The Conqueror Page 9

  I really ought to make it quite clear, here, since it could be misinterpreted, that it was not escapism, all this, but a form of communication. Or an advanced sort of game. Not only that, but it was something these two had conceived of together. Which is to say: to begin with Jonas thought that Buddha had picked it up from him, from all the stories he had told his brother over the years, about the uses of such curious inventions as the pole lasso or the sweat scraper, or about camel nose pegs and the laborious process of felt-making. But as time went on Jonas began to wonder. Because Buddha reacted in an unaccountable manner to some things. When just a little boy he had evinced an unusual fondness, not to say passion, for some coral and turquoise stones at Aunt Laura’s flat. It was all they could do to get them away from him. Only later did Jonas discover that stones like these were used in Mongolian jewellery. Another time, or rather lots of times, Buddha was to be found sitting in some green spot, arranging a circle of stones around himself. Every now and again Jonas would count the stones: there were always 108, neither more nor less. And the first time Buddha used chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, he – this boy who had fumbled for so long with knives and forks – ate perfectly with them, as if he had never done anything else. And who could explain his astonishing way with horses? Not to mention his talent for archery?

  In the evenings, after long, hard days spent milking, branding cattle, breaking in horses, whittling pieces of wood into horse-head violins and so on, they would lie in the tent and eat juicy lamb chops – it had to be sheep meat – cooked in a frying pan over the primus stove in the centre and drink kefir from a thermos – kefir was the closest they could get to the Mongolians’ fermented mare’s milk. ‘Have some more arkhi,’ Jonas might say before pouring kefir into Buddha’s little wooden bowl. Other meals consisted mainly of yellow cheeses: Gouda, Cheddar, Emmenthal, although they weren’t dried like the Mongolian cheeses. They also drank tea, tea mixed with a little butter and salt and new milk.

  ‘Tell me the story about Basaman,’ Buddha would say, as they lay like this in the tent, regaling themselves. And for the hundredth time Jonas told him the tale of how, in 1936, Basaman the shaman from Solon was killed by a Japanese locomotive when he attempted, a mite optimistically, to stop it. Alternatively, Jonas might tell of the time when Dölgöre the shaman magicked all of the spirits over which he had control into two Russian padlocks. At such moments Buddha would lie fingering the animal bones he had found, raising them to his lips as if they were flutes, or contemplating the elk’s antlers that he had been hanging on to for so long.

  They had made many such treks across the Mongolian steppes. The previous day had been no different in that respect. But this morning Jonas had woken with a fever, and it was getting worse and worse; he didn’t know what was wrong, only that it was something to do with his head, at the very worst meningitis, something serious, something that progressed fast and could be fatal. ‘Help,’ he managed to say to Buddha, or whisper, or think.

  He had slipped into a delirium, slipped down among sinuous shapes, lay reeling in his sleeping bag with his head sticking out of the tent opening, above and below the clouds at one and the same time. Buddha kept his head; first he sat for a while drumming with a stick on a saucepan. From when Buddha was very small, Jonas had remarked on his brother’s way of playing his toy drums: monotonously, mysteriously, as if he struck them not to make a noise like other children but to generate silence. And now, as he drummed on the saucepan, Buddha had gone into a sort of trance, had been transformed, this much Jonas grasped. Buddha fixes the elk antlers on his head, gets to his feet and starts to dance, even puts a stick between his legs so it looks as if he is riding a horse, dances, or rides around Jonas, not Buddha himself that is, but this thing inside Buddha, this thing of which Jonas knows nothing, this thing that hails from other, outer, spheres; and Jonas becomes aware, after an hour, possibly two, when Buddha is once more sitting quietly by his side, holding his hand, of how the fever slowly loosens its grip, of how his thoughts begin to run along their normal lines, of how the breeze suddenly feels cool and refreshing on his brow. ‘Thanks,’ he says, or whispers, or thinks.

