I have sometimes wondered what it must have been like for Jonas Wergeland to be imprisoned – a man used to travelling, to constantly changing his outlook, and then the same slice of the world day in day out, year in year out, broken only by day release, the odd outing: a life in which everything was done according to a strict timetable, so that you felt you were perpetually waiting for a tram. To the best of my knowledge, Jonas Wergeland has never complained. And Norwegian prisons are, of course, among the best in the world. I don’t know much about his day-to-day routine, although some information does slip out, a drop here and there in the papers at yearly intervals. A number of these have, for example, remarked on the lacquer casket – displayed in his cell like some sort of sacred relic – in which, word had it, he kept an ice-hockey puck, a round silver brooch and a slightly imperfect pearl. He allegedly spends his free time – under supervision – in the woodwork room, hard at work on a fresh copy of the Academic’s dragon head. On a couple of occasions, while out on day-release, he appears to have visited sports grounds where – and this may surprise a few people – he has practised throwing the discus.
Apart from his mother and his Aunt Laura, for a long while only his little brother Buddha and his daughter Kristin visited him regularly. As far as I know, Buddha’s conversations with his brother in the visiting room concerned such things as the archery in Kurosawa’s films or the new kites he had made, which could fly higher than ever, or the round twelve-man tent he had put up in the garden out at Hvaler, a perfect ger which he planned to live in, even during winter. With Kristin, who would soon be a teenager, Jonas did not talk much; for the most part they spent their time drawing – trees mainly, but other things too, or possibly the trees simply evolved into other images.
Other than that, Jonas Wergeland refused to see anyone. Even Axel Stranger, one of the few people to speak up for Jonas in court was apparently denied access.
During the week in which the woman filled the turret room with her almost unsettlingly powerful presence, I spent my days reading through the stories I had scribbled down the evening before. Sometimes I also hooked my own little tales onto the bigger ones, adapting them to her style. In the beginning I did all of this with mixed feelings, like someone relaxing their initial insistence on originality, but after a while it dawned on me that something unique can also be created out of other peoples’ thoughts and ideas. I was gradually beginning to look upon us as a team: two individuals narrating with one voice.
As I say, it was evening, Maundy Thursday. There was less air traffic than usual. Only now and again did a plane take off or land, lights in the darkness that we both followed with our eyes while she drank water, I coffee. ‘How idyllic,’ she said every time, at the sight of the landscape beyond the window, the heights of Holmenkollen glittering in the distance. ‘You should see where I come from, the want and the torment.’ For once she helped herself to something from the refreshments I had put out, a couple of grapes from the fruit bowl.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just have to remind myself that I am back in paradise.’
I have to admit that more and more often I caught myself wondering about her, about who she was. She was of indeterminate age; she could have been anything from thirty to fifty. Yes, that was the word: indeterminate. Dark. And I kept asking myself: how did she know all this? What powers was she in league with? Had she learned these things from other people or had she been there herself? There was something about this blend of seemingly objective observer and eager participant that both confused me and made me immensely curious. On the one hand, she related her tales with lofty detachment, dreamily, as if she had suddenly forgotten that she was talking about a real, live person. On the other hand, I sensed a reluctant, but deep, involvement, as if she knew Jonas Wergeland as well as Boswell had known Johnson or Eckermann Goethe.
I dimmed the lights, conscious of how she was gathering herself. She shifted round in her chair so that she could see out of the window overlooking the fjord, where a ship was slowly disappearing in the direction of Drøbak, lights twinkling, the shimmer of a starry constellation on a frosty night. It struck me that that ship, visible as it was only as strings of lamps, could prove deceptive, that in daylight it could turn out to be a rusting hulk. I had an idea that the same could be said of her stories, that they were not how they seemed to me at first glance.
