The Conqueror

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I — the professor — sat for a long time, thinking things over, after she had gone that evening. If the last thing she had told me proved to be true, then perhaps it was not so surprising for someone to ask themselves how such a person could have become the object of an entire nation’s abject adoration. This set me thinking once again about Jonas Wergeland’s description of Norwegian people — myself included — and I had to agree with him: we are a nation of laid back viewers, laid out in our Stressless chairs.

During the night, as I was frantically working to transcribe my pages and pages of notes in shorthand while her words were still fresh in my mind, I was struck by a twinge of doubt. What should I call the pages I was covering with writing: a biography or a novel? It worried me, from a professional point of view almost, that I so often — much more than usual — slid over into fiction, gave myself up so unreservedly to the narrative. Now and again I glanced around at the piles of information on Jonas Wergeland: everything from family trees, family photographs, copies of report cards and of the speech he had made on his thirty-fifth birthday, to the list of all the addresses at which he had stayed and statements of earnings and assets for every year, as well as that mountain of other notes and clippings which I had fleetingly imagined would illuminate a whole culture. It galled me to think that I had not managed to use more of all that meticulously gathered material, that almost without noticing it I had acceded to another, very different set of terms, had in some way not stayed true to an original plan. Not infrequently I had the feeling that I had been well and truly seduced by this woman’s stream of stories. Or perhaps I should say conquered.

And when the book was published — would it be her story or mine? I comforted myself with the thought that she had forbidden the use of a tape recorder, had left the final selection up to me. At the end of the day it was my memory and my associations that counted; even as her audience I was the real narrator. She told these stories so that I would understand — there were actually times when it struck me that she told them so that I could form the understanding she herself lacked.

For a long time the trial looked like being an affair which hinged upon forensic evidence — with the focus on strands of hair, fingerprints and times of day — and a prosecutor who put all of his energy into building up a viable chain of circumstantial evidence. So people went on hoping that Jonas Wergeland was innocent, as if they realized that if he were to be convicted, they too, their blindness, would be exposed. And as I say — more and more people had the feeling that somewhere along the line something was scandalously wrong, that an appalling injustice was being committed, a suspicion which seemed to be borne out by Jonas Wergeland’s inexplicable silence. Folk stubbornly refused to believe, for example, one of the witnesses for the prosecution who, in the midst of explaining something else, had launched an attack on Jonas Wergeland’s credibility, his ‘amazing fund of knowledge’ by telling the court about a red notebook in which Jonas Wergeland had apparently copied down twenty-odd extracts from books written in the nineteenth century. Even when the press followed up this assertion and showed how one saying, variations on which Jonas Wergeland had employed in countless different situations and which was even attributed to him in a Norwegian edition of Modern Quotations — ‘The essence of lying is in deception, not in words’ — that this maxim had actually been coined by John Ruskin, people refused to believe it. The more Jonas Wergeland was exposed to view, the more mud was slung at him, the more the mood seemed to turn in his favour.

And then — yet again — the media spotlight was turned full-force on Jonas Wergeland: at the point when the defence had only a couple of witnesses left to call, just before the summing up, just before the jury retired to decide the verdict, he broke his silence and asked to be allowed to make a statement; and within half an hour, once the defence counsel had had a word with the counsel for the prosecution and the judge in the latter’s chamber, everything was turned on its head. Jonas Wergeland took the stand and described in horrific detail how he had murdered Margrete Boeck — in other words, he confessed.