  Jonas never found out whether this nasty turn in the woods – or up on the Mongolian steppes, depending on your point of view – could have proved fatal. And it was never mentioned between the two boys. Jonas suspected that Buddha had saved his life that day. Not that it made much difference, really. Buddha had saved his life anyway. When you get right down to it, there was only one true hero in Jonas Wergeland’s life, and that hero’s name was Buddha.

  Made in Norway

  Which reminds me: I must tell you about the attack in Istanbul, but first I need to recount the tale of the Three Wise Men. You see, Jonas himself once had a go at being a shaman. Not by dancing but by reading. For even though Jonas Wergeland only rarely opened a book, there was a period – a long period – when he used to sit with the same thick book in his hands. And he wasn’t reading to himself, either; he was reading aloud, to another person, for the ears of that person who sat, or as good as lay, in a chair. And despite the fact that his companion’s eyes were fixed on a blank television screen, Jonas read: ‘For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:/Rain; empty river; a voyage,/Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight,’ he read and scanned the face opposite him, a face that remained as immobile as ever, eyes that never blinked.

  Jonas Wergeland was sitting in an institution in Oslo, reading to one of his best friends. He read aloud and at length. Jonas Wergeland was not a good reader, he recited in a flat monotone, softly, nonetheless he read, read with a dogged determination, from an endless poem, laying stress on, nay, instilling hope into, every word. As far as I know, this was the only time when Jonas Wergeland read because he felt that it really mattered, although he did not understand one word of what he was reading. He would read from this weighty tome, read these, to him, incomprehensible stanzas, for decades, at least once a month. Words such as: ‘Under the cabin roof was one lantern./The reeds are heavy; bent/and the bamboos speak as if weeping.’

  Jonas put down the book and stared deep into Viktor’s pupils, as if hoping for some sign of life, much as coals can sometimes give off a faint glow just when you think the fire has gone out. ‘I wish I could have brought you a bottle of aquavit – a bottle of Gilde’s Non Plus Ultra,’ he says. ‘But it’s not allowed, you see.’ No answer. Never any answer. Black coals.

  ‘I’m married now,’ Jonas said. ‘D’you remember I told you about Margrete, the one who dumped me in seventh grade?’ he said. ‘We have a baby,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to be doing a programme for television soon – got any good ideas?’ Jonas refused to give up, always spent a long time talking to Viktor, pausing briefly every now and again, as if listening to his friend’s replies: ‘You were right,’ he might say. ‘Pet Sounds is a more important album than Sergeant Pepper.’ Short pause. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it: as an ideology, Merckxism could definitely take over from Marxism.’ He may also have endeavoured to develop his argument, although not, of course, the way Viktor Harlem himself would have done it – if those coals had not been extinguished.

  They were sitting in a nursing home in Oslo, a totally characterless room that fitted well with Viktor’s own characterlessness, the eyes fixed on the blank television screen in the corner. For Viktor Harlem, time had stopped. He still looked as he had done at the age of nineteen, when in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. He – Viktor the Taoist – had attained his goal: he had become immortal. Jonas had the idea that, in spirit, his friend was actually somewhere else, that this was why his body remained the same – because there was nobody there, inside it. Viktor sat absolutely still, staring into space. There didn’t seem to be any point, but Jonas knew, hoped, that something was going on behind those black pupils. Something must register, surely, and this ‘something’ might, in the long run, generate a glow. ‘Remember what I said about the Middle Ages being a golden age in
the history of the West?’ Jonas said. ‘It was a bluff. One of many. It was something I lifted, just a quote from a book of lectures by Friedrich von Schlegel.’

  No reaction. No glow in Viktor’s pupils. His face as blank as the television screen in the corner.

  Occasionally, when they were in the lounge, Jonas would sit down at the piano and play one of the standards, ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ maybe, striking chords that would have made anyone else raise an eyebrow.

