The Conqueror Page 8
I live, as I suppose most people know from various newspaper and magazine articles, in the Oslo suburb of Snarøya, on one of the highest points in the area. My study is in a sort of turret at the top of the house. The house itself was modelled on Fridtjof Nansen’s mansion at Polhøgda, not that far away. From my desk I can watch the planes landing and taking off at Fornebu Airport, on the south-western section of the runway, as well as the boats sailing up and down the coastline of the Nesodden peninsula. It’s an inspiring vista: it makes me feel as though I am at a junction, that I am sitting in a control tower from which I have a complete overview. At times I can almost believe that all this activity around me is generated by my writing.
This illusion was soon shattered. The first sign that the biography of Jonas Wergeland was going to be different manifested itself in a pressing need to devote an extra year to the collection of material. And when I did finally set to work up here – after, that is, having gone through the phase in which I commit key points from my notes to memory, almost letting my brain soak up all my lines of argument – I saw that none of my hypotheses held water. And what was worse: that I could not come up with any new ones.
I sat in my turret, feeling hamstrung, or rather, that I had bitten off more than I could chew, staring at the stacks of papers and books round about me, the notice boards covered in cryptic notes and maps of Cape Town and Jaipur; the best encyclopaedia on the market lay next to a commemorative history of the Grorud Ironmongers, works on everything from woodcarving and organ music to Duke Ellington and the moons of Pluto. Chapters had been studiously plotted out on index cards that were then neatly filed in boxes and ring binders in a particular order, all of it adhering to a detailed chronological framework. Drawers and filing cabinets were brimming over with cuttings, copies of articles, transcripts, photographs, letters. The place was littered with audiocassettes and videotapes containing recordings of interviews and film footage. I sat in the turret and tried to take in all of this contradictory, unrelated, bewildering data. I soon realized that it would take me years merely to read such a volume of material. How to select those details that were significant? How to build a life out of all those boxes and binders bulging with television reviews, items on local history, snippets about women friends and the unreliable recollections of old friends? And above all: how was I to link together this mass of bits and pieces? When I eventually sat down to write, determined to make a start somewhere at least, I found myself absolutely and utterly stuck, my fingers refused, quite literally, to strike the keys.
I was at my wit’s end. I sat in a room packed with information. Around me loomed all sorts of fancy equipment: fax machines, photocopiers, video players, printers and, not least, computers, providing access to diverse networks – what I lacked, though, was the mental software necessary in order for the combination of data and hardware to produce some result. What should I include and what should I leave out? I could write a score of pages simply on Jonas Wergeland’s penchant for tweed jackets. At one point I felt tempted to do more research, take a trip to Tokyo, for example, see whether I could discover any clues to what had actually happened there – maybe that would break the block, endow me with a flash of crystal-clear insight – but I knew I would only be running away, putting things off. I could not afford to shilly-shally like this. The publishers were on my back. The press had got wind of the project, and the biography was already being described as a really juicy exposé. Everyone was waiting.
I had been suffering for some weeks from this attack of writer’s block when help arrived. It was a Sunday evening, with a thick fog outside. I had just lit a fire, wondering, as I did so, at an unusual and fierce burst of dog barking, when the doorbell rang. This marked the start of the strangest week of my life. On the doorstep, seeming almost to have materialized out of the fog, stood an enigmatic individual swathed in a black cloak, a figure that conveyed an instant sense of authority and dignity. ‘I have come to your rescue, Professor,’ this person announced bluntly and walked straight in before I could say a word. ‘I assume your study is up in the turret.’ The figure proceeded resolutely up the spiral staircase. I had no choice but to follow.
