The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  The collision left no memory of a bang in Jonas’s mind. It was more of a soft pop, like the sound when you squash a tin can, accompanied by a sickly smell, as of tainted meat – he had no idea where that came from – and when he at last looked out of the window, the car was sitting nowhere near where he would have expected it to be. Only later did he realize that his body had, of its own accord, braked sharply – he remembered catching a glimpse of Kristin’s cuddly toy flying through the space between the seats – and that, almost simultaneously, he had managed to swerve out of the way, to the left, because his car had been hit in the rear end and sent flying, spiralling, round to the right, though without being spun off the road. Some guardian angel must also have been watching over the other driver, who escaped with nothing worse than an injured knee. It transpired that he had dozed off for a few seconds, but that he too, when he woke up, had managed to decelerate enough, although he did lose control of the car. Naturally the incident made the headlines in several newspapers. There was no way Jonas Wergeland could be involved in a crash on the E6 without it being duly reported by the media; it was even believed that he had saved the other man’s life, thanks to his admirable driving skills. But none of this is of any relevance to our undertaking, Professor.

  What is really interesting here is the space in between: what happened when Jonas Wergeland’s car had come to a halt after the crash, before other cars arrived on the scene and help was called. Jonas has been out cold for a few seconds, and the first thing he registers, before he opens his eyes, is that his fingers are touching glass; he instinctively thinks that he has gone blind, that he is unhurt, but blind, that he is going to spend the rest of his life in the dark, the one thing he dreads most of all. And as he opens his eyes and realizes that he is not blind after all, it strikes him, with the force of a blow that he has been blind. That Margrete is seeing another man. And that man is Axel.

  He was unhurt, but his world had changed. The dramatic occurrence here was not the collision between the two cars, but the collision inside his head, the thoughts which, by dint of chemistry, by dint of physics, had been released only in order to become all tangled together in a shower of sparks. This was his gift, to be able to take two unrelated elements and make a story out of them, a story that was greater than the sum of its parts – and now, as if there were a curse attached to it, a price he had to pay, he had been forced to use this gift on himself, his own life; the realization ran round and round inside his head in a merciless loop, as if spelled out by 9,000 light bulbs on an electronic headlines sign: It was not just him and Margrete; it was not just the two of them, there were three of them. Margrete was cheating on him; she was having an affair with Axel. And he knew something else, too: it had been going on for some time. They had had every possible opportunity, for years. The conditions had been perfect. So perfect that there could be no doubt. It was this, the fact of Margrete’s infidelity – together with the recognition of his own inadequacy – that crashed into him, made him feel like dropping down dead, even though he had sustained no physical injury. In his own eyes he had been a past master when it came to fooling people. And all the time it was he who was being made a fool of, betrayed. This must be what they call being hoist with one’s own petard, he thought to himself later.

  Jonas felt queasy, sick to the marrow, managed to open the car door and crawl out. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said when the ambulance men came running over to him, ‘I’ve just been taken for a ride.’

  I – the professor – worked long into the night after my unknown guest had gone, writing like a soul possessed. It would not be going too far to say that I too was involved in a collision of sorts – her tales crashing into mine. I saw, at any rate, and quite suddenly, a wealth of unexpected cross connections in my own material: details, aspects which I had to weave in before they slipped my mind. I flitted purposefully to and fro in my turret room, stopping at one table only the next moment to dash over to another, possibly not altogether unlike a cook in a hotel kitchen, who has to keep an eye on a whole lot of things at once: sampling a little here and there, lifting food from all the pots and pans to make up one large and mouth-watering platter; I leafed through papers, looked things up in books, flicked through filing cards, listened to tapes of interviews I had forgotten I had. And I wrote, scribbling things down as fast as I could, as if the notes I had made while listening to her – which covered what she had actually said – were nonetheless only half the story. After one of her visits I rarely got to sleep much before dawn, and when I did finally tumble into bed in order to be reasonably fresh for our evening meeting, I was filled, exhausted though I was, with a strange kind of happiness.

  Nonetheless – for all that I was thankful, or perhaps simply because of the congruities which I was discovering in my own material – her way of telling things was starting to annoy me: there were, for example, many things which she had hinted at, whole stories, which she had never mentioned again. She had given rise to expectations within me that were not being fulfilled. I began, quite simply, to suspect that she did not have the overview she claimed to have, that she frequently lost track of threads in the loom she was setting up. That her semblance of omniscience, in fact, masked her ignorance.

