The Conqueror Page 13
Jonas had focused particularly on the moment when a bowing Abel hands over his paper on algebraic functions and their integrals – a theorem of such enormously far-reaching importance, regarded by some as the most significant mathematical work of the nineteenth century – at a meeting of the French Scientific Society at the Institut de France, in October 1826, where Augustin Louis Cauchy and Adrien Marie Legendre, the two men who would decide his fate – all shame on their names – were appointed to assess his paper: a scene in which Jonas made much of the Institut building, the solemn atmosphere of that room steeped in centuries of scholarship and the blasé faces of the assembled company, their sceptical glances at Abel, as he stood there, made up like a Negro. From this Jonas cut to a close-up of the front page of his manuscript, showing what was for him, Jonas, the obvious key to Abel’s failure. After his name Abel had added: Norvégien. From Norway. Norwegian. Could those grand gentlemen have been in any doubt? This addition was their guarantee that they were looking at a manuscript they did not have to take seriously, which they could, therefore, treat with the greatest indifference.
Abel’s hopes, on the other hand, were high; he expected to receive an answer within two weeks. The programme dwelt on Abel during this period of waiting as it dragged out, stretched to three weeks, then to four weeks; the camera followed Abel as he roamed the streets of Paris, waiting, lonely, hungry, waiting desperately, on tenterhooks, for the judges’ verdict. From time to time one was given a peek into Cauchy’s study and saw how Abel’s brilliant work on transcendental functions sank further and further down into a heap of papers, a situation almost as reprehensible, not to say stupid, as an Egyptologist having the Rosetta Stone fall into his hands right at the start, then forgetting where he’s put it. Cauchy – all shame on his name – was too taken up with his own works to look at the jottings of a young mathematician from Norway, a country where, by definition, scholarship was still languishing in the Stone Age.
In the meantime Abel, this Norwegian, was seen sitting in the cafés around St Germain des Prés, lodging as he did with a poor family who lived not far from there, in a street which no longer exists, as if the French, consumed by guilt, wished to erase all memory of Abel. He sits in cafés, writes letters that, typically, he dates with a mathematical problem. We see Abel, a Norwegian, walking the streets of a Paris that grows colder and colder; in the background we hear the sound of bells – a sound that dominates the whole programme – church bells ringing; we see how cold Abel is, shivering with cold, we hear him coughing, a cough that gets worse and worse; we see him circling, trembling with cold, around the Institut de France, stronghold of arrogance, where Jonas showed men walking out of the main door and shaking their heads dismissively, Cauchy among them – all shame on his name – at Abel who stands there waiting, humble, head bowed, made up like a Negro. The camera stuck with Abel, following him on his walks through the Jardin du Luxembourg amid the chiming of church bells, and from there back to the Institut de France, always back to that spot, around that building, coughing and coughing, then into the Café Procope, just round the back in the rue Mazarine, the haunt of all manner of individuals: Diderot and Rousseau to name but two; and here Abel, their equal, algebra’s answer to Rimbaud, scribbles on a sheet of paper, mulling over difficult mathematical questions. So here walked, here sat, a genius, an unacknowledged genius, a supposed nothing who was, in fact, a number one. And what was it they overlooked, these pompous Frenchmen, these budding Napoleons blinded by their own excellence? They overlooked a man with a unique gift for spotting profound connections between mathematical groups, how they affected one another; for turning tricky questions on their heads, seeing things from new angles, as when – instead of solving the problem of fifth-degree equations, he showed that generally these could not be expressed in terms of radicals. Similarly, with elliptic integrals: instead of studying the integrals themselves, he looked at the opposite, or inverse, functions, the elliptical functions. Suddenly, thanks to this magnificent device, everything looked different. Abel is brooding on a whole host of projects. There is just one catch: he has the misfortune to have been born on the periphery. Abel, a Norwegian, wanders around Paris, waiting and coughing, he waits one month, he waits two months, on a visit to a doctor he is found to be suffering from tuberculosis, but still Abel hangs on patiently in Paris for as long as his money lasts. Then he has to leave, travelling home by way of Berlin.
