send skimming down the hill like a curling stone. At one point during the eighties, after Leonardo’s sensational activities became public knowledge, Jonas received a number of tempting offers from the tabloids to speak out on the subject of their boyhood friendship. He turned them all down. But he could just see the headlines, what a story, full of details which no one could have guessed at.

Leonard’s family belonged to the bastion of the district’s working-class; for generations they had walked at the head of the local 1st of May parade. Aptly enough, their house rested on a solid granite plinth, as if in tribute to the valley’s proud stonemason tradition. Not only that, but they also overlooked the area where the first mills had been built, beside the falls at Alna. Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father was a big, burly, majestic-looking man with a backswept mane not unlike that of the writer and Nobel prize-winner Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It was quite obvious to Jonas that Leonard adored him. In the summer, father and son would go off on long walks in the hills together, and in the winter they would sleep out in snow holes. Leonard, too, was tall and well-built, and he had his father’s flashing eyes. Leonard liked to joke that he and Jonas were of royal blood, since both their fathers — Haakon and Olav — were called after kings. ‘We’re both princes,’ he declared, thumping Jonas on the back.

Jonas would later think of this time in his life as the Age of Wrath. Because what did they do? They sat in the Knutzens’ basement, whipping themselves up into a fury. I yell, therefore I am — that was their watchword. They joined the endless ranks of young men who are filled with pent-up rage in their late teens — a wrath which may simply stem from disgruntlement over the fact that there are no changes taking place in the world around them to match the revolutions that have suddenly broken out in their heads and bodies. But for Jonas there was more to it than that: these furious verbal outbursts also acted as a safety valve, a way of giving vent to his frustration at not being able to turn his parallel thoughts, his feeling of being in possession of exceptional gifts, into something concrete — some extraordinary deed, for example.

In fact, Jonas’s anger had actually burst into full flame on the day when he was brought down and hurt so badly by that Lyn player on the football pitch. He made a secret vow to stay way out on the sidelines for the rest of his life. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had founded their own republic, the Republic of the Outside Left, in Leonard’s basement. Jonas espied the glimmering of an alternative mission in life: to become the greatest Norwegian outsider of all time. He had not yet abandoned his dream of making a name for himself, but as yet he had come no closer to it than when, in eighth grade, he found himself in the headmaster’s office, standing stiffly to attention in front of HRH — His Royal Highness — himself, having to explain why he had committed an act of vandalism by carving his initials into his desk in large capital letters.

So when Leonard announced that they were going to work up an indignation towards society and an aloofness from it which would make the airy-fairy Kristiania Bohemia of another age look like a sweet little kindergarten, Jonas was with him all the way. It was the two of them, Jonas and Leonard, against the rest of the world. Against the rest of the universe. They would spend hours sitting in the basement, that breathing space from their otherwise intolerable and stiflingly inane surroundings, in a world which seemed even flatter than before, pouring curses and gall on the heads of moronic teachers, gormless girls, overrated sporting heroes, brainless television presenters, talentless Norwegian pop groups, the rat-faced hotdog seller at the stall next to the taxi stance; even Kjell Bondevik, the Minister for Church and Education, whom they had never met, nor seen, and about whom they knew very little, came in for his share of abuse. Not even the stupid old moon was safe from them. What was it doing, hanging about up there, enticing rocket-mad men with its cheesy face? In short, they showed no mercy. Towards anything or anybody. The word happiness, which cropped up at every turn, was taboo. ‘Get mad!’ was their motto. If, during this period, some brave soul had confronted them with the Bo Wang Lee question ‘What should you take with you?’ they would have had no hesitation in replying: ‘Nothing!’ Had it been up to them, the Ark could have been torpedoed out of the water any time. In the end, though, the incident on the football pitch was not enough of an explanation; Jonas did not know where all the resentment, the boundless contempt sprang from, or the unstoppable stream of sarcasm. He had heard that colours could affect people’s moods and for a long time he wondered whether the walls in the basement might actually have had an effect on their subconscious minds. Because the basement walls were painted bright red. Leonard’s father called it the Red Room after the café immortalised in Strindberg’s novel of that name, the Bohemian haunt of artists and literati. Whatever the case, since they were now possessed of this fiery temperament, Jonas realised — after a while, at least — that what mattered was to give it direction.

He was in a fortunate position, having for years been able to observe his brother’s demonstrations of different possible plans of attack. Daniel — who in Jonas’s mind was always not just one, but ten years his senior — had proved very early on to have a talent for playing the outsider. This was made perfectly clear, if it had not been before, one time when he had the mumps. He had come swaggering into the living room, all puffy-cheeked and wearing Rakel’s cigarette-fumed biker jacket — the resemblance to a very young Marlon Brando was staggering. ‘The wild one,’ he growled with feverish relish before staggering back to bed.

Jonas never knew where his brother found his inspiration, where he picked up his knowledge of Marlon Brando, for example, or other ‘rebels’ who were not particularly well-known at that time, or certainly not to boys of Daniel’s age. When asked, usually at large family gatherings, to speak about his plans for the future, he did not get flustered and stammer, as other teenagers might; Daniel would get quietly to his feet, his eyes burning, and commence by intoning: ‘I have a dream …’ He once went on a hunger strike for several days — he was actually capable of such a thing — in protest against his parents ‘strict’ ruling that he had to be in by nine o’clock in the evening. He solemnly declared that he was acting in the spirit of Mahatma Ghandi, and Haakon and Åse Hansen, inwardly smiling, were forced to relent. An attempt to mount a demonstration to demand that the whole estate be allowed to pick the apples in Wolfgang Michaelsen’s garden came, however, to nothing. Daniel had a failing. Just as Jonas wavered between various projects in life, so Daniel wavered between different rebel role models. One day he was to be found wearing a funny black cap, nasally whining ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the next he would be driving his mother to despair by charging about with a bucket in one hand, splattering paint onto huge sheets of paper spread out on the floor. He simply could not discover what his field of rebellion should be.

Jonas had always been convinced that his brother would end up as a soldier, become a sort of guerrilla leader. As a child, Daniel had loved everything to do with war and fighting and had evinced the most tireless inventiveness when it came to weapons. He very quickly discovered that it was best to load a cap gun with a strip of caps four layers thick, and by making an adjustment to the workings of the battery-driven machine guns which later appeared on the market he could produce a noise that left the little kids stunned. There was something special about the rubber bands and scraps of leather from which Daniel’s catapults were constructed that made his stones fly further; he refined peashooters to the point where the other kids feared him as much as an Amazon Indian with a blowpipe and poison darts. He was forever coming up with better materials for his bows, and fixed the lead tips from real bullets to his arrows. If not on the military front then Jonas certainly expected his brother to make a name for himself within the field of weapon technology. Instead Daniel, who also happened to be a hell of a ladies’ man, became a man of the cloth. So what happened?

Daniel was what Jonas would have called a tiresomely high achiever. He just kept forging ahead, as if on some endless red carpet, did not know the meaning of the word ‘opposition’. It was the same with sport, which also looked like being the one area in which Daniel could give his rebellious tendencies full play. Daniel had always been a fitness fanatic. He had, for example, been Grorud’s first proud owner of a Bullworker, a piece of equipment not unlike a telescope or a bazooka for which ads had suddenly started popping up everywhere and which just as quickly became the word on every boy’s lips, because it could give you a bull-like physique in no time flat. Jonas could not compress the cylinder by so much as a centimetre. Daniel, on the other hand, pumped it in and out with ease, while at the same time — as if the masturbation-style action automatically led his thoughts in that direction — holding forth on his latest girlish conquest.

It was, however, in athletics that Daniel was expected to do great things. He meant to walk — or rather, run — in the footsteps of the Kvalheim brothers who hailed from the flats down by Grorud station. Jonas had always admired Daniel’s alarming gift for self-abuse; it could be snowing buckets and still his brother would be out running; he practised interval and tempo training until he collapsed or threw up. And through it all he remained a rebel. Where Jonas, more by accident than design, had a scar in the shape of a little x above his eyebrow, there came a day when Daniel put a large X after his name. This came in the wake of the summer Olympics in Mexico City. Daniel insisted on being known only as Daniel X and that autumn, at an athletics meet at which he had won every event, he mounted the podium wearing dark sunglasses and a black glove on his right fist which he held demonstratively in the air. It all went so well and was so outrageously provocative until some aggrieved soul asked him what he was protesting against. At first Daniel was lost for an answer. It was one thing to protest against curfews and high garden fences, quite another to stick one’s fist in the air, and a black-gloved fist at that. He saved the situation with a watertight reply: ‘Everything!’

But in protesting against everything you protested against nothing. And when it came to the crunch Daniel’s anger, too, lacked direction. So maybe that was why he put an X after his name, to indicate that he was searching for a particular, but hidden, field which lay there waiting for him and his rebellious urges. To Jonas, the letter X seemed more indicative of a mysterious, unknown side to Daniel’s character. This suspicion was soon confirmed. His big brother finally met with opposition: a nerve-wracking experience which brought him down to earth with a bump. Daniel ran, as it were, smack into the gravity of life. And, of course, it involved a girl

Prior to this event and parallel with Daniel’s more harmless excesses, Jonas and Leonard conducted their passive protest in the Red Room. They were rebels without a cause. For months at a time, against all good advice, they let the sun go down on their anger. After a while, though, there was not much to be got out of whiling away their time down in the basement, nursing their seething contempt for everything and everyone. It was like sitting next to a pot of boiling water with nothing to put in it. For a time, therefore, their anger looked set to take a socially conscious turn. They decided to follow in the footsteps of Leonard’s father. And Leonard’s father was not just anybody.

One forenoon on board the Voyager, as we were about to bear due south into Aurlandsfjord, I came upon Jonas Wergeland sitting on a bollard. He was writing in a book which he must have bought in Lærdal, a big thick notebook with blank pages and stiff covers. We were just sailing past the Frønningen estate with its fine, white manor-house and the pine forest behind — we already knew that this was the family home of a famous painter, that the place even had its own art gallery. Martin was on the foredeck, on the lookout for killer whales — a school had recently been spotted in the area. The smell of the loaves he was baking in the old wood oven was already drifting up from the galley. Jonas Wergeland made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was writing, he merely looked up, smiled. I noticed that he wrote in a big, neat script. Like a beginner, someone who has not had much experience of writing by hand. It occurred to me that he might have been inspired by the surrounding scenery, by Sognefjord. If, that is, it was not the suspicion, or the knowledge, rather, that I was writing about him.

I had not meant to write anything. I do not know when the idea came to me. Maybe it was when he spoke about his auto-da-fé. He had spent several years working on a manuscript. As far as I know I was the only one to have seen it. I thought of Nehru, who wrote a history of the world for his daughter while he was in prison. For some years I regularly received envelopes containing twenty or thirty pages which I, in turn, handed back when I went to visit him — or rather, they had to pass through security control before getting to him. I read it like a serial. He did not ask for my comments. Sometimes I would say something, other times not. Had I known that he would destroy it, I might have made a copy. Although I don’t know. It was so — how can I put it — clumsy. Or, at least: there was so much of it, it was such a muddle. As if he was forever trying to get everything down. Even so, now and again he would write a passage which completely bowled me over, something so dazzlingly astute and original. And poignant. I read it with a mixture of confusion and gratitude. He also wrote about people and events that no one else had ever mentioned. About Mr Dehli the schoolmaster, about Bo Wang Lee, about a breathtaking kiss on Karl Johans gate. Nonetheless, I always had the feeling that he was circling around something, a central point which he could not capture in words.

So when he destroyed the whole lot, every last sheet of it, I was struck by a sense of responsibility. I had read it. I remembered a lot of it. Certain details word-perfect even. And I knew that many of these stories deserved to be made public. Ought to be made public. I also had something of an advantage. I knew a lot from before. In my more presumptuous moments I actually felt as though I knew everything. I had once drawn pictures with him. I had sat up in a tree with him and asked him why the sky was blue. I had been a child in his arms. And a child sees a great deal. I did not know him from the television, I knew him face to face; I knew him with my fingers and my cheek and my nose. Not only that but, particularly during the years when my brain was at its most malleable, he had been the person to whom I talked the most. I loved him more than anyone in the world. If the young Jonas was right, if the whole point of life was to save lives, then I had a job to do: to save him, metaphorically speaking, from drowning in lies.

What held me back was not my inevitable sympathy for him — I considered this a strength, not a weakness — but the thought of having to write a book, of actually putting words on paper. Because I realised that no other medium would do. If I was to get my message across. If I was to succeed in driving a wedge of doubt into the fossilised myths surrounding him. If I was ever to be able to say something about his genius, the origins of his creativity, the motives behind that peerless work of art Thinking Big — arguably Norway’s greatest cultural contribution to the world in the twentieth century. I would of course have preferred to use my own form, my own medium, but that was still in its infancy, it was nowhere near being fully developed. And few people understood it. Few people were willing to understand it. I had to make a compromise, take up again a tool I had abandoned in favour of something better. I was also forced to resort to a genre, the biography, which was akin to an antiquated, all but obsolete — though still popular — fictional form. It scared me. To have so much to say, to know so much — and to have to employ such an imperfect, passé mode of expression. To risk being dismissed for being too conventional, for sticking to the set rules for how to render characters vivid and believable; notions based on simple, recognisable elements, a set of ‘valid’ devices born of centuries of literature. I felt as though I was setting to work with a hammer and chisel.

I knew, of course, that in undertaking this task, I was stepping out into a whole industry — or perhaps I should say: onto a battlefield. And the merchandise to be fought over was Jonas Wergeland, his life and reputation. Not least the latter. At the point when I started writing, eleven books about him — not to mention countless news reports and articles — had already been published. Of the eight which appeared after his conviction and imprisonment, six would have to be described as extremely negative, almost derisive, with their hindsightful, moralistic tone. The two exceptions were Kamala Varma’s book and the curious biography, penned by another it is true, but at Rakel W. Hansen’s behest. I soon realised that my own writing style had been coloured by these two last-named works — possibly because in them I discerned something I could use, an approach which I recognised from my proper work.

The writing of Jonas Wergeland’s story should have been a laudable project. He was a figure from a period of change, in many ways the last representative of a bygone age, a television age — dare I say: an uncomplicated age. And yet, despite my good intentions I could not rid myself of an underlying scepticism. Or doubt. As I wrote, as I attempted to recapitulate some of the stories Jonas himself had grappled with in his manuscript, I kept wondering whether it was possible, in this limited and dauntingly simple form, to gain some clue to the one question which occupied me more and more and which rapidly became my deepest motive for writing: Why did he do it?