After removing the cloak with a flourish that put me in mind of a bullfighter, the stranger promptly sat down in the best chair in the study and ran an eye over all the clutter, all of that ridiculous, and so far useless, equipment. ‘Could I ask you, please, to dim the lights?’ this person said, almost as if disgusted by the shambolic scene, by the desk buried under papers and books – this sea of details, so impenetrable that I referred to it as ‘my dark sources’. I could see that the stranger was impatient, that this person, no matter how odd it may sound, gave the impression of having eaten too much, of being full to bursting. ‘I know you are working on a biography of Jonas Wergeland,’ the stranger said. ‘I also know that you have got bogged down. So I am going to help you. I am used to chaos.’ This person pulled the chair closer to the fire. ‘I am not blessed with omniscience – but I know a great deal. I hold, among other things, the key to the riddle of Jonas Wergeland. Or, not to beat about the bush, I carry, if I may make so bold as to say, the whole of his story in my head.’ It may have been because I was confused, but I thought I detected a slight accent, as if Norwegian was not my visitor’s mother tongue.
‘That is why I have come to you, Professor. You see, I cannot write, only recount.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ was the first thing I managed to say.
‘Out of pity,’ my visitor said. ‘Sheer pity.’
I was not sure whether the stranger was thinking of me or of Jonas Wergeland. ‘And your purpose?’ I asked, putting the same question in another way.
‘To save a life. Otherwise there would be no point.’
I still couldn’t tell whether the stranger was referring to Jonas Wergeland or myself. And it took some time for it to dawn on me that this person was actually offering me a job as chronicler of Jonas Wergeland’s story – on two conditions: that I undertook not to deviate from the order in which the story was recounted and that I wrote it by hand.
‘Can’t I use a tape recorder?’ I said.
‘No,’ the visitor replied. ‘I’m old-fashioned. I belong, so to speak, to another age. I do not wish to talk into a machine. I wish to talk to a face, I must have a person – call it a scribe if you like – to whom I can tell the story. I don’t trust machines.’
‘I just thought it might be handy to have the tape as backup,’ I said. ‘In case I missed anything.’
‘You don’t understand,’ the stranger said. ‘That’s the very possibility I mean to deny you. I said I would help you, not write the book for you. I don’t expect you to quote me word for word. I’m not looking for a copy. I want you to interpret what I say as you write. The stories will not be as I tell them but as you perceive them. If you do not get it exactly right, if you have to rely on your memory, then all to the good. And you are, of course, free to add things gleaned from your own material to improve upon it.’
I accepted. I had to accept if the publishers were ever to get their biography. At the back of my mind I thanked my stars for the fact that I had once, in a previous career, been ambitious enough to learn shorthand, had attended a course run by the Norwegian parliament, no less. Although for a long time I could not be sure, I have come to the conclusion that my visitor must have been aware that I was proficient – or at any rate moderately proficient – in this rare skill.
‘Well, we might as well get started right away,’ the stranger said, as if in the habit of giving orders. ‘Hurry up, I have the entire sequence worked out in my head, and mark my words, Professor, in this case the sequence is crucial; only by following it can you hope to understand anything at all. So please do not distract me; just one story out of place and it all falls apart.’
These words, the way they were uttered – with a kind of, how shall I put it, pent-up aggression – gave me the feeling that the stranger had something against Jonas
Wergeland, almost hated him, in fact. The figure kept a close eye on me from the chair by the fire as I fetched my spiral-bound notebook and a pen, staring at me as intently as a juggler with twenty balls in the air. Then the stream of stories began, and though during the course of their telling I still felt an urge to cry out, to protest, to pose questions, to ask their narrator to stop, I managed to refrain, to confine myself to taking notes, tried to get down as much as possible. I’m sure I hardly need add that this was the longest and most arduous single bout of writing I had ever undertaken.
Nonetheless, it was a relief to sit there with a blank sheet of paper in front of me, to have the chance, in a way, to start from scratch again. The results of that first evening, of our joint efforts, can be read on the preceding pages. And I believe the stranger was right: there was something about being forced to write, almost without thinking, as my visitor talked, that had a fruitful effect, so much so that I even managed, during short pauses, to jot down brief notes that I could enlarge upon later, points I suddenly recalled from my own research. The stranger created the necessary distance, enabling me to discern things from fresh angles, in a new light. Besides which, I liked the constant use of my title: ‘Professor’ – no one has called me that in fifteen years – as if my unknown visitor was, above all, well aware of my past. This gave me the confidence, at a later stage when I was transcribing my notes, to rework the text, sometimes quite drastically, on the basis of data from my own sources. Sometimes, when I read through the stories I found myself wondering whether this was what my visitor had said. Or whether, in the writing, even in those passages where I believe I have copied down the stranger’s exact words, somehow or other the story has gone from being half-true to being half-false.
