The Conqueror Page 10
The Three Wise Men were never in any doubt: this news had to be made public. But how? Not surprisingly it was Viktor himself, with his mysterious network of contacts, who came up with the solution and set the stage for the triumphant evening when the three friends came walking – arm in arm then too – along Karl Johans gate, like three gunslingers in a western striding down the main street of some lawless town. They had come across Egertorget, passing underneath the splendid neon sign for Freia Chocolate, at which Jonas had so often gazed in wonder as a child, and were making their way over to the Eastern Station. And there – dead ahead of them – as if inscribed across the dark evening sky – was the message, sweeping past the eyes of everyone who was watching, like the Northern Lights: NORWEGIAN SHELLS USED IN BIAFRA. How Viktor, undoubtedly with the help of some reporter, had succeeded in keying the headline into the telex machine at the Aftenposten offices on Akersgata, onto the tape which, by transmitting the data down a telephone wire, converted it into glowing letters running round the top of the Eastern Railway Station façade, remained a mystery – not least to the owners of the newspaper. There it was, however, the writing on the wall, as clear as it was inexplicable, presented as it was on the largest electric headlines sign in Norway. Every bit as impressive as the Freia Chocolate sign. A whole twenty-six yards of panels, nine thousand light bulbs, revolving round and round. The Three Wise Men stood at the bottom of Karl Johans gate along with a good many other people, gazing up at the building across from them, as if mesmerized by the incomprehensible, impossible, outrageous, insolent legend that swept past their eyes at regular intervals, picked out in blazing light bulbs: NORWEGIAN SHELLS USED IN BIAFRA, again and again, between an advert for Adelsten Ladies and Menswear and a subscription special offer.
Several members of the press had also seen it. To be on the safe side, Viktor had tipped off one of the city papers and sent them a copy of the article in Peace News. A few days later it made front-page headlines. People refused to believe it, of course. They simply could not credit it. To begin with, the Ministry of Defence also denied the assertions but later issued a statement confirming them: the arms had been produced by the Norwegian company Raufoss for an American client. A long and involved explanation was given for how this could have happened, together with an assurance that Norway had not, of course, sold these shells to Nigeria.
Not that anyone believed that either. The Three Wise Men did not mean to moralize; they simply wanted to show that Norway was involved with the outside world. As long as the wealth was filtering into the country – not to say pouring in, or rather, being sucked into Norway – you could be sure that, in global terms, we were on the side of the lawbreakers, not to say the vultures. It was this fact which, incredible though it may seem, the people of Norway succeeded in suppressing and go on suppressing, as they sit there deeply ensconced in their comfy Stressless armchairs. Hence the reason that they are regularly taken so completely by surprise when arms fabricated in Norway, some small component, shows up where it shouldn’t – be it, as past history has shown, in Cuba, in Israel, in the Soviet Union or Turkey. Or when it is discovered that some nice, respectable Norwegian concern has set up shop in a bloody dictatorship. Norway cannot stay an innocent bystander, sheltered from events forever. One of the things that was shot to pieces in Biafra, in that blessedly far-off conflict, was Norway’s innocence. Thanks to Viktor Harlem, this blot on the virtuous face of Norway was placed, as it were, on record, to endure for all time.
And now, nearly three years after this exploit, the Three Wise Men are walking the streets of Lillehammer after a glorious skiing expedition in Gudbrandsdalen, another exploit which I should like, if I may, to describe in detail later. Now though, as I say, they are walking side-by-side, arm in arm, gleefully firing off suggestions – each one crazier than the one before – for new and momentous demonstrations, fresh disclosures concerning woeful situations in what they call the Potato Monarchy. In later years, both Axel and Jonas would recall that Viktor – it may have been the Taoist in him – had had his misgivings about that day, that he had anxiously consulted his diary – otherwise known as his seventh sense – wherein the date was circled in bright red, and shaken his head. So now he was treading rather warily, as a superstitious person will avoid stepping on the cracks in the pavement, and all of a sudden, on a side street, he swaps places with Jonas, takes Jonas’s place in the middle, playing ‘all change’, like when they were boys, and then it happens, what so seldom happens, and yet now and again does: a chunk of ice slides off one of the roofs, a large, hard chunk of ice comes hurtling through the air, inexorably, and hits Viktor – of all people Viktor, who is walking in the middle – on the head.
