He hit her again, so hard that she fell back onto the bed. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he did it anyway. She could have stood up, walked out, but she lay where she was.
‘I want to know what happened,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything.’
‘I remember once…’
He hit her again, hated how she always told stories instead of answering.
I do not know if it is true – I have to express my doubts – because there are, there’s no hiding it, people who this selfsame afternoon, which is to say while Jonas was, as I have explained, standing in that bedroom, hitting Margrete again and again in his desperation and trying to worm out of her something he really did not want to hear – there are those who believe that, at exactly the same time, they met Jonas Wergeland on the Sognsvann line with all his skiing gear, on his way up to Nordmarka, and who maintain that he remarked, a mite flippantly, that one might just as well ski off the track a way and plonk oneself down in the snow. ‘Then you have to decide what to believe in,’ he said, or supposedly said. ‘The cold or the light?’
I ought perhaps to allow for the possibility that this really did happen, I mean that Jonas Wergeland actually was in several places at once, although – and I hate having to admit my own limitations – I only know about the one strand: the goings-on in the bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, where he went on torturing Margrete.
‘What was he like?’
‘You know him better than I do,’ Margrete said.
‘Was he good?’
‘For God’s sake, Jonas, what do you want me to say? No matter what answer I give you, it’ll be the wrong one. You’ll only see what you want to see anyway. The debt’s cancelled. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Did you?’ he repeated.
Margrete waited a long time before answering, lay gazing at the golden idol against the end wall. ‘Whatever I did, I did it for you,’ she said.
‘I’ll kill you,’ he said and struck her again, only just managing to overcome the urge to clench his fist. He was seething inside, and yet somehow distanced from it all, so he could see that he still had those dollar signs in his eyes, not a sign of avarice, but of blindness: a serpent in each eye. He struck and struck again, feeling that he was punishing himself, that this was a form of suicide, but he could not stop himself; it was like the sexual encounters of youth when the ecstasy of the moment outweighs any possible consequences that could last a lifetime. She could have put up a fight, but she did not. She lay there and allowed herself to be beaten, lay there and allowed Jonas Wergeland’s suspicions to grow and grow, curling herself up into a ball, tighter and tighter, as if practising for a future situation, or kept hoping that this would be the last time he would hit her, that this had to be done, to ensure that it never happened again; which is why, she was already willing to forgive him, even while the blows were raining down on her.
It may well be that the path from one point to another; from – say – a kitchen table in Ullevål Garden City to an office in Marienlyst, has to be understood as being the sum of all the possible paths one could take from that table to that office; if, that is, it is not the case that of all the likely routes only one becomes a reality, for one fact which a great many people can corroborate – indeed it is pretty much common knowledge – is that, no matter what happened on the day in question and wherever else he might have been, not long afterwards, during a quite unseasonal shower of rain, and after having had lunch with Margrete at the university, a lunch which was rounded off with a Napoleon cake, Jonas Wergeland presented himself at the Marienlyst office of NRK’s head of programming, to ask whether they were looking for new announcers, and thereafter – according to later rumours – not only did he come out with a story which made the normally rather reserved TV director burst out laughing, but to the latter’s question he replied that he was fed up studying architecture, fed up with the whole bloody business and felt like starting on something totally different, like television, for instance.
‘Up to now I’ve just been wrestling with shadows, now I want to work with light.’ And when he stepped out onto the street, his head buzzing with undreamed-of possibilities, he unconsciously made a kind of discus-throwing movement with his body: a pirouette combined with a leap in the air – rather like the triumphant gesture with which an exultant footballer expresses his delight at scoring an almost staggeringly unexpected, yet quite magnificent goal.
I – the professor – sat for a long time, thinking things over, after she had gone that evening. If the last thing she had told me proved to be true, then perhaps it was not so surprising for someone to ask themselves how such a person could have become the object of an entire nation’s abject adoration. This set me thinking once again about Jonas Wergeland’s description of Norwegian people – myself included – and I had to agree with him: we are a nation of laid back viewers, laid out in our Stressless chairs.
During the night, as I was frantically working to transcribe my pages and pages of notes in shorthand while her words were still fresh in my mind, I was struck by a twinge of doubt. What should I call the pages I was covering with writing: a biography or a novel? It worried me, from a professional point of view almost, that I so often – much more than usual – slid over into fiction, gave myself up so unreservedly to the narrative. Now and again I glanced around at the piles of information on Jonas Wergeland: everything from family trees, family photographs, copies of report cards and of the speech he had made on his thirty-fifth birthday, to the list of all the addresses at which he had stayed and statements of earnings and assets for every year, as well as that mountain of other notes and clippings which I had fleetingly imagined would illuminate a whole culture. It galled me to think that I had not managed to use more of all that meticulously gathered material, that almost without noticing it I had acceded to another, very different set of terms, had in some way not stayed true to an original plan. Not infrequently I had the feeling that I had been well and truly seduced by this woman’s stream of stories. Or perhaps I should say conquered.
