Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas put the whole incident out of his mind until his penultimate day on the island. He had hitched a ride on a yacht bound for Fiji; he would have to leave earlier than planned. On impulse he grabbed something from his bag and caught the bus back to the village. He got there an hour before sundown. The littlest children spotted him straight away and led him around smoking cooking fires and through the aroma of baked taro to the headman’s fale , to an elderly man lying on a mat with his head on a neck rest. When the formalities had been got out of the way Jonas was once more addressed by one of the young men from the beach — Jonas guessed that he must be the headman’s son — and then invited to enter his fale . Before long more men appeared. Jonas was ushered to one of the mats inside the hut, an open construction sitting on a coral-stone platform, with a roof made from the leaves of the coconut palm. The others sat down, smiled at him as they had done before. One of them touched him, as if to check whether he was real. Beyond the uprights of the hut a bunch of kids followed the proceedings. A woman brought in a bowl of kava. As far as Jonas could make out this was not a traditional kava ceremony, they had some other reason for passing the half coconut shell to him, as if sealing a contract, or celebrating something that went beyond any stretch of his imagination, but he drank, he drank and nodded, felt it behove him to do so, drank the greyish-white liquid which tasted chalky and made his whole mouth numb. The men sat cross-legged, speaking sometimes to him, sometimes to one another, Jonas made out certain words: ‘Matareva’ cropped up again and again, as did ‘Mr Morgan’. Jonas also thought he heard Gary Cooper’s name mentioned more than once. He remembered that a number of films had been shot on the island and things began to fall into place.

As darkness fell some women came in carrying freshly cooked dishes wrapped in banana leaves and woven coconut-fibre baskets of fruit. The sky was the colour of the hibiscus blossoms they wore in their hair. Soon the stars, too, appeared: unfamiliar constellations, seeming to offer endless possibilities for new ways of navigating. Jonas realized that he was a guest of honour. That this was no ordinary act of Samoan hospitality. No, it was more than that. They mistook him for someone else. He did not know who or what. Nor whether there was any risk attached to this case of mistaken identity. The men chattered incessantly, eyed him closely, nodded, smiled. He was an empty shell. They piled things into him. They turned him into someone else, a great man perhaps. All he did was to put up no resistance, make no protest.

Someone lit a paraffin lamp that hung from the ceiling. An array of dishes was set before him. He recognized fish in leaves, possibly octopus too, together with some indeterminate creamy paste. He spotted baked breadfruit, slices of taro in coconut milk, papaya and whole pineapples — he had no idea what the other things were. One person kept wafting the flies away from the food. Another brought him a dented cup containing some sort of cocoa.

The men cast curious glances at Jonas as he ate. On one of them he could see the edge of a big tattoo, the rest was concealed by his lava-lava . Maybe it was the glimpse of this strange design — either that or the night sky — that brought home to him something he had, without knowing it, learned from Carl Barks’s traveller’s tales: that we will always have the wrong idea about other cultures. We can never really understand them. We think we have understood something, but in fact we understand nothing.

The talk flew back and forth around him, the word ‘Hollywood’ cropped up at regular intervals, and by putting two and two together Jonas suddenly grasped that, despite his youth, they thought he was a director, a film director searching for a location for a film. They thought he meant to choose their beach. He felt laughter well up inside him. Or was it fear? How amazing. They took him for a film director. Or so he thought. And in that instant Jonas Wergeland knew why he had come here: he had come here to be part of this very experience, to sit on a mat in a fale under a mind-reeling, star-studded sky and be treated like a great man, a film director. And suddenly all his embarrassment was gone and instead he found himself seeing this entire, grandiose misapprehension as an edifying experience, as something important, something from which he had to learn. This experience might prove to be every bit as valuable as a black pearl, he thought.

Jonas sat listening to a distant song, not knowing how to thank his hosts for their hospitality. But he did as he always did on such visits, a gesture which also accorded well with what was expected on Samoa. He gave them a present. The same present as always. When Jonas Wergeland went on his travels he invariably took with him a G-MAN saw, a frame and a blade, a product for which his family, or at any rate his mother, was, in a manner of speaking, responsible So now he presented a G-MAN saw from the Grorud Ironmongers to these natives on an island in Samoa, in the South Pacific.

When Jonas stood at the rail of the yacht the next day, having spent the night in a palm-thatched hut before taking the bus back to town; when Jonas stood there and watched Apia and the rest of the island dwindling to nothing — tropical green sinking into blue — he felt relieved, happy. The previous evening he had lain awake, gazing out between the wooden uprights of the hut, and he carried away with him the memory of that vast, glittering night sky, which also represented an acknowledgment of the infinite potential for other names, other paths to take through the stars. And now, as ‘Upolu vanished from view, he also found it possible to laugh at the whole crazy episode, although he could not rid himself of the thought that deep down there had been a danger there too, that one wrong word, one wrong move could have spelled disaster for him. He thanked God, in a way, that he had escaped before the misunderstanding had been discovered.

On the other hand his heart was heavy. He had a feeling that this confusion, being mistaken for someone else, was a formative experience, that in different guises this incident would keep on recurring throughout his life. His despondency was prompted by the thought that perhaps he should not bemoan this fact: that it was, on the contrary, his only hope.

Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck of a boat and watched a Polynesian island disappear. He had left Norway with hardware and was returning with software, to use terms that were not common parlance back then. You set out carrying goods and come back with ideas. And unlike Erik Dammann, Jonas Wergeland did not return home with a Utopian ideal of Norway, of a new way of life, but with a Utopian ideal of himself. This might be a side of himself — the great director, metaphorically speaking — of which he knew nothing. Maybe, he thought, I’ve been wrong about myself all this time.

And somehow Jonas sensed that this journey was not over, that no journey is ever over, that they go on, that, like Carl Barks’s most thrilling adventures, they often end with a ‘to be contd.’.

The natural thing would, therefore, be to proceed to the trip to Jerevan, but if we’re to follow the sequence I have in mind — that sequence that will, I hope, explain everything — then this is not the place for it. Nor for the story of the stamps, which another — dare I say? — less seasoned narrator might have presented at this point. Here, instead, we must turn to another island. This same thought had also occurred to Jonas Wergeland himself while he was in Samoa: that all the seashells around him reminded him of the large, burnished shells in the parlour of the house on Hvaler, souvenirs of his paternal grandfather’s seafaring days, shells which, when Jonas held one to each ear, brought him the sound of the sea in stereo.