The Conqueror

My Dear Fellow Countrymen

The threads he was tying together had to do with having ambition, with the mystery inherent in that a person can be moseying along one day, perfectly content with life, only the next to be seized by an unquenchable urge to do something, be someone, make a name for himself. Where does this impulse come from? Could there be a little steel coil inside the body that can suddenly be wound up like the spring inside the workings of a clock? And furthermore: is it possible to determine the precise moment when a person chooses his main path in life? In Jonas Wergeland’s case, it is. And, I hasten to add, to avoid any misunderstandings: it was not me who talked him into it.

To questions from well-meaning relatives as to what he wanted to be when he grew up, throughout his childhood Jonas always answered without hesitation: ‘A pilot!’ or ‘A chef!’ — thanks to Uncle Lauritz and Three Star Larsen, Ørn’s father, respectively. In time, however, he came up with a more original occupation, one that invariably made those selfsame relatives smile: ‘I’m going to be the Father of my Country,’ he would say. Now this idea had not been plucked completely out of thin air: Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen lived in the same building as Aunt Laura on Sofienberggata in the Tøyen district of Oslo. To be the Father of one’s Country, to lead the people, seemed to Jonas a promising — and by no means unattainable — future calling, to stand before a sea of people and say, as Gerhardsen had done, with a slight catch in his voice: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’ And though this may have been a childish notion, yet it speaks of an exceptionally high level of ambition, a dream of achieving something great, which cannot be put down to his aunt’s Tøyen address. The explanation must have lain to as great an extent in his mother’s stirring stories — have patience, Professor, I’m getting there — not to mention his grandfather’s incessant stream of yarns, in which Jonas was always the hero, a fabulously well-equipped dragon slayer.

Jonas was sitting on his own, up in the little quarry in the forest hard by the People’s Palace, which doubled as the local cinema. According to the calendar, it was the end of April; the snow had melted, and the sun was getting stronger. All around him buds were bursting open; he almost thought he could hear the sound of popcorn hissing in oil just before the popping starts. He pulled off his jersey, sat there in just his shirt, a Davy Crockett T-shirt that would soon be too small for him. Jonas had spent most of his time alone since Little Eagle went away. He was considered to be a bit of a lone wolf, and the sort of unpredictable, aggressive wolf you didn’t dare tease. Jonas sat on a ledge in the middle of the quarry, sat there drowsing in the hot sun with granite crystals glittering all around him. The slope of the mountain formed a natural amphitheatre; Jonas sat there, peering down at an empty stage. In fact, had he been in the mood for it, he could well have pretended that he was standing among the market stalls on Youngstorget in Oslo, about to make a speech, as practised as another Demosthenes with pebbles in his mouth: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’

The particular attributes of this spot made it something of a holy place for the local community. The stone for Grorud Church had come from quarries in this area. Jonas might well have been sitting in a matrix for the church where he had been christened, the spire of which he could just make out above the treetops. The scouts often used the granite amphitheatre on ceremonial occasions, for rites that could bring a lump to many a young lad’s throat, on St George’s day for instance, or for the swearing-in of new scouts, when the place was decorated with flags and banners and candles, and the stone sides resounded with the murmurings of ‘Isolemnlysweartodomybest…’

Jonas was feeling down in the dumps. For the first time in his life he was truly depressed. The previous weekend they had had a visit from Sir William and family, who would shortly be leaving for Africa. And during Sunday dinner, the usual cold roast with brown sauce, his uncle had turned to the subject of Veronika and her rare gifts. ‘Mark my words, one day that girl is going to make it big,’ he intoned, while Jonas’s cousin kept her eyes fixed coyly on the tablecloth. ‘What about me?’ Jonas was foolish enough to ask to the obvious, malicious glee of the Brothers Grimm. ‘You, Jonas,’ Sir William had replied at length, after adjusting his silk cravat — as if he, this heartless individual, was for once considering biting back a spiteful remark — ‘you’ll never amount to anything. You’re the commonest little mongrel I’ve ever met, you’re a perfectly ordinary little boy and you should be content with that.’ Although none of the others took this as anything more than a jovial quip, or at least: no more than just another of his uncle’s almost pathologically crass remarks, his words had echoed in Jonas’s head for the rest of the meal: ‘Perfectly ordinary.’ The words ran round and round his head in a never-ending loop, like an electric headlines sign. ‘Perfectly ordinary…common…’

