The Conqueror

From the Annals of the Potato Monarchy

‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’

The idea, usually, was to come up with the best strategy for life in general: or rather, to achieve immortality, but on this particular evening the matter in hand was the more prosaic one — in both senses of the word — of the tactics for getting the best possible mark for the mock Norwegian exam held just before Christmas, a rehearsal for the actual university Prelim, an essay which tested not only one’s command of the finer points of the Norwegian language, but the whole of one’s shaky way of thinking. The Prelim essay was simply one of those trials that had to be undergone, like the BCG vaccination or the army’s long-distance endurance march.

Viktor and Axel had just finished playing a duet: ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’, meant as a kind of time-out. Viktor played the piano — no one played the piano like Viktor Harlem, the king of melancholy; he could elevate the blandest tune into a melodic heaven or make any tired old standard sound like you’d never heard it before — set free somehow, brand new. His left hand in particular spoke of a true gift, playing around with triads and switching about the notes in the chords as though the possibilities were endless. Axel’s double-bass playing was not up to the same standard, but it was impressive enough. Axel had always sought out the bass line in life anyway — Jonas regarded his fervent interest in the DNA molecule as a variation on this same theme.

Speaking of bass lines in life, I ought perhaps to intimate my doubts regarding the previous story. Because, knowing you, Professor, you will automatically assume that such an apparently shocking incident must have a decisive effect on a person’s development. But what if that were wishful thinking? The episode can, of course, provide some clue as to how Jonas Wergeland sowed the seeds of an acknowledgement that the spectator is the guiltiest of all criminals, but such an insight could also spring from other experiences. At this juncture I am tempted to ask you to forget all about the story from the wood, for the moment at least. I am afraid that it may distract your attention. For what if the really dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life lay in the bright stories, or in perfectly ordinary days, or in an incident akin to the one I am about to describe, one that revolves, not around Laila but around the love of Beate?

The Three Wise Men were at Viktor’s place, in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, in a cinnabar-red room known as ‘The Bamboo Grove’. Every Friday evening they gathered here — and often stayed all night — to talk and toast his illustrious patron, in the form of an icon on the wall. It was actually Viktor’s mother’s flat, but she had moved in with a new man, so he had the place to himself. At the end of the street stood a proud, old building that had once been a sailcloth factory. Appropriately enough, since they often felt that they were setting sail up there in Viktor’s flat, that they were weaving the fabric for great intellectual voyages.

The living room resembled a combination of bar, travel agency and joiner’s workshop. On the only wall not painted cinnabar red — but instead covered in wallpaper with a bamboo design — hung an enormous map of the world marked with a distinctly meandering line which looked as if it were following the round-the-world voyage of another Captain Cook, and the floor was covered in tools, off-cuts of timber and wood shavings. Aside from the table — two still pungent halves of an old oak sherry cask — Viktor had made all his own furniture, not least the bookshelves he was constantly having to extend to accommodate new books bought to provide more insight into Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Viktor claimed that everything, absolutely everything, he had ever learned — right down to the fact that he could, at the drop of hat, sum up the ins and outs of phenomenological, hermeneutic and analytical philosophy — derived from his tussles with Ezra Pound’s poetic conglomerate. It is also worth noting here that there was no television in the room. ‘The salvation of the world is bound to come from a corner other than the one in which the TV stands,’ said Viktor.

There was also another, less philosophical, explanation for the absence of a television. Having first entered the gates of the Cathedral School and instantly homed in on one another — rather like ants, by dint of chemical secretions — Viktor and Axel eventually discovered that they had a common bond in their fathers. It was hard for Jonas to see how a director with the Akers Mek shipyard in Oslo and a manager at the Løiten Distillery in Hedemarken could have anything in common, but the key here was the Wilhelmsen shipping line. ‘If it weren’t for our fathers,’ the two said, arms wrapped round one another, ‘Norway would never have had its most famous product: Line Aquavit.’

Furthermore, both Axel and Viktor loathed television — again because of their sires. Axel’s father had had a brief, but hectic political career and in connection with this had once had to take part in an edition of Open to Question, in its day an extremely popular discussion programme on NRK. On this he was given such a lambasting by the programme’s aggressive chairman that he never got over it.