  No response. An outsider would never have guessed that this human vegetable in the armchair had once, ten years earlier, been a regular firecracker, fizzing with ideas and flashes of inspiration, one great scintillating ball of energy; that this figure had been the natural leader and spokesman for a remarkable group known as the Three Wise Men: the sort of baffling individual, one in a hundred thousand, who in third year at high school, at the drop of a hat and without turning a hair, would proceed to sum up – to pick a subject at random – the ins and outs of analytical, phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.

  How does one become a conqueror?

  Jonas often thought about Lillehammer. He hated that town. As far as he was concerned, it was no surprise that Lillehammer should have been the scene of the first terrorist attack on Norwegian soil – the assassination of an innocent man, carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Ten years earlier they had walked there arm in arm, Jonas, Axel and Viktor, the Three Wise Men, on their way home from an eventful skiing holiday farther up Gudbrandsdalen, on their way home to the wilderness of the Cathedral School and the ominous advent of the university Prelim. Unlike Axel and Jonas, Viktor was very fair and had already begun to lose his hair. Caricatures in the school newspaper invariably depicted him as a light bulb screwed into a black polo neck sweater. And it was true, he always seemed lit up, incessantly sparkling with theories, exuberant notions – on that day too, just before it happened, as they, but mostly Viktor, were walking along, debating possible future demonstrations, the stream of talk punctuated by hoots of laughter as he reminded Jonas and Axel of some of their previous, highly original raids: because, despite what many might say, and despite a rather reckless approach to life, the Three Wise Men were warriors at heart, young men who were ready to revolt at the first sign of injustice and social folly and who devoted almost as much time to making sense of the world as they did to changing it.

  One of these latterly so legendary demonstrations was staged in Oslo on an autumn evening in 1969, as a protest against the situation in Biafra. I ought perhaps to say something here about Biafra, Professor, since disasters of this nature have a way of elbowing one another out of the collective memory. But Biafra constituted the real watershed. Biafra was nothing less than the first unthinkable famine to come sweeping into the living rooms of Norway by way of the television screen with the result that for years Biafra was to represent the epitome of world want. And remember: this was before such disasters were turned into light family entertainment, into Live Aid concerts and the like. Being confronted with the Biafran tragedy was like seeing one’s first horror movie, that sense of actually feeling one’s nerves fraying at the edges.

  The Biafran war held special meaning for Jonas, since it was this event that opened his eyes to the change that had occurred in his own home. Ever since his father, lured by the advertisements, had bought their first television set in order to watch the speed skating in the winter Olympics of 1964, Jonas’s parents had spoken less and less to one another. The hum of a perpetual conversation, a sound like the low thrum of a power station, so much a part of his childhood, was now replaced by the hum of the television set. And the chairs which had once sat facing one another were now ranged side by side – not only that, they had bought new chairs, of a type specially designed for television viewing.

  One evening in particular was to be of crucial significance. Jonas had been doing his homework and was on his way to the toilet when the usual metallic murmur prompted him to peek into the living room and thus he found himself confronted with a scene which he would never forget, one which stuck to his cerebral cortex like an icon: for there in the living room sat his parents, each in their chair, their eyes fixed on a screen filled with ghastly, heartbreaking reality, and yet they were so silent, so apathetic almost, that they might have been watching the Interlude fish in their aquarium. Although it’s only fair to say that when the first reports from Biafra were screened, Jonas’s parents too were, of course, appalled, they may even have wept, but by this time, six months later, their senses had become strangely blunted, they sat back in their chairs, staring listlessly at the television as if they were actually waiting for something else to come on, and this despite the fact that their eyes rested on one of those images which would be replayed again and again, with only minor variations, in the course of every famine disaster: a little girl with flies crawling over her eyes, weak from hunger, and on the ground right next to her: a vulture. Here, Jonas received an epiphanic vision of the true nature of Norway: this sight multiplied thousands upon thousands of times – people sitting in armchairs in front of televisions showing pictures of starving children far away.