Throughout the sail down Aurlandsfjord he sat up on deck, making notes quite openly. He kept looking up, looking around him, as if he could not get enough of this landscape, could hardly believe it was real. Now and again he would catch my eye, smile, then drop his gaze as if suddenly feeling shy. Although in truth he was shy. I always had the feeling that his eyes were the key. Sometimes they would glow so fiercely that it was almost frightening. It was so ardent, that look; he seemed to have to make a conscious effort to tone it down. I have heard women describe those eyes as ‘penetrating’. They felt that he saw all the way in to their innermost recesses. Or beyond them, as Kamala said. But it was not that simple. The real reason for the look in his eyes was shyness. The fact of being strong, but embarrassed by his strength. It was, as I have already suggested, this that set him apart from other television personalities. Such a focused gaze, such an intense presence, combined with a sort of bashfulness, as if he really did not want to be there at all. Was constantly questioning, felt uncomfortable with his own part in things. When you saw his face on the TV screen you had the impression that he was doing his best to hide something, some piquant secret. The effect was astonishing. A bit like seeing a good actor underplaying a part. Television viewers could scarcely believe their eyes: here, at last, was someone — a baffling exception to the hordes of exhibitionist, publicity-mad NRK personalities — who held something back, a man who could have ruled the world, but chose to appear on Norwegian television. That was why they loved him.

I was glad that he had hit it off so well with the crew of the Voyager, especially with Martin. I could hear them down in the galley, discussing how to make pasta al burro. ‘Don’t argue with me,’ Jonas was saying. ‘I learned to cook from an Italian chef in Grorud. A chef by the name of Leonardo, no less.’ With Hanna he tended to talk mostly about music; he was impressed by the string quartet collection she had brought along with her, although he could not understand how anyone could prefer Bartók to Haydn.

At this point I became aware of a problem. I was finding it more and more difficult to work on two projects at once, even though one of them, the book about him, was simply stewing away at the back of my mind. I realised that I was observing him as much as our surroundings — which ought to have had my complete and undivided attention. While studiously mapping out folk museums, farm museums and galleries in Aurland and Flåm, I was just as busy studying him. I observed him as if seeing him in the flesh could show me whether what I had written, what I was thinking of writing, was correct. True.

I began to suspect that his presence was, to an ever-greater extent, colouring my ideas concerning the OAK Quartet’s product, the groundwork for which we were laying on this sail along the fjord. Or that, in my mind, he had taken charge of the project. Or that these two were one and the same. As I wandered around Aurlandsvangen, looking at the shoe factory, the remarkable church — Sogne Cathedral — and the old Abelheim guesthouse, he was constantly in my thoughts. One day when I had gone for a walk on my own to consider whether we ought to link the writer Per Sivle with Flåm or with Stalheim and whether we should include anything at all on humanist Absalon Pedersøn Beyer — who hailed from Skjerdal, just north of Aurland — I suddenly stopped to look at Jonas Wergeland. He was sitting by the fence surrounding the playing fields alongside the river, up next to the school and the community centre, watching some boys practising the long jump. All at once I remembered why he should be so interested in seeing how far the boys could jump. I got distracted, forgot all about Per Sivle.

In everything he did or said I saw or heard stories, or connections with stories. The evening before we left Lærdal I happened to open a document and read something I had written about his programme on Thor Heyerdahl. He could not have known this, but when we cast off the next morning he said, with a sly glint in his eye: ‘This boat is another Kon-Tiki. A vessel which will prove whether it is possible to sail from the continent of the past to that of the future. From an old life to a new.’ He was talking, of course, about himself, but still.

Deep inside Aurlandsfjord Jonas stood gazing up at the steep slopes and high mountains rising on either side. ‘What is Samarkand compared to this?’ I heard him murmur. Although, did he actually say that? Or was it only a voice inside my head? At one point, after staring open-mouthed at my first sight of the tiny church at Undredal, the snow-covered peaks rearing up out of the valley beyond, I happened to glance round, to look up at Stigen, the little hill farm perched on its ledge — had people really lived there, and managed to scrape a living from it — and saw Jonas staring at a power line running across the fjord just ahead of us, strung with those spherical orange markers that look like basketballs; I heard later that a Dutch fighter plane had had a near miss there. Jonas stood there, utterly mesmerised, gripping the main shroud and peering up at the high-voltage cable. ‘Are you thinking of Lauritz, your uncle?’ I asked gently. He nodded, somewhat surprised that I should be able to guess this. I was not alone in seeing stories in the landscape. When Carl arrived with the car — he had driven through the new tunnel and was full of ideas for ways in which we could present the most spectacular stretches of road around the fjord — and we prepared to carry on down to Flåm, to see what we could possibly make of the railway line there, which had already been done to death, Jonas chose instead to go and take a look at a dam built as part of the hydro-electric development in the Aurland region. He ordered a taxi, asked to be taken to Låvisdalen. He wanted to find the spot where Olav Knutzen had taken that famous photograph of Leonard. ‘You understand, don’t you?’ he said to me. I understood.

Leonard’s father was, as I have said, not just anybody. Some people may recognise the name Olav Knutzen, since he was at one time a well-known photographer with the working-class press. And if the last part of his surname evokes associations with a Zen master then that is not really so surprising, since Leonard’s father could almost have scored a bull’s eye blindfold. He had such an eye for things, as well as a set of values so solid that he could make a picture of a granite quarry in Grorud seem as fascinating as the rock tombs in Egypt’s Valley of Kings.

The basement room in which Jonas and Leonard nursed their youthful wrath was not only painted red — an ideological prerequisite, you might say; the walls were also covered with framed photographs calling to mind the growth and the triumphs of modern Norway. Because Olav Knutzen was a staff photographer with Aktuell weekly; he called himself ‘a reporter with a camera’. Aktuell was the sort of publication in which the pictures were as important as the words. The international flagship of such publications was Life magazine. These days, when the full media circus seems to be on hand for every occurrence, it is easy to forget that there was a time when a single photograph could be the cause of an event becoming known worldwide. As Thor Heyerdahl discovered when he sold the photographs from the Kon-Tiki expedition to Life: pictures which captured the imagination of the people in a way that written reports of the expedition could not do.

It is to be hoped that many do still remember Aktuell, that admirable weekly, which had its foundations in the labour movement and its roots in the old ideal of popular education. Younger generations may well find it hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed in Norway. And if anyone should wonder whether we have lost sight in Norway of certain ideals and values, all you have to do is lay some copies of the old Aktuell alongside its modern-day equivalent: the tabloid Se og Hør. Jonas was, of course, familiar with Aktuell before he and Leonard became best friends, not least thanks to the pile of old copies in the attic of his grandfather’s house on Hvaler. Jonas never tired of reading those dusty magazines. Which is to say: he looked at the pictures — photographs of reindeer races at Kautokeino, or from a revival meeting in Skien, or from a farm halfway up a mountainside run by two sisters, little old ladies in their eighties, or from Mandal where — Jonas stared in disbelief — Arnardo’s elephants could be seen lumbering through the streets. I think it is safe to say that during the first couple of decades after the war this magazine represented the contemporary equivalent of television. Like an earlier day’s Round Norway it presented the country to the people.

While waiting for Leonard to finish his dinner meatballs Jonas would sit in the Knutzens’ red-painted basement, leafing through the back numbers of Aktuell ranged proudly on the shelf alongside the Workers’ Encyclopedia — as if this were all the learning one needed. He studied picture spreads depicting the building, step-by-step, of a tanker, or the life at the huge steelworks in Mo i Rana. Some of the street scenes in the older numbers were especially fascinating, not least if the subjects were familiar to him. Had the Eastern station really looked like that? And the bus stop by the gasworks? Such photographs were clear proof of how time flew. Only fifteen years ago, and yet things seemed unrecognisable. For Jonas, Aktuell was rather like an Illustrated Classics version of an ideology. Jonas Wergeland never read up on the theoreticians of the labour movement, but he always felt that he had some knowledge of the subject, just as he knew a bit about Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim after reading the comic-strip version.

Aktuell presented articles from all over the world, but what Jonas liked best were the features and series on Norway. From the Red Room’s somewhat dilapidated sofa he could accompany the fishermen to the fishing fields, lumberjacks into the forest, construction workers into tunnels; Aktuell described a day in the life of a checkout lady, it followed the course of rubbish men through the city and depicted the world inhabited by the potato peelers at the Rainbow Restaurant. Below many of his favourite photographs Jonas could read the name of Leonard’s father, Olav Knutzen. Sometimes all it said was OK, as if this were a stamp indicating that these pictures or — why not? — the reality they portrayed had been approved. ‘In a basement room in Grorud I got to know Norway,’ he was to say later. When Jonas Wergeland thought back on the golden age of the Norwegian Labour Party he always thought of Aktuell magazine.

What with his father working in the church and his mother at the Grorud Ironmonger’s, Jonas was a little envious of Leonard. Both his parents worked in the city centre. And not only that, but in buildings on the city’s finest square. Because if Oslo had a heart at that time, a real, pulsating heart — as London had its Smithfield Market, Paris had Les Halles and Rome the Campo de’ Fiori — then it had to be Youngstorget. Leonard’s mother worked in an office at the People’s House, headquarters of the National Federation of Trade Unions, and his father was based on the first floor of the People’s Theatre building itself, when, that is, he was not out travelling.

In the summer especially, the boys were forever running into town to meet Olav Knutzen on Youngstorget. Leonard always swelled with pride when his father came walking towards them with his Leica or, even better, the two-eyed Rolleiflex dangling over his stomach. There was something so bohemian about his big, burly figure. Apart from the eyes. These Jonas thought of as sharp. It was almost as if every now and again the z in the middle of his surname triggered a flash in his eyes, a little bolt of lightning. Olav Knutzen often took pictures of the boys standing among the market stalls on the square, munching plums or pears. In later years Jonas would often look at the copies of these photographs which he had been given, because they documented something he had already forgotten: how that time-honoured square had once been a cornucopian fruit and vegetable basket, possibly even a Red Room, for the whole city.

Leonard was proud of his father, and especially of those keen eyes of his. ‘That’s what it all comes down to,’ he often said when they were sitting in the Knutzens’ basement room. ‘The eye. The ability to perceive the world.’ He believed that he had inherited this gift. Leonard was, in general, uncommonly interested in the attributes passed on from parent to child. And Jonas had to admit that there was something about Leonard’s eyes, a quality reminiscent of a finely ground optic, an exceptional system of lenses, of the sort found in a Hasselblad camera. Jonas had been aware of this right from the moment when Leo stepped into his life, in a pair of Beatles boots, after the brushfire: those dark, alert eyes which seemed constantly to be on the lookout for things that were hidden from others. ‘You have a “da Vinci eye”,’ Jonas told him. They agreed to train this one sense: their sight. As a beginning. And in so doing they might even find a direction for their anger; discover, throw into relief the one detail which would lift the lid on the whole shebang. And that was exactly what Leonard would, unwittingly, do.

Since there was another reason, besides the colour of its walls, for calling their basement den the Red Room, the most obvious form of training seemed to be to join Olav Knutzen in the darkroom which he had set up in one of the storage rooms in the basement. Jonas was in his element in that dim, orange light, surrounded by the sweetish smell of chemicals; he loved the sense of anticipation as shadows began to form on the white paper in the developing dish, to then consolidate into sharp images in the clear liquid: Jonas and Leonard, grinning, each with their ice cream, and with the police headquarters and Youngstorget arcade in the background; a close-up of Jonas with a plum between his teeth, so sharp and with so much depth to it that the dusty, purplish bloom on the plum was readily discernible even though the print was in black-and-white. Later, when Jonas thought of Olav Knutzen, he would envy the way he could endow a snapshot with an eternal dimension, something which the ephemeral images on the TV screen could never do.

For Jonas, the darkroom with its red ambience and its chemical processes also came to symbolise a space one could inhabit mentally. Soon he was going to fall in love with a girl called Eva. Very much in love. As if his wrath had found its parallel in desire. This was in the middle of that stage in life when one is almost always in love, when one suddenly has the ability to blow up the tiniest detail to colossal proportions, not to mention a capacity for developing the most bizarre images in one’s mind. This is a time when, as most people seem to intuit, it is only a short stumble from love to stark, staring madness.

Jonas was in the school playground one day, and it would not be too far from the truth to say that an anorak made him see red. He never did figure out how or why it happened, whether it could be attributed to a keen-honed eye or what. He felt as though he was in a darkroom, watching a face come into view on a sheet of white paper, as if out of nowhere. All of a sudden she simply stepped out of the crowd during break at Grorud School and was so obviously the One. She was one of a kind, too. Words such as ‘proud’ or ‘noble’ sprang to mind when you looked at her. Eva N. was then, and even more so later, the sort of figure whom male artists would use as a model when illustrating the Norse sagas. First and foremost she was, however, a notorious skier. She wore a red anorak all winter, as if life itself was a high moor, and in the plastic pocket in her wallet she carried a picture, not of Cliff Richard or Mick Jagger, but of cross-country champion Gjermund Eggen. She went skiing as often as she possibly could, it was her passion. Every weekend, Sundays in particular, she would set out from Grorud on long expeditions into Nordmarka. From reliable sources Jonas learned that she almost always stopped in at Sinober, the Skiing Association café at the northern end of Lillomarka, and so he devised a plan whereby he would bump into her there, accidentally on purpose and in such a way that she would take him for an expert skier, a real bouillon and malt-beer-drinking mile-eater who more or less lived on the hills in winter.

In order to understand just what a crack-brained plan this was, one has to bear in mind what an exceptional antipathy to skiing Jonas had. One reason for this was Daniel’s excessive keenness for this very sport. Once or twice as a small boy Jonas had attempted to keep up with his brother on the many tough slopes leading up to Lilloseter: an experience which would appear to have satisfied his need for the taste of blood in his mouth and the feel of a string vest sticking to his back as he stood on a senseless finish line gasping for breath, with his whole body pulsating and his lungs feeling way too small.

So it says a lot about his achievement and even more about his red-hot infatuation that for several Sundays in succession he went for long runs along the ski trails of Lillomarka, despite being in very poor skiing form, to say the least of it. He staked all his hopes on running into her on the lot outside the main building at Sinober, possibly while she was engrossed in the inscrutable mysteries of ski waxing. Jonas was so besotted with Eva that he was quite sure luck would be on his side. Although in his frame of mind you did not think in terms of luck. You dealt in imperatives. She would be there — waiting almost — at Sinober. And how was he to make his entrance onto the lot? In this lay the very heart of his plan, the cunning detail designed to win her heart: he would come skimming in like a ski racer, or one of the elks of Lillomarka. At full speed and with a rime-coated face as proof of how fast he had been going.

