The Conqueror

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I — the Professor — do not know whether or not to call this the irony of fate. Jonas Wergeland escaped disaster that time, but nothing could save him from the media earthquake triggered by his arrest and later trial — not surprisingly perhaps, seeing that Wergeland himself was the instigating factor. The public hoped, of course, for as long as they could, hoped that something was wrong, that someone, somewhere had made a terrible and most unfortunate mistake. Rumour had it that Jonas Wergeland remained silent — and, others added, unmoved — and he refused to make any sort of statement to the police. He had accepted the lawyer appointed to defend him without demur and would not hear of engaging one of the big-time lawyers whom Daniel was sure would be able to help him.

I think everyone, including myself, awaited the trial in such a state of suspense that you would have thought the honour of Norway was at stake. At times, the interest in the case could almost be compared to the hullabaloo surrounding the winter Olympics at Lillehammer that would shortly be coming to a close. It seemed as though higher powers wished to reward the Norwegian people by treating them, for a short time — en masse, as it were — to not one mammoth spectacle but two: a thought-provoking reflection of Jonas Wergeland’s theory that Norway was ‘a nation of spectators’.

I do not know whether it is possible to say anything about the proceedings in the High Court beyond all that has already been reported, all that has been written, all the pictures that have been published — not least those risible sketches from the courtroom, like illustrations from cheap crime magazines. One can ask oneself whether there was anything about Jonas Wergeland that did not come out during the trial — a kind of inverted version of This is Your Life — thanks to the prosecution’s dogged efforts to prove his guilt. The most surprising part was probably the fact that Jonas Wergeland also chose to remain silent, as if he considered this his best mode of defence, or his only mode of defence: something which lots of people naturally interpreted as a black mark against him. Nonetheless, there was no doubt: through everything that came to light, everything that was relayed by the media and greedily watched, read, listened to and, not least, discussed everywhere, Jonas Wergeland seduced the Norwegian people anew.

By the time the case came to court a number of books about him had already been published, with titles such as The TV Demon and All That Glisters: superficial, hastily penned ‘biographies’ produced with only one aim in mind: to make money. Well, it was a very tasty story, almost worthy of Shakespeare himself: the vertiginous plunge from the peaks of distinction to the pit of hell. And yet the trial managed, indirectly mind you, to produce fresh details, whole stories in fact, primarily of the murkier sort, the relevance of which was skilfully argued by the prosecution — everything from a boyhood story about the theft of a stamp album to that of an embarrassingly degrading taxi ride about a year before the killing. The prosecutors also received plenty of help from Gjermund Boeck, Margrete’s father, and William Røed, Jonas’s uncle who, in their respective capacities as the Norwegian king’s ambassador and a director of Statoil presented their testimonies with great authority: his uncle, known within the family as Sir William, impeccably attired in a blazer with a gold silk cravat at his throat, painted a particularly lethal picture of what he called ‘Jonas Wergeland’s complete lack of character’. Few would disagree with the newspapermen’s refrain: ‘If anyone in modern times has been put in the stocks, then it’s Jonas Wergeland.’

In all fairness it has to be said that a few critical voices did say that it all went too far, as when an ex-girlfriend appeared in court and told — she, with her natural bloom and expressive features — of their six-month affair, a testimony in which their sexual escapades were more than hinted at. She had been called as a witness — this was a point which a tireless prosecutor emphasized at great length — because of a brutal tale, a quite shocking business, if it were true, which would possibly provide absolute proof of Jonas Wergeland’s terrible temper and violent tendencies. These revelations were all the more sensational since the woman concerned was now one of Norway’s best known film actresses, one of the very few to achieve international stardom — and as if that weren’t enough she had recently married and had a child by an Oscar-winning American director.

I would like, if I may, to slip in here a little information about this person drawn from my own material: Jonas Wergeland met Ingunn U. while she was at drama school, when her temperament was at its most volatile — if that is any excuse. She was the type who was liable to bathe in fountains and simulate scenes on the tram. If my source is correct, she went so far on several occasions as to have sex with Jonas with her face heavily made-up, wearing theatrical masks from a variety of roles; according to Jonas himself, the first time he was about to enter her she apparently murmured one of Juliet’s final lines: ‘O happy dagger — this is thy sheath!’ As far as I can judge Ingunn U. was a person who was more or less continually out of context. When Jonas broke up with her, she would stand all night outside his bedsit in Hegdehaugsveien, bawling and shouting and waking up half of Homansbyen until the police finally took her in hand. Whether it was acting or genuine hysteria no one ever knew; that was her secret, as it was on the stage or on film sets later in her career.

