Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

That he had not done, however, when he returned from the ministry in Oslo one evening and, slumped over the latest issue of the daily paper, Lågendalsposten , during their late dinner, she called attention to an ad. Bjørn Hansen considered himself a slow, introvert and not very spontaneous person. The ad announced an opening: the position as town treasurer at Kongsberg had now become vacant for qualified applicants. Bjørn Hansen read the ad, then gave Turid an enquiring glance. Was there something in the wording of the ad that had awakened her anti-bureaucratic sense of humour? But Turid again pointed at the ad and said, ‘For you, my dear. Town treasurer — that would be something for you, wouldn’t it?’ Bjørn Hansen looked at her again. He laughed. ‘Well, why not?’

Yes, why not? Why shouldn’t he apply for the position of treasurer at Kongsberg, now that he lived there? No sooner said than done. Bjørn Hansen solemnly applied for the position.

What is a town treasurer? A tax collector. He is the one who is responsible for the payment, on time, of the rightful taxes and fees to the State and the local authority, and for taking the necessary measures when that doesn’t happen. Originally, being a tax collector was a very high office; it was the bailiff who had that task, and he was the king’s man. Later it was the treasurer. He was a municipal public servant, trusted and respected, but he held a position with its roots in the urban community, and the fact that the tax collector was changed from being bailiff to treasurer can be seen as an expression of the State changing its character from a bureaucratic system of government to one based on extensive local democracy. The small-town treasurer in the twentieth century was no high official; he was recruited in the course of the daily routine in the Norwegian town where he worked, usually had no academic education, being a graduate of a business school or commercial college, and had risen through the ranks in the office of the treasurer.

Bjørn Hansen’s application was not welcomed by the treasury office employees. With his university degree and experience at the ministry, he was actually over-qualified and therefore pulled ahead of two long-time members of the staff who had lately been scowling at each other because both considered themselves qualified to reach the top. Bjørn Hansen snatched the title from under their very noses. And they immediately joined forces against him, from the first day that he — an outsider who lived with Turid Lammers in the Lammers villa, a snob of thirty-two with too many degrees, a softy — had a good look at the office and his colleagues.

He had moved to Kongsberg. And, on a whim, he had applied for the position of town treasurer and got it. In reality, he merely shrugged. Why in the world should he be town treasurer? A treasurer, of all things? Some whim that was, he thought, astounded. But Turid walked through the rooms of the Lammers villa singing, ‘My husband is town treasurer! My husband is town treasurer! I’m living with the treasurer! I’m living with the treasurer!’ Bjørn Hansen gazed at her in admiration. He couldn’t help laughing.

There was an audacious element in Turid Lammers’s gaiety that fascinated him. Thus encouraged, he went to his daily task, albeit with a shrug. Was he thinking that this job might be a professional dead end, to put it mildly? Well, he knew that, but simply gave a shrug. It was more important for him to find a job at Kongsberg, because he was beginning to get tired of commuting (it was also a strain on their relationship). He wouldn’t have minded continuing in the ministry, but not if he lived at Kongsberg. And now he was living at Kongsberg, that was a fact.

Bjørn Hansen had grown up in a town by the Oslo Fjord, the son of parents of limited means. He was a poor boy. Nevertheless it seemed natural to him to go to college, on account of his ready wits. He received his maturity certificate at the age of nineteen and, after sixteen months of military service, he had to make up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. Bjørn Hansen decided to go to Oslo to study. In reality, he was mostly interested in art and literature, philosophy and the meaning of life, but he chose to study economics. Chiefly because he had always been good at arithmetic and mathematics, but also because he had a vague feeling that he had to rise and get on in life, so as not to end up in the same poverty as his parents; at any rate, he wanted to get away from their bitter toil, and while he did not equate art and literature, philosophy and the meaning of life with bitter toil, they had, quite simply, an aura of luxury about them. Art and literature were not proper subjects to him, they were interests one could cultivate in one’s spare time, not means whereby to acquire a position, which he, with a genuinely unassuming matter-of-factness, saw as the end of academic study. Hence economics. But there were two ways of studying economics — you could become a Bachelor of Commerce (in Bergen) or a political economist (in Oslo). For Bjørn Hansen it had to be political economy. The study of business administration led to employment by private corporations, to the no doubt exciting jungle there, but this was so remote from Bjørn Hansen’s own point of departure, his moral and social intelligence, etc., that he did not even consider it. Due to some form of social consciousness, he chose political economy and, consequently, a career in public administration. So he decided to become a servant of the State, for lack of other alternatives.

When he met Turid Lammers, he had been employed in the ministry for six years (Bjørn Hansen always said, ‘I was employed in the ministry,’ but never said which one in all the eighteen years that had now gone by since he arrived at Kongsberg), and if someone asked him in which ministry, he replied, ‘Er, some ministry, I no longer remember exactly which,’ and couldn’t be made to say anything more, even though everyone knew that he was lying and had been about to be promoted. He wouldn’t have minded that, viewing it as quite natural, and could easily imagine being assistant or deputy secretary. He felt quite happy in the ministry; he found it exciting to work out budget estimates, and he was not insensitive to the fact that the estimates they were working out, in different variants, would have a practical bearing on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians, a thought which in no way was conducive to losing interest in one’s work. It was a sensible kind of work Bjørn Hansen was performing, and he could easily imagine continuing with it. But when Turid encouraged him, merrily, to apply for the position of town treasurer in Kongsberg, he had no problem with bidding farewell to his career in the ministry and he had never missed it during the eighteen years that had passed.

Did he become treasurer for Turid’s sake? He would not have done it without her encouragement, at any rate. Without her merriment at the thought that her partner would be the town’s treasurer. It was quite mad, Turid’s eyes sparkled, and he thought, ‘I’ll do it! Hell, yes, I’ll do it!’ and instantly felt a wild satisfaction at the thought that he would actually do it. It was the final break with everything that had gone before. It bound him at last to Turid Lammers. To this town. To their relationship here in this large, dilapidated Lammers villa. To the adventure, which had already acquired so many absurd features, and which he was as fascinated by as ever.

But to Turid’s (and, for that matter, his own) amazement, he had from the very first moment set about his work with great seriousness — well, almost fervour. Partly because, from the start, he felt the hostility in the treasurer’s office from the two employees who had been passed over. To tell the truth, he felt as if he had behaved rather shabbily towards them. It was really their job, after all, they should have competed for it, and the one who didn’t get it would forever have borne a grudge against the other and plotted against him intensely, on the quiet, using every low trick imaginable, instead of, as now, joining forces as allies, as time went by even as close friends, and directing all of their ill will towards him, the new treasurer. Having all but strolled into this leadership position (he had sixteen subordinates), he found himself with something to sharpen his wits on. Intrigue and knavery. The amount of mischief a roughly fifty-year-old employee in a treasury office can dream up when he feels he has been played for a fool and prevented from attaining his natural peak as town treasurer, is quite indescribable. And when, as in this case, there were two of a kind — birds of a feather, as they say — the atmosphere at the treasury could at times be more than strained. Instead of being laden with dust, which people usually associate with offices where dry, creaky bureaucrats spend their days, the corners were alive with a festering glow. But this atmosphere hardened him, well, matured him, if not as a human being, at least as a treasurer, and that was, after all, what mattered in this instance.