The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  All in all, a lot of things seemed to be taken to the extreme, blown totally out of all proportion. The whole sensation industry that fed on this case lent it the character of a farce, of something unreal. More and more people had the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. For a start, the motive seemed unclear. Why would Jonas Wergeland kill his wife? This seemed even more inconceivable to all those Norwegians for whom the thought of Jonas Wergeland and Margrete Boeck conjured up a picture of the ideal couple, snapped at premieres and parties, a regular feature in weekly mags and newspapers year after year; the television personality and his wife, a dark beauty who also happened to occupy the highly respected post of consultant physician.

  ‘Do you know what the most surprising thing of all is?’my guest asked on the fourth evening on which she visited me, clad in her usual elegant black and as earnest as always. ‘The most surprising part of all this washing of dirty laundry in public was one question that was never asked. Obviously because it had nothing to do with the case. And yet it gets to the very nub of the matter. Because, if it were true that Jonas Wergeland possessed all those failings and evil inclinations, how could a whole nation fall under his spell? And that being the case, does this not say everything about Norway, the cultural level of this country in the last decade before the millennium? That such an individual could wangle his way to such enormous power and popularity, I mean?’

  This evening she was in less of a hurry to launch into her unstoppable monologue; for the first time she wandered round the turret room, taking everything in. I have to be honest and admit that I was warming to her, that she was actually starting to intrigue me, those bright red lips in the pale face and the blazing eyes framed by such a remarkable mass of black; the way she moved, with the dignity of one of royal birth. As she passed me I tried again to place the indefinable odour that hung around her – it seemed to hail from some other land – but with no success. She stopped in front of one of the bookcases, pulled out a couple of the biographies I have written, leafed through them, smiled. ‘Well, you’ve certainly not been idle, Professor.’

  No I haven’t. I have always worked hard. I do not know whether it is necessary to mention this, but I am regarded as a pioneer within my field, my original field that is: historical research. I think I can safely say that I was the first, or certainly the first clear representative in Norway of what is now referred to as the Annales school: a form of historical research with the emphasis on research which, simply put, concentrates more on the long lines of history, the currents below the surface, than on individual lives, and endeavours, above all else, to eschew any kind of storytelling, especially of stories depicting political or military events as the illustrious deeds of great men. ‘Structures rather than events’ was my motto. Where the nineteenth century, my own specific field of study, was concerned, I took up the fight to tone down the focus on nation-builders and looked instead at the more economic and social aspects. My best known work, which is still cited in international history circles, is the treatise Broad Sail – the title meant to give an idea of the book’s subject matter and its scope – in which I shed light on the Norway of the nineteenth century by writing about the shipping trade and the south coast of Norway, though with wider reference to the whole period from 1536 to 1870. It is as much a study of the region as it is a work of history, an investigation of the relationship between the people and the country along the south coast. The first – and most highly praised – third of the book deals with the district solely from a geographic point of view: the climate, the coastline and the interior, islands, harbours and towns, land and seaways. The aim was to view the whole of the North Sea as one vast region in such a way that the relevance of Britain to what happened in Norway became apparent. By dint of interdisciplinary methods I describe everything from food, clothing, housing, tools, wages and prices, to the family circle, customs, religion and superstition – and even idioms peculiar to the south coast, not least seamen’s expressions. Some said that the treatise’s central character was not man, but the ship, or the sea.

  My apologies for this brief discourse, but I feel a need to underline that it was not a betrayal of, but doubts about, this method which led me to make a fresh start, whereby I would once more attempt to centre my account around people, those people whom I had, until now, working from my Olympian perspective, treated almost like insects, or as a ‘sum’. Perhaps – I say perhaps – this could be attributed to a new realization that you cannot discount the story from a description of historical events. In any case, this resulted in a string of books that could be said to be well known and that I suppose could be called biographies since they deal with figures of consequence in the history of nineteenth-century Norway. And while the general public had never heard of my four major scholarly works, not even The Structure of the Bureaucrat State, sales of the first biography, of P.A. Munch, simply skyrocketed. Two years later The Norwegian No, a book about Søren Jaabæk, appeared and repeated the success.

