Jonas spied a golden opportunity and acted fast; that the Oslo Electricity Board should have come along just at this moment fitted so perfectly that his heart skipped a beat. He ran back into the building, having first given instructions to Ørn, who stayed where he was and watched, as enthralled as Ali Baba himself, as the man opened the door on the low-voltage side of the substation, positioned himself in front of what looked like a row of porcelain door handles – in fact these were the so-called ‘knives’ used to break the circuit – and checked something with an instrument that hung on a cord around his neck, then he took a reading from something else with what looked rather like a square pair of pliers – it was all a mystery to Little Eagle. The technician had just stepped from behind the double-doors in the middle, where he had been inspecting the actual transformer, when Jonas emerged from the entry carrying a torch and a packet of Gjende biscuits; by sneaking round the foot of Egiltomta in a wide arc he managed to reach the back of the little brick building without being seen. Once the man had opened the third heavy, metal door to carefully examine whatever lay behind it, even making some notes in a little book, and was about to lock up – he had swung the door to again – Ørn attracted his attention, as arranged, by shouting: ‘Hey, there’s some kids fiddling with your wing-mirror!’ The man ran to his van, and at that moment Jonas darted inside the door of the transformer station and pulled it to, as it had been before.
Over by the van, the man shook his head in exasperation at Ørn, who was thumbing his nose at him from a safe distance. He walked back to the substation, where the door in the side was still standing slightly ajar, shut and locked it. Then he drove away, shaking his fist at Ørn.
But inside the transformer sat Jonas Wergeland, and Jonas Wergeland was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky, because only on this side of the substation could he do what he had in mind. Unlucky because he was in the most hazardous part of it, a highly dangerous area, to put it mildly, for anyone who didn’t know what they were doing, a fact which he instinctively knew, as he sat there with his back against the metal door, as if perched on a mountain ledge with a sheer drop in front of him. He had all the time in the world now. He was waiting for the evening, and he waited with the patience of an avenger, because this was not just any Saturday, it was an evening on which everyone was thinking about just one thing: the radio. Or to be more exact, the eleventh and final episode of the radio series Dickie Dick Dickens, which is to say, the first of three series which had been made, a golden moment in the history of Radio Theatre, with an unforgettable Frank Robert in the leading role – not to mention the score, composed by Gunnar Sønstevold, the man who had once heard a piano crash to the ground from a fifth-floor window.
How does one become a murderer?
If you knew how hard I have hunted, Professor, hunted for this story, this incident which, like one gene among thirty thousand, could be the cause of something out of the ordinary happening to a life.
Jonas had always been a little afraid of the electricity substation which lay between the blocks of flats: a building of the old type, a little house which hummed faintly, but tantalizingly, so that children often felt an irresistible urge to put their ears to the vents in the solid doors, as if faced here with a giant shell. Generally, though, the metal sign, the red lightning bolt and the legend ‘Danger – High Voltage’ were as good a deterrent as the Phantom’s skull. Any mention of the words ‘high-voltage’ tended to touch Jonas on the raw. It was not that long since his Uncle Lauritz, that cologne-scented man of the world, the SAS pilot who had sent his nephews postcards from every corner of the globe, had been killed when his private plane flew into a power cable: an occurrence which was rendered no less nightmarish by the fact that Jonas himself had once sat, rigid with terror, in that same, flimsy little Piper Cub. No one could see how the accident could have happened; his uncle was an experienced pilot. The way Jonas saw it, it must have been the forces contained within the high-voltage cable that had, in some mysterious way, lured his uncle into steering straight into it.
And now Jonas himself was only inches away from death. He sat listening to the hum, much louder in here than outside. Powers beyond his understanding, like in the Pentecostalists’ tent. After a while Ørn came over and talked to him through the air vents in the door, as if he were a prisoner in a condemned cell. ‘Everything’s fine,’ Jonas assured him, ‘but run up to my mum and tell her I’m spending the evening at your place.’ Nobody must know that he was hiding in here. Least of all Petter, that dirty louse Petter, later to become better known, not to say notorious, as Sgt Petter.