Not until word of Abel’s death reached Paris, a good two years later, was his paper unearthed by Cauchy – all shame on his memory – and dealt with post-haste, although it was not published until 1841, fifteen years after its submission. To crown it all, the publishers then added to the catalogue of crimes by losing the manuscript immediately thereafter.
Perhaps it’s not so strange that Jonas Wergeland, after working on Abel, had an even greater hatred of all things French, from the guillotine to their pompous, incomprehensible post-structuralism with its obscure terminology, all those arrogant Frenchmen, in fact, who, God help us, couldn’t even see that their own composer, Berlioz, was a genius; although Jonas Wergeland did possibly go too far in declaring in a promotional interview that the French were the most cynical and arrogant of races, that it was hardly any wonder they were the most detested and corrupt of all colonialists, or that they had no qualms about carrying out nuclear tests anywhere, as long as it wasn’t their own country. ‘And if you’re a corrupt dictator in the market for arms,’ he was reported as saying, ‘you can be sure that France will be happy to oblige, in their eyes no tyrant is too rotten.’ One of the film crew later maintained that, during the regular spot in which Wergeland himself entered the scene, he had spat on the Institut building – a shot which was edited out of the final version. Jonas Wergeland was sure he was right: France had killed a Norwegian, one of the greatest Norwegians of all time.
In the programme’s closing scene, Jonas Wergeland showed his hero standing just beyond the Pont Neuf, at that triangle where the two channels of the Seine run into one, gazing at the Institut de France. As a viewer, one senses Abel’s feeling that he is faced here with two choices in life, that he stands at a crucial parting of the ways. And yet one also sees what an ocean separates this coughing, shivering, starving figure by the bridge from those blind, self-righteous, shameless men shaking their heads outside the Institut de France. For the whole of the final minute Jonas showed fragments of Abel’s calculations projected onto various shots of Paris, not least of the Scientific Society building, televised images which made it look as though the buildings of Paris, the entire city, were covered in mathematical formulae, in Abel’s equations and elliptical functions, almost like graffiti, a rebellion, vandalism. An algebraic conquest.
Disoriented
One thing that comes to no one as a matter of course is love, far less that hormonal jitterbug inside us so feebly termed ‘being in love’. After Jonas’s dream, that somewhat morbid dream of getting his hands under Anne Beate Corneliussen’s bulging Setesdal sweater was, as it were, squeezed to bits, he suffered for some time from feelings of unfulfilled desire, and certain girls in the parallel class – this was before mixed classes became the norm – were the object of many a long look. Not unnaturally, it was one of these girls who eventually caught his attention or, more accurately, grabbed Jonas’s attention. Henny F. was a pretty ordinary girl, and Jonas did not take any real notice of her until the class trip in eighth grade, in March of that year – and, I should add, with the entire class in the throes of puberty – when they spent a whole tremulous week up in the hills near Vinstra, where the attraction between the sexes was strong enough to start an avalanche and a number of new pairings saw the light of day or rather, the dark of night. There was one dinner in particular at which Henny F. made a big impression by displaying her talent for tying knots of spaghetti in her mouth with her tongue. What would it be like to kiss such a girl, Jonas mused.
