Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
She looked up from her newspaper when he walked in and asked what had taken him so long. ‘You’ve been away more than half an hour,’ she said.
‘Half an hour?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. And where are my cigars, young man?’
‘What day is it?’ Jonas asked.
‘Saturday,’ his grandmother replied. ‘Have you lost your wits completely? Now hurry up and get back down there before the shop closes.’
Time. He lay all alone on a broad expanse of beach in Montevideo. Seen from above, the deckchair and parasol must have looked like a small, stranded vessel. Or a target in the middle of a white desert. He merely lay there staring into space while the days passed; after a while he could not have said whether he had been sitting in that deckchair and hanging around the run-down hotel with the sleepy ballrooms for two years or two weeks. Late one afternoon he got up, however, and took the bus into the city centre where he proceeded to wander aimlessly around the old town. Again he had that strong sense of being on the trail of things past, an age of spurs and stirrups, gaucho knives and ancient pistols. He came to a grimy church, or a chapel more like,
sandwiched
in between some other buildings. Outside it a couple of bent old women in black shawls were standing talking. Although he could not have said why, he went inside. The church was totally empty. Hushed. Candles burned here and there. He sank down onto a pew, soaked up the
atmosphere
, savoured the pleasant coolness which eased the pressure he still felt in his chest. A murmuring sound reached his ears, only a murmur, but still it echoed faintly around the cavelike room. He became aware that something was going on behind a curtain in one of the neat, dark little stalls – cabinets of a sort – along one wall. Someone was acknowledging their sins in a
confessional
. Jonas thought he caught a vague whiff of mothballs. On their knees, confessing. He thought about this. Unconsciously shaking his head because he found it so bafflingly antiquated. Baffling altogether, in fact.
A woman pulled back the black curtain and stepped out. His eyes almost started out of his head. She wore jeans and a college sweatshirt, trainers on her feet. Attractive. Dark, the way women here were. Twenty-ish. Jonas’s eyes lingered on her. She stood for a moment, hunting for something in a small leather bag before making for the door. He had been struck by her face. He did not get it: a young woman, on her knees in this dusty church. What had she confessed? He felt like following her, but did not. An old priest emerged
from the confessional. Jonas caught a glimpse of the grille through which you spoke, noticed that it showed signs of wear at lip level. All of a sudden he had a powerful urge to call out to the old priest, confess, bend the knee inside that stall, at that grille, divulge everything that was in his heart, pour it all out. ‘Father, I’m hiding my light under a bushel.’
He left the church and went back to roaming around, restlessly, aimlessly, and yet on the alert. He wandered along lost in thought, though with no idea what he was thinking about. When he looked up, he found himself in front of the antiquarian bookshop outside which he had stopped several times before, the one with
Kristin Lavransdatter
in the window. Inside he saw the girl from the church. Without stopping to think he opened the door and entered premises which summoned up once more the feeling he had had in the church. He found himself in a blessedly peaceful room. Of another order. A place in which an age-old, almost Ptolemaic view of things prevailed.
With the young woman was an elderly man. Both of them stared blankly at him. By way of explanation, or apology, Jonas pointed to the bulky novel by Sigrid Undset in the window, went so far as to pick it up, flick through it – an edition printed in Barcelona, part of a series of Nobel prize-winners. ‘Undset,’ he said. And then, in halting Spanish ‘I am from the same country.’ For some reason it sounded to him as if he was confessing. As if a whole story were contained within those few words. Something happened. The faces of the two others broke, as one, into big smiles. They both started talking, very fast. When they realised that he did not understand they switched to English, or rather: the young woman did the talking. He had to answer a great many eager questions – he could not help but smile at such avid curiosity – and in return he learned that the old man was the owner of the bookshop and the woman, Ana, was his granddaughter. Close to, she was even more attractive, or appealing. She wore amethysts in her ears, bluish-violet like the flowers on the jacaranda trees. Her name sounded like a vow. A sort of prefix. He did not know that she also embodied a golden opportunity – that she could be what Mr Dehli had called a catalyst. She had only popped in to pick up a book, was just leaving. In the doorway she paused, thought for a moment. Had Jonas eaten? Would he like to have lunch with her? Jonas glanced uncertainly at her grandfather, thinking to himself that the people here were a bit
old-fashioned
, Catholics, such a thing might be frowned upon, but the old man merely nodded, waved his arms at them: Go, go!
