It was as with all great theatre: something invisible was made real. By some magical means Gabriel transformed Oslo, the surrounding streets and buildings into Cairo, and the spectators – Bjørnson and Ibsen included – into the inmates of an insane asylum. More and more people stopped to watch, even though they really didn’t have the time; they were caught and held by Begriffenfeldt, which is to say the puppet on Gabriel’s hand proclaiming to the insane, which is to say the audience: ‘Come forth all! The time that shall be is proclaimed! Reason is dead and gone. Long live Peer Gynt!’ For a moment, because of the two hands inside the puppets, Jonas was reminded of another drama: the spectacle of two snakes twining themselves around one another.
A small crowd now filled the square in front of the National Theatre, forming a semicircle that spread far out onto the street, all eyes fixed on a puppet theatre no bigger than a television screen; people jostled one another to get a better look, as if the oriental rug underneath the stage was a magic carpet that could carry them anywhere. Gabriel would later say again: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them. Everyone has this longing inside them for something that’s a bit different.’
Jonas stood there thinking. Above all he was struck by how simple it seemed, with what uncanny ease Gabriel had hypnotized this host. Jonas found himself despising the general public, the folk round about him, not only because they had caused him to lose the bet – or rather, make a mistake – but because they could fall for something so transparently false: puppets with hands stuck inside them. Then he remembered how quickly he had allowed himself to be taken in by Gabriel. If I’m honest with myself, I’d probably be the first to stop in front of something like this, he thought, incredulously witnessing the way in which Gabriel Sand held more and more passers-by spellbound, it was quite a crowd for a normal weekday.
Later, Jonas himself would enjoy the goodwill of the public at large. Right at the start of his television career, when he was working as a television announcer, he discovered how the public could credit him with qualities he did not have. Just before he was due to announce a harrowing programme produced by the NRK foreign affairs department, he had got something in his eye and had to blink more often than normal. Viewers thought the programme had moved him to tears. Which meant he must be a sensible, soft-hearted person. Big splash in newspapers and magazines: ‘The announcer who dared to show his feelings.’ People showered him with sympathy. It was brought home to him then: you don’t win your uncommonness, you have it bestowed on you as a gift.
As he watched, Gabriel showed Peer meeting and listening in turn to Huhu the language reformer, the fellah with the royal mummy on his back and the Minister Hussein – Gabriel swiftly slipping one puppet after another onto his one hand; really beautiful puppets which Jonas realized he must have made himself – with Peer’s words of advice having increasingly bloody consequences, though in the end he is, nevertheless, wreathed by Begriffenfeldt with the words: ‘Long life to Self-hood’s Kaiser!’ Just at that moment the police appeared, as if they were guards in a madhouse, an asylum in total uproar.
It was a memorable sight. The little theatre and the crowd of people. That was all it took: a piece of wood with a square hole cut in it, two arms and a voice. And to top it all off: the police. As if a dangerous crime were being committed.
The policemen ask Gabriel – very politely, it must be said – to pack up and leave because he is causing an obstruction. Gabriel, for his part, starts winding them up, making fun of them, doing a sort of Charlie Chaplin turn, imitating the way the policemen are standing, crawling between their legs, miming a plea for help to the statues of Bjørnson and Ibsen. When, as the police see it, he refuses to comply with their request, he is driven off in the patrol car to Møllergata police station – amid a chorus of booing from the crowd. People have forgotten that they ought to be getting home, that they have to catch the bus or the train or the Nesodden ferry. They want to see more playacting.
Jonas sat in a dinghy in a bay just north of Drøbak, rowing slowly towards the shore. Without its mainmast, the old lifeboat looked like a floating chest, or a bin, a real loony bin. He saw how Gabriel, this man who had once stood on Karl Johan’s gate and seduced a crowd of people with nothing but his voice and a bit of hand-waving, had been caught in his own net, become entangled in the ropes of the sabotaged rigging. Jonas remembered his grandfather’s lovely model of the Colin Archer lifeboat, and with that thought came the realization that this too resembled a puppet theatre. And Gabriel’s sleep-sodden cries reinforced this illusion: ‘I am all that you will, – a Turk, a sinner, – a hill-troll –; but help; there was something that burst! I cannot just hit on your name at the moment; – help me, oh you – all madmen’s protector!’
