As for the world of antiquarian books with its staggering prices, Jonas saw it as being rather like a big-game hunt where the main attraction lay in the hides, in the irrational and sentimental values, rather than the words, the content. He thanked his lucky stars for the bookcase at home, which had sat there all those years, guarding its treasures in full view of everyone, but with no one being any the wiser. The books on the shelves were not unlike those mammoths that Nefertiti had told him about; mammoths that had fallen down the crevices in glaciers and were discovered again, thousands of years later, perfectly intact, frozen solid in the ice — for all one knew they, too, could have been in full view for ages and ages, encased in transparent ice; they, too, had a hide, a pelt which was worth a fortune because of its age.
Thus Jonas was able to exchange the hide bindings on the books for hard cash or trade them for another valuable commodity: travel. You could say that the books sprouted wings, or sails, and carried him off to foreign lands. So the spirit of Darwin had its effect even on Jonas Wergeland inasmuch as he was one of the very few people who were fortunate enough to discover the literal value of books, their potential for transcending boundaries.
Only a couple of other books ever commanded as high a price as the Darwin: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, for example — an unbelievable 60,000 in nice crisp kroner — but many of them also contained dedications, obscure dedications which increased their value several-fold. Even though Jonas’s curiosity as to the previous owner of these books grew with the years, he did not balk at selling them; he looked upon them as a legacy of sorts from the previous century, a fund of wisdom no longer required; even those quotations which he had learned by heart he eyed with considerable scepticism, regarding them more as toys, conversation pieces, a bunch of strange fossils, than as genuinely valuable knowledge. Jonas was always baffled by people who were impressed by them, who took them to be a sign of intelligence. And for anyone who thinks it is impossible to sail through life on the strength of twenty-odd quotations memorized from some relatively learned works, then I would ask them to take a look around them, at all of those who do sail through life, who may even be the foremost leaders in our society and who do not carry a single quotation in their heads, not even from a bad book.
The Jade Buddha
The few — I might almost say ‘the happy few’ — who managed to join one of the League of Friendship trips to China in the 1970s, in other words, those who could afford it and had made it through the ideological eye of a needle, can tell you that they were definitely no picnic. After a while, Jonas wearied of the heavy schedule and the thoroughly stage-managed visits to everything from the 7th of May Cadre School in Peking to the oil refinery in Nanking. And when it came to Shanghai, where they now found themselves, it went without saying that they had to make the pilgrimage to the little brick building containing the room in which the Chinese Communist Party was founded and go on the one-day excursion to an idealized People’s Commune; then there was the tour of a model hospital where they were treated to an acupuncture demonstration, as well as visits to some more solid establishments, such as the exemplary Steelworks no. 1. Wherever they went they were surrounded by wall newspapers and banners covered in huge characters which Jonas did not understand and which, despite their interpreter’s helpful translations, left him with a sense of remoteness, of an impenetrability that made a mockery of them, not least of the ‘concrete’ questions associated with their visits, usually asked by the girls with determined chins and steely gazes, questions to which Jonas felt there could be no answer, but which the Chinese seemed to find easy to deal with, producing great, long-winded answers to such questions, spouting verbose phrases that reminded Jonas of the time when he had had to recite the Shorter Catechism from memory, while their Norwegian guests nodded and made notes politely and were oh-so intent on learning, until eventually someone stood up and made a thank-you speech and presented a gift from Norway, after which they danced and sang Norwegian folksongs such as ‘Per Spelmann’ and ‘Hanen stend på Stabburshella’, the latter sung as a round at that, to give the Chinese a little taste of Norwegian culture. A punctilious and detailed report was of course written up later, and in the evening they did a recap. Little, very little, was left to chance.
On the whole, Jonas was surprised at how well he had got on with the M-L’s who made up the bulk of the party, characters at whom he could only shake his head before. Some of them would, like Jonas, eventually become key figures in Norwegian public affairs, individuals one saw on television and read about in the papers. Many a time Jonas had to smile when such a person showed up in some manifestly commercial context, as the representative of a typical capitalist concern, when he thought of how that same person had once sung ‘Per Spellman’ with such gusto at the Steelworks no.1 in Shanghai — although Jonas smiled not out of contempt, but out of respect for the unfathomability and broad diversity of mankind. All in all, he spent a lot of time talking to these people: as an astronomy student he detected many similarities between this sect and the planet Pluto — both were small and peripheral, but even so they provided some vital angles towards an understanding both of the universe and the people of Norway. One thing in particular which Jonas had confirmed was a quotation he had noted down in his ‘little red book’ and memorized, a quote by the American philosopher and psychologist William James, taken from an essay entitled ‘The Will to Believe’ from the book of the same name, which stated that moral questions are usually so urgent that they cannot be solved by waiting for sensible proof, and that when it comes to comparing values, we cannot turn to science for answers, we must consult our own hearts. Moral conviction is based, in other words, on the will to believe. And if there was one thing that these members of the AKP exhibited, more than any other ethical pressure group in Norwegian society, it was their rock-solid belief. As far as that went, they were all missionaries.
In whatever free time they had, when the others elected to put their feet up back at the hotel, worn out by their exacting schedule, Jonas seized the opportunity to go out into the streets, which he much preferred to Peking’s sterile avenues. And what did Jonas Wergeland do in the streets of Shanghai? Jonas Wergeland learned to cope with the masses. From the minute he set foot in China he had been surprised to note that he felt no fear when he walked the streets, surrounded by swarms of people. He had asked himself why this should be and came to the conclusion that it was because he stood out, even amid the hordes of black-haired Chinese in white, short-sleeved shirts. Not only was he almost a head taller than most of them, so that he seemed to skim about like a king on a shifting black and white chessboard, but he was constantly being gawped at, in fact almost everybody turned to look at him, and so here, in Shanghai, he had his first foretaste of his future as a television celebrity. Here, in one of the most densely populated thoroughfares in the world, Jonas was subjected to a form of therapy, he dived into the stream of humanity on the endless stretch of Nanking Street, the longest shopping street in China, with people walking twenty abreast along the pavements, and let it carry him along, as if in an interminable May Day procession; he found it hilarious, he crowed with laughter like a child learning to swim; he stood, out of breath, with his nose pressed against a shop window, studying how an abacus was used, before plunging back into the throng and being swept back down the street towards the Huangpu, like a fish in a shoal, moving as one with the others, and it was here, in Shanghai, that Jonas Wergeland finally lost his fear of crowds — or rather: his physical fear, the psychological dread of crowds was to stay with him all his life.