All in all, a lot of things seemed to be taken to the extreme, blown totally out of all proportion. The whole sensation industry that fed on this case lent it the character of a farce, of something unreal. More and more people had the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. For a start, the motive seemed unclear. Why would Jonas Wergeland kill his wife? This seemed even more inconceivable to all those Norwegians for whom the thought of Jonas Wergeland and Margrete Boeck conjured up a picture of the ideal couple, snapped at premieres and parties, a regular feature in weekly mags and newspapers year after year; the television personality and his wife, a dark beauty who also happened to occupy the highly respected post of consultant physician.

‘Do you know what the most surprising thing of all is?’my guest asked on the fourth evening on which she visited me, clad in her usual elegant black and as earnest as always. ‘The most surprising part of all this washing of dirty laundry in public was one question that was never asked. Obviously because it had nothing to do with the case. And yet it gets to the very nub of the matter. Because, if it were true that Jonas Wergeland possessed all those failings and evil inclinations, how could a whole nation fall under his spell? And that being the case, does this not say everything about Norway, the cultural level of this country in the last decade before the millennium? That such an individual could wangle his way to such enormous power and popularity, I mean?’

This evening she was in less of a hurry to launch into her unstoppable monologue; for the first time she wandered round the turret room, taking everything in. I have to be honest and admit that I was warming to her, that she was actually starting to intrigue me, those bright red lips in the pale face and the blazing eyes framed by such a remarkable mass of black; the way she moved, with the dignity of one of royal birth. As she passed me I tried again to place the indefinable odour that hung around her — it seemed to hail from some other land — but with no success. She stopped in front of one of the bookcases, pulled out a couple of the biographies I have written, leafed through them, smiled. ‘Well, you’ve certainly not been idle, Professor.’

No I haven’t. I have always worked hard. I do not know whether it is necessary to mention this, but I am regarded as a pioneer within my field, my original field that is: historical research. I think I can safely say that I was the first, or certainly the first clear representative in Norway of what is now referred to as the Annales school: a form of historical research with the emphasis on research which, simply put, concentrates more on the long lines of history, the currents below the surface, than on individual lives, and endeavours, above all else, to eschew any kind of storytelling, especially of stories depicting political or military events as the illustrious deeds of great men. ‘Structures rather than events’ was my motto. Where the nineteenth century, my own specific field of study, was concerned, I took up the fight to tone down the focus on nation-builders and looked instead at the more economic and social aspects. My best known work, which is still cited in international history circles, is the treatise Broad Sail — the title meant to give an idea of the book’s subject matter and its scope — in which I shed light on the Norway of the nineteenth century by writing about the shipping trade and the south coast of Norway, though with wider reference to the whole period from 1536 to 1870. It is as much a study of the region as it is a work of history, an investigation of the relationship between the people and the country along the south coast. The first — and most highly praised — third of the book deals with the district solely from a geographic point of view: the climate, the coastline and the interior, islands, harbours and towns, land and seaways. The aim was to view the whole of the North Sea as one vast region in such a way that the relevance of Britain to what happened in Norway became apparent. By dint of interdisciplinary methods I describe everything from food, clothing, housing, tools, wages and prices, to the family circle, customs, religion and superstition — and even idioms peculiar to the south coast, not least seamen’s expressions. Some said that the treatise’s central character was not man, but the ship, or the sea.

My apologies for this brief discourse, but I feel a need to underline that it was not a betrayal of, but doubts about, this method which led me to make a fresh start, whereby I would once more attempt to centre my account around people, those people whom I had, until now, working from my Olympian perspective, treated almost like insects, or as a ‘sum’. Perhaps — I say perhaps — this could be attributed to a new realization that you cannot discount the story from a description of historical events. In any case, this resulted in a string of books that could be said to be well known and that I suppose could be called biographies since they deal with figures of consequence in the history of nineteenth-century Norway. And while the general public had never heard of my four major scholarly works, not even The Structure of the Bureaucrat State, sales of the first biography, of P.A. Munch, simply skyrocketed. Two years later The Norwegian No, a book about Søren Jaabæk, appeared and repeated the success.

