Margrete indicated with a gesture that that much she had figured out for herself.
‘He was at the Newport festival in 1956, when Ellington made his comeback,’ Jonas said, as if this said all there was to say about Uncle Lauritz and what an exceptional person he had been. Jonas was standing in the centre of the room in the new wing of the villa, with its walls of Grorud granite, like a fortress; standing with his feet nestling cosily in a polar-bear skin and looking out of the window, down onto Bergensveien, at the junction with the road to Solhaug, while the weird strains of ‘Caravan’ meandered softly out of the loudspeakers, filling him with a wave of sentiment for which he sometimes felt the need, more pleasure than pain.
Margrete said nothing. She seemed to be out of sorts. She had been out of sorts for weeks. She did not say much to him either, never came out with so much as a single one of the little anecdotes of which she was usually brimful. She spent her time writing, writing letters to women friends all over the world: Jakarta, Santiago de Chile. She was a great letter writer; she enjoyed writing. Jonas never wrote anything or not letters anyway. Margrete wrote to someone at least once a week, long letters written with an old fountain pen, took pleasure in it, took pains over it, writing in a neat copperplate, wet, pale-blue characters, as if the actual process was as important as what she wrote. He envied her this dedication, the delight she took in covering page after page with a litany of inconsequential chitchat.
‘Do you have to go now?’ she asked again. ‘I mean, you do have this phobia about planes.’
‘I do not have a phobia about planes.’
‘Well you certainly don’t like flying.’
He turned away from the window and looked at her. She was writing, her eyes on the sheet of paper, she looked like a schoolgirl hunched over her first ‘a’s. ‘Mood Indigo’, with Lawrence Brown’s trombone, came brushing out of the hi-fi, painting him indigo inside. There were things that had happened to him that he had never spoken of, not even to Margrete; stories he wished to keep to himself — perhaps because he doubted whether anyone else would understand them. One of these concerned Uncle Lauritz and the day he had taken Jonas to the Oslo Flying Club, right next to Fornebu airport. He was six years old, they had been strolling about, looking at the light planes when his uncle came to a halt, as if quite by chance, in front of a Piper Cub, a small white plane with a red trim. Jonas did not know that it was his uncle’s own plane. ‘Want to go for a spin?’ Uncle Lauritz had said, smiling. If not exactly scared, Jonas had certainly been a little nervous: as I am sure anyone who has seen a two-seater Piper Cub from the late fifties would understand. It looked as though it would topple over if a grown-up so much as leaned against it. With its anything but reassuring skeleton of steel tubing covered with sailcloth and a paltry sixty horsepower engine in the nose, it looked like an only slightly larger version of the frail model planes that the big boys played with on the playing field at home, the ones they started by flicking the propeller with their fingers and steered in the air with the aid of two strings, standing in the middle of the field making the plane circle round and round above their head. Although things often went amazingly well to begin with, more often than not these flights ended with an almighty crash, either because the petrol had run out or because the boy pilot had lost control of the elevators on the other end of the strings.
The last thing Uncle Lauritz was expecting was for Jonas to say no, so he had already commenced the ritual known as the ‘walk around’, checking such things as the air in the tyres and whether the cables were securely attached to the rudders. So Jonas did his best to look enthusiastic, partly because he knew that he would then be one up on his chums. After all, it was a far cry from the endless yells of ‘Give us a ride!’ every time a plane flew over their heads, to actually getting to ride in one.
Soon afterwards, Jonas was in the cockpit, sitting in the seat behind his uncle, well strapped in with seat belt and shoulder harness. They had taxied out to their holding position, where Uncle Lauritz had run through the pre-flight checks: engine, instruments, talking on the radio throughout, carrying on a dialogue which Jonas understandably could not make head nor tail of since it was conducted in English, with words such as ‘ground’ and ‘tower’ and ‘clear to taxi’ cropping up again and again along with a lot of ‘LIMA BRAVO CHARLIE’s, although all of this only served to make Jonas feel safer, giving, as it did, the impression that they were in continual contact with some higher power. Not until they taxied out onto the runway did Jonas start to have misgivings. Or rather, to begin with everything was just great. Jonas actually enjoyed the swooping sensation, and he was not the slightest bit afraid when the little plane dipped or his uncle banked into a turn, making his tummy tickle. Besides, for the first few minutes he was too busy watching the instrument panel, particularly a funny-looking instrument that his uncle simply called ‘turn and slip’, with a black ball that indicated the angle at which they were flying. So the flight went without a hitch until the moment when Jonas looked out of the plexiglass window or rather, looked down. But it was not their height off the ground — somewhere around 3000 feet — that six-year-old Jonas Wergeland found frightening, it was the view itself or the perspective.
I make no secret of the fact that I consider this episode one possible source of certain fundamental traits in Jonas Wergeland’s character. After his initial doubts he had begun to look forward to seeing Oslo from the air, but the effect this had on him was very different from expected. It all came to a head, after they had been in the air for some time, when they flew over Grorud, and Uncle Lauritz proceeded to circle over Jonas’s hometown, with the best of intentions, of course, thinking, as he did, that the lad would get a kick out of it. ‘Look, there’s the block of flats where you live!’ he yelled over the drone of the engine, taking the aircraft gliding round in wide circles over a landscape that Jonas knew like the back of his hand. But instead of being thrilled by this sight, Jonas was actually scared, absolutely scared out of his wits, and I repeat: this was not the result of the G forces to which he was being subjected by the perpetual banking of the plane; Jonas Wergeland was terror-stricken purely and simply because the landscape below was unrecognizable. He stared at the ground in disbelief, refusing to credit that that, down there, was Grorud, Solhaug, Hagelundveien. They circled and circled, and Jonas looked down, even though he did not want to look down, but he was held, transfixed, he had to look down, down on that fearfully false, facile, flat image, on which only the broad straight lines of a childhood world full of nooks and crannies were chalked in — an image which bore no more resemblance to Grorud than a brick did to an ice cream factory. The voices coming over the radio all the time, the foreign language, heightened the sense of total unreality. One of the biggest shocks were the six blocks of flats, which looked so perversely farfetched, seeming to form the most unnerving pattern. And worst of alclass="underline" he saw no people.
This glance out of the window left Jonas feeling sick to the marrow, he could feel something welling up inside him, something akin to an urgent protest. He threw up all over the place, the vomit gushing out, spraying over the back of the seat in front of him and over his trousers; he retched violently and threw up again, spewing his load, tears starting from his eyes. His uncle took one swift glance over his shoulder, straightened up the plane and headed back towards Fornebu airport. Back on the ground, he lifted Jonas out of the stinking cockpit, registering as he did so the state it was in, but he was not angry, merely looked at Jonas a little strangely and stroked his hair.