Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

That winter he made a big discovery of his own, again concerning a mirror. It happened at home, in Rakel’s corner of the bedroom, one day when she had gone to the cinema. A strong smell of hair lacquer hung around her dressing table. Jonas sat down in front of the oval mirror and examined his face in it. Rakel claimed this was a magic mirror, like the one the queen in Snow White had. His eye went first to the strange scar, or more correctly: two scars on his forehead, just above his eyebrow, which sometimes seemed to form a cross. Making him look like a marked man. Marked out. Gradually, though, he became more aware of something else; he noticed how flat his face looked. Flat, that is, in that his whole face seemed like a mask covering something totally unknown. Not another face, but something indescribable, something beyond thought.

He could not remember when he had first latched onto his disquieting discovery: the world was flat. Not in the sense that the earth was flat — although Jonas had to admit he had a weakness for the notion that if you dug down deep enough you would end up in China. Everything was flat. Objects were flat, people were flat. The first time he was taken to the theatre — to see ‘The Wind in the Willows’ — not for one moment did it cross his mind that the marvellous characters on the stage were just an act. To him they were every bit as real and true as everything else round about him. He took the play to be a faithful reflection of reality. To Jonas, more than anything else the word ‘flat’ meant ‘simple’, a little too simple. A lack of depth. The fact that he had once saved a child’s life merely by sticking an arm underwater had taught him a bit about the shallowness of existence. The flatness of it. He never dared say this to anyone, partly because he thought he was the only one who knew: we had barely touched the world, we had scarcely begun to scratch the surface of it. The world might be round, but life was still flat.

To begin with, this did not really bother Jonas, but as time went on he felt a powerful urge to break through, to reach beyond the flatness. To discover something round. Something deep. Or no, not deep: he wanted to get at something else entirely. In his mind he called it ‘Samarkand’. Occasionally he caught himself stamping the ground hard, on impulse, as if convinced that a thin film would shatter, just like the first fragile coating of ice in the autumn. A similar thought occurred to him when he looked into Rakel’s mirror. Again he had a strong sense that there was something more, a certain potential, behind him, within him, which eluded his eye, his comprehension. I am quite different from how I appear in the mirror, he thought to himself. Afterwards, he would blame it on the fumes from the hair lacquer. He rammed his fist into the mirror with a force and a vehemence that surprised even him. He maintained that he had seen a glimmer of orange, of something enticing, in there behind the glass. He had lashed out quick as a flash, as if hoping, by dint of a surprise attack, to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that lay behind, as the mirror shattered, so to speak.

What this incident — and, not least, his badly cut knuckles — taught him was that using his fists would not help him to come to terms with the flatness of the world. It was, however, becoming increasingly clear to him that he was blessed with a gift which might enable him to penetrate beneath the surface, of objects and of people.

Jonas had always been a great one for fantasising — and by that I do not mean the sort of daydreaming in which many people indulge. For a boy of his age Jonas had an exceptional aptitude for thinking. He had detected the first signs of this ability — though he knew right away that it ought to be regarded as a gift — in his Aunt Laura’s flat in Tøyen, in that world of Oriental rugs and brocade, precious metals and Lebanese cooking. Aunt Laura looked like an actress, or a diva, but she was a goldsmith, highly skilled and sought after, who had her workshop — a veritable Eldorado to a child — set up in a corner of her living room. One day when, for the umpteenth time, Jonas had begged her to tell him something about the ‘greatest journey’ she had ever made as a rug collector, her trip to Samarkand, she said, in order to distract him: ‘Why don’t I teach you to play chess instead.’ The discovery he was about to make did not, however, have anything to do with the game of chess, or with anecdotes about famous matches, it concerned the pieces. ‘I played chess, silver against gold. No wonder I never became a master,’ he said later.

As a young woman Aunt Laura had made a chess set, with gold and silver plated miniatures of famous sculptures for the pieces. For the bishop she had chosen the Ancient Greek statue of the discus thrower, for the knight, Marcus Aurelius on horseback; Brancusi’s slender Bird was the rook, Michelangelo’s David the pawn and to Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman fell the honour of being the queen. Jonas learned a bit about art history along with the rules of the game. So for him chess was not so much a game as a story consisting of criss-crossing tales; tales, what is more, which dated from different times, since the pieces reflected the styles of a wide variety of eras. Not even the fact that his aunt wore a silk dressing gown which made her appear more naked than if she had been wearing nothing at all could divert Jonas’s attention from all those different sculptures. Brancusi’s bird was particularly intriguing. The artist seemed almost to have caught what lay behind the bird’s flight.

But the main point here is this: the first time Jonas laid eyes on Aunt Laura’s king, namely August Rodin’s The Thinker , he lapsed into reverie. That’s me, a voice inside him cried; that’s mankind, that’s how we are. Aunt Laura would always mean a great deal to Jonas, but above all else he loved her for making The Thinker the king. From that day in his aunt’s flat at Tøyen he was sure: his talent had, in some way, to be related to thinking. Jonas would promptly have applauded René Descartes, had he known of that gentleman’s attempt to establish one thing for certain, with his celebrated statement concerning the relationship between thinking and being.

Nobel prize-winners are often to be heard describing how as children they took old radios apart or built little laboratories in which they carried out chemical experiments. Jonas made do with his own thoughts. His mind was all the laboratory he needed. He took to meditating. In the most literal sense: he sat himself down and proceeded, quite resolutely, to reflect on things, letting observations run into one another while at the same time endeavouring to be aware of what he was doing, to map out where his thoughts were taking him. The average human being is said to have fifty thousand thoughts a day and it was as if Jonas meant to scrutinise every one of his — make a record of them, just as he would sit by the roadside, noting down car registrations. After a while he discovered that, oddly enough, his thoughts flowed best when he assumed the same position as Rodin’s figure: with his chin resting on his fist, his elbow propped on his thigh. From this point onwards his teachers and his chums would automatically resort to the same words to describe Jonas: ‘He’s a thoughtful character.’

Of all the many aspects of contemplation, the one at which Jonas really excelled was make-believe. Before too long he had become a master of pretence. He had the ability to create whole worlds inside his head, experience them with all his senses. Before leaving elementary school he had visited some of the most exotic countries on earth, really thought himself there with the aid of odd bits of information he had heard or had gleaned from school books. He had even visited Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. All you needed was a little piece of something and your imagination would do the rest, like Sherlock Holmes finding a scrap of clothing. Thanks to his powers of imagination Jonas had been a lion and a flower, not to mention a pencil and the gas helium. As for women: he had kissed Cleopatra — she had smelled of milk — before he had his first kiss. By the age of eleven, Jonas Wergeland was afraid that the world had been used up. He suspected, in other words, that he had reached a dead end where the possibilities of thought were concerned. He was also well aware that he was quite alone in appreciating his gift. At the start of a new school term, when the teacher asked where they had spent their holidays, Jonas had replied: ‘In the Kalahari desert. With the pygmies.’ Everybody had laughed. They had fallen about. They did not see that a fabrication could be as real as reality could be fabricated. Or, to put it another way: that the fiction could be less flat than the real thing.