Jonas sat with his back against the door in the gloom and waited, ate some Gjende biscuits, ran his fingers over the raised shape of the reindeer on them as if it were Braille, telling the tale of a breathtaking ride on a reindeer’s back. He must have dozed off, because all at once it was pitch dark. He switched on the torch. Right in front of him was a baffling-looking device, and behind it sat the transformer itself – that he knew – he could also hear the humming of the copper coils inside it. The beam of the torch fell on thick cables covered in some sort of insulating tape that made them look like bloated anacondas. For some reason they reminded him of a constantly recurring dream. Or perhaps they aroused his curiosity, in the same way as the pipes of an organ. It had something to do with hidden connections. He had always been interested in cables, in where they went, the whole hydroelectric network; he could hardly put a plug into a socket without thinking of one the detested Petter’s many jokes. What’s real power? To blow into an electric socket and make the current flow backwards!
Recently he had also seen something that had made him even more curious about cables. Here – and apropos of all the speculations regarding Jonas Wergeland’s penchant for round-the-world voyages – it should perhaps be mentioned that a journey need not be very long in order to be of crucial importance. A journey of five yards can be enough.
Jonas was a bit scared of Samson Berg, their neighbour right across the hall, a burly widower with a bushy beard and a cigar butt almost invariably wedged in the corner of his mouth, not unlike Mickey Mouse’s archenemy Black Pete, in fact. One day when Jonas was outside, struggling ineffectually with a cable, Berg came along and offered to help. ‘Do you want to come up and see a real cable?’ he asked once the new Bosch lamp was wired up to the bike. Jonas wasn’t altogether sure; on the other hand, he liked the idea of seeing inside another house, because although the flats at Solhaug all had the same number of rooms, stepping inside any one of them, even those flats belonging to the most boring people, was like entering an alien universe, an absolute jungle – especially because of the smell which, in Samson Berg’s case, was predominantly that of Brylcreem and cigars. The central feature in Berg’s living room was a luminous green aquarium which stood next to the radiogram, like a sort of forerunner to colour television, but that was not what Samson wanted to show him: ‘Look at this,’ he said and led Jonas over to a table on which sat a circular thing with a sort of pyramid rising out of it. At first Jonas thought this was what he had heard referred to and ridiculed as ‘modern art’. But Samson Berg worked for the Standard Telefon og Kabel factory down in the Grorud Valley, and this was nothing less than a cross-section of a cable, a circle full of smaller circles, sliced through in such a way that the circles climbed higher and higher the closer you got to the centre: a brilliant teaching aid, for use in showing the different layers of the power cable: the copper conductor, the insulating lining of oil-impregnated paper, the lead sheath and so on – all of which Berg eagerly explained to him. ‘It looks like a brooch,’ Jonas said reverently, thinking of Aunt Laura’s gem. Berg was so pleased with this remark that he brought Jonas a bottle of Solo orangeade as a reward, and while he sipped on this he was regaled with a mass of information about electricity, about the ‘lighting-up celebrations’ of the old days, when electricity came to a country village, and about the cables that lay buried in the ground, like wormballs. Above all, though, he was tr
eated to a whole lecture on the project Samson was most proud to have been a part of: the laying of the huge undersea cables across Oslo Fjord at Filtvet three years earlier. ‘You know what, Jonas, they used to talk about going around the world in eighty days – now all it takes is eight seconds,’ he said, then added: ‘There are people who think that power lies in guns, but these days it’s all about having control of the cables, the arteries of society. And d’you know something else? Soon we’ll be laying them – invisibly! – across the heavens.’
Thanks to Berg’s teachings, Jonas also knew a bit about transformers; in particular he remembered what Samson had told him about the windings, those copper coils: how, with something akin to a miraculous, electrical discus throw, they converted 5,000 volts – the standard high-voltage level in those days – to 230 volts. And even more importantly: that there was a switch somewhere inside the substation, a switch that could cut off the power to all six blocks of flats in Solhaug. I bet you can’t wait to hear what’s going to happen to Dickie Dick Dickens, Petter, you rotten devil – well, too bad, Jonas thought.
