Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

One day when Daniel was sitting in his room poring over Doré’s illustration for the story of Moses breaking the tablets of the law, Jonas walked in and wanted to know what his brother was looking at — grew even more curious when he noticed that his brother was peering at the page through the self-same magnifying glass which he used to burn his name into wooden walls. Jonas asked if he could see. Daniel said no, almost on principle, and the squabble escalated into a regular fist-fight which ended with Daniel — possibly inspired by Moses and the tablets — hitting his brother so hard over the head with the Family Bible, that little piece of furniture with the metal clasps, that Jonas was actually knocked out cold. The doctor was sent for, this being in the great days when family doctors still made house calls — in the Hansen family’s case a GP who drove up in a jeep like the ones used by the emergency services, for all the world as if Grorud was a jungle, or a highway littered with broken-down vehicles. After examining the patient and looking at the sizeable bump on his tender scalp, he said he believed that Jonas was suffering from concussion. The doctor ordered a day in bed under careful observation. On his way out he cast a glance at the Family Bible, which had been presented as evidence, and shook his head eloquently. Daniel was all innocence, standing there with an affectedly pious expression on his face. Sometimes, if Jonas happened to be in a church where Daniel was preaching, he would see that same look on his brother’s face, up there in the pulpit.

Jonas developed an early mistrust of books. And although he was obliged, over the years, to plough his way through a lot of textbooks, he regarded the fame he eventually won by announcing programmes on a flat screen as proof that his childhood suspicions had been well-founded. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, books could not be the path to making a name for oneself. In this he would prove to be sadly mistaken, although it would take him many years under lock and key to discover this.

Nonetheless, there came a day when Jonas Wergeland picked up a book and almost lost his life. How could that be? Not only that, but it was a novel, and Jonas knew that there was nothing worse than fiction. His bright sister Rakel disappeared into a world of her own at an early age; for years she drifted around Grorud like a local version of Don Quixote on his deluded wanderings, all thanks to the tales of the Arabian Nights. Later she became a truck-driving samaritan after reading a book by Albert Schweitzer. Something told Jonas that the covers of a book could harbour a bewitching power, that the contents could paralyze you, quick as a flash, like the strike of a cobra. Books too, like women, ought to bear a sign saying ‘Danger. High Voltage.’ All books ought to be fitted with hefty clasps and a solid padlock.

This suspicion was borne out by Viktor Harlem, Jonas’s best friend in high school, who told him how he had become hooked on literature. He actually used the word ‘hooked’, as if it were a drug addiction. Viktor had been in eighth grade at the time and had to make a herbarium for school. In order to press the flowers he borrowed the thickest book from his mother’s not exactly extensive library and some weeks later, as he was removing one of the flowers, his eye happened to fall on the page and he started to read. And that was that. ‘It was a germander speedwell that led me to Leo Tolstoy,’ Viktor said. And from there, thought, Jonas, it was no great leap to Ezra Pound and The Cantos, and a life as a vegetable in an institution, or perhaps one should say: a pressed flower in a herbarium.

Even as a child, Jonas understood that the words in books, particularly works of fiction, could be addictive, and read therefore only as much as was absolutely necessary. He did, of course, have to look at those volumes used in school, but even these he merely skimmed, with all his mental defences raised. He knew that at any minute he might be carried off to some Lambaréné, that a slightly unfortunate choice of book could result in him selling up on the spur of the moment and going off to Calcutta to help the poor. But since the works on the school syllabus were usually ruined for ever by one zealous teacher or another, Jonas escaped unscathed.

He never forgot, though, the lesson which Daniel had thumped into him: books were a weapon. They were dangerous. And like wolves, they were at their most dangerous in packs — as he discovered when a shelf full of books came crashing down on him in Karen Mohr’s bedroom. Only rarely did Jonas venture into a bookshop or a library — it was almost as if he half-expected that at any moment the bookshelves would come tumbling down on his head again, and bury him, or that the books themselves, seeing that he was alone, would attack him and tear him to shreds. The unease which Jonas felt in a well-stocked bookshop was not unlike Tippi Hedren’s dread of the crows and gulls perched on tree branches and railings all around her in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds.

And yet — one day, of his own free will, Jonas picked up a book. Why? Because he was in love. And because he wanted to kill a fly.

This was in the days between Christmas and New Year, barely a year after Jonas, now a young man, had met Margrete again. They were spending the holiday somewhere on the outskirts of Jotunheimen, in a cottage owned by Margrete’s parents. Jonas had been working for a short time as an announcer with NRK, he was just beginning to notice the first signs of his growing fame. Beyond the rough log walls it was bitterly cold, more than twenty below zero. They went only for short ski trips in the middle of the day, their shadows long in the almost horizontal rays of the low sun. The rest of the time they made love. They made a bed for themselves in front of the fireplace in the living room so that they would at all times have a view of the landscape outside. They lived on love and hot cocoa. Jonas had never felt so contented, so blissful, so inexplicably happy. He was, you might say, laid wide open to new impulses.

Sometimes Margrete would read. On one such occasion Jonas was lying staring into space, limp from lovemaking and intense conversations. All was quiet. No wind. A fly, wakened by the heat in the cottage, began to buzz; it was like the hiss of a snake in Paradise. Jonas glanced round for something to hit it with and his eye lighted on a paltry shelf of dog-eared paperbacks. He pulled out a copy at random and flattened the fly at the first attempt. Without looking up, Margrete murmured from her chair: ‘Books are not weapons.’

What was the greatest danger to which Jonas Wergeland was ever exposed? Not an easy one to answer, one would think. He had reefed sail in a gale in the middle of the night. He had ignited fury in an English pub. If anyone had asked Wergeland himself he would, however, have had no hesitation in replying: ‘The biggest risk I ever took was to read a book.’

He stood there holding the old paperback, weighing it in his hand. He was feeling a little reckless. He sank down into a chair, opened the book at the first page and began to read. Margrete and he sat each in their chair, with the mountain right in front of them if they raised their eyes: a slope so steep that the snow did not lie there, a normally black rock face to which the freezing cold and the low sun now lent a pinkish cast, a view which seemed almost to belong to another country, another planet. Jonas thought fleetingly of Bo Wang Lee and the Vegans, of the possibility of opening up the terrain. He dropped his eyes to his book again. He did not know that with this seemingly harmless act he had let a wolf out of its cage and that all unknown to him this wolf was now sneaking up on him from behind. For a few fateful seconds Jonas Wergeland forgot all about his ingrained sense of mistrust. He forgot what a profound impact a novel can have on one. He forgot that every work of fiction, even a flimsy paperback, is a Bible, a sacred text, containing layer upon layer of meaning. In opening a book you could be putting your whole view of the world to the test.