Viktor’s father worked, as I say, at the Løiten Distillery but cherished a distilled passion for another subject — Napoleon. In the very early sixties he took part in the quiz show Double Your Money, answering questions on this multifaceted topic. It went like a dream until they got to the 10,000-kroner question — a hairsbreadth away from winning a fortune, and he gave the wrong answer, or rather his mind went a complete blank when it came to one part of a multiple question, namely: ‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’ He could remember both Soult and Davout and even Lannes but not the last one. And of course it was Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte, no less, the future Karl Johan, with a street in the centre of Oslo named after him and all. Viktor’s father lapsed into such a deep fit of depression after this that eventually his mother could not take it any more; she divorced him and moved to the capital, leaving her husband on his St Helena. Viktor soon followed his mother: in the long run it wore you down to be reminded every other day that you were the son of ‘the man who got the 10,000-kroner question wrong’ and on Karl Johan of all people. He developed a complex about it. If you said one word about Napoleon to Viktor, if you so much as hummed the Double Your Money theme tune or that old favourite, ‘Do You Still Care for Me, Karl Johan?’, you risked being strangled on the spot. They never went anywhere near the royal palace and the equestrian statue of the marshal, and walked down the street named after him only if absolutely necessary. Jonas had a suspicion that Viktor had sworn to avenge his father some day, and that it was Napoleon who would be on the receiving end.

Not surprisingly, the Three Wise Men’s favourite tipple was aquavit, procured through Viktor’s incredible network of contacts. To them, aquavit was a sacred beverage, primarily because, according to Viktor, they ought to follow the example of The Seven Wise Men, seven famed Taoists of Ancient China — a group of poets and rebels who represented the very essence of Taoism’s ‘action through non-action’, who did indeed spend all day in a bamboo grove, where they drank and saluted everything that was against the establishment. Viktor believed that this wu-wei, non-action, was an excellent ideal, since it was exactly the Norwegian way. Do things without doing anything. Everything would sort itself out anyway. Norwegians had been living like that for centuries. The Three Wise Men were simply trying to perfect, to refine, this mentality. So, while other pupils at the Cath became Maoists, the three friends became Taoists; they sat in the Bamboo Grove and paid tribute to China in their own way — they had even been known to write poems, quite spontaneously and in their finest calligraphy, which they pinned up next to the wall newspaper in the schoolyard.

Viktor drank for another reason too: he had a fanatical obsession with immortality and believed that aquavit — perhaps because of its name — could help him. Inspired by the old Taoists who had used alchemy in order to achieve immortality, Viktor tried first of all to get his hands on the secret recipes for aquavit which were kept in the Wine Monopoly safe and, when he had no luck here, experimented with combinations of different Norwegian aquavits, in much the same way as whisky is blended in Scotland, and with drinking various brands in the perfect sequence. ‘The Taoists concentrated on the minerals cinnabar and gold,’ said Viktor. ‘I’m going for cumin and alcohol.’

They enjoyed the aquavit for its own sake too, naturally, and had many a heated argument as to which one was the best. While Jonas was a fan of Gammel Opland and was wont to launch into lengthy panegyrics to a flavour so full and rich, and at the same time so smooth and complex, that one had a sense of two forces colliding, or as he put it: coiling towards one another, and rising onto a higher plane — Axel and Viktor were almost programmed to give pride of place to Løiten Line Aquavit. Hence the reason for the map on the opposite wall — a world suspended between bamboo canes — showing the route taken by the ships of the Wilhelmsen line. ‘Like all good Norwegians, the aquavit has to leave the country in order to become refined,’ said Axel, raising his glass to the meandering line denoting the aquavit’s 135-day voyage across the seven seas, a mandala upon which they could meditate while they drank, to truly see the miracle of the passage from potato to golden liquor: a metamorphosis which began with cooling coils and ended with the ocean waves. ‘Cheers,’ said Viktor. ‘Here’s to the potato, grape of the North!’

