The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  Seeing that portrait of Sam Eyde again helped me to get over the worst of my frustration. It also reinforced my suspicion that this woman was not out to discredit Jonas Wergeland, a feeling which – to my relief – she confirmed the following evening by making what might almost be called a heartfelt plea. I could tell that I was ready for just such a clarification. For some time she had slowly and imperceptibly been turning what, to begin with, I had felt to be a negative picture of the man, into what I would call a defence of Jonas Wergeland. ‘Nothing, Professor, nothing is easier these days than to expose someone,’ she said, holding my gaze with eyes that seemed even more penetrating because of the black eyeliner. ‘You think, perhaps, that I am going to show you – and others – Jonas Wergeland’s treachery,’ she said. ‘Strip him bare and make fun of him for being a despicable charlatan,’ she said. ‘Not at all.’ She looked as if she was about to grasp my hands in her vehemence. ‘In my eyes, Jonas Wergeland is the embodiment of a heroic project, a project of the type that will always be in danger of coming to a tragic end.’

  ‘And what does this project involve?’ I was afraid I might offend her, but I was too curious not to ask.

  ‘Jonas Wergeland’s aim was nothing less than to do the impossible, even though he really did not have what it took. And he almost succeeded.’ She said all of this, embarking upon an argument from which I am only quoting fragments, while gazing out at the planes taking off from Fornebu, as if they could take her to a place that did not exist.

  Jonas Wergeland’s story, she said, was the story of a man who refused to accept his lot in life. Unlike a character in a classic epic, she said, Jonas Wergeland had rebelled against his fate. He managed, she said, to become someone other than who he was destined to be. Instead of being a single-cell creature, she said, he became a two-celled creature. And thus, she said, he played a part in mankind’s development into something better. Her face glowed as she talked – and not merely with the reflection of the flames in the hearth. There was something about her eyes too, a look of entreaty that stripped her words of any pomposity; they were not so much statements as expressions of an almost traumatic, personal concern. Because this was not the story of a man who hoodwinked a nation, she said, but that of an individual who succeeded, with the help of others, in discovering the best in himself, she said, or begged me to believe. Jonas Wergeland was – could just as easily have been – a hero for our times, she said, or implored, me to consider, as if she knew I was just about to think something else, something damning.

  We sat for a long time saying nothing, with only the crackling of the fire disturbing the silence, but she kept her eyes fixed on me. She did not wish, her eyes said, to do as so many others had been working very hard to do lately: reduce the genius to a banal, ordinary person. She wished, her eyes said, to lift the ordinary person up to the level of the genius, show that a man who considered himself talentless might in fact be in possession of tremendous riches, a wealth of possibilities. ‘We are all Sauls,’ she finished by saying. ‘Ordinary people who might at any minute be anointed king.’

  I did not want to disagree with her, despite the inescapable reality which cast a disquieting shadow over this beautiful monument of a rationale, I almost said testimony: Jonas Wergeland was a murderer. I could not bring myself to repeat this painful fact – not because I was unwilling to, but because there was an insistence bordering on desperation in her argument which made me think she had some other explanation, that she had a card up her sleeve which could still make this impossible game of patience come out right. Or as she had said during our first session together: ‘There is only one reason for telling stories: to save someone who has already been condemned. Tell the story against all odds.’

  This, our last evening, was Easter Saturday, and again her arrival was heralded by a distant rumble and the feeling that the whole house was shaking. I knew this would be our last meeting. I could tell it also by the way she glided slowly around the room, as if taking her leave of everything, before sinking into her chair and closing her eyes, as though gathering herself for a final, mighty push. It was with some sadness that I scribbled down notes in shorthand as she spoke, telling stories in a sequence, and with a conclusion, that made me gasp at the thought of a hitherto unimagined possibility.