And when the book was published – would it be her story or mine? I comforted myself with the thought that she had forbidden the use of a tape recorder, had left the final selection up to me. At the end of the day it was my memory and my associations that counted; even as her audience I was the real narrator. She told these stories so that I would understand – there were actually times when it struck me that she told them so that I could form the understanding she herself lacked.
For a long time the trial looked like being an affair which hinged upon forensic evidence – with the focus on strands of hair, fingerprints and times of day – and a prosecutor who put all of his energy into building up a viable chain of circumstantial evidence. So people went on hoping that Jonas Wergeland was innocent, as if they realized that if he were to be convicted, they too, their blindness, would be exposed. And as I say – more and more people had the feeling that somewhere along the line something was scandalously wrong, that an appalling injustice was being committed, a suspicion which seemed to be borne out by Jonas Wergeland’s inexplicable silence. Folk stubbornly refused to believe, for example, one of the witnesses for the prosecution who, in the midst of explaining something else, had launched an attack on Jonas Wergeland’s credibility, his ‘amazing fund of knowledge’ by telling the court about a red notebook in which Jonas Wergeland had apparently copied down twenty-odd extracts from books written in the nineteenth century. Even when the press followed up this assertion and showed how one saying, variations on which Jonas Wergeland had employed in countless different situations and which was even attributed to him in a Norwegian edition of Modern Quotations – ‘The essence of lying is in deception, not in words’ – that this maxim had actually been coined by John Ruskin, people refused to believe it. The more Jonas Wergeland was exposed to view, the more mud was slung at him, the more the mood seemed to turn in his favour.
And then – yet again – the media spotlight wa
s turned full-force on Jonas Wergeland: at the point when the defence had only a couple of witnesses left to call, just before the summing up, just before the jury retired to decide the verdict, he broke his silence and asked to be allowed to make a statement; and within half an hour, once the defence counsel had had a word with the counsel for the prosecution and the judge in the latter’s chamber, everything was turned on its head. Jonas Wergeland took the stand and described in horrific detail how he had murdered Margrete Boeck – in other words, he confessed.
For a society that had for so long suppressed all knowledge of tragedy, it was like suddenly being ambushed by irrationality. I remember how surprised I was myself and how at the time, drawing on information from various sources, I tried to form a coherent, if sketchy, picture of the actual course of events on that evening when Jonas Wergeland returned home from the World’s Fair in Seville. By all accounts, it was the staggering announcement by Margrete that she wanted a divorce which had started it all; she had apparently told him this as soon as he walked in the door, almost before he had managed to put down his suitcase; she wanted out, this latest trip of his had been the last straw, the fact that he had gone even though she had begged him to stay home; she was sick and tired of him putting his career, that blasted job in television, before everything else, and she did not want to discuss it, she had given the matter – their marriage, the future – careful thought; she should have done it long ago; all of this, or words to that effect, she had supposedly said, trembling all the while with a fury that had been allowed to build up to breaking point due to the fact that he had gone so far as to delay his return by several days. Jonas, for his part, was in no way chastened by this, instead he had flown off the handle – it was the shock, really – and had said some terrible, deeply hurtful things to her. They had been drawn into a spiral of spiteful remarks which, at one point, ‘in a haze of resentment’, had moved him to fetch the Luger from the cupboard in his workshop, a pistol he had had in his possession for many years – as his conscience-stricken brother, Daniel W. Hansen, had informed the police – and which, being perhaps a little overwrought, what with all the threatening letters after his programme on foreign immigrants, he had kept loaded in case he suddenly needed to defend himself. And when he came back with the pistol in his pocket, ‘only to give her fright’, according to his own testimony, she had carried on berating him, pouring scorn on him, and Margrete had a sharp tongue in her head, she could be devastatingly waspish, everybody knew that, and he had been astonished, horrified, to find how much he hated her; and when she laughed, yes, laughed in his face, he had shot her, which is to say, he had overcome his first murderous impulse and gone to her to ask for forgiveness, ask for time, ask that they wait a few days before deciding anything, maybe he would even hug her, but then, when she laughed – ‘a laugh I couldn’t bear to hear’ – he changed his mind, or rather: he lost control and banged her head off the wall, overcome by rage, and perhaps by fear, before shooting her at close range, in a split-second of boundless hatred. ‘I loved her, I wouldn’t have killed her for anything in the world, and yet I did it.’ One journalist encapsulated the case thus: ‘In the final analysis it comes down to the oldest of all questions: why do people do things against their will?’
