This interest in the Vikings went so far that their mother even took the boys down to the Akers Mek shipyard at Pipervika one day late in the autumn of 1966 to see the oil rig Ocean Viking, which was nearing completion. ‘These will be the new Viking ships,’ she said reverently, having gazed long in wonder at this giant.
And now, on a day in May of that same year – a month full of long holiday weekends – they were on the way to Stiklestad, scene of the famed battle in which King Olaf II was slain. Jonas was in a bad mood. He had been a bit tetchy – spoiling for a fight, you might say – for some time, mourning as he was for his lost love, for Margrete’s treacherous rejection of him and ditto departure from the country. They stopped for the night at Røros, also in its way a historic monument, albeit of more recent date than the Viking remains. The old mining town had an unreal beauty about it, as it lay there bathed in the copper light on the plateau, so unique that it would come as no surprise to anyone that it would soon be added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, right up there alongside the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Great Wall of China.
Each time the family arrived at a new place they followed the same two-fold ritual. The first thing they did, therefore, was not to visit the slagheaps or the old mines at Bergstaden but to march straight to the town ironmonger in a body, to check that they stocked G-MAN saws and possibly ask whether they had remembered to place a new order with the wholesaler if they had run out. In other words, half an hour after their bags had been lugged into the guest house, the Hansen family were to be found in the Bergmannsgata premises of M. Engzelius and Son, one of Røros’s time-honoured establishments, asking stern-faced and as with one voice almost, to see their selection of saws, and at least four members of the family breathed a sigh of relief when a baffled sales assistant showed them the wall on which the G-MAN saws were displayed exactly as they should be, because they knew that their mother showed no mercy if anything was missing – particularly if it was the new G-Mini saw, the very flagship of the Grorud Ironmonger’s range, called after the Gemini space rocket and equipped most ingeniously with two different blades, so that it could be used either for meat or logs, an innovation which was nothing short of world-shattering. Entire holidays could be ruined by ironmongers with negligent buyers, or shopkeepers who simply did not stock ‘the world’s best saw’. Sometimes their mother would go quite berserk: ‘Haven’t you heard about the drive to sell Norwegian-made products!’ she would shout, shaking her fists at a terrified shop assistant.
In the second part of this ritual, which was almost a way of conquering the town, they trooped after their father up to Bergstaden’s mighty white Ziir, which is to say the octagonal stone church. Their father had called from the guest house and made an appointment with the organist, so that he could at least see the famous old baroque organ that, sadly, had just broken down and would have to be repaired. Instead he was allowed to try out the brand-new, Czechoslovakian main organ. ‘Play some Bach, Dad!’ Daniel yelled up at the little door in the side, behind which his father was taking his seat, as if here too the whole point was to put the speedometer into the red. And their father played Bach while the rest of the family sat proudly in a pew in the centre of the lovely, light church, listening. Thinking back on it as an adult, it seemed to Jonas that his father made love to churches when he played. That his father made conquests of churches rather than women. That his aim in life was to play in as many churches as possible. Haakon Hansen may have been a sober-minded character, but when it came to organs he was a real Don Juan.
So, for Jonas, Norway was a network of organs and ironmongers, music and steel – he had a feeling that life itself must consist of just such a combination, of something soft and something hard. And no weekend jaunt was more perfect than on those occasions when his mother’s and his father’s interests conjoined, in places that had both a fine organ and an ironmonger stocking a wide range of G-MAN saws – plus, since this was of course their excuse for being there, an interesting rune stone.
Although Jonas liked Røros – the buildings and the landscape appeared so alien and intriguing that he pretended he was in Ulan Bator in Mongolia – he was feeling a bit despondent that night as he stood alone in front of the mirror in the bathroom. They had booked in to one of those atmospheric inns in the museum-piece street that ran down to the church, a place that had retained some breath of history from the days when Røros had been a pulsating mining community. His parents were sleeping in one room, the three children in another, with a shared bathroom.