Although I did try later to explain the success of these books by saying that I just happened to hit the biography boom which began around this time, satisfying the public’s apparently insatiable need for coherence, for a mirror they could hold up to their own lives, the real reason was obvious: the Norwegian people, the Norwegian general public at least, wanted histories not History. And maybe they are right: maybe our existence is best understood as a story. To some extent this depressed me, to some extent it heartened me. I confess, however, that this voracious interest took me by surprise, and what is more: it was this longed-for wider recognition that tempted me to resign my professorship in order to devote myself to writing biographies fulltime. And if I were a Judas, selling out my beliefs, then I didn’t sell them cheap; I made a fortune out of it. Forgive me, I’m only human — vain too: I willingly let myself be flattered by people who praised my gift for popularization, for taking a fresh slant on things, by reviewers who maintained that I had done for a number of prominent Norwegians what Lytton Strachey did for a bunch of his countrymen.

So I was wary of any tinge of irony in her voice when she addressed me as ‘Professor’, as if I were continually hearing myself being accused of having abandoned my true calling. Eventually, though, I began to interpret it more as her way of invoking, not to say appealing to, my academic abilities. I regarded her with bated breath as she flicked desultorily through my biography — the one I am most pleased with — of historian Ernst Sars: Prospect of a Life. ‘Do you think that so-called great people have to be out-of-the-ordinary?’ she asked, and then, as if not expecting a reply: ‘What if they were perfectly ordinary. Or downright weak.’ She put the book back. ‘Could one, for example, admire a man who might be a murderer?’

The ferry to Denmark slipped past, out on the fjord. It may have been its glowing lights that prompted her to move over to the fireplace where a fire was burning. ‘I hate this cold,’ she said again, although the temperature outside was only around zero, and then, seeing my look of surprise: ‘I’m used to much warmer conditions.’

As I was putting more wood on the fire she bent an openly appreciative eye on the mounds of papers on my desk, piled up so high that I could barely see out of the window when I sat down. There too lay all sorts of statistical surveys, official documents, fat works of reference, economic reports, a history of television, the yearbooks of various professional bodies — as if the room belonged to a social scientist or social anthropologist rather than a historian. I realized that, in my uncertainty regarding my project, I had fallen back on my old methods — I almost said: my old sins. Could it be that all along, without knowing it, I had been afraid that I would not be able to discern a clear storyline in the life of someone from our own century and had, therefore, accumulated all this material, just as I had done for my earliest works — on an epoch, on a country — as if hoping that somewhere in there I would spot one long thread winding its way through the mass of information. Or maybe I suspected that Jonas Wergeland was just another name for a — what shall I call it? — a way of thinking, that he was the symbol of a national trend: that, like Abraham in the Bible, he personified the whole history of his tribe, that he represented something more, except that I could not see what it was. And yet, surprisingly enough, she seemed to approve of my method. ‘I need someone who takes a man seriously,’ she said, ‘who understands that a man amounts to more than his own life.’

Before she came on the scene, I had had the feeling that I had in my possession the annals of Jonas Wergeland, but that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I lacked the structure: which is to say, the secret thread of life on which the stories of his life could be assembled like pearls on a string. Inevitably I had begun to wonder whether there could be a crucial difference between a life of today and a life from the previous century. It might be that one could now amass so much material on a life that it was no longer possible to recount it. Or was there a simpler explanation: that I was clinging to the past, to old-fashioned expository models, outdated theories on just about everything. The perpetual rumble from the airport occasionally made me feel as if I was sitting next door to a prehistoric zoo, full of dinosaurs.

Whether my fears were justified or not, my visitor’s stories forced me to see that I might have been on the trail of a story that was too big. She showed me that it was also possible to arrive at insight into a life through something seemingly fragmentary, strings of stories which at first sight are totally unconnected but which, when you get right down to it, constitute a new form of coherence and unity. Something seemed to dawn on me, especially when I was writing for all I was worth, trying to follow her disjointed narrative, and I was unwilling, off-hand, to call it an acknowledgement of inferiority. Maybe that’s just how life is, how it must be.

When I mentioned the trial to her, she sat down in the chair by the fire and laughed: ‘There was at least one story that did not come out there, Professor.’

I dimmed all the lights, apart from the lamp next to my own chair. She shifted closer to the fire and fixed her eyes on a spot outside the windows, as if fire and darkness were the very prerequisites of the storytelling. I put pen to paper just as a plane was taking off from Fornebu. I knew as little about where it would land as I did about the tales she proceeded to tell.