Io
On the way down to Turtagrø he turned back several times to look up at the three peaks behind us. ‘They remind me of the pyramids at Giza,’ he said. Late in the afternoon, down by the car, he stood for a moment regarding Store Skagastølstind, the mountain we had climbed. As if considering something. Then: ‘I’ve seen the Great Pyramid at Cheops,’ he murmured at length, ‘but this is greater.’ To me it sounded as if he were saying: I was dead, but now I am risen.
‘Why did you go so close to the edge?’ I asked.
‘I thought I could fly,’ he said. ‘I thought I had sprouted wings.’
We reached Skjolden that evening. The village lay in shadow, but the sun was still shining on the slopes high on the east side of Lustrafjord and on the snow atop Molden, the peak which formed the cornerstone of a chamber in which the shining water constituted the floor and the mountains the walls. The blossom on the apple trees we drove past seemed luminous. The beauty of it was almost too much.
The Voyager was lying waiting for us at the Norsk Hydro wharf, below the old Eide farmstead; Hanna and Carl had sailed up the day before. We got ourselves settled in the old lifeboat, a genuine Colin Archer, built over a hundred years ago. For the next few weeks it would be our home. A boat that had saved the lives of hundreds of people in distress. A stormy petrel. A vessel designed to put to sea when others were making for harbour. The perfect mobile base.
Martin promptly disappeared into the galley, I heard chinking sounds coming from his tiny, but discriminatingly stocked drinks cabinet. ‘Here you are,’ he said, as he came up again with a glass for our guest. ‘A Talisker from the Isle of Skye, laced with the tang of the ocean. The perfect whisky for drinking at sea. Welcome aboard.’
‘Cheers,’ said our guest. ‘Here’s to a boat fit for an old lifesaver.’
We had to make the most of our days at Skjolden. Carl had been allotted the most important task: the stave church at Urnes. Martin would be concentrating on the natural wonders of the area, particularly the Feigumfossen waterfall and Fortunsdalen. Hanna would be visiting places like Munthehuset at Kroken, where so many painters had stayed. And I was to chart the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s movements in and around Skjolden. In the course of this work I found myself one afternoon on the hill above Eidsvatnet, sitting by the foundations of his cottage, ‘Østerrike’. As I leafed through the fragmentary writings in Philosophische Untersuchungen, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the project on which we were engaged and Wittgenstein’s efforts to eschew the traditional limitations of the book form, where ‘b’ inevitably follows ‘a’. This made me wish that we could insert a ‘link’ to a small display – I envisaged a graphic image inspired by Wittgenstein’s clarinet – illustrating the connection between the fjord as form, as a network of branches, and the composition of his book.
We had been lucky with the weather. In the evening we were able to sit up on deck, exchanging findings and ideas while the sunlight slowly loosened its grip on the top of Bolstadnosi, behind Skjolden. Was there, for example, any correlation between Wittgenstein’s theories and the carvings in Urnes stave church? This was the sort of question we meant to encourage people to ask. Already we had some inkling of what our main challenge would be: of all the information we gathered – what should we take with us?
I think, though, that I spent just as much time observing our passenger, a man who had once had the whole nation in the palm of his hand and almost succeeded in steering it onto a different course, before he was sent to prison for the murder of his wife. Who was this man? I had taken it upon myself to uncover unknown aspects of his life. I had already written a long and elaborate rough draft which I was continually turning over in my mind, in parallel, so to speak, with my actual assignment.
I asked myself who I thought I was, to be undertaking such a task. I was neither a god nor a devil. I was a human being. I was a conjecturing individual. My style – even where my account sounded pretty dogmatic – could not help but be tentative, hypothetical. Full of eventualities and qualifications and reservations. Although I never actually said it, never revealed my scruples, my doubts and my unquestionable shortcomings, not even in parentheses, the whole thing was pervaded by an implicit ‘it may be that …’, or ‘as I see it …’. And yet sometimes, even when I was sitting up on deck, making more notes, I felt like a spirit drifting over the water, an omniscient spirit, a spirit with the power to create light, to separate sea from sky. It was easy to become enamoured of this illusion. I knew a lot, a nuisance of a lot, about the man sitting on a deck chest across from me. And I considered my youth an advantage. I was not interested in adding anything or tearing anything down. I simply wanted to understand: why did he do it?