The room was filled with a glorious aroma — of new wood and alcohol, combined with the promising smells emanating from the oven in the kitchen — as in an exotic forest or, why not, a bamboo grove. Other than that it was the need to discuss things, ‘a yen for upsetting the universe’ — Viktor’s words — which brought the Three Wise Men together in Seilduksgata, and there’s no getting away from it: seldom, if ever, has so much absolute tripe been served up in a Norwegian living room. As if they were well aware of this themselves, the three had developed an ironic method for classifying their arguments, a sort of Richter scale designed to measure their greater or lesser shock effect: by the number of glasses drunk. And if the truth be told, their discussions were usually at their best, and certainly their most entertaining, towards the end of the evening, when they had reached the ‘ten-aquavit arguments’.

On this particular evening, since the main topic of discussion was the strategy for the mock exam in Norwegian, Viktor began with a pretty well considered theory to the effect that Pet Sounds by the American group the Beach Boys was a far more important album, in terms of musical history, than Sergeant Pepper by the British group the Beatles. ‘It was here, with Brian Wilson’s bass harmonica playing, that it all began,’ said Viktor. ‘The rest was easy.’ This, particularly because of the comparison with Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon was a typical two-aquavit argument. The same could be said of Jonas’s later assertion, based on outrageously tenuous grounds, that Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine Olsen was broken off because he had syphilis. Whereupon Viktor introduced a three-aquavit argument for a new ideology: Merckxism — inspired by the racing cyclist Eddie Merckx — which involved keeping the masses down by showing sport on television, before Axel launched into a tirade about Tojo: ‘How come we know so flaming little about Tojo, when we know such a helluvalot about Hitler and Mussolini? That crook Tojo was the Second World War’s real éminence grise!’

What fascinated Jonas most was the sum of opinions formed, those leaps from topic to topic, or the points that flew thick and fast — as, for instance, in the poems by Ezra Pound which Viktor sometimes recited while standing by the ever-expanding bookcases. Something new seemed to come into being, not out of the substance of their arguments, but in the gaps between Pet Sounds and Kierkegaard, Eddie Merckx and Hideki Tojo.

Then it was time to eat. All three harboured the same fondness for Beate, a yen which, as the evening wore on could also set the mouth watering. Because the Three Wise Men ate just one thing in the Bamboo Grove: potatoes, and Beate — a relatively new variety — numbered among their absolute favourites, for its appearance too: the delicate contrast between red skin and white flesh. The Three Wise Men were ‘enologists’ on the potato front. Not since the so-called ‘potato preachers’ of the eighteenth century has anyone taken so much interest in the potato — especially in combination with its liquid by-product: ‘We have to use Mr Potato Head!’ was Viktor’s constant refrain.

It was not the first strawberries that the Three Wise Men looked forward to but the first potatoes; they knew when all the different varieties were due in the shops, that Ostara was an early, Kerr’s Pink a late crop; they sampled every sort, from the Dutch Bintje with its rather mild flavour to the powerful potato taste of the floury, yellow Pimpernels. They would go to any lengths to get hold of Saturna, a much underrated potato, and stuffed themselves silly when an extra tasty almond potato came on the market, a potato normally only grown in the mountains. ‘And I’d pay anything for those little Ringerike potatoes,’ Axel told his greengrocer.

Although they tried cooking potatoes in all manner of ways, from mashed to au gratin, for the most part they stuck to baked potatoes — not least because they were so wonderfully easy. The only other ingredient they added was garlic, in the form of garlic butter. Because it so happens that around 1970 Norway was invaded by an armada — a fleet of garlic boats, and despite the fact that these met with fierce resistance, as did everything from the outside world, and despite the fact that most people reacted with disgust and would even change their seat in the bus if someone smelled of garlic, in the end they succumbed. For the Three Wise Men, baked potatoes with garlic butter, presented in their silver-foil wrappings like some precious gift, represented the perfect blend of the Norwegian and the international. ‘To Wilhelmsen’s ships and garlic boats!’ they cried.

