The Conqueror

Made in Norway

Which reminds me: I must tell you about the attack in Istanbul, but first I need to recount the tale of the Three Wise Men. You see, Jonas himself once had a go at being a shaman. Not by dancing but by reading. For even though Jonas Wergeland only rarely opened a book, there was a period — a long period — when he used to sit with the same thick book in his hands. And he wasn’t reading to himself, either; he was reading aloud, to another person, for the ears of that person who sat, or as good as lay, in a chair. And despite the fact that his companion’s eyes were fixed on a blank television screen, Jonas read: ‘For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:/Rain; empty river; a voyage,/Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight,’ he read and scanned the face opposite him, a face that remained as immobile as ever, eyes that never blinked.

Jonas Wergeland was sitting in an institution in Oslo, reading to one of his best friends. He read aloud and at length. Jonas Wergeland was not a good reader, he recited in a flat monotone, softly, nonetheless he read, read with a dogged determination, from an endless poem, laying stress on, nay, instilling hope into, every word. As far as I know, this was the only time when Jonas Wergeland read because he felt that it really mattered, although he did not understand one word of what he was reading. He would read from this weighty tome, read these, to him, incomprehensible stanzas, for decades, at least once a month. Words such as: ‘Under the cabin roof was one lantern./The reeds are heavy; bent/and the bamboos speak as if weeping.’

Jonas put down the book and stared deep into Viktor’s pupils, as if hoping for some sign of life, much as coals can sometimes give off a faint glow just when you think the fire has gone out. ‘I wish I could have brought you a bottle of aquavit — a bottle of Gilde’s Non Plus Ultra,’ he says. ‘But it’s not allowed, you see.’ No answer. Never any answer. Black coals.

‘I’m married now,’ Jonas said. ‘D’you remember I told you about Margrete, the one who dumped me in seventh grade?’ he said. ‘We have a baby,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to be doing a programme for television soon — got any good ideas?’ Jonas refused to give up, always spent a long time talking to Viktor, pausing briefly every now and again, as if listening to his friend’s replies: ‘You were right,’ he might say. ‘Pet Sounds is a more important album than Sergeant Pepper.’ Short pause. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it: as an ideology, Merckxism could definitely take over from Marxism.’ He may also have endeavoured to develop his argument, although not, of course, the way Viktor Harlem himself would have done it — if those coals had not been extinguished.

They were sitting in a nursing home in Oslo, a totally characterless room that fitted well with Viktor’s own characterlessness, the eyes fixed on the blank television screen in the corner. For Viktor Harlem, time had stopped. He still looked as he had done at the age of nineteen, when in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. He — Viktor the Taoist — had attained his goal: he had become immortal. Jonas had the idea that, in spirit, his friend was actually somewhere else, that this was why his body remained the same — because there was nobody there, inside it. Viktor sat absolutely still, staring into space. There didn’t seem to be any point, but Jonas knew, hoped, that something was going on behind those black pupils. Something must register, surely, and this ‘something’ might, in the long run, generate a glow. ‘Remember what I said about the Middle Ages being a golden age in the history of the West?’ Jonas said. ‘It was a bluff. One of many. It was something I lifted, just a quote from a book of lectures by Friedrich von Schlegel.’

No reaction. No glow in Viktor’s pupils. His face as blank as the television screen in the corner.

Occasionally, when they were in the lounge, Jonas would sit down at the piano and play one of the standards, ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ maybe, striking chords that would have made anyone else raise an eyebrow.

