The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  In January 1988, in her capacity as Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland visited China, land of the dragon, where she was received with full honours: a point underscored by the meeting she had with Deng Xiaoping himself – a signal which did not go unnoticed in diplomatic circles, since Deng was still the most powerful figure in the world’s most populous country. The Chinese deliberately lionized Harlem Brundtland, a socialist and a woman who, by the standards of this country was, at just forty-eight years of age, very young to be a government leader. To Norwegian eyes, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s trip to China must have seemed like a modern-day Viking raid, a kind of peaceful conquest.

  During her visit, Chinese television did a feature on the Norwegian politician, and it was around this event that Jonas built his programme: which is to say, the fact that the Chinese television station totally misread the material they had obtained. Some time earlier the prime minister’s office had produced a so-called Video Press Kit on Gro Harlem Brundtland for the use of foreign television stations, to save her from constantly having to attend film shoots. This video contained footage of Gro – the first politician to become known to Norwegians by her first name – in a variety of situations, so-called stock shots, together with an information sheet, so that the stations could choose for themselves which shots they wanted to run, either to illustrate some news item on Harlem Brundtland or to use as the background to some relevant commentary.

  But the Chinese broadcast the entire video, with no commentary, to every home in China which owned a television, with the result that the viewers were treated to a total of eight different episodes in which the Norwegian prime minister played the lead, separated only by some blurb and a short title in English. For Jonas, this said everything there was to be said about communication, the divide, between Norway and China. Because to an ordinary Chinese this stream of images must have seemed nigh-on incomprehensible – a bit like a silent film about head-hunters in Borneo being screened in an igloo in Greenland. So Jonas reconstructed a typical Chinese room in the studio, and in this he showed a Chinese family sitting watching this television programme – he had been granted permission to use the actual video in this section of his dramatized documentary.

  Thanks to some authentic exteriors – footage which Jonas had had taken of the hutongs, the narrow lanes and alleyways of Beijing – and thanks to the excellent Chinese extras he found among the citizens of Oslo, mainly in the restaurant trade, it looked to the viewers as though the whole sequence had been filmed in Beijing, that the scene they were witnessing here truly was taking place in one of the little houses in one of Beijing’s countless, labyrinthine hutongs in January 1988.

  It was a sight which few viewers ever forgot: a Chinese family sitting round the table eating dinner and watching the Evening News on CCTV1, when suddenly a twenty-minute long video about Gro Harlem Brundtland starts to roll across the screen; the Chinese family are told only that this is a film about the Norwegian prime minister, no more than that, there is no voice-over: nothing, just one sequence after another, with a blank screen in between – like a series in which none of the episodes seems to follow on logically from the one before – and in which the only language spoken is Norwegian, except for the last shot, filmed at the UN Headquarters, although that doesn’t make any sense either since none of the family speaks English. Jonas showed the family chattering animatedly about the programme and occasionally laughing heartily and pointing at the TV screen with their chopsticks; the father and grandfather were particularly vocal, making loud comments in a form of Chinese few, if any, Norwegians would understand.

  There they sat, all well wrapped up in a room in which, in winter, the temperature never rose above 59 degrees, over their frugal meal, stewed celeriac with sweet soy sauce and boiled rice, in a room dotted with those characteristic lace cloths; with portraits of their ancestors hanging on the walls next to a landscape of Guillin – a place which Harlem Brundtland also visited on her trip; a calendar on a red cord by the door, a sideboard holding thermos flasks for boiling water as well as some small statuettes of the Eight Immortals and, beside it, in the place of honour, a television, a Peon or possibly a Panda with the plush cloth pulled back, and on the screen: Gro Harlem Brundtland, as if she too were one of the immortals – making, as she did, a succession of ghostly appearances in such widely disparate situations: on the rostrum in Parliament, standing outside the palace with her new Cabinet – and here the female members of the family noted that eight of the government ministers were women – in her office, at her home on the island of Bygdøy and so on, in all sorts of roles, evincing the same dynamism in each, maintaining the same breakneck pace, as career woman and housewife, as grandmother and government leader, party chief, electioneer and, not least, European: as Margaret Thatcher’s hostess in Tromsø and as a visitor to Downing Street, this sequence clearly demonstrating Harlem Brundtland’s awareness of how these days foreign policy is also a crucial factor on the domestic front.

  Here Jonas killed two birds with one stone. On the one hand he managed to show what an honour, what a compliment, what an invaluable advertisement for Norway this was: Gro Harlem Brundtland and her life shown in brief sequences interspersed with bits of blurb on – potentially at least – the 150 million televisions which were already to be found in China at that time. How proud that ought to make any Norwegian feel! How symbolic: the world’s most heavily populated country, now in the process of becoming a Great Power, of opening up – also via television – and there was Norway, and its prime minister, right in the thick of things.

