The Conqueror Page 15

  The man on the ground is grunting and writhing about, shaking. Jonas believes he sees his face change, at least seven times, as if it belongs to different people and not only people but animals too, wild beasts. The missionary bends over him and grips his head tightly, almost tearing at him. To Jonas, it looks like a battle in which one of the combatants is invisible. That said, though, it was a nice, clean fight, and for the record let me just say that it bore little similarity to the commercialised versions one is presented with in films, in which little girls speak with harsh male voices and heads spin round and round. In short, Jonas was observing an individual in obvious torment and a man who was endeavouring to do something about this torment. And did so. All at once, after a violent shudder, the young man relaxes, and a smile spreads across his lips. He stands up, raises his arms as if in thanks to heaven, before dropping onto his knees in the grass, with his elbows on a bench and his eyes shut, while the elders stand around him praising the Lord.

  Jonas left the tent, filled with the same blend of exultation and sadness as when he had to leave the copious market in Strömstad. He caught up with the others among the pine trees on their way to the boat. They were still laughing, slapping their thighs, roaring their heads off, had to keep stopping to stand doubled up with laughter. Jonas walked along quietly at the tail end. He was thinking, no, not just thinking: pondering. And what he was pondering upon, more than anything else, was whether such spirits always had to be evil. To tell the truth, this evening marked a turning point for Jonas’s notion of what it means to be a human being, although this perception still lay far out on the fringes of, or possibly beyond, language, rather like speaking in tongues. Looked at in this light, Jonas Wergeland was also saved at that meeting. He sauntered down to the rowboat, feeling strangely relieved. Who’s to say there’s only one of me, he thought, knowing what this meant: that other avenues were open to him, possibly even other lives.

  So Jonas did not wish, like the young man in the tent on Nedgården, to rid himself of these possible spirits; he wanted to cherish them, get to know them. He hoped he had at least seven spirits within him, like Mary Magdalene. Maybe even a wild beast. He could do with it: he whom everybody said was such a good boy. Several times that summer his mother would surprise Jonas when he was sitting talking to himself, using different voices. And this boy who, for years, had been such a fussy eater, suddenly started tucking in at mealtimes. Not only that, but he varied his diet, helped himself for the first time – oh, wonder of wonders – to boiled vegetables and didn’t even gag. So, whichever way you look at it, this was the summer when Jonas turned from a fairly puny little kid into a lad who rapidly shot up, bursting with health. And not only that: from that summer onwards Jonas Wergeland was possessed. He was on the trail of his true self. Or rather: his true selves.

  I – the Professor – remarked on one word that cropped up in every newspaper article on Jonas Wergeland: demonic. This was after the whole thing blew up anew, again when no one was prepared for it, as if it were all part of a carefully planned two-stage rocket launch. It would be wrong to call it a bombshell. To the general public, despite a certain shock factor, it was more in the nature of a spectacular fireworks display.

  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, during the first phase of the case, to be titillated by a couple of unexplained details. Why had Margrete Boeck not put up any resistance – especially when one considers her, albeit latent, self-defence skills? It could of course be, as one theory had it, that she had been taken totally by surprise. But couldn’t the caller be someone she knew, who banged her head against the wall, knocking her senseless before she realized what said caller was up to?

  Then there was the information the police eventually released regarding the murder weapon, the mysterious Luger. There were no fingerprints on the pistol, but the newspapers cited a number of theories as to its origins and ownership. This aspect gave rise to numerous in-depth reports on neo-Nazi organizations, including interviews with militant leaders and revelations concerning arms training and mail order companies. It became disturbingly apparent that even in Norway there were people who held secret meetings at which they reverently watched old documentaries about the Führer and gave the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, while at the same time guarding items of Nazi memorabilia from the war as if they were holy relics. But everyone, even the right-wing extremists who had launched a menacingly worded attack on Jonas Wergeland’s final programme – the one on immigrants, a programme which, not surprisingly, was shown again immediately after the killing – denied having anything to do with this brutal crime.

