The Seducer

Cities in Belgium

Jonas Wergeland is writing a’s in his copybook. He knows that he is involved in a solemn undertaking; he knows intuitively that this is a privilege, this fact of being able to sit here writing a’s. He had covered his copybook himself with the most fabulous waxed paper, carefully selected from the host of rolls in the stationer’s, in the most uncommon pattern possible. On the front is a label bearing his name, a label like the ones his mother stuck on the jam jars, as if to show that this book, this memory, has to be stored away, preserved in his recollection. Jonas dips his pen in the inkwell, a cheap plastic pen: black at the end where he fixed the nib and with a pale-blue shaft. Jonas writes another row of a’s, relishing the pressure of nib on paper, watches the wet ink slowly soaking into the fibres and drying, the tiny particles on the white surface bringing it home to him that writing is something concrete and palpable, a bit like his aunt engraving silver, he writes as neatly as he can — a a a a a a a — like a sigh of delight, something ecstatic, then draws a border. Borders are tricky, but there has to be a border. Jonas realizes that borders are important; they are ornamentation, they are a sign that the letters are not only letters but also something more, something beautiful: decoration or symbols harbouring a significance that extends far beyond the sound of ‘a’ or the word in which the letter appears. Jonas writes a’s, small characters that are like windows, openings onto other rooms, possibilities he has never seen before. The teacher comes over, she draws a lovely flower — Jonas has never seen such a lovely flower — in the bottom corner. Although his a’s are far from perfect and the borders are a bit crooked, she draws a make-believe flower as if to show that this — these a’s and borders — are as furrows ploughed in fertile soil in which almost anything can be made to grow.

Jonas Wergeland had not always been so sceptical of school. High school was one thing, elementary school was quite another. Where high school had represented a closing off, elementary school constituted an opening up. To the boy Jonas, those first years at elementary school were as exciting as the rugs in Aunt Laura’s flat, which is just about the greatest compliment a school could be paid: they were doors leading to wonderful rooms.

In Jonas Wergeland’s life there were only two sorts of school: the good and the indifferent. Elementary school was good, while junior high, high school and university were all indifferent. One could go so far as to say that Jonas Wergeland only ever had an elementary-school education, since this was the only public institution to teach him anything — the rest of his education he took care of himself.

Bearing in mind the fashion these days in literary circles for depicting the first years at school as a child’s worst nightmare, with teachers outdoing one another in acts of calculated terrorism, and pupils lying awake at night twisting their eiderdown covers into knots and muttering the most unlikely things to themselves, usually in Latin, I would like to present another, slightly different picture, not least because, from where I stand, it seems a mite strange, excuse me for saying so, that so many Norwegians — oddly enough, almost invariably people who have done very well for themselves — are forever whingeing about childhood and schooldays when one considers the less than idyllic conditions in schools in other parts of the world, where something as basic as a blank sheet of paper is like gold.

What I am saying is that when it comes to Jonas Wergeland’s elementary school, to Grorud School, you have to dispense with all the horror stories found in books and newspapers. Grorud School was no different from other state elementary schools of that time. It looked exactly as a school should: a great mastodon of a brick building with such standard features as drinking fountains with holes that you could press your finger over and send jets of water shooting sky-high, not to mention right in the face of some poor first-grader; a shed behind which to sneak a quick puff and lavatories in the basement where the girls could share their acquired knowledge in secret, and the boys, just as secretly, could spurt out their semen after catching an unbearably arousing peek of the English teacher’s bra between two of her blouse buttons.

As far as Jonas was concerned, elementary school had nothing to do with the search for truth; it was a place where one was presented with certain fundamental options. The most important lesson, or gift, he received there was an awareness of the infinite number of things about which he would never be any the wiser.

Jonas’s first-grade teacher was related to the poet and churchman Anders Hovden, and she taught her pupils a number of Hovden’s, permit me to say, very beautiful songs. Jonas loved to stand beside his desk, like a little candle burning in the night, to use a metaphor often attributed to young schoolchildren, singing ‘Fagert er landet’ along with the rest of the class. And what did this song teach him? It taught him that language is music, that there is more to words than their superficial significance; there is sound and rhythm. The fact is, you see, that Jonas did not understand the half of what he was singing at the top of his voice, singing out loud and clear, because it is written in Norway’s other language: nynorsk. But he loved this tune, the way these words fell one after the other, ‘soli ho sprett og ho glader’; more than anything else this ‘soli ho sprett og ho glader’ was an enigma, beautiful and incomprehensible, of which he never tired, that and the first lines of the second verse: ‘Likjest vårt folk i mager jord/skjelvende blomen på bøen’. Then there was another one, ‘Handi hans far min’, just as beautiful with its totally unfathomable lines, ‘Fekk ho sin svip av den tungføre år i andror so mang ei stund’, which sounded so wonderful that you had to rise up on to your tiptoes and shut your eyes. No one had to tell Jonas that words were objects containing layer upon layer of deep secrets. Indeed, after this, the whole dispute over the Norwegian language, or languages, was beyond Jonas — a fact I throw in, in the full knowledge of the, to an outsider, almost farcical fights that Norwegians will get into over the New Norwegian question. New Norwegian was a language which Jonas would have liked to have learned, had not so many teachers, with their cramming and fanaticism, eventually rendered this a lost cause.

