For his part, Jonas just stood there, studying the vomit that had stuck to his trouser legs, as a way of diverting his thoughts perhaps, or as if he were taking comfort in the little details, enjoying the sight of the tiny chunks of hot dog — they had stopped at Lysaker on the way out to the Flying Club to buy a hot dog wrapped in a potato pancake.
‘What happened?’ said Uncle Lauritz.
‘I don’t know,” said Jonas. ‘All of a sudden I just felt sick.’
The truth is that Jonas Wergeland had thrown up in horror, horror at seeing his beloved, chaotic, hilly, bustling Grorud, flattened out and brought down to a picture he could take in at a glance: a picture in which all the interesting details, tiny universes, were missing, as if what he were seeing were a formula, a diagram of an adventure. Gone were the rats at the rubbish dump, gone the words carved into the alder tree down by the stream, gone was old Frøken Schönfeldt on the bench with her handbag full of glacier mints. One could say that this was Jonas Wergeland’s first encounter with reductionism, and from that day forth he was to entertain an inveterate distrust of all forms of bird’s-eye view or synthesis, all systems or overall pictures: in other words, any totality that quelled refractory details and gave no thought to the individual. And later, the older he became, the more nauseated he would feel when confronted with theories or ideas that presented only one dimension of the multi-dimensional reality, as when faced with a teacher fervently championing the cause of dialectic materialism. Jonas detected the same flatness and appalling simplicity in such a theory, the same absence of real, live, enigmatic people, which he had been horror-struck to see from a light plane 3000 feet above the Grorud of his childhood.
So how do the pieces of a life fit together?
Jonas stretched out on the sofa with the remote control resting on his stomach, listening to Duke Ellington: ‘Solitude’, the 1940 band, Jimmy Blanton on bass, the flourish of Ben Webster’s saxophone, music that made him feel deeply nostalgic but which also helped him to relax, took his mind off his anxiety about the trip.
‘It’s not often I ask anything of you, Jonas.’ Margrete set aside her fountain pen, ran an eye over what she had written, several sheets of paper closely covered in pale-blue ink. Jonas realized that there was something different about her. ‘Couldn’t you stay at home? Just this once? Couldn’t they send someone else to that bloody World’s Fair?’
‘There’s no way, you know that. Not at such short notice. It was all arranged ages ago. Anyway, it’s my idea, it’s all down to me.’
‘What about Kristin?’ she said. ‘I’ve got that seminar next week-end, remember.’
‘I spoke to my mother, she can go down to Hvaler with her.’
‘But then I’ll be alone in the house when I get back. I don’t like to be alone. Why can’t you stay home?’
Outside the light was starting to fade. It was spring; it smelled of spring right to the heart of the room. On the hill leading down to the road the coltsfoot was already up, tiny yellow flames. ‘In my solitude,’ sang Ivie Anderson huskily, ‘you haunt me, with reveries of days gone by.’
‘I’m frightened,’ said Margrete.
‘Of what?’
‘I don’t know, I’m just frightened. How did he die, anyway, your Uncle Lauritz?’
‘I’ve told you. He crashed in his light plane. He was flying too high. Or too low. Or too far. I don’t remember. I was too young at the time. He was an experienced pilot. Nobody could understand it.’
‘I’m frightened,’ she said.
He sat up. ‘Margrete, why are you frightened? Tell me.’
She sat for a long time gazing at the nib of her pen. Then: ‘It’s that last programme of yours.’
She was referring to a programme on non-European immigrants to Norway, in which Jonas had put a bunch of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans in the Central Police Station; sitting waiting and waiting in the hallway outside the Immigration Department, whiling away the time by telling each other stories, a sort of Decameron of tales that drew their subject matter from Oslo’s new ghettoes; or other stories, the most amazing stories, of how these people saw Norway and, more especially, the Norwegians. Jonas had received a lot of negative, and to some degree malicious, responses to this programme.
Margrete told him that she thought someone had tried to kidnap her or to hurt her. She had been standing outside the Board of Health offices on St Olav’s plass when she saw two men jump out of a car and come towards her, straight towards her, with a look on their faces as if to say that she was the very person they were looking for. The friend she was waiting for chose just that moment to appear, the men had stopped short, hesitated then turned and jumped back into the car.
‘Rubbish,’ he said.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘You’re overestimating the power of television.’
‘But isn’t that what you’re always saying, how powerful it is?’
‘Yes, but not in that way. Margrete, take it easy. It’s that imagination of yours again. That’s what I’m always saying: you have far too vivid an imagination.’
She said no more. He thought: that’s not what she’s frightened of. She’s frightened of something else. All that was meant just as a lead in. He pushed the thought away. She lit a lamp, started on another letter. There were times when Jonas wished he had inherited his parents’ ability to converse, to put the clock back an hour. Then it was the turn of ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’, not with the 1940 band this time but an agonizingly mournful version from Newport ’56. Even so, Jonas was aware of how the tune set every vertebra in his spine vibrating, while at the same time summoning up the picture of a ten-year-old girl, a girl with the longest eyelashes in the world, who was hit by a Scania-Vabis truck while playing this very tune. Jonas shut his eyes, allowing Johnny Hodges’s saxophone to bury him in sentimentality.
‘Why are you playing it again?’ Margrete said from the table.
He did not answer.
‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘Jonas, I’m frightened. Couldn’t you stay home, just this once?’
He opened his eyes, looked at her, closed his eyes again. He lay there with the remote control on his chest, ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’ came to an end; he knew she did not like it but he pressed a button, heard the electronic hiss before the tune hit in again.
Two days later he was on the plane to Seville. He was to regret making that trip for the rest of his life.
The East is Red
He sat on a bench in a crowded park, looking out across a brown, muddy river teeming with every imaginable kind of boat, from little barges to rusty-hulled freighters; the occasional timeless junk glided past, and even the odd submarine, a red flag fluttering from its tower. Jonas gazed in fascination at the busy harbour, at this improbable spectrum of vessels, with the incessant hooting of the boats resounding in his ears, horns of varying pitches mingling with the bicycle bells on the street behind him, a sound like the tinkling of a thousand crystal shards; the deep, full notes and the crisp chiming, layer upon layer, forming a sound so complex, so inexhaustible and so totally apt for a country as unfathomable as China, land of the Ur-turtle.
Passers-by gaped at him in wonder, a few pointed openly. An elderly man, bareheaded and walking with a cane, stopped short and unabashedly eyed Jonas up and down. ‘Takk for i dag, ser deg i morgen,’ he said. ‘Bye for now. See you tomorrow.’ in Norwegian. When he saw the look on Jonas’s face he laughed and said: ‘You are from Norwegian? I could see it on you.’