Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Inside the copper doors of the Matenadaran he and the guide had wandered through its rooms, looking at ancient manuscripts from monasteries, handwritten copies of the works of Armenian scholars and of foreign books. Some texts from antiquity had only survived in their Armenian translations — a chronicle by Eusebios of Caesarea, a treatise on nature by Zeno. As if the script itself were a sort of Noah’s ark, thought Jonas, examining one fragile parchment volume: the Gospel of Lazarus. He felt as though the lovely letters were exerting an influence on him, trying to tell him something, although he did not know what.

Why had he gone to Yerevan? Perhaps simply to see this wilful alphabet. For the first time since elementary school he felt something for letters, had the urge to write, abandon television, even. It may be that this was precisely what this almost otherworldly script was telling him: that nothing was fixed. That anything was possible. What if I were to settle down here, he thought, break all ties and do something completely different?

Jonas had remained standing outside the institute, gazing down on the city and listening to a deep murmur emanating from beneath or above the landscape, as if some massive plates he could not see were turning or grinding against one another. He thought of Fridtjof Nansen, pack ice, he thought of Ararat, the glacier, he thought of the year ahead of him, he thought of the television series which was shortly to be broadcast, he thought of Margrete — he thought of Margrete, not knowing that, because of her, he would find himself at the centre of a sensational scandal, that he would discover how it felt when something he believed to be solid and permanent suddenly shifted under his feet. He could not know, was too busy savouring this slow moment of revelation, the sensation of being at a point where everything trickles down and converges, like sand in the narrow neck of an hourglass.

His reverie was interrupted by a man — because there was something else, not only a script, not only a mountain, but a person. Nansen Sarjan — almost having to shake Jonas awake and telling him that he had to leave, now, this very instant. ‘But why?’ Jonas asks lightly, despite a faint contraction of his testicles, ‘I’m leaving for Leninakan this evening.’ Leninakan was the largest city in Armenia after Yerevan, and Jonas meant to visit the university there the next morning. ‘Because you must,’ the man says adamantly and knocks out his pipe against his heel. ‘I just know, that’s all. You must not stay here one second longer.’

Jonas did not know why he allowed himself to be persuaded, why he permitted himself to be escorted, led by the hand almost, back to his hotel, where an impatient Nansen Sarjan had an earnest conversation with the Intourist representative, whereupon Jonas’s ticket was changed and he was driven straight off to the airport, without even stopping for a bite of lunch — maybe it was the thought of Nansen, Fridtjof that is, or of Noah, or of that enigmatic script which stopped him from protesting. Whatever it was, a sudden shunt, he arrived in Moscow that same afternoon. As the plane bumped down onto the runway he seemed to wake from a hypnotic trance.

Sometimes Jonas Wergeland doubted whether he had been to Yerevan at all.

The following day he heard rumours, but it wasn’t until he returned to Norway that he heard the full story: news of the disaster was all over the papers and on television. The morning after he left, Armenia had been hit by a severe earthquake, the worst experienced in the Caucasus in eighty years; 25,000 people had been killed, 12,000 were hospitalized, half a million people had been left homeless. The quake had wreaked particular havoc in Leninakan; large parts of the city, including the university, had been completely flattened.

Jonas Wergeland knew it: we owe our lives to other people.

A journey need not be long, in terms of time, for it to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.

I — the Professor — do not know whether or not to call this the irony of fate. Jonas Wergeland escaped disaster that time, but nothing could save him from the media earthquake triggered by his arrest and later trial — not surprisingly perhaps, seeing that Wergeland himself was the instigating factor. The public hoped, of course, for as long as they could, hoped that something was wrong, that someone, somewhere had made a terrible and most unfortunate mistake. Rumour had it that Jonas Wergeland remained silent — and, others added, unmoved — and he refused to make any sort of statement to the police. He had accepted the lawyer appointed to defend him without demur and would not hear of engaging one of the big-time lawyers whom Daniel was sure would be able to help him.

I think everyone, including myself, awaited the trial in such a state of suspense that you would have thought the honour of Norway was at stake. At times, the interest in the case could almost be compared to the hullabaloo surrounding the winter Olympics at Lillehammer that would shortly be coming to a close. It seemed as though higher powers wished to reward the Norwegian people by treating them, for a short time — en masse, as it were — to not one mammoth spectacle but two: a thought-provoking reflection of Jonas Wergeland’s theory that Norway was ‘a nation of spectators’.

I do not know whether it is possible to say anything about the proceedings in the High Court beyond all that has already been reported, all that has been written, all the pictures that have been published — not least those risible sketches from the courtroom, like illustrations from cheap crime magazines. One can ask oneself whether there was anything about Jonas Wergeland that did not come out during the trial — a kind of inverted version of This is Your Life — thanks to the prosecution’s dogged efforts to prove his guilt. The most surprising part was probably the fact that Jonas Wergeland also chose to remain silent, as if he considered this his best mode of defence, or his only mode of defence: something which lots of people naturally interpreted as a black mark against him. Nonetheless, there was no doubt: through everything that came to light, everything that was relayed by the media and greedily watched, read, listened to and, not least, discussed everywhere, Jonas Wergeland seduced the Norwegian people anew.

By the time the case came to court a number of books about him had already been published, with titles such as The TV Demon and All That Glisters : superficial, hastily penned ‘biographies’ produced with only one aim in mind: to make money. Well, it was a very tasty story, almost worthy of Shakespeare himself: the vertiginous plunge from the peaks of distinction to the pit of hell. And yet the trial managed, indirectly mind you, to produce fresh details, whole stories in fact, primarily of the murkier sort, the relevance of which was skilfully argued by the prosecution — everything from a boyhood story about the theft of a stamp album to that of an embarrassingly degrading taxi ride about a year before the killing. The prosecutors also received plenty of help from Gjermund Boeck, Margrete’s father, and William Røed, Jonas’s uncle who, in their respective capacities as the Norwegian king’s ambassador and a director of Statoil presented their testimonies with great authority: his uncle, known within the family as Sir William, impeccably attired in a blazer with a gold silk cravat at his throat, painted a particularly lethal picture of what he called ‘Jonas Wergeland’s complete lack of character’. Few would disagree with the newspapermen’s refrain: ‘If anyone in modern times has been put in the stocks, then it’s Jonas Wergeland.’