I studied him surreptitiously. It was a rare privilege to be able to spend some days with one’s subject. Although he looked different after his time behind bars, after his first years of freedom – his hair was grey now, his face thinner, his skin oddly darker somehow – I was surprised to find that he could stroll around Skjolden, check out the goings-on at the Fjordstova community centre – the climbing wall, the library – without being recognised. As far as I could tell, this did not bother him at all. Looked at objectively, though, this was quite something, in fact it was almost unbelievable: his visage had been erased, so to speak, from people’s memories. As if someone had pressed a huge ‘delete’ button.
His slide into oblivion had been a gradual thing, of course: long after he had exchanged the spotlit pedestal of television celebrity for the dim solitude of the prison cell he had remained the object of an interest bordering on mass hysteria. All the newspapers printed special supplements about him, detailing the high points of his career. Both the press and television behaved as if they were suffering from bulimia. They could not get enough of him. It was said that a number of women had tried to kill themselves, that they had been found clutching photographs of Jonas Wergeland. He had been an incandescent, edifying icon to the people of Norway, exalted and inviolable. Many people, I’m sure, can still recall how shocking it was, back in the infancy of television, when a newsreader got a fit of the giggles and thus revealed that he or she was only an ordinary mortal. But the wave of disbelief that swept the country when Jonas Wergeland, a national emblem, the nearest thing to a demi-god, was convicted of murder, was of another order entirely.
Even the most sensational scandals do not last for ever, though. After remarkably few years Jonas Wergeland was no more than a distant legend associated with the best of television broadcasting, He had been reduced to a word, a concept. If his name did crop up it was not uncommonly in the form of a superlative: ‘Wergelandian’. His television series – and other programmes made by him – had, however, a life of their own. The repeats had been running for years. The videos of Thinking Big also sold steadily. The reaction – an almost religious collective response – to the first showing could obviously never be repeated, but for that very reason perhaps, the artistic merits of the programmes came more into their own. Despite the ephemeral, soon to be outdated nature of the medium, Jonas Wergeland’s television series was an indisputable masterpiece. I am not alone in thinking this. A well-known English television critic wrote in his column in The Sunday Times that these programmes possessed the same undeniable quality and brilliance as the paintings of Rembrandt or Matisse. Nonetheless, these works of art had taken on a life of their own, independent of Wergeland’s person. There was no longer any connection between the name and the face. He could wander, unremarked, around a small Norwegian town, even pass the time of day with people without anyone recognising the features which they had idolised ten years previously.
One evening he was standing outside the old Klingenberg family home, where Wittgenstein had stayed during his first winter in Skjolden, when an elderly man happened along. They got talking. After a while I heard the other man say: ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you do for a living?’
‘I’m …’ Wergeland be
gan, then stopped, as if he were trying to say something for which there were no words. ‘I am a secretary.’
Which was true. He was now working as a secretary. And he was clearly proud of it.
On our third and final day in Skjolden harbour, he asked me if I would act as driver for him; he wanted to show me something. When we got to Luster he instructed me to turn down a narrow road immediately after Dale Church. We zigzagged up the steep hillside and eventually emerged on a plateau to be met by the unreal sight of a huge, white crescent-shaped building, four storeys tall. ‘Welcome to Hotel Norway,’ he said. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I learned later that the place was up for sale, and that a lot of interest was being shown by the travel industry.
This ghostly establishment was Harastølen, an old sanatorium from the turn of the century. The fresh air and the surrounding pine forests had made it a perfect spot for the treatment of tuberculosis; there were still some signs, like the low-ceilinged ‘cure porches’ set into the embankment skirting the front of the main building, suggestive of a world of deckchairs and blankets – like that described by Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain. Later on, the premises had been used as a hospital for long-stay psychiatric patients.