For a society that had for so long suppressed all knowledge of tragedy, it was like suddenly being ambushed by irrationality. I remember how surprised I was myself and how at the time, drawing on information from various sources, I tried to form a coherent, if sketchy, picture of the actual course of events on that evening when Jonas Wergeland returned home from the World’s Fair in Seville. By all accounts, it was the staggering announcement by Margrete that she wanted a divorce which had started it all; she had apparently told him this as soon as he walked in the door, almost before he had managed to put down his suitcase; she wanted out, this latest trip of his had been the last straw, the fact that he had gone even though she had begged him to stay home; she was sick and tired of him putting his career, that blasted job in television, before everything else, and she did not want to discuss it, she had given the matter — their marriage, the future — careful thought; she should have done it long ago; all of this, or words to that effect, she had supposedly said, trembling all the while with a fury that had been allowed to build up to breaking point due to the fact that he had gone so far as to delay his return by several days. Jonas, for his part, was in no way chastened by this, instead he had flown off the handle — it was the shock, really — and had said some terrible, deeply hurtful things to her. They had been drawn into a spiral of spiteful remarks which, at one point, ‘in a haze of resentment’, had moved him to fetch the Luger from the cupboard in his workshop, a pistol he had had in his possession for many years — as his conscience-stricken brother, Daniel W. Hansen, had informed the police — and which, being perhaps a little overwrought, what with all the threatening letters after his programme on foreign immigrants, he had kept loaded in case he suddenly needed to defend himself. And when he came back with the pistol in his pocket, ‘only to give her fright’, according to his own testimony, she had carried on berating him, pouring scorn on him, and Margrete had a sharp tongue in her head, she could be devastatingly waspish, everybody knew that, and he had been astonished, horrified, to find how much he hated her; and when she laughed, yes, laughed in his face, he had shot her, which is to say, he had overcome his first murderous impulse and gone to her to ask for forgiveness, ask for time, ask that they wait a few days before deciding anything, maybe he would even hug her, but then, when she laughed — ‘a laugh I couldn’t bear to hear’ — he changed his mind, or rather: he lost control and banged her head off the wall, overcome by rage, and perhaps by fear, before shooting her at close range, in a split-second of boundless hatred. ‘I loved her, I wouldn’t have killed her for anything in the world, and yet I did it.’ One journalist encapsulated the case thus: ‘In the final analysis it comes down to the oldest of all questions: why do people do things against their will?’

After the adjournment necessitated by Jonas Wergeland’s confession — the place was in uproar — the counsel for the defence finished examining the last witnesses; then came the presentation of documentary evidence and statements from expert witnesses. Thereafter, the prosecuting counsel could make his final remarks, now revised and much abbreviated. The newspapers were, however, all agreed that the lawyer appointed to defend Wergeland came more into her own now, after his confession, even though all the signs were that Jonas Wergeland would be found guilty as charged. In her summation she claimed with impressive eloquence that at the moment when the crime was committed the balance of her client’s mind had been disturbed, that he had been driven into a black rage by a fickle woman’s sudden and unreasonable demand for a divorce. Fortunately, as her last witness before the final remarks, she was able to call the writer Axel Stranger — Jonas’s high-school classmate and a close friend of the couple — who, in answering the defence counsel’s questions, coolly and astutely built up a reasoned argument to the effect that the murder was totally inexplicable, that it had to be the result of a terrible fit of temper, sudden and irrational. This testimony was the defence counsel’s one strong card, and she made the most of it: she pleaded that this was not a premeditated crime, but that it was the product of a sudden impulse; she attempted in other words to have the prosecution’s charge changed from wilful murder to involuntary manslaughter. And in this she succeeded. Jonas Wergeland got off, as I’m sure everyone knows, with seven years’ imprisonment.

‘It takes imagination to understand evil,’ the dark-robed woman said when she called on me on Maundy Thursday. ‘No rational theory can explain why Jonas Wergeland did what he did,’ she said and then, after gazing for some time at the tops of the fir trees outside, she added: ‘But a story can. Or several stories. If only we can put them in the right order.’ She was still gazing out of the window, as if seeking inspiration from the night, or the comings and goings at Fornebu. I also had the impression that her stories followed one another as much according to plan as the planes, that the slightest deviation could spell disaster.

I had started looking forward to it getting dark, because I knew she would appear then. In my mind I had begun to call her ‘my muse’. I lit the fire well in advance, got everything organized, the jug of water, the glass, the chair, knew by now what would please her. She also seemed to feel at home here, she roamed soundlessly around the room while I pretended to be getting ready, so that I could eye her surreptitiously — not a little fascinated — saw how she picked up a sheet of paper here and there, flicked through a book, smiled briefly to herself. I had never seen anyone like her, dressed in such black garments, with such black-lined eyes, such a white face, such blood-red lips. And enveloped in that strange, somehow smoky, scent: a scent I had never come across before, but which as time went on I found intriguing, attractive even.

