The Conqueror

Carl the Great

Is it possible to find a beginning, something that might have prepared us for the episode that shook, nay, stunned the whole of Norway? Might it lie in something as innocent as a journey abroad?

When, after four days surrounded by nothing but water, Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck and watched the green island slowly rise up out of the sea before him, truly rise up, as if it had been made for this moment, it occurred to him that this must have been how Columbus felt when he spied the first islands of the Caribbean — although he had been sailing for much longer and towards a quite different destination. Jonas had, nonetheless, the feeling that he was approaching an unknown continent. And as they slipped through the opening in the coral reef and found themselves, all at once, in Apia harbour, encircled by greenery, a green as bright as the slope running up to peaks he could not see — hidden as they were behind the first range of hills — the island on which he was about to set foot seemed to him like another Eden, a fresh start.

Why did Jonas Wergeland travel?

One day, Professor, someone will write a weighty treatise on the influence of Carl Barks on generations of Europeans. That’s right: Carl Barks — not Karl Marx. No one should be surprised when, one day, some individual becomes, say, Secretary-General of the United Nations and, to the question as to what his or her greatest influences have been, does not, as expected, say The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis or the works of Leo Tolstoy but quite simply replies: some cartoon ducks. In other words: those incomparable stories from the pen of American chicken farmer Carl Barks.

Jonas read very, very little as a child and adolescent, but he did devour every single Donald Duck comic issued from the fifties until well into the sixties — for reasons to which I shall return — and although he knew nothing about the contributing writers and illustrators, it was Carl Barks’s strips which made the biggest impact on him. So much so that certain stories were read as many as a hundred times, to the point where he knew them by heart; one might almost say they settled themselves as ballast inside him. Just as children of an earlier age had their hymns off pat, verse upon verse, Jonas knew the adventures of Donald Duck. Carl Barks opened wide the door not only onto the history of the world, including all its myths and legends, but also onto its geography. The countless expeditions Jonas undertook in the company of Barks’s heroes represented a grand tour not unlike that made by Niels Holgersson and his geese. Barks’s comic strips presented a first impression of regions and countries that never faded from Jonas’s mind. Considered from a certain angle, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Carl Barks who gave Jonas the urge to travel and to travel far.

Of all Carl Barks’s fantasies, there were few which Jonas liked better than those involving journeys to faraway places, to virtual Utopias no one knew existed: for example, that famed epic of the trip to Tralla La in the Himalayas, where money was unheard of, or the expedition into the forests of the pygmy Indians who talked in rhyme; or the trek into the mists of the Andes, where they stumbled upon the weird geometric universe of the square people. But Jonas also had a penchant for some of the shorter traveller’s tales, especially those that took Carl Barks’s trouserless ducks to the isles of the South Seas, to islands where the people sang ‘Aloha oe!’ and wealth was measured in coconuts. He particularly enjoyed the hair-raising trip to Tabu Yama, a volcanic island, where Uncle Scrooge had gone to search for black pearls in the lagoon.

I think, therefore, it is safe to say that Jonas Wergeland went — albeit unwittingly — to Polynesia to look for Carl Barks or to compare Carl Barks’s creations with the real thing, although I’m sure this is not the reason he would have given. On this, one of his first long trips in the seventies, his prime aim was to visit a place that was as unspoiled as possible, relatively speaking at least. And when he stood by the rail of the boat, looking towards Apia and those green hillsides, the landscape really did seem to have a virginal air about it, the air of some last remaining paradise: ‘Upolu, Apia, Utopia. But no sooner had that ostensible goal been achieved than he realized that he did not, in fact, have any idea why he had come here. In a way — and this is how Jonas Wergeland regarded most of his travels — he went there to discover why he had gone there.

Samoa may seem a long way away, Professor: very far, at any rate from everyday life in Norway. But we live in an age when all countries have become a part of all other countries. So I would just like to mention here that Samoa was, of course, not as unspoiled as Jonas Wergeland had thought or hoped: that Samoa has also had its part to play in the history of Norway. For it was here that a Norwegian by the name of Erik Dammann came to stay with his family for a while in the sixties, for much the same reason that Uncle Scrooge went to Tralla La, and to some extent it was here that he gained the insight which, not long afterwards, inspired him to write a book and, prompted by the overwhelming response to this book, to found a popular movement calling itself The Future In Our Hands, one of the oddest phenomena in the history of post-war Norway, a movement which, at its height at any rate, seemed to suggest that a surprisingly large number of Norwegians were receptive to the idea of another way of life and a very different global distribution of commodities. So Samoa could, in fact, be seen as the starting point for this movement; it might not be going too far, either, to say that Erik Dammann was actually trying to turn the whole of Norway into another Samoa. Jonas’s brother Daniel got particularly carried away — as was his wont — by such prospects for a couple of years, a phase which more or less overlapped with his involvement with the more extreme and far more puritanical and ascetic variant of these same ideals, namely, the Marxist-Leninist movement. Daniel subscribed to the more practical aspects of Dammann’s credo with a fanatical fervour; he even gave up drinking Coca-Cola, something which, considering the amount of Coke he consumed at that time, must be regarded as the doughtiest of all his doughty feats in life and indeed one of the few times when, opportunistic bastard that he was, he actually made a sacrifice.