As they strolled through the streets of the old town, from the Plaza Zabala down to the harbour, she told him more about herself. She had lived in Europe for many years. Her father had gone into exile with his family for the twelve years of the dictatorship, a time full of fear and terrible brutality.
Thousands had been imprisoned, many were tortured, many more simply vanished. But now the country had a new government, only recently elected. Ana had returned home to study sociology. She lived with her grandparents.
When she stopped to point out an enormous bank building to him they heard the clatter of pots coming from an open window. Unnaturally loud, as if someone was pretty mad about something. This prompted a laughing Ana to tell him about an unusual form of protest practised during the
dictatorship
. At a prearranged time – or quite spontaneously, following a speech on the radio – crowds of women would pour out into the streets, banging on pots and pans, making an ear-splitting din, as a demonstration against the ruling power. Ana explained proudly how, by refusing to be silent, refusing to cooperate, or quite simply by gossiping, by relaying stories, her grandmother and other women, ordinary housewives, had made the most effective, and indeed the only
possible
protest against the regime. Jonas could see it in his mind’s eye, hear it. Very funny, was his first thought, but then he thought again: to tell tales, to go out into the streets and bang on saucepans, that had to be just about the diametric opposite of lazing in a deckchair.
As Ana led him closer and closer to the harbour, towards one of the most crucial – catalytic – incidents in his life, Jonas realised that this was a story he had heard before. Of strong women and weak, corrupt men. He thought of his own grandmother and the German occupation. As with most
Norwegians
, Jørgine’s feelings about the war were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand it had been her finest hour. On the other, those five years had left their traumatic mark. Once, when Jonas accidentally used the word ‘Buchtel’ of one of the prisms on the chandelier, he almost got his ears boxed. ‘No German in this house!’ his grandmother had admonished fiercely.
Had Jørgine Wergeland told her grandchild a little more, he might have learned an important lesson about human beings. She could have taught him that there’s no telling how your life will turn out, even though you might already be, let’s say, sixty. You might look like a pretty ordinary character, a failure even, with a career that was well and truly over, only for some external circumstance to suddenly turn you into a person of paramount importance to an entire nation, possibly even mark you out as the saviour of
civilisation
. Seen in that light, one person’s long, commonplace life might sometimes simply be a preparation for the momentous deeds of their latter years, once he or she had discovered their true mission.
Up until the Second World War, Jørgine Wergeland had led a normal, happy life with her Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather, in a smallholding out at
Gardermoen
, the old drill ground. When the war came to Norway one of the
occupying
force’s first moves was to extend the airfield at Gardermoen. Jørgine
and Oscar lost their farm and Jonas’s grandfather dropped dead – he did not get much pleasure out of the compensation paid to them by the Germans. Granny always said that he ‘exploded with rage’. And apropos that destiny the outlines of which she was beginning to discern, inspired by a British
statesman
she added: ‘Losing the farm was my Dardanelles, my life’s lowest point.’
Jørgine moved into Oslo, and in honour of her husband she took
possession
of a spacious flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. But only a year later, in 1943, to everyone’s surprise – and consternation – she married an elderly, childless man and moved into his palatial residence in nearby Inkognitogata. No one could have suspected that Jørgine Wergeland had embarked upon a cunning sabotage operation, an operation she was determined to carry out even if it meant selling her soul to the devil.
Then, in the early autumn of the year the war ended, her second husband died. It was to all appearances a natural death – if a coronary can be
considered
a natural death. ‘It’s hardly surprising his heart failed him,’ Jørgine remarked conspiratorially to Jonas’s mother, ‘when you think how black and treacherous it was.’ It should perhaps be added that Jørgine had known full well that this man had a bad heart. The last thing she had wanted was to have to spend the rest of her life with him.