This was a trick he had learned. If it was cold enough, and fortunately on those Sundays it was, he would pull up at the foot of the last slope before the café — having taken it nice and easy up to that point, while constantly looking over his shoulder, just in case she happened to be coming up behind him — and puff his breath up onto his face, building up a becoming layer of frost on his eyelashes, eyebrows and the edge of his woolly hat. And bearing this irrefutable evidence of breakneck speed he would sprint over the last rise and come swooshing onto the clearing in front of the café, hawking and spitting and panting just heavily enough.

Sadly, the one thing lacking was the key ingredient: Eva was conspicuous by her absence. That he received approving glances from other skiers every time he swept onto the lot decked with frost like a Lillomarka elk was of little comfort. No red anorak, no noble girl with strong fingers wrapped around a tub of ski wax or a mug of blackcurrant cordial. Sunday after Sunday Jonas stood at the foot of that last slope, breathing frost onto his eyebrows, and even he could see the funny side of it, see himself from the outside — this boy, puffing and blowing like some animals do when mating. But even this laughable bird’s eye view of the situation could not stop him; he was convinced that Eva would only deign to bestow her attention, a glance, on him, if she could see what a brilliant skier he was.

Sunday after Sunday Jonas went haring off into the forest; it occurred to him that these cross-country treks might be a sublimated form of anger, that here on the ski trail he had actually found a direction for his wrath: love. Sunday after Sunday, by dint of some hefty double poling — over the last stretch at least — he would skim onto the lot at Sinober which, in his mind, had gradually become a symbol of a crazed red haze, an infatuation which he found almost frightening. But Eva always seemed to be somewhere else in Nordmarka. So Jonas ascertained, with equal disbelief, every time; he did not see how she could not be there when he had strained every sinew, masked himself so magnificently, rime-encrusted eyelashes and all, and was so bone-wearily lovesick. He stood outside the Sinober lodge café, feeling trapped, possibly because he happened to be staring down at his ‘Rat-Trap’ ski bindings. But still he held to his belief that he would meet her there. And sometimes he would glance up and, for a split-second, see a mirage, a red anorak, and he would be as sure as ever again: next Sunday she would be there. He could already picture the look on her face: first amazement, then sincere delight and finally: her inevitable, reciprocated love.

In the meantime there was some consolation and distraction to be found in the orange glow of the darkroom, watching Leonard’s father forcing, as it were, negatives into something positive. From the very outset of their friendship Jonas had kept telling Leonard: ‘You should take up photography, too, you know. If you want to be any good, you need to get started right away.’ Jonas felt so strongly about this that on more than one occasion he actually thrust Olav Knutzen’s well-worn Rolleiflex at his chum, rather like a relay baton. Leonard never took it. He felt he ought to make it his aim to do something else. It was not enough merely to foster the gifts you had inherited — a pair of penetrating eyes; you also had to improve upon them. ‘I know where I’m going to start,’ he said one autumn. ‘With films. We should always surpass our fathers’ achievements.’ Leonard did not know how right he would prove to be.

Again: how could anyone fail to see it? When one considers everything that has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s ingenious and innovative television programmes, it is a mystery that no one has ever mentioned his passion for the most closely related of art forms.

The next couple of years were pretty hectic. After a little doctoring of their school ID cards — a crime of which not a few were guilty — Jonas Wergeland and Leonard Knutzen became in all probability the youngest ever members of Oslo Film Club. And if anyone got wise to their scam they never let on. Leonard was big for his age anyway, and Jonas masked himself as well as he could — if not with frost then with a moody expression. During the late sixties, every Saturday afternoon without fail they would go along to the Saga cinema, or sometimes the Scala, and take their seats together with people who viewed new Polish or Japanese films in utter silence, or sighed with pleasure at Orson Welles’s three-minute long, unbroken opening shot from Touch of Evil.

Jonas started going to the cinema more often, on his own too, not knowing that this interest would one day lead him to the foremost university in England. He was very soon convinced: the motion picture had to be the highest form of art created by man. Nothing had ever spoken to him as strongly as this. Through the photographs in Aktuell and the many films he would eventually see, he discovered man’s weakness for illusion. Because even though, when he took his seat in the cinema and saw with his own two eyes that the stretch of canvas hanging above the stage was flat — as flat as the world, he was struck every time by the unimaginable depths which this two-dimensional panel acquired as soon as the house lights went down and the stream of images was projected onto the screen. He realised that he had underestimated his inherent capacity for embellishing upon the story, investing the magnified pictures on the flat surface in front of him with thoughts and dreams.

This may go some way to explaining why, in the television series Thinking Big, he very surprisingly and, in the eyes of some, most provocatively, chose film as the angle from which to address Thor Heyerdahl’s achievements and the significance of his work. True, Jonas Wergeland concentrated on the Kon-Tiki — but not on the expedition as such. The whole, absolutely all, of the programme on Heyerdahl dealt with Kon-Tiki the film.

It is often said that people today do not really believe that something has happened, in real life that is, until they see it on television.

Thor Heyerdahl’s stroke of genius lay in the fact that he actually foresaw the advent of this way of thinking only two years after the end of World War II, when he embarked on the Kon-Tiki expedition: possibly the most famous of all bold Norwegian expeditions. With him he took not only food and drink, he also had a cine camera. In our own day this has become the first commandment for all journeys of this nature; even solo expeditioners to the North Pole make sure to film themselves while, one is tempted to say, freezing to death or being eaten by polar bears. Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Heyerdahl rested on the thesis that the documentary film on the Kon-Tiki voyage, and a crudely shot film at that, constituted a greater feat than the voyage itself.

And apropos those two budding rebels in the Red Room, when it came to a keen-honed eye Thor Heyerdahl was the perfect role model for them. When he looked at a map of the world he did not, as others did, see the continents as being separated from one another. Instead, he saw the oceans as linking them to one another. And he saw that the Earth was round, even though the scientific reality was flat. Not least, Heyerdahl understood the importance of the ocean currents, and advanced heretical theories on migrations across the Pacific Ocean. What if the islands of Polynesia had been discovered by voyagers from the east? What if someone in ancient times had managed to sail from Peru to Polynesia? All of the figures in Jonas Wergeland’s television series were discoverers: Ibsen with his monocled eye, Foyn with his long telescope, Skrefsrud with his laryngoscope — a linguistic magnifying glass, if you like. And Heyerdahl with his eye for connections. Columbus may have discovered the sea route to America, but it was Heyerdahl who discovered the next stage, as it were, of that sea route, who showed that the world was one continuous realm; that for thousands of years the possibilities had existed for contact between different cultures, despite the great distances between them.

Scornful experts — unwittingly displaying the sort of glaring ignorance so often found among so-called scholars — dismissed any likelihood of a prehistoric voyage from South America. For one thing, they were positive the raft would absorb so much water that it would sink after two weeks. So in order to prove them wrong Heyerdahl set out on just such a journey, on a craft similar to the one which he believed these early seafarers had used. The Kon-Tiki expedition was, first and foremost, an undertaking which Heyerdahl felt compelled to carry out in order to make people take his hypotheses seriously. Thor Heyerdal’s voyage on those nine balsa logs lashed together was part of an attempt to prove a fact. But instead he gave birth to a piece of fiction. Jonas Wergeland did not know what Heyerdahl himself felt about this paradox, whether he would have regretted having underestimated the way in which such a sail would appeal to people’s imaginations, but in Jonas’s book it was a far greater achievement to star in a modern-day odyssey than to prove a scientific theory. Heyerdahl could write fat treatises till he was blue in the face. In the mind of the world he would always be the Kon-Tiki man. That was why Jonas Wergeland presented the whole programme from the angle of the Kon-Tiki film, of Heyerdahl as a film director. In Jonas’s eyes, it was the film which had made Heyerdahl who he was.

After just twenty minutes’ instruction in a camera shop in Oslo, amateur photographer Thor Heyerdahl used his 16 mm camera for the first time to film the building of the raft at the Callao naval yard outside of Lima. The US government had given them a supply of film, but when they went to collect their equipment at the customs in Peru they found that most of the colour film had been stolen. A lot of film would also be ruined at sea by the dampness and the heat. So there are no interior shots of the raft, no scenes showing Heyerdahl writing in his diary or Bengt Danielsson with his feet up, reading one of the seventy-three sociological and ethnographical works which he had brought with him. But Heyerdahl captured a lot of other stuff on film: flying fish on the deck, huge whales rolling on the surface, the crew hauling dolphins aboard. He filmed members of the expedition cooking, measuring the height of the sun with a sextant, playing guitar, dipping a pen in the ink from an octopus. Shots of the raft taken from a distance — which Heyerdahl obtained by rowing recklessly far out in the little rubber dinghy — turned out particularly well. He went on using the camera until everyone had been picked up from Raroia, the atoll on which they foundered after sailing and drifting 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean. By which time he had, almost symbolically, shot as many thousand feet of film.

Heyerdahl wanted to try and sell the film, so he had it developed in New York. Useless, said the people from Paramount and RKO after the first showing of the unedited footage, or extracts from it. Besides having been shot at the wrong speed the film was a mass of flashes and flickering, a hodgepodge of images: pelicans taking off, waves washing over the deck, a floundering fish, close-ups of the sail, of a man’s legs, a snake mackerel, a face, clouds. And shark heads from every conceivable angle. Only occasionally were there longer scenes in which something actually happened. Viewing the uncut film, for hour after hour, was a genuinely disheartening experience, even for Thor Heyerdahl; these disjointed fragments were pretty much the very opposite of the great unified whole, the existence of which he was trying to prove.

The one detail above all others which Jonas Wergeland chose to pluck out of Thor Heyerdahl’s eventful life, the moment he decided to blow up, was Heyerdahl’s decision to cut and edit a 16 mm version of the film himself. In a scientific cliffhanger to rival the search for the structure of the DNA molecule, the programme showed how for days Heyerdahl and his assistants worked round the clock in a hotel room in New York, cutting the hopeless raw footage down to just over an hour of film. In sequences that were as jerky and chaotic as the uncut film, Jonas Wergeland showed Heyerdahl looking and looking, searching for scenes which could be cut out and spliced together. There were close-ups of flickering countdowns, of the splicer, of eyes and frantic fingers. Long, monotonous shots of food being prepared or crew members manning the rudder were cut up into a lot of shorter clips — shots of Lolita the parrot in particular were slotted in at regular intervals; they alternated between wide shots taken from the top of the mast and close-ups, they switched back and forth between depictions of everyday tasks and more dramatic scenes, such as the visit from the whales and yet more shark-fishing, sheer action drama. The scene depicting the expedition’s final and most alarming moment — the collision with the deadly coral reef — was little short of a masterpiece, with an effective cut to the telegraph operator, ostensibly sending a last report on their position, though this was in actual fact a shot from a totally different stage of the voyage. This, Jonas Wergeland told the viewers, was Thor Heyerdahl’s greatest achievement: a cut-and-paste Kon-Tiki expedition; days and nights spent in a hotel room, editing a jumbled, unusable mass of images into a film which captured the interest of the whole world by saying something about what a single, inspired individual could accomplish.

Through this, Wergeland also managed to say something about the importance of the montage technique. Even for a scientist like Thor Heyerdahl. In the hands of a skilled editor uninteresting material can be rendered fascinating. And to some extent that was what Heyerdahl did: wove information together in a new way. The pieces were all there, but no one had ever put them together before. Heyerdahl combined arguments from archaeology and ethnology, folklore and religious research, botany and zoology, linguistics and physical anthropology. But he also took account of the Polynesians’ own legends, discoveries from ancient times and natural phenomena such as winds and ocean currents. There was, he said, a need for a new kind of science, with researchers from different fields working together, building, assembling.

The big test, a moment every bit as crucial as that when the raft had to force Raroia’s jagged reef, came with the talk and the presentation of the cine film at the Explorers’ Club on an autumn day in 1947. This was the Kon-Tiki film’s real world premiere. Half an hour beforehand Heyerdahl was still gluing the strips of film together. During the showing he received the first sign of what was to come: the fairy-tale ending. Because, just as with a good story the less one embroiders upon it the more likely it is to appeal to the imagination, so too with this simple and technically flawed film. No matter how colourless and wavery the pictures may be, in their minds, people will blow them up. The greyer, the better. The flatter, the deeper. It was a huge success. The audience went wild.

Thanks to a couple of exceptionally committed and technically proficient Swedes, foremost among them Olle Nordemar, it was later possible to re-edit the original film from the lecture at the Explorers’ Club to the point where, on 13 January 1950, Kon-Tiki could have its cinema premiere in Stockholm. And, although the contribution made by the Swedes — not least in improving on the editing — must not be forgotten, this was, and still is, the proudest day in Norwegian film history. The Kon-Tiki went on to crown its voyage by bringing home an Oscar to Norway — the country’s first, and for a very long time only, Academy Award. Some might say that Heyerdahl’s book has also played its part in fixing the story of the Kon-Tiki in the mind of the world, but in doing so they forget that the film, in due course also the televised version, has reached half a billion people. It was a film which had an effect on people. Cinemagoers felt as though they were actually on the raft. There are reports of people feeling seasick and having to be helped out by the usherettes. The film even evoked personal associations for Jonas Wergeland when he saw it again while working on the programme. His thoughts went to a traumatic sail across Oslo fjord in a gale.

Thor Heyerdahl presented a bold new theory on the origins of the Polynesians. Here was a Norwegian who truly dared to think big. He set out, quite simply, to rewrite the history of mankind. And, of course, the inevitable happened. The expedition’s one hundred and one days out on the Pacific Ocean, the main purpose of which had been to document the validity of a fat treatise, became a thrilling tale of adventure, straight out of the Arabian Nights. Heyerdahl was acclaimed as the author of a brilliant manuscript. In Britain the film was compared to the tales of Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad. The Americans cited myths shaped by such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick. Thus — very subtly — Wergeland showed Kon-Tiki to be an archetypal Norwegian film. Its message was that Norwegians were a seafaring people, and that they had always had a tendency to turn science into an adventure, a heroic exploit. Jonas Wergeland could never quite rid himself of the thought that there were certain parallels between Heyerdahl’s film and Heyerdahl’s theories. That just as he had made an enthralling film out of his poor raw material, so his provocative theories were built upon very shaky foundations.

