It was a bright summer evening, not a cloud in the sky, and yet standing in that room Jonas felt an ominous darkness stealing in. Three of the walls in the room were filled, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves; the fourth was dominated by windows and some paintings that looked like windows. Filmy white curtains fluttered gently over the deep window embrasures, casting shifting patterns over the rugs in a sort of double-exposure. In one corner stood the double bass. Jonas had a painful, recurring fantasy, in which Axel was making love to Margrete in the same way that he played the double bass, standing behind her, with his hands on her breasts, passionately intent on turning her into an unusual bass line under those probing fingers of his: Oscar Pettiford, ‘Bohemia After Dark’. Jonas had always wondered why Axel, such an attractive man, had never married. Now he knew. There was nothing Axel needed: he had Margrete. And any man who had Margrete had no cause to ask for more.
‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ Axel says, pouring some whisky. ‘Water? Ice?’
‘No, nothing,’ Jonas mumbled, knowing he ought to have asked for ice, take something to cool him down. There was a tinkle as Axel dropped ice cubes into his own glass. Jonas observed his friend’s clothes, the same old ‘uniform’: the tweed jacket draped over a chair, the white cotton shirt, baggy trousers and thick-soled shoes, as if he were still a boy who walked the streets at night, a nomad as in his student days – a person who had never grown up, a man who still lived in a world of fanciful chatter and airy-fairy dreams of being able to rock the Milky Way on its axis. Irresponsible bastard.
‘Sit down, please,’ Axel pointed to an armchair, a Stressless Royal identical to the one that Viktor used to sit in, staring at a blank television screen, there and yet not there.
Jonas put out a hand, as if to ward off such a fate, or as if realizing that for a very long time he had been as insensible and distant as Viktor.
‘Something struck me the other day when I was watching a repeat of your programme on Nansen,’ Axel said in his usual quick, intense fashion. ‘D’you remember the time after that mock exam when Viktor gave Napoleon what for, when we were sitting talking? I said there were no heroes any more, and you quoted something by Carlyle, from that rag of his which you’d probably never read, Heroes and Hero Worship or whatever it was called; something to the effect that history was simply the biographies of great men – I think maybe that was more or less what you were trying to say with your television series. Or am I wrong?’
‘Axel stop it, please,’ was all Jonas could say, he had a momentary urge to laugh, barely managed to stifle a hoarse and pathetic ‘Etiam tu, mi fili Brute.’
It was light outside, and yet it was growing dark, very dark. Jonas stood in the centre of the room, trying to make time stand still, looking at the shelves, all those book spines. Behind glass doors. As if they were treasures. Or as if this were some sort of hall of mirrors. A den of narcissism. When did Jonas first begin to have doubts about Axel? It must have been when he dropped out of university and started writing. Jonas could not understand it. Laughed at his friend, teased him, sneered at him even. What a waste. Axel, with his matchless gifts, his flair for combining biology and chemistry. Jonas had been baffled by his decision. His flight from DNA to fiction, from the genetic to the grammatical. ‘You, who would rather uncover a chain of cause and effect than be the King of Persia,’ Jonas had sneered. ‘Yes, that’s just why I did it,’ Axel said.
Jonas had never got more than halfway through any of Axel’s books; they did nothing for him. Axel himself claimed that his novels were inspired by DNA, that the search for a structure, a bass line in life played a part in his stories too. But Jonas could make nothing of them, was not even turned on by the rather pernicious, raw eroticism that pervaded some of the stories, this element which a number of critics found so intriguing and which they called ‘perversion as innovation’. In recent weeks Jonas had, however, nurtured a reluctant interest in – almost a fear of – this darker aspect; at home he had leafed with trembling fingers through some of Axel’s novels, hardly daring to read for fear of coming upon something he recognized. He remembered only too well what Axel had once said about writing: ‘Being a writer comes of being a liar,’ he said. ‘Books are the paths where deceit, lies and truth intersect. When two lies meet a truth is born, and when two truths meet, a lie is generated.’