  No sooner was she done than she got to her feet, clearly exhausted. ‘I have to go now,’ she said, stopping by the window. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, but I have a long journey ahead of me.’ She looked out across the fjord, where it lay shimmering in the darkness, as if wishing to brand that view into her memory. Or – this occurred to me later – as if she were weighing up something important, something she was about to say, but didn’t.

  Before she left I signed the contract she had drawn up. She waived her claim to any royalties – she didn’t want the publicity, she said – but I undertook to transfer part of my fee to a certain person. I was both surprised and not surprised when I saw the name. A girl.

  I had known it all along, really, I thought to myself. She swathed herself in her black cloak, like a magician about to make his exit, and moved towards the spiral staircase, then turned, with almost surprising abruptness, and clasped my hand – as if she knew that I guessed who she was and with this gesture was begging me never to divulge it. But I think she also took my hand in order to thank me. She confirmed my sense of having been her muse, as much as she had been mine. That for some reason she needed me in order to tell this story. ‘Several times you’ve asked me why I was doing this,’ she said at the last. ‘And I could just as easily have said: out of love. And sheer desperation. Because I do not understand it. I have also told it for my own sake. Not just for yours, or Jonas Wergeland’s.’

  For the first time I remained standing by the window, watching her leave, the black figure walking down the driveway and through the gate. I could sense that I was more than fascinated: I was close to falling in love. Amazed and yet not so, I saw her climb into the cab of a semi-trailer, the biggest I’d ever seen: or rather, it was just the truck part, without the trailer. I couldn’t see what colour it was, but I would bet anything that it was black. The enormous cab, and the naked, little rear section made the vehicle look very alien, oddly empty. At first I thought someone was collecting her, but then I saw her slide behind the wheel herself, heard the mighty roar as the engine started up, and a sea of lights came on. She must have spotted me, because she beeped the horn, loud as the siren on a massive boat, and drove off. I watched the truck fade from view, gleaming and formidable, as though she were lifting off in a spaceship. I stood there, feeling that a great obligation had been placed on me, feeling as though she had uncoupled her trailer and dumped a heavy load in the garden: in my study, as it were.

  And while all this was going on, or had gone on, late on an Easter Saturday, my thoughts went to the central character, a man sitting in his cell a couple of miles away – once the emperor of Norway, now emperor of a hundred square feet, whose final, curt comment to the press had been: ‘I got off too lightly.’ But if he really did have the creative powers which I had discerned in his programmes – and plenty of breathing space – it could be that a few square feet was enough. I stood in my ‘control tower’ wondering who he was. Could be. I gazed at a plane, possibly the last one of the evening, coming in to land; a plane which Jonas Wergeland might also have followed with his eyes if his window was facing in the right direction, and I reflected upon another possibility which my visitor had chanced to mention: that the real Jonas Wergeland was to be found somewhere in between all these stories. Maybe – in reality – he wasn’t even in a cell at all.

  Or, as she said when she began upon the last story of the evening: ‘There has to be another way.’ And after a long pause: ‘There is another way.’

  In Seventh Heaven

  So it is with pounding heart, Professor, that I now continue. For, as Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his mind went back to th
e moment when he had stepped through the door of the villa, only half an hour earlier, thinking that everything was going to be fine, even though he had just got back from the World’s Fair in Seville and was still recovering from a rough flight home. He was upset, certainly, furious in fact, but when he rang the bell and no one answered the door, he calmed down. Everything’s going to be fine, he told himself, I just need to get some sleep, have some time to myself. He felt relieved, unspeakably relieved, the way you do when you’ve got out of doing something you’ve been dreading for ages. He let himself in, flicked the switch for the outside light, but the bulb wasn’t working, he didn’t like that, never liked it when a switch was turned on and nothing happened, everything would be fine, he was alone, he would sit down in the living room, he would put his feet up, sift through his mail and listen to a CD of Bach fugues, he would ride it out, he would take a shower, stand under the hot water for a long, long time, he would be alright, he just needed a little time. He left his suitcase and his duty-free bag in the hall and wandered into the office he shared with Margrete, looked away sharply on seeing her textbooks on the shelf, a number of them on dealing with venereal diseases, far too many of them, didn’t want to think about that now, didn’t want to think about that, or about Margrete at all, instead lifted the bundle of letters lying on the desk and took a quick look through them, then on the way into the living room he stops at one, the only one which comes as a surprise, an envelope stamped ‘Oslo University’, from which he can tell that the sender is a woman, a well-known name in academic circles.