  And on the other hand, Jonas managed to show how fantastic the Norwegian premier must have seemed to Chinese eyes, what a bafflingly Utopian place Norway must seem; a country where half of the government ministers were women and where the country’s leaders walked the streets and talked to ordinary people, lived in perfectly normal houses – it was almost an insult to a nation that had only just put behind it a modern-day reign of tyranny which had cost possibly as many as fifty – some said eighty – million lives, in the name of a fanatical and mistaken political strategy, in a country where you still could not criticize anyone at all openly without being ruthlessly consigned to long-term imprisonment. And after the final shot on the video, in which Harlem Brundtland was seen speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, authoritatively and in her faultless English, in her capacity as chairman of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which is to say: as the world’s ambassador for the environment, the role which forged her eminent international standing and won her awards and distinctions left, right and centre, Jonas had cut to footage of heavily polluted Beijing exteriors, close-ups of gunge clinging to walls, the smoke from briquette fires hanging heavily over the hutongs in the cold January air, as if to say that from the viewpoint of the Beijing hutong, all of this, an awareness of the environment, this video, Norway in general – a small society wrestling with the luxury problem of how to shift the balance from prosperity to preservation – did not matter a jot; the Norwegian social-democracy, its queen, or empress, included, would never be anything other than an exotic postcard passing across the television screen, an almost nonexistent, picture-book idyll – a fact which is confirmed by a look at a Chinese map of the world, in which Norway appears as a bracket the size of a fly dropping tucked way up in the left-hand corner, or Chinese history or geography schoolbooks, in which Norway is barely mentioned and only then in the greater context of Scandinavia or Europe in general.

  In a way all of this was rendered doubly strange for Jonas as he stood outside that shop window on Solli plass, gazing through it at his own programme, because he could not hear a single sound. He felt totally distanced from it, or as baffled as any Chinese viewer. It also seemed to him that she, the Mother of her Country, was trying to tell him something, although he did not know what, because no words reached his ears even though she was moving her lips.

  The hypnotic effect of this was further enhanced by the fa
ct that there was not just one television in the window; the programme was being run simultaneously on twelve different TVs set close together. Fabulous, thought Jonas. He could not help thinking of synchronized swimming: Gro Harlem Brundtland and eleven clones all mimicking her actions. Or that this duplication created a kind of pattern, a broadcasting network which also led to an accumulation of the programme’s effect. He remembered that someone had used the words ‘interwoven strands’ when speaking of the programmes shown so far. And it truly was as if this, the screens in front of him, enabled him to see the big picture, the one formed by the twelve small ones, as something else – and, most importantly, as something more complex, the sum of the individual, identical images. The figurative aspect, the pictures of Gro Harlem Brundtland, dissolved and something ornamental, abstract took its place. Like looking into a brain, he thought, seeing a way of thinking laid bare.

  Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

  Jonas Wergeland stood in the middle of an all but deserted Oslo, outside a shop window and saw again, on television, how he himself stepped onto the scene, into the room with the Chinese, in his regular spot, saw himself in a matrix of screens, divided into twelve, stood and stared, utterly captivated, at himself, twelve identical figures. I’m possessed by demons, he thought, unconsciously leaning so far forwards towards the window that he ended up bumping his forehead on the glass.

  In Transylvania

  To be a spectator. The trauma of traumas, the one thing he feared most of all: that he wished, at all costs, to avoid. Once more I shall tell the story of the radio theatre.

  East of the flats lay a wooded hill, a triangle wedged between the cliff face, Bergensveien and Trondheimsveien about which, for many years Jonas and his chums had mixed feelings. Because through this lonely spot ran the short cut to the People’s Palace, better known as Grorud Cinema. The cinema was, in fact, a trade union concern, and so from an early age Jonas was brought up to regard films, illusions, as a natural part of working-class life. You hack out stone during the day and lose yourself in dreams in the evening. Every place has its Cinema Paradiso.

  The room in which the films were shown was the same one in which Jonas had attended his first Christmas parties: a hall, in other words, reserved for boisterous festivities, and though Jonas would later be bowled over by the decor of such gems as the Klingenberg, the Sentrum and the Eldorado, in terms of atmosphere no cinema could match the stark surroundings of Grorud Cinema, with interlocking steel-framed chairs ranged in front of a grimy, battered screen upon which fantastic pictures could be discerned even before the picture had started. At Grorud Cinema children also got in to see adult films – far too often, in fact. Pretty much the only criterion for being allowed in was that you could reach up to the ticket window with your money, a window which was, as it happens, not unlike the ones at the Eastern Railway Station, so you felt you were asking for: ‘A ticket to Hollywood, please.’ Thanks to this very liberal regime, Jonas not only saw a heap of harmless films about Lassie and the sons of Lassie, but also a lot of hair-raising pictures which he definitely should not have seen, among them at least two Dracula movies in which a fearsome, bloodthirsty Christopher Lee was repeatedly seen standing silhouetted against the full moon, baring his needle-sharp fangs at some quaking woman. It was after the latest of these, Dracula Prince of Darkness, as a bunch of boys were walking back to Solhaug through the wood in a huddle, not unlike what the Romans called a ‘square formation’ – faint with terror, eyes flicking this way and that – that one lad with a rather macabre sense of humour came up with the idea that they were in the middle of Transylvania. To crown it all, the moon chose that moment to go behind a cloud, and it didn’t take too much imagination to hear the eerie flapping of bat wings and the howling of wolves echoing off the granite face of Ravnkollen, on top of which the outlines of Dracula’s black castle could clearly be discerned. From then on the wood was never referred to as anything but Transylvania. It was a mystery to Jonas how they could have whipped themselves up en masse into such a state of hysteria over something they knew to be so silly, but it just went from bad to worse. It got to the point where they were even pinching their mothers’ gold crucifixes and wearing them tucked inside their shirts when they had to walk home from the cinema in the evening. Even during the day the boys avoided crossing this spot. In Transylvania anything could happen.