Maybe it was time for me to reassess the myth of ‘the complex Jonas Wergeland’, she said, extending a hand to the surrounding room, in which every piece of furniture was spilling over with material about this man. And then – taking me completely unawares – she declared that Jonas Wergeland’s life was extremely straightforward, that it was his incredible simplicity that was so difficult to fathom. Just as life itself seems complicated – even though strictly speaking it amounts to no more than twenty amino acids in different constellations – so Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in creating the illusion of being a complex character by coiling his simplicity into spirals. ‘That is why you got bogged down, Professor. I know it sounds strange, but the way I see it, it is this very ordinariness that is the key to his rise to stardom. His genius, if that is the word, lay in turning this into a strength. As when a minus and a minus give a plus.’ She took some more grapes from the bowl, absentmindedly, not really aware of what she was doing. ‘Hindsight’s a great thing,’ she went on, ‘in the wake of his conviction there was no shortage of people coming forward to point out that there obviously had to be something suspect about a man who could bring an entire nation to its knees; that no one could be surprised if such a person had an inherent demonic streak. But I ask you, Professor: what if the reason for his success as a seducer lay not so much in evil as in emptiness? In the tendency which all people have for filling the emptiness with substance. And the greater the emptiness, the greater the substance.’
The Interpreters’ Kaiser
This leads me on quite naturally to the next tale – because I have not yet spoken of the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Not that I have unconsciously been wishing to put it off, since it is so dark, overshadowing all else, but simply because only now does this part slot into place, even though everything is in fact interwoven with everything else, just as in the Academic’s carvings. Each story can only really be told by telling the lot.
It was night, and Jonas Wergeland was standing with a power saw in his hands. With one part of his mind he could see the inordinacy of the situation, saw himself from the outside, like a character in a low-budget melodrama. And one that dealt with the most primitive of all impulses: revenge. An eye for an eye. So bloody theatrical, he thought. Gabriel was asleep in a bunk down below, helped along by a half-bottle of whisky. Jonas could hear him snoring all the way up here on the deck. He was on board the lifeboat Norge, a weather-beaten circumnavigator riding at anchor in Vindfanger Bay, just north of Drøbak, at the head of Oslo fjord. And he was not standing just anywhere; he was standing at the boat’s heart, before the mainmast.
He almost jumped out of his skin when the power saw started up. It sounded hellish in the darkness, as if the ghost of the Blücher itself had risen again from the deep. Jonas has already cut the lanyards of the shroud on the one side, and it won’t take him long to fell the mast, he knows what to do, cuts into the wood between the mast step and the fife rail; stands there in a cloud of exhaust fumes, watching the saw blade slice through the mast. No sign of Gabriel, although by the racket you would have thought someone was driving a motorbike around the deck. Jonas watched the mast slowly topple over. Not the tearing apocalyptic crash he had expected, had possibly been hoping for, something akin to a lightning strike, ropes flying in all directions with furious whiplash cracks; instead it was all very quiet, like an echo from that time when a pine tree fell somewhere deep in a Norwegian forest, in a snow-covered landscape perhaps. The boat didn’t even tilt as the mast hit the manrope and the rail; it was more like a great soft bump. What cracked so loud? Jonas thought, nevertheless, as h
e stared at the damage he had wrought. Norway from your hand, a voice sniggered somewhere inside him.
Jonas was in the dinghy and some distance away from the boat by the time he saw a white figure come stumbling through the hatchway and heard this person grunting into the darkness, asking whether Hell’s Angels were on the go or what. It was Gabriel – Gabriel in anachronistic long johns and long-sleeved undershirt, eccentric to the bone, you might say.
‘You bastard,’ Jonas hisses. ‘You fucking bastard. I should have sunk her, but you don’t get off that easy.’
Jonas didn’t know if the elderly man on the deck could see him, knew what was going on, or whether he was too drunk. As he became more and more mired in the rigging now lying on the deck Gabriel began to declaim, as if he were on a stage, as if this too was a drama, though one more rooted in reality. ‘A knife! I am blunt,’ he ranted in a voice hoarse with sleep and booze, ‘mend me and slit me! The world will go to ruin if they don’t mend my point for me.’
Jonas realized that Gabriel had some idea of what was going on, because he remembered where he had heard those words for the first time, the ones which were now being roared out into the night.
