Another time he let himself drift, just to see where he would end up. He swam with the slightly thinner crowd down the wide street that runs along the riverbank, once the great and famous Bund, now Zhongshan Dong Erlu, past grandiose but grimy grey façades, built in the European style; he was swept on down the boulevard by the mass of people, passing under plane and camphor trees while three-wheeled cars kept up an infernal tooting, bicycle bells chiming all around them like a thousand crystal prisms. Jonas was carried all the way into the old city to be faced with chaos, albeit a chaos with some sort of order to it; he was carried through narrow overcrowded streets, between rickety, run-down stone houses with ramshackle wooden balconies, until suddenly he found himself at the Yu Yuan Gardens, the traditional Chinese gardens which would not become a sightseeing ‘must’ — even for Norwegian tourists — until some years later. Where he actually succeeded in ordering tea in the age-old teahouse and later, in a restaurant of sorts, sampled some steamed dumplings filled with meat before catching sight of a market in which he bought a dried seahorse, of all things, to celebrate his new life as a relaxed and exultant part of the sea of humanity.
In the evenings they would sit in the opulent restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel, with its pale-green walls, lacquer red pillars and gilding, enjoying the view of the river and the harbour, drinking Tsing-tao beer and recapping on the day’s activities, or rather: what they could learn from them, which was quite a lot — so much, in fact, that the majority of them tended to grow very sleepy and take themselves off to bed.
On one such evening, Jonas went out alone. He walked a little way down Nanking Street, strangely empty now, then turned to the right, into the area lying between the main street and the Suzhou river: a bewildering maze of narrow alleyways lined by low stone houses, their woodwork painted in shades of dark-red and brown, the odd sycamore tree, bamboo poles draped with clothes hung to dry. It was dark: warm. People sat outside, in the feeble light of electric lamps hung in the trees. Men in T-shirts were playing cards. Jonas passed a few little garages, the flames of welding torches, work going on round the clock. People gazed at him curiously, pointed unrestrainedly, all talking at once at the top of their voices. They smelt of muck mixed with hot oil, cooking smells.
After about half-an-hour Jonas realized that he was lost — although he was not in any way alarmed by this discovery. Everything looked the same: small low houses, lamps in the trees, heaps of rubbish, people sitting on low stools eating dumplings, old folk smoking. Jonas had not the foggiest notion of where he was, but he felt no fear; standing outside a bicycle repair shop, he calmly pulled out his mouth organ, put it to his lips and began to play Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, not giving any thought to the fact that it should be that particular tune, or whether he hoped to achieve anything with it, although he was not at all surprised when an old man suddenly appeared before him, a man, what is more, who belied the myth of the inscrutable po-faced Chinaman, standing there with a bowl of noodles in his hand and a look of utter disbelief on his face, even Jonas could see that, disbelief and fear. He waved his chopsticks frantically, admonishingly, apparently trying to make Jonas stop playing, glancing round about him as he did so, before beckoning Jonas into a courtyard and from there into a little room with a picture of Chou En Lai on the wall and an empty birdcage hanging from the ceiling, where it was just the two of them — or at least, a young woman popped her head round a door then disappeared again. The man was wearing a round Mandarin cap, which Jonas instinctively took to be a sign of great courage.
It took some time for Jonas to grasp that the old man had been moved, truly moved, to hear him play that tune on the mouth organ, so moved that he gripped both of Jonas’s arms, as if in greeting, and in English of a sort told Jonas, falteringly, that he had once played in a jazz band at the Peace Café, the hotel where Jonas was now staying, but that jazz music, like all other decadent pursuits, had long since been forbidden. The old Chinese man in the Mandarin cap pointed at the mouth organ which Jonas was still holding in his hand and said ‘Forbidden, forbidden’ and attempted to explain how they, the jazz musicians, could not even practise together because of informers. The old man began to dismantle a huge pile of chests and suitcases, in order to get at the chest on the very bottom, from which he produced a little case. This he opened, to reveal a lovely old saxophone nestling in blue velvet. ‘Johnny Hodges,’ Jonas said, pointing to the saxophone. The other man beamed, he nodded eagerly, before his face became impassive once more. ‘Ellington is dead,’ he said, looking Jonas in the eye. ‘No, no, Ellington isn’t dead. Don’t you worry,’ Jonas said, as if wanting to comfort this Chinese man who had been robbed of the possibility to pursue his own interests. But it was true; Duke Ellington was dead. Unknown to Jonas, he had died a couple of days earlier. So it was not until later that he had time to wonder how an elderly Chinese down a back street in Shanghai could have heard about it; might it have been a stanza from the funeral service — at which the sound of an alto-sax played by Johnny Hodges himself had drifted up into the vaulted ceiling of the Cathedral of St John the Divine — that had somehow been relayed all the long way from New York to Shanghai?
