‘Ah, yes, gonorrhoea,’ said Dr Kleveland.
After Jonas had swallowed half a dozen tablets and given the name of the infection source – something about which he had no qualms – and been told to contact the person concerned himself and ask her to call at the Health Centre, he made a remark, out of relief really, which clearly annoyed Dr Kleveland and caused her, for once, to lose a little of her professional demeanour: ‘Oh well, that’s not so bad really,’ he said.
Like other doctors, Dr Kleveland was adept at differentiating between the performance of her duties and the temptation to lecture her patients. But on this particular day, prompted perhaps by sheer wisdom or what is known as feminine intuition, Dr Kleveland simply saw red and did something she had never done before and would never do again – she took down a book from the office bookcase: it immediately put Jonas in mind of Ørn’s stamp album or the family Bible at home, but he could not have been further off the mark, because it proved to be a textbook on venereal diseases, a classic work in fact, as Jonas would later discover, and this she dropped with a demonstrative thud onto the desk in front of him: ‘Have a look in here,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll see if you’re still saying “Oh well”.’
Jonas leafed through the book while Dr Kleveland prepared the sample which, to be on the safe side, was to be sent somewhere else for testing. The sight that met Jonas’s eyes was not a pretty one, but the pictures were mesmerizing, every bit as mesmerizing as Gustav Doré’s illustrations in the family Bible, in fact they could have been used as an addendum to the chapter on Sodom and Gomorrah: black, avenging angels, photographs illustrating the different venereal diseases, including those cases which had gone too long without treatment. In full colour. More than anything else they made him think of leprosy, especially the male organs, which looked as if they were about to drop off, like half sawn-off branches. These images were in fact so hideously grotesque and spoke of such pain that Jonas could not bear to look at them – possibly also because it was the most sensitive area of the body which was affected and because, paradoxically, what he was seeing here was, in many cases, the fruits of pleasure. He had been given a glimpse into a gruesome world that was the exact opposite of Daniel’s Mykle universe, the whispered recitals of his youth, lines such as ‘with deeply tremulous reverence to fondle her secret recesses’.
Jonas closes the book, or rather: his body closes the book, refuses to see any more. Dr Kleveland is also finished with what she was doing, says nothing, can tell from Jonas’s face that she doesn’t need to, she simply gives him a couple of practical instructions before he bows out backwards.
It was, therefore, this not exactly pleasant story that lay behind Jonas’s nigh-on blind trust in Margrete, his firm belief that she would never be unfaithful. The way he saw it, she simply had to be immune to adultery. She worked at the Health Centre, after all, he reasoned, in the same department, Dermatology and Venereal Diseases, which he himself had once attended, shaking in his shoes. And how, he asked himself, could a woman who saw that sort of thing every day, those rot-infested, throbbing, suppurating, fungus-ridden genitals – a great many of them the result of infidelity – how could she ever contemplate exposing herself to or even get anywhere close, to such an eventuality?
Margrete seldom talked about her work at home. Jonas all but forgot that she was even a doctor, never mind a derma-venereologist. Or maybe he simply blocked it out, had no wish to think about what went through the heads of the men who had the honour of resting their penises, occasionally healthy penises at that, in Dr Boeck’s lovely hand, as if on scales of purest gold. If she did mention her job, it was usually to tell some anecdote about skin, or skin disorders – a safer topic. Because she did work with these too, for half of each day to be exact, dealing with everything from acne to all manner of rashes and eczemas, carrying out prosaic little operations camouflaged by such obscure terms as ‘biopsy’ and ‘cryotherapy’. Jonas always felt that this must be why she attached such great erotic importance to skin, she would spend whole evenings just stroking him with her fingers, enabling him to experience a closeness he had never known before. ‘No sexual organ can hold a candle to the skin,’ she said. At such moments he thanked his lucky stars, to be so privileged: to be married to a woman unlike any other in the world.