Of course, it always helped to be in the same class as Nefertiti, who knew that nothing of what they learned could be taken for granted, that the bulk of it was based on arbitrary, historically and geographically determined attitudes and information and was, therefore — to their teacher’s understandable consternation — forever addressing herself to the most bizarre questions and pursuits. She could, for example, spend a while gazing at her blotting paper and then, prompted by this, suddenly get to her feet, unasked, and tell the class how a guy called Leonardo da Vinci used to make notes using mirror writing, just think — mirror writing! Whereupon every member of the class would turn to studying his or her own blotting paper. Either that or she might draw a picture of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and when the teacher, not the one, it should be said, with the Anders Hovden hymns, asked with ill-concealed annoyance why in the world she had the trees casting purple shadows, Nefertiti would reply without so much as looking up: ‘Because Gauguin did it that way.’ Again she might sit for a whole hour staring at her pencil and ruler to finally, at the end of the class, raise her hand and say, ‘Please Miss, why do we only use twelve centimetres of the eighteen-centimetre pencils we buy?’ Now Miss had never given this much thought — and who can blame her? But then Nefertiti would say: ‘I think it’s really stupid that we have to throw six centimetres away.’ ‘What makes you say that?’ Miss felt moved to ask although she feared the worst. To which Nefertiti replied, ‘Because the annual global production of pencils stands at fourteen billion, which means that 20,000 trees are felled every year just to fill our rubbish bins.’ As I say, Nefertiti was one of a kind. Jonas knew, and it saddened his heart, that she was too good for this world, that she had a head as fragile as terracotta.

Speaking of trees, the woodwork room was, not surprisingly, a glorious fund of substance and smells. Jonas so enjoyed his first encounter with a plane — the resistance offered by the wood, and the transparent wood shavings — that he planed what was meant to be a chopping board right down to a spindly stick. When the teacher asked what he was doing, he pointed to the coiling shavings and asked if he could take them home. As for handwork, generally regarded as a girls’ subject, this was, if possible, even more fun. Jonas never quite grasped how, with the aid of two needles and a length of wool, one could in principle create a never-ending garment, not to mention the difference between plain and purl; right away Jonas had to try, out of sheer curiosity, to knit a scarf using nothing but purl stitches.

This was the elementary school where Jonas Wergeland learned something, an idyllic place where details were left undisturbed and could be appreciated one by one for the miracles they were. Because it was the opening up of subjects that Jonas found fascinating, the door that was flung wide, allowing you to simply run right in and dive head first into whatever seemed most interesting at the time, things that others might consider a load of old rubbish — just like the Ash Lad or like, well, a child. This was before the time when individual details were forged into ironhard systems that then had to be swotted up and churned out at an exam; this was before teachers started talking about the great concepts and theories, before anyone told you that the rainbow’s pretty colours were actually white light.

This was, therefore, still in the days when, in a magical science lab packed with cupboards full of mysterious objects and gas taps on the desks — that alone! — the teacher might well bring out an odd-looking piece of equipment known as an electrostatic machine. And what then? Well, he would ask a pupil to step up onto an insulated stool and hold the black drum while he, the teacher that is, spun the glass disc, causing it to rub against two leather flaps before, with a dramatic flourish, switching off the light and making great sparks jump between it and the pupil’s nose, like some wizard from Camelot. Or take the device known as a ‘tellurion’: a revolving model of the Earth and the Moon. Jonas did not know it, but his subsequent fascination with the planet Pluto had its beginnings here.

Best of all, however, were the geography lessons. Nothing at elementary school came as a greater revelation than the blank maps that were handed out from time to time, sheets marked only with the outline of a country, forming a delightful starting point for a sort of personal migration or voyage of discovery on which you yourself could give names to an as yet unknown continent: rivers, mountains, cities. You learned geography in the fullest sense of that word; you described the world.

Perhaps this is the most important experience in Jonas Wergeland’s life, inasmuch as years later he would attempt to make television that was as exciting as those first years at school, when everything was as fresh as the morning dew and full of blank pages, to return to a metaphor with which Norwegians are familiar; when the taste-buds were still sharp, the possibilities legion; when details were still details, the world still the world and not a theory of the world. This was, of course, a Utopian ideal, but Jonas Wergeland did try in his series Thinking Big, to tell the stories of Fridtjof Nansen and others as if the viewers had never heard of them and as if the viewers knew nothing of the workings of television. Jonas Wergeland tried, in other words, to achieve the impossible aim of creating television programmes based on the assumption that no Norwegian had ever seen television before.

And now, for the benefit of my non-Norwegian readers, a brief but necessary foray into Norwegian literature, to a novel by Alexander Kielland entitled Poison, a bitter denunciation of the late nineteenth-century grammar-school system and of mindless mechanical learning by rote: see another boy, a boy named Marius sitting in a geography class where he is being driven to despair by a teacher demanding of his pupils that they reel off the names of cities in Belgium, more cities in Belgium, more cities in Belgium …

Then see this boy, Jonas Wergeland, being handed a blank map of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, plotting in the cities according to his own sweet will: Brussels, Antwerp, Liège, Brugge. He knows it is alright if he puts them in the wrong places, it doesn’t matter, he’s creating the world. There’s only one thing wrong with this set-up: there are too few cities in Belgium and so Jonas has to come up with some other names. And since this is in fifth grade, his teacher does not say a word; instead she permits herself a little smile. And may they live forever, all those schoolmistresses who teach children to sing ‘Fagert er landet’ and smile at the things children will come up with and who do not try to correct anything, even when it involves a subject as touchy, in Norwegian terms, as cities in Belgium.