The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  What he really needed in his new career was staying power. And, as you know, Professor, if there was one thing Jonas Wergeland had plenty of, it was staying power. How many times have we had to listen to the same old stories of how thorough he was, of the time he spent touching up his programmes, eternally cutting and editing: how he was never satisfied – with the sound, the lighting, his commentary, the tempo, the very pulse. He would sit on his own, going over the drafts of programmes again and again, making notes for improvements. ‘He sat in his office long into the night,’ it was said, as if this were something remarkable, because this was NRK, and at NRK no one worked overtime, least of all if it was unpaid. But Jonas Wergeland worked on long into the night, of his own free will, because he wanted to make programmes that people would never forget.

  There was another factor – unknown to most people – which lent the programme on Wilhelmsen an added personal touch. In many ways this was Jonas’s tribute to Omar Hansen: a covert attempt to clear a man’s name – a salute to a grandfather who had, after all, been a seaman for half his life and ‘sailed Wilhelmsen’ to boot. The scenes had a personal feel to them because they were coloured by his grandfather’s countless stories about the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line, all those repeated boyhood references to ‘Speed and Service’ and ‘The Wilhelmsen Style’. And whenever his grandfather made Jonas a promise he always sealed it by saying: ‘You may rely upon Wilhelmsen.’

  This programme was, therefore, in large part a declaration of love for the ship, for all the names beginning with ‘T’ which were read out like an incantation in the background, like symbols from a deep-sea poem – Talleyrand, Tudor, Triton, Taurus – because even though the Norwegians never designed a Model-T, they did have their T-ships, a whole succession of them, a genuine glossary in which each ‘T’ evoked its own universe, a snippet of geography or history, and it was these potent words which Jonas Wergeland wished to remind the viewers of. Here, it was the ships which played the lead in a programme which took a loving look at the lines and the profiles of those great vessels: ‘a real Boy’s Own programme,’ people said, and everyone who has ever strolled along a quayside, taking an unadulterated, lordly delight in inspecting the boats and dreaming of faraway places, knows what they were talking about. ‘Never has a ship been captured on film with such empathy and invention, such beauty and grace,’ as one critic wrote.

  Jonas made use of everything from old film footage of the ships to postcards commissioned by the company, showing those Wilhelmsen vessels which had also carried passengers: prestigious cards which Jonas himself had been given as a child by a first mate, a relative from Hvaler, and had stuck up on the wall so he could look at them and dream that he was a ship-owner and this was his proud fleet. More than anything else, though, he used model ships, the kind that are normally kept in glass cases, yard-long copies in which every detail has been conscientiously recreated, a mouth-watering sight for anyone with a liking for ships, exquisite miniatures which left one wide-eyed and wondering, like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. With the theme tune for Postbox, the shipping channel’s most popular programme, playing in the background, Jonas panned the camera lingeringly over these elegant ships, following their curves and caressing individual details, as if this were a programme about the erotic arts, not the art of engineering. And the viewers’ response, their bedazzled eyes, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Henrik Ibsen was right: Norwegians are under the spell of the sea. The ship has been Norway’s great achievement, from Viking times onwards. As the programme progressed, Jonas filled the screen with a map of the world on which the famous Wilhelmsen Lines were gradually traced across the seven seas, giving the impression of a colossal and almost incomprehensible conquest, a web, a veritable internet, a global embrace. And throughout it all, those names like points on a line – Talabot, Tabor, Tarifa, Trafalgar – as if the entire world consisted of nothing but ‘T’s. It was possibly a rather nostalgic programme, meant as a reminder of how shipping was one of the cornerstones upon which Norway’s affluent society had been built: of a quite inconceivable time when this nation had boasted the fourth largest merchant fleet in the world, but a fine reminder all the same: images that could not fail to touch the hearts of every Norwegian. These lines across the oceans were as beautiful a sight, as great a national treasure, as the Academic’s woodcarvings; the Wilhelmsen Lines were testament to the fact that a piece of artistic decoration could be carried out into the world.