Viktor instantly fell to the ground, unconscious, and lay still. Axel, quick-witted as always, sprinted into a shop and called an ambulance. When it arrived he got in along with Viktor.
Jonas stayed behind. Picked up, of all things, the block of ice. Thought for a second, perhaps, of the old party game, Spin the Bottle. The whim of chance. Thought, perhaps, incensed by his own impotence, of smashing a window, all the windows in the street. He felt a burning urge to climb up onto the roof, to see that spot where the chunk of ice had broken off, from which it had fallen, the cause of the accident. Instead he stood where he was, regarding it as if it were a crystal ball, offering the prospect of an answer, and he did, in fact, glimpse something inside the ice. He took it back to the guesthouse in which they were staying and put it in the washbasin. Only then, with the bathroom light shining on it, did he spy the earring inside, one of those big pearl earrings, fake, cheap. Or maybe it was genuine, he thought. Jonas had no idea how it could have got there. How do things ever find their place? By a process that was possibly just as inexplicable or as logical as Norwegian shells winding up in Biafra.
Axel was sitting in the corridor when Jonas arrived at the hospital; distractedly running his fingers through his hair, as if trying to straighten out his black curls. Viktor was still unconscious, undergoing clinical tests in Admissions. The X-rays of his head had revealed nothing. They could hope. But both Axel and Jonas knew that a head was every bit as fragile as an electric bulb. They sat wordlessly side by side. Jonas rubbed his forehead; Axel fiddled with his hair. A kindly doctor asked them to come back the next day. Axel had called Viktor’s mother. She was on her way to Lillehammer.
At the guesthouse the chunk of ice had almost melted away. Jonas told Axel about the earring, but when he looked for it, it was gone. ‘Don’t kid around with me now,’ Axel said.
After a week Viktor regained consciousness, but that was all. He said nothing. He was somewhere else. Even though he could dress himself, could walk, could eat, he still needed help. He was there, and yet not. There was no reason why it should have been so, but so it was. He was a mystery to medical science, as they said. Jonas took it hard, even harder than Axel. Six months later, when he went to Timbuktu, there were those who said it was because he felt so bad about Axel.
Axel eventually wound up in an institution in Oslo, and it was here that Jonas visited him regularly, year after year. ‘Behind hill the monk’s bell/borne on the wind./Sail passed here in April;/may return in October/Boat fades in silver; slowly.’ No response. Viktor sat utterly motionless, staring into space. An extinguished light bulb.
Ironically enough, Viktor’s mother had bought him a Stressless Royal. Here, in this chair, Viktor spent the greater part of his life from then on. All he did was eat and watch TV, nothing else. He, who had never looked at a television before, who was never still, sat there like an inert king. One might almost say he had become the perfect Norwegian, Jonas thought. The quintessential spectator. Who saw and yet did not see. Who could watch anything at all without it making any impression. An exponent of wu-wei, non-action. And even now, ten years after the accident, Viktor looked as young as ever; he might still have been in his third year at high school, about to sit his university Prelim. It was true: Viktor had gained eternal life but at what a pr
ice.
‘Do you remember Master Tung-hsüan-tzû and the art of love?’ Jonas said.
No glow in the eyes before him, eyes which had sparkled when Viktor had told Jonas about the Taoist metaphors for the different ways of thrusting into a vagina – like a wild horse leaping into a river, like a sparrow pecking up rice in a field, like large rocks sinking into the sea, or like the wind filling a sail – images which showed Jonas, as Daniel’s examples had done, that the act of love posed the greatest challenge to the imagination, or was it the other way round?
‘You know Svein Rossland, my old teacher, knew Niels Bohr?’ Jonas said. ‘They worked together in Copenhagen.’
No response. For the first few years, Jonas had talked a lot about this, hoping that it would ring a bell somewhere inside Viktor’s head, hoping to find a switch that might turn him on.
