That night, after some skilful diversionary tactics and a bit of a reshuffling as far as rooms were concerned, his brother’s brief besieging of the Princess was brought to a successful conclusion. But as he was leaving her room, about to make his way to the floor below, he bumped into a Chinese man who just about jumped out of his skin at sight of Daniel. The Chinese led him down the stairs, looking so aghast that Daniel saw nothing for it but to go with him, all the way down to the Art Deco lobby, where the Chinese man’s horror swiftly transmitted itself to the people at reception, who summoned a doctor and the police, not to mention the national guide who had been asleep and who had his work cut out trying to sort the whole thing out. Daniel had not the foggiest notion what was going on, but it turned out that his face was covered in blood: that he was in fact a pretty grisly sight to behold. The hotel staff, understandably, had assumed that he had sustained some serious injury. Whereas the truth of it was that the Princess had had her period, but had either been too shy or so hot for him that she had not wanted to mention it, and in the delectable darkness of their conjoining, when she had laid herself open like a ripe, juicy fruit, Daniel — hell-bent on the implementation of his sister’s lesson — had not noticed anything either.
So you see, Daniel had not always been known as Red Daniel, but after that episode the nickname stuck. Later, Jonas Wergeland was to look upon this as being the M-L’s only redeeming feature, and their only possible way of making up for their monstrous zealotry: they could tell all the great stories from those days, such as the story of Red Daniel, a modern folktale which, in all its grisly humour, shows that the AKP not only had the blood of the workers on their hands, but also on their heads.
Mammoth Sale
It suddenly strikes me that I have not yet explained how Jonas Wergeland financed his travels, although I did mention at one point that he had Charles Darwin to thank for his visit to Timbuktu. A trip to the Far East, plus the cost of staying there for three weeks, is anything but cheap, not even if you happen to be travelling under the auspices of the Norwegian-Chinese League of Friendship.
As I said earlier, no one in Jonas’s family was much of a book reader, apart from his Aunt Laura, who kept her edition of Ibn Battuta’s travel journals, along with a pile of other recherché and rather suspect volumes, safely tucked away in a chest in the flat in Tøyen, like a treasure that had to be buried when one lived in the same building as the solid Einar Gerhardsen. At least, thanks to Aunt Laura, Rakel had the Arabian Nights printed indelibly on her memory. Jonas’s grandmother had been more of a one for pictures, and other than that he lived with a family blessed with gifts of a verbal nature. His grandfather had been a wonderful storyteller, and as we know his mother and father never stopped talking, to each other at any rate.
Then came those boxes of books which his mother had inherited from some distant Wergeland relative: books which she dutifully and neatly arranged on a couple of bookshelves bought specially for the purpose, after which they were rarely touched. For all that it mattered, the shelves might just as well have been filled with rows of cardboard dummies, the sort of thing you see at Ideal Home exhibitions.
By and large, in Jonas’s house books were used only to prop up the legs of the bed when the children were small and had a cough, to raise their heads: the worse the cough, the thicker the books. Jonas did wonder later whether this might have had an effect on him, whether those words had crawled up the bedposts, so to speak, and into his body. Or whether they had protected him, like the metal bowls filled with vinegar placed under bed legs in the tropics, in the old days at least, to keep the insects away. Maybe, Jonas thought, a book under the leg of the bed would also safeguard against bad dreams. On one occasion he did ask his mother which books she had used most, but she could not remember.
The books also came in handy when Jonas and Daniel had to press flowers for the endless herbariums at school, or when their mother was making brawn for Christmas and had to press the meat. Certain books also made the perfect forts and entrenchments when they were playing with their toy cowboys and Indians.
Apropos this last, I ought to mention that Daniel — who else but Daniel? — had got onto the track of another way in which books could be valuable. He had first become aware of this during a paper collection, the sort of thing organized once a year to raise funds for the school band, and an event that the children looked forward to with excitement, because you never knew what might be hidden away in those great piles of newspapers and other scrap paper, in the way of comics, for example, not to mention porno mags. The same old legend was forever circulating, about how one year somebody had found this really outrageous foreign porno mag, full of pictures of black guys hung like elephants and willing white women, outside Five-Times Nilsen’s doorway, although it might have been Jens Øvesen’s or rather Jesse Owens’s, he was just the kind of guy to have that sort of thing. So the boys fell on those piles of paper and rummaged frantically through every last one of them in the hope of at least unearthing some Katzenjammer Kids Christmas annuals or maybe a Donald Duck comic from the early fifties.
It was during just such a raid that Daniel happened upon a small cardboard box full of Red Indian adventure stories that must have belonged to one of the bigger boys who felt he had outgrown such childish things, several volumes of a series that was very popular at that time. Not, you understand, that Daniel himself was a reader, he stuck exclusively to comics and strip cartoons in all their guises, but he had gathered from his chums that a few of the volumes in this series were much sought-after, and one of these, Deerfoot Takes to the Hills was there in the box. So Daniel slipped it under his jersey and left the others where they were. Over the next few weeks, Jonas was surprised to see one little thing after another piling up on his brother’s side of their double-top desk: a pencil-sharpener shaped like a globe, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, an elaborately constructed hair-band catapult for firing staples, two old volumes of Texas cartoons and so on, and Daniel had to admit that he had received these in ‘payment’ from the other boys in exchange for letting them borrow that rare copy of Deerfoot Takes to the Hills.
Neither Daniel nor Jonas ever read books, however, not even Deerfoot Takes to the Hills. Neither could his school readers or the novels which in due course had to be covered as part of the syllabus induce Jonas to see any value whatsoever in books. Given the choice, Jonas would have had the contents of all books related to him verbally in the most truncated version possible or, at worst, drawn. Books were bound up with Norwegian classes and dissertations: a necessary evil. And to crown it all, there were Gabriel’s lectures onboard his old lifeboat, the Norge, on the future of television, which had left Jonas convinced that books were as hopelessly obsolete as the dinosaurs, a relic of some long gone era.