No response. An outsider would never have guessed that this human vegetable in the armchair had once, ten years earlier, been a regular firecracker, fizzing with ideas and flashes of inspiration, one great scintillating ball of energy; that this figure had been the natural leader and spokesman for a remarkable group known as the Three Wise Men: the sort of baffling individual, one in a hundred thousand, who in third year at high school, at the drop of a hat and without turning a hair, would proceed to sum up — to pick a subject at random — the ins and outs of analytical, phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas often thought about Lillehammer. He hated that town. As far as he was concerned, it was no surprise that Lillehammer should have been the scene of the first terrorist attack on Norwegian soil — the assassination of an innocent man, carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Ten years earlier they had walked there arm in arm, Jonas, Axel and Viktor, the Three Wise Men, on their way home from an eventful skiing holiday farther up Gudbrandsdalen, on their way home to the wilderness of the Cathedral School and the ominous advent of the university Prelim. Unlike Axel and Jonas, Viktor was very fair and had already begun to lose his hair. Caricatures in the school newspaper invariably depicted him as a light bulb screwed into a black polo neck sweater. And it was true, he always seemed lit up, incessantly sparkling with theories, exuberant notions — on that day too, just before it happened, as they, but mostly Viktor, were walking along, debating possible future demonstrations, the stream of talk punctuated by hoots of laughter as he reminded Jonas and Axel of some of their previous, highly original raids: because, despite what many might say, and despite a rather reckless approach to life, the Three Wise Men were warriors at heart, young men who were ready to revolt at the first sign of injustice and social folly and who devoted almost as much time to making sense of the world as they did to changing it.

One of these latterly so legendary demonstrations was staged in Oslo on an autumn evening in 1969, as a protest against the situation in Biafra. I ought perhaps to say something here about Biafra, Professor, since disasters of this nature have a way of elbowing one another out of the collective memory. But Biafra constituted the real watershed. Biafra was nothing less than the first unthinkable famine to come sweeping into the living rooms of Norway by way of the television screen with the result that for years Biafra was to represent the epitome of world want. And remember: this was before such disasters were turned into light family entertainment, into Live Aid concerts and the like. Being confronted with the Biafran tragedy was like seeing one’s first horror movie, that sense of actually feeling one’s nerves fraying at the edges.

The Biafran war held special meaning for Jonas, since it was this event that opened his eyes to the change that had occurred in his own home. Ever since his father, lured by the advertisements, had bought their first television set in order to watch the speed skating in the winter Olympics of 1964, Jonas’s parents had spoken less and less to one another. The hum of a perpetual conversation, a sound like the low thrum of a power station, so much a part of his childhood, was now replaced by the hum of the television set. And the chairs which had once sat facing one another were now ranged side by side — not only that, they had bought new chairs, of a type specially designed for television viewing.

One evening in particular was to be of crucial significance. Jonas had been doing his homework and was on his way to the toilet when the usual metallic murmur prompted him to peek into the living room and thus he found himself confronted with a scene which he would never forget, one which stuck to his cerebral cortex like an icon: for there in the living room sat his parents, each in their chair, their eyes fixed on a screen filled with ghastly, heartbreaking reality, and yet they were so silent, so apathetic almost, that they might have been watching the Interlude fish in their aquarium. Although it’s only fair to say that when the first reports from Biafra were screened, Jonas’s parents too were, of course, appalled, they may even have wept, but by this time, six months later, their senses had become strangely blunted, they sat back in their chairs, staring listlessly at the television as if they were actually waiting for something else to come on, and this despite the fact that their eyes rested on one of those images which would be replayed again and again, with only minor variations, in the course of every famine disaster: a little girl with flies crawling over her eyes, weak from hunger, and on the ground right next to her: a vulture. Here, Jonas received an epiphanic vision of the true nature of Norway: this sight multiplied thousands upon thousands of times — people sitting in armchairs in front of televisions showing pictures of starving children far away.

It seems likely — and this is just a theory — that this was the evening on which Jonas Wergeland formed his overriding perception of Norway: of Norway as a nation of spectators. Finally, Jonas understood what his parents’ generation had been building on those community workdays in the 1950s: a grandstand in which they had now taken their seats. All of Norway had become what it could indeed appear to be when seen from space — a 1200-mile long granite grandstand packed with armchairs. Window On Our Times was the name of the programme, and people truly did sit there in their chairs as if staring through a window in the wall at the world outside, following all the suffering in the world from the sidelines as it were. Television was, quite simply, an invention eminently suited to a country which lay thus on the periphery, which was used to witnessing events from a safe distance. ‘The screen tricks us into believing that we don’t live a sheltered life,’ as Jonas Wergeland once remarked in a debate. The Norwegian word for television is ‘fjernsyn’ — meaning ‘distant vision’. And because the fjernsyn gave such a blessed illusion of beholding some distant vision, one could hold onto the blissful sense that one was merely a spectator and never an active participant.

