Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

In a way all of this was rendered doubly strange for Jonas as he stood outside that shop window on Solli plass, gazing through it at his own programme, because he could not hear a single sound. He felt totally distanced from it, or as baffled as any Chinese viewer. It also seemed to him that she, the Mother of her Country, was trying to tell him something, although he did not know what, because no words reached his ears even though she was moving her lips.

The hypnotic effect of this was further enhanced by the fact that there was not just one television in the window; the programme was being run simultaneously on twelve different TVs set close together. Fabulous, thought Jonas. He could not help thinking of synchronized swimming: Gro Harlem Brundtland and eleven clones all mimicking her actions. Or that this duplication created a kind of pattern, a broadcasting network which also led to an accumulation of the programme’s effect. He remembered that someone had used the words ‘interwoven strands’ when speaking of the programmes shown so far. And it truly was as if this, the screens in front of him, enabled him to see the big picture, the one formed by the twelve small ones, as something else — and, most importantly, as something more complex, the sum of the individual, identical images. The figurative aspect, the pictures of Gro Harlem Brundtland, dissolved and something ornamental, abstract took its place. Like looking into a brain, he thought, seeing a way of thinking laid bare.

Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

Jonas Wergeland stood in the middle of an all but deserted Oslo, outside a shop window and saw again, on television, how he himself stepped onto the scene, into the room with the Chinese, in his regular spot, saw himself in a matrix of screens, divided into twelve, stood and stared, utterly captivated, at himself, twelve identical figures. I’m possessed by demons, he thought, unconsciously leaning so far forwards towards the window that he ended up bumping his forehead on the glass.

To be a spectator. The trauma of traumas, the one thing he feared most of all: that he wished, at all costs, to avoid. Once more I shall tell the story of the radio theatre.

East of the flats lay a wooded hill, a triangle wedged between the cliff face, Bergensveien and Trondheimsveien about which, for many years Jonas and his chums had mixed feelings. Because through this lonely spot ran the short cut to the People’s Palace, better known as Grorud Cinema. The cinema was, in fact, a trade union concern, and so from an early age Jonas was brought up to regard films, illusions, as a natural part of working-class life. You hack out stone during the day and lose yourself in dreams in the evening. Every place has its Cinema Paradiso.

The room in which the films were shown was the same one in which Jonas had attended his first Christmas parties: a hall, in other words, reserved for boisterous festivities, and though Jonas would later be bowled over by the decor of such gems as the Klingenberg, the Sentrum and the Eldorado, in terms of atmosphere no cinema could match the stark surroundings of Grorud Cinema, with interlocking steel-framed chairs ranged in front of a grimy, battered screen upon which fantastic pictures could be discerned even before the picture had started. At Grorud Cinema children also got in to see adult films — far too often, in fact. Pretty much the only criterion for being allowed in was that you could reach up to the ticket window with your money, a window which was, as it happens, not unlike the ones at the Eastern Railway Station, so you felt you were asking for: ‘A ticket to Hollywood, please.’ Thanks to this very liberal regime, Jonas not only saw a heap of harmless films about Lassie and the sons of Lassie, but also a lot of hair-raising pictures which he definitely should not have seen, among them at least two Dracula movies in which a fearsome, bloodthirsty Christopher Lee was repeatedly seen standing silhouetted against the full moon, baring his needle-sharp fangs at some quaking woman. It was after the latest of these, Dracula Prince of Darkness , as a bunch of boys were walking back to Solhaug through the wood in a huddle, not unlike what the Romans called a ‘square formation’ — faint with terror, eyes flicking this way and that — that one lad with a rather macabre sense of humour came up with the idea that they were in the middle of Transylvania. To crown it all, the moon chose that moment to go behind a cloud, and it didn’t take too much imagination to hear the eerie flapping of bat wings and the howling of wolves echoing off the granite face of Ravnkollen, on top of which the outlines of Dracula’s black castle could clearly be discerned. From then on the wood was never referred to as anything but Transylvania. It was a mystery to Jonas how they could have whipped themselves up en masse into such a state of hysteria over something they knew to be so silly, but it just went from bad to worse. It got to the point where they were even pinching their mothers’ gold crucifixes and wearing them tucked inside their shirts when they had to walk home from the cinema in the evening. Even during the day the boys avoided crossing this spot. In Transylvania anything could happen.

At Solhaug there were not too many years between the different ‘generations’, which is to say the groups of children who played together. Jonas belonged to the second generation. The first batch of kids were all three or four years older, and their undisputed leader was Petter, or Sgt Petter as he was known after the new Beatles album came out and, by some enviable means, he managed to get hold of a silk military-style coat — from London’s Carnaby Street itself, no less — just like the ones the Beatles were wearing on the cover of said album. Not only that, but under his nose he sported some wisps of hair which he called a moustache.

None of the girls really stood out. Apart from Mamma Banana. Mamma Banana was what was known as ‘easy’. The sort of girl who, if she didn’t exist, every boy would have to invent. There were the wildest rumours going around about how insatiable she was and the things she found to console herself with on hot summer nights if there was no boy around. ‘Nothing can satisfy her,’ Guggen whispered to Jonas and rolled his eyes. ‘Not even a magnum bottle of beer.’ Mamma Banana just couldn’t get enough of it. Hence the name.

Her real name was Laila, and she lived farther up Bergensveien in a tumbledown Swiss-style villa with coloured glass screening the veranda. If Jonas were honest with himself, she seemed more quiet than randy. But she was pretty; and they also had proof, of course, that those demure, downcast eyes were just a cover. One autumn, the smaller kids had been running around telling everybody that Karl’s Beetle was alive, that it rocked and rolled after dark. Jonas and his chums almost laughed their heads off at such daft notions. The Beetle in question was an ancient Volkswagen, an old banger really, which everybody called Charlie’s Chariot — an allusion to their name for what is also known, depending where one comes from, as the Plough, the Big Dipper or Charles’s Wain. It had been sitting outside Number Four for ages, covered by a tarpaulin. But the kids kept going on and on about it, so one night Jonas and a couple of the others stole down to the courtyard and hid behind some bushes. And it was true enough: Charlie’s Chariot had to be a creature of the night, because it did indeed come to life. It shook, rocked back and forth, like a giant tortoise, except that it never left the spot. Five minutes later they had their explanation. From under the tarpaulin crept Laffen and Mamma Banana. They must have managed to unlock the door and were using the car as a love-nest. But even this was not enough to convince Jonas — Laffen was an okay guy, he actually moved away soon after this, and no one knew what had really gone on under that tarpaulin. Jonas still found it hard to bridge the gap between the vulgar rumours about Mamma Banana and the happy face he had seen in the light of the street lamp when Laila clambered out of Charlie’s Chariot, as if she really had been on a trip around the stars.