  Which was what made the contrast so striking. Because at the programme’s centre was a ship-owner who had lost half his fleet, seen one after another of his precious ships go down without being able to lift a finger. Jonas Wergeland was never in any doubt about which situation said most about Wilhelm Wilhelmsen, popularly referred to as the Captain. For Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was not the sort of ship-owner who loves only money, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was a ship-owner who loved boats above all else, to whom the seafaring side – the ship, the men on board – meant as much as the commercial side. His older brother may well have been a more distinguished and far-sighted ship-owner, but in Jonas Wergeland’s eyes Wilhelm was the obvious choice, epitomizing as he did the Norwegian’s relationship with the sea: a ship-owner who, like most Norwegians, put safety first – there is even a story of how once, when a mouse had nibbled a hole in a chart, Wilhelm plotted a course round the hole, just to be on the safe side. And for those same reasons of safety he decided to put his faith in something sound, on lines, to take no chances, to bank on oil; Wilhelm was a ship-owner and a seaman, an owner with fifteen years service at sea, an owner who knew the bars of Saigon and Shanghai, a man who joined the company offices as a captain, with a roll in his walk and malaria in his blood. Wilhelm Wilhelmsen’s most treasured possession was not the stable of horses he would later own nor the palatial mansion with a Chinese pagoda in the pool in the grounds but a battered, camphor-wood ship’s chest from his years at sea as a young man.

  For such a ship-owner, the war was not merely a source of patriotic indignation, but to as great, or a greater, extent, a source of real pain. There was nothing Wilhelmsen did not know about his ships, nothing; he had been involved in discussions about new vessels with the shipbuilders, he inspected the ships himself as soon as they docked at Oslo’s Filipstad Wharf, he knew every captain, every chief engineer on board the boats that were now being bombed, torpedoed, sunk on the high seas. Which is why Jonas Wergeland depicted Wilhelm Wilhelmsen on the bridge of a sinking ship, and replayed this shot again and again, to denote the twenty-six times during the war when Wilhelmsen was lost at sea in his thoughts. The filming of this scene had been a tough enough job in itself, involving a gruelling shoot down at a place called Verdens Ende, Norway’s very own World’s End on the tip of the Tjøme peninsula, not far from Wilhelmsen’s hometown of Tønsberg. Despite the NRK management’s worries about the expense, Jonas had organized the building of a set representing the last visible part of a sinking ship, the bridge upon which Wilhelmsen stood – although of course ships seldom sunk in such a way that the bridge was the last thing to be seen, but it was meant to be symbolic, and not one viewer complained. Actor Normann Vaage said later that he almost drowned during the shoot, because Jonas was never satisfied and Vaage had to put up with being sunk into the waves again and again. ‘Stop moaning, Vaage,’ Wergeland had shouted at him. ‘We’re at World’s End, remember!’

  There is nothing so terrible, so ghastly, so disillusioning, so tragic, as a sinking ship. During the war the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line lost twenty-six ships, a whole string of ‘T’s which disappeared into the deep, and it was not only boats that were wiped out, it was words: Tenerife, Tortugas, Tancred, Touraine – and, not least, Thermopylae – they were legends that went to the bottom, whole epics: an Argos with all of its tales. And the main point of the programme was that Wilhelm Wilhelmsen took the tragedy of all this as personally as if he himself had been on board and gone down with each ship. Which is why Wilhelm Wilhelmsen w
as shown in that recurring shot, standing stiffly to attention in his captain’s uniform while the water slowly engulfed him; sequences with a primitive, almost brutal rhythm to them, accompanied by the discordant strains of an organ; sailors who had survived had described how the most infernal noise was heard as the air was squeezed out of the different sized valves when the boat went under – several times Jonas was put in mind of his first composition, the piano piece ‘Dragon Sacrifice’. By dint of such devices he created an effect that had viewers hanging on for dear life to their Stressless chairs, to save being sucked down into the deep themselves. Jonas Wergeland was in his element on this shoot, chasing the suggestion that only pictures can create, ships sinking again and again, and at the same time drawing on all his images of the war, that sore point in Norwegian history – an era in which the people of Norway took such an insatiable interest. Jonas Wergeland did not wish to manipulate but merely to underpin the viewers’ imaginations, and in so doing he helped them to see more than pictures on a screen; instead it was as if they sat in darkened rooms dreaming the whole thing up for themselves. ‘To be honest, I’ve never really done anything but Radio Theatre,’ Jonas Wergeland remarked on more than one occasion.