Jonas is still standing in the centre of the room, rocking back and forth as though teetering on the brink of a precipice. The faint tang of malt whisky invades his nostrils, the music of the Oscar Pettiford Trio streaming from concealed loudspeakers coils itself around him. ‘Are you just going to stand there gawping all evening?’ Axel says. ‘Come on, sit down.’ Again the hand motioning towards the chair, as if he were offering Jonas a vacant throne.
Axel was wearing a pair of old, black-rimmed glasses, with tape wrapped round one arm. All of a sudden his friend, this former friend of his, seemed such a tragic figure to Jonas. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s just too fucking awful, it’s just too…’
He could not look Axel in the eye. He still had his gaze fixed on the bookshelves. He had always been suspicious of people who had a lot of books, who spent such a large part of their lives reading. From the very start he had disliked Margrete’s reading. She read whenever she had the chance, read with an avidity, an ardour that was written all over her face. And in all sorts of positions, often more or less on the spot where she came across the book: standing, sitting, lying down, as if the book immediately hypnotized her body into a state of immobility, total concentration. Sometimes, when she had hunted for and found a novel on the bottom shelf of the bookcase at home, Jonas would find her kneeling on the floor, bent over the book, her behind in the air, as if she were performing a devout act, praying. Or maybe it was an invitation, an expression of a secret longing to be taken from behind. Lately, with the jealous man’s amazing gift for visualizing, sticking certain images onto the mind’s eye so that they overshadow everything else, he had pictured Axel finding her like that, here, on one of those little rugs.
‘Where do you do it?’ Jonas said, finally fixing his eyes on Axel, skewering him. ‘Here?’ He waves his arms in the direction of the chequerboard of rugs. It was the perfect place. Axel’s flat. A man living alone, working at home. ‘Or have you been going along on all these weekend trips she’s been taking over the past few years – to London, Paris, Amsterdam?’
He could have sworn there was fear in the look Axel sent him: ‘Sit down, Jonas. Let’s talk about this.’
This was the proverbial last straw, this partial admission, because it may be – let us be honest, Professor, and give Jonas Wergeland the benefit of the doubt – it may be that deep down he had hoped that Axel would deny the whole thing, obdurately, even if it was true, refute everything, and then end it with Margrete, pretend it had never happened, so that they could still be friends; or at the very least that he would go down on his knees and ask forgiveness, burst into tears, beg Jonas not to think too harshly of him, but now, after what he had already taken to be a confession, Jonas lost control completely, gave vent to two weeks of accumulated wrath, hailed accusations down on Axel’s head, peppered with all of the worst expletives he had been storing up, vitriol and gall, while Axel stood there quietly, taking it, knew that he had to stand quietly and take it, stood there wearing those old glasses with the taped arm, like one who was already wounded, a pathetic figure in Jonas’s eyes, a man who, in between Jonas’s volleys of abuse, still managed to break in to say that this, this whole performance, was unworthy of a man of Jonas’s intelligence, of such a brilliant doyen of the arts, couldn’t Jonas see that he was reducing himself to the oldest cliché of them all; and after Jonas, maddened still further by such an ill-timed reproof, ducked his head and knocked back all of his whisky in one gulp, to slake his parched throat as much as anything; and after Axel had nodded approvingly, as if he thought Jonas had at last come to his senses, and after Jonas had set his glass down neatly, almost
gently, on the table, and after Axel had promptly lifted the bottle and refilled it, and after Jonas had straightened up and just stared at Axel, and after Oscar Pettiford’s music, the bass lines which had accompanied the whole carry-on, had come to an end, and after Axel had said something funny, and after Jonas had smiled, yes, laughed, and after Axel had walked over to Jonas, possibly meaning to get him finally to sit down, or to hug him, Jonas kicked Axel in the groin – in his mind, in the nuts – as hard as he could, with a power and precision comparable only to that of a kicker in American football, and his thoughts went to an incident in a basement in his childhood when he had experienced on his own person the full force of such an unspeakably painful mode of attack, learned that the sac containing his precious testicles was a button which, when subjected to remarkably little pressure, could put the whole body out of action: a trick which he had, therefore, memorized carefully, although he had never had need of it till now, the perfect opportunity, a swingeing boot to the balls, to the very solar plexus of sex, unexpected and hence supremely effective – and Jonas savours, truly savours, the moment when Axel, that unspeakable son of a bitch, first doubles up then sinks to the floor like an empty sack, a felled mast, with a long-drawn groan of pain.
