Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

It was a memorable sight. The little theatre and the crowd of people. That was all it took: a piece of wood with a square hole cut in it, two arms and a voice. And to top it all off: the police. As if a dangerous crime were being committed.

The policemen ask Gabriel — very politely, it must be said — to pack up and leave because he is causing an obstruction. Gabriel, for his part, starts winding them up, making fun of them, doing a sort of Charlie Chaplin turn, imitating the way the policemen are standing, crawling between their legs, miming a plea for help to the statues of Bjørnson and Ibsen. When, as the police see it, he refuses to comply with their request, he is driven off in the patrol car to Møllergata police station — amid a chorus of booing from the crowd. People have forgotten that they ought to be getting home, that they have to catch the bus or the train or the Nesodden ferry. They want to see more playacting.

Jonas sat in a dinghy in a bay just north of Drøbak, rowing slowly towards the shore. Without its mainmast, the old lifeboat looked like a floating chest, or a bin, a real loony bin. He saw how Gabriel, this man who had once stood on Karl Johan’s gate and seduced a crowd of people with nothing but his voice and a bit of hand-waving, had been caught in his own net, become entangled in the ropes of the sabotaged rigging. Jonas remembered his grandfather’s lovely model of the Colin Archer lifeboat, and with that thought came the realization that this too resembled a puppet theatre. And Gabriel’s sleep-sodden cries reinforced this illusion: ‘I am all that you will, — a Turk, a sinner, — a hill-troll —; but help; there was something that burst! I cannot just hit on your name at the moment; — help me, oh you — all madmen’s protector!’

Jonas knew he would never see him again. ‘You bastard,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll never forget you. More’s the pity.’

Gabriel was standing stock-still on the deck now, looking like the ghost from Hamlet in his white underwear. What a noble mind is here o’erthrown, Jonas thought. Gabriel Sand. An impostor. And yet: how long had it taken for Jonas to see through him? A man who ate his meals on board a boat every day, at a table fitted with a fiddle rail, with a bookshelf constructed in such a way that the books would not fall off in heavy weather — and who had never put to sea in his boat. Who kept a logbook for the lifeboat Norge , even though he had never tethered up to a buoy, had never been south of Drøbak, had never been to any of the places or done any of the things he had described so vividly: killer whales off the Canadian coast, Princess Aroari of the Marquesa Islands, the plums of the Azores, storms around Cape Horn. It was all a bluff. The stupid idiot couldn’t even swim. Jonas rowed away, still annoyed with himself. How could he have been fooled, and for so long, by such a character?

Gabriel’s white form grew smaller and smaller. This was the final scene. Jonas had the impression that he was acting now, too. That he wasn’t really hopping mad. That Gabriel appreciated this stunt, this act of rebellion, this parting. That he had actually been waiting for something like this to happen for three years. That he was pleased, regarded this as a worthy ending, a test-piece that proved that Jonas had completed his apprenticeship.

For Jonas it was, nonetheless, a relief to see the boat’s rigging destroyed. He felt as if a net had ripped apart and he was, at long last, free.

Perhaps once, perhaps twice in their lives, most people will find themselves undergoing a radical transformation. You could walk out onto a plain and leave that plain as someone else entirely. You have a sudden urge to start anew, with a different set of values, quite different ideals. A war can have that effect on a person. For Jonas Wergeland, who had never been to war, it was a spell in what he was inclined to call a loony bin that did it.

I am talking, in other words, about the year he spent doing his national service, with N Brigade, and more specifically about an incident which took place just after they had completed their ABC survival course at Skjold, up north in the Indre Troms region, a course geared not towards anything as innocent as mastering the alphabet but to learning how to survive under extreme circumstances: in the case, that is, that Norway were to be attacked by atomic, biological or chemical weapons. For two weeks Jonas Wergland dealt, in theory and in simulated practice, with the sort of possible scenarios which few people dare think about; he had, for example, to plot out on a sheet of paper those zones which would be affected by radioactive fallout; he learned how lethal bacteria and viruses could be spread most effectively over the widest possible area, and he tramped about in protective clothing and a mask like a spaceman, pretending to establish the presence of such fiendish inventions as sarin or mustard gas.

Maybe it was the ridiculous skills he learned on that ABC course, this illusion of being able to survive even if the world went due west, that drove Jonas to go off into the wild; as if, after all those staggering, hypothetical possibilities, he sorely needed to scrape about in a piece of concrete Norwegian reality, the soil he was in fact supposed to defend — or maybe he simply wanted to confront the foe that was forever being waved in their faces and at whom they had for so many months been haphazardly firing blanks: an adversary they never saw but who, according to high command, was out there somewhere and might at any minute start making life hell for them. No one could be surprised if a man — frustrated at being charged with an important task, but one which is never clearly defined — suddenly goes off willy-nilly, in hopes of meeting this mysterious foe. In case you have not yet guessed it, Professor, I am once more about to relate the story of the radio theatre.

Jonas had a weekend’s leave. He took advantage of an army recreation scheme and the fact that he was friendly with the officer in charge of transport to borrow a jeep on the excuse that he and another soldier were going to camp out for the night in Dividalen National Park, a little way to the southeast. His mate hopped off, however, a couple of miles down the road, outside his girlfriend’s house in Andselv, with instructions on what to say to the company commander on the Sunday evening. Jonas then headed towards a much more remote destination than Dividalen, namely Alta in the far north which, despite the long drive, he passed right through before cutting south again and arriving, after driving for a couple of hours through mountain birch and rosebay willowherb, at Kautokeino where, on a whim, he made a sharp swing to the left, onto a narrower road which he followed for about six or seven miles, until he came to Av’zi. Jonas parked the jeep, got out, shouldered his rucksack and struck off resolutely into the wild, bearing eastward, as if intent on doing the exact opposite of going due west.

He made his way up onto the bare, open plain at the foot of Muv’ravarri, skirted round Gar’gatoai’vi and eventually, after an unexpectedly tough march over rocks and moss, bogs and streams, reached the eastern side of Stuora Oaivusvarri, where he pitched camp 1,600 feet above sea level. The most incredible thing so far was that he had not encountered the notorious Finnmarksvidda mosquito. All he could hear was a vague humming; there was something there, all the time, but hidden from view.

Having dined on combat rations from his Readiness Support Package, also known as ‘dead-man-in-a-tin’, and boiled coffee, Jonas settled himself outside his tent and gazed at the sun, which was slowly sinking, but which, here in the third week of July, would still stay above the horizon all night. He felt limp. Drained. As if the radiation he had been dealing with in theory had in fact permeated his body. Although he had actually been feeling like this for some time. Ever since Viktor’s accident. That chunk of ice falling out of the blue. Jonas sat there, gazing at the landscape, struck by how remarkably desolate it was. This must be the closest one came in Norway to a desert. And how still it was. Like finding oneself in a world after a nuclear war, he thought. Was this really his country? All of a sudden it seemed so totally alien that Jonas’s interest perked up again. He knew he would encounter something of crucial importance out here, but not what form it would take. It merely lay there, latent, like a hum, behind everything else. In his heart of hearts he may have been hoping to stumble upon some inconceivably massive diamond find. Or better still: a chunk of ice with a pearl ear-stud inside it.