After the adjournment necessitated by Jonas Wergeland’s confession – the place was in uproar – the counsel for the defence finished examining the last witnesses; then came the presentation of documentary evidence and statements from expert witnesses. Thereafter, the prosecuting counsel could make his final remarks, now revised and much abbreviated. The newspapers were, however, all agreed that the lawyer appointed to defend Wergeland came more into her own now, after his confession, even though all the signs were that Jonas Wergeland would be found guilty as charged. In her summation she claimed with impressive eloquence that at the moment when the crime was committed the balance of her client’s mind had been disturbed, that he had been driven into a black rage by a fickle woman’s sudden and unreasonable demand for a divorce. Fortunately, as her last witness before the final remarks, she was able to call the writer Axel Stranger – Jonas’s high-school classmate and a close friend of the couple – who, in answering the defence counsel’s questions, coolly and astutely built up a reasoned argument to the effect that the murder was totally inexplicable, that it had to be the result of a terrible fit of temper, sudden and irrational. This testimony was the defence counsel’s one strong card, and she made the most of it: she pleaded that this was not a premeditated crime, but that it was the product of a sudden impulse; she attempted in other words to have the prosecution’s charge changed from wilful murder to involuntary manslaughter. And in this she succeeded. Jonas Wergeland got off, as I’m sure everyone knows, with seven years’ imprisonment.
‘It takes imagination to understand evil,’ the dark-robed woman said when she called on me on Maundy Thursday. ‘No rational theory can explain why Jonas Wergeland did what he did,’ she said and then, after gazing for some time at the tops of the fir trees outside, she added: ‘But a story can. Or several stories. If only we can put them in the right order.’ She was still gazing out of the window, as if seeking inspiration from the night, or the comings and goings at Fornebu. I also had the impression that her stories followed one another as much according to plan as the planes, that the slightest deviation could spell disaster.
I had started looking forward to it getting dark, because I knew she would appear then. In my mind I had begun to call her ‘my muse’. I lit the fire well in advance, got everything organized, the jug of water, the glass, the chair, knew by now what would please her. She also seemed to feel at home here, she roamed soundlessly around the room while I pretended to be getting ready, so that I could eye her surreptitiously – not a little fascinated – saw how she picked up a sheet of paper here and there, flicked through a book, smiled briefly to herself. I had never seen anyone like her, dressed in such black garments, with such black-lined eyes, such a white face, such blood-red lips. And enveloped in that strange, somehow smoky, scent: a scent I had never come across before, but which as time went on I found intriguing, attractive even.
‘Shall we begin?’ she said, though without her usual brusqueness.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I ventured to ask, yet again.
‘I told you: to save a life.’
‘From punishment?’
‘Of course not. Something far more difficult. From pointlessness.’
It occurred to me that she had also come to save me, save me from the chaos in that room. Because each time she started to tell one of her stories, she seemed to cast a net over all the mounds of paper, the piles of books, and gather them up, making them hang together. And yet I was not sure. Sometimes I felt that the stream of words that fell from her lips swept me up into a spiral, and I found myself asking whether we were working away from or towards a centre. Occasionally I would think that the story she was telling lay at the heart of it all, only then to realize that it was more peripheral – other times the opposite was the case. And my understanding of Jonas Wergeland’s life grew or dwindled accordingly.
As if sensing my frustration, every so often she would resort to the idea of the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for our endeavour. ‘This is an important piece of the puzzle,’ she might say out of the blue, in the midst of a story. I knew that she was referring not to one of those degenerate, modern jigsaw puzzles consisting of machine-produced, almost identical pieces, but a real jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has a shape all of its own, means something in itself, independent of the whole. The sort of jigsaw puzzle that only a master can design. Full of traps, where two pieces that may fit together do not actually belong together, or where details on one piece mislead you into thinking that it should go somewhere else. Or where you fit a piece into place and find that it changes everything, the whole picture. ‘Imagine if you were to find a box full of jigsaw-puzzle pieces in an old attic,’ she had said on our very first evening, ‘but you don’
t know what the picture should look like, you don’t even know if you have all the pieces…’
Well, that was true enough. It felt more as if several jigsaw puzzles had been tipped into the same box. So far I had not discerned any overall picture. And I missed all the identical pieces of sky or grass, the everyday bits or whatever you want to call them. And she did not present the stories, the pieces, as if they were meant to form something two-dimensional, a picture, a rectangle, but rather as though the pieces fitted into different places in a long chain, a chain that coiled around the room, striving to take on three dimensions.
I regarded her as she stood by a desk that was close to collapsing under all that material. Despite her pallor, she had an Oriental look about her. She was reading a copy of a newspaper article published just after the verdict was announced – yet another jigsaw piece – a survey in which the majority of those asked condemned Jonas Wergeland in the strongest terms. Because the people of Norway were outraged by his confession. They had believed in him right to the bitter end, and now they felt let down. He had woven a colourful magic carpet under their TV chairs, and when he pulled it from under them they lost their balance. ‘If you ask me, I think that trial was more like a sacrificial rite in which Jonas Wergeland was made the scapegoat for the embarrassing naivety of a whole nation,’ my guest said.
I did not altogether agree. Because although after the verdict was announced some people did take part in demonstrations of the sort seen in fundamentalist countries in which protesters burn dummies, portraits or flags to show their deep contempt – in this case it was videotapes which were thrown onto the flames or down the rubbish chute – there were others, women in particular, a remarkable number of women, who wrote to Jonas Wergeland in prison to say that they understood him, that he had deserved a better wife, a woman who realized that when you lived with a genius you had to make sacrifices. Several of these women, intelligent women, made proposals of marriage to him.
The Conqueror Page 32