Jonas didn’t ask much about Margrete’s work either – his experience at the Health Centre, the knowledge of what hurts that elegant façade could conceal seeming to have scared him off such topics for good and all. He followed her career more or less on the sly, knew for example how interested she had been, when he met her – at the time when she was doing a supplementary course at the University Hospital – in a ‘new’ disease called chlamydia. He could not rid himself of the suspicion that her pleasure lay, as it were, in the venereal. How else to explain why she sometimes came home all-aglow to tell him that they had had a case of syphilis that day – a rare occurrence now – and then launched into a gripping and very detailed description of the image in the microscope, in which the corkscrew forms of the spirochaete stood out clearly against the dark background: an image which, by the way, she compared to a starry sky, delighting in the discovery in a way that reminded Jonas of his own days as an enthusiastic student of astronomy. But normally she said very little. Understandably. ‘Well, it’s hardly the most scintillating dinner-party conversation is it – entertaining everyone with the latest news on the condylomata or herpes fronts,’ was the excuse she gave on one occasion.
If she said anything about the everyday goings-on at the Health Centre, it usually had to do with what she saw or heard, rather than with the diseases as such. She might, in strictest confidence, tell him about the medical students who came by the centre, the questions they were liable to blurt out in the heat of their enthusiasm, not to mention the embarrassing, often astonishing, networks disclosed by particularly active infection sources. ‘It’s at times like those that you realize how much mischief one person can do, how quickly things spread,’ she said. ‘Or see that, at the genetic level, we are still ninety per cent animal.’ But more often than not, when Margrete gave in to temptation, it was to tell the stories that men in particular, patients that is, could come out with when they stood there with their trousers round their ankles, unwinding the bandages from their cocks, as if they felt that only the most fantastic tale could explain how on earth their bowsprit could have sustained such damage. Jonas knew that Margrete was in a class by herself when it came to the greatest challenge in her profession: establishing a rapport with a patient. She could make a shamefaced boy relax, an unscrupulous, cynical man open up and give her his confidence. And there were times when Jonas suspected that this was the underlying reason, maybe even the real reason, why she enjoyed her work so much: the fact that she got to hear all those amazing tales, as if she were working not at the Health Centre but in a bazaar. ‘Do you know anything about taking precautions?’ Margrete had asked one man with a severely wounded penis. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘After I’ve been with a woman I always wash my dick with cognac.’ Margrete had eyed the man up and down: ‘And do you think that’s good enough?’ she said. ‘Well, it should be,’ the man replied indignantly, ‘it’s three-star!’
But to get back to where we came in: Jonas Wergeland had got it into his head that, with her day-to-day insight into the grislier aspects of sex, Margrete would never allow another man to stick his penis inside her. He had, in other words, forgotten with what warmth and devotion she had welcomed his rigid manhood – that same organ which had once run with pus. It never occurred to Jonas that in the very course of her work Margrete would have learned some simple way of protecting herself. Or that this was exactly why she appreciated having a nice, clean man with a healthy, pulsating member between his legs.
It looks down on Earth while my heart stands still
(Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)
Sometimes Jonas wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered sta
nding outside a distinctive building called the Matenadaran, an institute for the preservation of ancient documents. And although he vaguely recalled something about a conversation, and possibly something about a mountain – like a white arc in the blue – if he thought hard enough about it, all he remembered was the script.
He had stopped without thinking next to a statue on the terrace just below the entrance, struck by a feeling that his body was full of letters. The statue showed a pupil kneeling before Mesrop Mashotots, the man who was reputed to have created the Armenian alphabet, the characters that were carved into the wall behind him: an alphabet that had never been used by any other people. It was a script that appealed to Jonas; the capitals in particular had an unusually regular and stylized form that at the same time made the characters seem somehow to have been reversed. A script for outsiders, thought Jonas, befitting a proud and hard-pressed people.