  The same went for the sequence of the tales, which had confused me so much to begin with because of the daring leaps from one stage to another in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Now all at once I found myself getting exasperated because her leaps were not radical enough; more and more it seemed to me that the ‘links’ she used to hook one story up to another were completely arbitrary, that they were by no means as carefully considered as she maintained. Sometimes I almost became quite angry with her when, having finished one story, she would move on to some pretty predictable tale rather than the one I was expecting, or one which – on the basis of my own knowledge – I might have suggested, a far more exciting leap. It struck me that I could almost have made a better job of it myself. I had the urge to alter her sequence but decided to keep my part of the bargain. There was also something else which prevented me from making any objections; it was becoming increasingly clear to me, from her ardour and her agitation, that she had something – a great deal – at stake here. I was actually afraid to distract her. She could be knocked totally off balance. On a couple of occasions the evening before I had had the distinct impression that, underneath the apparent composure, behind the supposedly so carefully formulated stream of words, she had long since lost control.

  It also surprised me that she had not mentioned the book about Jonas Wergeland which had excited more interest than anything else so far: the award-winning biographical novel The Seducer – a book considered to be not much more than a starry-eyed hagiography – which had really put the cat among the pigeons, both because it went totally against the stream of broadsides being levelled at Jonas Wergeland around the time of its publication, and because its author remained anonymous – for a while at least.

  Naturally, thanks to the unscrupulous, stop-at-nothing tactics employed in journalism today, it was not many weeks before the author was exposed – I almost said stripped bare – with headlines on the front page of some of the tabloids so big you’d have thought Martin Bormann had been tracked down in Norway. She turned out, in fact, to be Kamala Varma, a woman of Indian extraction, an anthropologist who had eventually become a Norwegian citizen and who wrote and spoke Norwegian as well as anyone in the country. Despite all the media coverage, even now very little is known about her. No one, as far as I know, can, for example, say to which caste she belongs. Although this probably didn’t matter so much, since she came from a prosperous, westernized family in Delhi and had taken her degree in anthropology at Columbia University in the United States. Kamala Varma undoubtedly saw herself as a citizen of the world. It was said that she came to Norway because she had seen Song of Norway, of all things, on one of the TV channels in New York. And despite the fact that this is – it’s only fair to say – the most awful film, it did leave her
wanting to see Norway, especially the Norwegian countryside, so when she got there the first thing she did was to visit all of the exotic locations from the film: Bergen, Geiranger and, not least, Ulvik in Hardanger, where Toralv Maurstad and Christina ride up the sides of the valley on a Norwegian pony. This may have been Kamala Varma’s first impression of the country, one which would always colour her view of it: that in Norway she was walking, or should one say riding, into an idyllic fiction that would never end.

  The interesting fact, for our purposes, is how she came to meet Jonas Wergeland; and even though this is still a little unclear, I have been able to establish that during the latter half of the eighties Kamala Varma was conducting an anthropological field study at the very prison to which Jonas Wergeland would later be committed – an achievement in itself, testifying to a nigh-on diplomatic shrewdness, when one considers how difficult it was to gain permission to observe such a closed society. While working there she became friendly with the prison chaplain and later, long after her anthropological study had been completed, she became a prison visitor under the auspices of the Norwegian Red Cross; as such she was paired up with an inmate of the prison, to whom she would make regular visits, outside normal visiting hours. Kamal Varma became a very popular visitor. She had an exceptional gift for listening and for establishing a rapport with the prisoners – not so much because she was a woman, but because she too was an outsider.

  It so happened that the prisoner whom Kamala Varma had been visiting for some years completed his sentence just as Jonas Wergeland arrived at the prison, and because Jonas was something of a special case and kept himself very much to himself – he adamantly refused to speak to anyone – the chaplain asked Kamala Varma whether she would consider being Jonas Wergeland’s prison visitor. She said she would. And it was as the chaplain had hoped: when the suggestion was put to Jonas, his curiosity was aroused – if nothing else, a woman of Indian origin would make a change from Norwegians of whom, not surprisingly, he was pretty sick after the trial and everything that had been written about him. He agreed, and their very first meeting marked a turning point for him. They had talked about Indian architecture. And thus it came about that Kamala Varma and Jonas Wergeland spent several hours together every week for almost two years, and not in the visiting room but in his cell: a privilege granted to prison visitors. Wergeland must have told her a good deal during these visits, must really have opened his heart to her. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he refused to see her any more. Apparently she took it very hard. There were also rumours that Wergeland had attempted to take his own life. Then, to everyone’s surprise, her book appeared. Her motives in writing it, what induced her to break the prison visitor’s oath of confidentiality, can only be guessed at. In any case the book sold like hot cakes, even better than my own new biography that year, on Johan Sverdrup.

  It was not just the circumstances which I have outlined above which caused such an extraordinary furore when her anonymity was destroyed, the real problem was that Kamal Varma was also the detested and lambasted author of Norway – An Appendix, a book regarded by many as the most scurrilous attack on Norway and Norwegians ever penned.

