But first let me say something about this childhood universe as it pertained to Jonas Wergeland. Philosophers and scientists are forever trying to come up with something smart to say about the nature of life — take, for example, all that artful talk about the world in a grain of sand. Not that I have any intention of depriving anyone of the illusion of being able to discover new ‘truths’, but if I might just point out that this is something which every child experiences, even if many of them do in time succeed, by the most amazing feat of erasure, in suppressing such insights. Every child inhabits all of history and all of geography in the most natural way possible. What those speculators in the meaning-of-life industry grope their way towards time and again are, in other words, merely scraps of a lost childhood.
Jonas Wergeland and his friend through thick and — even more so — thin, Nefertiti Falck, grew up in Grorud, on a community housing development with the fine-sounding name of Solhaug — Sunnyhills — six low blocks of flats sitting at the top of Hagelundveien. Here, in the north-east corner of Oslo, within a relatively small area, the whole history of Norway was exposed to view. Here lay the forest where people could live as hunters and gatherers; here, on the farms around Ammerud, one could see the shepherd and the sewer, the whole of peasant society in the flesh. And behind the blocks of flats ran Bergensveien, bearing witness to a burgeoning commercial trade, not to mention highwaymen a little further up around Røverkollen — Robbers’ Hill; Norway as an industrial nation could be studied at close quarters, both in the quarries alongside Trondheimsveien and in the textile factories along the banks of the River Alna. Grorud was one of the few places which provided an almost perfect illustration of the saying: ‘Town and land, hand in hand’. And during Jonas’s formative years, the new service industries also began to shoot sky-high, quite literally, in the shape of garish supermarkets and, not least, the Grorud shopping centre with its Babel tower block, all twelve storeys of it, with, most importantly — a real fairground attraction this — a lift. All history was there, in one small patch of ground. No one told them this, but they took it in, so to speak, with mother’s milk, through play.
And when it came to geography, Grorud was, like all other places in Norway, a result of the creative movement of the glaciers with its rivers and lakes, its fertile soil in valleys nestling between hills and steep mountainsides. The stark, almost vertical, granite face of Ravnkollen, rising up directly behind Solhaug, was a particularly dominant topographical feature, a sort of magnified version of the Berlin Wall which their mothers strictly forbade them to scale — in vain of course. Thanks to the childish imagination, the wide world, too, was to be found in nucleus in these few square kilometres: jungle, prairie, Sherwood Forest — you name it — it was all there, in miniature. In the world of childhood there is always a Timbuktu, some sort of outer limit and a Mount Everest, posing the ultimate challenge. Even the Victoria Falls were in principal anticipated at Grorud in the ‘waterfall’ down in the stream; for a child, a three-foot cascade is good enough.
On a day in mid-May, in the year in which Gagarin broke the space barrier in his own way, Jonas and Nefertiti embarked upon their great expedition to inner Østfold. It all began when Nefertiti’s father received a letter, the envelope plastered with foreign stamps and in fact addressed to an aunt whom everyone believed to be somewhere abroad. Nefertiti’s parents only had a rough idea of where she had previously lived and since the letter did not look all that important they laid it on one side, with the result that Nefertiti, who had a feeling that her aunt had returned home and that they would be able to locate her, decided to deliver the letter personally. But when Nefertiti mentioned the name of the place to Jonas he was all against the idea, since to him it sounded as alien and, not least, as daunting as any exotic name from the unreal frames of the comic strips. ‘There’s adventure to be found wherever you go,’ said Nefertiti, ‘and we can’t spend all our lives sitting on our backsides in Grorud, can we?’
So there he was, on the train, and it was strange how well Jonas was to remember that trip, the sharpness of every detail, especially from the point where the track branched, after Ski station, and headed off into the complete unknown: up to then the only place he had ever taken the train to was Frederikstad. He always remembered that expedition into inner Østfold more clearly than, let’s say, his trip to Shanghai: the moment, for example, when they crossed the River Glomma, having left behind them stations with such outlandish names as Kråkstad, Tomter and Spydeberg, and Nefertiti brought out a mouth organ. But Nefertiti did not play ‘Oh, My Darling Clementine’ or any other such tired old evergreen. No, she played ‘Morning Glory’ by Duke Ellington, no less, and she played that intricate melody beautifully on a gold, chromatic mouth organ, while they rolled along tracks flanked on both sides by black fields on which the first shoots were just starting to show; either that or spring-green meadows dotted with yellow flowers, and one with a whole herd of horses galloping across it and a gleaming white church in the background, like something Edward Hopper might have painted. She played so well, so divinely, that Jonas was able to take her cap round and collect a whole six kroner in jingling coins before they passed Mysen.
Now at this point I really ought to say something about Nefertiti, although nothing can really do her justice. She was the same age as Jonas, but unlike him, the mere sight of an ant could prompt her to point out that the ants had already evolved into at least ten thousand different species while at the same time asking Jonas why the life of human beings should be governed to such an extent by sight and sound whereas ants went wholly by taste and smell, a chemical form of communication; or she might ask what Jonas thought of a world that revolved around the woman, the female. Nefertiti had an unusually shaped head which she always concealed under a cloth cap; it was so uncommonly long at the back that Jonas sometimes wondered whether she might be from another planet. Her clothes and her appearance were pretty ordinary apart from the fact that she always wore her hair in plaits, had pearl studs in her ears and boasted the longest eyelashes in the world. These aside, Nefertiti’s most distinctive feature was her inexhaustible imagination, which ensured that no matter what she thought of or made, it was always different. She could make paper airplanes shaped like the Concorde of the future that glided endlessly through the air; she knocked together carts that made the kids from Leirhaug, the development down the road, scratch their heads and made rafts the like of which Huckleberry Finn would never have dreamed possible.
Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius, albeit unbeknownst to himself, was to choose a girl as his best friend. It was Nefertiti who taught him that women are, first and foremost, teachers, then mistresses — and above all that when you come right down to it, the female is a very different and, more to the point, a much more fascinating creature than the male.
They alighted at Rakkestad, sniffed the scent of a sawmill on the other side of the railway track before walking up to the crossroads, where they stood with their backs to the Co-op, the sort of shop where you could buy anything, absolutely anything, from paintbrushes to three sorts of syrup, but which has, of course, since been pulled down, every last brick of it — in true Roman fashion, one might say — to be replaced, as in so many other places, by a standardized box of a petrol station.