Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Jonas did not know what to think though, when his grandmother skirted the little bandstand where in summer they listened to bands from Sagene or Kampen, and headed down towards Fridtjof Nansens plass, was even more puzzled when they crossed the square and climbed the slope leading to the Town Hall itself, which loomed over them like a red-brick mountain. The way the two towers slanted away from one another when he gazed up at them from ground level at such close quarters, made Jonas feel that he was about to enter a giant W. It was dark, late, not a soul in sight. Granny rang the bell next to the main door and a moment later it swung open as if by magic. A burly figure in a pale-blue shirt and navy-blue serge trousers was striding down the hall towards them. His face was stern, like that of a strict teacher, but his expression changed when he saw Jørgine Wergeland. ‘Welcome to the Hall of the Mountain King,’ he said in a deep voice, signalling to the night watchman in his booth that he would take care of these visitors personally.

‘Everyone gone?’ Granny asked. The man nodded, sneaking a glance at Jørgine’s hat. ‘Did you forget it’s Saturday evening, or night rather,’ he said. ‘Even the mayor has gone home.’ His tone of voice, his smile, told Jonas that it was not the first time this man had met his grandmother. Nonetheless Jonas realised that he was experiencing something very special. He did not understand why they had been allowed in, still less why this man had greeted his grandmother so respectfully, not to say warmly. So, let it be said — since Jørgine Wergeland’s reputation as a sort of war hero in Town Hall circles does not fully explain it — that this took place in a soon distant past and in another Norway. Because one thing is for sure: no one, not even an extraordinary grandmother and her grandchild, would be allowed inside Oslo Town Hall late at night today, however magically beautiful the spring evening.

‘This is Einar Moe,’ Jonas’s grandmother told him. ‘He’s the head warden here, he has his own flat on the premises.’

‘What are we doing here?’ Jonas whispered, casting anxious, sidelong glances at the head warden’s bushy eyebrows. If Moe had been wearing a string vest he would have looked exactly like Mr Bastesen, Solhaug’s formidable caretaker.

‘Patience, patience,’ his grandmother said. ‘Shall we start the tour?’ she asked Einar Moe.

And so it was that on an April night in the early sixties, Jonas Wergeland got to see the inside of Oslo Town Hall. Or at least, he did not see it all at once, he saw it a little bit at a time. You see, they did not switch on the lights — Jonas thought it was because the head warden did not want to break the rules, but it might also have been because Granny wanted it that way. However that may be, when they stepped into the central hall — that high, wide space — it was in total darkness, although a little of the glare from the spotlights outside filtered through the windows at the bottom end overlooking the fjord. Jonas could only just make out pictures on the walls. And it was evidently these which his grandmother wished to show him, because Mr Moe pulled out a torch and proceeded to shine it on sections of the paintings; and while Mr Moe wielded his torch like a pointer of light, the two adults took it in turns to tell Jonas what he was seeing. They started with the long picture running under the balcony on the eastern wall, a fresco teeming with life, painted by someone called Alf Rolfsen and depicting the years of the German occupation; Granny described each scene, Mr Moe’s circle of light moving in time with her dramatic commentary. Jonas actually felt a little scared and had to hold his grandmother’s hand, but at the same time he was quite carried away by the show: it was rather like looking at a darkened stage, with a spotlight illuminating one patch after another. Or perhaps he was thinking of the game he played at Aunt Laura’s flat in Tøyen, when he shone a torch on the oriental rugs on the wall and pretended that he was the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid going out to see how things stood in his kingdom — a comparison which was not too far-fetched since if anything were capable of revealing the secrets of the kingdom of Norway it would surely be the decorations in Oslo’s Town Hall.

Einar Moe shifted the spotlight to Henrik Sørensen’s massive picture on the end wall. This was painted in a different style from the previous one, with gold smouldering in the parts submerged in the gloom. Mr Moe, the head warden, shone the torch on a boy in the bottom right-hand corner while Granny explained how this lad was setting out on a journey which could be followed all the way through the painting, right up to the top left-hand corner where he presented his fairy-tale princess with a crown. Jonas stood with his head thrown back and his eyes glued to the beam of light as it travelled slowly over the gigantic, richly-detailed picture, revealing more and more figures and scenes. All of a sudden he realised what, more than anything else, it reminded him of. It reminded him of what it had been like to leaf through his first ABC book, seeing the letters which he would, in time, learn to put together to form words, a language. Or, even more perhaps: of a reading book.

A thought occurred to Einar Moe, he popped back to the night watchman’s booth and returned with another torch for Jonas. The effect was even better. To begin with they both shone their torches on the same part, so that they were able to see more at one time, but after a while Jonas began to aim his beam at different areas from Moe’s. While his grandmother talked about the images caught in the head warden’s beam, Jonas could light up a detail some way off, so that it presented a kind of parallel illustration, a wordless, amplifying comment. This frequently proved most effective, as when Moe and his grandmother were peering at a figure in Sørensen’s massive picture, and Jonas shone his light on the ornamental design which Alf Rolfsen had painted in muted al secco on the side wall over the stairway. This provided an excellent complement, and counterpoint, to Henrik Sørensen’s vivid painting, almost like a necessary veil hanging over it.

They ascended the broad, imposing staircase, with Jonas sweeping the torch beam over the wall behind him as they went. Suddenly he caught sight of a sailor stepping ashore with a present in his hands, a string of pearls. A proud and extremely knowledgeable Mr Moe treated them to a little lecture on the different sorts of stone used for the building’s floors and walls. To Jonas the Town Hall seemed like a monument constructed out of species of rock from all over Norway. In the Festival Gallery they spent a lot of time perusing, or illuminating, the frescoes by Axel Revold at either end of the room. Many of the fragments which Jonas caught in his torchbeam that night — scenes from the shipping and manufacturing industries, fishing and agriculture, popped into his mind years later in Leonard Knutzen’s basement, as he flicked through old issues of Aktuell magazine. These were images from a pioneering era, a time of cloth caps and an entire nation working together to build a country; to drag it, one might say, from the Middle Ages into modern society within only a few decades.

People who chanced to walk past along the waterfront at Pipervika may have wondered at the beams of light dancing behind the Town Hall windows. They could not know that inside a small boy was being shown a great big ABC of Norway, that he was being told the history of his forefathers through pictures, being ushered around the city’s front room by an extraordinary grandmother and a hospitable head warden. Later, when Jonas visited the Vatican, he was to some extent prepared. For although Oslo Town Hall could not boast of Michelangelos or Raphaels it did, nonetheless, have Sørensen and Rolfsen, and if that was not Heaven, it was certainly Earth, Life — it was, in short, a good place to start. As a grown man it occurred to Jonas that some day it would be possible — particularly if the ideas which won their first victory at Anders Lange’s meeting in the Saga cinema managed to permeate the whole of Norwegian society — to convert the Town Hall into a mausoleum in which the finest ideals of social democracy would lie buried.