Jonas knew he would never see him again. ‘You bastard,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll never forget you. More’s the pity.’
Gabriel was standing stock-still on the deck now, looking like the ghost from Hamlet in his white underwear. What a noble mind is here o’erthrown, Jonas thought. Gabriel Sand. An impostor. And yet: how long had it taken for Jonas to see through him? A man who ate his meals on board a boat every day, at a table fitted with a fiddle rail, with a bookshelf constructed in such a way that the books would not fall off in heavy weather – and who had never put to sea in his boat. Who kept a logbook for the lifeboat Norge, even though he had never tethered up to a buoy, had never been south of Drøbak, had never been to any of the places or done any of the things he had described so vividly: killer whales off the Canadian coast, Princess Aroari of the Marquesa Islands, the plums of the Azores, storms around Cape Horn. It was all a bluff. The stupid idiot couldn’t even swim. Jonas rowed away, still annoyed with himself. How could he have been fooled, and for so long, by such a character?
Gabriel’s white form grew smaller and smaller. This was the final scene. Jonas had the impression that he was acting now, too. That he wasn’t really hopping mad. That Gabriel appreciated this stunt, this act of rebellion, this parting. That he had actually been waiting for something like this to happen for three years. That he was pleased, regarded this as a worthy ending, a test-piece that proved that Jonas had completed his apprenticeship.
For Jonas it was, nonetheless, a relief to see the boat’s rigging destroyed. He felt as if a net had ripped apart and he was, at long last, free.
Due East
Perhaps once, perhaps twice in their lives, most people will find themselves undergoing a radical transformation. You could walk out onto a plain and leave that plain as someone else entirely. You have a sudden urge to start anew, with a different set of values, quite different ideals. A war can have that effect on a person. For Jonas Wergeland, who had never been to war, it was a spell in what he was inclined to call a loony bin that did it.
I am talking, in other words, about the year he spent doing his national service, with N Brigade, and more specifically about an incident which took place just after they had completed their ABC survival course at Skjold, up north in the Indre Troms region, a course geared not towards anything as innocent as mastering the alphabet but to learning how to survive under extreme circumstances: in the case, that is, that Norway were to be attacked by atomic, biological or chemical weapons. For two weeks Jonas Wergland dealt, in theory and in simulated practice, with the sort of possible scenarios which few people dare think about; he had, for example, to plot out on a sheet of paper those zones which would be affected by radioactive fallout; he learned how lethal bacteria and viruses could be spread most effectively over the widest possible area, and he tramped about in protective clothing and a mask like a spaceman, pretending to establish the presence of such fiendish inventions as sarin or mustard gas.
Maybe it was the ridiculous skills he learned on that ABC course, this illusion of being able to survive even if the world went due west, that drove Jonas to go off into the wild; as if, after all those staggering, hypothetical possibilities, he sorely needed to scrape about in a piece of concrete Norwegian reality, the soil he was i
n fact supposed to defend – or maybe he simply wanted to confront the foe that was forever being waved in their faces and at whom they had for so many months been haphazardly firing blanks: an adversary they never saw but who, according to high command, was out there somewhere and might at any minute start making life hell for them. No one could be surprised if a man – frustrated at being charged with an important task, but one which is never clearly defined – suddenly goes off willy-nilly, in hopes of meeting this mysterious foe. In case you have not yet guessed it, Professor, I am once more about to relate the story of the radio theatre.
Jonas had a weekend’s leave. He took advantage of an army recreation scheme and the fact that he was friendly with the officer in charge of transport to borrow a jeep on the excuse that he and another soldier were going to camp out for the night in Dividalen National Park, a little way to the southeast. His mate hopped off, however, a couple of miles down the road, outside his girlfriend’s house in Andselv, with instructions on what to say to the company commander on the Sunday evening. Jonas then headed towards a much more remote destination than Dividalen, namely Alta in the far north which, despite the long drive, he passed right through before cutting south again and arriving, after driving for a couple of hours through mountain birch and rosebay willowherb, at Kautokeino where, on a whim, he made a sharp swing to the left, onto a narrower road which he followed for about six or seven miles, until he came to Av’zi. Jonas parked the jeep, got out, shouldered his rucksack and struck off resolutely into the wild, bearing eastward, as if intent on doing the exact opposite of going due west.