Be that as it may, Jonas Wergeland found it hard to imagine any greater feat: to win an Oscar, in the USA itself, a country where the competition to attain such dreams is so fierce. In the scene where Jonas himself made his appearance in the Heyerdahl programme, this was the point which he highlighted. When you walked into the Kon-Tiki Museum on the island of Bygdoy, Wergeland said, the first thing one should look at was not the raft, but the glass case containing the Oscar statuette. This was the museum’s main attraction. It was this figurine, 33.5 cm in height and four kilos in weight, made from zinc and copper and covered with a layer of ten-carat gold, which spoke of the truly great deed. And it could also be said to symbolise Heyerdahl’s life-long dealings with statues great and small.

Through his television series, Jonas Wergeland showed that it was not just in sport that a country like Norway could make its mark in the world, despite what many young Norwegians — like Daniel — had been brought up to believe. You could win gold in the arts. Because Heyerdahl did not win his gold, his Oscar, for a sporting achievement — though some would reduce it to such — but for his vision, his idea. As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, that statuette was worth more than all the Olympic and World Championship golds ever won by Norway.

There was also the odd Oscar winner among the films seen by Jonas and Leonard as members of the Oslo Film Club. But primed as they were by their hotheaded sessions in the Red Room, with its library of old Aktuell magazines, it took them only a few months to discover their first love. As the son of a ‘reporter with a camera’ with the working-class press, Leonard felt sure that he was destined to fall for Italian neo-realism, films which — for all their differences one from another — testified to a strong social conscience, and often had a documentary element to them. But even Jonas, who had no real concept of Italy or ‘the Eternal City’ other than that formed by the garish postcards he had received as a small boy from his Uncle Lauritz the SAS pilot, felt strangely drawn to such films as The Earth Trembles, The Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City.

It was only natural that this interest should have an influence on their appetite, their palates suddenly seeming to yearn for flavours to match what they saw on the cinema screen. The basement — which in the Knutzen family’s more frugal past had housed a lodger — also contained a makeshift kitchenette with a cooker and a small fridge, and this proved to be all that was needed for Leonard’s culinary experiments, his flights into the realms of Italian cuisine.

Leonard was, however, a realist; he confined his endeavours to one dish. They had of course heard of such wonders as minestrone soup and pizza, but when they dreamt of Italy they thought, first and last, of spaghetti. If one were to compare, as we did earlier, their seething wrathfulness and lack of a cause to sitting empty-handed and devoid of ideas next to a pot of boiling water, then at last they had found something to put into the pot: pasta. It goes without saying, when one considers the time and the place, that they did not go so far as to purchase professional utensils or try their hand at more exacting and fiddly variations such as ravioli or tortellini. Leonard concentrated solely on the different sauces, and soon confirmed that these were not limited to ketchup and the dry-fried chunks of minced beef which his mother sprinkled over spaghetti on the rare occasions when she happened to make it for dinner. All it took was something as simple as a knob of butter and some toasted poppy seeds for Jonas and Leonard to feel they were partaking of their pasta several hundred miles further south.

Leonard took it very seriously. He could not get his hands on the uncooked herb-based sauce, pesto, but he did things in that spartan kitchenette in the Red Room which had never been attempted in Grorud before — not even in the swish Golden Elephant restaurant. It was here, for example, that Jonas first saw someone make a tomato sauce from scratch. Otherwise, just about everything went into Leonard’s sauces, not least into his bolognese; Jonas never did find out what he threw into the pot, but his friend was a sight to be seen, standing over the simmering stew, sampling it, then promptly grating some nutmeg into it, as a finishing touch which, nonetheless, spelled the difference between lip-smacking success and inedible fiasco. At the peak of his culinary career he actually grew basil on the windowsill. As a grown man, Jonas would dine at critically acclaimed trattorie in Florence and Genoa, but he never tasted a pasta sauce as good as the ones which Leonard Knutzen dished up in a modest kitchenette in Grorud.

Leonard received a lot of help from his father. During the long summer season, when Youngstorget abounded in fresh vegetables, Olav brought home the finest fresh produce. There was, however, one problem: a want of parmesan, and even worse, of olive oil — remember, this was Norway in the 1960s, in gastronomic terms a Third World country. Luckily Leonard eventually discovered Oluf Lorentzen’s treasure-chest of a shop on Karl Johans gate, where not only did they have that essential piquant cheese, they also had an olive oil which, to his delight, was called Dante. And garlic, of course. Jonas and Leonard were probably the first people in Grorud to smell of this plant. And who knows, this may even have been a stronger indication of their outsider position than an obsession with Italian films. To reek of garlic would have been regarded by lots of people in those days as a more radical sign of wrath than an upraised fist in a black glove.

The food spurred them on to even more enthusiastic discussions of the Italian cinema. It almost seemed as if it was the spaghetti itself which made it so easy to talk vociferously and gesticulate wildly, vehemently brandishing one’s fork while yelling pointed remarks at one another. ‘I’m telling you, it’s the low budget that makes Rossellini’s editing so bloody brilliant!’ Leonard declared. ‘Better a back street in Naples any day, than all of Griffith’s phony studio sets and daft cardboard elephants!’ cried Jonas. They became more hot-blooded, a strange new temperament awoke within them. One of the things they liked best was to mop up the last of the sauce with chunks of the white bread. At such moments they seemed about to break, quite spontaneously, into Italian.

And then one spring, as if the one thing led quite naturally to the next, they attended a seminar on Italian film held at the Film Institute in the Oslo suburb of Røa. If they had been looking for something to ‘believe in’ and were expecting it to appear on the silver screen, then this was their epiphany. Their introduction to Michelangelo.

They took their seats in the cinema expecting more neo-realism, instead they were presented with something quite different. On that weekend at Røa they saw four films in all by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Éclisse and The Red Desert. They were shocked, outraged almost. His scenes reminded them of the stupid, stylised illustrated serials in weekly magazines. Was such a thing possible? They saw figures walking in different directions, one in the foreground, one in the background. The pace was so slow that they had to stifle a yawn. The close-up of a face could be held for ages. Occasionally characters would move out of shot, but the shot, the empty scene, would be held, long. Antonioni did not seem to have any intention of telling them a story. His characters did not do anything, they acted no parts. They looked. As if none of them could make sense of the world in which they found themselves. Jonas and Leonard understood little of it, and even less of what the thinking behind the films might be. They kept wanting to get up and leave, but they never did. Jonas suddenly realised that he had found a kindred spirit, someone who was out to show them that the world was flat.

On the train back into town they sat staring out of the window. Was it possible? To make a film which ended not with a man and woman meeting as they had arranged, and as everyone expected, but with a seven-minute long sequence in which the audience saw nothing but dull scenes from somewhere in a city. And yet: over the next few days, every now and again either Jonas or Leonard would suddenly exclaim: ‘Claudia! Anna!’ in that typical, exaggerated Italian accent. Or, with anguished expression: ‘Perchè? Perchè? Perchè?’ And they knew that they had been sucked into that universe. Or it had taken up residence inside them.

As to the search for some direction for their anger, its future looked precarious. Instead of sneering at the deplorable state of the world, they were more liable to spend an hour discussing Monica Vitti’s bone structure and the broad bridge of her nose: part lioness, part porn model. Her lips. The way she made up her eyes. One Saturday at the Grand café, after the Film Club, Leonard announced — apropos the power of the Italian tradition — that all philosophy, all questions, including that of Monica Vitti, boiled down to the subject of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, the contrast between Plato pointing upward and Aristotle pointing forward. One pointing to heaven, the other to the world. ‘So which way would you choose?’ Jonas asked. Leonard reached a hand into the air, pointing upward. Jonas thought that was his answer. ‘Two coffees,’ Leonard said when the waiter came over. ‘And two marzipan cakes, since there seems to be a shocking want of tiramisù around here.’

Things started to become rather hazy. They did not do much except wander around, looking. Without any idea of what they were looking for. When not eating spaghetti with a carbonara sauce, or possibly a processed cheese and walnut sauce, down there in the basement, in that red laboratory, or darkroom, in which they had originally planned, by dint of experimentation, to figure out what to do with their lives, to develop images of possible plans of attack, they sat and vacillated. And not only that: they doubted. For the moment at least, Leonard seemed more interested in wielding the pepper grinder — Jonas would never forget the sound of that utensil — than in getting hold of a camera. But he succeeded in justifying his vacillation. ‘I wander around absorbing impressions,’ Leonard said, expertly twirling spaghetti round the base of his spoon with his fork. He was gearing up for his career as Norway’s greatest film director. He was honing his eye.

And his role model, or honing steel, was Michelangelo — Antonioni, that is. They discussed his films. The flagpoles in L’Éclisse, the church bells in L’Avventura, the humming radio masts in The Red Desert. They marvelled at the way in which Antonioni reduced everything to flat planes, even using a telephoto lens to compress the depth of the image. It surprised them to find how well they could remember whole scenes, seemingly meaningless snippets of dialogue. The long sequence on the island in L’Avventura had made a particularly strong impact on them: all those people wandering around on their own, tiny figures cutting this way and that across the deserted landscape, looking for Anna, the lost girl. While Jonas regarded Antonioni as a kindred spirit, mainly because his films seemed to be all thought rather than action, for Leonard he was a mentor. He almost wept with rage when a guy at the Film Club told them that Antonioni had been forced to work in a bank for a while. A bank! Leonard, with a father working for the left-wing press and a mother in the Trade Union building, considered this the most degrading of all occupations. ‘A bank! You’d be better working for the Society of the Blind.’

At long last Leonard decided that his eye was sharp enough. From one day to the next he started calling himself Leonardo — since the Christian names of all the great Italian film-makers ended in ‘o’: Vittorio, Roberto, Federico, Luchino, Pier Paolo, Bernardo. The time had come for him to make his own films, to found ‘the Italian school’ in Grorud. While other boys received Tandberg tape-recorders or gold watches as confirmation gifts, Leonard was able to show off a fabulous 8 mm cine camera, complete with projector and splicer. And he was hooked. He became as fanatical about his camera as Jimi Hendrix — a fellow outsider — was about his guitar. Word had it that Hendrix slung on his instrument as soon as he got up in the morning; he fried bacon with his guitar hanging at his back and took it to the toilet with him. Likewise, everywhere Leonard went his camera went too. He also started wearing sunglasses, whatever the weather: with black frames, like the ones worn by Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita. Later, during his years at high school, his style of dress also changed. While Jonas stuck, during the cold months of the year, to his duffle coat, Leonard went around with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape and a scarf which he never tied, but simply draped over the coat. No Afghan coat for Leonard. ‘There goes an intellectual,’ his attire said. Or rather: ‘There goes a film director. A Leonardo.’

Jonas was press-ganged into a brief but intense career as an actor in various enigmatic films, or more correctly: disjointed scenes played out in and around Grorud. On one occasion he had to get up at the crack of dawn to sit stock-still in front of the lovely glass rotunda by the ornamental pond in the middle of the shopping centre. Not a soul around. Nothing but an ethereal light. Buildings on three sides. Clear geometric shapes and long shadows. A touch of the Giorgio de Chiricos. ‘Look straight up into the air,’ Leonard shouted as he circled with the little camera. ‘Think of something … deep.’ After shooting four rolls of three-minute film he was satisfied. ‘Superb,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking about? You had a face like a dream machine.’

Possibly because he had been sitting facing the Golden Elephant restaurant, Jonas had been thinking about the one subject that was often in his thoughts, although he was not always conscious of it. Her. Always her. Even when he imagined that he was thinking about other girls. He would experience the same thing again, or a slight variation on it, some years later when he found himself in another almost deserted square, a very long way from Grorud, although here too he was surrounded on three sides by buildings — albeit of a more monumental and very different character. Jonas Wergeland was in that place in the world which had been the goal of his dreams, a shimmering pinprick inside his skull, for as long as he could remember: Samarkand. To Jonas Wergeland this fact seemed so incredible — and so mind-boggling — that he might as well have been standing on Saturn’s moon Titan.

His dreams of Samarkand could be laid, of course, at the door of his Aunt Laura and years of veiled references to a city which, as far as he could gather, was the most important place in her life. ‘Tell me who you met in Samarkand,’ he urged her time and again as he lay on the sofa, letting himself drift dreamily into all the rugs on her walls. ‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she would always reply patiently from the corner where she was working at her glittering little goldsmith’s bench. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’

It was odd, really. He had come here, travelled such a ridiculously long way, all because Aunt Laura would not tell him what had happened to her here. It was not a story, but the absence of a story that had led him deep into Central Asia. From the moment when he first heard his aunt pronounce those syllables, Sa-mar-kand, he had longed to visit this place. The very word itself fascinated him. For Jonas, Samarkand had become the one place in the world most likely to hold the answer to the riddle of every human being. Sometimes Jonas felt that all that was needed for him to become complete was a tiny cog, and that this last little piece just happened to be in Samarkand. He had to go there. Jonas Wergeland’s trip to Samarkand was, in the very truest sense, a formative experience or, as it used to be called in the old days: a Grand Tour.

Perhaps that was why getting there proved so difficult. Nowadays, when everybody and their uncle is circling the world on a bike with a video camera and a laptop, or visiting every city in the world beginning with the letter B in the course of a year, it is as easy to get to places as it is hard to discover anything knew, anything semi-original. Of all the journeys Jonas Wergeland made, there was only one which he considered to have been really gruelling, and that was the trip to Samarkand. For a Norwegian in the seventies, it was one of the few places which was completely out of reach. It presented a challenge on a par with crossing Antarctica on crutches. Getting in to Uzbekistan, in that far-flung corner of the Soviet Union, at that time — with no excuse other than an incomprehensible urge to see Samarkand — was an accomplishment, a feat of daring unparalleled in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Strictly speaking it could not be done, but Jonas did it. Thanks to the art of persuasion, bluffing, bureaucratic hurdling, charm, patience and amazing luck. And, not least, wrath. Jonas simply got so mad that he won through. For a short while his anger found a direction, a clear purpose.

So the contrast, once he was actually there in Samarkand, was all the greater. Because no one appeared to care any more. It was all very peaceful and undramatic. He may well have been under surveillance, but he was free to go where he pleased, see whatever he liked, alone, ostensibly at any rate, in a city which nestled so beautifully among the snow-covered mountains; where everything, as far as he could tell, revolved around cotton and melons. And silk — a reminder of a time when this city was a bustling hub on the Silk Road. Jonas had the feeling that he knew this place. He found himself thinking, of all things, of Snertingdal. He half expected to see a sign saying ‘The Norwegian Organ and Harmonium Works’.

