‘How could you tell?’ Jonas asked.
The man pointed to Jonas’s shoes, but said: ‘Face. Ja, vi elsker. Bjørn Bjørnstjerne.’ This time he was quoting the Norwegian national anthem and misquoting the name of its author. The man sat down on the bench next to Jonas. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket, once blue now almost grey, that reminded Jonas of the jackets his grandfather had once worn, jackets that smelled of the seven seas and a hundred harbours. The man explained, in English of a sort, that at one time, many years before, he had worked in the bar of the seaman’s club. He waved an arm in the direction of the Huangpu’s murky waters, the bustle on the river, as if this were an attraction in itself. Just beyond them, two old men were playing mah-jong. ‘My father was a Christian,’ the man told him as if in confidence. His father had been a convicted criminal who had served time in prison. In Changsha, in Hunan province. On his release he had met a missionary from the Norwegian Missionary Society who had told him the story of Lars Skrefsrud, the Norwegian missionary who had also been to prison. This story had changed his father’s life, the man maintained.
They sat for a while in silence, gazing at the boats sailing so close together on the Huangpu that you could almost have crossed to the other side without getting your feet wet. ‘That was a long time ago,’ the man said. ‘The churches are closed now.’
Jonas nodded. He was more annoyed at the fact that the Jade Buddha Temple was closed, he would have liked to have seen it.
‘Do you know anything about Skrefsrud?’ said the man. Behind them the bicycle bells sounded like a sea of grasshoppers.
No, Jonas did not, apart from the name and some vague memory of an RI lesson about the Santal Mission. Wasn’t there something about the Norwegian Mission Society refusing to take him as a student?
‘He was a great orator,’ the man said.
‘Like Mao.’
‘Exactly. Like Mao.’ The man nodded eagerly. Did Jonas know that Skrefsrud had once spoken to 15,000 people in the capital city of Norway, out-of-doors — no loudspeakers, of course — and that he had spoken for two hours?
‘Why do you take such an interest in Skrefsrud?’
‘Because of my father. That strange coincidence. They were both locksmiths of a sort, too.’
‘So you are a Christian?’
‘No, but that does not stop me from respecting him.’
Jonas looked at the man and smiled, unsure whether he was referring to Skrefsrud or his father. People were funny. When he returned home from that trip, this was one of the things he remembered best, a little Chinese man talking about Lars Skrefsrud in a park on the banks of the Huangpu, thus tying up neatly with a story about red pins which Jonas had first heard as a small boy, from Nefertiti’s great-aunt, on a terrace on the banks of the Rakkestad river and leaving Jonas with a sense of connectedness in life and the world.
‘Are you a missionary?’ the man asked as he rose to leave. Jonas shook his head. He could have said: I’m travelling with a group of missionaries, only they don’t do their missionary work here, but in Norway. One might say that they had come to the ‘mother country’ for a refresher course.
Jonas had decided to keep a low profile and not make fun of his travelling companions. He knew, and was almost ashamed to admit, that he had his brother, the legendary Red Daniel, to thank for the fact that he had been able to make ‘the great leap’ from Norwegian to Chinese soil at all, places on such trips were in great demand. So without delving any deeper into the whys and wherefores, or the tedious preparations for the trip itself, I will simply take the liberty of saying that in the latter half of May 1974 Jonas Wergeland found himself in the Middle Kingdom, along with twenty-three others travelling under the auspices of the Norwegian-Chinese League of Friendship, and that they were there with the clearly stated aim of learning.
The most important lesson Jonas learned on this eventful trip — more important than his meeting with the living mummy Mao Tse Tung — was about his brother. Jonas had to go all the way to China to discover that he had got Daniel all wrong. For the greater part of his life Jonas had despised Daniel deeply and sincerely for his astonishing ability to combine overachievement with opportunistic radical views, his way of pairing success at school and on the sports field with all the ‘right’ forms of rebellion at any given time: the Rolling Stones, a final year at the Experimental High School, the odd joint, demonstrating against the hydroelectric power station at Mardøla — and the AKP. Essentially, the two had been waging a cold war ever since Buddha came into the family, Jonas could never forgive Daniel for being ashamed of Buddha. And yet, to Jonas’s surprise, Daniel had pulled a few strings and wangled him a place on the trip to China. And Jonas was grateful. For years, ever since Aunt Laura had told him about Ao, the Chinese Ur-turtle, the turtle that carries the world on its back, he had longed to see China.
I really ought to provide a brief summary of the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist movement, but I will have to refrain, for one thing because on this subject most Norwegians are liable to suffer from a fatal mental block — and the generation in question be heavily on the defensive — for at least another fifty years; so the detrimental effects will be felt for a while yet. Just as with the slow-acting poisons in certain mushrooms, the serious hallucinations do not kick in until much later.
I will simply say that Red Daniel was a member, and seemingly one of the more fanatical and dedicated ones, of the Norwegian Maoist party, more commonly referred to by the acronym AKP which, by dint of the staccato fashion in which the cadres were wont to pronounce it, tended to put one in mind of the rifle that the majority of young Norwegian men make the acquaintance of during their national service: the AG3. And in many ways that is what they were, a bunch of walking, talking automatic rifles; they could take bits from one another and put themselves together exactly as one would assemble a rifle. To cut a long story short: when it came to the so-called M-L movement, Jonas Wergeland inclined towards the virus theory. As far as Jonas could see, the fact that a whole gang of ostensibly normal young Norwegians seemed to feel that they had been saved by a political theory which was at one and the same time so touchingly naïve and so horrendously totalitarian could only be put down to the ideological side-effects of some form of virus that had so far escaped the notice of medical research.
That said, I would go so far as to say that the motives of many members of the party were far more irrational than was first thought; it was not simply a matter of sublimated religious fervour or a disguised lust for power, as some people, wise after the event, have maintained. During their three weeks in China, Jonas discovered his brother’s essential story: the story which provided the key to his enigmatic persona.
This story was a variation of another story with which Jonas was to some extent familiar but which he had never got to the bottom of. It concerned his brother’s piano playing. Like many children, while he was in the fourth grade Daniel had — much against his will — started taking piano lessons from a teacher who lived on Bergensveien, and despite having little or no talent for it — listening to him practise was downright painful — he struggled valiantly through ‘Gems from the Baroque’ and ‘Practice is Fun’ and ‘The Piano and I’ to the point where even Jonas, who was never surprised by his brother’s opportunism, could not imagine what induced him to carry on. Only when, after four hard years, Daniel had finally decided to throw in the towel, to stop taking piano lessons, did he confess to Jonas, one evening when they were lying in their bunk-beds, what it was that had kept him going back to that in many ways detested house up on Bergensveien week after week: to have the chance, once again, of feeling the piano teacher’s tits brush the back of his neck as she leaned over him impatiently to show him how the pieces he was murdering ought to be played. And even though Jonas had to grant that the young piano teacher was very attractive, he could hardly believe his ears, lying there in his bunk-bed: that anyone would put up with four years of torture for the occasional thrill of feeling a pair of tits against the back of their head!