‘I often said that Pluto had to have a moon, but everybody laughed at me,’ Jonas said. ‘Now they’ve discovered it, the Americans.’
No response.
In a final attempt to rouse his friend, and one that was about as dangerous as tampering with an unexploded bomb, Jonas asked, ‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’
No response.
After the accident, after the Prelim, after Timbuktu and after national service, Jonas started at Oslo University. Jonas suspected that he might have chosen to study astrophysics because he wanted to learn more about the universe, that universe which causes two people to swap places, then makes a chunk of ice drop out of the sky. He wanted to learn the ways of the universe – or its Tao, as Viktor would have put it – and mankind’s place in this design.
‘Comes then snow scur on the river/And a world is covered with jade.’
Criminal Past
Why wrestle with mystifying chains of cause and effect? There were times in his life when Jonas Wergeland was less concerned with questioning how the universe came into existence than with charting his own existence. As, for example, on one of the few trips he made together with his wife, when they managed no more on their first evening than to take a taxi across the bridge and ride up to the restaurant at the top of the Galata Tower where, thanks to Margrete’s whispered conversation with the mâitre d’, they were given a table by one of the windows overlooking the old town. And as Jonas was sitting there with his glass of raki and the taste of fried clams in his mouth, waiting for a helping of osmanli köftesi – recommended by Margrete – it struck him that he could have left for home the next morning, had he been an ordinary tourist, that is, because this, the sight before him, had to be the paramount and most enduring image of Istanbul: the silhouettes, the Oriental skyline – an almost stupefyingly beautiful prospect, triggering a myriad of associations. He ran his gaze over the array of domes and minarets and thought of Aunt Laura; thought how he was sitting in a city where Europe and Asia, and possibly also the medieval and the modern world, intertwined. And, in the midst of all this, as his eye fell on master architect Sinan’s massive, nigh-on tumescent, Süleymaniye Mosque, he felt a twinge of guilt because it reminded him of a dream, a calling which he had forsaken.
‘I think I like the Blue Mosque best,’ he said, his eyes flitting over the floodlit buildings on the other side of the water.
‘Just because it has six minarets?’ said Margrete. ‘You’re like a little boy. Going for the battleship with the most guns.’
Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? His travels had something to do with memory, with visiting places that were a part of him but which he could not recall. Jonas Wergeland always set off on a journey with a suspicion that he was, in fact, going home. And when they were making love in the hotel room in the old town, not very far from the large, covered bazaar, it seemed to him that Margrete was making love to him in a different way, as if she were bent on urging his imagination to follow new and eccentric paths, with the result that, afterwards, when he thought of the mosques, it suddenly struck him that they looked rather like giant crabs, either that or Samurai helmets flanked by the tips of lances. And this stroke of invention could not simply be ascribed to the shabby, though elegant and exotic interior – the ceramic tiles in the bathroom with their reproduction of a famed Iznik design, the bunch of tulips on the marble bedside table – which could have made him feel that one of the recurring dreams of his youth had come true and he was actually spending a night in the harem with one of the sultan’s slaves. There was something about this city itself, about making love here, which filled him with a rare and weighty awareness of being ‘in place’, as if he had completed an invisible circle. And as they lay there listening to the muezzins proclaiming the hour of late evening prayers Margrete asked him why he was so pensive, why he lay there smiling in the darkness, and he said, ‘Because I have roots here.’ For so it is: not only the sins of the fathers but also the blissful experiences of the parents are visited on the sons.
Neither the Blue Mosque nor the Topkapi was at the top of Jonas’s list of sights to see, however. The following day he took Margrete to a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn, the narrow inlet separating the old part of the city from the new; to the Pera Palas, a hotel built to accommodate passengers off the Orient Express in the days when Istanbul was the most cosmopolitan of all cities. Margrete laughed at his eagerness, thought he meant to show her the suite in which Kemal Atatürk or Mata Hari had stayed. ‘Why did we come here?’ she asked out of politeness. ‘Because…’ Jonas said and left a lengthy pause for dramatic effect, as they stood there, directly across from the pale-green, cubic building. ‘Because my parents once stayed here.’