He flashed the torch over his surroundings. The big grey box right in front of him was the switch for an oil-immersed transformer, although he found it hard to believe – that a switch could be that big. Jonas had pictured it as being just an ordinary switch, something like the mains switch in a fuse box; this bulked as large as the engine compartment of a car. Cables carrying 5,000 volts, which might, in fact, have been supplied by Standard Telefon og Kabel, ran from the electricity pylons into the bottom of the switch, these first had to pass through ‘knives’ and fuses, then down into the relays and the white bushing insulators at the top of the switch. Jonas’s heart sank. He came to the conclusion that the switch must be worked by the cast-iron wheel fixed to the front of the box, because he could see the word ‘On’ printed on a red semicircle in the middle of it, and below an arrow pointing anticlockwise: ‘Off’. He tried turning the wheel in the direction indicated but couldn’t budge it an inch; he was conscious that he was now dangerously close to the cables running into the switch, 5,000 deadly volts. Although he did not know how much danger he was in: had he put his hand close enough to the connection points of any of the cables running into the switch, the current would have flashed over and he would have been killed on the spot.
Jonas sits with his back against the door. It is twenty-five minutes past eight. Up and down the blocks people were settling themselves next to the radio to listen to Dickie Dick Dickens, eager to know whether Dickie would win through to become king of the Chicago underworld, and no one was more keen to know the outcome than Petter. Hence the reason Jonas was sitting there – despite being afraid of the dark, despite the high-voltage sign. At long last he was going to have his revenge on the dirtiest, rottenest pig of them all. And if this surprises you, Professor, if you are wondering what act of villainy could possibly drive a child to plunge a whole housing estate into darkness to get at just one person, then you will have to wait, because this is not the place for the answer to that question.
Jonas sat inside something big, dark, dangerous, perhaps sensing even now that this was the fundamental situation in his life: to sit inside something totally unfamiliar, looking for the point from which one could, nonetheless, make an impact, set something in motion. If, that is, this was not a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness inside him. To become someone else, become something. He shone the torch this way and that and finally caught sight of a little red button on the side of the metal box with the wheel on the front. He edged over to it. One last chance. He knew it was foolhardy. Thought of all that tremendous power. What if he was wrong, and he dropped down dead the minute he touched that button? Or perished in a shower of sparks as the whole thing short-circuited. Jonas pictured how they would find him lying there, all charred and shrivelled, like the potatoes they wrapped in tinfoil and then forgot to take off the bonfire. He looks at his watch. At eight-thirty on the dot he presses the button. He registers the fact that he is still alive. And that something is happening with a chain and a cog, that the wheel is turning, that the word ‘Off’ is now showing on a green semicircle. I did it, he thinks. There is dead silence, the hum has stopped: it’s as if the electricity supply to life itself had been shut off. I hope you’re pissing yourself, he thought, with Petter in mind.
He could not see the result of his handiwork himself, but Ørn told him what a magnificent sight, or anti-sight, it had been; he had stood at the window watching the area served by the substation, the whole of Solhaug, being blacked out, and, far more importantly as far as Jonas was concerned, the green cat’s-eyes of the wireless sets being extinguished, at the same time as the voices died away. Fortunately very few people had portable radios, Petter certainly didn’t, and neither did any of the neighbours in his building who happened to be at home. In any case, all thoughts of Radio Theatre were forgotten in the general confusion caused by a power cut, a minor catastrophe, when people had more than enough to do just trying to find out what had happened and remembering where they had put the candles. It wasn’t until the next day that Petter was heard complaining loudly over the fact that he had missed Dickie Dick Dickens: ‘Aw, bugger it, and it was the last episode, too!’
In just a little under half an hour two men from the Oslo Electricity Board turned up outside the substation on Hagelundveien. They went into the low-voltage side first. Jonas could see the light from their torches, heard them talking to one another, muttering something about a possible overload. When they eventually unlocked the door on the high-voltage side they got such a shock, such a fright, that Jonas managed to nip between them and run up Egiltomta, which he knew like the back of his hand, before they could get a good look at him.
