So it was Nefertiti who first opened Jonas’s eyes to the riches lying hidden on the totally neglected bookshelves in the living room. Until then, Jonas had found those rows of books no more interesting than any grey rock-face. But Nefertiti had chipped away a little of the cliff and shown him — to stick to the metaphor of books as dinosaurs — that it harboured wonderful fossils: fossils which, even if they did belong to some obsolete race, could be very valuable, shedding light, as they did, on certain vital crossroads in the evolution of the Earth.
Or at least, to begin with Jonas had not seen what she was getting at. He thought it was the contents of the books that were valuable and, as I have mentioned more than once, he jotted down an extract from each of the twenty-odd books in his little red notebook. It was only after his momentous encounter with Christine A. in the well-stocked library of the Cathedral School — where she had not only ridden him to an understanding of transcendental functions but also shown him a book by Kepler that was worth a quarter of a million kroner — that he grasped the full significance of that tip from Nefertiti: that in fact they were also worth money, hard cash. The first thing he did when he returned home was to take a closer look at the books which Nefertiti had lined up on the bottom shelf, none of which had been touched since; only to discover that almost all of them dated from the nineteenth century, with a couple from the late seventeen-hundreds. Not only that, but when he noted down a couple of titles and looked them up in an encyclopaedia at school, he found that they were all first editions.
One day he picked a book at random, blew the dust off it, and instead of going to school he went to see Aunt Laura. On his way up to her flat he ran into Einar Gerhardsen on the stairway and bowed low to him as if he were some sort of headmaster to whom Jonas was apologizing for playing truant. Up in the flat, among the Persian rugs and the innumerable tools for shaping silver and gold into the most daring ornaments, he managed to persuade his aunt to put down her punches and accompany him to a second-hand bookshop; he wanted her, a grown-up, to make enquiries about the book, to save anyone getting the wrong idea.
Jonas had gone through the phone book, and the minute they swept through the door of Damm’s, the venerable antiquarian bookshop on Tollbugata, he knew he had made the right choice. They found themselves in a room lined from floor to ceiling with books, interspersed with a few old prints and maps and the odd globe dotted here and there. But it was the model of a sailing ship hanging from the ceiling that really gave Jonas the feeling of having landed in the offices of an agency specializing in boundary-transcending voyages to ancient, faraway realms. He took an instant liking also to the man who came to attend to them: a typically courteous, distinguished gentleman, with what Jonas described to himself as an aristocratic aura. Aunt Laura, in a big hat and with coal-black eyelids, played her part beautifully: a rather distrait eccentric lady who had inherited some books, she had brought one with her, would the gentleman be so kind as to take a look at it, was it worth anything at all?
Jonas would remember that moment all of his life, how the owner of the antiquarian bookshop took the book, a perfectly ordinary book as far as Jonas was concerned, with an olive-green leather spine, marbled side papers and green corners, a book that appeared little different from a chunk of grey granite from a drab rock-face, and the bookshop’s proprietor also took it into his hands as if it were a perfectly ordinary book, but when he looked at it more closely his face lit up. He opened it and tentatively ran his fingers over it, as if he had scraped the surface of a chunk of granite only to find that it was actually a gold nugget. He asked them most politely to step into an office, where he flicked through some catalogues, from book auctions, he explained, before telling Aunt Laura, with no ifs, buts or maybes, that this book, this insignificant-looking wodge of paper, 500 printed pages — as far as Jonas could see not all that different from Deerfoot Takes to the Hills — was worth something in the region of 50,000 kroner.
‘But why?’ asked Aunt Laura. Even she had been knocked for six by this news.
‘Because it is by Charles Darwin,’ the proprietor of the bookshop said, glancing at the title page. ‘Because it is a first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. No more, no less. A milestone. One of the most significant treatises in the history of mankind.’
Jonas Wergeland never became a great one for books, but he loved second-hand bookshops. To him they were like the setting for a lottery, one in which he had hit the jackpot.
Jonas dragged his aunt out into the street and home to Tøyen, where he spent a long time sitting in silence among the rugs and all the copper on the walls, trying to take in what he had just learned; went on worrying at it for a whole week before allowing his aunt to sell the first edition of Darwin’s book to the antiquarian bookshop and put the money into a bank account in her name, an account to which she arranged that he would also have access — and which would remain their lifelong secret. Such a deal appealed to Jonas. A book-lover got Charles Darwin, and he got 50,000 kroner, plus a quotation, one which, aptly enough, he had found underlined in the ninth chapter, ‘On the Imperfection of the Geological Record’, and which he had come across again, encapsulated in the final chapter, also underlined, as if it really did all come down to a question of mountains and fossils — and time, as things increased steadily in value as the years went by. ‘The mind cannot grasp,’ Darwin had written, ‘the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.’
And so it came to pass, to employ an epic phrase befitting this episode, that even while still at high school, Jonas Wergeland never had to scrimp and save in order to travel. Although it was a while before he really began to eat into the account; to begin with he only went as far as Stockholm and Copenhagen. But eventually he had to sell more of the books that Nefertiti had picked out, leaving them, like a last will and testament, on the bookshelf; works such as Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion, with its almost illegible Gothic typeface, Charles Baudelaire’s Oeuvres Posthumes et Correspondances inédites — a book which impressed Jonas most for its endpapers, the leafs stuck to the inside of the boards, blue patterned in gold — and The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, two weighty quartos: all sold, of course, through the agency of his aunt, who had nothing against acting as middle-man and who gradually became better and better acquainted with the charming proprietor of Damm’s antiquarian bookshop, partly on account of his discerning selection of Oriental rugs, while he, for his part, was not a little curious about a woman as dramatically made-up as another Karen Blixen who happened to own such a unique book collection. Around the time that his family moved in to the new villa on the other side of Bergensveien, right under the granite rockface, Jonas sold the last of the books, among them Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, Journal de Eugène Delacroix, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty not without a twinge of regret for each of them, remembering as he did all the pleasure he had derived from those quotes about a people’s ‘spirit’, about realism being the opposite pole to art and about a state that could not accomplish great things with small men. All the same, the sale of those books ensured that once again his account showed an astonishingly healthy balance: what amounted, in fact, to a small fortune — for a young man, at least.