Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Well, that was true enough. It felt more as if several jigsaw puzzles had been tipped into the same box. So far I had not discerned any overall picture. And I missed all the identical pieces of sky or grass, the everyday bits or whatever you want to call them. And she did not present the stories, the pieces, as if they were meant to form something two-dimensional, a picture, a rectangle, but rather as though the pieces fitted into different places in a long chain, a chain that coiled around the room, striving to take on three dimensions.

I regarded her as she stood by a desk that was close to collapsing under all that material. Despite her pallor, she had an Oriental look about her. She was reading a copy of a newspaper article published just after the verdict was announced — yet another jigsaw piece — a survey in which the majority of those asked condemned Jonas Wergeland in the strongest terms. Because the people of Norway were outraged by his confession. They had believed in him right to the bitter end, and now they felt let down. He had woven a colourful magic carpet under their TV chairs, and when he pulled it from under them they lost their balance. ‘If you ask me, I think that trial was more like a sacrificial rite in which Jonas Wergeland was made the scapegoat for the embarrassing naivety of a whole nation,’ my guest said.

I did not altogether agree. Because although after the verdict was announced some people did take part in demonstrations of the sort seen in fundamentalist countries in which protesters burn dummies, portraits or flags to show their deep contempt — in this case it was videotapes which were thrown onto the flames or down the rubbish chute — there were others, women in particular, a remarkable number of women, who wrote to Jonas Wergeland in prison to say that they understood him, that he had deserved a better wife, a woman who realized that when you lived with a genius you had to make sacrifices. Several of these women, intelligent women, made proposals of marriage to him.

I have sometimes wondered what it must have been like for Jonas Wergeland to be imprisoned — a man used to travelling, to constantly changing his outlook, and then the same slice of the world day in day out, year in year out, broken only by day release, the odd outing: a life in which everything was done according to a strict timetable, so that you felt you were perpetually waiting for a tram. To the best of my knowledge, Jonas Wergeland has never complained. And Norwegian prisons are, of course, among the best in the world. I don’t know much about his day-to-day routine, although some information does slip out, a drop here and there in the papers at yearly intervals. A number of these have, for example, remarked on the lacquer casket — displayed in his cell like some sort of sacred relic — in which, word had it, he kept an ice-hockey puck, a round silver brooch and a slightly imperfect pearl. He allegedly spends his free time — under supervision — in the woodwork room, hard at work on a fresh copy of the Academic’s dragon head. On a couple of occasions, while out on day-release, he appears to have visited sports grounds where — and this may surprise a few people — he has practised throwing the discus.

Apart from his mother and his Aunt Laura, for a long while only his little brother Buddha and his daughter Kristin visited him regularly. As far as I know, Buddha’s conversations with his brother in the visiting room concerned such things as the archery in Kurosawa’s films or the new kites he had made, which could fly higher than ever, or the round twelve-man tent he had put up in the garden out at Hvaler, a perfect ger which he planned to live in, even during winter. With Kristin, who would soon be a teenager, Jonas did not talk much; for the most part they spent their time drawing — trees mainly, but other things too, or possibly the trees simply evolved into other images.

Other than that, Jonas Wergeland refused to see anyone. Even Axel Stranger, one of the few people to speak up for Jonas in court was apparently denied access.

During the week in which the woman filled the turret room with her almost unsettlingly powerful presence, I spent my days reading through the stories I had scribbled down the evening before. Sometimes I also hooked my own little tales onto the bigger ones, adapting them to her style. In the beginning I did all of this with mixed feelings, like someone relaxing their initial insistence on originality, but after a while it dawned on me that something unique can also be created out of other peoples’ thoughts and ideas. I was gradually beginning to look upon us as a team: two individuals narrating with one voice.

As I say, it was evening, Maundy Thursday. There was less air traffic than usual. Only now and again did a plane take off or land, lights in the darkness that we both followed with our eyes while she drank water, I coffee. ‘How idyllic,’ she said every time, at the sight of the landscape beyond the window, the heights of Holmenkollen glittering in the distance. ‘You should see where I come from, the want and the torment.’ For once she helped herself to something from the refreshments I had put out, a couple of grapes from the fruit bowl.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just have to remind myself that I am back in paradise.’

I have to admit that more and more often I caught myself wondering about her, about who she was. She was of indeterminate age; she could have been anything from thirty to fifty. Yes, that was the word: indeterminate. Dark. And I kept asking myself: how did she know all this? What powers was she in league with? Had she learned these things from other people or had she been there herself? There was something about this blend of seemingly objective observer and eager participant that both confused me and made me immensely curious. On the one hand, she related her tales with lofty detachment, dreamily, as if she had suddenly forgotten that she was talking about a real, live person. On the other hand, I sensed a reluctant, but deep, involvement, as if she knew Jonas Wergeland as well as Boswell had known Johnson or Eckermann Goethe.

I dimmed the lights, conscious of how she was gathering herself. She shifted round in her chair so that she could see out of the window overlooking the fjord, where a ship was slowly disappearing in the direction of Drøbak, lights twinkling, the shimmer of a starry constellation on a frosty night. It struck me that that ship, visible as it was only as strings of lamps, could prove deceptive, that in daylight it could turn out to be a rusting hulk. I had an idea that the same could be said of her stories, that they were not how they seemed to me at first glance.

Maybe it was time for me to reassess the myth of ‘the complex Jonas Wergeland’, she said, extending a hand to the surrounding room, in which every piece of furniture was spilling over with material about this man. And then — taking me completely unawares — she declared that Jonas Wergeland’s life was extremely straightforward, that it was his incredible simplicity that was so difficult to fathom. Just as life itself seems complicated — even though strictly speaking it amounts to no more than twenty amino acids in different constellations — so Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in creating the illusion of being a complex character by coiling his simplicity into spirals. ‘That is why you got bogged down, Professor. I know it sounds strange, but the way I see it, it is this very ordinariness that is the key to his rise to stardom. His genius, if that is the word, lay in turning this into a strength. As when a minus and a minus give a plus.’ She took some more grapes from the bowl, absentmindedly, not really aware of what she was doing. ‘Hindsight’s a great thing,’ she went on, ‘in the wake of his conviction there was no shortage of people coming forward to point out that there obviously had to be something suspect about a man who could bring an entire nation to its knees; that no one could be surprised if such a person had an inherent demonic streak. But I ask you, Professor: what if the reason for his success as a seducer lay not so much in evil as in emptiness? In the tendency which all people have for filling the emptiness with substance. And the greater the emptiness, the greater the substance.’