  Then came the silence, or lassitude: a kind of collective mental state like the way you feel on getting up, stiff and slightly dazed, to switch off the television late on a Saturday evening. The public could not know it, but it was at this point that Jonas Wergeland’s brother, Reverend Daniel W. Hansen, contacted the police – ‘after lengthy and painful consideration’ – having also seen the picture of the Luger in the paper. At police headquarters he had no difficulty in picking out the murder weapon from a selection of pistols and thereafter gave the name of the Luger’s probable owner. Reverend Hansen was, by all accounts devastated. But as he had said on arriving at the police station: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’

  From that moment on the entire media picture – a picture which can safely be filed under the heading of New Expressionism – was dominated by one news story: Jonas Wergeland had been arrested, charged with the murder of his wife. The press promptly resorted to such phrases as ‘Norway’s crime of the century’. At any rate it was the perfect event for a well-developed information society. For a couple of days the country was in the grip of something approaching mass hysteria. The reaction to Wergeland’s arrest even exceeded all the commotion surrounding the death of the old king the year before, certainly in terms of column inches and television coverage. Reports on the Evening News showed people weeping openly in the street and taking photographs or shooting video film outside Villa Wergeland in Grorud, as if this were Hollywood. Some fans even went so far as to light candles outside the fence. A number of newspapers gave readers their own page in which to express their thoughts and feelings. An entire nation appeared to be ripe for counselling.

  Everyone attempted yet again to get in touch with the person at the centre of it all. An interview, just a couple of quotes even, would have been the scoop of the year. But Jonas Wergeland had been remanded in custody, barred from receiving mail or visitors; and when this ban was lifted he would not speak to anyone apart from close family. His mother came to see him, and his little brother, known as Buddha. Indeed Buddha visited Oslo District Prison as often as was practically possible and was soon well acquainted with everyone there. Nonetheless, and even though the prison staff felt bad about it, they had to confiscate several of the odd presents he wanted to give Jonas. On one occasion he brought a kite. ‘What’s your big brother going to do with that?’ they asked. ‘I thought he could fly it from his cell window to drive out evil spirits,’ said Buddha.

  The first person who was allowed to visit Jonas Wergeland, however, was Kristin, his daughter – a fact that did not go unnoticed in certain of the tabloids. Jonas Wergeland’s mother had shielded her from the worst instances of invasive reporting by taking refuge on Hvaler. But it was the girl herself who had asked to see her father, not only asked, in fact, but insisted. And what did they talk about? They talked about trees. Yes, trees. According to my source, they spent a whole hour chatting about trees. When her time was up, Kristin left with her father a drawing in which the tree underneath the ground, the root system, was as big as the tree itself.

  But to return to my starting point, to the way in which the media gloated over the fact that the heroic image of Jonas Wergeland was crumbling like an icon riddled with rot, and how the lowest common denominator in every article was the word ‘demonic’. It was this particular expression that had – I can find no better word – arrested my attention and to some extent
influenced my decision to accept the publisher’s almost unnecessarily lucrative offer. That had to be the deepest aim of the biography, the litmus test of its originality: to explain the nature of Jonas Wergeland’s demoniacal side. And that may have been why I got so bogged down, if you like, in all the material I had assembled since it did not offer the faintest glimmer of an answer to questions of this type. Until my rescuer showed up, what I had lacked, above all else – strangely enough, considering the panoramic view from my study window – was the perspective which would bring the lines of Jonas Wergeland’s life into relief, show me a theme and hidden passages instead of screeds of place names and dates. Due to these unexpected problems I had also begun to worry about another eventuality – something which my visitor, not without a touch of sarcasm, had hinted at on our very first meeting: that this assignment might be on the difficult side for someone who had hitherto wrestled solely with the past. Was it possible for me, with my background and experience, to disclose the essence of modern life?

  Or, as my unknown helper – I almost used the word employer – said at the beginning of the third evening we spent together in the turret at Snarøya: ‘Every life seems banal the minute one tries to sum it up.’ Despite repeated offers of some refreshment – I humbly suggested a little Stilton and a glass of port – all the stranger asked for was a jug of water. ‘My only trouble is that I suffer from an abiding thirst,’ my visitor said with that barely discernible accent. ‘By the way – I would appreciate it if you would light the fire as you usually do; it’s so damned cold in this country.’

  As soon as the logs caught light my visitor stretched hungry hands out to the flames, at the same time eyeing a caricature of myself that hung on the wall. Like President de Gaulle, I am always drawn with the face of an elephant, because of my prominent nose and big ears. I prefer to think, though, that it’s because I have an excellent memory – something I most certainly had need of at this time.