He knew what he wanted to see first: Registan Square, the centre of the city, this too once a marketplace. And when he sank to the ground there, simply sat right down with his legs crossed, he knew that it had been worth all the travails of the preceding days; all the hassle, all the discouragement, all the dirty looks from officials in hilarious big hats. Although Aunt Laura refused to tell him about her own experiences, she had described this place to him again and again, told him that it was far and away the finest public square in the world — the West had nothing to equal it. She had compared it to a square with the most imposing gothic cathedrals on three of its four sides. ‘Imagine the Town Hall Square,’ she said, ‘And then imagine another, almost identical, Town Hall where the Western Station is, and a similar building on the spot where Restaurant Skansen sits. And all of them covered in the most exquisite ceramic tiles. Can you picture it?’ Yes, Jonas could picture it. The Town Hall in Oslo was, for many reasons, his favourite building in Norway.

Jonas sat in a sort of lotus position on the edge of the square, soaking up these ornamental riches, now partially restored after years of neglect. The buildings — the Ulug Beg to the west, the Tillya Kari to the north and the Shir Dar to the east — had once been madrasahs, Muslim colleges. Minarets flanked the three massive façades, in each of which was a doorway thirty to forty metres tall. The entire complex was faced with glazed tiles in bright colours, a mass of geometric patterns, floral motifs and Kufic calligraphy. An incredible jigsaw puzzle. Jonas lingered over each wall in turn, not worrying about the time, loving the way the slowly shifting light kept revealing new details in the mosaics. He opened up. Tried to make himself open to something which lay within him and was only waiting for him to find a way of drawing it out. He would find a missing piece here, a story, or at least a snippet of a story.

He had sensed it the moment he reached the square and sank down onto the ground.

Jonas sat there gazing at the three façades. Like three gigantic oriental rugs. They almost seemed to cancel one another out, to generate a void of sorts, concentrated nothingness. He could lose himself in those walls, in the ornamentation, disappear into them. Get to the back of them, he thought. If he stared at them for long enough he might even be able to step out into Aunt Laura’s bazaar of a flat, where he had played as a child, with a torch in the dark.

Samarkand was more than a place. Jonas was conscious of a Samarkand beyond Samarkand, something which was not a city, but a crucial insight. This feeling was confirmed as he sat cross-legged on Registan Square. Because if there was any truth in his suspicion, that the world was flat, then here, in Samarkand, he had found the edge. Samarkand had to be a good place for an outsider. An outside-left position from which one could open up the game, change the rules almost. Not for nothing had Samarkand’s greatest ruler invented a variation on chess using twice as many pieces. For an instant, Jonas had a sense of being back in the world as it was before Copernicus, before people knew that the earth was round. Of being able to start afresh. Follow another fork in the road than that which humanity had so far taken.

And then, just as he felt that something vital was about to rise to the surface, that Samarkand beyond Samarkand, much in the way that one feels a sneeze building up, suddenly it slipped away and in its place was another thought, or a cluster of thoughts, as impenetrable and manifest and rich in nuance as one of the glowing façades before him: Margrete. He had come to this place because he thought he would meet Margrete here. Or at least that there was a possibility of meeting her here. If there was the slightest chance of meeting her anywhere in the world it had to be here, in Samarkand. After all, what was Margrete like? Margrete was the sort of person who could easily take it into her head to go to Samarkand. He realised, although he had never come anywhere close to formulating such a thought before, that he was sure he would meet Margrete here. It was the same sensation, albeit greatly intensified, which he had occasionally experienced as a lovesick teenager: you would go a long way out of your way, or ski for miles, if there was even the most microscopic chance of running into the girl you loved, as if by pure accident. And Jonas saw that, unconsciously, this was exactly what he had been thinking this time too. If he went to Samarkand, the most unlikely place in the world, he was bound to run into her. It was a simple as that.

And with thoughts of this nature running through his head, he realised how much she had been on his mind all the years since she had left, how much he missed her, what an indelible impression those months with her had made on him. This was the story which he had come here to uncover. This was the Samarkand beyond Samarkand. The story of Margrete’s absence, the gaping void she had left inside him. Unbeknown to him, the memory of Margrete had bulked larger and larger in his mind. Maybe, he thought to himself, he was more deeply, more devotedly hers here, now, than when they were going out together.

Jonas rested his eyes on the blue dome of the Tillya Karis, let his mind dwell on a blue found nowhere else in the whole world. Wasn’t blue the colour of hope?

He felt that he was ready. Ready for something. The world was flat and he was sitting on its edge. He knew that something was going to happen, but he was not prepared for the fact that it was already happening. He was just getting to his feet, and then it happened. He felt a hand being placed lightly on his shoulder. There was someone behind him.

Why did he do it?

During his years with Leonardo, in the epoch of the Italian school and more especially at the height of their Grorud filming fervour, Jonas imagined that he had forgotten Margrete. One might even say that Michelangelo Antonioni helped him, or consoled him, by making films which showed that love today was an extremely tricky, and possibly downright impossible, business. Only once did the thought of Margrete crop up, like a wound, in his mind — when they were hunting for a leading lady. They were looking for a girl who would be as ravishingly beautiful as Jeanne Moreau or Monica Vitti. ‘Whatever happened to that Bangkok chick of yours,’ Leonard asked. ‘Shut up,’ Jonas retorted. It was one of the few occasions when he felt like punching his pal.

In the end they picked Pernille, mainly because she was a year older and had a scooter, a Vespa, which was the perfect prop for a film as heavily influenced by the Italians as Leonard’s. Jonas could not deny that Pernille was disconcertingly attractive, with a dark and rather sulky beauty reminiscent of Claudia Cardinale; secretly he dreamed of being kissed by her the way Cary Grant was kissed by Ingrid Bergman in Notorious: for three whole minutes, the most famous kiss in the history of the cinema, or the most groundbreaking at any rate, in the way it so cunningly got round the censors.

But Leonard wanted them back to back. A good many weird ten-minute tales were shot in open countryside, with a lot of wandering past one another, far apart, a lot of staring into space. ‘Look anxious,’ Leonard would yell at Jonas, ‘look as though you’re feeling guilty about something, although you don’t know what.’ Nothing happened and everything was a mystery. Nonetheless, Jonas was often amazed by the way in which what, to him, was simply a succession of obscure scenes could, when shuffled around and spliced together in the final, grainy short films which Leonard showed on a sheet in the Red Room to the accompaniment of the projector’s hum, suddenly appeared to have a vague plot. He once asked his friend what he enjoyed most about film-making and was not at all surprised when Leonard replied: ‘The editing.’

Then came the great revolution. Or the great loss. The loss of wrath. If, that is, it had not been lost long before. Jonas and Leonard had missed seeing Antonioni’s new film Blow-Up at the cinema, having been on their summer holidays at the time, but just over a year later they found themselves in the Oslo Cinematographers’ screening room in Stortingsgaten along with the Film Club study group, for a showing of this unforgettable movie, so steeped in the London of the sixties, steeped in the music and design of the sixties and, above all else, steeped in metaphysical overtones. It was about a photographer who had taken some pictures of a couple, eventually just the woman, in a park and when he enlarged the photographs discovered that on film he had also — possibly — caught a crime being committed in the background, in the bushes, a man with a gun and a body on the ground. Amazing, thought Jonas. You take pictures of what you think is a love scene, and it turns out to be connected to a murder. With his heart in his mouth he watched as the main character blew up one section of the photograph, from which he then blew up another section. Jonas and Leonard sat in the dark, eyes glued to the screen, letting themselves be seduced by Antonioni’s visual conjuring tricks. Like the photograph they, too, were blown up, enlarged. For a while after this Leonard regretted having chosen film rather than photography. They felt like borrowing Olav Knutzen’s Leica and Rolleiflex and taking pictures of every bush they saw. What would they find if they enlarged sections of them? For several weeks they were possessed of an urge to blow up everything.

It so happened that the memory of a personal blow-up was still quite fresh in Jonas’s mind. The year before he had been head over heels in love. And blow-up is the word. After all, what is love but one huge exaggeration. And even more so if it hits you during that crazy, mixed-up period known as adolescence. Jonas was constantly aware of how, depending on the circumstances, his eyes would turn into a microscope or a telescope. All of a sudden his ears were as sensitive as the finest microphones; he could readily detect ten different nuances of tone in one ‘Hi.’ He could smell a girl at two hundred metres, and if a feminine shoulder or arm were to nudge against him, his skin felt as tender as a newborn kitten. Just watching a girl sucking on a lolly pop made him want to run amok. The sight of Anne Beate Corneliussen using his bicycle pump to blow up her tyre could send him into inordinate frenzies of excitement. Jonas felt as though his head was becoming human, while his body was still stuck at the animal stage. And maybe it was this same split which gave rise to the tendency to exaggerate everything — if, that is, it was not a last, desperate attempt to hang on to childhood, a state in which reality and fantasy could exist side by side. Later, on the other side of the border, so to speak, it would occur to Jonas that exaggeration was a toll you had to pay when you passed into the realms of adulthood.

For Jonas Wergeland the summer of 1967 was never the Summer of Love. He would have understood, though, if anyone were to describe the following winter as the Winter of Love. Because those were the months when he saw red, which is to say: when his love for Eva N. burned brightest and he made fruitless forays into Lillomarka on skis every single Sunday, hoping to run into her — quite by chance — at Sinober.

Then, on the eleventh Sunday, an exceptionally cold day in the middle of March, Fortune smiled on Jonas. Having taken Daniel’s laughing, but well-meant, advice to apply grip wax to the middle section of his ski soles, he plunged into the forest, where skiing conditions were still decent. He strode out frantically, as if he knew that this was his last chance; conscious, shamefully almost, of how much fitter he was, and that he was really getting the hang of it now, even managing to exploit the give of the skis in the innumerable dips. Yet again he stopped at the foot of the last slope before Sinober to blow a coating of rime over his brows and lashes, and yet again an impressive diagonal stride brought him skimming up to the café. Everything was the same as always, apart from a bright flash of red outside the main café building. At first he thought maybe he was seeing spots in front of his eyes, due to his racing pulse, but no, there she was, there was Eva’s sturdy figure and, not least, her red anorak.

He pretended not to see her, leaned nonchalantly on his poles, as if resting for a second or two, before wheeling round, voracious mile-eater that he was, and scooting off again. He stopped beside the signpost, at a crossroads with lots of arrows pointing to different lives. In the end she came over to him, with half a slice of bread and goat’s cheese cupped in her mittens. She eyed his rime-covered eyebrows curiously. ‘Jonas? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you liked skiing.’ What she did not say was that she fell for him at that very moment.

A month later Jonas asked himself, for several reasons, why a girl like Eva N. should have fallen for him. From a subjective point of view, flushed with love as he was, he had of course been sure that he would win her, but objectively he knew that she was unattainable. He could execute all the best Gjermund Eggen moves and it would make no difference. He could not know that what Eva, like a couple of dozen other women, had fallen for was, quite simply, the look in his eyes. Or an expression which was written large on his face, as clear as the scar over his eyebrow. They immediately perceived that he, Jonas Wergeland — although he did not know it — was restlessly searching for something great, something important, and every one of them believed that they were the key to this great and important thing for which he was searching. Jonas’s conscious or unconscious urge to discover things and the indefinable talent from which it derived was as obvious to these women as a set of antlers on his head would have been. In their eyes he was one in a billion. The bearer of different thoughts, a man whose eyes, whose face, testified to the fact that he was obsessed with the desire to achieve a goal, an outer limit, possibly even a backside, with the power to expand reality. And this, they thought — while at the same time thinking that he must sense it too — he could only do through a woman. To them, that handful of women, this was irresistible, more powerful than any aphrodisiac. They were not attracted by good looks or power or money — and most certainly not by skiing skills — but by a curiosity which was focused on an impossibility.

Jonas looked at her from under the crust of rime on his eyelashes, which was now starting to melt. He was about to say something, but his voice cracked, everything cracked. She looked so strong. Invulnerable. She was the sort of person who could withstand anything. Sleep out in temperatures of forty below. Drink urine and eat reindeer moss. But Jonas saw something else too. He saw what was written all over her: Danger. High Voltage.

‘Fancy going on a bit further?’ she asked, bending down and picking up a fistful of snow, squeezing it, examining it, as if debating whether to rewax. Rewax life, Jonas thought. This was not part of the plan. He had never been further than Sinober. Places such as Varingskollen or Kikut were only vague names. He glanced up at the arrows. The signpost looked like a many-branched tree, it called to mind the ones found at certain tourist attractions, with signs showing the direction and the distance to various capital cities. Here the signs pointed out across the winter landscape, towards Movatn, Nittedal, Snippen, Grefsen, Sørskogen. He could ski like a champion — as long, he hoped, as he didn’t have to ski down to Movatn, or to Tømte. Might as well ask: Do you want to take a run down to Hell?

‘Fancy a run down to Tømte?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said, quick as a wink. Knowing this was sheer lunacy.

Now Jonas had, for some time before this, associated women with a certain amount of risk. He was well aware that in giving a girl the eye you also laid yourself open to the possibility of losing your head. Jonas was by no means a stranger to the idea that, when you came right down to it, women were dangerous.

All of this had its roots in the first death which Jonas could remember. A death which was, in the words of the grown-ups, ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Uncle Lauritz, the SAS pilot, had been killed in an accident — not on a scheduled flight, a cataclysmic, catastrophic crash in a Caravelle, but in his little Piper Cub. It so happened that Jonas’s mother had to take him with her on the day when she had to go through her brother’s things. His grandmother could not face it. The accident had clearly brought back painful memories. When the news was broken to her she had gone to lie in the bath and listen to the BBC. This was always a bad sign. ‘He was an excellent pilot,’ she murmured, chewing on the butt of a cigar. ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’

Jonas was glad of the chance to visit the flat. Lauritz had been his hero, although his uncle was hardly ever around. He was like a knight who rode into Jonas’s life from time to time and dropped off a toy from Paris or a box of Quality Street from London. Once, when some bigger boys were threatening to beat Jonas up for puncturing their football, a taxi pulled up and Uncle Lauritz got out, dressed in his navy-blue uniform with the four gold stripes on the cuffs. The other boys just stood there, awestruck, outside Jonas’s building. At that moment, in Jonas’s eyes, his uncle was an angel.