Jonas Wergeland was, however, blissfully ignorant of Erik Dammann’s links with Samoa as he strolled along Beach Road, the main thoroughfare in Apia, looking for somewhere cheaper to stay than Aggie Grey’s Hotel. It was hot and humid, and a sweet scent filled the air — not from spices, but from flowers. Apia itself was not much more than a large village: the church towers and spires rising above the white, two-storey wooden houses with their corrugated iron roofs the only sign that this was, in fact, a town. Just five or ten minutes’ walk from the town centre the wooden houses gave way to fale, open-sided huts thatched with palm branches. The only familiar thing that Jonas could see was the bamboo, which called to mind his boyhood ski poles. He walked along Beach Road, clad in a neutral — one might almost say universal — tropical suit, glorying in the feeling of being a total stranger, a person whom none of the inhabitants of ‘Upolu or Apia knew anything about. For all they know, I could be a young scientist, he thought, or the rebellious son of a billionaire, or — why not? — a writer looking for romantic inspiration, an excuse to get sand between his toes.

This sense of absolute anonymity was to some extent ruined the very next morning as he was eating breakfast at the guesthouse. When a young, hippie-looking man from New Zealand who, it transpired, had a neighbour of Norwegian descent, heard that Jonas was Norwegian, he immediately started blethering on about Ole Bull, wanting to know why in hell Ole Bull didn’t establish Oleanna, his Utopian colony, on Samoa. It would have had a much better chance of success here than in America, of all the stupid, bloody places. ‘Can’t you just hear it?’ he said. ‘Ole Bull’s violin interwoven with those lovely Samoan harmonies.’

As a way of escaping from this conversation, later that day Jonas walked down to the market and took a bus out of town, a bus that looked more like a gaily decorated, open-sided shed on wheels. He got off at a random spot next to a banana grove, not far from a village, but these he skirted around and walked through breadfruit trees and bushes covered in exotic scarlet blooms, down to the sea, three to four hundred yards beyond the village. The beach was just as it ought to be, with palms bending over a crescent-shaped ribbon of golden sand. Jonas stopped to gaze in wonder at the lagoon, the seabirds sailing over the bands of foam where the Pacific broke against the reef. The sky was overcast. He discerned the top of a volcano beyond the hills, shrouded in mist, almost unreal.

Jonas feels a faint pinching of his testicles and turns around: a group of men are walking towards him. All are clad in lava-lavas, gaily-patterned sarongs, most are bare to the waist, a couple are wearing shirts. Some of them are carrying palm-leaf baskets on poles across their shoulders. Several are clutching sapelu knives, the kind used for splitting coconuts. Jonas’s first thought is that his life is in danger, that he must have committed some dire offence against something or someone — thoughts of broken taboos flash through his mind — but he quickly realizes that the men seem happy to see him, that they aren’t just happy, they look as if they can hardly believe their luck, they are all talking at once, pointing excitedly and yet respectfully, as if he were a stranded emperor. They keep up a constant stream of chatter, smiling broadly. He doesn’t know what to make of it all. He says something. None of them speak English. They point to the sand, the palms, the reef offshore, nod their heads. They point to his tropical duds, laugh, point to his sunglasses, his hat. ‘Matareva,’ they say again and again. And then, pointing to him: ‘Mr Morgan.’

Jonas introduced himself, pronouncing his name slowly, said that he was from Norway, repeated this in all the languages he knew, said that he studied the stars: this was at a little-known period in his life when Jonas Wergeland was attending classes at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. He pointed to the sky, pronounced the words ‘Southern Cross’, and wasn’t it true, he said, or tried to say, that these islands were home to master navigators who sailed by the so-called ‘star paths’, the kaveinga? They merely laughed, not understanding a word, smiled, bowed, went through the motions of embracing an imaginary woman, mimicking romantic scenes. ‘Mr Morgan,’ they insisted. Jonas waved his hands in protest, but it made no difference; their expressions said he couldn’t fool them, they knew who he was. So when Jonas heard the sound of a bus in the distance he jabbed at his watch and excused himself, then jogged off through the grove and up to the road. The men followed him, beckoning, as if inviting him to come with them to the village. He mimed a polite no, but this did not stop them from staying with him until the bus drew up, and when he waved goodbye, it was clear from their gestures that they were urging him to come back soon.