  Although I did try later to explain the success of these books by saying that I just happened to hit the biography boom which began around this time, satisfying the public’s apparently insatiable need for coherence, for a mirror they could hold up to their own lives, the real reason was obvious: the Norwegian people, the Norwegian general public at least, wanted histories not History. And maybe they are right: maybe our existence is best understood as a story. To some extent this depressed me, to some extent it heartened me. I confess, however, that this voracious interest took me by surprise, and what is more: it was this longed-for wider recognition that tempted me to resign my professorship in order to devote myself to writing biographies fulltime. And if I were a Judas, selling out my beliefs, then I didn’t sell them cheap; I made a fortune out of it. Forgive me, I’m only human – vain too: I willingly let myself be flattered by people who praised my gift for popularization, for taking a fresh slant on things, by reviewers who maintained that I had done for a number of prominent Norwegians what Lytton Strachey did for a bunch of his countrymen.

  So I was wary of any tinge of irony in her voice when she addressed me as ‘Professor’, as if I were continually hearing myself being accused of having abandoned my true calling. Eventually, though, I began to interpret it more as her way of invoking, not to say appealing to, my academic abilities. I regarded her with bated breath as she flicked desultorily through my biography – the one I am most pleased with – of historian Ernst Sars: Prospect of a Life. ‘Do you think that so-called great people have to be out-of-the-ordinary?’ she asked, and then, as if not expecting a reply: ‘What if they were perfectly ordinary. Or downright weak.’ She put the book back. ‘Could one, for example, admire a man who might be a murderer?’

  The ferry to Denmark slipped past, out on the fjord. It may have been its glowing lights that prompted her to move over to the fireplace where a fire was burning. ‘I hate this cold,’ she said again, although the temperature outside was only around zero, and then, seeing my look of surprise: ‘I’m used to much warmer conditions.’

  As I was putting more wood on the fire she bent an openly appreciative eye on the mounds of papers on my desk, piled up so high that I could barely see out of the window when I sat down. There too lay all sorts of statistical surveys, official documents, fat works of reference, economic reports, a history of television, the yearbooks of various professional bodies – as if the room belonged to a social scientist or social anthropologist rather than a historian. I realized that, in my uncertainty regarding my project, I had fallen back on my old methods – I almost said: my old sins. Could it be that all along, without knowing it, I had been afraid that I would not be able to discern a clear storyline in the life of someone from our own century and had, therefore, accumulated all this material, just as I had done for my earliest works – on an epoch, on a country – as if hoping that somewhere in there I would spot one long thread winding its way through the mass of information. Or maybe I suspected that Jonas Wergeland
was just another name for a – what shall I call it? – a way of thinking, that he was the symbol of a national trend: that, like Abraham in the Bible, he personified the whole history of his tribe, that he represented something more, except that I could not see what it was. And yet, surprisingly enough, she seemed to approve of my method. ‘I need someone who takes a man seriously,’ she said, ‘who understands that a man amounts to more than his own life.’

  Before she came on the scene, I had had the feeling that I had in my possession the annals of Jonas Wergeland, but that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I lacked the structure: which is to say, the secret thread of life on which the stories of his life could be assembled like pearls on a string. Inevitably I had begun to wonder whether there could be a crucial difference between a life of today and a life from the previous century. It might be that one could now amass so much material on a life that it was no longer possible to recount it. Or was there a simpler explanation: that I was clinging to the past, to old-fashioned expository models, outdated theories on just about everything. The perpetual rumble from the airport occasionally made me feel as if I was sitting next door to a prehistoric zoo, full of dinosaurs.

