The Conqueror

Because it was there

Jonas’s family often went on holiday jaunts around Norway. Because, you see, they had a car. Children today would hardly consider the fact of having a car anything to shout about, but back then it was a real event when Dad came home, proud as a stag in rut, with a new automobile, usually the first ever; people hung out of their windows and everybody, or all of the male residents of the estate at any rate, had to troop out to view this object of wonder and stand with their hands in their pockets asking questions about the technical details before the family went off for the ritual trial run, cheered on their way like a ship on its maiden voyage. Rakel liked the old Opel Caravan best, because of the name’s associations with the Arabian Nights world in which she lived, while Jonas was for a long time a fan of the Opel Rekord, mainly because it had a speedometer on which the indicator, a horizontal line, started out green, then magically turned yellow and eventually red, depending on how fast you drove. The future Red Daniel, true to form, was forever yelling: ‘Into the red, Dad, drive it into the red!’

How does one become a conqueror?

More often than not the destination on the weekend jaunts the family took when Jonas was a boy was determined by his mother or rather, his mother’s stories. Åse Wergeland was not one for lulling children to sleep with nice, wholesome bedtime stories. In the evening, when their sister was tucked up with her Romance magazine or the 1001 Nights, Åse was in Daniel’s and Jonas’s room, telling them tales of the Vikings’ bloodthirsty world, stories which she claimed were taken from the Norse sagas. As a little boy, Jonas used to connect the word ‘saga’ with the Norwegian word for a saw: ‘sag’. Thus he thought that his mother’s liking for the old legends must have something to do with her interest in saws and her work at the Grorud Ironmongers. Not an unreasonable conclusion, since his mother fought hard, with sword in hand you might say, to ensure that a product such as the G-MAN saw would conquer the market.

Jonas had always been particularly fond of the line in the Norwegian national anthem where it says: ‘and with that saga night that falls, fall dreams upon our earth.’ Almost every evening for years during his childhood his mother told the boys stories from Norway’s glorious Viking age before they went to sleep with — at Jonas’s behest — her round silver brooch pinned to her chest, as a kind of prop. What the boys did not know was that their mother’s stories were recounted freely from memory, she mixed up people and events and also had a tendency to render the tales even more exciting and dramatic if that were possible — and more brutal — by drawing on the arsenal of intrigue and misdeed she had built up thanks to years as an avid reader of detective stories. Nonetheless, they were fed, albeit in the wrong contexts, most of the most famous lines from the sagas: all Jomsborg’s Vikings are not yet dead, a fall means good luck, you have struck Norway from my hands, the King has fed us well, the roots of my heart are still fat — all of those matchless old saws. They were also wont to quote them at appropriate moments, as when Daniel farted and inquired: ‘What cracked so loud?’

The question is, therefore, particularly when one bears in mind the formidable capacity which stories have for forming an individual, whether the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life was not, in fact, his mother and whether, by admitting this, I am also shifting the focus of my account. Because most heroic tales can awaken forces which until then have lain fettered inside a person; they can unleash a spontaneous urge to emulate the hero’s deeds — as, for example, when Daniel, tried to imitate the Viking king Olav Tryggvason by walking along the oars while Jonas was rowing, and very near drowned. The great ideal, though, was Einar Tambarskjelve, at least for Jonas who liked archery and who, even that early on, may have been aiming too high. For once, his mother had actually matched the right words with the right person, all the way from Einar’s answer to King Olaf Tryggvason’s question as to what had cracked so loud: ‘Norway, from your hand, lord king,’ and the part immediately after this, when he is handed the king’s weapon: ‘Too weak, too weak the king’s sword is,’ to the words he speaks just before he dies: ‘Dark it is in the king’s moot hall.’ The boys’ blood used to run cold at the savagery of their mother’s stories; folk swearing that they would heap body on body before they would surrender, teeth jangling on ice as men clove open one another’s skulls, foreign weaklings praying to God to be spared from the wrath of the Norsemen. So it was thanks to many years spent in the company of the figures in his mother’s more or less unlikely stories that Jonas Wergeland not only vowed to go to Miklagard, otherwise known as Istanbul, but was also imbued with a latent impulse to become a conqueror, expand boundaries and possibly also a taste for a certain belligerent lack of restraint, like the character in the Icelandic saga who kills a thrall simply ‘because he was there’. When you get right down to it, it would not be altogether wrong to say that it was Jonas Wergeland’s mother who turned him into a potential murderer.