As Jonas stood there in his pyjamas, brushing his teeth, his thoughts turned to Margrete, back to Margrete, who had chucked him; and it was then, as he was standing there, cosseting his broken heart, that he noticed the strange box on the shelf below the mirror, and it couldn’t possibly be a powder compact, so he had to open it. He was not so stupid that he didn’t recognize it for what it was. His mother’s diaphragm. He gazed at the rubber ring, at first panic-stricken because for a second or so he thought that it was the same size in diameter as the vagina and could not imagine how his little penis could ever fill such a huge space. On reflection, though, he realized that that could hardly be the case. A sudden surge of excitement hit him, a sense of expectation not unlike the thrill he had felt the first time he found his mother’s pack of sanitary towels on top of the geyser in the bathroom at home: Sheba, the name alone had set his spine jangling, set him thinking about realms which seemed as exotic and remote as the queen’s little blue face, Egyptian-like on the pack.
Jonas stands in that bathroom in Røros, staring at himself in the mirror, then drops his gaze and spies something else lying next to the diaphragm. His father’s razor. These two objects represented a mysterious beauty, like a dome and a minaret. Or something soft and something hard. Jonas felt that this situation called for a creative act, a combining of these two objects. The sight he beheld here cried out for a make-believe fight, with the razor as a sword and the diaphragm a shield clashing together in a great battle – on the field at Stiklestad for example. Alongside the razor lay a razorblade. With his fingertips Jonas lifted it, made a cut in the thin rubber membrane of the diaphragm, not very long and close up against the elastic ring, where it was all but invisible; he put the diaphragm back in its box, closed the lid. The way he saw it he had pressed a button. Now what would happen?
He lay in bed – Rakel and Daniel were already fast asleep – listening to his mother and father in the bathroom, could hear that they were in high good humour, laughing softly, that it was one of those nights. Jonas lay on his back, looking up at some knotholes in the boards of the ceiling and smiling to himself in the grey half-light. It was as if only now did he understand the wisdom of the sagas, those pithy sayings. Because if he had ever been asked why he had done what he did, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with any other explanation either, except: ‘Because it was there.’
At breakfast, while Rakel was studying the map and his father was wondering whether he would be allowed to play the organ in Nidaros Cathedral, their mother told them about a dream she had had. ‘I met a white elephant,’ she said. ‘And would you believe, I dreamed that it wrapped its trunk around me and lifted me high into the air.’ She laughed, nudged their father in the arm. ‘Pass me the jam, Daniel, and stop playing the Battle of Stiklestad here at the table at least.’
Only Jonas suspected that she might have been impregnated by that white elephant, that for several hours now a Buddha had been in the making.
Cape
Whence come our dreams? The past or the future?
It is a bright, clear morning, already warm, and he is making his way into the centre with all his senses in top gear. He strolls through the vestiges of the Company’s Gardens and on down Adderley Street, then turns right into Golden Acre, the new, ultra-modern shopping centre and there, ahead of him, is the Grand Parade, an open square with a low and not particularly impressive fortress in the background. The air is heavy with unfamiliar smells. He is ten
se, tries to shake the feeling off, but he is tense. He sees stalls selling fruit and vegetables and, on closer inspection – yes, sure enough – next to them a flea market. It all fits, he thinks. So far.
It was the first morning in a new city, and the dream had been fresh in his mind when he woke up. He had dreamed that he met a woman dressed in white at a flea market and that she had asked him the way to Greenmarket Square – he remembered this with strange clarity: Greenmarket Square. And that she was wearing a labyrinthine brooch. Jonas did not set any great store by his dreams, unless it was for their entertainment value, but suddenly it occurred to him that this could be important, not to say crucial, as far as his life was concerned. After breakfast, just to be on the safe side, he enquired at reception as to whether there was a flea market in the city. He was in luck, they said, it was Wednesday, so there was a market on the Parade. ‘Do you have a map?’ Jonas asked, not so much intrigued as perturbed.