Axel lay writhing on the floor. But Jonas couldn’t stop there, he was working in a red haze, he kicked him, heard something crunch, was suddenly reminded of the collision on the E6, the feeling that it was not just a matter of a crash, but of squeezing a pliant tin can; he kicked and kicked at Axel as he lay curled up on the floor in a sort of foetal position, moaning, kicked him as hard as he could, in the chest, in the back, the thighs, the head, till the glasses broke and the blood ran from Axel’s nose. And even as he showered Axel with the foulest curses he could think of, went totally, verbally, berserk, while kicking away at what, as far as he was concerned, was a miserable worm – once his friend, now a traitorous worm – he was filled with a strange sense of release which made him stop.
When he left, Axel was lying lifelessly amid a tangle of rugs, as if buried in a broken up jigsaw puzzle. Jonas considered smashing the double bass but managed to restrain himself. Don’t go too far, he told himself, well aware that he couldn’t possibly go any further than he already had. He staggered out of the flat, out into Oslo, wandered around aimlessly, found a restaurant where he gorged himself like a Roman emperor, out again, on to a bar; he felt like celebrating, got as sloshed as it is possible for a man to get, before he was all but thrown out, politely, but firmly, and as good luck would have it managed to flag down a taxi right outside, a taxi with an inexperienced woman driver. ‘Bergensveien,’ he said, hearing how he slurred the word. And then, muttering to himself: ‘Or to hell. I’ve just killed a man.’
I – the Professor – had long suspected that there was something odd about the confession Jonas Wergeland made in court. That he should have killed his wife in a fit of uncontrolled aggression brought on purely by her unexpected request for a divorce did not fit, or fitted only in part, with the red – or rather, green – thread of jealousy that wound its way through so many of the stories, a thread which was bound, in the end, to be drawn tight, like the noose on a gallows.
Modern physics is right: observation alters the thing being observed. I was confused. On the one hand, I had – there was no denying it – a bundle of exceedingly unpleasant stories; on the other hand, I had all the positive things I myself had experienced – learned, in fact – thanks to Jonas Wergeland. Could I – I mean during that year when I, like most Norwegians, let everything else go hang in order to catch every single programme in the Thinking Big series – really have been wrong about Jonas Wergeland’s talent for television? Would his programmes too have evinced other, very different, qualities, maybe even fallen completely flat, if viewed in the light of what I now knew? I unearthed the folder containing comments on Jonas Wergeland’s television work, flicked through the bundles of cuttings and copies of articles. Superlatives all the way: ‘He has created a new National Portrait Gallery inside our head,’ wrote one critic. Despite the controversies that were sure to be sparked off by such programmes, there was no doubt that, prior to his arrest at any rate, Jonas Wergeland was regarded by expert media researchers as a television genius – not because he had gathered an entire nation around the TV, but because he had produced original programmes, films which broke with the usual, tired old fare. ‘A born natural,’ as several commentators put it. He was proclaimed television’s Copernicus because he upset prevailing ideas of what should lie at the centre of a programme. ‘Jonas Wergeland did not just transform the media,’ one writer concluded, ‘he reinvented it.’