Inside the copper doors of the Matenadaran he and the guide had wandered through its rooms, looking at ancient manuscripts from monasteries, handwritten copies of the works of Armenian scholars and of foreign books. Some texts from antiquity had only survived in their Armenian translations – a chronicle by Eusebios of Caesarea, a treatise on nature by Zeno. As if the script itself were a sort of Noah’s ark, thought Jonas, examining one fragile parchment volume: the Gospel of Lazarus. He felt as though the lovely letters were exerting an influence on him, trying to tell him something, although he did not know what.
Why had he gone to Yerevan? Perhaps simply to see this wilful alphabet. For the first time since elementary school he felt something for letters, had the urge to write, abandon television, even. It may be that this was precisely what this almost otherworldly script was telling him: that nothing was fixed. That anything was possible. What if I were to settle down here, he thought, break all ties and do something completely different?
Jonas had remained standing outside the institute, gazing down on the city and listening to a deep murmur emanating from beneath or above the landscape, as if some massive plates he could not see were turning or grinding against one another. He thought of Fridtjof Nansen, pack ice, he thought of Ararat, the glacier, he thought of the year ahead of him, he thought of the television series which was shortly to be broadcast, he thought of Margrete – he thought of Margrete, not knowing that, because of her, he would find himself at the centre of a sensational scandal, that he would discover how it felt when something he believed to be solid and permanent suddenly shifted under his feet. He could not know, was too busy savouring this slow moment of revelation, the sensation of being at a point where everything trickles down and converges, like sand in the narrow neck of an hourglass.
His reverie was interrupted by a man – because there was something else, not only a script, not only a mountain, but a person. Nansen Sarjan – almost having to shake Jonas awake and telling him that he had to leave, now, this very instant. ‘But why?’ Jonas asks lightly, despite a faint contraction of his testicles, ‘I’m leaving for Leninakan this evening.’ Leninakan was the largest city in Armenia after Yerevan, and Jonas meant to visit the university there the next morning. ‘Because you must,’ the man says adamantly and knocks out his pipe against his heel. ‘I just know, that’s all. You must not stay here one second longer.’
Jonas did not know why he allowed himself to be persuaded, why he permitted himself to be escorted, led by the hand almost, back to his hotel, where an impatient Nansen Sarjan had an earnest conversation with the Intourist representative, whereupon Jonas’s ticket was changed and he was driven straight off to the airport, without even stopping for a bite of lunch – maybe it was the thought of Nansen, Fridtjof that is, or of Noah, or of that enigmatic script which stopped him from protesting. Whatever it was, a sudden shunt, he arrived in Moscow that same afternoon. As the plane bumped down onto the runway he seemed to wake from a hypnotic trance.
Sometimes Jonas Wergeland doubted whether he had been to Yerevan at all.
The following day he heard rumours, but it wasn’t until he returned to Norway that he heard the full story: news of the disaster was all over the papers and on television. The morning after he left, Armenia had been hit by a severe earthquake, the worst experienced in the Caucasus in eighty years; 25,000 people had been killed, 12,000 were hospitalized, half a million people had been left homeless. The quake had wreaked particular havoc in Leninakan; large parts of the city, including the university, had been completely flattened.
Jonas Wergeland knew it: we owe our lives to other people.
A journey need not be long, in terms of time, for it to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.
I – the Professor – do not know whether or not to call this the irony of fate. Jonas Wergeland escaped disaster that time, but nothing could save him from the media earthquake triggered by his arrest and later trial – not surprisingly perhaps, seeing that Wergeland himself was the instigating factor. The public hoped, of course, for as long as they could, hoped that something was wrong, that someone, somewhere had made a terrible and most unfortunate mistake. Rumour had it that Jonas Wergeland remained silent – and, others added, unmoved – and he refused to make any sort of statement to the police. He had accepted the lawyer appointed to defend him without demur and would not hear of engaging one of the big-time lawyers whom Daniel was sure would be able to help him.