  Whether my fears were justified or not, my visitor’s stories forced me to see that I might have been on the trail of a story that was too big. She showed me that it was also possible to arrive at insight into a life through something seemingly fragmentary, strings of stories which at first sight are totally unconnected but which, when you get right down to it, constitute a new form of coherence and unity. Something seemed to dawn on me, especially when I was writing for all I was worth, trying to follow her disjointed narrative, and I was unwilling, off-hand, to call it an acknowledgement of inferiority. Maybe that’s just how life is, how it must be.

  When I mentioned the trial to her, she sat down in the chair by the fire and laughed: ‘There was at least one story that did not come out there, Professor.’

  I dimmed all the lights, apart from the lamp next to my own chair. She shifted closer to the fire and fixed her eyes on a spot outside the windows, as if fire and darkness were the very prerequisites of the storytelling. I put pen to paper just as a plane was taking off from Fornebu. I knew as little about where it would land as I did about the tales she proceeded to tell.

  Because it was there

  Jonas’s family often went on holiday jaunts around Norway. Because, you see, they had a car. Children today would hardly consider the fact of having a car anything to shout about, but back then it was a real event when Dad came home, proud as a stag in rut, with a new automobile, usually the first ever; people hung out of their windows and everybody, or all of the male residents of the estate at any rate, had to troop out to view this object of wonder and stand with their hands in their pockets asking questions about the technical details before the family went off for the ritual trial run, cheered on their way like a ship on its maiden voyage. Rakel liked the old Opel Caravan best, because of the name’s associations with the Arabian Nights world in which she lived, while Jonas was for a long time a fan of the Opel Rekord, mainly because it had a speedometer on which the indicator, a horizontal line, started out green, then magically turned yellow and eventually red, depending on how fast you drove. The future Red Daniel, true to form, was forever yelling: ‘Into the red, Dad, drive it into the red!’

  How does one become a conqueror?

  More often than not the destination on the weekend jaunts the family took when Jonas was a boy was determined by his mother or rather, his mother’s stories. Åse Wergeland was not one for lulling children to sleep with nice, wholesome bedtime stories. In the evening, when their sister was tucked up with her Romance magazine or the 1001 Nights, Åse was in Daniel’s and Jonas’s room, telling them tales of the Vikings’ bloodthirsty world, stories which she claimed were taken from the Norse sagas. As a little boy, Jonas used to connect the word ‘saga’ with the Norwegian word for a saw: ‘sag’. Thus he thought that his mother’s liking for the old legends must have something to do with her interest in saws and her work at the Grorud Ironmongers. Not an unreasonable conclusion, since his mother fought hard, with sword in hand you might say, to ensure that a product such as the G-MAN saw would conquer the market.

  Jonas had always been particularly fond of the line in the Norwegian national anthem where it says: ‘and with that saga night that falls, fall dreams upon our earth.’ Almost every evening for years during his childhood his mother told the boys stories from Norway’s glorious Viking age before they went to sleep with – at Jonas’s behest – her round silver brooch pinned to her chest, as a kind of prop. What the boys did not know was that their mother’s stories were recounted freely from memory, she mixed up people and events and also had a tendency to render the tales even more exciting and dramatic if that were possible – and more brutal – by drawing on the arsenal of intrigue and misdeed she had built up thanks to years as an avid reader of detective stories. Nonetheless, they were fed, albeit in the wrong contexts, most of the most famous lines from the sagas: all Jomsborg’s Vikings are not yet dead, a fall means good luck, you have struck Norway from my hands, the King has fed us well, the roots of my heart are still fat – all of those matchless old saws. They were also wont to quote them at appropriate moments, as when Daniel farted and inquired: ‘What cracked so loud?’

