Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And then — yet again — the media spotlight was turned full-force on Jonas Wergeland: at the point when the defence had only a couple of witnesses left to call, just before the summing up, just before the jury retired to decide the verdict, he broke his silence and asked to be allowed to make a statement; and within half an hour, once the defence counsel had had a word with the counsel for the prosecution and the judge in the latter’s chamber, everything was turned on its head. Jonas Wergeland took the stand and described in horrific detail how he had murdered Margrete Boeck — in other words, he confessed.

For a society that had for so long suppressed all knowledge of tragedy, it was like suddenly being ambushed by irrationality. I remember how surprised I was myself and how at the time, drawing on information from various sources, I tried to form a coherent, if sketchy, picture of the actual course of events on that evening when Jonas Wergeland returned home from the World’s Fair in Seville. By all accounts, it was the staggering announcement by Margrete that she wanted a divorce which had started it all; she had apparently told him this as soon as he walked in the door, almost before he had managed to put down his suitcase; she wanted out, this latest trip of his had been the last straw, the fact that he had gone even though she had begged him to stay home; she was sick and tired of him putting his career, that blasted job in television, before everything else, and she did not want to discuss it, she had given the matter — their marriage, the future — careful thought; she should have done it long ago; all of this, or words to that effect, she had supposedly said, trembling all the while with a fury that had been allowed to build up to breaking point due to the fact that he had gone so far as to delay his return by several days. Jonas, for his part, was in no way chastened by this, instead he had flown off the handle — it was the shock, really — and had said some terrible, deeply hurtful things to her. They had been drawn into a spiral of spiteful remarks which, at one point, ‘in a haze of resentment’, had moved him to fetch the Luger from the cupboard in his workshop, a pistol he had had in his possession for many years — as his conscience-stricken brother, Daniel W. Hansen, had informed the police — and which, being perhaps a little overwrought, what with all the threatening letters after his programme on foreign immigrants, he had kept loaded in case he suddenly needed to defend himself. And when he came back with the pistol in his pocket, ‘only to give her fright’, according to his own testimony, she had carried on berating him, pouring scorn on him, and Margrete had a sharp tongue in her head, she could be devastatingly waspish, everybody knew that, and he had been astonished, horrified, to find how much he hated her; and when she laughed, yes, laughed in his face, he had shot her, which is to say, he had overcome his first murderous impulse and gone to her to ask for forgiveness, ask for time, ask that they wait a few days before deciding anything, maybe he would even hug her, but then, when she laughed — ‘a laugh I couldn’t bear to hear’ — he changed his mind, or rather: he lost control and banged her head off the wall, overcome by rage, and perhaps by fear, before shooting her at close range, in a split-second of boundless hatred. ‘I loved her, I wouldn’t have killed her for anything in the world, and yet I did it.’ One journalist encapsulated the case thus: ‘In the final analysis it comes down to the oldest of all questions: why do people do things against their will?’

After the adjournment necessitated by Jonas Wergeland’s confession — the place was in uproar — the counsel for the defence finished examining the last witnesses; then came the presentation of documentary evidence and statements from expert witnesses. Thereafter, the prosecuting counsel could make his final remarks, now revised and much abbreviated. The newspapers were, however, all agreed that the lawyer appointed to defend Wergeland came more into her own now, after his confession, even though all the signs were that Jonas Wergeland would be found guilty as charged. In her summation she claimed with impressive eloquence that at the moment when the crime was committed the balance of her client’s mind had been disturbed, that he had been driven into a black rage by a fickle woman’s sudden and unreasonable demand for a divorce. Fortunately, as her last witness before the final remarks, she was able to call the writer Axel Stranger — Jonas’s high-school classmate and a close friend of the couple — who, in answering the defence counsel’s questions, coolly and astutely built up a reasoned argument to the effect that the murder was totally inexplicable, that it had to be the result of a terrible fit of temper, sudden and irrational. This testimony was the defence counsel’s one strong card, and she made the most of it: she pleaded that this was not a premeditated crime, but that it was the product of a sudden impulse; she attempted in other words to have the prosecution’s charge changed from wilful murder to involuntary manslaughter. And in this she succeeded. Jonas Wergeland got off, as I’m sure everyone knows, with seven years’ imprisonment.

‘It takes imagination to understand evil,’ the dark-robed woman said when she called on me on Maundy Thursday. ‘No rational theory can explain why Jonas Wergeland did what he did,’ she said and then, after gazing for some time at the tops of the fir trees outside, she added: ‘But a story can. Or several stories. If only we can put them in the right order.’ She was still gazing out of the window, as if seeking inspiration from the night, or the comings and goings at Fornebu. I also had the impression that her stories followed one another as much according to plan as the planes, that the slightest deviation could spell disaster.

I had started looking forward to it getting dark, because I knew she would appear then. In my mind I had begun to call her ‘my muse’. I lit the fire well in advance, got everything organized, the jug of water, the glass, the chair, knew by now what would please her. She also seemed to feel at home here, she roamed soundlessly around the room while I pretended to be getting ready, so that I could eye her surreptitiously — not a little fascinated — saw how she picked up a sheet of paper here and there, flicked through a book, smiled briefly to herself. I had never seen anyone like her, dressed in such black garments, with such black-lined eyes, such a white face, such blood-red lips. And enveloped in that strange, somehow smoky, scent: a scent I had never come across before, but which as time went on I found intriguing, attractive even.

‘Shall we begin?’ she said, though without her usual brusqueness.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I ventured to ask, yet again.

‘I told you: to save a life.’

‘From punishment?’

‘Of course not. Something far more difficult. From pointlessness.’

It occurred to me that she had also come to save me, save me from the chaos in that room. Because each time she started to tell one of her stories, she seemed to cast a net over all the mounds of paper, the piles of books, and gather them up, making them hang together. And yet I was not sure. Sometimes I felt that the stream of words that fell from her lips swept me up into a spiral, and I found myself asking whether we were working away from or towards a centre. Occasionally I would think that the story she was telling lay at the heart of it all, only then to realize that it was more peripheral — other times the opposite was the case. And my understanding of Jonas Wergeland’s life grew or dwindled accordingly.

As if sensing my frustration, every so often she would resort to the idea of the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for our endeavour. ‘This is an important piece of the puzzle,’ she might say out of the blue, in the midst of a story. I knew that she was referring not to one of those degenerate, modern jigsaw puzzles consisting of machine-produced, almost identical pieces, but a real jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has a shape all of its own, means something in itself, independent of the whole. The sort of jigsaw puzzle that only a master can design. Full of traps, where two pieces that may fit together do not actually belong together, or where details on one piece mislead you into thinking that it should go somewhere else. Or where you fit a piece into place and find that it changes everything, the whole picture. ‘Imagine if you were to find a box full of jigsaw-puzzle pieces in an old attic,’ she had said on our very first evening, ‘but you don’t know what the picture should look like, you don’t even know if you have all the pieces…’