It had all begun, as so often before, with a conversation down below in the saloon on board the Norge, not – according to Gabriel – a decommissioned lifeboat, but a true-blue royal yacht. From the minute Jonas first met Gabriel the two had been firm friends, but back then he had known nothing about this man’s profession. In his manner Gabriel was rather like a distinguished old major-domo. It was only when Jonas came aboard the boat, Gabriel’s domicile, that he discovered the man had been an actor. On one of the bulkheads, next to a sea chart of Western Samoa, he noticed some photographs which made him smile: stills from an earlier era showing Gabriel in the oddest rig-outs, wearing crowns and ridiculous-looking tights, pictures in which the faces looked like masks and the figures cast sinister shadows.
Also in the saloon was a bookshelf containing nothing but plays; Gabriel called it ‘Nemo’s library’. It held no more than about twenty volumes. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘And I could probably chuck ten of them.’
Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, Gabriel would treat Jonas to a one-man show on board the Norge, in a crossfire of unfamiliar odours – tar and paraffin, birch logs and whisky – which lulled Jonas into lounging back contentedly on the bench seat. Amid the creaking of the rigging and the gaff, in a floating proscenium of fir, pine, oak and teak and with the minimum of props – possibly no more than a walking stick and a handkerchief – Gabriel acted out, and played all the parts in, scenes from some of the world’s great dramatic works, from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Phaedra by Racine to Pirandello’s Henry IV and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape – masterpieces in which he had also performed, so Jonas was given to understand, in his formerly so renowned, now legendary, one-man theatre, ‘The Tower Company’, in its mouldering premises on Storgata. Jonas sat in the dimly lit saloon, as enthralled as a child at a pantomime, all but falling off its tip-up seat. He could well believe the story that stated Gabriel had once played an Iago so vicious that he had been beaten up after the show by an incensed member of the audience.
Every time he was on the boat Jonas would also hear Gabriel reciting a brief monologue – it might be while he was in the galley, spreading marmalade on toast, or stoking the stove, while he was winding up his fine gold pocket watch or rowing Jonas ashore; he hollered it, sang it, whispered it. ‘I recite it every day, for practice,’ he said. It was, moreover, a woman’s monologue, Ophelia’s speech after Hamlet has humiliated and tricked her, making her believe that he is mad: ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,’ and so on: lines which Jonas eventually knew by heart and hence was even more impressed by the fact that Gabriel was forever bringing out fresh nuances in them, thus presenting a different picture of Ophelia, or of Hamlet, each time – perhaps simply by dint of a pause, a cheery grin at the wrong moment, or with those hands of his, a tiny gesture which suddenly made everything clear, words redundant. But Gabriel was never satisfied, he altered the tone of every word, the set of the head, every aspect that was open to variation, year after year, as if it was of the utmost importance to come up with the perfect rendering of these particular lines. ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here…o’erthrown.’
On several occasions it was evident that Gabriel found Jonas’s open admiration irksome. One day when they were each sitting with a somewhat tardy ploughman’s lunch in front of them in the penumbra of the saloon, Gabriel broached this subject: ‘I am not – and you’ll never hear me admit this again – a great actor.’ He pointed to an ugly scar under one eyebrow, as if this were proof of his statement. ‘Why am I good? Because of you. It’s your generosity that turns my acting into more than empty gestures, cheap effects created by the contrast between words and expression. The roles lie within you, I merely bring them to life. Do you want some pickle? More whisky? Help yourself. Now listen: how much stuff do you have to put onto a stage in order to create a forest?’ His gold tooth gleamed. ‘One stick is enough. The audience’ll see to the rest. The audience is the real creative element in a play.’ He got to his feet, picked up a log, opened the stove door: ‘And this, my friend, is all it takes to give a glimpse of hell.’ He tossed the log into the stove. ‘Thanks to the audiences, people like you, I learned early on to what heights even a second-rate actor can rise.’ He crossed the room and tapped the barometer, which did not budge, however, from its perpetual ‘Fair Weather’. Then he added: ‘I’m telling you: it’s a temptation worthy of Lucifer himself.’