Not many couples from Grorud visited Istanbul in the early fifties, but Åse and Haakon Hansen did. And it was mainly Jonas’s mother’s doing. Åse was an avid reader of detective novels, and there was one very good reason why Istanbul held such a particular appeal for her. It is true that Jonas came from a more or less bookless home, but that was only because these paperbacks, most of them in English, never made it onto any bookshelf; they came and they went, leaving no trace – the majority of them were of course borrowed. Most notably during the run-up to the Easter break, true to a singular Norwegian tradition for reading crime novels over this particular holiday, his mother would gather together a pile of dog-eared English books with garish covers – as if inspired by the Church’s gory Easter story; as if in need of a secular counterweight, so to speak. For a long time as a small boy Jonas felt that the Crimea would have to be the perfect spot for Norwegians to spend the Easter holidays.
One of his mother’s favourite writers was Agatha Christie, and of all her books she liked Murder on the Orient Express the best. So when – thanks to Uncle Lauritz the pilot and his connections with the newly formed SAS airline – she was offered the chance for her and Haakon to fly to Istanbul, she jumped at it. To cap it all they were to be put up at the Pera Palas hotel, where Agatha Christie had written the aforementioned book. Although the timing was not of the best, his mother insisted on making the trip – heartily supported by Aunt Laura, who offered to look after Rakel and Daniel, the latter of whom was still being bottle-fed. And I’m sure you can tell where this is leading, Professor.
His parents had been given a room on the fourth floor with a view of the Golden Horn above the Atatürk Bridge and the Fatih Mehmet mosque, the mosque of the Conqueror himself, sitting dead centre on the hill on the other side. They had never said anything, but Jonas had worked it out for himself: ‘I must have been conceived in the Pera Palas Hotel,’ he told Margrete exultantly and drew her through the dark wooden doors into a hotel where, though it had lost something of its lustre, one could still catch a whiff of bygone grandeur, not least if one peeked into the banqueting hall just off the lobby: like something out a dream with its pillars in two sorts of pale-brown marble and a cupola clad with wood panelling inset with latticed windows. ‘Imagine being granted the gift of life right here,’ he said. But when Margrete tried to lead him round the side of the recept
ion desk and over to the ancient, openwork wooden lift to see Agatha Christie’s room on the fourth floor, he would not go; instead he dragged her into the Orient Express Bar where they found a table next to the octagonal aquarium in the centre. To see the fourth floor, where his parents had also stayed, the prospect of the Conqueror’s mosque, would be going too far, it would be a form of sacrilege, like poking one’s nose into the mystery of life itself, much as today’s genetic scientists are doing. And besides, Jonas’s own feelings on the matter were a mite ambivalent. Both because a book, even a bad book, could prompt a person to travel to a distant country – hence the reason, perhaps, that Jonas, throughout his life mistrusted books so – and because he disliked the thought of being conceived, to all intents and purposes, out of the heady thrill induced by pulp fiction; of being not highborn, but lowborn.
As they sat in their armchairs in the Orient Express Bar, surrounded by terracotta walls covered in Islamic ceramics, each with a cup of Turkish coffee in front of them, he toyed with the idea of staying here, on this spot where Europe and Asia seemed to lie fondling one another. He had a vision of the exquisite drama which must have been enacted in the brass bed in his parents’ room, possibly even on the oriental rug with which he knew every room to be furnished, this act of love that had produced him, Jonas Wergeland. And in a way it fitted: there was something of the European about his mother and something of the Asian about his father, such an intertwining had to – was bound to – give rise to something extraordinary. This he liked, could not hear the name of the Golden Horn without feeling that it was in some way connected with his father, that his father must have had ‘a golden horn’ on that very night, since it had expelled the spermatozoa which fertilized his mother’s egg, thus tying the first knot on the carpet that would be his life. In olden days the area on this side of the Golden Horn was known as Pera – which means ‘the other side’. He, Jonas, had therefore come into being ‘on the other side’. He sat in a bar in Istanbul, in the hotel of his conception, and hugged the notion of being an outsider. Because, in case you haven’t yet realized it, Professor, Jonas Wergeland had an almost pathological need to feel different.