I think everyone, including myself, awaited the trial in such a state of suspense that you would have thought the honour of Norway was at stake. At times, the interest in the case could almost be compared to the hullabaloo surrounding the winter Olympics at Lillehammer that would shortly be coming to a close. It seemed as though higher powers wished to reward the Norwegian people by treating them, for a short time – en masse, as it were – to not one mammoth spectacle but two: a thought-provoking reflection of Jonas Wergeland’s theory that Norway was ‘a nation of spectators’.
I do not know whether it is possible to say anything about the proceedings in the High Court beyond all that has already been reported, all that has been written, all the pictures that have been published – not least those risible sketches from the courtroom, like illustrations from cheap crime magazines. One can ask oneself whether there was anything about Jonas Wergeland that did not come out during the trial – a kind of inverted version of This is Your Life – thanks to the prosecution’s dogged efforts to prove his guilt. The most surprising part was probably the fact that Jonas Wergeland also chose to remain silent, as if he considered this his best mode of defence, or his only mode of defence: something which lots of people naturally interpreted as a black mark against him. Nonetheless, there was no doubt: through everything that came to light, everything that was relayed by the media and greedily watched, read, listened to and, not least, discussed everywhere, Jonas Wergeland seduced the Norwegian people anew.
By the time the case came to court a number of books about him had already been published, with titles such as The TV Demon and All That Glisters: superficial, hastily penned ‘biographies’ produced with only one aim in mind: to make money. Well, it was a very tasty story, almost worthy of Shakespeare himself: the vertiginous plunge from the peaks of distinction to the pit of hell. And yet the trial managed, indirectly mind you, to produce fresh details, whole stories in fact, primarily of the murkier sort, the relevance of which was skilfully argued by the prosecution – everything from a boyhood story about the theft of a stamp album to that of an embarrassingly degrading taxi ride about a year before the killing. The prosecutors also received plenty of help from Gjermund Boeck, Margrete’s father, and William Røed, Jonas’s uncle who, in their respective capacities as the Norwegian king’s ambassador and a director of Statoil presented their testimonies with great authority: his uncle, known within the family as Sir William, impeccably attired in a blazer with a gold silk cravat at his throat, painted a particularly lethal picture of what he called ‘Jonas Wergeland’s complete lack of character’. Few would disagree
with the newspapermen’s refrain: ‘If anyone in modern times has been put in the stocks, then it’s Jonas Wergeland.’
In all fairness it has to be said that a few critical voices did say that it all went too far, as when an ex-girlfriend appeared in court and told – she, with her natural bloom and expressive features – of their six-month affair, a testimony in which their sexual escapades were more than hinted at. She had been called as a witness – this was a point which a tireless prosecutor emphasized at great length – because of a brutal tale, a quite shocking business, if it were true, which would possibly provide absolute proof of Jonas Wergeland’s terrible temper and violent tendencies. These revelations were all the more sensational since the woman concerned was now one of Norway’s best known film actresses, one of the very few to achieve international stardom – and as if that weren’t enough she had recently married and had a child by an Oscar-winning American director.
I would like, if I may, to slip in here a little information about this person drawn from my own material: Jonas Wergeland met Ingunn U. while she was at drama school, when her temperament was at its most volatile – if that is any excuse. She was the type who was liable to bathe in fountains and simulate scenes on the tram. If my source is correct, she went so far on several occasions as to have sex with Jonas with her face heavily made-up, wearing theatrical masks from a variety of roles; according to Jonas himself, the first time he was about to enter her she apparently murmured one of Juliet’s final lines: ‘O happy dagger – this is thy sheath!’ As far as I can judge Ingunn U. was a person who was more or less continually out of context. When Jonas broke up with her, she would stand all night outside his bedsit in Hegdehaugsveien, bawling and shouting and waking up half of Homansbyen until the police finally took her in hand. Whether it was acting or genuine hysteria no one ever knew; that was her secret, as it was on the stage or on film sets later in her career.
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