More and more often my thoughts returned to that disc which I had heard so much about, and which Jonas Wergeland told us even more about: the disc attached to the Voyager probes which, inconceivably many years from now, might pass other stars and planets. Some day – who knew – it might even be opened and played, analyzed, by beings from some distant galaxy. What would they think, if think was the right word, when they saw the picture of a snail’s shell, or the leaf of a strawberry plant? Of a dolphin or a banquet in China? What would they think when they heard, on this disc, the sound of wind and rain, of grasshoppers and frogs? Footsteps, heartbeats, laughter? Or, what could they possibly make of this: the sound of a kiss? I tried to imagine the reaction of an extra-terrestrial being on hearing a voice say in the Indian language Gujarati: ‘Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.’
At night, when darkness eventually fell, I would sometimes go up on deck to look at the sky. I liked to think of those two space probes bound for a utopian destination, of the fact that the message they carried, a gold-plated copper disc, was encased in a protective aluminium cover. Wherever you looked there were connections. Even between Høyanger and a space probe. The first object ever to be sent in the other direction, out of our solar system, took aluminium with it.
A couple of nights ago Jonas Wergeland told us, with a look on his face I remembered from the treetop conversations of my childhood, about all the new discoveries which Voyager 2 had made for us – it had, for example, found seven hitherto unknown moons circling the planet Neptune. I could not help wondering, the other morning, as I watched him from a distance, sitting with his arm round Kamala: might I be able to discover new ‘moons’ circling Jonas Wergeland, a man who has been so minutely charted?
There were lots of signs in Høyanger of the halcyon days of the labour movement. Not for nothing was the main street named after the political activist Marcus Thrane. I noticed the keen interest with which Jonas took in the ‘Own Home’ district and later the Park area or ‘garden city’, just down from the old hospital: possibly Høyanger’s most unique feature. For all I know it was the architect in him waking up. On Kloumann’s allé he ran a close eye over the fine residences built for the town’s captains of industry, with their privileged location overlooking the fjord. Suddenly, as if inspired by Arnberg’s church and the unexpected link with Oslo Town Hall, he decided he wanted to chart the decoration of public buildings in Høyanger and only a couple of phone calls later we found ourselves inside Valhalla, the old red-brick Youth Club building behind the school, the walls of which were covered with pictures of Viking kings and the homes of New Norwegian poet-chiefs. All at once Jonas Wergeland was a bundle of energy, leading the way to the Town Hall, to the community centre and the bank where, almost hidden away, we found pictures and other works by famous Norwegian artists. In a conference room on the fourth floor of the Town Hall we even managed to track down reproductions of the murals which had once adorned the old People’s Palace. Jonas spent a long time poring over these lost paintings of men carrying out different sorts of work in and around Høyanger. ‘How could they not preserve that lovely building?’ he asked.
My guess is that it was these decorations, along perhaps with some memory of his grandmother, that prompted him to ask me what we had thought of doing as regards Sogn and World War II, Sogn and the Germans. Because Kaiser Wilhelm had not been the only German to visit Sognefjord. There were still plenty of traces of their presence, whether as small bunkers, or as vast fortresses like the one at Lammetun. We had discussed this, of course, particularly in connection with another town very similar to Høyanger – Årdal at the very head of Sognefjord – since there too water-power was used to produce aluminium. Årdal could almost be said to have been a gift from the Germans. The liberated Norwegians got the whole thing on a plate. We had considered various angles, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was not within our remit to criticise Norwegian shortcomings during the Second World War or to discuss how beneficial the war had been for the growth of Norwegian industry. We had to draw the line somewhere.
Jørgine Wergeland, on the other hand, was not one for drawing lines. During the war she organised the home front in the truest sense of that term, although hers was a far more ruthless and dogged campaign of resistance than that waged by that other Home Front, the Norwegian underground movement. On her wedding night, when she locked her hammerhead of a husband out of the bedroom it was with an icy paraphrasing of Churchill’s words in response to Britain’s signing of the Munich agreement: ‘You had the choice between shame and war. You chose shame, but you shall have war.’