His mother had never been to the flat before. Her brother had never invited her or any other members of the family over. If he asked them out it was always to Restaurant Skansen or the Moorish Salon at the Hotel Bristol. ‘Lauritz lived his own life,’ she explained apologetically to Jonas. He was seldom home either, what with him being a pilot. Jonas could tell that, grief-stricken though she was, his mother was also a little curious. ‘He was actually very shy. Bashful. A bit like you. It must run in the family,’ his mother remarked to Jonas. She and Lauritz had not had much to do with one another since their childhood days at Gardemoen. Even as a boy her brother had been obsessed with the desire to get away: ‘I want to fly high. And far.’

In the end, though, his flight was short. And low. The general view — and the one also expressed in the coroner’s report — was that it was unthinkable for a pilot as experienced as Lauritz to have flown into a high-voltage cable by accident, or certainly not the cable in question, which was a known hazard. It wasn’t as if the weather had been bad, nor had it been particularly windy. No one actually came out and said it, but it was there between the lines: suicide. Jonas preferred the words ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’. Rakel said the whole thing reminded her of what had happened to a legendary French flier by the name of Saint-Exupéry — Jonas liked the name the moment he heard it — who had disappeared on a mission towards the end of the Second World War. Neither he nor his plane had been found.

Some said he had crashed in the Alps, others that he went down in the Mediterranean. No explanation for the accident was ever forthcoming. Which was just how it should be, Jonas thought. The death of a knight, not to mention an angel, ought to be shrouded in mystery.

‘It must have been a woman,’ Jonas heard his mother say to his father. His uncle had worn a locket around his neck, the sort with a compartment for a small picture. But when they were preparing for the funeral and his mother opened it, it was empty. Still she stuck to her theory. ‘It’s the only possible explanation,’ she said. ‘An unhappy love affair.’ Jonas pondered this expression. It was the first time he had heard a negative word used in conjunction with the one word which he held to be the most positive in life. He sampled this pairing: ‘unhappy’ and ‘love’. This was the first intimation Jonas was given of the gravity of love, and different in nature from what he would later derive from Karen’s Mohr’s story from Provence. This one spoke of the possible consequences of love. Love did not only make you fly high, it could just as easily make you fly low. Too low. Maybe love was not something one should reach out for without thinking. Jonas had the wild idea that all girls ought to wear signs around their necks saying: ‘Danger. High voltage.’ Love was like electricity. It could give warmth and light, but it could also black out a life, short-circuit it.

‘What do you think his flat looks like?’ Jonas asked on the way over there.

‘I’ve no idea. He’d only been living there for three or four years. Probably just the same as anyone else’s. Perfectly ordinary.’

Jonas guessed that his mother was hoping to find some clue there to her brother’s decision to end his life by embracing a high-voltage cable. A solemn declaration on his desk, maybe. A box of passionate love letters. Jonas, on the other hand, was thinking that he was soon going to be entering the flat of one who had loved, a man who had been a victim of love. In short, he was about to see the chamber of love itself. It started out well enough. As far as Jonas was concerned at any rate. A door with three big, burglar-proof locks. No one had keys to it. There had been no keys in his pockets. ‘There are no keys to a human being,’ his father had said softly from the piano bench, having declined to come with them. His mother had called a locksmith, made an appointment, the man had arrived at the same time as them. ‘Lauritz didn’t open up to anyone,’ his mother muttered when the door was finally breached. Jonas’s first thought was that this place must harbour some great — and possibly dark and scandalous — secret. After all, you didn’t have three huge locks on your door for nothing.

They stepped inside. Jonas tried to conceal the hope he felt. He remembered the first time Wolfgang Michaelsen had invited him into his room and he walked in to find lots of model warplanes hanging in the air, at least fifty of them, and every one painted in the right colours. It had come as such a shock, it made you start; it was like opening a door and walking straight into the middle of World War II.

More than anything, Jonas was hoping that they would find something valuable. A legacy of some sort. He wished that he had other qualities in common with his uncle, apart from shyness. He saw a secret room. Full of gold ingots. Or unknown paintings by Tidemann and Gude, worth millions. Or at the very least a few volumes of comic books.

But the flat was all bare. And all white. It was like breaking into a massive safe and finding it empty. They wandered through three large rooms. No books, no rugs, nothing on the walls. Nothing in the bathroom, not even a razor or a bottle of aftershave. The kitchen too was empty. The fridge, all the shelves were bare. Maybe he really was an angel, Jonas thought, a being who did not need food, did not need to shave. There was nothing in the bedroom but a bed, perfectly made. In the fitted wardrobe hung a couple of suits and uniforms. Apart from a few spartan pieces of furniture and the requisite electrical appliances they found only one thing of any value: underneath the window sat an imposing, exclusive stereo system, exotic pieces of equipment which gave the living room the look of a large cockpit and, next to them, an orange box full of Duke Ellington records. Jonas was to think later that this was possibly as good as any flight recorder, that if you listened carefully enough to these discs, tried pronouncing their titles, you would find the answer. This thought struck him, of course, only after Margrete had given him Rubber Soul as a farewell present. For all they knew, this box of records could have been the equivalent, for Uncle Lauritz, of a box of love letters — worth more than all the gold ingots in the world.

The bare white walls made Jonas feel as though the whole flat was just one big white room. The opposite of a darkroom. A place where not a single picture could be developed. The more he thought about this, the more reasonable — and right — it seemed to him. Everyone needed a place in which they could feel lonely. In his day-to-day life Uncle Lauritz the SAS pilot occupied a room that encompassed the whole world. So vast. So full of everything. One day Cairo, the next Athens. Which was why he needed this inner space that was all his own. Maybe for him it could never be white enough or empty enough.

Just before they left, Jonas spotted something. A small dark square on one of the living-room walls, like a stamp stuck on Antarctis. A sign of life. Jonas went over to it. It was a portrait, smaller than a passport photo, fixed to the wall with a pin. A woman’s face. His mother was standing next to him. She said nothing. Jonas knew what she was thinking: this was the picture which had once sat in the locket that Uncle Lauritz wore around his neck. ‘I knew it,’ his mother said, sounding almost relieved. ‘It was a woman.’

And yet for Jonas this altered everything. The flat was no longer empty. It was full of love. Unless, of course, that microscopic portrait betokened a desperate wish to minimise things, a frantic attempt to render the greatest thing in life nigh on invisible. However that may be: the flat did have a secret room. That tiny picture, that face.

Jonas had not yet met Bo Wang Lee; nevertheless it did occur to him that this flat also constituted an answer to the question of what you should take with you. You walked for a while on this Earth. What was worth collecting? He liked Uncle Lauritz’s simple answer: the music of Duke Ellington and a face.

On the way home his mother suddenly said, more to herself than to Jonas: ‘She wasn’t good enough for him. If you ask me she was a tart.’

Jonas pretended not to hear, but this comment confirmed his misgivings — paradoxical though they were, considering those white rooms — concerning the darker aspects of love, and the risk of losing one’s head completely.

He was to learn more about what it meant to lose one’s head that day at Sinober when he stood under the ski-trail signpost, those arrows pointing in all directions, staring as if bewitched at a gigantic white room covered in snow. He had agreed without a moment’s hesitation when Eva asked if he wanted to take a run over to Tømte with her, even though he knew that in order to get there they would first have to ski down to Movatn Lake. And Movatn was the main reason that Jonas had never gone beyond Sinobar. The slopes down to the lake were legendary, known for being among the very worst the whole of Nordmarka had to offer in the way of downhill runs. Even Daniel, fanatical skier that he was, referred to them with a faint shudder as the Slopes from Hell. And as if that wasn’t enough, there had been a bit of a thaw, then the surface had frozen hard again: the trails were covered in a lethal layer of ice.

Even on the first, not particularly taxing slopes, Jonas knew that he had embarked on a downright dangerous expedition. ‘Careful, now,’ Eva called over her shoulder a moment later, then the back of her red anorak disappeared over the top of something which looked to Jonas like an endless plunging descent, with steep slopes rising up on either side. The track was narrow and icy, there was no chance of ploughing; Jonas felt like he was on a bob-sleigh run; fir trunks loomed close, tightly packed, braking was impossible, he simply had to go for it, even though he had tears in his eyes and was travelling faster and faster over the glassy surface; and at the bottom there was a sharp turn to the left, one which the experienced skiers knew about, but not Jonas, with the result that he shot straight off into the forest at breakneck speed and crashed, inevitably and sickeningly, into a tree. Although to Jonas it was not a tree, but a high-voltage cable. He had known it was there ever since he fell in love, knew that he was bound to go careering into it sooner or later. For a few seconds everything went black. Or, not black: red.

He came round to find Eva standing over him. Fortunately he had hit the tree with his feet, with the sides of his skis first — there was an ugly gash in the trunk — even so he was battered and bruised and seemed to have broken, or at least sprained his leg, possibly tearing up his old football injury, the very source of his wrath. He could not get up. Then he noticed something which, for a moment, made him forget his pain. Eva was looking at him with a face which was unrecognisable, which pulsed with warmth, as if she were running a high fever. Jonas realised that Eva was in love, although in his dazed condition he thought that this was something which had only happened now, thanks to his accident. His battered state was the whole premise for her falling in love. The fact that he was done for. Down for the count. Not strong at all, no Lillomarka elk, but weak. She bent down to put her arms round him. Jonas caught a faint whiff of goat’s cheese, blackcurrant cordial and universal wax. She slipped as she tried to help him up, fell on top of him, almost on purpose, he thought. Jonas was conscious of her lips brushing his cheek, felt her breath on his neck, the smell of her, the softness; that ‘hard’, fit, muscular girl, and yet this softness. As if the contours of her body were more palpable through anoraks and sweaters and tights than if she had been naked. For a few seconds there, it seemed to Jonas that he could feel every millimetre of that half of her body which was in contact with his.

It was worth it all for that instant of intense closeness. Jonas had the feeling that they did not need to do any more than that. That this brief, electrified moment more than justified all the ski trekking, the months of red-hot expectation, the pictures of her which he had blown-up almost to the point of unrecognisability and caressed in his dreams.

They got to their feet, brushed off the snow. His leg hurt. She turned to run her fingers over the marks his ski binding had made in the tree trunk, as if he had carved their names inside a heart. Although he tried not to, eventually he had to meet her eye and as he held her gaze he saw it all, as in a red haze, a darkroom in which pictures were developed at lightning speed. Up to this point you might say that he had merely loved her with his eyes, and only now did his mind seem to catch up with his vision and compel him to perceive her in another way, forced him to consider whether his eyes might have been wrong. Again he was made aware of what a blessing and a curse it was to be able to extract all he could from a girl at their first meeting, or from the moment when he understood that things could get serious. He was unable to stop the thoughts that flew off into the future, there to branch out in all directions, as if he were standing at a crossroads, covering every possible ski route at the same time — and all in order to determine whether she was the person he hoped she would be. Within a matter of seconds he found himself delving, despite his youth and lack of experience, deep into the exhausted possibilities of wedded life, into the petty arguments of a fifteen-year-old marriage; and not only that, he also explored all of the alternative forks in the road, the various, hypothetical paths in life he encountered at different points along the way. He stood there gazing into her eyes, and in his mind he saw their first kiss, actually saw quite vividly how he caught the taste of raspberry jam, then saw them going to the cinema and, weeks later, how he touched her breasts — from outside a flannel shirt, it’s true; how he had dinner at her house, not only that, but that they had grouse, shot by her father, and then how, late one evening, in front of a roaring fire he slipped his hand between her legs; how they got engaged, the mad, passionate lovemaking in a sleeping bag; how they got married, the speech she made at the wedding, their first child, buying a house — log-built — dinners with friends, the general wear and tear, the quarrels over lopsided cheese-cutting. Everyone knows the expression ‘to undress her with his eyes’. Jonas carried on where others left off. Not only was Jonas Wergeland capable of simulating an orgasm, he could simulate an entire marriage.

They struggled back up the hillside to Sinober. She kept her body pressed close against his the whole time, acting almost as a crutch. They phoned from the café. Haakon Hansen drove up through Nittedal to collect him. As Jonas shut the car door she stared at him through the window with eyes that made him quake. He was hers, those eyes said, or so Jonas imagined. And she wanted him as he was now, hurt, an invalid of sorts, someone on whom she could take pity, care for, help. Jonas did not know whether he was misinterpreting all this. His mother had once hinted that maybe he took life too seriously. Sometimes Jonas thought that he also took love too seriously. Or was too scared. Scared of being disappointed. Scared of finding that not only the world but love, too, was flat. In other words: scared of catching Melankton’s syndrome.

When he returned to school a couple of days later, she came straight over to him at the morning break, wanting to hold his hand, to show that they were going together, although there had been no talk of this between them. He refused, but again she had looked at him with that feverish expression on her face which told him that any rebuff would be lost on her. At every break that day she came running happily up to him and groped eagerly for one of his hands. He kept them in his pocket.

By the last interval of the day the penny had finally dropped. ‘I can’t go out with you,’ he said, barely managing to get the words out before she grabbed him roughly and threw him to the ground, hard, right down into the slush. More in desperation than in anger. Several of the others saw it, whispered. She walked off. She sounded as though she was crying. Jonas could not understand how someone so apparently robust and strong-minded could react in such a way.

Then, one night in March when Jonas was just on his way to bed, the whole family heard someone shouting out on the flag green. They went to the windows. In the centre of the patch of lawn between the blocks of flats stood Eva N. in her red anorak, calling his name. Loudly and clearly. And broken-heartedly. Daniel almost killed himself laughing, but his mother shushed him sternly.

No one would ever forget that night. Eva had brought something with her. It looked like a cartridge-case. She did something to the top before holding the tube straight up above her head. For a moment Jonas was afraid that she was going to set light to herself, like those Buddhist monks in Vietnam. Up shot a rocket, a coruscating streak, hundreds of metres long, accompanied by a whistling sound. It was a distress flare. Jonas remembered that her father had a boat. The flare exploded high in the sky above the flats. People had come out onto their balconies, they stared up at the bright red ball slowly descending on a tiny parachute. Falling gently and gracefully, burning with a strange intensity. The whole of Grorud seemed to be bathed in red light. And in the scant two minutes for which it lasted, the girl on the grass called Jonas’s name, just his name, helplessly almost, as if she was crying out to be saved, rather than loved. As if she was saying: ‘Look, I am bleeding.’