But still I was not sure. I got out one of his programmes – I have them all on video, ranged on the shelf next to my own biographies; picked one at random: ‘The Dipper’, the programme on Sam Eyde, and slotted it into the video machine. I felt tense, afraid almost, as I sat in my Stressless chair, eyes riveted on the opening sequence, the close-up of a stylised form, a Viking ship, a logo on a plastic bag, before the camera pulled back to reveal a factory and then, from above, the surrounding countryside, a foreign landscape – the viewer would automatically place it in the Middle East – and right enough, it was Qatar, a fertilizer plant in Umm Said, part-owned by Norsk Hydro: a Viking ship in the desert, a strange conquest, like a fantasy, not to say a mirage. One could not help asking what was the connection here? And as if in reply the camera homed in once more on the drawing of the Viking ship, which gradually began to change, clearly working backwards through various graphic incarnations until it ended up at the original, far more figurative Viking ship logo, now on a barrel containing Hydro’s first major product: what was known as Norwegian saltpetre.
I had been thinking of getting myself a cup of coffee, but I couldn’t get out of my chair nor stop the video; I went on watching, had to see the next scene and the next and the next, felt almost as though I had become Sam Eyde in those last years before the turn of the century, first as a student and then working as an engineer in Germany, in metropolises such as Berlin and Hamburg, Dortmund and Lübeck. I meant to get myself a cup of coffee, but I went on watching, losing myself in the shots of the massive constructions which Eyde tackled: stations, docks, bridges – I even took his great idea about communication for my own. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself standing, so it seemed, beside Sam Eyde in Germany, in a highly developed society with lots of heavy industry. I identified with Eyde, living and working in a country experiencing explosive growth and thinking of Norway, a dirt-poor, underdeveloped country. But, Eyde thought – or we thought, Eyde and I – Norway had one enormous resource: its waterfalls. The question was: how to use all this potential? One would have to create a major industry – founded on what, though? And this is where Eyde mobilizes his powers of imagination, his bridge-building skills, by connecting two separate ideas. In Lübeck, two years before the start of the twentieth century, he reads a lecture on the catastrophic shortage in nitrogen with which the world will soon be faced. This is just the spark that is needed; a bridge is formed between two synapses in the brain. What, besides water, does Norway have in abundance? Answer: air. Eyde – or rather, we: Eyde and I – see a way of generating wealth in Norway from two things as elementary as air and water. He – we – will quite simply pluck assets out of thin air! An electrochemical industry! I sat there watching, staring, oblivious to all else, I was there, in the scenes depicting his collaboration with Kristian Birkeland, the development of the electric reverberatory furnace which drew nitrogen from the air; an invention which, once they had secured the capital and formed the company which would one day become Norsk Hydro, paved the way for the quite incredible development – by Norwegian standards – of the hydroelectric stations and factories at Skienvassdraget and Rjukan, while the people of Norway shook their heads: until, that, is, they were presented with the aforementioned Norwegian saltpetre – Norwegian air packed into barrels, nitrogen fertilizer for the soil – and what a success it wa
s, a Viking ship which conquered the world. Thus the whole programme revolved, in an almost imperceptible but exceedingly elegant fashion, around the four elements: air, fire, water and earth.
As I say, I went on sitting there, had thought of getting up to fetch something to drink but went on sitting there, delighting in the way my senses became so involved; I spotted delectable details which I had not noticed before, even though I must have seen this programme at least four times. And it was not only the actual substance of it, those uplifting trains of thought, which enthralled me. I saw, or felt inside myself, with the whole of my subconscious, how important the sound was; I understood this better now, of course, after the story of Jonas Wergeland’s love of the radio and radio plays. Like its theme, the soundtrack to the programme on Sam Eyde was inspired by the four elements; the camerawork almost took second place to the sighing of the wind, the crackling of fire and electricity, the scrunch of shovels delving into earth – this last alluding both to the groundbreaking work done by the company’s founders and the relevance of the fertilizer. But the predominant sound – the essence of the programme – was that of water: waterfalls, of course, but also rain and murmuring brooks, conjuring up associations of something close to paradise, of Norway as an oasis of opportunity.
As I pressed the stop button on the remote control, I realized – as if this were a criterion of excellence – that not for one moment had I sat back in my Stressless chair, I had remained bolt upright through the whole thing, my wits somehow sharpened. There was no doubt: this programme, this grand conception, this bubbling, sparkling programme, would surely act as a counterweight to some of the dark tales my guest had told me.
The Conqueror Page 48