So there he was, threading his way between tables that were, for the most part, covered in junk, when a young woman – obviously a tourist like himself and dressed in clothes that seemed far too white, giving her the appearance of an angel paying a visit to a trouble-torn world – approached him and asked him the way to Greenmarket Square. Jonas had studied the map and gave her exact directions, possibly too long and involved – partly to mask his own inner turmoil – on how to get there, all the while with his eyes riveted on her brooch, as if a much more interesting map lay hidden there, in its pattern. She thanked him with a laugh, she too a little confused. For the rest of the day he walked around in a daze, with no idea of where he was; he was simply waiting for the night, for new dreams.
No one can say that Jonas Wergeland rested on his laurels. In the midst of his triumph, in the year when the television series Thinking Big was broadcast to great general jubilation, he was to be found in South Africa, armed with a visa and the blessing of the Norwegian Foreign Office. He was on his way home from South Georgia where they had just finished shooting a programme on the old Norwegian whaling stations and had made a brief stopover on the Cape. To celebrate the success of the shoot he checked into the hotel in Cape Town, the Mount Nelson, which, with its stately atmosphere and its situation on the hillside above the city centre truly was a place fit for a lord.
The following morning he sat at the breakfast table deep in thought, reviewing his night. He had dreamed that he was a hairsbreadth from being run down by a white Ford. The grapefruit he was eating reinforced a sour-sweet sensation inside him; he also noted how the halved fruit resembled a wheel. He was possibly overreacting, but he decided to tread warily, took care when crossing the road that same morning when looking around the Bokaap district of the city, the old Malay quarter where the city’s Muslims had made their homes. Having first visited the Auwal Mosque on Dorp Street he then attacked the steep, narrow streets climbing up the slope to Signal Hill.
He was about to cross the street just next to one of the little mosques in Chiappini Street when his attention was caught by a spicy aroma. This moment’s distraction was all it took for him almost to be hit by a white Ford that came racing down the hill. The driver banged on his horn, and Jonas jumped back onto the pavement. And as he was standing there gasping for breath, with people staring at him and his heart pounding, he realized that he liked this, these sudden tie-ups between dreams and reality. He was actually more exhilarated than shaken, as if he had just come alarmingly close to an irascible rhino on a safari where everything, even those things which seemed dangerous, was safe and stage-managed.
But he did not know what to think when he was jolted out of sleep at dawn the next morning in his bed at the Mount Nelson; his testicles felt has if they had been caught in a nutcracker. He had dreamed of falling, of riding on a cable railway, dreamed that the car he was in fell down, fell and fell until it smashed to pieces on the ground.
Jonas had not been planning to do it, to take the trip up Table Mountain, he was afraid of heights. Now he had to. His whole body craved it, his throat constricted with excitement. Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? To say that he wanted to expose himself to risk, to rebel against his innate penchant – not least as a Norwegian – for security, is only half the truth. There were some moments when Jonas Wergeland actually believed that travel was training for death. Training in cutting all ties. As a boy, when they played ‘knifey’ he was never as interested in winning a bigger slice of territory as he was in the knife itself, everything which the knife, the sharp steel, represented in terms of danger and fateful possibilities; one quick slash through normality and all at once you found yourself in the complete unknown.
While still in the taxi on the way up to the lower cableway station on Taffelberg Road he noticed how his senses were stimulated by the forthcoming feat of daring, how he was seeing in a new way, spotting the oddest details in his surroundings. He also registered a flutter of impatience, as if he were keen to get this over as quickly as possible, as if he were longing to die. Once he was actually inside the gondola he forced himself to look down into the void while he thought about his dream, all the way up, for six or seven minutes, even thought he hated it, felt sick with fear. Or no, not fear. The whole experience was more like being on a high: being hauled through the air by a cable while the seconds tick away, a question of will it, won’t it, will it, won’t it; but nothing happened. Naturally nothing happened. And yet: it could have happened.