The stories which their mother embroidered upon for the boys had been told to her by her father, the only difference being that Oscar Wergeland had read from the sagas, both from Snorre Sturlason’s tales and from the Icelandic family sagas, so he had passed far more accurate versions of the tales to little Åse and Lauritz — the latter conscientiously followed up this upbringing, of course, by becoming the captain on a succession of DC planes in the SAS fleet, all named after Viking heroes. And Oscar did not just read them stories, he also told them stories from his own life that, in their turn, had given him his insatiable interest in the sagas and the Viking age in general.

In his youth, Jonas’s maternal grandfather had from time to time visited an uncle who had a farm down near Onsøy. On one such occasion, when he was helping prepare the ground for the building of a new house, they came upon the remains of a ship, along with various artefacts. While it could not match the greatest treasure trove found in Norway: gold weighing a total of five and a half pounds, it still fired the imagination; there had been one sword hilt in particular which his grandfather had been much taken with — years later he was still able to sketch it on a piece of paper for his children.

Their mother had to tell this story for Daniel and Jonas time and time again; for all I know she may well have thrown in a couple of elements from Oehlenschläger’s poem about the Golden Horns found in Denmark. Jonas could just picture it: you go out to the field one day to plough or lift potatoes and suddenly you’re unearthing the history of Norway. Jonas never really got that out of his head: it could even be that he also applied it to other areas of his life. After all, since large amounts of gold had been buried during periods of unrest in Viking times, and since most of it still lay hidden in the ground, with a little luck at any time you might stumble on something valuable. Jonas had fantasies of finding treasures of undreamed-of worth if he so much as rolled away a stone in the forest. He also knew how these things would look: exactly like the bowl-shaped dragon brooch Aunt Laura had given his mother, with its pattern of intertwining lines.

As I say, it was his mother, or his mother’s stories that determined where many of the family’s trips took them — even his father and Rakel, who were really both living in worlds of their own, meekly went along with her choices. Daniel and Jonas called these jaunts Viking raids, and that’s possibly quite true: these trips were a combination of holiday and business, colonization and fierce combat — the boys taking care of the latter. In this way the family had covered the length and breadth of southern Norway, seen everything from rock engravings and cairns to ancient roadways and battlefields, from the tumulus at Haug by the shores of Karmsundet just north of Hafrsfjord, to Kaupang in Vestfold, from Raknehaugen Barrow in Ullensaker to the rune stones at Vang Church in Valdres. On these trips they immersed themselves so deeply in the world of the sagas that on one occasion, after they had pretty much cleaned out a roadside hotdog stall, Daniel had burped contentedly and said, ‘The King has fed us well.’

This interest in the Vikings went so far that their mother even took the boys down to the Akers Mek shipyard at Pipervika one day late in the autumn of 1966 to see the oil rig Ocean Viking, which was nearing completion. ‘These will be the new Viking ships,’ she said reverently, having gazed long in wonder at this giant.

And now, on a day in May of that same year — a month full of long holiday weekends — they were on the way to Stiklestad, scene of the famed battle in which King Olaf II was slain. Jonas was in a bad mood. He had been a bit tetchy — spoiling for a fight, you might say — for some time, mourning as he was for his lost love, for Margrete’s treacherous rejection of him and ditto departure from the country. They stopped for the night at Røros, also in its way a historic monument, albeit of more recent date than the Viking remains. The old mining town had an unreal beauty about it, as it lay there bathed in the copper light on the plateau, so unique that it would come as no surprise to anyone that it would soon be added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, right up there alongside the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Great Wall of China.

Each time the family arrived at a new place they followed the same two-fold ritual. The first thing they did, therefore, was not to visit the slagheaps or the old mines at Bergstaden but to march straight to the town ironmonger in a body, to check that they stocked G-MAN saws and possibly ask whether they had remembered to place a new order with the wholesaler if they had run out. In other words, half an hour after their bags had been lugged into the guest house, the Hansen family were to be found in the Bergmannsgata premises of M. Engzelius and Son, one of Røros’s time-honoured establishments, asking stern-faced and as with one voice almost, to see their selection of saws, and at least four members of the family breathed a sigh of relief when a baffled sales assistant showed them the wall on which the G-MAN saws were displayed exactly as they should be, because they knew that their mother showed no mercy if anything was missing — particularly if it was the new G-Mini saw, the very flagship of the Grorud Ironmonger’s range, called after the Gemini space rocket and equipped most ingeniously with two different blades, so that it could be used either for meat or logs, an innovation which was nothing short of world-shattering. Entire holidays could be ruined by ironmongers with negligent buyers, or shopkeepers who simply did not stock ‘the world’s best saw’. Sometimes their mother would go quite berserk: ‘Haven’t you heard about the drive to sell Norwegian-made products!’ she would shout, shaking her fists at a terrified shop assistant.