  They say that during the war, when the Wilhelmsen fleet was being run from London, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went to the office as usual, had his black Cadillac sent to collect him every day from the mansion on Trosterudveien, a house which Jonas and Ørn were to take stock of a good twenty years later, and was driven to No. 20 Tollbodgaten, where he stepped through the heavy oak doors and said good morning to the caretaker before hurrying up to the first floor, past ‘The Three Graces’, and letting himself in to his office. What he did up there, in a room lined with old paintings of sailing ships, no one knows. But Jonas Wergeland knew what went on in there. Because during the war Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was neither in Trosterudveien nor in Tollbodgaten, he was at sea, he was on board all of his ships, every single one of them; he was in several places at once and every time he heard that a ship had gone down, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down too. Why? Because he was still the Captain. When the Tudor was torpedoed, Wilhelmsen was not in Norway; he was somewhere northwest of Cape Finisterre, on board the Tudor. Wilhelmsen went down with his ship. When the Triton was torpedoed northeast of the Azores, Wilhelmsen was on board; when the Taurus was bombed off Montrose in Scotland, Wilhelmsen sank along with it, and when the Talabot – a name which aroused even stronger feelings in the Captain, because not only had the Talabot been the first of the T-boats, but Wilhelm Wilhelmsen had actually served as an ordinary seaman on that ship – so when, after a heroic crossing from Alexandria, this second Talabot was set ablaze by bombs in the harbour at Valletta on Malta and thereafter partially sunk in order to prevent its cargo of munitions from exploding, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down with the ship. It is not true to say that Wilhelmsen spent the war sitting behind a desk; in his thoughts he spent every day, his whole life in fact, on the bridge. WW, a quadruple V-sign: We Will Win. This was what Jonas wanted to show, and showed in such a way that even the most hard-bitten Norwegian could not help but be moved.

  After this programme – which, to Jonas’s surprise, was never criticized for its pathos – NRK received masses of thank-you letters from seamen, surviving war veterans. They thanked Jonas Wergeland for so clearly illustrating a fact which people in Norway had, for over half a century, blocked out: what a debt not only the nation, but the whole world, owed to those seamen. In Norway it was the sailors who made the biggest sacrifice during the war. Almost half of all Norwegian casualties were seamen. They were like Leonidas’s soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae, they helped to thwart a far superior force. No one can overestimate the contribution made by the Norwegian merchant fleet to the defeat of the Axis powers, and it is easy to see why the lines tracing the routes followed by the Wilhelmsen fleet and other shipping companies reminded some people of the diagrams of battles in historical atlases. What Churchill said about the RAF is equally true of the Norwegian seamen: Never was so much owed by so many to so few.

  Talleyrand, Tabor, Tarifa, Trafalgar – a heroic poem, an epos. Those words beginning with ‘T’ – recited as scene followed scene – were the names of boats, all of which sank, went down, during the war. Jonas closed the programme with a clip from a documentary that showed the launching, four years after the end of the war, of the Thermopylae II, which was actually built at the Akers Mek yard in Oslo. ‘What a triumph,’ wrote one old wartime seaman. ‘Like witnessing a resurrection.’

  Axel, on the other hand, was scathing in his criticism of this programme. Three quarters of an hour on Wilhelmsen and not one word about aquavit. Outrageous.

  And if I might add my three ha’pence worth, in retrospect I cannot help thinking of the resemblance between the shots of Wilhelmsen on the bridge of a sinking ship and the photographs taken of Jonas Wergeland just after the murder of Margrete Boeck, and indeed as he looked in the courtroom, standing there with an air of defiance mixed with quiet grief and cool dignity, as if he, Jonas Wergeland, were also in the midst of a terrible shipwreck.