Jonas put the whole incident out of his mind until his penultimate day on the island. He had hitched a ride on a yacht bound for Fiji; he would have to leave earlier than planned. On impulse he grabbed something from his bag and caught the bus back to the village. He got there an hour before sundown. The littlest children spotted him straight away and led him around smoking cooking fires and through the aroma of baked taro to the headman’s fale, to an elderly man lying on a mat with his head on a neck rest. When the formalities had been got out of the way Jonas was once more addressed by one of the young men from the beach — Jonas guessed that he must be the headman’s son — and then invited to enter his fale. Before long more men appeared. Jonas was ushered to one of the mats inside the hut, an open construction sitting on a coral-stone platform, with a roof made from the leaves of the coconut palm. The others sat down, smiled at him as they had done before. One of them touched him, as if to check whether he was real. Beyond the uprights of the hut a bunch of kids followed the proceedings. A woman brought in a bowl of kava. As far as Jonas could make out this was not a traditional kava ceremony, they had some other reason for passing the half coconut shell to him, as if sealing a contract, or celebrating something that went beyond any stretch of his imagination, but he drank, he drank and nodded, felt it behove him to do so, drank the greyish-white liquid which tasted chalky and made his whole mouth numb. The men sat cross-legged, speaking sometimes to him, sometimes to one another, Jonas made out certain words: ‘Matareva’ cropped up again and again, as did ‘Mr Morgan’. Jonas also thought he heard Gary Cooper’s name mentioned more than once. He remembered that a number of films had been shot on the island and things began to fall into place.

As darkness fell some women came in carrying freshly cooked dishes wrapped in banana leaves and woven coconut-fibre baskets of fruit. The sky was the colour of the hibiscus blossoms they wore in their hair. Soon the stars, too, appeared: unfamiliar constellations, seeming to offer endless possibilities for new ways of navigating. Jonas realized that he was a guest of honour. That this was no ordinary act of Samoan hospitality. No, it was more than that. They mistook him for someone else. He did not know who or what. Nor whether there was any risk attached to this case of mistaken identity. The men chattered incessantly, eyed him closely, nodded, smiled. He was an empty shell. They piled things into him. They turned him into someone else, a great man perhaps. All he did was to put up no resistance, make no protest.

Someone lit a paraffin lamp that hung from the ceiling. An array of dishes was set before him. He recognized fish in leaves, possibly octopus too, together with some indeterminate creamy paste. He spotted baked breadfruit, slices of taro in coconut milk, papaya and whole pineapples — he had no idea what the other things were. One person kept wafting the flies away from the food. Another brought him a dented cup containing some sort of cocoa.

The men cast curious glances at Jonas as he ate. On one of them he could see the edge of a big tattoo, the rest was concealed by his lava-lava. Maybe it was the glimpse of this strange design — either that or the night sky — that brought home to him something he had, without knowing it, learned from Carl Barks’s traveller’s tales: that we will always have the wrong idea about other cultures. We can never really understand them. We think we have understood something, but in fact we understand nothing.

The talk flew back and forth around him, the word ‘Hollywood’ cropped up at regular intervals, and by putting two and two together Jonas suddenly grasped that, despite his youth, they thought he was a director, a film director searching for a location for a film. They thought he meant to choose their beach. He felt laughter well up inside him. Or was it fear? How amazing. They took him for a film director. Or so he thought. And in that instant Jonas Wergeland knew why he had come here: he had come here to be part of this very experience, to sit on a mat in a fale under a mind-reeling, star-studded sky and be treated like a great man, a film director. And suddenly all his embarrassment was gone and instead he found himself seeing this entire, grandiose misapprehension as an edifying experience, as something important, something from which he had to learn. This experience might prove to be every bit as valuable as a black pearl, he thought.

Jonas sat listening to a distant song, not knowing how to thank his hosts for their hospitality. But he did as he always did on such visits, a gesture which also accorded well with what was expected on Samoa. He gave them a present. The same present as always. When Jonas Wergeland went on his travels he invariably took with him a G-MAN saw, a frame and a blade, a product for which his family, or at any rate his mother, was, in a manner of speaking, responsible So now he presented a G-MAN saw from the Grorud Ironmongers to these natives on an island in Samoa, in the South Pacific.

When Jonas stood at the rail of the yacht the next day, having spent the night in a palm-thatched hut before taking the bus back to town; when Jonas stood there and watched Apia and the rest of the island dwindling to nothing — tropical green sinking into blue — he felt relieved, happy. The previous evening he had lain awake, gazing out between the wooden uprights of the hut, and he carried away with him the memory of that vast, glittering night sky, which also represented an acknowledgment of the infinite potential for other names, other paths to take through the stars. And now, as ‘Upolu vanished from view, he also found it possible to laugh at the whole crazy episode, although he could not rid himself of the thought that deep down there had been a danger there too, that one wrong word, one wrong move could have spelled disaster for him. He thanked God, in a way, that he had escaped before the misunderstanding had been discovered.

On the other hand his heart was heavy. He had a feeling that this confusion, being mistaken for someone else, was a formative experience, that in different guises this incident would keep on recurring throughout his life. His despondency was prompted by the thought that perhaps he should not bemoan this fact: that it was, on the contrary, his only hope.

Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck of a boat and watched a Polynesian island disappear. He had left Norway with hardware and was returning with software, to use terms that were not common parlance back then. You set out carrying goods and come back with ideas. And unlike Erik Dammann, Jonas Wergeland did not return home with a Utopian ideal of Norway, of a new way of life, but with a Utopian ideal of himself. This might be a side of himself — the great director, metaphorically speaking — of which he knew nothing. Maybe, he thought, I’ve been wrong about myself all this time.

And somehow Jonas sensed that this journey was not over, that no journey is ever over, that they go on, that, like Carl Barks’s most thrilling adventures, they often end with a ‘to be contd.’.