‘Shall we begin?’ she said, though without her usual brusqueness.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I ventured to ask, yet again.

‘I told you: to save a life.’

‘From punishment?’

‘Of course not. Something far more difficult. From pointlessness.’

It occurred to me that she had also come to save me, save me from the chaos in that room. Because each time she started to tell one of her stories, she seemed to cast a net over all the mounds of paper, the piles of books, and gather them up, making them hang together. And yet I was not sure. Sometimes I felt that the stream of words that fell from her lips swept me up into a spiral, and I found myself asking whether we were working away from or towards a centre. Occasionally I would think that the story she was telling lay at the heart of it all, only then to realize that it was more peripheral — other times the opposite was the case. And my understanding of Jonas Wergeland’s life grew or dwindled accordingly.

As if sensing my frustration, every so often she would resort to the idea of the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for our endeavour. ‘This is an important piece of the puzzle,’ she might say out of the blue, in the midst of a story. I knew that she was referring not to one of those degenerate, modern jigsaw puzzles consisting of machine-produced, almost identical pieces, but a real jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has a shape all of its own, means something in itself, independent of the whole. The sort of jigsaw puzzle that only a master can design. Full of traps, where two pieces that may fit together do not actually belong together, or where details on one piece mislead you into thinking that it should go somewhere else. Or where you fit a piece into place and find that it changes everything, the whole picture. ‘Imagine if you were to find a box full of jigsaw-puzzle pieces in an old attic,’ she had said on our very first evening, ‘but you don’t know what the picture should look like, you don’t even know if you have all the pieces…’

Well, that was true enough. It felt more as if several jigsaw puzzles had been tipped into the same box. So far I had not discerned any overall picture. And I missed all the identical pieces of sky or grass, the everyday bits or whatever you want to call them. And she did not present the stories, the pieces, as if they were meant to form something two-dimensional, a picture, a rectangle, but rather as though the pieces fitted into different places in a long chain, a chain that coiled around the room, striving to take on three dimensions.

I regarded her as she stood by a desk that was close to collapsing under all that material. Despite her pallor, she had an Oriental look about her. She was reading a copy of a newspaper article published just after the verdict was announced — yet another jigsaw piece — a survey in which the majority of those asked condemned Jonas Wergeland in the strongest terms. Because the people of Norway were outraged by his confession. They had believed in him right to the bitter end, and now they felt let down. He had woven a colourful magic carpet under their TV chairs, and when he pulled it from under them they lost their balance. ‘If you ask me, I think that trial was more like a sacrificial rite in which Jonas Wergeland was made the scapegoat for the embarrassing naivety of a whole nation,’ my guest said.

I did not altogether agree. Because although after the verdict was announced some people did take part in demonstrations of the sort seen in fundamentalist countries in which protesters burn dummies, portraits or flags to show their deep contempt — in this case it was videotapes which were thrown onto the flames or down the rubbish chute — there were others, women in particular, a remarkable number of women, who wrote to Jonas Wergeland in prison to say that they understood him, that he had deserved a better wife, a woman who realized that when you lived with a genius you had to make sacrifices. Several of these women, intelligent women, made proposals of marriage to him.

I have sometimes wondered what it must have been like for Jonas Wergeland to be imprisoned — a man used to travelling, to constantly changing his outlook, and then the same slice of the world day in day out, year in year out, broken only by day release, the odd outing: a life in which everything was done according to a strict timetable, so that you felt you were perpetually waiting for a tram. To the best of my knowledge, Jonas Wergeland has never complained. And Norwegian prisons are, of course, among the best in the world. I don’t know much about his day-to-day routine, although some information does slip out, a drop here and there in the papers at yearly intervals. A number of these have, for example, remarked on the lacquer casket — displayed in his cell like some sort of sacred relic — in which, word had it, he kept an ice-hockey puck, a round silver brooch and a slightly imperfect pearl. He allegedly spends his free time — under supervision — in the woodwork room, hard at work on a fresh copy of the Academic’s dragon head. On a couple of occasions, while out on day-release, he appears to have visited sports grounds where — and this may surprise a few people — he has practised throwing the discus.