Jonas knew why Sir William’s summation of his character had affected him as it had. It was because he had realized — only at that moment, in fact — that for him, Jonas Wergeland, to be ordinary was the worst of all possible fates. At the same time it had dawned on him that his uncle was right. He was ordinary, he was common. And not only that: he was as common as common could be. He had known it for some time, although he couldn’t have put it into words. His only talent lay in his voice. And maybe an extra vertebra in his spine. Hardly the makings of a Father of the People. The best he could hope for was to be an announcer at the Eastern Station. Better, then, to be like Ørn, he thought hopelessly. Better to be a loser. Sooner a ‘Fail’ than a ‘Fair to Middling’.

So here he was, sitting in the amphitheatre, in a granite grandstand, as if in illustration of his fate: he was to be a spectator, he was doomed to be a spectator for the rest of his life. He slumped back, feeling flat, felt himself becoming one with the bedrock, grey on grey. The sun was so hot that the air actually smelled of sun, of spring, of stone. The living world seethed round about him, like in a laboratory, giving him a sense of tremendous pressure, a feeling that something stupendous was about to take place. He sat, or sprawled, there, filled with a burning desire to be transformed.

This yearning, or rather, this heartfelt prayer, could be traced back to a crucial flash of insight which he had been granted not long before — he must have been in a particularly receptive state, antennae working frantically, after his uncle’s prophecy. In biology class their teacher had been talking about diamonds, told them that diamond, the hardest of all substances, was a mineral consisting of pure carbon, as was graphite — except that graphite was very soft. ‘Carbon is, therefore, polymorphous,’ the teacher said. Although Jonas did not know the meaning of this expression: that carbon could crystallize in different ways — in other words, that diamond could be formed only under great pressure, while graphite was a low-pressure variant of the same substance — he got the main point: that carbon could assume a number of forms. This had brought him much-needed comfort — to know that plain, ordinary graphite, as he knew it, for example, in his own pencil, when subjected to a different level of pressure could become a diamond — become what the Greeks called ‘adamas’, meaning invincible. Was there any reason why he might not contain similar potential?

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas is lying there in a drowse when he becomes aware of a movement on the edge of the clearing below him. He opens his eyes wide and sees two adders slithering towards a flat rock dead ahead of him, only ten yards away. He sits stock-still, feels how his heart pounds at the sight of the snakes — not because they are dangerous, but because he knows that a drama of the utmost significance is about to be played out on the stage before him.

Suddenly the two snakes raise the front parts of their bodies into the air and begin to sway towards one another, for some time they do this, as in some strange dance, before they almost — so it seems to Jonas — twine themselves around one another, though without touching, and still with their bodies lifted off the ground. Jonas was thrilled. He had heard of snakes ‘wrestling’: rival males wrapping themselves round one another. But as far as he knew this usually happened in the grass, horizontally. The confrontation he was witnessing here was being conducted in a semi-vertical position, this surely had to be something of a miracle; adders were not actually all that flexible, they didn’t have the cobra’s ability to raise its body high into the air. The snakes seemed to Jonas to be bathed in light, a golden glow. A promise, he thought to himself, it’s a promise.

Jonas knew right away that this sight, this upward-straining intertwinement was vitally important, that it had the power to heal him, in the same way as the serpent of brass Moses set on a pole in the desert. The way he saw it, this moment, those seconds when they raised themselves into the air and formed a double spiral, had been created for him — and him alone. These creatures were doomed to crawl on their bellies, but they had risen up, right in front of him, held up their heads as it were, defied the biblical curse, did the impossible — yes, that was it: the impossible — defied their biological limitations and lifted themselves up, a zoological miracle on a stage of granite. Later it would occur to Jonas that they had formed what looked like a section mark, that he had caught a glimpse of the essence of life, of the first clause in the law of life.

