Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

From the turret we could see the planes gliding in or taking off, so close that until darkness fell the logos of the different airlines were clearly visible; and if we turned round we could see the fjord, the boats slipping past, with an occasional, brilliantly illuminated colossus looking too big for the narrow channel.

‘Somewhere in Jonas Wergeland’s life there is a pattern,’ the stranger continued. ‘A pattern that generated the energy which, in turn, gave him the power to do what he did. What stories then, what series of events was it, that made Jonas Wergeland, a perfectly ordinary human being, capable both of creating that magnificent and inspiring television series and of being arrested and charged with murder? Because whichever way you look at it, no one can say that they did not appreciate the high standard of these programmes when they were broadcast, that they were not uplifting. And no matter what people may claim, no one, not even the most zealous inquisitor, knows anything about Jonas Wergeland’s motives — I’m talking here about his innermost motives — on that evening when he returned home from the World’s Fair in Seville.’

I could tell that I was tense, almost involuntarily tense. And at the same time grateful to be experiencing something I believe many people spend all their lives longing for: to meet a stranger who asks you to take a seat by the fire so that he or she can tell you what it’s all about.

‘This first story shows that to call Jonas Wergeland demonic is an oversimplification as outrageous as that of calling a dragon a monster,’ the stranger declared with fire reflected in those pupils and a concentration which made me feel the story was at that very moment being pulled out of its waiting room in the storyteller’s memory.

On one of the threads that forms a spiral in Jonas Wergeland’s life he killed a dragon. And if we enter one of the coils in this spiral we find the following story:

They were going to put on a radio play. Not the way they had done as little boys, when they caught bumblebees and held them, buzzing and buzzing, inside shoeboxes. No, proper radio theatre. Jonas and Little Eagle were about to undertake a project that would represent the culmination of their career; they were going to record a play of their own writing, based on the story of St George and the Dragon. This undertaking did, however, present lots of challenges, and the greatest of these, aside from the different voices, was of course posed by the background noises, referred to in the trade simply as ‘background’: the sound effects which enable listeners to picture rafts heading towards dangerous rapids, or skiers in a snowstorm, if that is what is required. That was Ørn’s job, the sound effects; he was what you might call the floor manager. ‘There’s no sound I can’t make,’ was Ørn’s motto. I don’t know whether I have to spell it out for you, Professor, but when it comes to the question of which person has exerted the greatest influence on Jonas Wergeland’s life, the answer has to be Little Eagle — alias Ørn-Henrik Larsen.

It was actually Daniel who had told them about St George, because Daniel was in the Cubs and they had recently celebrated St George’s Day with much pomp and ceremony. Jonas and Ørn instantly fell for the story of the knight who sets out to rescue the princess from the dragon. They had originally been thinking of recording a simplified version of Jack London’s Call of the Wild — with Colonel Eriksen the elkhound playing the lead — but soon found that this presented certain insurmountable problems as far as the sounds were concerned. It was one thing to get an extremely placid Colonel Eriksen to bark in the right places, or even howl; manufacturing a whole pack of wolves was something else again.

But what sort of sound does a dragon make? Or to put it another way: what is the creepiest sound you can think of?

The tape recorder they were using, or ‘ magnetophone ’ as Mr Larsen grandly referred to it, had only one track, which meant they had to record the voices and the background noises at the same time. Incidentally, this machine, acquired for Mr Larsen to brush up his ‘Can you tell me the way to the nearest restaurant?’ in eight languages, was itself a little marvel. I take it, Professor, that you recall the Tandberg tape recorders of the mid-fifties? TB2s they were called: like little temples to sound with their mahogany casings and loudspeakers installed behind latticed glass panels.

Actually it would not be entirely out of place to dwell for a moment, here, on the name Tandberg: on the company’s founder, Vebjørn Tandberg, a prime Norwegian example of the pioneer spirit and industrial farsightedness, and perhaps even more on the blissful feelings of nostalgia which Tandberg’s products arouse within a large proportion of the Norwegian population. Say ‘Silver Super’ and you trigger a collective landslide of memories, mental pictures of casings in highly polished, lacquered wood, possibly shot with the memory of the feel of a fingertip turning a tuning dial or even the give of the buttons when pressed. Newer models produced around this time were a delight to the eye as well as the ear, not least the real battleship of the Tandberg fleet, the ‘Huldra’, the ultimate expression of tasteful design, a Norwegian equivalent of Denmark’s Lego, an object which, when set in its place in the living room, raised the whole house several rungs up the ladder of modernity and sophisticated elegance. With its knobs and lights, its teak casing and its wood-nymph name, it imbued an apartment with an air of space age, tropical island and mysterious forest combined.

We find ourselves, therefore, in an era which already seems remote, a time when the living room was still arranged around the radiogram, the wireless being the household altar, occupying the place soon to be accorded to the television set, when people switched religion as you might say, swapped old gods for new. And when Jonas Wergeland was a boy the most eagerly awaited radio programme was the Saturday Children’s Hour , and best of all, like the trinket in the centre of a lucky potato: the weekly serial. Jonas could never get enough of these, especially the noises in the background which one could barely hear but which acted like drum rolls on his nerves, made him bite his knuckles — creaking doors, footsteps on stairs, matches being struck inside dark caves — his brain fairly seethed, he saw those scenes, clearer than he ever would later when he saw, with his own eyes I mean, those notorious pieces on television’s Armchair Theatre : the Finnish plays, for example, with their hilariously exaggerated sounds of feet scrunching through cold snow. All those afternoons spent in a chair pulled up close to the radio — breathtaking hours of listening to The Road to Agra, The Jungle Book, Around the World in Eighty Days — taught Jonas that sounds have an unconscious effect on us, just as a song can tip an incident over into a whole other dimension — like the time, one May 17, when Wolfgang Michaelsen, under duress, of course, and blushing furiously, played an infernally strident clarinet during the singing of the national anthem on the flag green in the morning, thus inserting an ironic, not to say anarchic, element into the pompously patriotic tenor of the day: the chairman of the residents’ association, standing there in his new suit, May 17 ribbons fluttering, all the children in their Sunday best with money burning a hole in their pockets. All things considered, it was the radio, and more specifically the radio plays, which truly taught Jonas Wergeland about the power of illusion, how little it took to fire people’s imaginations. ‘It’s really quite amazing,’ he said to Ørn, ‘how the mere sound of somebody crumpling a bit of paper can make you so scared you pee your pants.’