He alighted at the upper station, wandered around for half an hour on the top of the vast landmark, over three and a half thousand feet above sea level, a mountain so flat that from the sea it looked like a table covered with a tablecloth. His grandfather had raved about it. Jonas walked about, reading posters but not taking in anything of what he was reading, surveyed the view without seeing what he was surveying, looked into the restaurant and the souvenir shop without really being there, without buying anything. His feet were on solid ground, but he felt as if he were balancing on a knife’s edge. A narrow promontory that could split his life in two.
It happened on the way down. He was alone in the gondola with an elderly man who stood with one hand tucked inside his jacket, like another Napoleon. Few tourists visited the country in those days, even fewer at that time of year. The wind had risen a little, but the weather was fine; the sea sparkled brilliantly in the south, as a reminder, almost, of how rich in diamonds the country was. The man immediately struck up a conversation, he was from Cape Town himself, brightened up when Jonas mentioned Norway, showed him his stick: ‘See what that is?’ he said eagerly, nodding at the handle. And then, triumphantly: ‘Whalebone.’
It might have been because of his grandfather, but Jonas could almost foresee what happened next. The man pointed down at Table Bay and the harbour and began to tell him about all the Norwegian whale fishermen who had passed through the city. ‘Some of the harpooners lived here all year round, you know.’ The man knew something of the whaler’s life, he had delivered food to the ships when they were bunkering. ‘Canned fruit was popular,’ he said. ‘Peaches especially.’ Within a couple of minutes he had told a great deal about Norwegians and Cape Town. ‘And it’s no secret,’ he chuckled, ‘that a fair number of babies with Norwegian blood in their veins have been born here.’
They were a third of the way down. Jonas observed that the wind had freshened; the gondola was rocking noticeably. He felt afraid, and yet was conscious of how concentrated everything was, even what the man was saying. A life crumpled up into a few seconds. Usually Jonas preferred to maintain a discreet silence on the subject of Norway and whales. The images from South Georgia were still fresh in his mind: the ghost towns at Husvik and Grytviken, the rusty storage tanks, half-sunken whaling ships, a deserted flensing plan forming a slanting dance floor for the penguins. The whale population around South Georgia is still as little as ten per cent of what it once was. In some seasons nigh-on 8,000 whales could be caught in those waters. A total massacre.
‘Great city,’ the man said, peeri
ng out. ‘Shame about all the blacks, ruin everything so they do. Fucking and fighting’s all they know. Animals. Bloody animals.’ The man’s knuckles whitened around the handle of his stick.
Jonas did not feel like getting into a discussion with this character, he merely shook his head, unconsciously almost, and went on gazing at the view.
This only goaded the other man: ‘And please don’t talk to me about racism. I happen to be one of those people who rate the whale very highly among God’s creatures. I think it really is as intelligent as we are. But I’d never dream of criticizing you lot for hunting it. So you can’t bloody well blame us for doing to the kaffirs – inferior beings that they are – what you’ve done to the whale. In fact, we ought to take a leaf out of you Norwegians’ book. Do a really radical cull.’
Just as Jonas was about to protest at this comparison, out of common decency, if nothing else, the gondola stopped. A twang. Like a pizzicato note from a violin string. Something was wrong.
He tried not to look down and instead gazed out at the water, a carpet of diamonds; he had never seen an ocean sparkle like that, so bright, so dazzling. But the man was not to be sidetracked; he was visibly incensed. ‘Don’t you come here acting all holier-than-thou,’ he said. ‘We’re the same, you and I. Your lot got rich on whaling. We got rich through the blacks. You should be downright proud of Svend Foyn. Inventing the grenade harpoon puts him in the same league as Hiram Stevens Maxim, the man behind the machine-gun.’
The Conqueror Page 24