This experience — I am in a position to reveal here — also lay behind one of Jonas Wergeland’s earliest programmes for television: one in which, so the advance publicity promised, he would take a look at the most quintessentially Norwegian product ever. Everyone was sure this would be something like Bjelland’s fish balls or possibly one of Frionor’s frozen seafood dishes, but in fact it turned out to be a product made by Ekornes, the successful furniture manufacturers from Sunnmøre on the west coast. In this programme Jonas Wergeland stated, not without a trace of irony, that Norway’s greatest contribution to the world in recent times was not the cheese-slice, nor the plastic keycard, but the Stressless chair, first launched onto the market in 1971 — an invention worthy of a land of spectators and indeed one for which the national spectator mentality was an absolute prerequisite. Because the Stressless patent was — and still is, I might say — brilliant in all its simplicity. The innovative feature, no less than a revolution in the relaxation industry, was that you could assume different sitting positions merely by shifting your body. A lazy nudge of the hip was enough, a little wriggle. You no longer needed to stretch your hand down to a lever. The position was adjusted by the weight of the body itself. Jonas filmed a lingering sequence demonstrating the merits of the chair — which was set in front of a television: a comical scene that did not fail to provoke a lot of bitter complaints to the NRK management from the furniture industry. But Jonas was perfectly serious. ‘We ought to design a new Norwegian flag,’ he said. ‘White as innocence and with a stylized Stressless chair in the centre, just as India has the Emperor Ashoka’s wheel on its flag.’ Jonas had no doubt: in a hundred years the Stressless would be on display in museums, hailed as a national symbol on a par with the painting of ‘Bridal Procession in Hardanger’.

What I am trying to say is that the Biafra disaster occupied a nigh-on traumatic place in Jonas’s consciousness, which is why he reacted so strongly when Viktor announced that autumn, that Norwegian missiles were being used in the war down there in tropical Africa. And do please pay attention here, Professor, because if there is one thing I know a little bit about it is the evil acts of which mankind is capable. Viktor read everything and anything and had contacts everywhere. Viktor was the sort of character who walked around with Le Monde’s weekly digest sticking out of his jacket pocket. He had an acquaintance in England who worked for a publication entitled Peace News, and in this paper, in the forthcoming November issue, it was reported that arms manufactured in Norway were being used in Biafra. Viktor had a copy of the article. He was outraged. It had, of course, been rumoured that NATO ammunition was being employed down there, but this had elicited no great outcry. Any suggestion that these weapons might in some way be connected to Norway had nonetheless been denied. But now. In England they had a photograph, proof that the name of Norway was branded on the Biafra conflict for all time. In other words, that for once Norway was not a mere spectator but also, in fact, a participant of sorts. The picture showed the casing of a 40mm shell, stamped with the legend USN (NORWAY) — Norway, typically, only as a parenthesis but there all the same. ‘They ought to make miniature copies of this shell-casing,’ Viktor felt, ‘for Norwegians to sit on top of their television sets.’