But what cheered him most of all was that this spectacle corresponded with — you might almost say, consolidated — an image he had had in his head for a long time, an image or a tactile sensation which stemmed from a feverish dream and which could be compared only to the feeling of running a finger along a corkscrew. Also, he had immediately made the connection between the two snakes in the clearing and the ball of snakes he had stumbled upon the year before. This dance was a continuation of that incident, a clarification of something of which the ball had allowed him a mere glimpse: two spirals intertwined. The principle of leverage, of something that could set mighty things in motion, raise him to undreamed-of heights. He stared at the snakes for so long that they slithered through his eyes and into his head. At any rate, suddenly they were gone, dissolved into thin air so it seemed. The snakes, or a double helix, had taken up residence in his brain. ‘Inside me I carry a new way of thinking,’ his heart sang. ‘I am different.’

At that very moment — believe me, it’s true — Jonas heard a voice, or perhaps something more akin to the deep scale of notes from an organ, which said, or told him, in no uncertain terms that he would be a conqueror. He always maintained that that voice or sonorous peal came from the very granite on which he was sitting, almost oozed from the crystals — so clearly that he could positively feel the vibrations, as from the membrane of a loudspeaker. And at that instant he knew, as if it were an integral part of the experience, what his weapon in this conquest would be: that intertwining form.

I know this sounds a bit high-flown. But everyone experiences — to a greater or lesser degree — mystical moments, when they receive a clear and inescapable message — or whatever you want to call it — and for Jonas Wergeland this was how it happened. From that day onwards he knew for sure. He was not going to be a chef or a pilot, nor even the Father of his Country; he was going to be a conqueror. By the time he stood up and set off for home he had carved out a calling for himself, as solid as a granite church.

You look surprised, Professor, because you have never heard of this, such a pivotal episode. Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I might have done on an earlier occasion, when I said that Jonas Wergeland did not recognize the significance of these events until they cropped up again, thanks to some woman. What if he had not experienced these things at all? What if he had merely imagined them, dreamed them up, during those acts of love, but so vividly and with such powerful conviction that he seemed to have experienced them. Whatever the case, Jonas Wergeland felt that these women somehow enabled him to relive many fundamental stories upon which he was able to draw later, use as springboards to a changed life. It was as if he had been given the chance to travel back in a train and get off at stations he had run past first time round. So you see it could well be that Jonas Wergeland’s later success, his inimitable chain of television programmes was forged from causes — stories — which never were but which could be reconstructed, like Gleipne, the chain in Nordic mythology: it too was made from things that did not exist.

It might be more correct to say that at a certain point — possibly not until that coupling in a dim room in the Museum of Cultural History — it was brought home to Jonas Wergeland that one was not doomed to be the person one was, or at least not only that person. One could become more. We are not, he thought, we form ourselves.

One thing that is certainly true is that when he got home from the quarry he wrote his name on a sheet of paper, and to his amazement he found that his handwriting had changed. On impulse he had also put a ‘W’ between his first and last names, ‘Jonas W. Hansen’ he wrote and discovered that he had made a new name for himself: that one letter could be all it took to change everything, just as the little prefix ‘un’ before the word ‘common’ produces something uncommon. As he contemplated the ‘W’ Jonas could not help thinking of a machine of some kind which could cause him too to stretch himself, much as a leg that is too short can sometimes be made longer. The ‘W’ had the appearance of a coat of arms or a royal emblem — Jonas VI or something of the sort. His initials, too, looked exceptionally powerful, nigh-on divine. There was something about the sight of these three characters which instinctively prompted him to clear his throat and say, in all seriousness, as if carrying out a voice test: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’

The next day he cycled to school, even though he hadn’t passed the proficiency test. He was bursting with newfound self-confidence. At the school gate he collided with Margrete Boeck, the new girl in the parallel class to his own. Turn a ‘W’ on its head and you get an ‘M’. He didn’t know it then, but his life had already changed.