I don’t know whether anyone remembers now, it is already so long ago, but it was here in the early nineties that the Bosnian refugees whom the Red Cross succeeded in having released from Serbian concentration camps and who then came to Norway by way of Croatia were interned. There were around 340 of them all told, counting their families. Many of them were severely traumatised; they had been subjected to what psychiatrists term ‘catastrophic stress’, they had witnessed the most appalling violence – ethnic cleansing – and were in a very vulnerable condition, one which could easily escalate into acute crisis. The Norwegian authorities meant well, I’m sure – they called it a transit centre – but it does not take much imagination to see that it was not good for people suffering from this sort of syndrome to live in such isolation – halfway up a mountain, deep inside a Norwegian fjord – for over a year. Things became so bad that the inmates staged a hunger strike. But not until over half of the refugees had applied to return to Bosnia – they actually preferred that war-torn region to Harastølen – did the baffled Norwegian immigration authorities realise just how embarrassing the whole situation was. The refugees received a promise that they would be resettled in the surrounding community.
We stood with our backs to the old sanatorium, a brick colossus honeycombed with long corridors and little rooms. Most of the Bosnians had had to stay at Harastølen for a year and a half, some of them for almost two years. I shot a glance at Jonas Wergeland. I could see that he was moved. He knew what it was like to live in isolation, in degrading conditions. He had no trouble imagining how it would feel to have to live here for any length of time. The refugees’ Norwegian hosts did not, however, have the benefit of this experience or such insight. Here, in what had once been a treatment centre for TB sufferers and the insane, a desolate spot five hundred metres up a mountainside, these poor people had been stashed away, as if they were either dangerously infectious or crazy. As one of them so neatly put it: ‘I feel I have gone from one prison camp to another.’
We stood outside Harastølen, next to the remains of what had once been a cable railway, just the sort to run up to an ‘eagle’s nest’, and gazed across the fjord to the mountains on the other side. In the distance we could hear the sound of sheep bells, like the ones Norwegian supporters ring when cheering their skiers on to more gold-medal victories. Jonas was very quiet. Then, as I was making to leave he said: ‘Is it possible, do you think, to understand everything about Norway from such a marginal position as this, in the grounds of a disused asylum?’
And then he began to talk, to talk eagerly and at great length. It was years since I had heard him speak with such commitment. He spoke of how incredibly lucky he had been to grow up in an age marked by the greatest economic, social and cultural changes since the Stone Age. And in that era of unbelievable prosperity he had also had the good fortune to be living in the most privileged and sheltered corner of the globe. But that was also, he said, why he felt so ashamed.
Readers will, I hope, bear with me here, if I slip in a few thoughts on modern Norway plucked from that monologue, that confused blend of praise and blame, delivered by Jonas Wergeland at Harastølen, near Luster. Because, he said, standing here outside this old TB hospital, this erstwhile mental home and, briefly, refugee centre, he felt compelled to consider the growth of modern Norway. And the conclusion he had reached was that it had all happened too fast. That was why we had become so unsympathetic, so intolerant, so callous and forbidding, all affected by a collective, almost panic-stricken case of tunnel vision which permitted us to see only what we wanted to see and which, in our misguided struggle to safeguard what belonged to us, caused us to lose sight of the need for human solidarity and common decency. He simply could not get his head round the fact that little more than a century ago Norway had been a country so poor, so doomed to scrimp and save, that the few gas lamps in the streets of its towns were not lighted on moonlit nights. Would he ever be able to understand this nation which, in the regatta of history, started out hopelessly far behind at the beginning of the twentieth century as a rot-ridden longboat with moth-eaten sails, and rounded the millennium buoy, suddenly in the lead, as a luxury yacht in a class by itself, all gassed up and bristling with electronic equipment – all of this almost without having to lift a finger, and with no one knowing quite how it had happened. Anyone would think a good fairy had flown over us and with a wave of her wand transformed a draughty log cabin into a chalet-style villa with ten rooms and underfloor heating in the bathroom. What had happened to us? Or rather: was it any wonder we didn’t know how to deal with our wealth? ‘We’re like a nation of stunned lottery winners,’ Jonas Wergeland said. ‘When people get rich too quickly they almost always lose their perspective. In this case a whole society was hit.’