  It would be untrue to say that Jonas Wergeland was totally unprepared for the bleakness of prison life. Once – one winter – he had spent hours listening to details from the Inferno, to the description, for example, of how Brutus, Cassius and Judas were chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Satan. Or how those who had accepted bribes wound up in a bath of seething pitch, a molten mass like the tar they used to boil up in the old shipyards, with little demons holding them down in the mire with the help of forks, like a cook would prod bits of meat bobbing to the surface of a stew. Jonas knew what happened to murderers too – though he had no idea, of course, what the future held in store: they were doomed to boil forever in a river of blood. Jonas had sat in a blue auditorium, in the front row, with his ears pinned back, while next to him Axel was busy taking notes – when, that is, he wasn’t leafing frantically through a book in order to score yet another exclamation mark in the already overcrowded margin. Round about them, solemn-faced souls were writing as if their lives depended on it. They were all students, attending a series of lectures on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

  The mid-seventies was not exactly a time when students flocked, of their own free will, to lectures on Dante and the medieval worldview – not if it wasn’t on the syllabus, at any rate. The university was draped and hung, inside and out, with banners screaming out demands and declarations of support to all points of the compass. To some extent, the Norwegian version of the Cultural Revolution could, I’m sure, be characterized as a divine comedy, although as far as the students were concerned, modern-day Albania was a great deal closer to the ideal than Dante’s Italy. In Norway it was the imaginary Vømmøl Valley that set the standard for both paradise and poetry. So it goes without saying that it was Axel – Axel, who had for some time known that he would never be a biochemist and who had secretly sent his first clumsy, literary efforts to several publishers – who had sniffed out the Dante lectures in their students’ course list and managed to lure Jonas into making the leap, so to speak, from the revolutionary university routine to the Middle Ages – or was it, perhaps, the other way round? But the bait which Axel used to snare Jonas was not the content of the lectures, it was the lecturer – none other than Suzanne I., who is now known to everyone in Norway but who at that time, despite the fact that she had by then turned forty, had not yet found her calling and was recognized only within a very narrow circle. Axel had, however, heard of her through some literary friends and saw right away that she was one of those women who fulfilled all the strict criteria required to merit the distinguished epithet ‘sophisticated’ which he and Jonas had thrashed out while wandering aimlessly through the city late at night.

  And from the word go, Jonas, who had really just come along for the fun of it, was hooked, in spite of the fact that he was the only person in that auditorium who had not read a word of Dante – he had never been any closer to a classical text than his big brother’s Illustrated Classics. He wasn’t entirely ignorant, though. As a little boy at Aunt Laura’s he had – speaking of picture books – found a volume containing Gustav Doré’s engravings for Dante’s Inferno, and these illustrations were still clear in his mind; indeed they enabled him, perhaps to a greater extent than the others, to follow Suzanne I.’s increasingly complex constructions and tempestuous zigzagging between the allegorical and the literal planes, which, by the way, showed him that hell, like the eroticism in Agnar Mykle’s books, was on the whole a matter of metaphor.