  It seems likely – and this is just a theory – that this was the evening on which Jonas Wergeland formed his overriding perception of Norway: of Norway as a nation of spectators. Finally, Jonas understood what his parents’ generation had been building on those community workdays in the 1950s: a grandstand in which they had now taken their seats. All of Norway had become what it could indeed appear to be when seen from space – a 1200-mile long granite grandstand packed with armchairs. Window On Our Times was the name of the programme, and people truly did sit there in their chairs as if staring through a window in the wall at the world outside, following all the suffering in the world from the sidelines as it were. Television was, quite simply, an invention eminently suited to a country which lay thus on the periphery, which was used to witnessing events from a safe distance. ‘The screen tricks us into believing that we don’t live a sheltered life,’ as Jonas Wergeland once remarked in a debate. The Norwegian word for television is ‘fjernsyn’ – meaning ‘distant vision’. And because the fjernsyn gave such a blessed illusion of beholding some distant vision, one could hold onto the blissful sense that one was merely a spectator and never an active participant.

  This experience – I am in a position to reveal here – also lay behind one of Jonas Wergeland’s earliest programmes for television: one in which, so the advance publicity promised, he would take a look at the most quintessentially Norwegian product ever. Everyone was sure this would be something like Bjelland’s fish balls or possibly one of Frionor’s frozen seafood dishes, but in fact it turned out to be a product made by Ekornes, the successful furniture manufacturers from Sunnmøre on the west coast. In this programme Jonas Wergeland stated, not without a trace of irony, that Norway’s greatest contribution to the world in recent times was not the cheese-slice, nor the plastic keycard, but the Stressless chair, first launched onto the market in 1971 – an invention worthy of a land of spectators and indeed one for which the national spectator mentality was an absolute prerequisite. Because the Stressless patent was – and still is, I might say – brilliant in all its simplicity. The innovative feature, no less than a revolution in the relaxation industry, was that you could assume different sitting positions merely by shifting your body. A lazy nudge of the hip was enough, a little wriggle. You no longer needed to stretch your hand down to a lever. The position was adjusted by the weight of the body itself. Jonas filmed a lingering sequence demonstrating the merits of the chair – which was set in front of a television: a comical scene that did not fail to provoke a lot of bitter complaints to the NRK management from the furniture industry. But Jonas was perfectly serious. ‘We ought to design a new Norwegian flag,’ he said. ‘White as innocence and with a stylized Stressless chair in the centre, just as India has the Emperor Ashoka’s wheel on its flag.’ Jonas had no doubt: in a hundred years the Stressless woul
d be on display in museums, hailed as a national symbol on a par with the painting of ‘Bridal Procession in Hardanger’.

  What I am trying to say is that the Biafra disaster occupied a nigh-on traumatic place in Jonas’s consciousness, which is why he reacted so strongly when Viktor announced that autumn, that Norwegian missiles were being used in the war down there in tropical Africa. And do please pay attention here, Professor, because if there is one thing I know a little bit about it is the evil acts of which mankind is capable. Viktor read everything and anything and had contacts everywhere. Viktor was the sort of character who walked around with Le Monde’s weekly digest sticking out of his jacket pocket. He had an acquaintance in England who worked for a publication entitled Peace News, and in this paper, in the forthcoming November issue, it was reported that arms manufactured in Norway were being used in Biafra. Viktor had a copy of the article. He was outraged. It had, of course, been rumoured that NATO ammunition was being employed down there, but this had elicited no great outcry. Any suggestion that these weapons might in some way be connected to Norway had nonetheless been denied. But now. In England they had a photograph, proof that the name of Norway was branded on the Biafra conflict for all time. In other words, that for once Norway was not a mere spectator but also, in fact, a participant of sorts. The picture showed the casing of a 40mm shell, stamped with the legend USN (NORWAY) – Norway, typically, only as a parenthesis but there all the same. ‘They ought to make miniature copies of this shell-casing,’ Viktor felt, ‘for Norwegians to sit on top of their television sets.’