Word that somebody had been inside the transformer soon spread and was the subject of much comment among the residents of Solhaug – there was some talk of communists – but no one ever found out who it was. Jonas did, however, have the feeling that Petter regarded him with some surprise, as if he had discovered that Jonas was charged in a totally different way, had become a different person. In years to come Jonas would be plagued by the fear that this sweet revenge would have grim consequences – a fear which was borne out six years later when he took that walk through Transylvania with Laila. Deep down, and despite the time gap, Jonas always felt that the assault on Laila was prompted by something he had done, that it came as a consequence of Petter’s missing the final episode of a radio detective series.
But his immediate feeling was one of pleasure. He caressed the thought of how pressing such a little button could do so much, how easy it was to make an impact on so many people at once in the society in which he lived. This was the first time on which Jonas Wergeland synchronized people’s attention. Later he would do so again, on a much bigger scale, the only difference being that then people, the inhabitants of an entire country, would voluntarily put off lights so that they could sit in semidarkness and switch off from everything else in order to concentrate on the light which his television programmes bestowed on them.
Brain Power
I have the suspicion, after having told such a story, that I have changed Jonas Wergeland’s life completely – and that I ought, therefore, to tell all the stories I have told so far over again. However that may be, this brings us to a new beginning:
There are various conflicting accounts as to how Jonas Wergeland got the idea for his great television series, but all confusion on this score is dispelled if one goes back to an incident in the mid-eighties when Wergeland, frustrated by his respected – but rather isolated – position within NRK, granted himself a ‘thinking trip’ – if, that is, this was not an instance of sheer escapism, a sudden and desperate urge to get away, seeing that he felt totally flat and longed, in a metaphorical sense, to touch a high-voltage cable. Having completed a feature in New York on Arnstein Arneberg’s and Per Krogh’s work on the Security Council Chamber at the United Nations building, he embarked, hopefully – or as tr
emulously as someone making their first parachute jump – on this quest, travelling almost in a loop around the earth; but not until he was flying in over Tokyo was he struck by the sense that something big was about to happen, as if it was because of him that they landed – as if he had been sitting dozing, then suddenly shouted to the pilot: ‘For God’s sake, go down here!’ It might also have had something to do with the fact that they were put into a holding pattern, that they had to circle over Narita airport several times, and as they were coming in to land Jonas felt a fluttery, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he were being dragged down by an airy maelstrom towards a centre, a gravitational point for which he had always been searching.
How does one become a conqueror?
The sight of all those cables and wires hanging in midair, so unlike Oslo – like being inside an enormous transformer – confirmed his feeling that it must be possible to change one’s way of thinking in such a metropolis; Jonas walked around, rejoicing in the fact that, as always in a new place, he had to be guided by his nose, ears, mouth, eyes; that for a few days he would need to recapture the sensual intelligence he had relied on as a child. And so he wandered, at all times strangely on the alert, into the abundantly-stocked stores, with sales assistants bowing and murmuring ‘Irasshaimase?’ at every turn; he breathed in the aroma of noodle soup behind black curtains in little bars, peeked inside garishly lit parlours where hundreds of pachinko machines filled the air with their ear-splitting din, watched people on the underground standing totally engrossed in erotic comics, gazed expectantly at tempting displays of wax food in restaurant windows before stepping inside and letting his taste-buds decide for themselves, put his fingertips to those flimsy walls of rice paper which reminded him of the model gliders of his childhood, stood outside in the evening gawking in disbelief at streets where shops rigged out like pure son et lumière extravaganzas sat right across from tiny, moss-grown temples that might have been portals to unknown regions. And all the while he was instinctively looking for a centre, with no success, because Tokyo was the most bewildering city he had ever visited, it had no obvious centre to it, or rather: it had so many centres, below ground too – Shinjuku station, for example, or the underground Yaesu arcades. Jonas had the feeling that forces were sweeping him round in a spiral and that the centre was everywhere and nowhere.
The Conqueror Page 37