Having married her unsuspecting building contractor, Jørgine Wergeland took, as they say, the law into her own hands, and funnily enough her main weapon derived from his underground activities. Shrewd entrepreneur that he was, he had contrived to conceal a radio in a rather unlikely, but practical, place: the lavatory. So Jonas Wergeland was not the only one who owed a debt to British broadcasting. Jørgine spent a lot of time in the toilet – or the English Quarter as she called it – on the pretext of chronic constipation, listening to the BBC’s edifying transmissions from London. ‘I’m a graduate of the WC school of resistance,’ she would tell people, who would have no idea what she was talking about. It became something of a code. ‘I’m always running in to listen to WC,’ she said to Jonas’s mother. Everyone, including her husband, thought she was going off her rocker.
By listening to Winston Churchill’s stirring speeches, as well as all the references to them and quotations from them in other broadcasts, Jørgine built up a deadly arsenal for use in her clandestine guerrilla war – although it might perhaps be fairer to call it a private judicial purge, since she knew her husband would never be convicted of financial treason. In addition to a store of pithy Churchillian sayings she was armed most appropriately with several boxes of expensive Romeo y Julieta cigars – a gift, ironically enough, to her non-smoker of a husband from certain affluent business contacts. The man was as dull as they come – despite his hammerhead appearance. Jørgine would later use the same words of him as Churchill had used of Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister: ‘I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.’ During one of the first breakfasts they shared, she lit one of her big Cuban cigars and declared, with a slightly revised version of a quote she had heard many times: ‘I shall fight you to the last; I shall fight in the hall, I shall fight in the parlour, I shall fight in the kitchen, I shall fight in the bedroom; I shall never surrender.’ A statement which actually brought a frown to the brow of this man, whose sole concern in life up to this point had been to find the shortest way to making a fast buck.
It may sound callous, but as far as Jørgine was concerned it was very simple. She was faced here with the same phenomenon which Churchill had labelled, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, ‘a crime beyond description’. She had lost her Oscar because the Germans came to Gardermoen, and she was going to see to it that someone paid for that; she had no pity for a man who had helped the Germans to extend airfields and made a packet in the process. A man, who, by some obscure moral logic, regarded himself as innocent, blameless. During her vengeful hunt for suitable candidates, she had not only made sure that the chosen contractor had a bad heart, but that he was in fact heartless. Nonetheless, he was subjected not to bloody confrontations, but to strategic manoeuvres. Early on, Jørgine had committed another of Churchill’s sayings to memory: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’ In addition to a two-year long policy of evasive action in the bedroom, Jørgine’s campaign consisted primarily of dropping sly little hints, day in, day out, as to her husband’s crimes, while at the same time inundating him with camouflaged Churchill quotes memorised in that room, the WC, behind whose locked door she was to be found more and more often, puffing on a fat cigar. She quite simply wore him dow
n, mentally; she made life unbearable for him – or rather: for his heart. He did not recognise the charming, considerate woman he had first met, not even to look at. And it was true: during those years Jørgine Wergeland’s face would actually start to resemble Churchill’s round, plump, but exceedingly strong-willed countenance.
Her husband gave up eventually, or gave up the ghost, the year the war ended; and all of those who were present in the Western crematorium believed that they saw, in Jørgine, a genuinely grieving widow. But what was runnin through Jørgine’s mind were Churchill’s words when Britain declared war against Japan: ‘When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.’ In any case she was too taken up with Alf Rolfsen’s impressive paintings in the chapel. These beautiful frescoes reminded her of the fortune she had inherited, because even after the post-war currency stabilisation she had been left with what was, all things considered, a considerable sum of money. And there in the crematorium, as she ran her eyes over Alf Rolfsen’s pictures, it came to her, an idea that had been at the back of her mind for some time: she had to use this blood money for something positive, uplifting; it had to be invested in a building. And she did not have to look far: ‘I found Norway’s biggest piggy bank,’ she would later tell the aforementioned Alf Rolfsen as they sat in the Town Hall’s Festival Gallery one day, having their elevenses.