So what did we do? That’s right, we cut ourselves off. Suddenly we had become so stinking rich that we could afford to shut out the rest of the world. For although the Harastølen story is not all black and white – things had had to be organised at very short notice and so many people had arrived at one time – Jonas Wergeland found it a disgraceful and highly symbolic tale. ‘Think about it,’ he said to me. ‘It took over fifty years for Norway to take in as many refugees as we ourselves produced – Norwegians who fled to Sweden – during the five years of the Second World War. What’s happened to our memories? What’s happened to our capacity for fellow-feeling? Why didn’t we so much as blush when the UN’s high commissioner felt obliged to point out that it was more difficult to gain asylum in Norway, the birthplace of Fridtjof Nansen, than in most other countries in Europe.’
Jonas scanned the deserted hillsides on the other side of Lustrafjord as he pointed to the most paradoxical thing about Norway: such wide-open spaces and such closed hearts. We could, it is true – had they been Europeans, and had their sufferings been given enough television exposure – have taken in thousands in almost no time at all. It was the least we could do. If we were to divide the country up among us every Norwegian would have 70,000 square metres of land all to himself. And yet deep down inside we wanted to keep ourselves to ourselves. Stay a rich man’s reserve. The accumulated value of our national costumes alone, complete with all their silver ornaments, would exceed the gross national product of many a Third World country. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, modern Norway was suffering from the King Midas syndrome. Everything we touched turned to gold. But we could no longer embrace our fellow men. We kept our mouths shut and walled ourselves in, applauding the government’s efforts to build a Great Wall around our borders, constructed out of what were – by its lights – unassailable legal niceties. To Jonas it was a sad fact: what Adolf Hitler could not do, we had managed for ourselves. We had built our own Festung Norwegen.
Bearing in mind what happened at
the tail end of the millennium, when the Norwegian people were given the chance to respond spontaneously and unselfishly to the new stream of refugees from the devastation of the Balkans at least, I have thought a lot about the impassioned monologue which Jonas Wergeland delivered at Luster. Because even though he was right in what he said about Norwegians and their long-standing mistrust of asylum seekers, I have the suspicion that in talking about this he was, in fact, talking about something else. The Norwegian government’s unfortunate consignment of Bosnian refugees to Harastølen was effected during Jonas’s first months in prison, which is to say at a time when he was taking a harder look at his own life than ever before. Although I cannot express this very clearly, I am convinced that in his monologue at Harastølen – his condemnation of such isolationism – Jonas Wergeland was actually talking about himself.
I started walking towards the car and when he did not follow, I looked back. I turned just in time to see him kneeling on the steps leading up to the building, outside what he had described as a monument to our brutish attitude towards everything that was not Norwegian. I was instantly reminded of the German chancellor, Willy Brandt, going down on his knees on behalf of the German people before the monument to those who died in the Warsaw ghetto in the Jewish uprising of 1943. I believe Jonas Wergeland felt the need to do something similar here, albeit on a smaller scale: to beg forgiveness for his nation’s foolishness, for its eagerness to turn Norway into an impregnable fortress. Although, when you get right down to it, it could be that this, too, was done for personal reasons.
Jonas had first encountered this mistrust of strangers when just a little boy. In elementary school he had had a very strict, very proper, headmaster who, due to the fact that his initials were HRH, was simply referred to as His Royal Highness. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman with an aquiline nose and eyebrows like canopies, who walked with chest out and chin up. He was notorious for reciting never-ending poems at the drop of a hat, poems that no one could understand a word of, or at least none of the pupils on whom he kept such a strict eye and whom he punished so zealously for the slightest misdemeanour.
The Discoverer Page 8