  At Solhaug there were not too many years between the different ‘generations’, which is to say the groups of children who played together. Jonas belonged to the second generation. The first batch of kids were all three or four years older, and their undisputed leader was Petter, or Sgt Petter as he was known after the new Beatles album came out and, by some enviable means, he managed to get hold of a silk military-style coat – from London’s Carnaby Street itself, no less – just like the ones the Beatles were wearing on the cover of said album. Not only that, but under his nose he sported some wisps of hair which he called a moustache.

  None of the girls really stood out. Apart from Mamma Banana. Mamma Banana was what was known as ‘easy’. The sort of girl who, if she didn’t exist, every boy would have to invent. There were the wildest rumours going around about how insatiable she was and the things she found to console herself with on hot summer nights if there was no boy around. ‘Nothing can satisfy her,’ Guggen whispered to Jonas and rolled his eyes. ‘Not even a magnum bottle of beer.’ Mamma Banana just couldn’t get enough of it. Hence the name.

  Her real name was Laila, and she lived farther up Bergensveien in a tumbledown Swiss-style villa with coloured glass screening the veranda. If Jonas were honest with himself, she seemed more quiet than randy. But she was pretty; and they also had proof, of course, that those demure, downcast eyes were just a cover. One autumn, the smaller kids had been running around telling everybody that Karl’s Beetle was alive, that it rocked and rolled after dark. Jonas and his chums almost laughed their heads off at such daft notions. The Beetle in question was an ancient Volkswagen, an old banger really, which everybody called Charlie’s Chariot – an allusion to their name for what is also known, depending where one comes from, as the Plough, the Big Dipper or Charles’s Wain. It had been sitting outside Number Four for ages, covered by a tarpaulin. But the kids kept going on and on about it, so one night Jonas and a couple of the others stole down to the courtyard and hid behind some bushes. And it was true enough: Charlie’s Chariot had to be a creature of the night, because it did indeed come to life. It shook, rocked back and forth, like a giant tortoise, except that it never left the spot. Five minutes later they had their explanation. From under the tarpaulin crept Laffen and Mamma Banana. They must have managed to unlock the door and were using the car as a love-nest. But even this was not enough to convince Jonas – Laffen was an okay guy, he actually moved away soon after this, and no one knew what had really gone on under that tarpaulin. Jonas still found it hard to bridge the gap between the vulgar rumours about Mamma Banana and the happy face he had seen in the light of the street lamp when Laila clambered out of Charlie’s Chariot, as if she really had been on a trip around the stars.

  This sight did, however, fire his erotic imaginings, much in the same way as the show on the flag green in the summertime, when the older girls armed themselves with plaid travelling rugs, Bambi record-players and piles of well-worn singles and Laila danced the twist along with the others, while Jonas and the younger lads lay on the slope a little way off, pretending to be playing on grass-blade whistles. And I tell you it was some sight: sixteen year-old Laila twisting her body this way and that in a sort of trance-like dance, with hips and a polka-dot bikini top that produced such inexplicable collisions in their thoughts that the boys had to fix their eyes on the pennant outstretched in the breeze for a second or so, before again daring to scan the green sward filled with girlish bodies wriggling out of the sheer, youthful joy of being alive.

  Laila seemed to like Jonas; or at least she spoke to him. She had even been known to walk
home from the shopping centre with him if they happened to bump into one another there – despite the fact that he was younger than her. Maybe it was because he didn’t tease her or shout rude remarks after her like the other boys. Some people said she wasn’t all there, but Jonas realized – even more so after Buddha came along – that there could be well be some other reason; that she had understood, seen, something which caused her somehow to shut herself off from the world a bit. And after Aunt Laura told him that the Arabian name for The 1001 Nights was Alf Layla wa-Layla, Jonas always thought of Laila as being a princess of sorts, an initiator of tales.

  What sort of sound does a dragon make?

  One evening – in the spring of the year when he was in his first year at junior high – Jonas had gone to Grorud Cinema and happened to sit down next to Laila. No Dracula film that night but a romantic affair with lots of kissing and a couple of nail-biting scenes which moved Laila to grip his hand – whether consciously or unconsciously he could not have said. Sgt Petter also betrayed his presence in the hall with demonstrative hoots of phoney laughter at unlikely moments. Outside, after the film, he drew Jonas aside and asked if he could talk Laila into walking home through the wood. Sgt Petter was with three other boys of his own age, a trio known to some as The Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘What for?’ Jonas asked.