  That said, there is no concealing the fact that for Jonas the most fascinating part of it all was Suzanne I. herself; she fascinated him as only very few women did, more specifically: those who could lift him up onto a higher level – to stick to the Dantean imagery. While Suzanne I. was talking about the hideous torments of hell and the striking correlation between crime and punishment, while she was explaining Dante’s overall plan and the conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and the teachings of the Church, Jonas, sitting in the front row, felt a button in his spine being pressed, felt his entire nervous system being put on red alert. While the rest were reading Dante, he was studying her, not least the austere face in which one eye seemed to look inward while the other gazed outward. There was something oddly anachronistic, not to say aristocratic, about her, partly also because of the way in which her hair was pinned up, like an elaborate snail’s shell, and her rather old-fashioned, though stylish, taste in clothes, which made her look like a wealthy, conservative, middle-class lady. It was winter, and exceptionally cold, with ice everywhere – a fitting climatic backdrop to the lectures, inspired by the nethermost circle of the Inferno – and usually, when she stepped out of the lift, always bang on time, so punctual that you could have set your watch by her, she was clad in an almost demonstratively voluminous fur, making no attempt to hide her vanity. Axel said she was reckoned to be something of an eccentric and that she had only recently come home to live in Norway after many years abroad, in Italy among other places – hence the reason that she was liable, every now and again, to recite a few stanzas in vibrant Italian, making Jonas feel that behind her mask she concealed many more passionate sides to her character.

  The lectures were hard going, and student and after student dropped out – including, fortunately, those Pharisaic pains in the neck who found it necessary to argue about everything from improbabilities in the chronology of the work to impossibilities in the topography. Only a fraction of the students were still sticking with it by the time the colourful and relatively entertaining Inferno section had been completed and they moved on to the much greyer Purgatorio, in which Suzanne I.’s longwinded expositions and scholastic leanings came more into their own – and had a soporific effect on quite a few listeners. But Jonas – who was not all that impressed with the Inferno – he had, after all, spent several hours in a pitch-black grave – was growing more and more interested and looked forward – I was about to say: like a sinner – to Tuesdays, to Suzanne I.’s monologues about free will and the nature of the soul, not to mention her interpretations of Dante’s three dreams and Virgil’s discourses on love; he half-ran down the hill from the university – not to the Student Union at Chateau Neuf, where Axel and he occasionally attended one of the riotous gatherings in the amphitheatre-style auditorium and had no trouble imagining that they had been consigned to some wailing circle in the Inferno – but to the building next door, the old Divinity School, the top floor of which was home to the Institute f
or General Literary Studies, as if it had by some divine irony been set on a higher ledge on the Mountain of Purgatory than the theologians themselves.

  By the time they got to the Paradise section, that pretty rarefied and by no means readily accessible ascension, fraught with transparent faces, indistinct souls and star-like spirits capable of choreographing their points of light into all manner of forms, only Jonas and three others were still sticking it out in the blue auditorium – even Axel the bookworm had opted out, muttering some sheepish excuse about a tough end-of-term exam. But Jonas sat there, still in the front row, and let himself be held transfixed, let the pressure build up inside him; he did not merely listen to what Suzanne I. was saying but paid as much attention to the way she said it, her gestures, the look on her face, especially when she was talking about light, about how Dante used light – as a kind of visual music – and even more so when she got onto the subject of Beatrice’s strange and problematic part in the whole thing, all while Suzanne I.’s amber necklace smouldered like embers at her throat. There was also something in what she said that tied in, in some strange way, with his own area of study, astrophysics, the exploration of the heavens, of the cosmos, those vast entities which were just about driving him round the bend with their staggering, nebulous dimensions, their billions upon billions of galaxies. You could say that in some ways Jonas found Dante’s text just as enlightening, even if it was six hundred years old. It seemed to him that Dante’s observations on the celestial spheres, based on Ptolemy’s theories, were at least as right or wrong as the theories about the universe with which he was confronted in his astrophysical studies. In six hundred years, today’s hypotheses would seem every bit as arbitrary as Dante’s, he thought. And I ought perhaps to mention here that it may have been Suzanne I., with her highlighting of the architectonic and symmetrical aspects of Dante’s work, who led Jonas Wergeland to cut short his astronomy studies and begin, instead, on a course which revolved around architecture.