  Soon after Kamala Varma came to the country in the mid-seventies she obtained a post at the University of Oslo, and after years of work, studies in the field you might say, her sensational socio-anthropological treatise was published by the Oxford University Press: a work which has gone on – many would say, unfortunately – to win wide popularity and acclaim in international anthropological circles. To what extent this has harmed Norway is not something we will go into here. The title: Norway – An Appendix does, however, say a lot about its main standpoint: that a book on Norway can never be more than an appendix to a book about the world. To Kamala Varma, Norway is, as its contours on the map suggest, an appendix, an inconsequential adjunct, nourished by the body, but making no appreciable contribution to it, or – if it does – only in some obscure way. Certain chapters even give one the impression that there is talk here of an inflamed appendix, an area which could easily be removed without this having any effect on the rest of the world.

  Right at the start, in the foreword, ‘Report from a Parenthesis’, the tone is set for a book in which each chapter looks at a different aspect of the Norwegian people and their culture: the survival of old Norse pagan rites (‘The Christmas Dinner’), the inhabitants’ relationship with the forests and mountains (‘The Rucksack’), the fear of making a stand (‘The Ash Lad’), oil as an economic sheet anchor (‘Blinkers’), gambling fever (‘Lottery Land’), the annual exercise in absolution (‘Collecting-Tin Nation’), the mania for encyclopaedias (‘Great Norwegian’) and, not least, the powerful faith that prevailed in Norway, faith so strong that there is even a church for those who have no faith (‘The Heathen Church’). Earlier I touched upon the question of Kamala Varma’s caste – it is no exaggeration to say that after this book was published, in Norway at least, she became a pariah, a person who did well not to show their face in public. For a lot of people, her biographical novel, The Seducer – which is to say, the combination of this woman, author of Norway – an Appendix, and Jonas Wergeland, viewed by many as a traitor to his country, no better than Quisling – was too much to take. A flood of letters to the press called for Kamala Varma to be stripped of her Norwegian citizenship and expelled from the country – an attitude that only served to confirm everything she had said in a chapter on the Norwegian’s latent hatred of foreigners (‘Norwegian Front’).

  Not until the last evening but one did my black-clad visitor see fit to bring up the subject of the Indian woman. Her arrival – that of my unknown helper, I mean – happened, by the way, to coincide with a mysterious occurrence. Just before the doorbell rang I heard a boom, sounding right over the house, like a roll of thunder or a plane that had flown off course. It gave me quite a fright. I went to the window but saw nothing. Nor could I see anything when I opened the door for her. And yet there was something about the look in her eyes: it seemed even more intense than usual, as if she had taken some sort of stimulant, or perhaps rather, had just had a very exhilarating experience.

  Up in the turret room her eye immediately fell on Kamala Varma’s biographical novel, which was lying on my desk. She ran her fingers over the jacket illustration of a Persian rug. ‘She did what she could to save him,’ she said. ‘No one can take that away from her.’ Right next to it, like an antipodean, lay the Norwegian translation of Norway – an Appendix. She picked it up, weighed it in her hand. ‘The question is whether this anthropological study does not provide a better key to some understanding of Jonas Wergeland than her faction,’ she said, taking her seat in her usual chair by the fire.

  From where I sat I could see her profile silhouetted against the window, overlooking Fornebu, and beyond: the proud outline of Kolsåstoppen, like the back of a stranded whale. Again I asked myself who the regal figure before me could be, to what she owed her incredible memory, what motives she might have, behind those motives which she had declared to me – and for the first time I may have had a faint, a very vague, inkling. Be that as it may: what I had first construed as hate seemed more like concern, a sense of desperation almost, on Jonas Wergeland’s behalf. That evening her eyes were lined with an even deeper black than before, if that were possible, and this too conjured up thoughts of the Near East or possibly Arabia. I had also been wondering about the expressions she sometimes used, mostly when she wanted to underline a point: ‘inscribe it on the nail of your little finger’, for example, or: ‘lift my words like an earring to your ear’ – phrases which reinforced my suspicion that she had her roots in another culture.

  As she browsed through Kamala Varma’s book on Norway she stretched her legs out to the fire, shivering visibly – she was always cold. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, ‘from the foreword: “I have set myself the fine goal of bringing to life an entire small civilization of which we know next to nothing.” Good, eh? As if Norwegians were an overlook
ed minority in Outer Mongolia.’ She turned a few more pages at random: ‘“What does it mean to be Norwegian?”’ she read. ‘“To be Norwegian is to watch a rape being committed and imagine that one is innocent.” Sounds familiar, wouldn’t you say, Professor?’

  She put down the book, held her hands out to the flames in the hearth, looked out at the day which was fast fading outside, thus reducing our view to a band of darkness dotted with points of light, some of which moved and flashed. ‘I’ve said it before: part of the key to understanding Jonas Wergeland lies in the fact that he was Norwegian. It was the Norway within him that made him what he was – for good and ill. Some people say, you know, that every biography is everyone’s biography. Hence it must be possible to regard the biography of Jonas Wergeland as that of every Norwegian. In many ways I would agree with that. Let me begin, therefore, with a story in which Norway itself plays the lead. Hurry now, Professor, we’re running out of time.’