Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas felt queasy, sick to the marrow, managed to open the car door and crawl out. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said when the ambulance men came running over to him, ‘I’ve just been taken for a ride.’

I — the professor — worked long into the night after my unknown guest had gone, writing like a soul possessed. It would not be going too far to say that I too was involved in a collision of sorts — her tales crashing into mine. I saw, at any rate, and quite suddenly, a wealth of unexpected cross connections in my own material: details, aspects which I had to weave in before they slipped my mind. I flitted purposefully to and fro in my turret room, stopping at one table only the next moment to dash over to another, possibly not altogether unlike a cook in a hotel kitchen, who has to keep an eye on a whole lot of things at once: sampling a little here and there, lifting food from all the pots and pans to make up one large and mouth-watering platter; I leafed through papers, looked things up in books, flicked through filing cards, listened to tapes of interviews I had forgotten I had. And I wrote, scribbling things down as fast as I could, as if the notes I had made while listening to her — which covered what she had actually said — were nonetheless only half the story. After one of her visits I rarely got to sleep much before dawn, and when I did finally tumble into bed in order to be reasonably fresh for our evening meeting, I was filled, exhausted though I was, with a strange kind of happiness.

Nonetheless — for all that I was thankful, or perhaps simply because of the congruities which I was discovering in my own material — her way of telling things was starting to annoy me: there were, for example, many things which she had hinted at, whole stories, which she had never mentioned again. She had given rise to expectations within me that were not being fulfilled. I began, quite simply, to suspect that she did not have the overview she claimed to have, that she frequently lost track of threads in the loom she was setting up. That her semblance of omniscience, in fact, masked her ignorance.

The same went for the sequence of the tales, which had confused me so much to begin with because of the daring leaps from one stage to another in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Now all at once I found myself getting exasperated because her leaps were not radical enough; more and more it seemed to me that the ‘links’ she used to hook one story up to another were completely arbitrary, that they were by no means as carefully considered as she maintained. Sometimes I almost became quite angry with her when, having finished one story, she would move on to some pretty predictable tale rather than the one I was expecting, or one which — on the basis of my own knowledge — I might have suggested, a far more exciting leap. It struck me that I could almost have made a better job of it myself. I had the urge to alter her sequence but decided to keep my part of the bargain. There was also something else which prevented me from making any objections; it was becoming increasingly clear to me, from her ardour and her agitation, that she had something — a great deal — at stake here. I was actually afraid to distract her. She could be knocked totally off balance. On a couple of occasions the evening before I had had the distinct impression that, underneath the apparent composure, behind the supposedly so carefully formulated stream of words, she had long since lost control.

It also surprised me that she had not mentioned the book about Jonas Wergeland which had excited more interest than anything else so far: the award-winning biographical novel The Seducer — a book considered to be not much more than a starry-eyed hagiography — which had really put the cat among the pigeons, both because it went totally against the stream of broadsides being levelled at Jonas Wergeland around the time of its publication, and because its author remained anonymous — for a while at least.

Naturally, thanks to the unscrupulous, stop-at-nothing tactics employed in journalism today, it was not many weeks before the author was exposed — I almost said stripped bare — with headlines on the front page of some of the tabloids so big you’d have thought Martin Bormann had been tracked down in Norway. She turned out, in fact, to be Kamala Varma, a woman of Indian extraction, an anthropologist who had eventually become a Norwegian citizen and who wrote and spoke Norwegian as well as anyone in the country. Despite all the media coverage, even now very little is known about her. No one, as far as I know, can, for example, say to which caste she belongs. Although this probably didn’t matter so much, since she came from a prosperous, westernized family in Delhi and had taken her degree in anthropology at Columbia University in the United States. Kamala Varma undoubtedly saw herself as a citizen of the world. It was said that she came to Norway because she had seen Song of Norway , of all things, on one of the TV channels in New York. And despite the fact that this is — it’s only fair to say — the most awful film, it did leave her wanting to see Norway, especially the Norwegian countryside, so when she got there the first thing she did was to visit all of the exotic locations from the film: Bergen, Geiranger and, not least, Ulvik in Hardanger, where Toralv Maurstad and Christina ride up the sides of the valley on a Norwegian pony. This may have been Kamala Varma’s first impression of the country, one which would always colour her view of it: that in Norway she was walking, or should one say riding, into an idyllic fiction that would never end.

The interesting fact, for our purposes, is how she came to meet Jonas Wergeland; and even though this is still a little unclear, I have been able to establish that during the latter half of the eighties Kamala Varma was conducting an anthropological field study at the very prison to which Jonas Wergeland would later be committed — an achievement in itself, testifying to a nigh-on diplomatic shrewdness, when one considers how difficult it was to gain permission to observe such a closed society. While working there she became friendly with the prison chaplain and later, long after her anthropological study had been completed, she became a prison visitor under the auspices of the Norwegian Red Cross; as such she was paired up with an inmate of the prison, to whom she would make regular visits, outside normal visiting hours. Kamal Varma became a very popular visitor. She had an exceptional gift for listening and for establishing a rapport with the prisoners — not so much because she was a woman, but because she too was an outsider.

It so happened that the prisoner whom Kamala Varma had been visiting for some years completed his sentence just as Jonas Wergeland arrived at the prison, and because Jonas was something of a special case and kept himself very much to himself — he adamantly refused to speak to anyone — the chaplain asked Kamala Varma whether she would consider being Jonas Wergeland’s prison visitor. She said she would. And it was as the chaplain had hoped: when the suggestion was put to Jonas, his curiosity was aroused — if nothing else, a woman of Indian origin would make a change from Norwegians of whom, not surprisingly, he was pretty sick after the trial and everything that had been written about him. He agreed, and their very first meeting marked a turning point for him. They had talked about Indian architecture. And thus it came about that Kamala Varma and Jonas Wergeland spent several hours together every week for almost two years, and not in the visiting room but in his cell: a privilege granted to prison visitors. Wergeland must have told her a good deal during these visits, must really have opened his heart to her. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he refused to see her any more. Apparently she took it very hard. There were also rumours that Wergeland had attempted to take his own life. Then, to everyone’s surprise, her book appeared. Her motives in writing it, what induced her to break the prison visitor’s oath of confidentiality, can only be guessed at. In any case the book sold like hot cakes, even better than my own new biography that year, on Johan Sverdrup.