As the daylight waned and Gabriel lit the paraffin lamp – lending the place the air of an English pub, he turned – and Jonas saw this as a natural progression of their conversation – to the subject of Hitler, no less a person than Adolf Hitler. Gabriel maintained, and I will confine myself to a potted version of what was a lengthy discourse, that it was not in fact Hitler’s uncommon gifts which had dazzled people, but his fabulous ordinariness. Hitler had hardly any talent to speak of, but he had spied the potential of the theatre, succeeded in employing these dramatic devices on a larger scale, on society itself; he had understood how easy it was to hold a mass spellbound, that simplicity was the key, that in the depths of their souls people, everyone, especially those who felt confused – and who, in our day and age, did not feel confused? – longed for drama and ritual. ‘You have no idea how very, very easily people allow themselves to be seduced,’ Gabriel said. ‘Christ, boy, you’re not drinking anything.’
Maybe it was his very sobriety that brought out the sceptic in Jonas: ‘If you’ll excuse me for saying so, that is the biggest load of codswallop I’ve ever heard.’
Gabriel looked at him with his mismatched eyes, the one with a weary cast to it because of the scar, the other gimlet-sharp: ‘Listen here, my young friend: I’ll bet you that I, the simplest person in the world, a failed artist, could seduce folk anywhere, anytime – on Karl Johan tomorrow, if you like; I’ll prove to you that I can draw a crowd the like of which you’ve never seen, and single-handed at that.’ Then, after a pause during which they both sat listening to the roar of the stove, he added in a quieter voice: ‘Only to help you understand the forces which are contained within every human being. But which we repress. And that includes you.’
‘I bet you can’t,’ Jonas said.
‘What d’you bet?’ retorted Gabriel, quick as a flash.
‘My soul!’ said Jonas, quite carried away, as if he were on a stage.
The following day after school Jonas was walking along Universitetsgata. He was just passing the point where the Studenten ice cream parlour cast its tantalizingly aromatic Banana Split lasso across the street, when he caught sight of Gabriel outside the National Theatre, standing between the statues of Ibsen and Bjørnson, as if the old thespian had no qualms about setting himself up against these verdigris-coated intellectual giants. With all the finesse of a major-domo he had rigged up a small puppet theatre, not muc
h more than a board with a square hole cut in it, no bigger than a television screen, and this he had placed on a folding table with a little Oriental rug draped over it, behind which he could sit on his suitcase, invisible to people directly in front of the stage. He’s mad, Jonas thought. They’ll laugh in his face. But no one laughed when Gabriel Sand took up his stand in that heavily symbolic corner of the city – between parliament and palace, university and theatre. He was ready for combat; a failed actor in his ancient, dark, chalk-striped suit, with waistcoat and watch-chain and all, and on his head a bowler hat which endowed him with a look of bygone nobility. Or Charlie Chaplin.
To begin with Gabriel did nothing. He stood stock-still beside the tiny stage, and still he attracted attention. There was something about his stance, his face, his eyes that made passers-by stop and stare expectantly at the man standing to attention there between Ibsen and Bjørnson.
Jonas reaches the square just as Gabriel begins upon a scene from the fourth Act of Peer Gynt, the high point of the play, in which Peer arrives in Egypt. Gabriel, or Gabriel’s hand, makes the puppet playing Peer look up at the statue of Ibsen as if it were the Sphinx outside of Cairo: ‘Now where in the world have I met before something half-forgotten that’s like this hobgoblin? Because met it I have – in the north or the south. Was it a person? And if so who?’ And immediately thereafter: ‘Ho! I remember the fellow! Why of course it’s the Bøyg that I smote on the skull.’ From that moment on Gabriel had the audience in the palm of his hand.
Unlike the people who crowded around the little stage, Jonas stood back a little, in order to keep an eye on Gabriel where he sat on a suitcase plastered with scuffed labels, with a puppet on each hand, acting out the meeting between Peer Gynt and Begriffenfeldt, which ended with Begriffenfeldt saying that the interpreters’ kaiser had been found, before leading Peer into the madhouse.
The Conqueror Page 33