The old man walked Jonas back up to Nanking Street. ‘The Duke,’ he said, as if addressing Jonas, and made a little salute, a bow, the kind of thing seen in films, before taking himself off.
Which brings me to another incident which had actually slipped my mind. I mention it simply because the photograph of this incident, to which Jonas Wergeland himself never ascribed any importance, led many Norwegians to believe, and still does to this day, that in his past Jonas Wergeland had been something of a revolutionary: a reputation which in some Norwegian circles, even the more conservative, carries a certain prestige, as if it were a badge of wartime heroism, granted only to the bravest of the brave in idyllic Norway.
Before leaving for home they had one last day in Peking, on which they were scheduled to visit the History Museum and the Museum of the Revolution. The bus which had brought them there from the Peking Hotel parked at the back of the Great Hall of the People, home of the National People’s Congress, which meant that they only had to turn the corner to find the vast, the almost unbelievably enormous, expanse of Tiananmen Square spread at their feet, swarming with people and with the Monument to the People’s Heroes between them and the Gate of Heavenly Peace, fronting the Forbidden City. Instead of walking straight across the square to the History Museum, they walked along the massive façade of the Great Hall, to take a look at the main entrance.
A car had pulled up at the foot of the steps and as they were standing there, in the middle of the stone stairway leading up to the huge yellow building with the red flags fluttering on its roof, a group of Chinese came out of the door to the Great Hall and proceeded to walk slowly towards them. As they were passing Jonas and the others, the huddle of Chinese stopped and opened up, like a lift door, to disclose a figure at its centre, supported between two others. The Norwegians’ guide was beckoned over to the group, and Jonas saw an elderly man in a grey Mao suit turning to their guide and asking him something. Having received a reply — which is to say, after one after another of his companions had whispered the reply into the ancient’s ear — a smile lit up his old face and he made towards them, supported by two younger men, and at that moment Jonas recognized the old man in the Mao suit, because the old man in the Mao suit was none other than Mao himself; the word was that Mao was ill and rarely went out, and yet there was the man himself, Mao Tse Tung, coming towards them; not at all well, anybody could see that, but large as life. Mao Tse Tung had been attending the People’s Congress before setting out for Southern China, where he would stay for the remainder of the year, consigning Peking to his wife, Jiang Qing, and her fateful conspiracies. Mao Tse Tung headed straight for Jonas Wergeland, even though there were twenty other Norwegians in his party; Mao Tse Tung walked up to Jonas Wergeland and no other and offered him his hand; Mao Tse Tung’s lips moved, although Jonas could not catch a single sound, but another Chinese came to their aid and interpreted. ‘You are from Norway?’ he said, which is to say: Mao said. ‘I have met several other young people from Norway,’ Mao said through the interpreter. He stood there clasping Jonas’s hand, and it occurred to Jonas that he had finally managed to see a jade Buddha after all, a face, yellowish-green and deeply transparent. If, that is, it was not a rotten, hundred-year-old egg: the sort of thing the Chinese considered a delicacy. Mao, for his part, had automatically assumed Jonas to be the leader of his party. Mao Tse Tung had run an eye over those twenty people and, despite the Parkinson’s disease which made it almost impossible for him to coordinate anything at all, not even his speech, the great helmsman — or seducer — had promptly come to the conclusion that Jonas Wergeland was, so to speak, the great revolutionary among them and probably a person of considerable influence and power back home in Norway.