  As usual the stranger was dressed in black, a colour that accentuated an almost startling pallor; and, although that face had the aspect of a scholar, I cannot say that I liked the person sitting across from me. I noted that the hands were covered in little scars, and the clothes emitted an indefinable odour reminiscent of burnt horn, or possibly it was the reek of a chemistry lab. This person told me nothing about who they were; merely stared at me, eagerly, expectantly almost, again apparently so brimful of stories that those lips could barely contain them.

  ‘This matter…engages me, Professor. Greatly. Personally.’ There were times, especially on those first evenings, when the stranger faltered or groped around, as if unable to remember or not knowing the right Norwegian word.

  ‘Would it be impolite of me to ask why?’

  ‘What if I were to tell you that I am involved in it, that I may unfortunately be partly to blame for Jonas Wergeland’s actions,’ the visitor said, sending me a glance that frightened me. ‘Would you believe me if I said that it was all the result of a wager? How could we know that it would have such – how shall I put it – unfortunate consequences?’

  ‘And what was this wager about?’ I ventured to ask.

  ‘It might be a bit difficult to explain on what plane it lay – I mean, to explain it to you. I could say that I, moving as I did in an entirely different sphere, as it were, quite simply bet that Jonas Wergeland would become a great man, “make a name for himself” as they say. My opposite number, if that is the correct term, bet that, with what talents he had, Jonas Wergeland would never amount to anything. You could say that we were betting on whether he would become a dragon or a sparrow.’

  I was on the point of asking what the stakes in this wager had been, but my visitor had already embarked upon a preamble which was clearly meant to lead into that evening’s stories: ‘You might not think it of me, Professor, but I actually regard it as my duty to help you. Just because the image of a hero has been shattered doesn’t mean that it cannot be put together again, albeit as another image.’

  From the turret we could see the planes gliding in or taking off, so close that until darkness fell the logos of the different airlines were clearly visible; and if we turned round we could see the fjord, the boats slipping past, with an occasional, brilliantly illuminated colossus looking too big for the narrow channel.

  ‘Somewhere in Jonas Wergeland’s life there is a pattern,’ the stranger continued. ‘A pattern that generated the energy which, in turn, gave him the power to do what he did. What stories then, what series of events was it, that made Jonas Wergeland, a perfectly ordinary human being, capable both of creating that magnificent and inspiring television series and of being arrested and charged with murder? Because whichever way you look at it, no one can say that they did not appreciate the high standard of these programmes when they were broadcast, that they were not uplifting. And no matter what people may claim, no one, not even the most zealous inquisitor, knows anything about Jonas Wergeland’s motives – I’m talking here about his innermost motives – on that evening when he returned home from the World’s Fair in Seville.’

  I could tell that I was tense, almost involuntarily tense. And at the same time grateful to be experiencing something I believe many people spend all their lives longing for: to meet a stranger who asks you to take a seat by the fire so that he or she can tell you what it’s all about.

  ‘This first story shows that to call Jonas Wergeland demonic is an oversimplification as outrageous as that of calling a dragon a monster,’ the stranger declared with fire reflected in those pupils and a concentration which made me feel the story was at that very moment being pulled out of its waiting room in the storyteller’s memory.

  Radio Theatre Presents

  On one of the threads that forms a spiral in Jonas Wergeland’s life he killed a dragon. And if we enter one of the coils in this spiral we find the following story:

  They were going to put on a radio play. Not the way they had done as little boys, when they caught bumblebees and held them, buzzing and buzzing, inside shoeboxes. No, proper radio theatre. Jonas and Little Eagle were about to undertake a project that would represent the culmination of their career; they were going to record a play of their own writing, based on the story of St George and the Dragon. This undertaking did, however, present lots of challenges, and the greatest of these, aside from the different voices, was of course posed by the background noises, referred to in the trade simply as ‘background’: the sound effects which enable listeners to picture rafts heading towards dangerous rapids, or skiers in a snowstorm, if that is what is required. That was Ørn’s job, the sound effects; he was what you might call the floor manager. ‘There’s no sound I can’t make,’ was Ørn’s motto. I don’t know whether I have to spell it out for you, Professor, but when it comes to the question of which person has exerted the greatest influence on Jonas Wergeland’s life, the answer has to be Little Eagle – alias Ørn-Henrik Larsen.