The Three Wise Men were never in any doubt: this news had to be made public. But how? Not surprisingly it was Viktor himself, with his mysterious network of contacts, who came up with the solution and set the stage for the triumphant evening when the three friends came walking — arm in arm then too — along Karl Johans gate, like three gunslingers in a western striding down the main street of some lawless town. They had come across Egertorget, passing underneath the splendid neon sign for Freia Chocolate, at which Jonas had so often gazed in wonder as a child, and were making their way over to the Eastern Station. And there — dead ahead of them — as if inscribed across the dark evening sky — was the message, sweeping past the eyes of everyone who was watching, like the Northern Lights: NORWEGIAN SHELLS USED IN BIAFRA. How Viktor, undoubtedly with the help of some reporter, had succeeded in keying the headline into the telex machine at the Aftenposten offices on Akersgata, onto the tape which, by transmitting the data down a telephone wire, converted it into glowing letters running round the top of the Eastern Railway Station façade, remained a mystery — not least to the owners of the newspaper. There it was, however, the writing on the wall, as clear as it was inexplicable, presented as it was on the largest electric headlines sign in Norway. Every bit as impressive as the Freia Chocolate sign. A whole twenty-six yards of panels, nine thousand light bulbs, revolving round and round. The Three Wise Men stood at the bottom of Karl Johans gate along with a good many other people, gazing up at the building across from them, as if mesmerized by the incomprehensible, impossible, outrageous, insolent legend that swept past their eyes at regular intervals, picked out in blazing light bulbs: NORWEGIAN SHELLS USED IN BIAFRA, again and again, between an advert for Adelsten Ladies and Menswear and a subscription special offer.

Several members of the press had also seen it. To be on the safe side, Viktor had tipped off one of the city papers and sent them a copy of the article in Peace News. A few days later it made front-page headlines. People refused to believe it, of course. They simply could not credit it. To begin with, the Ministry of Defence also denied the assertions but later issued a statement confirming them: the arms had been produced by the Norwegian company Raufoss for an American client. A long and involved explanation was given for how this could have happened, together with an assurance that Norway had not, of course, sold these shells to Nigeria.

Not that anyone believed that either. The Three Wise Men did not mean to moralize; they simply wanted to show that Norway was involved with the outside world. As long as the wealth was filtering into the country — not to say pouring in, or rather, being sucked into Norway — you could be sure that, in global terms, we were on the side of the lawbreakers, not to say the vultures. It was this fact which, incredible though it may seem, the people of Norway succeeded in suppressing and go on suppressing, as they sit there deeply ensconced in their comfy Stressless armchairs. Hence the reason that they are regularly taken so completely by surprise when arms fabricated in Norway, some small component, shows up where it shouldn’t — be it, as past history has shown, in Cuba, in Israel, in the Soviet Union or Turkey. Or when it is discovered that some nice, respectable Norwegian concern has set up shop in a bloody dictatorship. Norway cannot stay an innocent bystander, sheltered from events forever. One of the things that was shot to pieces in Biafra, in that blessedly far-off conflict, was Norway’s innocence. Thanks to Viktor Harlem, this blot on the virtuous face of Norway was placed, as it were, on record, to endure for all time.

And now, nearly three years after this exploit, the Three Wise Men are walking the streets of Lillehammer after a glorious skiing expedition in Gudbrandsdalen, another exploit which I should like, if I may, to describe in detail later. Now though, as I say, they are walking side-by-side, arm in arm, gleefully firing off suggestions — each one crazier than the one before — for new and momentous demonstrations, fresh disclosures concerning woeful situations in what they call the Potato Monarchy. In later years, both Axel and Jonas would recall that Viktor — it may have been the Taoist in him — had had his misgivings about that day, that he had anxiously consulted his diary — otherwise known as his seventh sense — wherein the date was circled in bright red, and shaken his head. So now he was treading rather warily, as a superstitious person will avoid stepping on the cracks in the pavement, and all of a sudden, on a side street, he swaps places with Jonas, takes Jonas’s place in the middle, playing ‘all change’, like when they were boys, and then it happens, what so seldom happens, and yet now and again does: a chunk of ice slides off one of the roofs, a large, hard chunk of ice comes hurtling through the air, inexorably, and hits Viktor — of all people Viktor, who is walking in the middle — on the head.

Viktor instantly fell to the ground, unconscious, and lay still. Axel, quick-witted as always, sprinted into a shop and called an ambulance. When it arrived he got in along with Viktor.