Jørgine moved back to her old home in Oscars gate, as if she were once more together with her first husband, or as if her life during the years in Inkognitogaten had been a top-secret affair, a mission performed incognito. When she left the building contractor’s flat which had, for her, been more of a battlefield than a home, she took with her just one thing apart from her husband’s bankbook: the magnificent crystal chandelier. Had Jonas known the story behind it, he might better have understood why, when they were cleaning the chandelier, his grandmother so often put on records by Vera Lynn, with songs which Jørgine knew from wartime: hits such as ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Yours’ and ‘Wishing’. Like Jonas, his grandmother too gazed up at the chandelier, into the crystal droplets, as if they were screens on which she saw scenes being enacted. But unlike Jonas, Jørgine did not see pictures from the Queen’s Chambers, she thought about the war, and about Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather. Jonas observed how her eyes filled with tears and she became lost in her own thoughts when Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was revolving on the turntable. To Jonas these songs were just boring old evergreens, but to her they clearly represented a link with other universes, a portal to infinite inner landscapes. And later he would come to understand that this music must have had the same sort of sentimental associations for his grandmother as Rubber Soul had for him. Simple though they were, those tunes could turn some organ inside you to jelly, to soft rubber. So flexible were Jørgine’s thought processes that at such times she was not only capable of calling the Town Hall Oslo’s Statue of Liberty, she was just as likely to think of it as her Oscar statuette.
Given all this, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Jonas was willing to risk life and limb in defence of the Town Hall. So when Viktor, the leading light of The Three Heretics, came up with the idea for his ‘Emil Lie Demonstration’ on, or for, the Town Hall Square, expressly to save this splendid Statue of Liberty or ‘piggy bank’, from a new dictatorship, that of the automobile, he was all for it. The Three Heretics recognised something that should have been obvious to everyone, not least the city fathers: the square in front of the Town Hall was an organic part of the building itself. Defile the square and you defiled the Town Hall too.
One suitably beautiful day in September at the very beginning of the seventies, they went to work, which is to say: out into Rådhusgaten, more or less as the gold hands on the clock tower announced that the time was four p.m. and the bells struck up a folk tune – on this occasion ‘The Food Song’ from Sunnmøre. A lot of people were going to be hopelessly late for dinner, though, because thousands of cars were soon stuck fast in the centre of Oslo due to a demonstration the aim of which was as simple as it was impossible: ‘Dancing on the Town Hall Square!’
If one did not know better one could be forgiven for thinking that this event was the forerunner of the somewhat incongruous carnivals which would be arranged a decade or so later. Viktor had succeeded in mobilising about forty students from the Cathedral School as well as some from the Experimental Grammar School – an even better breeding ground for radicalism and iconoclasm than the Cath., if that were possible, and these now proceeded to march round in a circle extending across the four lanes closest to the Town Hall. They were all dressed and made up to look like caricatures of tourists: Frenchmen in berets, Nigerians in gaily coloured robes, Arabs in long djellabahs, Americans in cowboy hats and Hawaiian shirts, Austrians in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats. Those students posing as Japanese carried cameras and snapped non-stop, their jaws dropping in shock – although, if one were being mean, one could say that they focused on the car number-plates, as if their owners were kerb-crawlers. Some carried placards. ‘A disgrace to Norway!’ and ‘Is this the city’s finest plaza?’ a couple said in German and English. And in Italian: ‘Would anyone run a four-lane expressway over the Piazza Navona?’ Jonas was guised as an Indian, in a white, high-collared Nehru jacket and Ghandi cap – an outfit which Pernille had helped him with – and he was conscious of feeling not quite so shy in this unfamiliar attire. ‘I am a film director from Bombay and I am here to find locations in Oslo for a film about māyā,’ he announced fearlessly in his best curry-and-rice English to one irate motorist who was yelling that there would be hell to pay if he wasn’t there to pick his wife up from the hairdresser’s.