Apart from his mother and his Aunt Laura, for a long while only his little brother Buddha and his daughter Kristin visited him regularly. As far as I know, Buddha’s conversations with his brother in the visiting room concerned such things as the archery in Kurosawa’s films or the new kites he had made, which could fly higher than ever, or the round twelve-man tent he had put up in the garden out at Hvaler, a perfect ger which he planned to live in, even during winter. With Kristin, who would soon be a teenager, Jonas did not talk much; for the most part they spent their time drawing — trees mainly, but other things too, or possibly the trees simply evolved into other images.

Other than that, Jonas Wergeland refused to see anyone. Even Axel Stranger, one of the few people to speak up for Jonas in court was apparently denied access.

During the week in which the woman filled the turret room with her almost unsettlingly powerful presence, I spent my days reading through the stories I had scribbled down the evening before. Sometimes I also hooked my own little tales onto the bigger ones, adapting them to her style. In the beginning I did all of this with mixed feelings, like someone relaxing their initial insistence on originality, but after a while it dawned on me that something unique can also be created out of other peoples’ thoughts and ideas. I was gradually beginning to look upon us as a team: two individuals narrating with one voice.

As I say, it was evening, Maundy Thursday. There was less air traffic than usual. Only now and again did a plane take off or land, lights in the darkness that we both followed with our eyes while she drank water, I coffee. ‘How idyllic,’ she said every time, at the sight of the landscape beyond the window, the heights of Holmenkollen glittering in the distance. ‘You should see where I come from, the want and the torment.’ For once she helped herself to something from the refreshments I had put out, a couple of grapes from the fruit bowl.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just have to remind myself that I am back in paradise.’

I have to admit that more and more often I caught myself wondering about her, about who she was. She was of indeterminate age; she could have been anything from thirty to fifty. Yes, that was the word: indeterminate. Dark. And I kept asking myself: how did she know all this? What powers was she in league with? Had she learned these things from other people or had she been there herself? There was something about this blend of seemingly objective observer and eager participant that both confused me and made me immensely curious. On the one hand, she related her tales with lofty detachment, dreamily, as if she had suddenly forgotten that she was talking about a real, live person. On the other hand, I sensed a reluctant, but deep, involvement, as if she knew Jonas Wergeland as well as Boswell had known Johnson or Eckermann Goethe.

I dimmed the lights, conscious of how she was gathering herself. She shifted round in her chair so that she could see out of the window overlooking the fjord, where a ship was slowly disappearing in the direction of Drøbak, lights twinkling, the shimmer of a starry constellation on a frosty night. It struck me that that ship, visible as it was only as strings of lamps, could prove deceptive, that in daylight it could turn out to be a rusting hulk. I had an idea that the same could be said of her stories, that they were not how they seemed to me at first glance.

Maybe it was time for me to reassess the myth of ‘the complex Jonas Wergeland’, she said, extending a hand to the surrounding room, in which every piece of furniture was spilling over with material about this man. And then — taking me completely unawares — she declared that Jonas Wergeland’s life was extremely straightforward, that it was his incredible simplicity that was so difficult to fathom. Just as life itself seems complicated — even though strictly speaking it amounts to no more than twenty amino acids in different constellations — so Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in creating the illusion of being a complex character by coiling his simplicity into spirals. ‘That is why you got bogged down, Professor. I know it sounds strange, but the way I see it, it is this very ordinariness that is the key to his rise to stardom. His genius, if that is the word, lay in turning this into a strength. As when a minus and a minus give a plus.’ She took some more grapes from the bowl, absentmindedly, not really aware of what she was doing. ‘Hindsight’s a great thing,’ she went on, ‘in the wake of his conviction there was no shortage of people coming forward to point out that there obviously had to be something suspect about a man who could bring an entire nation to its knees; that no one could be surprised if such a person had an inherent demonic streak. But I ask you, Professor: what if the reason for his success as a seducer lay not so much in evil as in emptiness? In the tendency which all people have for filling the emptiness with substance. And the greater the emptiness, the greater the substance.’