Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

One of the triplets had jumped into the rope in front of him. Behind him he had another triplet. At one point he was skipping in the loop flanked by two almost identical individuals. Jonas detected a touch of the supernatural in this. He was quite certain that the two triplets had had something to do with the way his thoughts had split in two, and towards the end, before the accident, he had the feeling that he was on the verge of unearthing a third, parallel, image, one relating to the teacher on playground duty, who also taught handwork — a subject which triggered a whole host of thoughts with its sharp knives and stupefying glue fumes. So intrigued did Jonas become with this phenomenon, this possibility, this pleasure, that he went on skipping, even after he had skipped his forty times and was supposed to jump out. Kids were piling up behind him, among them the third triplet; there was some muttering, shouts for him to get out of there, but Jonas went on skipping in his own two-fold, and soon — if the others would just leave him alone — three-fold world, because he instinctively knew, or thought, that skipping, and possibly this whole complex of people, including two triplets, jumping up and down inside the ellipse formed by the smacking rope, was what was needed in order for him to keep two, close to three, thoughts in the air at one time. And sure enough: when an impatient Hjørdis or Helga or Herborg or whoever went so far as to shove him out of the rope, he lost not just one, but both, all of his thoughts. They burst like bubbles. He went rolling across the tarmac as if he had been hurled out of a massive centrifuge. He hurt himself quite badly, he was bleeding from a cut to his brow, where it had rammed into a sharp stone. But it had been worth it. And in a way it seemed only reasonable that such a discovery should send you flying flat on your face. He walked home from school that day with an ugly scab forming on his forehead where he would bear a scar for the rest of his life, feeling as though he had been ennobled, or that he had found the badge of mankind’s nobility: the potential to think more than one thought at the same time. The rope, which was once again slung over his shoulder and across his chest was no longer a rope, but the sash of a noble order.

He never tried to repeat this exploit, partly because he didn’t want to annoy the others, and partly because he realised that this was something he could experiment with on his own. He may also have been afraid that the faculty of which he had caught the merest glimpse might disappear. That great care would have to be taken with any further experiments. Oddly enough, Jonas made his new discovery around the time of Esso’s first major advertising campaign, when everywhere you went you saw the slogan ‘Put a tiger in your tank’. Jonas had done just that, put a tiger in his think-tank. That, at least, is how it felt, and with the same hint of danger. His prospective gift might just as easily bring him bad luck as good, something far worse than a cut brow.

He was to make this same discovery again and again: if you did not keep your exceptional talent to yourself, you had a much greater chance of being laughed at, or even penalised, than of being applauded. It was the same with football. But when his team’s fiercest rivals for the top position in the league, the west-side team Lyn, came to Grorud, hubris got the better of Jonas; he could not contain himself. The whole Grorud team was more than usually keyed-up, balefully eyeing the fancy cars which pulled up outside the clubhouse, bringing the Lyn players and their trainers. ‘We’re going to hammer you lot black and blue,’ one slick-haired Lyn player remarked blithely as he hopped out; referring, with this dig, to the colours of the Grorud strips. ‘Bloody snobs,’ Leo hissed through his teeth as he stood there with Jonas, glowering at these boys who seemed to come from another stratosphere, who dressed differently, who had different haircuts, who seemed, in short, more grown-up than them, as if the whole bunch could, at any minute, turn round and become lawyers, company directors and stockbrokers. Lyn supporters will have to excuse this mythologising of their team, this is simply a description of the way in which Jonas Wergeland and his teammates saw it.

For a long time during this crucial match, too, Jonas was able to charge more or less unhindered up the left wing, but unlike the other teams they had come up against that season, Lyn had a trainer who spotted Jonas’s uncommon ability and shouted some instructions to his defence, mainly to one of the right-backs who looked, to Jonas, a bit like King Kong. Jonas became the brunt of some really dirty tackling. During one such foul he must have cracked a rib; the pain was almost unbearable, but he played on. He should have known. He should have stopped, kept his talent hidden. But at that moment he just couldn’t. He got too carried away. There was something about Lyn, Lyn on Grorud’s home ground, something historic, symbolic. It was the Right against the Left.

Jonas scored two goals, even with his chest hurting like mad he scored two very simple, but very sweet goals with little chip shots off the side of the foot, one into either side of the net, well out of reach of the Lyn keeper, he was so taken aback he didn’t even have a chance to make a dive for the ball. The Lyn defenders were clearly rankled by the utter prosaicness of these goals, their cheeky nonchalance. Jonas saw the dirty looks they sent him. A curving shot skimming under the crossbar from twenty metres out, that they could have stomached, a superb lob or a lethal half-volley shot, but these soft, ruthless shots to the foot of the post were just too demeaning. This was socialism in practice: painfully simple.

The score was 3–3, with five minutes of the game to go. Jonas was alone out on the left flank, received a pass from Leo in their own half, ran up the wing, wincing at the pain in his ribs, but crossing the halfway line nonetheless, no one in his way; all the players were starting to flag, Jonas had a free run up that side of the pitch, and on he ran, hugging the touchline and registering, out of the corner of his eye, Leo running parallel with him, like a neighbouring idea in his mind: two thoughts, utterly dissimilar, but with a common goal. And it may have been at that very moment that he made up his mind to stay out here for the rest of his life, on the left wing. Because, despite his short-lived career in football, from that day onwards Jonas saw himself as belonging to the ‘outside left’. No matter what cause he was fighting for, he would always try to find an outsider position, a sideline along which he could dribble the ball while everybody else clustered together in the centre, and although where Jonas was concerned, it was more a psychological than a political appellation, he would have had nothing against being a founding member of a new party, to be called the Outside Left.

This also sheds some light on his later attempt to expose the opposite wing for what it was. As an adult — not least in prison — Jonas Wergeland spent a lot of time trying to analyze the most disturbing watershed in the history of modern Norway, a sort of collective fall from grace. 1973 is fixed in the global consciousness as the year when the oil crisis gave a serious indication of the state the world was in, and of its grave economic problems. In Norway, however, where they had only started pumping out their black gold a couple of years earlier, the situation in 1973 was almost the very opposite: in Norway they were having trouble coping with their nascent wealth. This fact manifested itself most clearly, if indirectly, at a public meeting in the Saga cinema in Oslo in April of that year. The choice of venue was most apt, since it would be quite true to say that a new saga had its beginnings here. A saga of the grimmer sort. On the stage stood a seasoned public speaker: an eccentric dog lover in a suit and a bow tie, with a bottle of egg liqueur to oil his vocal chords. Anders Sigurd Lange was his name, and he made a speech which was interrupted by bursts of applause over a hundred times. This meeting led to the founding of a political party which initially went by the curious name of ‘Anders Lange’s party for the drastic reduction of taxes, duties and state intervention’. Later it acquired another and possibly even more curious appellation: Fremskrittspartiet — the Progress Party.