The fact was that her new husband was a building contractor. And in the self-same war which had caused Jonas’s grandfather to ‘explode with rage’ this other man had made a mint. Jonas’s grandmother had not been idle during the year in which she lived alone in Oscars gate. Like a spy she had
infiltrated
certain circles and, with great care and a surprising degree of cynicism, selected a person who had made money primarily by building airfields for the Germans. There is no point in naming this man or in listing the airfields in question – the country was swarming with such types, and there were airfields all over the place. But for Jørgine Wergeland, who had lost both smallholding and husband because the Germans decided to cover more of Gardermoen with concrete, it was essential that the man of her choice had been contracted to lay runways. Had she lived, Jørgine Wergeland would, I’m sure, have appreciated the irony of it when the time came to build a new main airport in Norway and Gardermoen once more became a goldmine for building contractors.
Another important vital condition in her choice of husband, or victim, was that he had to be an entrepreneur who had ceased his business
activities
– bluntly described by Jørgine as his treasonous activities – in good time and had seen the wisdom of one of the rules of mountain safety which
everyone
in Norway would later know by heart: there’s no shame in turning back – although in his case it was more a matter of turning his
coat
back. And
to be on the safe side he had even become involved, half-heartedly and very circumspectly, in some underground work. The minute she met him Jørgine noticed that his eyes were set abnormally far apart. He looked a bit like a hammerhead shark. This sinister feature became more marked as the war progressed, as if it took its toll to keep looking two ways at once. Be that as it may, he neatly avoided being arrested or punished when peace was declared, despite government investigations and a bloodthirsty public hue-and-cry against collaborators.
It is tempting, even though it lies outside the scope of this story, to take a closer look at the boom in certain sectors during the war. Disturbingly many Norwegians made a lot of money, just as the whole of Norway today grows richer with every war waged, due to the attendant rise in the price of oil. Much has been written about the astonishingly cooperative line taken by the Norwegian authorities, with the exception of the King and the government, towards the occupying force, more or less from day one. ‘The wheels have to be kept turning in the interests of the working people,’ was how it was phrased. This cooperation also included tasks of such military importance as the repair and extension of airfields. In the spring and summer of 1940, not one class, not one organisation, not one political party advocated an open policy of sabotage, and so it continued, with surprisingly few exceptions, for some time. This says a lot about Norway. Other countries lost millions of people, to famine, in battle; the citizens of the Soviet Union, not least, fought and died – also for Norway’s benefit. And what did Norway do? The
somewhat
less than heroic answer would be: ‘We trod softly.’ Poland lost about twenty per cent of its population, Norway three per mil. Not counting the sinking of the
Blücher
, the fight put up by certain divisions in the very
earliest
phase of the war, not least at Narvik, a few dozen genuine heroes and, of course, the navy, the Norwegian resistance campaign could be said to have been one of the least heroic ever. All military operations were terminated in June 1940, after eight weeks. Later, it also came out that every fifth
Norwegian
officer had been a member of Quisling’s National Unity party. Within just about every branch of trade and industry hands were extended to the Germans. And the gains could on occasion be prodigious. Which makes it all the harder to understand – for a foreigner particularly – how Norway, a country which was subjected to a relatively mild period of occupation, could have carried out such an unreasonably relentless series of judicial purges after the war – as if all the hostility and outrage could finally be vented, five years too late. Despite everything so far written about Norway and the Second World War, it would not be too bold a prediction to state that our
contribution
to the war effort, our spirit of resistance, will be shown to be even more
frayed and pathetic when still more researchers have delved into the events of those five years. Such a statement might be hard for a few people to swallow, but Jørgine Wergeland for one would have declared herself heartily in
agreement
. ‘Our military honour was lost when the dreadnought Norge was sunk at the Battle of Narvik,’ she said once to Jonas. ‘With the battleship
Eidsvold
our ideals too went down.’