Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Not surprisingly, the Three Wise Men’s favourite tipple was aquavit, procured through Viktor’s incredible network of contacts. To them, aquavit was a sacred beverage, primarily because, according to Viktor, they ought to follow the example of The Seven Wise Men, seven famed Taoists of Ancient China — a group of poets and rebels who represented the very essence of Taoism’s ‘action through non-action’, who did indeed spend all day in a bamboo grove, where they drank and saluted everything that was against the establishment. Viktor believed that this wu-wei , non-action, was an excellent ideal, since it was exactly the Norwegian way. Do things without doing anything. Everything would sort itself out anyway. Norwegians had been living like that for centuries. The Three Wise Men were simply trying to perfect, to refine, this mentality. So, while other pupils at the Cath became Maoists, the three friends became Taoists; they sat in the Bamboo Grove and paid tribute to China in their own way — they had even been known to write poems, quite spontaneously and in their finest calligraphy, which they pinned up next to the wall newspaper in the schoolyard.

Viktor drank for another reason too: he had a fanatical obsession with immortality and believed that aquavit — perhaps because of its name — could help him. Inspired by the old Taoists who had used alchemy in order to achieve immortality, Viktor tried first of all to get his hands on the secret recipes for aquavit which were kept in the Wine Monopoly safe and, when he had no luck here, experimented with combinations of different Norwegian aquavits, in much the same way as whisky is blended in Scotland, and with drinking various brands in the perfect sequence. ‘The Taoists concentrated on the minerals cinnabar and gold,’ said Viktor. ‘I’m going for cumin and alcohol.’

They enjoyed the aquavit for its own sake too, naturally, and had many a heated argument as to which one was the best. While Jonas was a fan of Gammel Opland and was wont to launch into lengthy panegyrics to a flavour so full and rich, and at the same time so smooth and complex, that one had a sense of two forces colliding, or as he put it: coiling towards one another, and rising onto a higher plane — Axel and Viktor were almost programmed to give pride of place to Løiten Line Aquavit. Hence the reason for the map on the opposite wall — a world suspended between bamboo canes — showing the route taken by the ships of the Wilhelmsen line. ‘Like all good Norwegians, the aquavit has to leave the country in order to become refined,’ said Axel, raising his glass to the meandering line denoting the aquavit’s 135-day voyage across the seven seas, a mandala upon which they could meditate while they drank, to truly see the miracle of the passage from potato to golden liquor: a metamorphosis which began with cooling coils and ended with the ocean waves. ‘Cheers,’ said Viktor. ‘Here’s to the potato, grape of the North!’

The room was filled with a glorious aroma — of new wood and alcohol, combined with the promising smells emanating from the oven in the kitchen — as in an exotic forest or, why not, a bamboo grove. Other than that it was the need to discuss things, ‘a yen for upsetting the universe’ — Viktor’s words — which brought the Three Wise Men together in Seilduksgata, and there’s no getting away from it: seldom, if ever, has so much absolute tripe been served up in a Norwegian living room. As if they were well aware of this themselves, the three had developed an ironic method for classifying their arguments, a sort of Richter scale designed to measure their greater or lesser shock effect: by the number of glasses drunk. And if the truth be told, their discussions were usually at their best, and certainly their most entertaining, towards the end of the evening, when they had reached the ‘ten-aquavit arguments’.

On this particular evening, since the main topic of discussion was the strategy for the mock exam in Norwegian, Viktor began with a pretty well considered theory to the effect that Pet Sounds by the American group the Beach Boys was a far more important album, in terms of musical history, than Sergeant Pepper by the British group the Beatles. ‘It was here, with Brian Wilson’s bass harmonica playing, that it all began,’ said Viktor. ‘The rest was easy.’ This, particularly because of the comparison with Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon was a typical two-aquavit argument. The same could be said of Jonas’s later assertion, based on outrageously tenuous grounds, that Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine Olsen was broken off because he had syphilis. Whereupon Viktor introduced a three-aquavit argument for a new ideology: Merckxism — inspired by the racing cyclist Eddie Merckx — which involved keeping the masses down by showing sport on television, before Axel launched into a tirade about Tojo: ‘How come we know so flaming little about Tojo, when we know such a helluvalot about Hitler and Mussolini? That crook Tojo was the Second World War’s real éminence grise !’

What fascinated Jonas most was the sum of opinions formed, those leaps from topic to topic, or the points that flew thick and fast — as, for instance, in the poems by Ezra Pound which Viktor sometimes recited while standing by the ever-expanding bookcases. Something new seemed to come into being, not out of the substance of their arguments, but in the gaps between Pet Sounds and Kierkegaard, Eddie Merckx and Hideki Tojo.

Then it was time to eat. All three harboured the same fondness for Beate, a yen which, as the evening wore on could also set the mouth watering. Because the Three Wise Men ate just one thing in the Bamboo Grove: potatoes, and Beate — a relatively new variety — numbered among their absolute favourites, for its appearance too: the delicate contrast between red skin and white flesh. The Three Wise Men were ‘enologists’ on the potato front. Not since the so-called ‘potato preachers’ of the eighteenth century has anyone taken so much interest in the potato — especially in combination with its liquid by-product: ‘We have to use Mr Potato Head!’ was Viktor’s constant refrain.

It was not the first strawberries that the Three Wise Men looked forward to but the first potatoes; they knew when all the different varieties were due in the shops, that Ostara was an early, Kerr’s Pink a late crop; they sampled every sort, from the Dutch Bintje with its rather mild flavour to the powerful potato taste of the floury, yellow Pimpernels. They would go to any lengths to get hold of Saturna, a much underrated potato, and stuffed themselves silly when an extra tasty almond potato came on the market, a potato normally only grown in the mountains. ‘And I’d pay anything for those little Ringerike potatoes,’ Axel told his greengrocer.

Although they tried cooking potatoes in all manner of ways, from mashed to au gratin, for the most part they stuck to baked potatoes — not least because they were so wonderfully easy. The only other ingredient they added was garlic, in the form of garlic butter. Because it so happens that around 1970 Norway was invaded by an armada — a fleet of garlic boats, and despite the fact that these met with fierce resistance, as did everything from the outside world, and despite the fact that most people reacted with disgust and would even change their seat in the bus if someone smelled of garlic, in the end they succumbed. For the Three Wise Men, baked potatoes with garlic butter, presented in their silver-foil wrappings like some precious gift, represented the perfect blend of the Norwegian and the international. ‘To Wilhelmsen’s ships and garlic boats!’ they cried.

From time to time they would raise their glasses to the icon, to the portrait of Viktor’s illustrious patron, the notorious picture of the then prime minister, Per Borten, clad in nothing but his underpants, with what looked like a potato stuck down them. ‘The premier, deep in thought,’ the marvellous caption proclaimed. Jonas took much the same pride in this photograph of Per Borten, clipped from the newspaper Dagbladet , as Daniel did in the picture of Ingeborg Sørensen in Playboy . Per Borten was a true Taoist, so ambiguous in his replies that no one knew what he meant, and he saw things from so many sides that he would later be described as a poor prime minister. ‘Every Norwegian is at heart a member of the Farming Party!’ Viktor whooped at the picture. This icon always filled them with a profound gratitude that, in a country where such a person had been the head of government for six years, nothing bad could possibly happen. If anyone asked ‘What is Norway?’, one only had to bring out this photograph and say: ‘This man was our Prime Minister’ — and that said it all.