The aim of the demonstration was not the same as at Mardøla: to protect something. The Three Heretics set out to dam the heavy and apparently unstoppable stream of painted bodywork flowing past the Town Hall. And the elliptic circle of flabbergasted tourists, or students rather, in the middle of the road actually did succeed in stopping the cars and causing a massive traffic jam around the square. Despite threatening overtures from a few angry drivers and some incipient scuffling, the demonstrators were reassured each time they glanced up at the façade of the Town Hall, where St Hallvard, the patron saint of the city, stood with his arms raised, blessing their venture for all to see.
Viktor had given a lot of thought to what they could possibly hand out to the nearest cars, something which – in the spirit of Ghandi – would illustrate the demonstration’s positive aims, but it was Jonas who came up with the idea. He remembered a picture taken around 1950 by OK – Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father – of an open-air dance, or ‘cobblestone ball’ as they were called, with people tripping the light fantastic, happy and proud, on the Town Hall Square. Jonas called the Aktuell photographer, who instantly allied himself with their cause and ran off a couple of hundred copies of the photograph at his own expense. It is never easy to get those affected by it to understand the point of a demonstration. Several of the first motorists got very hot under the collar and kept tooting their horns aggressively, but others thought it was fun – even more so when they were handed the long forgotten photograph, inscribed with the words: ‘The heart of the city needs dancing, not lead.’ They realised that they were part of something momentous, that they were making history, so to speak. One or two would also save this picture and frame it in fond memory of that day. They might have been late getting home, but they could see that it truly was a disgrace that the Town Hall Square, of all places, this public space laid out so beautifully in front of the city’s foremost landmark, should be overrun by cars. On Pipervika, people had welcomed Fridtjof Hansen back from his inspiring expeditions. Here those same people had hailed their dauntless king after the war. Albert Schweitzer himself had addressed a large crowd on this very spot. The Town Hall Square was the heart of the city, but it was also its lungs, a corner designed to give us a breathing space, oxygen. And the politicians and town planners had turned it into the city’s colon.
Afte
r a while – though not soon enough to prevent total chaos, with a tailback stretching all the way to Malmøya, several kilometres to the south – the law did of course arrive, four squad cars plus mounted police, to disperse the demonstrators. A number had to be carried away, but Jonas and Viktor were the only ones to put up a fight – Jonas was almost happy to feel an old rage stir inside him again. Both were taken to the police station. In a brief item on the Evening News Jonas was seen being carted off, still holding aloft the placard bearing his message written, thanks to the kind offices of the Indo-Iranian Institute, in Marathi: ‘Destroy not the Gateway of Norway!’ – with a clear allusion to the Gateway of India, Bombay’s most famous landmark. The irony of it was not lost on Jonas: the first time he managed to achieve his goal in life, to make his name publicly known, it was in the form of an alias, as Vinoo Sabarmati, a famous film director from Bombay. In due course a newspaper photograph was even said to have reached India, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that people there really did take Jonas for a film-maker from Bombay who had accidentally strayed into an unknown corner of the world called Norway, a place overrun by police and cars.
Life is full of mysterious coincidences. Jonas had earlier seen how rings could meet and intersect, and not only in water. Still, though, he was startled to read, in prison, that the Town Hall Square – at long last free of cars again – had been paved with flagstones from India. You could almost be said to be walking on the bedrock of India right in the centre of Oslo. This news brought back rather painful memories of his valiant youthful protest, and also revived a thought which had come to him as he was being led down to the harbour area in Montevideo, in far-off Uruguay, by a young, politically-aware woman called Ana: there has been too little iconoclasm and too much orthodoxy in my life. I need to be more of a rebel.
The Discoverer Page 58