  It was actually Daniel who had told them about St George, because Daniel was in the Cubs and they had recently celebrated St George’s Day with much pomp and ceremony. Jonas and Ørn instantly fell for the story of the knight who sets out to rescue the princess from the dragon. They had originally been thinking of recording a simplified version of Jack London’s Call of the Wild – with Colonel Eriksen the elkhound playing the lead – but soon found that this presented certain insurmountable problems as far as the sounds were concerned. It was one thing to get an extremely placid Colonel Eriksen to bark in the right places, or even howl; manufacturing a whole pack of wolves was something else again.

  But what sort of sound does a dragon make? Or to put it another way: what is the creepiest sound you can think of?

  The tape recorder they were using, or ‘magnetophone’ as Mr Larsen grandly referred to it, had only one track, which meant they had to record the voices and the background noises at the same time. Incidentally, this machine, acquired for Mr Larsen to brush up his ‘Can you tell me the way to the nearest restaurant?’ in
eight languages, was itself a little marvel. I take it, Professor, that you recall the Tandberg tape recorders of the mid-fifties? TB2s they were called: like little temples to sound with their mahogany casings and loudspeakers installed behind latticed glass panels.

  Actually it would not be entirely out of place to dwell for a moment, here, on the name Tandberg: on the company’s founder, Vebjørn Tandberg, a prime Norwegian example of the pioneer spirit and industrial farsightedness, and perhaps even more on the blissful feelings of nostalgia which Tandberg’s products arouse within a large proportion of the Norwegian population. Say ‘Silver Super’ and you trigger a collective landslide of memories, mental pictures of casings in highly polished, lacquered wood, possibly shot with the memory of the feel of a fingertip turning a tuning dial or even the give of the buttons when pressed. Newer models produced around this time were a delight to the eye as well as the ear, not least the real battleship of the Tandberg fleet, the ‘Huldra’, the ultimate expression of tasteful design, a Norwegian equivalent of Denmark’s Lego, an object which, when set in its place in the living room, raised the whole house several rungs up the ladder of modernity and sophisticated elegance. With its knobs and lights, its teak casing and its wood-nymph name, it imbued an apartment with an air of space age, tropical island and mysterious forest combined.

  We find ourselves, therefore, in an era which already seems remote, a time when the living room was still arranged around the radiogram, the wireless being the household altar, occupying the place soon to be accorded to the television set, when people switched religion as you might say, swapped old gods for new. And when Jonas Wergeland was a boy the most eagerly awaited radio programme was the Saturday Children’s Hour, and best of all, like the trinket in the centre of a lucky potato: the weekly serial. Jonas could never get enough of these, especially the noises in the background which one could barely hear but which acted like drum rolls on his nerves, made him bite his knuckles – creaking doors, footsteps on stairs, matches being struck inside dark caves – his brain fairly seethed, he saw those scenes, clearer than he ever would later when he saw, with his own eyes I mean, those notorious pieces on television’s Armchair Theatre: the Finnish plays, for example, with their hilariously exaggerated sounds of feet scrunching through cold snow. All those afternoons spent in a chair pulled up close to the radio – breathtaking hours of listening to The Road to Agra, The Jungle Book, Around the World in Eighty Days – taught Jonas that sounds have an unconscious effect on us, just as a song can tip an incident over into a whole other dimension – like the time, one May 17, when Wolfgang Michaelsen, under duress, of course, and blushing furiously, played an infernally strident clarinet during the singing of the national anthem on the flag green in the morning, thus inserting an ironic, not to say anarchic, element into the pompously patriotic tenor of the day: the chairman of the residents’ association, standing there in his new suit, May 17 ribbons fluttering, all the children in their Sunday best with money burning a hole in their pockets. All things considered, it was the radio, and more specifically the radio plays, which truly taught Jonas Wergeland about the power of illusion, how little it took to fire people’s imaginations. ‘It’s really quite amazing,’ he said to Ørn, ‘how the mere sound of somebody crumpling a bit of paper can make you so scared you pee your pants.’