Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Later, when Aunt Laura asked him, what he had found in Samarkand, Jonas answered without a second thought: ‘In Samarkand I met myself.’

After his hike around Aurlandsdalen Leonard had made a similar discovery, though of a more down-to-earth nature, more brutal and shocking. And sitting, battered and bruised, you might say, in a basement no longer redolent with delicious pasta sauces, he told Jonas all about it. Jonas always felt that the moment of Leonard’s revelation should have been illustrated with a slow-motion sequence like the one at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point , the climax of the film, when a building blows up and we see the explosion replayed thirteen times from different angles and distances. To cut a long story short, Leonard had found out that his father, Olav Knutzen, was not in fact his father. Leonard had been every bit as blind as the central character in Blow-Up ; he had not seen what was going on in the bushes, as it were.

So who was his father? Leonard met Jonas one Friday afternoon on Youngstorget — which, by the way, standing as it now does as a monument to a sacred, bygone ideal, is the closest one comes in Oslo to Samarkand’s Registan Square. They hung around on the corner of the Trade Union building for half an hour. Jonas thought they were waiting for Leonard’s mother, who worked there. Leonard said nothing, just hopped up and down impatiently. Suddenly he pointed to a man coming out of a bank across the street which was now closed for the day. ‘That’s him,’ Leonard sobbed. ‘That’s my father.’ Jonas refused to believe it. A smarmy little git, a dark, skinny guy in a blue suit, with slicked-back black hair. He could actually have passed for an Italian, maybe even a film director, but he was just about the very opposite of Olav Knutzen with his weighty, Nobel laureate presence. His name was Dale and Leonard was one jump ahead of Jonas in himself acknowledging the irony of the legend on the placard he was holding up in the by then published photograph from that summer: SAVE THE DALE. ‘And shall I tell you what the worst part is?’ Leonard said. ‘He works in a bank, on the cash desk.’ Jonas remembered Leonard’s vituperative, indignant rants against bankers and banking, prompted by the story of how Antonioni had had to earn his living early on in his career. From the way Leonard spoke it sounded to Jonas as though his friend were pronouncing his own death sentence. Leonard had such a morbid obsession with heredity that one look at that little shrimp, his biological father, was enough to tell him that those genes offered no hope whatsoever. Such a man could not possibly sire a prince.

Jonas never did learn how Leonard had found out about it. Whether it was just that his mother had finally got round to telling him, or whether he had, quite by accident, caught something going on in the background while filming the everyday doings on Youngstorget; something which he had blown up, enlarging it until he could make out a detail — a clue. Or whether it should simply be put down to a keen-honed eye. What if a young bank clerk had lodged with the Knutzens when they were just setting up house together, what if the basement really had been a darkroom, a red-lamped love nest.

Whatever the case, this discovery fairly took the wind out of Leonard’s sails. The way he saw it, he no longer had the letters OK, Olav Knutzen’s initials, stamped on him. And in losing the ’z’ in his name, he seemed also to have lost a vital chromosome — that lightning bolt, that flash — the guarantee of a good eye. All Leonard’s grand, elaborate plans were quashed. That ’z’ now seemed more emblematic of sleep. He dropped out of school, shelved his cine camera and the outline for a twelve-minute 8 mm film on reduction, and away he went.

Or at least, before he disappeared he asked Jonas to please meet him at the Film Institute at Røa. Jonas had duly shown up, fearing the worst. They were alone. Jonas was ordered to take a seat in the screening room, and there he sat, surrounded by forty-six other, empty, seats while Leonard ran the film. Which film? Blow-Up . But this was a new version. Leonard had re-edited it. Jonas sat all alone in the screening room, watching the film. He was impressed. And intrigued. Because this was a totally different story. Less confusing. As if the gap between art and reality had been edited out. And as far as Jonas could tell, the murder was actually solved. The film, or rather: Leonard’s version of it, ended with the central character going to his studio to photograph, and more or less seduce Verushka, the fabulous fashion model: a scene which, in the original film, came right at the beginning. It was pretty close to a happy ending.

Jonas was often to think that the roots of his best and most famous television programmes were to be found here, in a tiny cinema in the Oslo suburb of Røa. He sometimes thought of the Thinking Big series as being just one film, cut in different ways.

On the way back to town, Leonard told him that some kind soul at the offices of the film’s Norwegian distributor had given him a worn-out copy which was actually due to be scrapped. And a sympathetic person at the Film Institute had let him use the cutting desk there. So? What did Jonas think? There was a note of anxiety in Leonard’s voice. What he had done might well seem like sacrilege. To re-edit Blow-Up — it was tantamount to re-editing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Jonas did not know what to say. In time he would come to see that Leonard had possibly been conducting an experiment inspired by genetic engineering. He wanted to prove to Jonas that he could reconstruct himself. That there was hope, despite his little shrimp of a bank teller father. But at the time Jonas could not see anything to suggest that Leonard had succeeded in his venture. All the light seemed to have gone out of his friend’s dark eyes. There was not a spark. Only blackness. As if a shutter had dropped down for good and all.

Then Leonard Knutzen disappeared. Someone said that he had gone to India, that he took LSD and had long since blown his mind out completely. Others claimed to have seen him, or someone who looked like him, in the centre of Copenhagen, carrying a sign — or probably a placard — in the shape of a big hand pointing to a dive down a side street, the sort of place where, in the very early seventies, you could see grainy German porn movies.

Jonas thought often of how fragile a life was, how very, very little it took to knock a person off course. Or onto a new course. You bend down to tie your shoelaces and when you straighten up again your life has changed. Jonas himself had been an astonished witness to the moment when Daniel, high on innumerable easy victories, was suddenly brought face to face with the gravity of life. Jonas never really understood his brother, but he would have bet anything in the world that Daniel would never have become anything as outrageously far-fetched as a minister of the church.

That autumn Daniel had little thought for anything but his prospects as a star athlete; he was going through a phase when he was, in many ways, at his most intolerable, a tearaway disguised as a rebel, Daniel X with his black-gloved fist. Almost as if it were a natural extension of stretching his muscles after a tough training session, he started going out with a girl who sang in a Ten Sing choir. When it came to getting into a girl’s pants, Daniel was not fussy; it was okay by him even if the girl in question was a member of something as soulless and unmusical as one of those YWCA choirs: spotty teenagers singing off-key, backed by a band with badly tuned guitars — a nigh-on blasphemous set-up, in Daniel’s eyes, and about as far from Aretha Franklin’s gut-wrenching, wailful ecstasies as you could get.