He made his way up onto the bare, open plain at the foot of Muv’ravarri, skirted round Gar’gatoai’vi and eventually, after an unexpectedly tough march over rocks and moss, bogs and streams, reached the eastern side of Stuora Oaivusvarri, where he pitched camp 1,600 feet above sea level. The most incredible thing so far was that he had not encountered the notorious Finnmarksvidda mosquito. All he could hear was a vague humming; there was something there, all the time, but hidden from view.
Having dined on combat rations from his Readiness Support Package, also known as ‘dead-man-in-a-tin’, and boiled coffee, Jonas settled himself outside his tent and gazed at the sun, which was slowly sinking, but which, here in the third week of July, would still stay above the horizon all night. He felt limp. Drained. As if the radiation he had been dealing with in theory had in fact permeated his body. Although he had actually been feeling like this for some time. Ever since Viktor’s accident. That chunk of ice falling out of the blue. Jonas sat there, gazing at the landscape, struck by how remarkably desolate it was. This must be the closest one came in Norway to a desert. And how still it was. Like finding oneself in a world after a nuclear war, he thought. Was this really his country? All of a sudden it seemed so totally alien that Jonas’s interest perked up again. He knew he would encounter something of crucial importance out here, but not what form it would take. It merely lay there, latent, like a hum, behind everything else. In his heart of hearts he may have been hoping to stumble upon some inconceivably massive diamond find. Or better still: a chunk of ice with a pearl ear-stud inside it.
The next morning he wended his way further eastward, through unfamiliar terrain where the ground was covered mainly by moss and heather, dwarf birch and greenish-grey willow, with a scattering of rotting reindeer antlers. He soon mastered the technique of planting his army boots on the tangled roots of the willow trees when crossing streams. Although the landscape seemed monotonous it was not flat, but constantly rose and fell, a fact that made it hard to get his bearings. The soggy peat sapped his strength, and the walk was not made any easier by the heat, with the temperature in the mid-eighties. And yet you’re actually inside the Arctic Circle, Jonas told himself. If you were to follow this same line of longitude you’d be walking across the ice on Greenland, so help me. And that is absolutely true: anyone wanting to see how much Norway owes to the warm embrace of the Gulf Stream need only go for a hike across Finnmarksvidda.
At long last he reached the top of Lavvoai’vi and sat there surveying the view all the way across to the snow-covered peaks on the coast, feeling that he had much the same perspective on things as the rough-legged buzzard swooping over his head. But it was not an outlook he was after: it was insight. He scanned the surrounding scene, feeling that he was at the very centre of the country, that to be sitting here on this hilltop on Finnmarksvidda must be the equivalent of being on Ayer’s Rock, the red mountain in the heart of Australia, a place where it was so forcibly impressed on one that every landscape has a story to tell. Sitting there, staring out across the boundless plain, he realized that it was true what some people said: Norway was one big, protected national park. And it is not a bad idea to pause for a moment here to consider Finnmarksvidda, Professor, because what can you know about Norway unless you have visited Finnmarksvidda? Not Jotunheimen, but Finnmarksvidda is Norway’s primeval home, as well as an outer limit of the imagination, a sort of Timbuktu within the country’s borders. Not until he was sitting on the top of Lavvoai’vi, with a view that ran full-circle, did Jonas really appreciate a fact which he had come across so often in school textbooks: that an incredible ninety-six per cent of Norway was virgin territory. Only now did he see how desolate, how wild Norway actually was, how uncivilized, how fundamentally uninhabited. He surveyed the landscape, feeling for a moment that it exuded an emptiness that his imagination could never hope to fill. ‘Holy shit,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You could dump a small European country here, just on this deserted plain round about me, and all the millions of people in it.’
