Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

As the daylight waned and Gabriel lit the paraffin lamp — lending the place the air of an English pub, he turned — and Jonas saw this as a natural progression of their conversation — to the subject of Hitler, no less a person than Adolf Hitler. Gabriel maintained, and I will confine myself to a potted version of what was a lengthy discourse, that it was not in fact Hitler’s uncommon gifts which had dazzled people, but his fabulous ordinariness. Hitler had hardly any talent to speak of, but he had spied the potential of the theatre, succeeded in employing these dramatic devices on a larger scale, on society itself; he had understood how easy it was to hold a mass spellbound, that simplicity was the key, that in the depths of their souls people, everyone, especially those who felt confused — and who, in our day and age, did not feel confused? — longed for drama and ritual. ‘You have no idea how very, very easily people allow themselves to be seduced,’ Gabriel said. ‘Christ, boy, you’re not drinking anything.’

Maybe it was his very sobriety that brought out the sceptic in Jonas: ‘If you’ll excuse me for saying so, that is the biggest load of codswallop I’ve ever heard.’

Gabriel looked at him with his mismatched eyes, the one with a weary cast to it because of the scar, the other gimlet-sharp: ‘Listen here, my young friend: I’ll bet you that I, the simplest person in the world, a failed artist, could seduce folk anywhere, anytime — on Karl Johan tomorrow, if you like; I’ll prove to you that I can draw a crowd the like of which you’ve never seen, and single-handed at that.’ Then, after a pause during which they both sat listening to the roar of the stove, he added in a quieter voice: ‘Only to help you understand the forces which are contained within every human being. But which we repress. And that includes you.’

‘I bet you can’t,’ Jonas said.

‘What d’you bet?’ retorted Gabriel, quick as a flash.

‘My soul!’ said Jonas, quite carried away, as if he were on a stage.

The following day after school Jonas was walking along Universitetsgata. He was just passing the point where the Studenten ice cream parlour cast its tantalizingly aromatic Banana Split lasso across the street, when he caught sight of Gabriel outside the National Theatre, standing between the statues of Ibsen and Bjørnson, as if the old thespian had no qualms about setting himself up against these verdigris-coated intellectual giants. With all the finesse of a major-domo he had rigged up a small puppet theatre, not much more than a board with a square hole cut in it, no bigger than a television screen, and this he had placed on a folding table with a little Oriental rug draped over it, behind which he could sit on his suitcase, invisible to people directly in front of the stage. He’s mad, Jonas thought. They’ll laugh in his face. But no one laughed when Gabriel Sand took up his stand in that heavily symbolic corner of the city — between parliament and palace, university and theatre. He was ready for combat; a failed actor in his ancient, dark, chalk-striped suit, with waistcoat and watch-chain and all, and on his head a bowler hat which endowed him with a look of bygone nobility. Or Charlie Chaplin.

To begin with Gabriel did nothing. He stood stock-still beside the tiny stage, and still he attracted attention. There was something about his stance, his face, his eyes that made passers-by stop and stare expectantly at the man standing to attention there between Ibsen and Bjørnson.

Jonas reaches the square just as Gabriel begins upon a scene from the fourth Act of Peer Gynt , the high point of the play, in which Peer arrives in Egypt. Gabriel, or Gabriel’s hand, makes the puppet playing Peer look up at the statue of Ibsen as if it were the Sphinx outside of Cairo: ‘Now where in the world have I met before something half-forgotten that’s like this hobgoblin? Because met it I have — in the north or the south. Was it a person? And if so who?’ And immediately thereafter: ‘Ho! I remember the fellow! Why of course it’s the Bøyg that I smote on the skull.’ From that moment on Gabriel had the audience in the palm of his hand.

Unlike the people who crowded around the little stage, Jonas stood back a little, in order to keep an eye on Gabriel where he sat on a suitcase plastered with scuffed labels, with a puppet on each hand, acting out the meeting between Peer Gynt and Begriffenfeldt, which ended with Begriffenfeldt saying that the interpreters’ kaiser had been found, before leading Peer into the madhouse.

It was as with all great theatre: something invisible was made real. By some magical means Gabriel transformed Oslo, the surrounding streets and buildings into Cairo, and the spectators — Bjørnson and Ibsen included — into the inmates of an insane asylum. More and more people stopped to watch, even though they really didn’t have the time; they were caught and held by Begriffenfeldt, which is to say the puppet on Gabriel’s hand proclaiming to the insane, which is to say the audience: ‘Come forth all! The time that shall be is proclaimed! Reason is dead and gone. Long live Peer Gynt!’ For a moment, because of the two hands inside the puppets, Jonas was reminded of another drama: the spectacle of two snakes twining themselves around one another.

A small crowd now filled the square in front of the National Theatre, forming a semicircle that spread far out onto the street, all eyes fixed on a puppet theatre no bigger than a television screen; people jostled one another to get a better look, as if the oriental rug underneath the stage was a magic carpet that could carry them anywhere. Gabriel would later say again: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them. Everyone has this longing inside them for something that’s a bit different.’

Jonas stood there thinking. Above all he was struck by how simple it seemed, with what uncanny ease Gabriel had hypnotized this host. Jonas found himself despising the general public, the folk round about him, not only because they had caused him to lose the bet — or rather, make a mistake — but because they could fall for something so transparently false: puppets with hands stuck inside them. Then he remembered how quickly he had allowed himself to be taken in by Gabriel. If I’m honest with myself, I’d probably be the first to stop in front of something like this, he thought, incredulously witnessing the way in which Gabriel Sand held more and more passers-by spellbound, it was quite a crowd for a normal weekday.

Later, Jonas himself would enjoy the goodwill of the public at large. Right at the start of his television career, when he was working as a television announcer, he discovered how the public could credit him with qualities he did not have. Just before he was due to announce a harrowing programme produced by the NRK foreign affairs department, he had got something in his eye and had to blink more often than normal. Viewers thought the programme had moved him to tears. Which meant he must be a sensible, soft-hearted person. Big splash in newspapers and magazines: ‘The announcer who dared to show his feelings.’ People showered him with sympathy. It was brought home to him then: you don’t win your uncommonness, you have it bestowed on you as a gift.

As he watched, Gabriel showed Peer meeting and listening in turn to Huhu the language reformer, the fellah with the royal mummy on his back and the Minister Hussein — Gabriel swiftly slipping one puppet after another onto his one hand; really beautiful puppets which Jonas realized he must have made himself — with Peer’s words of advice having increasingly bloody consequences, though in the end he is, nevertheless, wreathed by Begriffenfeldt with the words: ‘Long life to Self-hood’s Kaiser!’ Just at that moment the police appeared, as if they were guards in a madhouse, an asylum in total uproar.