It was all very embarrassing, of course. That the family, the whole estate, should have been witness to this drama. Mr Iversen was cursing under his breath about people turning a March night into New Year’s Eve, robbing him of his once-a-year shot at the limelight. ‘It’s against the law,’ he muttered. ‘It’s sheer madness.’

At the same time Jonas could not help feeling rather proud. Here was this girl, in the middle of the flag green, and so in love with him that she did not care two hoots whether she was making a fool of herself in front of the whole estate. It was almost as though, standing there on that March night in the red glow from the flare — in a vast darkroom, if you like — she thought that she could develop love. It may well have been madness. But, looked at another way: she had nothing to lose. She was in distress. She did it in order to save herself, Jonas thought to himself. She wanted to maximise the crisis, so to speak, get the heartache over and done with. From that point of view the red light was the saving of her. And who knows, maybe she recalled this episode, in many ways a heroic deed, years later — by which time she was a famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions — when she saved her own life by sending up a similar parachute flare in Antarctis after her kayak was wrecked and she was left drifting on a large ice floe.

But to get back to the red thread of our story: Jonas was well-equipped to identify with Blow-Up — a film that revolved around a room suffused with red light in which an individual produced more and more blurred enlargements of smaller and smaller sections of a photograph. It was a film about the mystery of the image, all images. It was a film which quite simply questioned the nature of reality. Do we see what we see? Or, in Jonas Wergeland’s version: Are you in love when you are in love?

Somewhat against their will, both Jonas and Leonard were drawn further and further into Michelangelo Antonioni’s universe. Something was happening to them. Very gradually. Jonas began to feel unwell. His wrath turned to perplexity. They were looking for answers, but were given nothing but questions. They wanted to train their eye, hone it, but instead found themselves losing confidence in it. Leonard did not know that he was soon to lose confidence in everything, including his own origins.

For them this was a time of confusion. They ate their spaghetti with an ever growing repertoire of sauces: tuna with olives and tomatoes, a cream sauce with ham and leeks, while their discussions became more and more woolly. As their uncertainty and sense of alienation grew, so the Red Room underwent a metamorphosis. Leonard — now simply Leonardo — had started replacing the familiar photographs from Aktuell, hung on the walls by his father, with others. He removed from its frame the picture from Norsk Hydro of workers stacking bars of aluminium and in its stead put a still from Fellini’s 8½. A photograph of miners on Svalbard was supplanted by a shot from The Red Desert of Monica Vitti in an industrial wasteland. Reality was giving way to fiction. They hardly ever left the basement now; day after day they sat in the Red Room eating pasta and discussing films they had seen, films they had not seen and films which Leonardo envisaged making. Jonas would not emerge from this state of confusion and woolliness until he rediscovered both his wrath and a focus for it through taking part in a spectacular demonstration in the Town Hall Square. By then Leonardo was long gone.

Later, Jonas would think it only natural that their almost parodically artificial existence should explode into pitiless reality. He was spending less time with Leonard by then, having started at Oslo Cathedral School. And there was no way that Leonard, or even a befuddled Leonardo, was going all the way into the city to attend some toffee-nosed school. ‘You’re a traitor to your class,’ he muttered to Jonas, in a brief flashback to their early, neo-realistic glory days in the Red Room. Leonard went on to a high school in the Grorud Valley. Though with a heavy coat swinging from his shoulders like a cape.

Leonard’s dreadful discovery was made shortly after his last hike with his father. It was years since they had gone hill-walking together, but it may be that Leonard was making an effort to shake himself awake, thinking that the Norwegian mountains and fresh air would form a counterbalance to the Red Room and the flickering images of individuals incapable of making contact with one another. In the summer of 1970 he and his father went walking in the hills around Aurlandsdalen and it was here that Olav Knutzen took a picture which would eventually find its way into a host of yearbooks and reference works. Because by this time a new trend had long been apparent in the media: they would all — every last news outlet — descend on one spot. Everyone covering the same story. And even though at one time there had been some debate about Aurlandsdalen and the question of inalienable natural heritage versus energy needs, in the press as well as in an uproarious edition of television’s Open to Question chaired by the Grand Panjandrum himself, Kjell Arnljot Wig, the focus shifted away from Aurlandsdalen with the advent of the Mardøla affair. That summer, the eyes of the nation were on the great falls in the Møre og Romsdal region and a demonstration during which protesters, including professor of philosophy Arne Næss, were gently and politely carted off by the police. Meanwhile, in Aurlandsdalen, the Oslo Electricity Board could quietly get on with the work of damming Viddalsvatn and the waters beyond to form one huge lake, without anyone blocking the broad construction road with so much as a twig. So, with the accuracy of a Zen master, Olav Knutzen took the only photograph from Låvisdalen recording the merest hint of a demonstration, a faint protest, at least, against the development which got under way here in June of the same year as the Mardøla project. It was an important piece of documentary evidence, this picture, which is also why it has been reproduced so often; because in Norway it is Aurlandsdalen, and not Mardøla, which represents a watershed in the history of nature conservation; the Aurlandsdalen controversy was proof that an element of reflection had bored its way into all views on constant progress, heedless growth — something which led, among other things, to the establishment a couple of years later of an environmental protection agency. Olav Knutzen took his snap at the point when work had just begun on a structure of pyramid-like dimensions, a dam 100 metres in height and 370 metres in length and as broad at its base as it was tall. This photograph — in the background of which one can see the building contractor, Furholmen’s, massive construction machines at the foot of the dam, as well as some summer steadings which would soon be under water — shows Leonard with a wry little grin on his face — whether of confusion or anger Jonas could never decide. In his hand he holds a placard bearing the legend: ‘SAVE THE DALE’. Although perhaps what it should have said, or so Jonas would later think, was ‘Save the illusion’.

That same autumn Leonard got in touch with Jonas, and as soon as Jonas entered the basement room he knew that something was badly wrong. The aroma of simmering pasta sauce was noticeably absent. His friend greeted him with a face as deadpan as Buster Keaton’s. ‘I’ve made a horrible discovery,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned something that has changed my life. I’m not the person I thought I was.’

At the time Jonas had merely laughed at him, but much the same thought was to strike him years later, before his trip to Samarkand. The fact is, you see, that Jonas went all the way to Samarkand, to that blow-up in his mind, because he was in something of a dilemma regarding his future. He felt the need, therefore, to find some place far beyond the real world, a place where he could contemplate himself and his life at the greatest possible remove. And without realising it he fell back on Leonard’s choice of words: I am not the person I think I am. In short, Jonas set out on the long journey to Samarkand in order to discover himself.

After having sat for a long time exposing himself, exposing his body to the intricate beauty still discernible in the faded façades on Registan Square, Jonas got to his feet with the vague idea of visiting a nearby museum. It was at this moment that someone placed a hand, very lightly, on his shoulder. Jonas turned round and stared in bewilderment into the face of a man around his own age. He must have been sitting right behind him, in his blind spot, so to speak. The stranger smiled at the way Jonas started. ‘Tourist?’ he inquired, in pretty good English. ‘I did not think I would ever see a tourist here.’

Jonas was in no way prepared for what happened next. Although he ought to have been prepared. He was in a strange state of mind. And he was in Samarkand.

‘And you?’ Jonas asked.

‘I too am a tourist, although I suppose you could say this is my own country,’ the young man said.

Jonas was still feeling somewhat shaken by the sight of the other man. His features seemed disconcertingly familiar. Something about him filled Jonas with an uneasy curiosity. ‘I am from Leningrad,’ the young man said. ‘My name is Yuri.’ He offered his hand, they shook. Jonas also introduced himself, finished by saying ‘Norway’. As if it were a mantra. It never failed. Norway was a word which elicited a response from people, no matter where, as if they immediately associated it with something exotic, even those who did not even know that Norway was a country. The thought struck Jonas: there might be people in the world for whom Norway was a Samarkand, a spot so unreal that it acquired a magical, seductive aura.

Not so with Yuri. When he heard where Jonas was from he pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something down on it with a pencil, so vehemently that the graphite virtually flew in all directions. He handed the slip to Jonas. Then he waited, in evident suspense, as if he had just handed over a passport which would gain him immediate entry into Jonas’s world. On the paper was a fractional equation: figures and letters and infinity symbols. Jonas could make neither head nor tail of it. ‘Abel,’ said Yuri. ‘Abel!’ he repeated, even more emphatically, pointing at the piece of paper. ‘From a proof of convergence criteria.’

Jonas realised that this had to be an extract from one of Niels Henrik Abel’s theorems, did not dare to admit that he was completely stumped, even though he had attended the same school as Norway’s greatest mathematician. He merely nodded. Affected to nod enthusiastically, knowingly.

‘One of my teachers showed me this,’ Yuri said. ‘He called Abel the Pushkin of mathematics. The poet of algebra.’

Jonas was quite taken aback by the thought of a country where a school-teacher could be acquainted with such advanced mathematics. Unless, of course, there was talk here of a Russian Mr Dehli. Jonas was intrigued by this: Abel, a Norwegian name and at the same time a word, a fascinating word at that, in a universal language. Abel and Samarkand could have been said to belong to the same word-class.

He considered politely taking his leave. He had been planning to visit a museum and then Timur Lenk’s mausoleum. He was constantly reminded by his surroundings of his mongoloid younger brother, Benjamin; Samarkand had been one of the Mongols’ cities, first destroyed by Genghis Khan, then designated their capital by the mighty Timur Lenk, or Tamburlaine, one of those restless rulers who had shaken the world.

But when Yuri invited Jonas to accompany him to a nearby chaikhana, or tea house, Jonas knew right away that this person was more important than any historic sight, more important, even, than Timur Lenk who had made the whole world tremble. Minutes later they were sitting surrounded by old men wearing turban-like headgear or small embroidered skullcaps, drinking tea under large, retouched photographs of Communist leaders. Yuri told him a little about himself. His father was a musician, a pianist; his mother worked in a shop selling ironmongery. He had an older sister who, when she wasn’t driving a truck, did nothing but read novels. ‘And I have a brother, a year older than me,’ Yuri said with a smile. ‘A real tearaway. Best at everything. And an incorrigible womaniser.’

Round about them men were eating shaslik or plov. Some were playing the mandatory chess or dominoes. Jonas heard what Yuri was saying, but tried to distance himself from it. He was in a ferment. The worst of it was that he knew what was coming. And come it did. ‘I also have a little brother with Down’s syndrome,’ Yuri said. ‘Do you know what that is?’

Jonas nodded. Took a sip of his green tea. Glanced round about, glanced out of the window. Dusk was falling. He ought to be getting back to his hotel. He felt dizzy, disoriented. He had been in a kind of trance ever since he had looked deep into the walls of the buildings on Registan Square, gazed into flat surfaces which had suddenly, as a whole, assumed a depth — or no, not depth: many dimensions, more than three.

The young Russian was still talking about his little brother with Down’s syndrome. Jonas was dreading the revelation of one particular fact. That, too, was forthcoming. ‘It was all my fault,’ Yuri said. ‘I won’t go into detail, but it was because of me that my mother had that baby.’

Jonas sat for a while saying nothing, hardly dared to ask. But: ‘What do you do?’ he said.

What was he to think if the young man opposite him told him that he was going to university, but that he had still not made up his mind which subject to study.

‘I’ve just been offered a job in television,’ his companion said.

Jonas breathed a sigh of relief. Some of his sense of unease left him.

‘Television,’ he said, laughing out of utter relief. ‘What’s so exciting about that?’

‘It’s the future — I thought everybody knew that,’ Yuri said, genuinely amazed that anyone should respond in such a way; not only that, but a young man from what could almost be described as an eastern province of the USA. ‘I want to make programmes,’ Yuri said. ‘Programmes that will work a change in people, make them think differently. Without that there is no hope for this bizarre country, these countries. You see — I can say this to you — Communism is already dead.’ The way he said this, lowering his voice and glancing wryly at the portraits of Politburo members, allowed Jonas to laugh even more.

It was almost dark when they left the tea house. Yuri pulled Jonas towards a bus. ‘I want to show you something that far too few people know about,’ he said. They alighted in the north-eastern quarter of the city and walked up a hill. Jonas thought they must have come there for the view, but Yuri headed towards a small building. A man was just locking up. Yuri spoke to him, beckoned to Jonas. They could go in. It transpired that hidden away inside this building, a simple vaulted structure, was something extraordinary: a hollow cut out of the rock face. This was all that was left, Yuri told him, of Ulug Beg’s massive observatory; a circular building thirty-five metres high. They were standing next to the remains of a gigantic instrument. Yuri explained that this was part of a narrow meridian arc, two parallel rails covered in polished marble slabs. He pointed to incisions in the stone, marking the degrees. This instrument had been used to make various astronomical observations. Jonas looked at the arc, tried to imagine the rest of it extending towards the heavens. It looked like a ramp.

They were back on the square outside. The weather was clear. The points of light in the darkness above their heads seemed unusually close. ‘I am going to use the television camera like a telescope,’ Yuri said. ‘I mean to find the stars on earth, among my own people.’ He said this lightly, but something in his voice spoke of serious intent.

They both stood with their heads tilted back. This place, the remains of the observatory, inspired them to assume this position. ‘Did it ever cross your mind that we could give the constellations new names, start from scratch, if you like?’ Yuri asked. When Jonas did not reply Yuri went on talking, but his voice began to fade, as if Jonas were being picked up, carried off. Which was only natural. Because, having achieved what was just about the most impossible thing on earth and made it to Samarkand, to the edge of a flat world, there was only one way to go and that was out. Samarkand was one big launch pad. With his head tilted back, his eyes fixed on the stars, Jonas realised that he would have to go beyond Samarkand; he had to get out there — out into space — to find the spot for which he was searching.

So, for anyone who still has not grasped it, it was here, on a little hill in Samarkand, that Jonas Wergeland decided to study astrophysics, to take the step, so to speak, from the Silk Road to the Milky Way. Here, in Uzbekistan, possibly due to the limpid blue his eyes beheld on the domes of the mosques, or because of the stars in the mosaic patterns of the Ulug Beg madrasah doorway on Registan Square, suddenly, although never before, not for one moment, had he considered such a move, he took the first step into a realm of red dwarfs and supergiants and black holes and hundreds upon mind-blowing hundreds of billions of galaxies. It struck him that astronomy could be his Samarkand. A standpoint from which he would be able to see everything, including the world, from the outside. After all, it goes without saying really: there is only one reason for taking up astrophysics: a desire to understand the Earth. Or, to be more precise: a desire to understand oneself.