The second evening on which the stranger sat down in the chair by the fireplace, rather like a general commandeering my house, this enigmatic character started without any preamble – and with eyes riveted, so it seemed, on the darkness, if not, that is, on the tall pine tree outside the window overlooking the fjord – on a story that was totally new to me.
Outer Land
One day Jonas Wergeland was quite suddenly sent reeling. He knew he was seriously ill but was incapable of doing anything, nor did he feel like doing anything, hardly seemed to care. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky, up at the clouds, up at woolly floes that were forever changing, moving too fast, careening towards him. He was far from all help, far out on the Mongolian steppes, surrounded by nothing but a rippling sea of grass and a sky fraught with wind.
An odd-looking face leaned into his field of vision, a Mongol, but he had something on his head, antlers; he looked like some sort of weird hybrid, a dragon, was Jonas’s first thought, no, a spirit creature, half-elk, half-man, a figure which began to move, dance in a circle around Jonas.
He was ill, dangerously ill, had been suddenly stricken, something to do with his head, his brain maybe, an inflammation of his most vital organ, deep in a foreign country. He was afraid, and yet not. His body had been invaded by worms, ribbons that slithered around, wove in and out of one another, ribbons that slowly tipped him over into an abstract state, a reality in which undulating patterns took over from the known world. ‘Help,’ he cried, or whispered, or thought.
He tried to pull himself together. He recognized the dancer. It was Buddha. He had to hold on to that thought. Buddha. And Mongolia.
Only the day before, everything had been fine. Not just fine. Wonderful. Jonas and Buddha had been stretched out on the heights of Karakorum, as was their wont, peering down into the valley below. ‘Isn’t that a caravan we can see down there?’ Jonas might say. Buddha would gaze long and hard, as if listening for something on the wind, might pluck a blade of grass and proceed to chew on it: ‘No, I think it’s a procession of monks on their way to the temple,’ he would say at last. When Jonas strained his eyes he could catch a glint of gold from the roof of a temple in the distance.
They lay back on the grass and gazed up at the clouds, at the birds in flight, and listened to the sounds of the wind. They had all the time in the world and no particular plans. ‘There’s a good dragon flying over us today,’ said Buddha, meaning simply that the weather was nice, with clouds drifting by overhead. They were in the midst of a boundless space, with wide plains stretching out on all sides. From their ger fluttered a long, fringed pennant. Buddha lay there purring like a cat. Or a prayer wheel. Buddha was the only person Jonas knew who had this ability. He could curl up in a ball and be so content that he positively thrummed inside. And nowhere did Buddha feel happier than up here on the heights, on the steppes, in a landscape where the sky dominated one’s field of vision – if they were lucky it was breezy too; and the wind seemed to enhance Buddha’s sense of freedom and well-being. ‘Know what I like best about Mongolia?’ Jonas said. ‘You’d have to walk a hundred miles if you wanted to hang yourself.’
The day before, Jonas had dozed off for a while when they were lying like this, had not woken until Buddha was standing over him yelling, ‘Get up, lazybones, time to wrestle.’ Buddha was ten years old but already strong. They wrestled Mongolian-style. The first one whose knee or elbow, back or shoulder touched the ground had lost. Jonas allowed a puffing, panting Buddha to bring him down, whereupon Buddha proceeded to run around, whooping triumphantly. ‘Hey, stop all that jumping about and come and help me get things ready for the night,’ Jonas said, wanting to calm him down.
They crawled into the ger, through a door facing due south. They always carried a compass. A ger was supposed to be an image of the universe – the ancient universe, that is – with the stove, like the sun, at its centre. There was a place for everything; Jonas and Buddha slept in the area that faced west. To the north lay the sacred objects; Buddha usually brought a box full of different bits and pieces or maybe a picture. On this occasion it was a portrait of Agnetha Fältskog from the pop group ABBA.