The big breakthrough came on May 17, on the morning of Constitution Day itse
lf, after they had been running amok with firecrackers for hours, destroying diverse bike handlebars and postboxes, as well as scorching the stockings of some of the mothers quite badly with the more capricious ‘jumping-jacks’, which shot dangerously this way and that – exploding, as they did, several times. Jonas attended the traditional ceremony in the Memorial Grove, where the Grorud School girls’ choir arranged themselves on the steps of the church and sang – at the top of their voices, as they say – ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, no more, no less, and there stood Henny F., wreathed by green birch leaves, along with the other girls in their thin white sweaters and red skirts and, not least, red bonnets which looked so totally out of place and yet utterly irresistible, especially on Henny F., and they sang, they sang so beautifully that Jonas felt his body go numb with delight. For there was something mystical about songs sung in harmony, he had discovered this for himself in first grade, when their teacher had taught them to sing ‘All the Birds’ in two-part harmony. With tireless patience she had taken half of the class out into the corridor and rehearsed the second part with them one by one. And when they sang this song that they had been practising and practising, ‘All the Birds’, for the first time altogether, it went surprisingly well, it didn’t merely sound twice as beautiful, it sounded ten times as beautiful, so beautiful that it made Jonas’s scalp tingle. This was an aesthetic milestone and a preparation for the day when Jonas would discover how much finer things became when you simply wove two of them together. But here was the girls’ choir, not the world’s best girls’ choir perhaps, but they were singing in harmony, singing ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, a song Jonas had heard many times but which now, because of Henny F., standing there with a look of such fervour on her face, all-aglow in the midst of the group of girls, Henny F. with her throat straining eagerly and Jonas’s eyes fixed on her larynx, sensing as he did that this was the seat of her magic, acquired the semblance of pure beauty and gave Jonas a musical experience that not even Wagner at his most grandiose and extravagant could top. Standing there in the Memorial Grove, Jonas felt a pressure on his spine, felt something seizing hold of him body and soul, even though he had not yet deciphered the signals from the dragon-horn button he had swallowed as a little boy; and for the first time – or the second if one counts Margrete, a relationship which Jonas himself had pushed to the back of his mind – he understood that girls were different, that what he was now feeling, this longing, this throbbing, all-consuming desire, was something other than the more limited randiness triggered by Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pneumatic allurements. This was not the ABC of Sex; this was the Alpha and Omega of love.
He started walking home from school with Henny F., liked to hear her talk, this in itself enough: her voice caressing his ears, making him go all funny inside. Although these were the days of colourful, almost psychedelic, Flower-Power garb, she often wore more theatrical clothes than other girls, as if for her the world was a stage. On one occasion she invited him to her house, and he was introduced to her father, a violinist who, as one might expect, looked kindly on a son of the organist from Grorud Church. Jonas also got to see her room where, apart from a couple of diplomas for ski jumping, the walls were completely covered in pictures of pop groups cut from the countless music magazines that flourished during these years: groups Jonas knew next to nothing about, even though many of the same pictures were also stuck up on Daniel’s wall – and on the ceiling – at home. He noticed that the Hollies were much in evidence, a group which – as I’m sure even you are aware, Professor – was, not surprisingly, particularly strong on the vocals. She played him some singles: ‘Look Through Any Window’, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, ‘Bus Stop’, songs in which Allan Clark, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash created their distinctive harmonies, and to which Henny F. added an upper part, even higher than Graham Nash’s – no small achievement, had Jonas but known it. ‘Maybe you’ll be a star too one day,’ he said and pointed to a picture of Cilla Black sporting long, false eyelashes, ‘I mean, you’re so musical.’ She shook her head shyly: ‘Who me? No!’
Nevertheless she blossomed under his importunate attentions. To the surprise of her friends, at the eighth grade end-of-term party, to which their parents were also invited, she did a turn with another girl; they played nylon-stringed guitars and sung one of the year’s big hits, ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, in two-part harmony. For this they reaped, not surprisingly, a spontaneous burst of applause with lots of cheering, whistling and stamping of feet. Very few could have suspected, however, that at a later date this same girl – and this may not be entirely unconnected with her having known Jonas – would become one of Norway’s greatest singers – a lyric soprano, a diva, so they said – who spent part of each year abroad and had engagements on all the world’s most famous stages. Jonas stayed close to her throughout the evening. She was wearing an eye-catching and rather unusual mini-dress of deep-red velvet. In the crush he ran a stealthy finger over her shoulder, saw how it left a trail, like a signature.
On one of the first days of the summer holidays Jonas invited Henny F. to go orienteering with him. In a move to encourage people to try a different form of exercise, the Grorud Athletics Society orienteering club had set up a series of control points in Lillomarka. If you visited a certain number of control points in the course of the season, you won a badge. For Jonas this was, however, only an excuse; he borrowed Daniel’s map and compass and there they were, Jonas and Henny F., on a hot summer’s day in the woods, both tense with an expectancy that had nothing to do with orienteering.