Jonas stayed behind. Picked up, of all things, the block of ice. Thought for a second, perhaps, of the old party game, Spin the Bottle. The whim of chance. Thought, perhaps, incensed by his own impotence, of smashing a window, all the windows in the street. He felt a burning urge to climb up onto the roof, to see that spot where the chunk of ice had broken off, from which it had fallen, the cause of the accident. Instead he stood where he was, regarding it as if it were a crystal ball, offering the prospect of an answer, and he did, in fact, glimpse something inside the ice. He took it back to the guesthouse in which they were staying and put it in the washbasin. Only then, with the bathroom light shining on it, did he spy the earring inside, one of those big pearl earrings, fake, cheap. Or maybe it was genuine, he thought. Jonas had no idea how it could have got there. How do things ever find their place? By a process that was possibly just as inexplicable or as logical as Norwegian shells winding up in Biafra.

Axel was sitting in the corridor when Jonas arrived at the hospital; distractedly running his fingers through his hair, as if trying to straighten out his black curls. Viktor was still unconscious, undergoing clinical tests in Admissions. The X-rays of his head had revealed nothing. They could hope. But both Axel and Jonas knew that a head was every bit as fragile as an electric bulb. They sat wordlessly side by side. Jonas rubbed his forehead; Axel fiddled with his hair. A kindly doctor asked them to come back the next day. Axel had called Viktor’s mother. She was on her way to Lillehammer.

At the guesthouse the chunk of ice had almost melted away. Jonas told Axel about the earring, but when he looked for it, it was gone. ‘Don’t kid around with me now,’ Axel said.

After a week Viktor regained consciousness, but that was all. He said nothing. He was somewhere else. Even though he could dress himself, could walk, could eat, he still needed help. He was there, and yet not. There was no reason why it should have been so, but so it was. He was a mystery to medical science, as they said. Jonas took it hard, even harder than Axel. Six months later, when he went to Timbuktu, there were those who said it was because he felt so bad about Axel.

Axel eventually wound up in an institution in Oslo, and it was here that Jonas visited him regularly, year after year. ‘Behind hill the monk’s bell/borne on the wind./Sail passed here in April;/may return in October/Boat fades in silver; slowly.’ No response. Viktor sat utterly motionless, staring into space. An extinguished light bulb.

Ironically enough, Viktor’s mother had bought him a Stressless Royal. Here, in this chair, Viktor spent the greater part of his life from then on. All he did was eat and watch TV, nothing else. He, who had never looked at a television before, who was never still, sat there like an inert king. One might almost say he had become the perfect Norwegian, Jonas thought. The quintessential spectator. Who saw and yet did not see. Who could watch anything at all without it making any impression. An exponent of wu-wei, non-action. And even now, ten years after the accident, Viktor looked as young as ever; he might still have been in his third year at high school, about to sit his university Prelim. It was true: Viktor had gained eternal life but at what a price.

‘Do you remember Master Tung-hsüan-tzû and the art of love?’ Jonas said.

No glow in the eyes before him, eyes which had sparkled when Viktor had told Jonas about the Taoist metaphors for the different ways of thrusting into a vagina — like a wild horse leaping into a river, like a sparrow pecking up rice in a field, like large rocks sinking into the sea, or like the wind filling a sail — images which showed Jonas, as Daniel’s examples had done, that the act of love posed the greatest challenge to the imagination, or was it the other way round?

‘You know Svein Rossland, my old teacher, knew Niels Bohr?’ Jonas said. ‘They worked together in Copenhagen.’

No response. For the first few years, Jonas had talked a lot about this, hoping that it would ring a bell somewhere inside Viktor’s head, hoping to find a switch that might turn him on.

‘I often said that Pluto had to have a moon, but everybody laughed at me,’ Jonas said. ‘Now they’ve discovered it, the Americans.’

No response.

In a final attempt to rouse his friend, and one that was about as dangerous as tampering with an unexploded bomb, Jonas asked, ‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’

No response.

After the accident, after the Prelim, after Timbuktu and after national service, Jonas started at Oslo University. Jonas suspected that he might have chosen to study astrophysics because he wanted to learn more about the universe, that universe which causes two people to swap places, then makes a chunk of ice drop out of the sky. He wanted to learn the ways of the universe — or its Tao, as Viktor would have put it — and mankind’s place in this design.

‘Comes then snow scur on the river/And a world is covered with jade.’