  The question is, therefore, particularly when one bears in mind the formidable capacity which stories have for forming an individual, whether the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life was not, in fact, his mother and whether, by admitting this, I am also shifting the focus of my account. Because most heroic tales can awaken forces which until then have lain fettered inside a person; they can unleash a spontaneous urge to emulate the hero’s deeds – as, for example, when Daniel, tried to imitate the Viking king Olav Tryggvason by walking along the oars while Jonas was rowing, and very near drowned. The great ideal, though, was Einar Tambarskjelve, at least for Jonas who liked archery and who, even that early on, may have been aiming too high. For once, his mother had actually matched the right words with the right person, all the way from Einar’s answer to King Olaf Tryggvason’s question as to what had cracked so loud: ‘Norway, from your hand, lord king,’ and the part immediately after this, when he is handed the king’s weapon: ‘Too weak, too weak the king’s sword is,’ to the words he speaks just before he dies: ‘Dark it is in the king’s moot hall.’ The boys’ blood used to run cold at the savagery of their mother’s stories; folk swearing that they would heap body on body before they would surrender, teeth jangling on ice as men clove open one another’s skulls, foreign weaklings praying to God to be spared from the wrath of the Norsemen. So it was thanks to many years spent in the company of the figures in his mother’s more or less unlikely stories that Jonas Wergeland not only vowed to go to Miklagard, otherwise known as Istanbul, but was also imbued with a latent impulse to become a conqueror, expand boundaries and possibly also a taste for a certain belligerent lack of restraint, like the character in the Icelandic saga who kills a thrall simply ‘because he was there’. When you get right down to it, it would not be altogether wrong to say that it was Jonas Wergeland’s mother who turned him into a potential murderer.

  The stories which their mother embroidered upon for the boys had been told to her by her father, the only difference being that Oscar Wergeland had read from the sagas, both from Snorre Sturlason’s tales and from the Icelandic family sagas, so he had passed far more accurate versions of the tales to little Åse and Lauritz – the latter conscientiously followed up this upbringing, of course, by becoming the captain on a succession of DC planes in the SAS fleet, all named after Viking heroes. And Oscar did not just read them stories, he also told them stories from his own life that, in their turn, had given him his insatiable interest in the sagas and the Viking age in general.

  In his youth, Jonas’s maternal grandfather had from time to time visited an uncle who had a farm down near Onsøy. On one such occasion, when he was
helping prepare the ground for the building of a new house, they came upon the remains of a ship, along with various artefacts. While it could not match the greatest treasure trove found in Norway: gold weighing a total of five and a half pounds, it still fired the imagination; there had been one sword hilt in particular which his grandfather had been much taken with – years later he was still able to sketch it on a piece of paper for his children.

  Their mother had to tell this story for Daniel and Jonas time and time again; for all I know she may well have thrown in a couple of elements from Oehlenschläger’s poem about the Golden Horns found in Denmark. Jonas could just picture it: you go out to the field one day to plough or lift potatoes and suddenly you’re unearthing the history of Norway. Jonas never really got that out of his head: it could even be that he also applied it to other areas of his life. After all, since large amounts of gold had been buried during periods of unrest in Viking times, and since most of it still lay hidden in the ground, with a little luck at any time you might stumble on something valuable. Jonas had fantasies of finding treasures of undreamed-of worth if he so much as rolled away a stone in the forest. He also knew how these things would look: exactly like the bowl-shaped dragon brooch Aunt Laura had given his mother, with its pattern of intertwining lines.

  As I say, it was his mother, or his mother’s stories that determined where many of the family’s trips took them – even his father and Rakel, who were really both living in worlds of their own, meekly went along with her choices. Daniel and Jonas called these jaunts Viking raids, and that’s possibly quite true: these trips were a combination of holiday and business, colonization and fierce combat – the boys taking care of the latter. In this way the family had covered the length and breadth of southern Norway, seen everything from rock engravings and cairns to ancient roadways and battlefields, from the tumulus at Haug by the shores of Karmsundet just north of Hafrsfjord, to Kaupang in Vestfold, from Raknehaugen Barrow in Ullensaker to the rune stones at Vang Church in Valdres. On these trips they immersed themselves so deeply in the world of the sagas that on one occasion, after they had pretty much cleaned out a roadside hotdog stall, Daniel had burped contentedly and said, ‘The King has fed us well.’