Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Often he would turn things on their heads. ‘There are any number of possible futures, everybody knows that,’ he said during one history class. ‘But did it ever occur to you that there also exists a wealth of possible pasts? For tomorrow I want you to write a couple of pages on what the Second World War would have been like for someone from Japan. Don’t just sit there gawping. Make a note in your homework books.’

Mr Dehli’s main interest lay, however, in impressing upon them the way in which the different subjects were all interconnected, as in an organic system of learning. He showed them how just about everything can be set into a fresh context. He told them about poets in history class and religion in Norwegian classes. It came as a shock to Jonas to hear his teacher say that there was nothing to stop them introducing elements from the Weed’s or Miss Pi’s domains, from natural history and maths, that is, into their essays. Mr Dehli advocated a viewpoint which would hold sway in the universities a decade later: if you wanted to do something original with your life then you needed to have both feet on the ground, firmly planted in at least two different realms of study. The more remote from one another the better.

Although Mr Dehli could not know it, in his mind Jonas likened this idea to a necklace he had seen as a child. On it hung a disc engraved on both sides with obscure strokes and dashes which, when you spun the disc round, spelled ‘I love you’.

Despite his conviction that he was special, despite his gift for thinking, up until now Jonas had not done particularly well at school. Or at least, he had not been interested. With the advent, in fifth grade, of the more soporific, factually oriented lessons, he fell behind. Not even the weird and often funny sentences which their teacher made up to help them remember the names of towns in southern Norway or the fjords of Finnmark could enliven his interest. Particularly when it came to writing Norwegian essays Jonas had a problem: he tended to lose himself in the ramifications of his own mental associations. His essay for the exam in eighth grade was a disaster, rewarded, or punished rather, with a P for Poor.

But here he had found a teacher who did exactly the same thing, the difference being that Mr Dehli turned it into a strength. ‘What is the opposite of truth?’ he asked on one occasion, and answered before they had time to think: ‘Clarity.’ Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the thinnest branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following — heart in mouth, almost — their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and … and … and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but …’, and a sigh of relief would run through the classroom, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.

‘Watch this,’ Mr Dehli said in Norwegian class one day, placing a glass beaker of water over a Bunsen burner. ‘Today we’re going to produce an ester.’ He poured equal amounts of ethanol and acetic acid into a test tube and let it sit for a while in the boiling water. ‘See? Nothing happens,’ he announced, absent-mindedly waving a grammar book in the air. ‘In order to instigate a reaction we need something else. Watch carefully now.’ Mr Dehli added a few drops of concentrated sulphuric acid to the test tube and put it back into the boiling water. A lovely smell, like fruit or perfume, filled the classroom. What was going on? Jonas wondered. Chemistry in the Norwegian class? ‘Imagine that those two liquids are two different thoughts,’ Mr Dehli said. ‘Put them together and nothing happens. But then imagine that a third thought suddenly comes to me and I think this along with the other two. Abracadabra! A reaction is triggered!’ Mr Dehli pointed triumphantly to the test tube containing the sweet-smelling liquid. ‘These are the thoughts you have to pursue,’ he concluded, thereby making the final link between chemistry and Norwegian. ‘Those which act as catalysts .’ No one understood what he was getting at better than Jonas, who had for years been whipping up parallel thoughts while skipping doubles and — perhaps even more crucially — had seen the world grow, thanks to a real live ‘catalyst’.

It’s true, one day the world did grow. Jonas was ten years old, sitting all alone on a rock beside Badedammen — the lake that had been converted into a bathing pond for the residents of Grorud back in the thirties. It was early evening and unusually quiet. No yells from down by the weir, where the boys were given to chucking squealing girls into the water; no shouts, half-fearful, half-gleeful, because Jonas — did he have gills? — was swimming all the way across the pond underwater; no mothers lazing on the grassy slope in distracting bikinis with one anxious eye on the toddlers playing by the water’s edge. A brief shower, a warm drizzle, had only just sent the last bathers home for dinner. Now the park-like surroundings were once more drenched in a warm light. The lifeguards, holders of the most coveted of summer jobs — those white uniform caps alone — had quit the scene, having first emptied the elegant wrought-iron litter bins. The shutters were closed on the kiosk and its rich store of ice-poles and ice-cream cones. Jonas sat with the sun on his back next to the diving board where, only days before, Daniel — clad in his new, tiger-striped bathing trunks — had executed a somersault for the very first time; his triumph marred only by the fact that he forgot to look where he was going and ended up ripping the lilo of a lady who, fortunately, managed to roll off it in time. Jonas stared at a dragonfly which was flitting back and forth across the smooth surface of the lake. A dragon from China. He sat there, hoping that something would happen.

Absently he threw a stone into the water, watched the rings spreading out, further and further out, circle upon circle, a huge target. He was bored, he had no one to play with. The summer holidays had begun, his chums were all away. He cursed the disagreement, instigated by an overbearing uncle, which meant that the summer would be half over before Jonas and his family could go to Hvaler.

He picked up another stone, flung it further out, gazed at the rings which began to spread outwards, felt his thoughts, too, flowing in all directions, fanning out from him in a sort of circle. At that same moment something happened to the ripples on the water. They were broken. Or rather: they ran into rings radiating from some other point. He had not heard a splash, the other stone must have been thrown at exactly the same instant as his own. Jonas’s eyes lingered on the pretty picture in the water, the pattern formed by the waves colliding, intersecting — a much nicer sight than the solitary set of rings.

And then a boat came sailing towards him; it emerged from some bushes to his left and bore in a gentle arc straight towards the spot where he was sitting. He shut his eyes, opened them again. It might have had something to do with the landscape in the background, the absence of people. The boat grew. The whole pond grew. The perspective twisted. The boat became a real ship, a magnificent liner. The pond became the open sea. And suddenly Jonas recognised the vessel, it was the MS Bergensfjord itself, the finest of the American liners. Jonas could not have said how long this vision lasted, an actual ship from the Norwegian American Line on a small lake on the fringes of Lillomarka, but it was dispelled, at any rate, when the model ship rammed into the shore right at his feet. The illusion shattered; his surroundings shrank, reverting once more to the familiar bathing pond.