Jonas sat on the top of Lavvoai’vi, next to a trigonometric point, a pole, rather like a seamark in a sea of moss, lichen and stone and almost had to hang on to it, so mind-reeling were the prospects. Because there was something about this vast, untamed wilderness which also helped him to see the reason for the golden age which his country was living through: the gift granted to Norway was that of remaining untouched. Just as Europe had been thrown into chaos during the age of the great migration, while Norway was enjoying a time of plenty and prosperity when it could relax and consolidate its glorious Viking Age – so it was now, too. They had entered upon a new era of great migrations, and once more Norway had succeeded – again thanks to its strict legislation – in remaining untouched, if you didn’t count the handful of poor refugees who slipped through the needle’s eye, and a few thousand immigrant workers. It could, in fact, be on the threshold of a new golden age, while the rest of the world lay bleeding.
But – he could not rid himself of this thought – this was also his chance. The country was wide open to conquest. The whole of Norway lay spread before him like an enormous blank page.
This was also why he had, perhaps unwittingly, made for this spot. He did not want, like Nansen, to cross anything, or to reach some far frontier; he wanted to work his way inwards, into something, in towards a vital centre: the riddle that is Norway. If there was one place where he had a chance of finding an unknown – nay, unlikely – Norwegian reality, a vital source of inspiration, it had to be here. In the emptiness. He took another compass bearing, still due east, towards Urdutoai’vi, and tramped off, first down, then straight ahead, alongside lakes and over marshes dotted with reddish-orange cloudberry maps. Still no mosquitoes. He kept a sharp lookout in all directions, with the monotonous call of the golden plover in his ears. He was brimful of optimism, knew that there was a part of Norway that could not be pinned down on a map. Here, right here, at any minute, he might run into what he sought – a lion or, if nothing else, a diamond the size of a pinhead.
It was still abnormally hot. Plump white clouds, nigh-on identical to one another, glided across the sky at regular intervals, their bottom edges flattened out as if they were being pushed across a glass surface. Jonas felt an incipient tightening of his balls. Late in the afternoon the humming sound grew ominously louder, so much so that the whole plain suddenly sounded like a camouflaged gener
ator. Jonas kept looking round about as he pitched camp on a knoll in a little hollow between Lavvoai’vi and Urdutoai’vi, right next to a stream. The sun was hovering low on the horizon, and he was on his way into the tent to unroll his sleeping bag when the ground began to shake, and at that same moment he heard the rumbling, it sounded as if a tank was driving straight for him.
He spun round. He had known, and yet not known. It was a dragon. At first he was disappointed. The next instant, delighted. Delighted because it confirmed that all his ingrained ideas about the world, everything he had learned in his twelve years of schooling, was wrong, or at any rate not the whole story. He also had time to think that Daniel ought to have been there, to see that Jonas was right: the Norwegian lion was not a lion. The creature in the national coat of arms, the creature that lived at the heart of Norway, was a dragon.
How did this dragon look? It was transparent. By which I mean, the dragon was made up of mosquitoes, millions of mosquitoes. It was formed, quite simply, out of the most common of all things. That was the secret: at the heart of Norway lived a dragon, a monster composed of small fry. And it emitted a shimmering glow, like the Northern Lights, or like something electrified. And here – at last – Jonas found the answer to the question of what sound a dragon makes. It hums. Like a transformer. He should have known it, because the dragon is a creature that has mastered the art of transformation.
For this reason he only saw the dragon clearly, in all its unnerving gruesomeness, at the second when he turned around – the next moment it was transparent, a dense swarm of glistening mosquitoes. Only when he had had his back to it had the dragon assumed its real form. Consequently there is only one way to slay a dragon, and Jonas instinctively knew how, had learned this skill long before, was not even surprised to find hidden strands in his life suddenly revealing themselves in this way, a little like the secret writing they used to do as children, which only became visible when you held the paper over the cooker ring. A dragon could only be killed by a discus throw, a swift, surprising pivotal action. Jonas stood with his back to it, picked up a flat, almost circular stone, a good two pounds in weight, stood with his back to it and gathered himself, hefted the stone disc in his hand, made a couple of swings, heard the hum turn into a roar, whirled round and threw the stone with all his might, like a discus, so that it struck the dragon right between the eyes, with a noise like that of a vase smashing, before it had time to become transparent. The dragon fell down dead, lay revealed as a true dragon in all its banality, as seen in countless pictures. It reminds me of something I’ve seen before, Jonas thought to himself, only it’s bigger.
The Conqueror Page 34