Jonas wasn’t particularly handy with a map and compass and at one point, after finding five control points and punching their card amid rather exaggerated whoops of glee, they lost their way somewhere in the hilly terrain between Breisjøen and Alunsjøen Lakes: or rather, they had wandered on to the top of an out-of-the-way hill, a small mountain almost, where there should have been a control point, but where there was no control point, whereupon Jonas bombastically declared that this hill was not on the map, that they found themselves, in other words, in an uncharted region of Norway.
Henny F. has nothing against this. She removes her rucksack, pulls out a large chequered travelling rug and unfurls it, as one might cast a net, onto the grass. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s soak up the sun for a while.’ They are in a totally secluded spot and she promptly proceeds to take off her clothes, lies down in just her bra and panties, cotton garments with a pattern that gives them the look of a bikini. Jonas strips off too, sits down beside her in his underpants, which all of a sudden seem far too small. Both are pale-skinned.
‘What sort of sound does a dragon make?’ Jonas finds himself asking.
She turns and looks at him. Says not a word. Just looks.
‘That’s right,’ Jonas says. ‘No sound.’
He fell to studying the terrain, appearing terribly interested in something, placed the compass on the map and took his bearings, sat like this until Henny F. swept them off his lap with a resoluteness, bordering on resentfulness, that surprised him. ‘Forget that,’ she said, as if making a protest against all attempts to put the world in order at this moment. Jonas stayed perfectly still, forced himself not to glance down at Henny F., lying there next to him with her eyes closed, an outstretched girl’s body clad only in a few square inches of cotton. Jonas sat in a piece of uncharted Norway, feeling something he had not felt since Margrete: that he was positively shuddering with desire. Or confusion. Or bewilderment. If he had not realized it before, he saw now that behind all the fine theories about reason and intellect, human beings consisted to just as great an extent of chemicals and electricity, that people could at times be turned, at the push of a button, into a factory buzzing with hormones, all wilfully going their own way.
He slid down onto the travelling rug, on his back. A moment later he felt her finger brush his hand, her fingertips, and it is not much of an exaggeration when I say that this situation, from a subjective point of view at least, is reminiscent
of Michelangelo’s fresco of the Creation, fingers touching, life coming into being. Because that is what it was like and that is how it would be every time a girl touched Jonas: as if he suddenly awoke, became someone else; he was no longer an ordinary boy, he was something very special.
He had to turn over onto his stomach, for several reasons. She began to stroke the back of his neck, his shoulders. Touching him ever so lightly, allowing her fingertips to no more than graze the hairs on his body. He had the idea that his skin had turned to velvet, that the pressure of her fingers had left a trail. She kept this up for some time, before lying back and starting to hum, possibly a Hollies song, ‘I’m Alive’, Jonas couldn’t have said.
He propped himself up on his elbows, leaned over her and, at long last, he did it, he kissed her, experienced a parallel to the phenomenon of two-part harmony: how, when they meet, two ordinary pairs of lips become more than the sum of their parts, so much so that suddenly he was drifting in all directions, he was both lying there and yet not lying there, because her tongue could not only tie knots in spaghetti, it could also suspend gravity and all the laws of cause and effect, besides showing him that the mouth was linked to every other part of the body, that there had to be cross-connections from the groove between his upper lip and his nose to the line bisecting his scrotum, as if they were, so to speak, on the same meridian. To Jonas’s mind the whole of his explosively randy body, every molecule, was invested in that kiss. And as if to reciprocate he worked his way down to her neck, her throat; was so worked up that, without meaning to, he gave her a huge love bite. He hoped, however, that she would interpret this as a stamp, a watermark, a sign of true love – something which need not be hidden underneath a polo-neck sweater but should be paraded like a medal: ‘Look, I’ve been kissed; I’ve been kissed by a randy, besotted boy!’