In the second part of this ritual, which was almost a way of conquering the town, they trooped after their father up to Bergstaden’s mighty white Ziir, which is to say the octagonal stone church. Their father had called from the guest house and made an appointment with the organist, so that he could at least see the famous old baroque organ that, sadly, had just broken down and would have to be repaired. Instead he was allowed to try out the brand-new, Czechoslovakian main organ. ‘Play some Bach, Dad!’ Daniel yelled up at the little door in the side, behind which his father was taking his seat, as if here too the whole point was to put the speedometer into the red. And their father played Bach while the rest of the family sat proudly in a pew in the centre of the lovely, light church, listening. Thinking back on it as an adult, it seemed to Jonas that his father made love to churches when he played. That his father made conquests of churches rather than women. That his aim in life was to play in as many churches as possible. Haakon Hansen may have been a sober-minded character, but when it came to organs he was a real Don Juan.

So, for Jonas, Norway was a network of organs and ironmongers, music and steel — he had a feeling that life itself must consist of just such a combination, of something soft and something hard. And no weekend jaunt was more perfect than on those occasions when his mother’s and his father’s interests conjoined, in places that had both a fine organ and an ironmonger stocking a wide range of G-MAN saws — plus, since this was of course their excuse for being there, an interesting rune stone.

Although Jonas liked Røros — the buildings and the landscape appeared so alien and intriguing that he pretended he was in Ulan Bator in Mongolia — he was feeling a bit despondent that night as he stood alone in front of the mirror in the bathroom. They had booked in to one of those atmospheric inns in the museum-piece street that ran down to the church, a place that had retained some breath of history from the days when Røros had been a pulsating mining community. His parents were sleeping in one room, the three children in another, with a shared bathroom.

As Jonas stood there in his pyjamas, brushing his teeth, his thoughts turned to Margrete, back to Margrete, who had chucked him; and it was then, as he was standing there, cosseting his broken heart, that he noticed the strange box on the shelf below the mirror, and it couldn’t possibly be a powder compact, so he had to open it. He was not so stupid that he didn’t recognize it for what it was. His mother’s diaphragm. He gazed at the rubber ring, at first panic-stricken because for a second or so he thought that it was the same size in diameter as the vagina and could not imagine how his little penis could ever fill such a huge space. On reflection, though, he realized that that could hardly be the case. A sudden surge of excitement hit him, a sense of expectation not unlike the thrill he had felt the first time he found his mother’s pack of sanitary towels on top of the geyser in the bathroom at home: Sheba, the name alone had set his spine jangling, set him thinking about realms which seemed as exotic and remote as the queen’s little blue face, Egyptian-like on the pack.

Jonas stands in that bathroom in Røros, staring at himself in the mirror, then drops his gaze and spies something else lying next to the diaphragm. His father’s razor. These two objects represented a mysterious beauty, like a dome and a minaret. Or something soft and something hard. Jonas felt that this situation called for a creative act, a combining of these two objects. The sight he beheld here cried out for a make-believe fight, with the razor as a sword and the diaphragm a shield clashing together in a great battle — on the field at Stiklestad for example. Alongside the razor lay a razorblade. With his fingertips Jonas lifted it, made a cut in the thin rubber membrane of the diaphragm, not very long and close up against the elastic ring, where it was all but invisible; he put the diaphragm back in its box, closed the lid. The way he saw it he had pressed a button. Now what would happen?

He lay in bed — Rakel and Daniel were already fast asleep — listening to his mother and father in the bathroom, could hear that they were in high good humour, laughing softly, that it was one of those nights. Jonas lay on his back, looking up at some knotholes in the boards of the ceiling and smiling to himself in the grey half-light. It was as if only now did he understand the wisdom of the sagas, those pithy sayings. Because if he had ever been asked why he had done what he did, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with any other explanation either, except: ‘Because it was there.’

At breakfast, while Rakel was studying the map and his father was wondering whether he would be allowed to play the organ in Nidaros Cathedral, their mother told them about a dream she had had. ‘I met a white elephant,’ she said. ‘And would you believe, I dreamed that it wrapped its trunk around me and lifted me high into the air.’ She laughed, nudged their father in the arm. ‘Pass me the jam, Daniel, and stop playing the Battle of Stiklestad here at the table at least.’

Only Jonas suspected that she might have been impregnated by that white elephant, that for several hours now a Buddha had been in the making.