Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

So I was wary of any tinge of irony in her voice when she addressed me as ‘Professor’, as if I were continually hearing myself being accused of having abandoned my true calling. Eventually, though, I began to interpret it more as her way of invoking, not to say appealing to, my academic abilities. I regarded her with bated breath as she flicked desultorily through my biography — the one I am most pleased with — of historian Ernst Sars: Prospect of a Life . ‘Do you think that so-called great people have to be out-of-the-ordinary?’ she asked, and then, as if not expecting a reply: ‘What if they were perfectly ordinary. Or downright weak.’ She put the book back. ‘Could one, for example, admire a man who might be a murderer?’

The ferry to Denmark slipped past, out on the fjord. It may have been its glowing lights that prompted her to move over to the fireplace where a fire was burning. ‘I hate this cold,’ she said again, although the temperature outside was only around zero, and then, seeing my look of surprise: ‘I’m used to much warmer conditions.’

As I was putting more wood on the fire she bent an openly appreciative eye on the mounds of papers on my desk, piled up so high that I could barely see out of the window when I sat down. There too lay all sorts of statistical surveys, official documents, fat works of reference, economic reports, a history of television, the yearbooks of various professional bodies — as if the room belonged to a social scientist or social anthropologist rather than a historian. I realized that, in my uncertainty regarding my project, I had fallen back on my old methods — I almost said: my old sins. Could it be that all along, without knowing it, I had been afraid that I would not be able to discern a clear storyline in the life of someone from our own century and had, therefore, accumulated all this material, just as I had done for my earliest works — on an epoch, on a country — as if hoping that somewhere in there I would spot one long thread winding its way through the mass of information. Or maybe I suspected that Jonas Wergeland was just another name for a — what shall I call it? — a way of thinking, that he was the symbol of a national trend: that, like Abraham in the Bible, he personified the whole history of his tribe, that he represented something more, except that I could not see what it was. And yet, surprisingly enough, she seemed to approve of my method. ‘I need someone who takes a man seriously,’ she said, ‘who understands that a man amounts to more than his own life.’

Before she came on the scene, I had had the feeling that I had in my possession the annals of Jonas Wergeland, but that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I lacked the structure: which is to say, the secret thread of life on which the stories of his life could be assembled like pearls on a string. Inevitably I had begun to wonder whether there could be a crucial difference between a life of today and a life from the previous century. It might be that one could now amass so much material on a life that it was no longer possible to recount it. Or was there a simpler explanation: that I was clinging to the past, to old-fashioned expository models, outdated theories on just about everything. The perpetual rumble from the airport occasionally made me feel as if I was sitting next door to a prehistoric zoo, full of dinosaurs.

Whether my fears were justified or not, my visitor’s stories forced me to see that I might have been on the trail of a story that was too big. She showed me that it was also possible to arrive at insight into a life through something seemingly fragmentary, strings of stories which at first sight are totally unconnected but which, when you get right down to it, constitute a new form of coherence and unity. Something seemed to dawn on me, especially when I was writing for all I was worth, trying to follow her disjointed narrative, and I was unwilling, off-hand, to call it an acknowledgement of inferiority. Maybe that’s just how life is, how it must be.

When I mentioned the trial to her, she sat down in the chair by the fire and laughed: ‘There was at least one story that did not come out there, Professor.’

I dimmed all the lights, apart from the lamp next to my own chair. She shifted closer to the fire and fixed her eyes on a spot outside the windows, as if fire and darkness were the very prerequisites of the storytelling. I put pen to paper just as a plane was taking off from Fornebu. I knew as little about where it would land as I did about the tales she proceeded to tell.

Jonas’s family often went on holiday jaunts around Norway. Because, you see, they had a car. Children today would hardly consider the fact of having a car anything to shout about, but back then it was a real event when Dad came home, proud as a stag in rut, with a new automobile, usually the first ever; people hung out of their windows and everybody, or all of the male residents of the estate at any rate, had to troop out to view this object of wonder and stand with their hands in their pockets asking questions about the technical details before the family went off for the ritual trial run, cheered on their way like a ship on its maiden voyage. Rakel liked the old Opel Caravan best, because of the name’s associations with the Arabian Nights world in which she lived, while Jonas was for a long time a fan of the Opel Rekord, mainly because it had a speedometer on which the indicator, a horizontal line, started out green, then magically turned yellow and eventually red, depending on how fast you drove. The future Red Daniel, true to form, was forever yelling: ‘Into the red, Dad, drive it into the red!’

How does one become a conqueror?

More often than not the destination on the weekend jaunts the family took when Jonas was a boy was determined by his mother or rather, his mother’s stories. Åse Wergeland was not one for lulling children to sleep with nice, wholesome bedtime stories. In the evening, when their sister was tucked up with her Romance magazine or the 1001 Nights, Åse was in Daniel’s and Jonas’s room, telling them tales of the Vikings’ bloodthirsty world, stories which she claimed were taken from the Norse sagas. As a little boy, Jonas used to connect the word ‘saga’ with the Norwegian word for a saw: ‘ sag ’. Thus he thought that his mother’s liking for the old legends must have something to do with her interest in saws and her work at the Grorud Ironmongers. Not an unreasonable conclusion, since his mother fought hard, with sword in hand you might say, to ensure that a product such as the G-MAN saw would conquer the market.

Jonas had always been particularly fond of the line in the Norwegian national anthem where it says: ‘and with that saga night that falls, fall dreams upon our earth.’ Almost every evening for years during his childhood his mother told the boys stories from Norway’s glorious Viking age before they went to sleep with — at Jonas’s behest — her round silver brooch pinned to her chest, as a kind of prop. What the boys did not know was that their mother’s stories were recounted freely from memory, she mixed up people and events and also had a tendency to render the tales even more exciting and dramatic if that were possible — and more brutal — by drawing on the arsenal of intrigue and misdeed she had built up thanks to years as an avid reader of detective stories. Nonetheless, they were fed, albeit in the wrong contexts, most of the most famous lines from the sagas: all Jomsborg’s Vikings are not yet dead, a fall means good luck, you have struck Norway from my hands, the King has fed us well, the roots of my heart are still fat — all of those matchless old saws. They were also wont to quote them at appropriate moments, as when Daniel farted and inquired: ‘What cracked so loud?’