Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

They say that during the war, when the Wilhelmsen fleet was being run from London, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went to the office as usual, had his black Cadillac sent to collect him every day from the mansion on Trosterudveien, a house which Jonas and Ørn were to take stock of a good twenty years later, and was driven to No. 20 Tollbodgaten, where he stepped through the heavy oak doors and said good morning to the caretaker before hurrying up to the first floor, past ‘The Three Graces’, and letting himself in to his office. What he did up there, in a room lined with old paintings of sailing ships, no one knows. But Jonas Wergeland knew what went on in there. Because during the war Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was neither in Trosterudveien nor in Tollbodgaten, he was at sea, he was on board all of his ships, every single one of them; he was in several places at once and every time he heard that a ship had gone down, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down too. Why? Because he was still the Captain. When the Tudor was torpedoed, Wilhelmsen was not in Norway; he was somewhere northwest of Cape Finisterre, on board the Tudor . Wilhelmsen went down with his ship. When the Triton was torpedoed northeast of the Azores, Wilhelmsen was on board; when the Taurus was bombed off Montrose in Scotland, Wilhelmsen sank along with it, and when the Talabot — a name which aroused even stronger feelings in the Captain, because not only had the Talabot been the first of the T-boats, but Wilhelm Wilhelmsen had actually served as an ordinary seaman on that ship — so when, after a heroic crossing from Alexandria, this second Talabot was set ablaze by bombs in the harbour at Valletta on Malta and thereafter partially sunk in order to prevent its cargo of munitions from exploding, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down with the ship. It is not true to say that Wilhelmsen spent the war sitting behind a desk; in his thoughts he spent every day, his whole life in fact, on the bridge. WW, a quadruple V-sign: We Will Win. This was what Jonas wanted to show, and showed in such a way that even the most hard-bitten Norwegian could not help but be moved.

After this programme — which, to Jonas’s surprise, was never criticized for its pathos — NRK received masses of thank-you letters from seamen, surviving war veterans. They thanked Jonas Wergeland for so clearly illustrating a fact which people in Norway had, for over half a century, blocked out: what a debt not only the nation, but the whole world, owed to those seamen. In Norway it was the sailors who made the biggest sacrifice during the war. Almost half of all Norwegian casualties were seamen. They were like Leonidas’s soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae, they helped to thwart a far superior force. No one can overestimate the contribution made by the Norwegian merchant fleet to the defeat of the Axis powers, and it is easy to see why the lines tracing the routes followed by the Wilhelmsen fleet and other shipping companies reminded some people of the diagrams of battles in historical atlases. What Churchill said about the RAF is equally true of the Norwegian seamen: Never was so much owed by so many to so few.

Talleyrand, Tabor, Tarifa, Trafalgar — a heroic poem, an epos. Those words beginning with ‘T’ — recited as scene followed scene — were the names of boats, all of which sank, went down, during the war. Jonas closed the programme with a clip from a documentary that showed the launching, four years after the end of the war, of the Thermopylae II , which was actually built at the Akers Mek yard in Oslo. ‘What a triumph,’ wrote one old wartime seaman. ‘Like witnessing a resurrection.’

Axel, on the other hand, was scathing in his criticism of this programme. Three quarters of an hour on Wilhelmsen and not one word about aquavit. Outrageous.

And if I might add my three ha’pence worth, in retrospect I cannot help thinking of the resemblance between the shots of Wilhelmsen on the bridge of a sinking ship and the photographs taken of Jonas Wergeland just after the murder of Margrete Boeck, and indeed as he looked in the courtroom, standing there with an air of defiance mixed with quiet grief and cool dignity, as if he, Jonas Wergeland, were also in the midst of a terrible shipwreck.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must concentrate once again on a thread which winds to the surface so often that it may well lie under everything. I am referring, in other words, to the story of the great shipwreck in Jonas Wergeland’s own life. And as in the war, here too a villain stood behind the torpedoing.

Although Jonas escaped miraculously unscathed from the crash on the E6, it left him walking about like a wounded man. He considered kicking up a fuss, making one hell of a scene, but decided in the end not to say anything to Margrete, not even in the way of veiled accusations regarding what had finally dawned on him, something so obvious that he ought to have tumbled to it long before. In any case, Margrete was not the crux of the problem. Somewhere in his mind Jonas had always harboured a fear, prompted by her inherent unreliability, or by something he could not put into words, that there would come a time when she would betray him. Even though he wished he did not love her half so much, there were times when he saw a witch in her, a supernatural side which was most evident in her constant insistence on freedom, a freedom which also included the right to behave unpredictably, or respond to motives he could not fathom. He had caught a glimpse of this way back in seventh grade, before she left Norway, in the ruthless way in which she had broken up with him. I never want to see her again, he had thought, with something close to relief.

The problem, as far as Jonas was concerned — the shock — was Axel.

He went around in a daze, went to work as usual — although he didn’t do anything there except sit and brood — but was always on the lookout for clues, signs that might give them away, lead him to a place where he would, as it were, catch them red-handed. It was here that the underside side of his creative genius was revealed: one and one made three — here, in his private life, as in his programmes. He rummaged through Margrete’s closet, disgusted with himself for doing so; rooted around in a wardrobe drawn from all over the world: colourful kangas for the beach, black Thai silk for evening; even Margrete’s soiled panties were turned inside out and examined for suspicious stains; he went through her diary, looking for coded appointments, hunted through her handbag for a letter, a note, some item that ought not to be there, if only a strand of hair. And incessantly, a wormball in his head: one and one makes three, had to make three. He found himself admiring them, the whole affair, how clever they were, this web of lies which they had spun and arranged so brilliantly, this triangle which they had constructed, as perfect and intricate and yet as jaw-droppingly simple as Pythagoras’s theorem about the square of the hypotenuse. What annoyed him most of all was his helplessness. He stood there shamefaced amid a heap of dirty washing with a metallic taste in his mouth, born of fear, or spite, a psychosomatic secretion from the organs of jealousy, and when he pulled off his shirt that night a sour, unfamiliar smell wafted up to him from his armpits, as if his body were trying to tell him that — if not physically, then mentally — he had been infected. He could understand, and even agree with, those who said that jealousy was a sickness, a chemical reaction in the brain; he didn’t give a toss, he knew he was sick, wanted to be that way, he nursed this state of green madness, viewing it, through the fog, with a certain curiosity even, as if he had just discovered new sides to himself, had sniffed out the darkest springs in the human heart. He peered, fascinated, into this hallucinatory chasm, astonished, almost impressed by the monster of hate which he saw taking shape, growing more and more terrible, day by day.