  Penalty Kick

  Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must concentrate once again on a thread which winds to the surface so often that it may well lie under everything. I am referring, in other words, to the story of the great shipwreck in Jonas Wergeland’s own life. And as in the war, here too a villain stood behind the torpedoing.

  Although Jonas escaped miraculously unscathed from the crash on the E6, it left him walking about like a wounded man. He considered kicking up a fuss, making one hell of a scene, but decided in the end not to say anything to Margrete, not even in the way of veiled accusations regarding what had finally dawned on him, something so obvious that he ought to have tumbled to it long before. In any case, Margrete was not the crux of the problem. Somewhere in his mind Jonas had always harboured a fear, prompted by her inherent unreliability, or by something he could not put into words, that there would come a time when she would betray him. Even though he wished he did not love her half so much, there were times when he saw a witch in her, a supernatural side which was most evident in her constant insistence on freedom, a freedom which also included the right to behave unpredictably, or respond to motives he could not fathom. He had caught a glimpse of this way back in seventh grade, before she left Norway, in the ruthless way in which she had broken up with him. I never want to see her again, he had thought, with something close to relief.

  The problem, as far as Jonas was concerned – the shock – was Axel.

  He went around in a daze, went to work as usual – although he didn’t do anything there except sit and brood – but was always on the lookout for clues, signs that might give them away, lead him to a place where he would, as it were, catch them red-handed. It was here that the underside side of his creative genius was revealed: one and one made three – here, in his private life, as in his programmes. He rummaged through Margrete’s closet, disgusted with himself for doing so; rooted around in a wardrobe drawn from all over the world: colourful kangas for the beach, black Thai silk for evening; even Margrete’s soiled panties were turned inside out and examined for suspicious stains; he went through her diary, looking for coded appointments, hunted through her handbag for a letter, a note, some item that ought not to be there, if only a strand of hair. And incessantly, a wormball in his head: one and one makes three, had to make three. He found himself admiring them, the whole affair, how clever they were, this web of lies which they had spun and arranged so brilliantly, this triangle which they had constructed, as perfect and intricate and yet as jaw-droppingly simple as Pythagoras’s theorem about the square of the hypotenuse. What annoyed him most of all was his helplessness. He stood there shamefaced amid a heap of dirty washing with a metallic taste in his mouth, born of fear, or spite, a psychosomatic secretion from the organs of jealousy, and when he pulled off his shirt that night a sour, unfamiliar smell wafted up to him from his armpits, as if his b
ody were trying to tell him that – if not physically, then mentally – he had been infected. He could understand, and even agree with, those who said that jealousy was a sickness, a chemical reaction in the brain; he didn’t give a toss, he knew he was sick, wanted to be that way, he nursed this state of green madness, viewing it, through the fog, with a certain curiosity even, as if he had just discovered new sides to himself, had sniffed out the darkest springs in the human heart. He peered, fascinated, into this hallucinatory chasm, astonished, almost impressed by the monster of hate which he saw taking shape, growing more and more terrible, day by day.

  Until the evening in June when he stood outside the door of Axel’s apartment, unannounced and a lot more breathless than the several flights of stairs could warrant. He notes the Trio lock, rings the bell. Axel opens the door, opening also onto muted jazz and a faint whiff of garlic. Jonas had expected Margrete to be standing there, had been coiled and ready to spring, lithe as a wild beast, push the door wide open, squash the louse, before storming through every room, but he could tell straight away that she was not there. Axel let him in, looking surprised, pleased, expectant. And perhaps – in the suspicious eyes of Jonas Wergeland at least – a shade nonplussed.

  ‘Can you hear what that is?’ Axel asked once they were standing in the living room. ‘The Oscar Pettiford Trio, “Bohemia After Dark” – just like in the old days at Seilduksgata,’ he said, answering his own question, pleased by this coincidence: this music, and Jonas suddenly turning up on his doorstep. He is already on his way over to the drinks cabinet, across a pinewood floor strewn with little rugs, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, studiedly asymmetric. He could bake some potatoes, he joked, but he was all out of aquavit. Instead he returned with glasses and a rare malt whisky, a name Jonas had never heard before, a name that was hard to memorize, get one’s tongue round.