From time to time they would raise their glasses to the icon, to the portrait of Viktor’s illustrious patron, the notorious picture of the then prime minister, Per Borten, clad in nothing but his underpants, with what looked like a potato stuck down them. ‘The premier, deep in thought,’ the marvellous caption proclaimed. Jonas took much the same pride in this photograph of Per Borten, clipped from the newspaper Dagbladet, as Daniel did in the picture of Ingeborg Sørensen in Playboy. Per Borten was a true Taoist, so ambiguous in his replies that no one knew what he meant, and he saw things from so many sides that he would later be described as a poor prime minister. ‘Every Norwegian is at heart a member of the Farming Party!’ Viktor whooped at the picture. This icon always filled them with a profound gratitude that, in a country where such a person had been the head of government for six years, nothing bad could possibly happen. If anyone asked ‘What is Norway?’, one only had to bring out this photograph and say: ‘This man was our Prime Minister’ — and that said it all.

But by now the discussion had risen onto a higher plane. Axel put forward the theory, based on Dr Christian Barnard’s recent magnificent achievement, that one could in all likelihood fix a broken heart simply by having a heart transplant — a typical five-aquavit argument. Jonas considered the time was right to insist that the Norwegian film Vagabond really deserved to rate as highly as The Battleship Potemkin and Citizen Kane, after which Viktor proceeded to enlarge upon the reckless notion that human thought was possibly just one of Mother Nature’s many whims, much like the spiral-shaped horns with which she had equipped certain long-extinct creatures, excrescences which were, in fact, of more harm than good to the creature — an assertion which I think can safely be counted as a seven-aquavit argument.

As the evening drew towards its close, with the table strewn with potato skins wrapped in crumpled silver foil and Axel revealing that he had at long last deciphered the meaning of the lyrics of Procol Harum’s celebrated hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and, just to make sure they got the point, bawling out the words ‘We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor…’, Jonas, who was still at the lowest aquavit level, began once again to give loud vent to his worries about their Norwegian mock, the essay, which was only a week away. Viktor had no fears, he had worked out a strategy ages ago — a strategy which he would go on fine-tuning until the Prelim. He swore by the creativity of the afterglow of alcohol — or as he put it: its te, an inner force — particularly in evidence during the couple of hours when the brain came to life and lay there, razor-sharp, like a sparkling, freshly polished optical instrument. The only problem was how to get this limbo-like state between death and new life to coincide with the first hours of essay writing. Viktor planned to turn up for the mock exam suffused with a perfectly calculated afterglow, arrived at by drinking a variety of aquavits in a particular order, thus assuring himself of a dazzling overview of the subject matter. But it was risky — just one shot too many the night before could take him from the heights of the afterglow’s Capitol to the Tarpeian cliffs of the hangover the morning after.

‘So what’s your problem?’ Axel asks.

‘I could do with a dose of originality,’ Jonas says. And well he might. Up to this point, mediocrity had paid off; Jonas received his best marks ever for bland essays consisting of material copied from one source or another and totally devoid of individuality. ‘So how,’ he asked, ‘am I supposed to write an essay containing any trace of independent reasoning and still get a good mark?’

This question remained unresolved. Jonas left Seilduksgata as Viktor was getting to his feet, glass in hand: ‘I’ve finally discovered the deeper reason for why you and I are friends, Axel,’ he said. ‘It’s because I’m a Taoist and you’re a biochemist. There’s a parallel, you see, between the sixty-four possible hexagrams in the I Ching and the sixty-four possible combinations of base triplets in the genetic code!’ The last Jonas heard before he closed the door of the cinnabar-red room was Axel embarking on a long harangue on which of Ibsen’s totally crazy and unlikely endings was the most totally crazy and unlikely and announcing that he was going to call Agnar Mykle to ask what he thought — by this stage he was always ready to call Agnar Mykle — while Viktor had sat down at the piano and put everything he had into a rendering of ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird’ featuring some hitherto unheard-of harmonies — a ten-aquavit argument if ever there was one.

