Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It took more than the Queen of Soul and her seductive gospel strains to bring Daniel to the scripture, though. Jonas began to notice that Daniel seemed unusually agitated, then one evening he confessed to his little brother: he had knocked up his girlfriend. He was as desperately certain as you can only be when you are sixteen and have finally ‘done it’, with all the imprudence and raw self-assurance of the first-timer. Jonas could not resist it: ‘Maybe you should have put a black glove on your dick as well,’ he said. His brother, who would normally have flattened him for that, pretended not to hear, and instead went on cursing his spermatozoa, those microscopic champion swimmers that could make a woman’s body swell up like a balloon. He admitted to Jonas that suddenly he was seeing pregnant women all over the place. Wherever he looked there were people with prams and packs of nappies. He was done for. He could already see the headlines: ‘Grorud’s youngest parents.’

It was in this frame of mind that Daniel attended one of the last athletics meets of the year, and at the Jordal Amfi Arena, more specifically in the long-jump pit, he felt a higher power taking a hand in his life.

Daniel was an unusually gifted athlete and had always been particularly good at the long jump. He loved the combination of sprinting and jumping; he revelled in the challenge of hitting the board just right. So he was not at all happy with his first jump of five metres and twenty-seven centimetres — he was used to jumping around six metres. It could not just have been a case of nerves, a slight loss of concentration at the thought of a Ten Sing girl who was alarmingly ‘late’. Something had held him back in the air, he said later. A weight, a heaviness, as if there were some connection between gravidity and gravity. This feeling was even more pronounced on his second jump, when he hit the board perfectly and yet — as if the gravitational force had somehow doubled — jumped a shorter distance than normal. When the measuring crew announced the length — the same as before: ‘Daniel: 5.27’ — he did not give it too much thought. But when, on his third and last jump — the schedule at this meet only allowed for three tries — he jumped exactly five metres and twenty-seven centimetres yet again, he began to wonder. For the first time in his career, Daniel walked away from the long-jump pit without a medal.

Over the next few days, his mood exacerbated no doubt by growing anxiety over his girlfriend’s overdue period, Daniel started to give some serious thought to his weird result in the long-jump: 5.27 three times in a row — that was more than a coincidence. And with his natural propensity for speculation, it was not long before he consulted the old Family Bible, on the principle that a long-jump result was like a grain of manna, a little slip of paper that you picked out of a bowl, like a tombola ticket. Although he had never believed a word of it before, at that particular moment he was sure that the scripture would determine the course of his life. In the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 27, once he had managed to decipher the elaborate Gothic lettering, he slowly read to himself, with eyes as wide, surely, as those of King Belshazzar himself: ‘TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.’ The context, together with Gustav Doré’s dramatic illustration, left him in no doubt: the writing was on the wall. Weighed and found wanting.

Daniel knew what this meant. His soul was too light. For someone as concerned with the health and well-being of the soul as Daniel was, there could be no harsher verdict. At an early age he had read how certain religions believed that the soul was placed in a scale after death. If it proved too light it was cast into the jaws of a monster which sat next to the seat of judgement waiting to receive it. To Daniel this Bible text could mean only one thing: she was pregnant.

Although, there might still be hope. What if this were a final warning from a merciful God? Daniel fell to his knees. Just at that moment Jonas walked in, then pulled up short on the threshold. He could not believe his eyes. Daniel with his back to him, on his knees next to the bed. Daniel the rebel, a pig-headed bugger who had never in his life bowed down to anything. Softly and, if the truth be told, a mite fearfully Jonas retreated. What his brother said, what he prayed for, what he promised — because he must have made some sort of deal — Jonas never discovered. But from that day onwards Daniel W. Hansen was a Christian. You might say that he rotated his X forty-five degrees, turning it into a cross. And I hardly need say: there was no pregnancy. Soon afterwards, Daniel’s girlfriend came to see him, all smiles, to tell him that everything was okay. For days afterwards, Jonas could hear Daniel humming to himself when he thought he was alone, and Jonas’s hearing was good enough for him to recognise the hymn: ‘Hallelujah, my soul is free.’

Daniel kept his promise, though. He remained a Christian. It may be that his time as Daniel X had merely been a harbinger of what was to come, as Jonas had thought — an intimation of an unknown x inside him, a religious chamber. If, that is, he did not believe that he had at last found the field which had been there waiting for his rebellious heart. To Jonas it was nothing short of a miracle. Proof that at any moment a person can suddenly change. So when other, normally peaceable individuals suddenly became raging revolutionaries, Daniel, with his slumbering, inborn talent for rebellion, was holed up indoors with his nose buried in his Bible, as if he had already started studying theology, embarked upon his career in the church. He had found his Samarkand. His life had acquired weight.

Leonard Knutzen, too, gained weight. Or at least his wallet did. Years later, when Jonas rarely ever thought of his old friend, Leonard’s name suddenly appeared in the newspapers. Although eventually the headlines spoke simply of Leonardo. In photographs his coat was always slung over his shoulders like a cape, a touch which now seemed elegant rather than affected. And his eyes looked keen again. The first article appeared in conjunction with a much publicised exhibition of works by young Norwegian photographers. Leonard Knutzen had put up the money for the exhibition. A lot of money. Leonard Knutzen was a rich man. Fabulously rich. But no one, not even in media circles had ever come across his name before. He lived abroad. Leonard had quietly made himself a fortune on the stock market. The image of him presented in the press was of a shrewd individual much to be admired, a financial artist; it was them, the media, who nicknamed him Leonardo, without knowing anything of his heroic past as the Italian-inspired director of a good number of twelve-minute 8 mm films full of scooters and people gazing in different directions. Leonard had done it — done what he had shown he could do with Blow-Up in that tiny cinema at Røa. He had actually re-cut his own fate. He had used the art of montage to create a new life for himself. Or perhaps one should simply say that he had enlarged himself.

To Jonas, Leonard seemed the very personification of modern Norway — a nation which led the most anonymous, the most discreet, of existences, alongside the other nations of the world, while the money simply poured into the state coffers. Likewise, Leonard sat in his faraway office, pressing buttons, unremarked by anyone in his native country, while the money pumped into his offshore accounts. The press’s glowing reports of Leonardo’s doings reminded Jonas of a conjuring trick. Leonard was now blowing up money, he could take a krone and, by dint of an abstract, magical process, magnify it into ten. Both Leonard and Norway had discovered that you did not need to work — or not, at least, in the old-fashioned physical fashion depicted in Aktuell magazine — in order to get rich. Leonard had finally found a use for his keen eye. That was still the key. An eye for where to put one’s money. An eye for the perfect stock. In interviews he said, half in jest, that he supposed he might be a Leonardo when it came to spying investment opportunities which no one else believed possible. To Jonas it seemed more as though Leonard had determined to blow the abilities, the genes, of a lousy bank teller into something great. He had produced a happy ending, against all odds, and in spite of the original film.