Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

By listening to Winston Churchill’s stirring speeches, as well as all the references to them and quotations from them in other broadcasts, Jørgine built up a deadly arsenal for use in her clandestine guerrilla war — although it might perhaps be fairer to call it a private judicial purge, since she knew her husband would never be convicted of financial treason. In addition to a store of pithy Churchillian sayings she was armed most appropriately with several boxes of expensive Romeo y Julieta cigars — a gift, ironically enough, to her non-smoker of a husband from certain affluent business contacts. The man was as dull as they come — despite his hammerhead appearance. Jørgine would later use the same words of him as Churchill had used of Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister: ‘I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.’ During one of the first breakfasts they shared, she lit one of her big Cuban cigars and declared, with a slightly revised version of a quote she had heard many times: ‘I shall fight you to the last; I shall fight in the hall, I shall fight in the parlour, I shall fight in the kitchen, I shall fight in the bedroom; I shall never surrender.’ A statement which actually brought a frown to the brow of this man, whose sole concern in life up to this point had been to find the shortest way to making a fast buck.

It may sound callous, but as far as Jørgine was concerned it was very simple. She was faced here with the same phenomenon which Churchill had labelled, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, ‘a crime beyond description’. She had lost her Oscar because the Germans came to Gardermoen, and she was going to see to it that someone paid for that; she had no pity for a man who had helped the Germans to extend airfields and made a packet in the process. A man, who, by some obscure moral logic, regarded himself as innocent, blameless. During her vengeful hunt for suitable candidates, she had not only made sure that the chosen contractor had a bad heart, but that he was in fact heartless . Nonetheless, he was subjected not to bloody confrontations, but to strategic manoeuvres. Early on, Jørgine had committed another of Churchill’s sayings to memory: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’ In addition to a two-year long policy of evasive action in the bedroom, Jørgine’s campaign consisted primarily of dropping sly little hints, day in, day out, as to her husband’s crimes, while at the same time inundating him with camouflaged Churchill quotes memorised in that room, the WC, behind whose locked door she was to be found more and more often, puffing on a fat cigar. She quite simply wore him down, mentally; she made life unbearable for him — or rather: for his heart. He did not recognise the charming, considerate woman he had first met, not even to look at. And it was true: during those years Jørgine Wergeland’s face would actually start to resemble Churchill’s round, plump, but exceedingly strong-willed countenance.

Her husband gave up eventually, or gave up the ghost, the year the war ended; and all of those who were present in the Western crematorium believed that they saw, in Jørgine, a genuinely grieving widow. But what was runnin through Jørgine’s mind were Churchill’s words when Britain declared war against Japan: ‘When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.’ In any case she was too taken up with Alf Rolfsen’s impressive paintings in the chapel. These beautiful frescoes reminded her of the fortune she had inherited, because even after the post-war currency stabilisation she had been left with what was, all things considered, a considerable sum of money. And there in the crematorium, as she ran her eyes over Alf Rolfsen’s pictures, it came to her, an idea that had been at the back of her mind for some time: she had to use this blood money for something positive, uplifting; it had to be invested in a building. And she did not have to look far: ‘I found Norway’s biggest piggy bank,’ she would later tell the aforementioned Alf Rolfsen as they sat in the Town Hall’s Festival Gallery one day, having their elevenses.

Jørgine moved back to her old home in Oscars gate, as if she were once more together with her first husband, or as if her life during the years in Inkognitogaten had been a top-secret affair, a mission performed incognito. When she left the building contractor’s flat which had, for her, been more of a battlefield than a home, she took with her just one thing apart from her husband’s bankbook: the magnificent crystal chandelier. Had Jonas known the story behind it, he might better have understood why, when they were cleaning the chandelier, his grandmother so often put on records by Vera Lynn, with songs which Jørgine knew from wartime: hits such as ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Yours’ and ‘Wishing’. Like Jonas, his grandmother too gazed up at the chandelier, into the crystal droplets, as if they were screens on which she saw scenes being enacted. But unlike Jonas, Jørgine did not see pictures from the Queen’s Chambers, she thought about the war, and about Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather. Jonas observed how her eyes filled with tears and she became lost in her own thoughts when Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was revolving on the turntable. To Jonas these songs were just boring old evergreens, but to her they clearly represented a link with other universes, a portal to infinite inner landscapes. And later he would come to understand that this music must have had the same sort of sentimental associations for his grandmother as Rubber Soul had for him. Simple though they were, those tunes could turn some organ inside you to jelly, to soft rubber. So flexible were Jørgine’s thought processes that at such times she was not only capable of calling the Town Hall Oslo’s Statue of Liberty, she was just as likely to think of it as her Oscar statuette.

Given all this, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Jonas was willing to risk life and limb in defence of the Town Hall. So when Viktor, the leading light of The Three Heretics, came up with the idea for his ‘Emil Lie Demonstration’ on, or for , the Town Hall Square, expressly to save this splendid Statue of Liberty or ‘piggy bank’, from a new dictatorship, that of the automobile, he was all for it. The Three Heretics recognised something that should have been obvious to everyone, not least the city fathers: the square in front of the Town Hall was an organic part of the building itself. Defile the square and you defiled the Town Hall too.

One suitably beautiful day in September at the very beginning of the seventies, they went to work, which is to say: out into Rådhusgaten, more or less as the gold hands on the clock tower announced that the time was four p.m. and the bells struck up a folk tune — on this occasion ‘The Food Song’ from Sunnmøre. A lot of people were going to be hopelessly late for dinner, though, because thousands of cars were soon stuck fast in the centre of Oslo due to a demonstration the aim of which was as simple as it was impossible: ‘Dancing on the Town Hall Square!’

If one did not know better one could be forgiven for thinking that this event was the forerunner of the somewhat incongruous carnivals which would be arranged a decade or so later. Viktor had succeeded in mobilising about forty students from the Cathedral School as well as some from the Experimental Grammar School — an even better breeding ground for radicalism and iconoclasm than the Cath., if that were possible, and these now proceeded to march round in a circle extending across the four lanes closest to the Town Hall. They were all dressed and made up to look like caricatures of tourists: Frenchmen in berets, Nigerians in gaily coloured robes, Arabs in long djellabahs, Americans in cowboy hats and Hawaiian shirts, Austrians in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats. Those students posing as Japanese carried cameras and snapped non-stop, their jaws dropping in shock — although, if one were being mean, one could say that they focused on the car number-plates, as if their owners were kerb-crawlers. Some carried placards. ‘A disgrace to Norway!’ and ‘Is this the city’s finest plaza?’ a couple said in German and English. And in Italian: ‘Would anyone run a four-lane expressway over the Piazza Navona?’ Jonas was guised as an Indian, in a white, high-collared Nehru jacket and Ghandi cap — an outfit which Pernille had helped him with — and he was conscious of feeling not quite so shy in this unfamiliar attire. ‘I am a film director from Bombay and I am here to find locations in Oslo for a film about māyā ,’ he announced fearlessly in his best curry-and-rice English to one irate motorist who was yelling that there would be hell to pay if he wasn’t there to pick his wife up from the hairdresser’s.