Jonas really did take this Norwegian mock exam seriously: so seriously that he took himself off to the extensive archives of The Worker, which were housed high up in the People’s Theatre building on Youngstorget; he had sought refuge here before when he had a tricky subject to write on for homework, lying as it did on the way from school to the subway. Here he sat, working his way systematically through folders containing cuttings on subjects which he thought might come up, so that he would be able, within a couple of hours, to resolve international questions presented to him under such ghastly, imperative headings as ‘Give an account of…’ or ‘Describe and discuss…’ But he was afraid that it was no use: that the result would still depend on how he felt on the day and on the sheer luck of the draw.

It was at that point that Einar Gerhardsen — I almost said God — walked through the room. And bear in mind — this came to pass in the days when only the King was more popular than the old prime minister, or ‘Man of our Times’ as he was dubbed a few years later. He had an office on the ninth floor, he was writing his memoirs, writing, you might say the essay of his life.

Gerhardsen gives Jonas a friendly nod, possibly remembers meeting him on the stairs with Aunt Laura at home in Sofienberggata, although he may of course nod and smile at all goggle-eyed high-school students. It is a big moment all the same: Gerhardsen standing there tall and straight in a chequered shirt and knitted waistcoat: a road worker who truly had paved the Way. A symbol of security on a par with Mount Dovre, large as life in front of him. And actually talking to him, making Jonas feel he has to tell him how nervous he is about the essay, whereupon Gerhardsen smiles, and this in turn encourages Jonas to ask about NATO. ‘Because the fact is,’ says Jonas, ‘that a lot of the radical pupils at the school keep agitating for Norway to pull out.’

Maybe it was the complexity of the question that prompted Gerhardsen to invite Jonas into his office where, once they were settled on a sofa, he told Jonas in simple — I almost said ‘folksy’ — terms his opinion on this subject. Jonas listened intently, with his eyes on the long, wiry hands before him, which were constantly in motion, seeming to conduct the old premier’s words about what a difficult process it had been, a thumbnail sketch, and yet detailed, surprisingly detailed, so much so that Jonas almost felt guilty for taking up this man’s doubtless very valuable time. ‘The Norwegian ideal was of course impossible,’ Gerhardsen said in a slightly tremulous voice. ‘The idea of wanting to feel secure, but without being under any obligation.’ Initially, Gerhardsen told him, he had been in favour of a joint Nordic defence programme, and then, when this proved impossible to implement, of a Western alliance, although he was sceptical of American foreign policy. ‘That was a very hard time for me,’ he said, wringing his hands in mild embarrassment. ‘You could say that I doubted my way to saying yes.’ Jonas gazed with something approaching adoration at the monumental features across from him; the thought of the enigmatic stone figures on Easter Island flashed through his mind. Before he left, Jonas was given the second volume of Gerhardsen’s memoirs, the one which appeared in the bookshops that autumn and in which he had actually described Norway’s path to membership of NATO.

Came the day of the exam. Viktor showed up looking deathly pale and with a thumping headache. No cause for concern, he assured them; he was in perfect form, felt sharp as a razor. Jonas had been more strung-out than usual as he sat there waiting, freshly sharpened pencil at the ready, in the gym hall — normally a place for physical exercises, but now dedicated to mental gymnastics. He was not really surprised when he was handed the exam paper; it all had to do, as Viktor would have said, with alchemy: ‘Assess the importance of Einar Gerhardsen in Norwegian post-war politics’ read one option.

Jonas dashed off a rough draft, scribbling like mad, wrote down all he had read, all the conclusions he had reached, so pleased that he almost wept after he had made his fair copy and handed it in. He knew he could simply have presented the generally accepted view, that of a man who had spearheaded the rebuilding of the country and worked for social levelling and equality, of an era epitomized by unprecedented economic growth and a rise in prosperity which, perhaps more than in any other country, benefited all the people — he could have written about all of that and got good marks for it. As a reward for delivering exactly what was expected, the conventional response. But Jonas wanted, for once, to think for himself, to be provocative, and so instead he wrote — wrote so hard that his pencil snapped several times while he was still on the rough draft: the most important factor was that of international solidarity, he wrote, Gerhardsen understood that if there was one country in the world that could no longer act as if it were living in splendid isolation, that country was Norway, he wrote. Only through painful collaboration could one hope to contribute to détente and have a positive influence, he wrote. ‘Gerhardsen — possibly because he was a socialist first, last and always — embodied the will to see beyond the bounds of his own country,’ Jonas wrote. ‘Gerhardsen simply took up the fight for a political agenda which led Norway from being a spectator to being an active participant.’