All of this had originally been Jonas’s idea. Or so he thought. Ever since Buddha was a baby, whenever his brother had been taken along to social gatherings, it had vexed Jonas to see how people automatically looked down on him. As Buddha grew older and began to display what were, by his own standards, rare gifts, they had hatched a plan. In any given situation Jonas might ask the others present if they knew what a dell was, or a gurtum – and naadam, ladies and gentlemen, what might that be? The others could not, of course, answer. But Buddha, aged seven or eight, could hold forth for minutes on end, describing a dell, a national costume in a variety of different styles, the trimmings, the nine buttons, the bright blue, red, yellow and green hues; or explain in detail what took place during the naadam festival, not least the horse-riding competition. This soon put paid to that slightly indulgent, benign attitude; and Buddha was treated, if not exactly the same as everyone else, then certainly with a new respect, not to say awe. And awe was, after all, better than condescension or that unappetizing blend of pity and curiosity which reduced Buddha to a cute, innocent mascot.
As time went on, Jonas and Buddha created a common domain that was theirs alone; they were both citizens of an imaginary Mongolia, ‘land of the brave, proud men’. As often as possible they would take themselves off to Lillomarka to indulge their Mongolian inclinations: to be nomads on a boundless plain, nomads who loved the wind and the freedom found under those clear skies, who would quite spontaneously compare sheep viewed against a lush pasture with pearls on green velvet. Over his bed in the new villa, just a stone’s throw from Solhaug and their old flat, Buddha had a large-scale map of Mongolia and across this they made many an arduous trek before he went to sleep. In due course, Buddha memorized the names of most of the country’s towns and provinces, mountains and rivers. He was also one of the very few people in Norway who knew the meaning of such utterly elementary words as ‘khalka’, ‘tugrik’ and ‘urga’. Jonas never could tell how much of all this his brother understood, but he certainly remembered it, used the words properly – it could of course have been put down to his marvel
lous gift for mimicry, which also made him an uncommonly good ABBA imitator – his renderings of numbers such as ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’ were quite priceless. Buddha could well be called an expert in his field. Jonas took a certain pleasure in this: that, in one area at least, his brother knew more than most people. The strange thing was that Jonas, too, became captivated by this universe, as if it were an outer land, an Outer Norway, just beyond the boundaries of the realm in the same way as there was an Outer Mongolia. Jonas had, in fact, known it from the start: his brother possessed valuable gifts into which it would be difficult for him, Jonas, to gain any insight.
Jonas lies in his sleeping bag, bathed in sweat, understanding everything and understanding nothing, both remembering and not remembering where he is. He is burning up inside his skull. His heart is beating irregularly. His thoughts are in a whirl, drifting with the clouds, causing him to forget that he may be mortally ill, that this could be the end – if, that is, the figure dancing round him, the figure with the antlers on its head, cannot save him. ‘Help,’ he cries, whispers, thinks.
Who was the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life? It was Buddha. Of this I am in no doubt, Professor: it was Buddha.
Over a number of years in the mid-seventies, Jonas and Buddha created a little slice of Mongolia for themselves in the heart of Lillomarka. They would strike off from the forest track down at Breisjø Lake, cut through the ruins of the monastery in Bispedalen – which turned, as if by magic, into a lamasery filled with the sounds of murmured prayers and resounding gongs – and continued up the slope until they reached the top of Revlikollen. Being so high up, on what was, in those days, a bare hilltop, gave them a pretty good illusion of standing on a mountain plateau, and it was easy to make believe that they were not far from Karakorum, site of Genghis Khan’s old camp, the very heart of the world. Here they pitched their tent – not a felt ger, unfortunately, but a tent all the same. It was no coincidence that Jonas should have written, around this time, a singular and controversial study paper on the architecture of tents. ‘I do believe you could have stirred up a minor revolt among the Bedouins with that,’ commented one of his tutors at the School of Architecture.