Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

As they strolled through the streets of the old town, from the Plaza Zabala down to the harbour, she told him more about herself. She had lived in Europe for many years. Her father had gone into exile with his family for the twelve years of the dictatorship, a time full of fear and terrible brutality. Thousands had been imprisoned, many were tortured, many more simply vanished. But now the country had a new government, only recently elected. Ana had returned home to study sociology. She lived with her grandparents.

When she stopped to point out an enormous bank building to him they heard the clatter of pots coming from an open window. Unnaturally loud, as if someone was pretty mad about something. This prompted a laughing Ana to tell him about an unusual form of protest practised during the dictatorship. At a prearranged time — or quite spontaneously, following a speech on the radio — crowds of women would pour out into the streets, banging on pots and pans, making an ear-splitting din, as a demonstration against the ruling power. Ana explained proudly how, by refusing to be silent, refusing to cooperate, or quite simply by gossiping, by relaying stories, her grandmother and other women, ordinary housewives, had made the most effective, and indeed the only possible protest against the regime. Jonas could see it in his mind’s eye, hear it. Very funny, was his first thought, but then he thought again: to tell tales, to go out into the streets and bang on saucepans, that had to be just about the diametric opposite of lazing in a deckchair.

As Ana led him closer and closer to the harbour, towards one of the most crucial — catalytic — incidents in his life, Jonas realised that this was a story he had heard before. Of strong women and weak, corrupt men. He thought of his own grandmother and the German occupation. As with most Norwegians, Jørgine’s feelings about the war were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand it had been her finest hour. On the other, those five years had left their traumatic mark. Once, when Jonas accidentally used the word ‘Buchtel’ of one of the prisms on the chandelier, he almost got his ears boxed. ‘No German in this house!’ his grandmother had admonished fiercely.

Had Jørgine Wergeland told her grandchild a little more, he might have learned an important lesson about human beings. She could have taught him that there’s no telling how your life will turn out, even though you might already be, let’s say, sixty. You might look like a pretty ordinary character, a failure even, with a career that was well and truly over, only for some external circumstance to suddenly turn you into a person of paramount importance to an entire nation, possibly even mark you out as the saviour of civilisation. Seen in that light, one person’s long, commonplace life might sometimes simply be a preparation for the momentous deeds of their latter years, once he or she had discovered their true mission.

Up until the Second World War, Jørgine Wergeland had led a normal, happy life with her Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather, in a smallholding out at Gardermoen, the old drill ground. When the war came to Norway one of the occupying force’s first moves was to extend the airfield at Gardermoen. Jørgine and Oscar lost their farm and Jonas’s grandfather dropped dead — he did not get much pleasure out of the compensation paid to them by the Germans. Granny always said that he ‘exploded with rage’. And apropos that destiny the outlines of which she was beginning to discern, inspired by a British statesman she added: ‘Losing the farm was my Dardanelles, my life’s lowest point.’

Jørgine moved into Oslo, and in honour of her husband she took possession of a spacious flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. But only a year later, in 1943, to everyone’s surprise — and consternation — she married an elderly, childless man and moved into his palatial residence in nearby Inkognitogata. No one could have suspected that Jørgine Wergeland had embarked upon a cunning sabotage operation, an operation she was determined to carry out even if it meant selling her soul to the devil.

Then, in the early autumn of the year the war ended, her second husband died. It was to all appearances a natural death — if a coronary can be considered a natural death. ‘It’s hardly surprising his heart failed him,’ Jørgine remarked conspiratorially to Jonas’s mother, ‘when you think how black and treacherous it was.’ It should perhaps be added that Jørgine had known full well that this man had a bad heart. The last thing she had wanted was to have to spend the rest of her life with him.

The fact was that her new husband was a building contractor. And in the self-same war which had caused Jonas’s grandfather to ‘explode with rage’ this other man had made a mint. Jonas’s grandmother had not been idle during the year in which she lived alone in Oscars gate. Like a spy she had infiltrated certain circles and, with great care and a surprising degree of cynicism, selected a person who had made money primarily by building airfields for the Germans. There is no point in naming this man or in listing the airfields in question — the country was swarming with such types, and there were airfields all over the place. But for Jørgine Wergeland, who had lost both smallholding and husband because the Germans decided to cover more of Gardermoen with concrete, it was essential that the man of her choice had been contracted to lay runways. Had she lived, Jørgine Wergeland would, I’m sure, have appreciated the irony of it when the time came to build a new main airport in Norway and Gardermoen once more became a goldmine for building contractors.

Another important vital condition in her choice of husband, or victim, was that he had to be an entrepreneur who had ceased his business activities — bluntly described by Jørgine as his treasonous activities — in good time and had seen the wisdom of one of the rules of mountain safety which everyone in Norway would later know by heart: there’s no shame in turning back — although in his case it was more a matter of turning his coat back. And to be on the safe side he had even become involved, half-heartedly and very circumspectly, in some underground work. The minute she met him Jørgine noticed that his eyes were set abnormally far apart. He looked a bit like a hammerhead shark. This sinister feature became more marked as the war progressed, as if it took its toll to keep looking two ways at once. Be that as it may, he neatly avoided being arrested or punished when peace was declared, despite government investigations and a bloodthirsty public hue-and-cry against collaborators.

It is tempting, even though it lies outside the scope of this story, to take a closer look at the boom in certain sectors during the war. Disturbingly many Norwegians made a lot of money, just as the whole of Norway today grows richer with every war waged, due to the attendant rise in the price of oil. Much has been written about the astonishingly cooperative line taken by the Norwegian authorities, with the exception of the King and the government, towards the occupying force, more or less from day one. ‘The wheels have to be kept turning in the interests of the working people,’ was how it was phrased. This cooperation also included tasks of such military importance as the repair and extension of airfields. In the spring and summer of 1940, not one class, not one organisation, not one political party advocated an open policy of sabotage, and so it continued, with surprisingly few exceptions, for some time. This says a lot about Norway. Other countries lost millions of people, to famine, in battle; the citizens of the Soviet Union, not least, fought and died — also for Norway’s benefit. And what did Norway do? The somewhat less than heroic answer would be: ‘We trod softly.’ Poland lost about twenty per cent of its population, Norway three per mil. Not counting the sinking of the Blücher , the fight put up by certain divisions in the very earliest phase of the war, not least at Narvik, a few dozen genuine heroes and, of course, the navy, the Norwegian resistance campaign could be said to have been one of the least heroic ever. All military operations were terminated in June 1940, after eight weeks. Later, it also came out that every fifth Norwegian officer had been a member of Quisling’s National Unity party. Within just about every branch of trade and industry hands were extended to the Germans. And the gains could on occasion be prodigious. Which makes it all the harder to understand — for a foreigner particularly — how Norway, a country which was subjected to a relatively mild period of occupation, could have carried out such an unreasonably relentless series of judicial purges after the war — as if all the hostility and outrage could finally be vented, five years too late. Despite everything so far written about Norway and the Second World War, it would not be too bold a prediction to state that our contribution to the war effort, our spirit of resistance, will be shown to be even more frayed and pathetic when still more researchers have delved into the events of those five years. Such a statement might be hard for a few people to swallow, but Jørgine Wergeland for one would have declared herself heartily in agreement. ‘Our military honour was lost when the dreadnought Norge was sunk at the Battle of Narvik,’ she said once to Jonas. ‘With the battleship Eidsvold our ideals too went down.’