Jonas took his departure in the long peacetime, stated that the nigh-on unnatural, 125-year long period of peace up to the outbreak of the Second World War had left Norwegians pampered and blind. And even during the war — in the minds of most people the greatest national catastrophe of the twentieth century — the number of Norwegians killed was no greater than the number killed on Norwegian roads in a couple of decades. This had given birth to a kind of collective illusion, Jonas wrote, that it was possible to stay out of the turmoil of international affairs. The Norwegian people were used to having bounty flowing into their laps, despite the fact that they kept themselves apart from the world. The Gulf Stream factor, Jonas called it, came up with the name then and there, was all at once a fount of inspiration and ideas. The way he saw it, the Norwegian people seemed to have been in a prolonged state of shock ever since gaining their freedom and independence in 1905; they were absolutely terrified to open their mouths at all in case something went wrong and they found themselves entangled in a web of ties and obligations. They seemed to be hanging on to the notion of themselves as a nation of free peasants and had closed their minds to the fact that Norway was an industrial nation, dependent on a global market. Jonas’s heart sang in his breast, he felt as though the graphite of his pencil was being transformed into diamond. In conclusion he unabashedly wrote that joining NATO represented the most crucial change of the post-war years, namely the internationalisation of Norway. This was also Gerhardsen’s greatest claim to fame. He had recognized — albeit reluctantly — that it was international politics, rather than the labour movement, which had shaped and would go on shaping the development of Norwegian society in our century. Gerhardsen understood, in short, that the prosperity of Norway — and indeed the potential for creating a welfare state — depended on conditions existing beyond the borders of Norway. ‘Einar Gerhardsen saw,’ the Norwegian teacher read in Jonas Wergeland’s essay, ‘that what we today call “autonomy” had in fact been lost long before.’

What Jonas did not realize then, although he did later, was that Gerhardsen, by taking Norway into NATO, also laid the foundations for a ‘No’ to the EU. In reality, the two Norwegian referendums on whether to join the European Union were decided back then, in 1949, by Einar Gerhardsen alone, because, no matter how you look at it, he was the key player, both in the government and in the party. Had it not been for Gerhardsen’s stance on a Western defence treaty, the famous national congress in February 1949 would never have passed a resolution supporting negotiations on membership of such an alliance. And had Norway not become a member of NATO, it would, due to the uncertainties surrounding national security, in all probability have gone on to join the EEC or, later, the EU. To Jonas’s mind, there was no one to whom the Norwegian anti-EU movement owed a greater debt than Einar Gerhardsen.

Jonas sat in that gym hall, tired but happy, as if he had just finished a hard training session: feeling, for once, that he had written something with a bit of bite, a dash of originality.

And I ask you, Professor: can this person — can this faltering, naïve, vulnerable individual really be a murderer?

Axel got good marks, as always, for a gift of an essay question. He wrote about Henrik Ibsen — a glib, sycophantic, coolly calculated essay, totally at odds with everything he believed. Viktor, for his part, got top marks, a six, for an essay which ‘assessed the role played by heroes in the lives of ordinary people’ — top marks in melancholy, alcoholic afterglow. He wrote about Napoleon, he tore Napoleon to shreds. Four Løiten aquavits, two Gammel Oplands and Five Gilde Taffels. His words were hammered in like nails in a coffin. Napoleon didn’t stand a chance.

Jonas, on the other hand, got a two for his essay, subtitled ‘From Spectator to Player’. He didn’t know what to think. His Norwegian teacher made some remark about it being all very well to show a bit of involvement, but God knows there were limits. It should probably be borne in mind that this was at a time, during the build-up to the EU referendum, when feelings ran high, among schoolteachers too. Nevertheless, Jonas Wergeland’s first attempt to realize his dream of becoming the Father of his Country — if, that is, it was not a covert experiment aimed at bringing him immortality — was almost a total failure.