And Margrete was probably still there at the back of his mind, in the form of a belief that concealed within science there was alchemy, that there was, nonetheless, a link between astronomy and astrology. Jonas may have been hoping, through research, through some grandiose project, to influence future occurrences, alter predestined chains of events. In other words: if he could make his name shine, quite literally, all across the sky, maybe she would see it. Come back.

Later, when Aunt Laura asked him, what he had found in Samarkand, Jonas answered without a second thought: ‘In Samarkand I met myself.’

After his hike around Aurlandsdalen Leonard had made a similar discovery, though of a more down-to-earth nature, more brutal and shocking. And sitting, battered and bruised, you might say, in a basement no longer redolent with delicious pasta sauces, he told Jonas all about it. Jonas always felt that the moment of Leonard’s revelation should have been illustrated with a slow-motion sequence like the one at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, the climax of the film, when a building blows up and we see the explosion replayed thirteen times from different angles and distances. To cut a long story short, Leonard had found out that his father, Olav Knutzen, was not in fact his father. Leonard had been every bit as blind as the central character in Blow-Up; he had not seen what was going on in the bushes, as it were.

So who was his father? Leonard met Jonas one Friday afternoon on Youngstorget — which, by the way, standing as it now does as a monument to a sacred, bygone ideal, is the closest one comes in Oslo to Samarkand’s Registan Square. They hung around on the corner of the Trade Union building for half an hour. Jonas thought they were waiting for Leonard’s mother, who worked there. Leonard said nothing, just hopped up and down impatiently. Suddenly he pointed to a man coming out of a bank across the street which was now closed for the day. ‘That’s him,’ Leonard sobbed. ‘That’s my father.’ Jonas refused to believe it. A smarmy little git, a dark, skinny guy in a blue suit, with slicked-back black hair. He could actually have passed for an Italian, maybe even a film director, but he was just about the very opposite of Olav Knutzen with his weighty, Nobel laureate presence. His name was Dale and Leonard was one jump ahead of Jonas in himself acknowledging the irony of the legend on the placard he was holding up in the by then published photograph from that summer: SAVE THE DALE. ‘And shall I tell you what the worst part is?’ Leonard said. ‘He works in a bank, on the cash desk.’ Jonas remembered Leonard’s vituperative, indignant rants against bankers and banking, prompted by the story of how Antonioni had had to earn his living early on in his career. From the way Leonard spoke it sounded to Jonas as though his friend were pronouncing his own death sentence. Leonard had such a morbid obsession with heredity that one look at that little shrimp, his biological father, was enough to tell him that those genes offered no hope whatsoever. Such a man could not possibly sire a prince.

Jonas never did learn how Leonard had found out about it. Whether it was just that his mother had finally got round to telling him, or whether he had, quite by accident, caught something going on in the background while filming the everyday doings on Youngstorget; something which he had blown up, enlarging it until he could make out a detail — a clue. Or whether it should simply be put down to a keen-honed eye. What if a young bank clerk had lodged with the Knutzens when they were just setting up house together, what if the basement really had been a darkroom, a red-lamped love nest.

Whatever the case, this discovery fairly took the wind out of Leonard’s sails. The way he saw it, he no longer had the letters OK, Olav Knutzen’s initials, stamped on him. And in losing the ’z’ in his name, he seemed also to have lost a vital chromosome — that lightning bolt, that flash — the guarantee of a good eye. All Leonard’s grand, elaborate plans were quashed. That ’z’ now seemed more emblematic of sleep. He dropped out of school, shelved his cine camera and the outline for a twelve-minute 8 mm film on reduction, and away he went.

Or at least, before he disappeared he asked Jonas to please meet him at the Film Institute at Røa. Jonas had duly shown up, fearing the worst. They were alone. Jonas was ordered to take a seat in the screening room, and there he sat, surrounded by forty-six other, empty, seats while Leonard ran the film. Which film? Blow-Up. But this was a new version. Leonard had re-edited it. Jonas sat all alone in the screening room, watching the film. He was impressed. And intrigued. Because this was a totally different story. Less confusing. As if the gap between art and reality had been edited out. And as far as Jonas could tell, the murder was actually solved. The film, or rather: Leonard’s version of it, ended with the central character going to his studio to photograph, and more or less seduce Verushka, the fabulous fashion model: a scene which, in the original film, came right at the beginning. It was pretty close to a happy ending.

Jonas was often to think that the roots of his best and most famous television programmes were to be found here, in a tiny cinema in the Oslo suburb of Røa. He sometimes thought of the Thinking Big series as being just one film, cut in different ways.

On the way back to town, Leonard told him that some kind soul at the offices of the film’s Norwegian distributor had given him a worn-out copy which was actually due to be scrapped. And a sympathetic person at the Film Institute had let him use the cutting desk there. So? What did Jonas think? There was a note of anxiety in Leonard’s voice. What he had done might well seem like sacrilege. To re-edit Blow-Up — it was tantamount to re-editing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Jonas did not know what to say. In time he would come to see that Leonard had possibly been conducting an experiment inspired by genetic engineering. He wanted to prove to Jonas that he could reconstruct himself. That there was hope, despite his little shrimp of a bank teller father. But at the time Jonas could not see anything to suggest that Leonard had succeeded in his venture. All the light seemed to have gone out of his friend’s dark eyes. There was not a spark. Only blackness. As if a shutter had dropped down for good and all.

Then Leonard Knutzen disappeared. Someone said that he had gone to India, that he took LSD and had long since blown his mind out completely. Others claimed to have seen him, or someone who looked like him, in the centre of Copenhagen, carrying a sign — or probably a placard — in the shape of a big hand pointing to a dive down a side street, the sort of place where, in the very early seventies, you could see grainy German porn movies.

Jonas thought often of how fragile a life was, how very, very little it took to knock a person off course. Or onto a new course. You bend down to tie your shoelaces and when you straighten up again your life has changed. Jonas himself had been an astonished witness to the moment when Daniel, high on innumerable easy victories, was suddenly brought face to face with the gravity of life. Jonas never really understood his brother, but he would have bet anything in the world that Daniel would never have become anything as outrageously far-fetched as a minister of the church.

That autumn Daniel had little thought for anything but his prospects as a star athlete; he was going through a phase when he was, in many ways, at his most intolerable, a tearaway disguised as a rebel, Daniel X with his black-gloved fist. Almost as if it were a natural extension of stretching his muscles after a tough training session, he started going out with a girl who sang in a Ten Sing choir. When it came to getting into a girl’s pants, Daniel was not fussy; it was okay by him even if the girl in question was a member of something as soulless and unmusical as one of those YWCA choirs: spotty teenagers singing off-key, backed by a band with badly tuned guitars — a nigh-on blasphemous set-up, in Daniel’s eyes, and about as far from Aretha Franklin’s gut-wrenching, wailful ecstasies as you could get.

It took more than the Queen of Soul and her seductive gospel strains to bring Daniel to the scripture, though. Jonas began to notice that Daniel seemed unusually agitated, then one evening he confessed to his little brother: he had knocked up his girlfriend. He was as desperately certain as you can only be when you are sixteen and have finally ‘done it’, with all the imprudence and raw self-assurance of the first-timer. Jonas could not resist it: ‘Maybe you should have put a black glove on your dick as well,’ he said. His brother, who would normally have flattened him for that, pretended not to hear, and instead went on cursing his spermatozoa, those microscopic champion swimmers that could make a woman’s body swell up like a balloon. He admitted to Jonas that suddenly he was seeing pregnant women all over the place. Wherever he looked there were people with prams and packs of nappies. He was done for. He could already see the headlines: ‘Grorud’s youngest parents.’

It was in this frame of mind that Daniel attended one of the last athletics meets of the year, and at the Jordal Amfi Arena, more specifically in the long-jump pit, he felt a higher power taking a hand in his life.

Daniel was an unusually gifted athlete and had always been particularly good at the long jump. He loved the combination of sprinting and jumping; he revelled in the challenge of hitting the board just right. So he was not at all happy with his first jump of five metres and twenty-seven centimetres — he was used to jumping around six metres. It could not just have been a case of nerves, a slight loss of concentration at the thought of a Ten Sing girl who was alarmingly ‘late’. Something had held him back in the air, he said later. A weight, a heaviness, as if there were some connection between gravidity and gravity. This feeling was even more pronounced on his second jump, when he hit the board perfectly and yet — as if the gravitational force had somehow doubled — jumped a shorter distance than normal. When the measuring crew announced the length — the same as before: ‘Daniel: 5.27’ — he did not give it too much thought. But when, on his third and last jump — the schedule at this meet only allowed for three tries — he jumped exactly five metres and twenty-seven centimetres yet again, he began to wonder. For the first time in his career, Daniel walked away from the long-jump pit without a medal.

Over the next few days, his mood exacerbated no doubt by growing anxiety over his girlfriend’s overdue period, Daniel started to give some serious thought to his weird result in the long-jump: 5.27 three times in a row — that was more than a coincidence. And with his natural propensity for speculation, it was not long before he consulted the old Family Bible, on the principle that a long-jump result was like a grain of manna, a little slip of paper that you picked out of a bowl, like a tombola ticket. Although he had never believed a word of it before, at that particular moment he was sure that the scripture would determine the course of his life. In the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 27, once he had managed to decipher the elaborate Gothic lettering, he slowly read to himself, with eyes as wide, surely, as those of King Belshazzar himself: ‘TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.’ The context, together with Gustav Doré’s dramatic illustration, left him in no doubt: the writing was on the wall. Weighed and found wanting.

Daniel knew what this meant. His soul was too light. For someone as concerned with the health and well-being of the soul as Daniel was, there could be no harsher verdict. At an early age he had read how certain religions believed that the soul was placed in a scale after death. If it proved too light it was cast into the jaws of a monster which sat next to the seat of judgement waiting to receive it. To Daniel this Bible text could mean only one thing: she was pregnant.

Although, there might still be hope. What if this were a final warning from a merciful God? Daniel fell to his knees. Just at that moment Jonas walked in, then pulled up short on the threshold. He could not believe his eyes. Daniel with his back to him, on his knees next to the bed. Daniel the rebel, a pig-headed bugger who had never in his life bowed down to anything. Softly and, if the truth be told, a mite fearfully Jonas retreated. What his brother said, what he prayed for, what he promised — because he must have made some sort of deal — Jonas never discovered. But from that day onwards Daniel W. Hansen was a Christian. You might say that he rotated his X forty-five degrees, turning it into a cross. And I hardly need say: there was no pregnancy. Soon afterwards, Daniel’s girlfriend came to see him, all smiles, to tell him that everything was okay. For days afterwards, Jonas could hear Daniel humming to himself when he thought he was alone, and Jonas’s hearing was good enough for him to recognise the hymn: ‘Hallelujah, my soul is free.’

Daniel kept his promise, though. He remained a Christian. It may be that his time as Daniel X had merely been a harbinger of what was to come, as Jonas had thought — an intimation of an unknown x inside him, a religious chamber. If, that is, he did not believe that he had at last found the field which had been there waiting for his rebellious heart. To Jonas it was nothing short of a miracle. Proof that at any moment a person can suddenly change. So when other, normally peaceable individuals suddenly became raging revolutionaries, Daniel, with his slumbering, inborn talent for rebellion, was holed up indoors with his nose buried in his Bible, as if he had already started studying theology, embarked upon his career in the church. He had found his Samarkand. His life had acquired weight.

Leonard Knutzen, too, gained weight. Or at least his wallet did. Years later, when Jonas rarely ever thought of his old friend, Leonard’s name suddenly appeared in the newspapers. Although eventually the headlines spoke simply of Leonardo. In photographs his coat was always slung over his shoulders like a cape, a touch which now seemed elegant rather than affected. And his eyes looked keen again. The first article appeared in conjunction with a much publicised exhibition of works by young Norwegian photographers. Leonard Knutzen had put up the money for the exhibition. A lot of money. Leonard Knutzen was a rich man. Fabulously rich. But no one, not even in media circles had ever come across his name before. He lived abroad. Leonard had quietly made himself a fortune on the stock market. The image of him presented in the press was of a shrewd individual much to be admired, a financial artist; it was them, the media, who nicknamed him Leonardo, without knowing anything of his heroic past as the Italian-inspired director of a good number of twelve-minute 8 mm films full of scooters and people gazing in different directions. Leonard had done it — done what he had shown he could do with Blow-Up in that tiny cinema at Røa. He had actually re-cut his own fate. He had used the art of montage to create a new life for himself. Or perhaps one should simply say that he had enlarged himself.

To Jonas, Leonard seemed the very personification of modern Norway — a nation which led the most anonymous, the most discreet, of existences, alongside the other nations of the world, while the money simply poured into the state coffers. Likewise, Leonard sat in his faraway office, pressing buttons, unremarked by anyone in his native country, while the money pumped into his offshore accounts. The press’s glowing reports of Leonardo’s doings reminded Jonas of a conjuring trick. Leonard was now blowing up money, he could take a krone and, by dint of an abstract, magical process, magnify it into ten. Both Leonard and Norway had discovered that you did not need to work — or not, at least, in the old-fashioned physical fashion depicted in Aktuell magazine — in order to get rich. Leonard had finally found a use for his keen eye. That was still the key. An eye for where to put one’s money. An eye for the perfect stock. In interviews he said, half in jest, that he supposed he might be a Leonardo when it came to spying investment opportunities which no one else believed possible. To Jonas it seemed more as though Leonard had determined to blow the abilities, the genes, of a lousy bank teller into something great. He had produced a happy ending, against all odds, and in spite of the original film.

On the other hand, Jonas also had the definite impression that for Leonard the driving force was still wrath. That Leonard had rediscovered some of the Italian temperament from those evenings in the Red Room, a little of the bite of all those spicy sauces they had spooned over their pasta. The fiery grindings of the pepper mill. Either that or he had accomplished something which only very few ever manage: to preserve some of the indignation which we tend and nurture so carefully in our youth. Jonas could not help thinking that one should possibly take this as a lesson. Maybe everyone should have a little placard stuck to the fridge door of their settled, routine existences, a slip of paper saying: SAVE THE WRATH.

All the write-ups on Leonard Knutzen did, however, also lead Jonas to immerse himself in much more serious reflections. He was reminded of another time. He had, he recalled, not only been mad at the world. Once he had actually tried to open up the world. In junior high he had met a master, a schoolmaster, and before that Bo Wang Lee.