Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘And what do you think happened to those two Jews?’ Veronika said when she was finished. ‘D’you think they came back to Hvaler for their summer holidays after the war?’

In his mind Jonas saw a boat sinking, slowly and softly into the deep. At this point he had no idea how Veronika knew all this, whether there were other people besides their fathers who remembered it, or whether it was simply something she had dug up herself, evidence of the talent which had shown itself in her at an early age and would one day make her a top-notch reporter. But, knowing the Veronika who stood before him as he did, he also knew that it was the naked truth.

He lay there, tied to the bed, involuntary tears streaming down his cheeks — cursing those tears, that Veronika should see them — and all at once he understood that this — this — was the Story behind the stories, the tale his grandfather had been searching for as he rocked back and forth in his chair, flanked by the dark, carved sideboards in the parlour, like a knight fighting shadowy monsters. His grandfather did not only have a dragon tattooed on his arm, he also had an invisible tattoo on his heart. And the reason he screwed up his eyes when he told a story was that he always had his sights on that one story, as if he were frantically trying to alter it by telling all those other stories. That was also why he always backed when he was rowing, because he so desperately wanted to turn back time, travel backwards and maybe one day reach the point, that total eclipse of the sun, when he had made his terrible mistake.

Veronika had scored a bull’s-eye. If she hated Jonas for spurning her she could not have found a better way of taking her revenge — not even the pleasure she derived later from seeing Jonas gamble away a whole bundle of money on worthless shares could compare to the triumph she felt at the sight of Jonas’s stricken face on that pillow. His grandfather was as good as a god to him; she knew this must hurt him dreadfully.

‘Christ, you’re mean Veronika, you’re so mean,’ was all Jonas managed to blurt out.

‘And you, Jonas, you’re such a loser,’ retorted Veronika, as if alluding to the pleasure that could have been his but which he had lost all chance of now. ‘In fact you’re worse than that: you’re a mediocrity. Even your cock gives you away.’ She picked up her panties and T-shirt, disappeared down the stairs. By the time Jonas had worked himself free, two hours later, she was gone.

But there was one thing Veronika had not reckoned on. She thought she had dealt Jonas’s image of Omar a mortal blow. But Jonas would only grow to love his grandfather even more after this disclosure, because now he understood his grandfather’s air of vulnerability, his desperate bent for telling stories, the effort it took to go on living in spite of his act of treachery: an occurrence which no amount of remorse could atone for. In time Jonas came to see that this was his story too, since it had to do with his roots. Hence the reason he kept returning to the question of whether a story about evil could, by some strange metamorphosis, some day become a beautiful story, whether Hitler could even become Homer or, as he thought of it when working at his carving bench, whether a dragon could become a swan.

Jonas Wergeland never really rid himself of the fatal suspicion that you had to be a criminal to be a good storyteller. Or that behind the best stories there was always a hurt, a wound, much in the same way as a foreign body will, in the course of time, cause an oyster to make a pearl; which, when you get right down to it, means that a pearl is disease transformed into beauty.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must start with words: Tenerife, Tortugas, Tancred, Touraine . All through the programme this catalogue of names was recited, like beautiful alliterations, stanzas from a patriotic poem everyone used to know and which Jonas Wergeland meant to bring to life once more — lines as memorable as ‘You must not take so much to heart, that injustice which touches not your own part.’

Many have remarked on Jonas Wergeland’s ability to keep the viewers’ eyes glued to the screen from the first flicker, to stop them from zapping to another channel within those first, critical thirty seconds. The opening sequence of the programme on Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was no exception: it is the Second World War; a German submarine is seen firing a torpedo at a merchant ship. Thanks to an absolutely brilliant montage of clips from old documentaries, seen partly through the periscope, partly from the surface, Jonas created an almost unbearable cliff-hanger of a scene, rendered doubly effective by a shot in which the camera actually seemed to be following the torpedo through the water to its target, to the accompaniment of a spine-chilling soundtrack not unlike the theme from Jaws . The whole thing culminated in a grim, long drawn-out explosion and a dreamlike sequence in which the ship slipped down into the deep — a brilliant illusion created by an underwater camera filming a sinking model ship in the clear water of a swimming pool.

More than once during the shooting of this episode Jonas was reminded of what a thrill, what a boost he had got from making his first ever programme. Because, although Wergeland’s colleagues have insisted that he was a natural for television, that he had a sixth sense for where a camera ought to be placed, which passages were good and which were bad, this was not the case. When NRK, with some reservations, offered Jonas Wergeland, the increasingly popular television announcer, the chance to make programmes, he just about panicked, his mind went blank. The story is that he went to London and stayed there for a month, and that when he came home there was nothing he didn’t know about TV. No one knows what he got up to in London, not even I — whether, as some people maintain, he sat through Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo fifty times, or whether, as others say, he spent every single day and night at the BBC’s Broadcasting House — but I am pretty sure that there, in his mysterious fashion, he found a key to the secret of television broadcasting. However that may be, he returned to Norway possessed of a self-confidence worthy of a television Einstein. And in the first programme he made for NRK, about the Norwegian elkhound — yes, that’s right, the Norwegian elkhound — he discovered, to his heartfelt delight, or relief, what a perfect medium television was for a person like him, one with such limited abilities; he gave thanks for the fabulous stroke of luck that had led him to such an enormously suggestive medium: a single twirl of the camera and people saw a UFO, their eyes just about starting out of their heads. Jonas Wergeland had found his arena, a field in which he could become a conqueror. Despite the fact that he created a series of what were — objectively speaking — outstanding programmes, definite milestones in television history, Jonas knew something which he never told to a living soul: making television programmes was the easiest job in the world — the TV studio the perfect refuge of the mediocre. Television was the salvation of Mr Average.

What he really needed in his new career was staying power. And, as you know, Professor, if there was one thing Jonas Wergeland had plenty of, it was staying power. How many times have we had to listen to the same old stories of how thorough he was, of the time he spent touching up his programmes, eternally cutting and editing: how he was never satisfied — with the sound, the lighting, his commentary, the tempo, the very pulse. He would sit on his own, going over the drafts of programmes again and again, making notes for improvements. ‘He sat in his office long into the night,’ it was said, as if this were something remarkable, because this was NRK, and at NRK no one worked overtime, least of all if it was unpaid. But Jonas Wergeland worked on long into the night, of his own free will, because he wanted to make programmes that people would never forget.