Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

At long last Ørn lies still. His eyes are closed. There’s snot on his upper lip. He’s a sorry sight. They lie quietly for a long while, Jonas on top of Ørn.

Little Eagle opens his eyes, looks straight up into Jonas’s eyes. His gaze does not waver. He never used to do that. He stares long and hard at Jonas. Jonas looks down at Ørn. He knows what he is seeing. Never in his life has he seen it before, but he knows what it is: hate.

‘You bastard,’ Ørn says.

Just the once. And not all that loudly.

They go on lying there. Ørn gazes into Jonas’s eyes. For ages they lie there. Jonas thinks it’s funny, but he doesn’t laugh. Something about the situation stops him from laughing.

Then he gets up. Little Eagle clambers to his feet, turns and walks off. Jonas waits for a few minutes before following him down the road towards Solhaug, catches a glimpse of Ørn’s back as he turns in between the blocks of flats. Jonas went home to change his clothes, shut his eyes to go over the new lines for the sketch that he was going to be presenting outside of Number One, in front of all the grownups.

Ørn didn’t come to see it. Jonas did not see Ørn that evening — not even then, on Midsummer’s Eve, the longest, lightest day of the year.

Soon afterwards Ørn moved away. Little Eagle, it transpired, was gone forever.

Stamps illustrate the uniformity of an era. For months, years maybe, everyone, millions of letter-writers, stick identical images on their envelopes. Stamps were the forerunners of the mass media: there too, for weeks on end, one sees the same face, the same picture, everywhere. It was against just such a background that Jonas Wergeland’s programmes stood out; he produced a stream of images unlike anything ever seen before, on NRK or any other channel.

After the scandal broke, Jonas Wergeland’s television programmes were pretty much put under the microscope, as if people were searching for clues, some warning of what was to come. The programme on Niels Henrik Abel, in particular, with its unforgettable opening shot of the Pont Arts in a grey, December-chill Paris — the eyes fixed longingly, almost pleadingly on the façade of the Institut de France — was subjected to a lot of scrutiny. Initially, its pointed visual statements were construed as a sign of admirable commitment — something singularly lacking in most TV programmes — but the prevailing, hypocritical consensus later was that here Jonas Wergeland had gone over the score, that this out-and-out caricature of Frenchmen and all things French was far too spiteful by half. ‘Behind the virtuosity of this programme one discerns something dark, hateful even,’ one famous opportunist would later write. However that may be, the story of Niels Henrik Abel formed the basis for the most subjective and aggressive of Jonas Wergeland’s programmes.

I can now reveal, Professor, that there were personal reasons for this. And here I am thinking not of stamps, although I’m sure you have already spotted the connection, you may even own one of the stamps issued on 6 April 1929 to mark the centenary of Niels Henrik Abel’s death. No, I am referring to one of Jonas Wergeland’s first and little-known trips abroad, to that same city of Paris. He was feeling nervous even before he had got through passport control, as if he was prepared for anything to happen at an airport named after Charles de Gaulle. This insecurity, which he thought must spring from some sort of national inferiority complex, grew even more palpable as he was passing through Customs, where a man in uniform eyed him sternly. And it was at this point that Jonas, as he saw it, made his big mistake: he smiled. The customs officer promptly called him over and asked to see his luggage. Jonas had the feeling that the man was doing this purely out of resentment — he wasn’t going to have any stupid Norwegian smiling at him. He didn’t conduct a neat search of Jonas’s suitcase either but rummaged around in it as if sure of turning up something, and when he found nothing, Jonas was led into another room where the first man and another officer proceeded to interview, or virtually cross-examine him — that, at least, is how it seemed to Jonas. ‘Here in Paris I’m not a Norwegian, I’m a nigger,’ Jonas said to himself. I would like to emphasize that I’m sure such things did not happen very often, that this was in all likelihood a cosmic exception to the usual hospitality of the French passport and customs authorities. Nonetheless, it did happen. Jonas spoke to the two officers in his best French, but they acted as if they did not understand, interrupted him with curt, antagonistic orders, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, Jonas kept thinking; and this they did even though they knew he hadn’t done anything, this they did because they had every right to do so, Jonas could be a dangerous character, a big-time smuggler. Jonas had smiled: now who would smile at a strange Frenchman if they had nothing to hide? They asked to see his tickets, inquired as to where he would be staying, how much money he had with him, he understood what they said, they did not understand what he said, although they should have been able to; several times Jonas heard the word ‘ zéro ’ — not ‘ rien ’, but ‘ zéro ’ — and automatically assumed that this referred to him; I’m not sure, Professor, but it isn’t altogether inconceivable that they also asked him to undress, that they also searched his person in the most thorough and humiliating way and still with every right to do so, I say again, even though he had done nothing wrong, ‘ il est nul ’, but he had smiled, he was suspicious, a pathetic Norwegian, a nigger in Paris, they had sussed out that he was a nothing trying to make out that he wasn’t just a nothing, they simply would not have a nothing in their country, in France, a land of ones, the cradle of European civilization; Jonas felt that they were laughing at him the whole time: at his clothes, his sad excuse for a suitcase and not least his halting French, which had been good enough at school but a joke here. ‘ C’est un zéro en chiffre .’ They let him out of the room with a little laugh, and even though they did not find anything, Jonas felt that they had exposed him, that they had stripped him bare, in more than one sense. ‘They raped me mentally,’ he said later. Even if he was not a nothing, they made him feel like a nothing.

Am I on the right track? Why else would Niels Henrik Abel, as played by Normann Vaage, walk around Paris made up to look like a Negro? Jonas Wergeland’s story about Abel was a tale of intellectual racism, of the degradation of a small nation, of the world’s doubts that anything good could really come out of Norway. There was a personal reason for the underlying rage in the programme, but that is not the whole explanation. Jonas Wergeland was on safe ground here — for who could help but feel outraged at the thought of how Abel was treated in Paris?

Jonas Wergeland could, of course, have centred his programme on Abel around the discovery of elliptical functions and the heart-stopping race to pip Gustav Jacobi to the post, but from the very start he knew how to angle this programme in his series on heroic Norwegians, Thinking Big : he would focus on Abel’s waiting. Niels Henrik Abel was, in short, a brilliant scholar, a man who, in the words of one mathematician, was in the process of ‘discovering Magellian passages to huge areas of that same, vast analytical ocean’. An individual who, in his short life, would establish a legacy ‘which will keep mathematicians occupied for five hundred years’, as another put it. The programme captured this unique person at the point on his grand tour when he arrived in Paris, the mathematical capital of the day, to present what has since become known as the great Abelian theorem, his masterpiece, to the French Scientific Society, in hopes of seeing it published in their Mémoires des savants étrangers’ and thereby winning international recognition and a university lectureship, as well as the chance to develop all of the other ideas proliferating inside his head to an extent unseen in any other mathematician at that time. Abel is in Paris. This is his moment of truth. The only problem is that he comes from Norway.