Jonas knew that something terrible was lying in wait. Worse than a dragon. ‘He’s dead,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t you just let him rest in peace?’
‘A Luger,’ said Veronika. ‘Fancy that, Jonas, a Luger.’ Veronika edged right up close to him; Jonas was looking up at her already full breasts. ‘How on earth could that pistol, that detested pistol, so bound up with the Germans, have landed in Grandpa’s safe?’ she said, oozing ruthlessness.
‘Please don’t,’ Jonas said. The minute she mentioned the Luger he had known that this was a piece that would change everything. Possibly even the future. Intuitively he understood that his life too could be altered by the mention of this Luger.
‘Too late,’ Veronika retorted smartly, as if she knew that Jonas might go to very great lengths to be spared having to hear the rest. But this was another of Veronika’s talents — once she had started something there was no stopping her, no matter how fateful the consequences.
So she told him, stood there naked in the morning light, in the very loft where Daniel and Jonas had once succeeded in opening the safe, and where their grandfather had snatched the canvas bag out of the lacquer casket before they had a chance to touch it. And for the first time Jonas heard, from Veronika’s lips, the story of their grandfather’s treachery during the war, of the day when two men dressed as islanders and carrying forged border resident papers, stepped off the ferry. Omar Hansen had seen at a glance that behind their disguise they were really fearful city folk on their way to Sweden; all they had to do was wait for nightfall and a rowboat that lay waiting, but they never got that far, because when their grandfather spotted the German border police’s patrol boat out in the fjord he wasted no time in rowing out and hailing it; and then, out of a sadly misplaced sense of duty, he actually reported them, those two fugitives, and hence gave the Germans no choice, even though they were amazingly tolerant out here, turning a blind eye to this, that and the other. Thanks to this zealous and enterprising action on the part of Jonas Wergeland’s grandfather, the two men, who also turned out to be Jewish, were found and arrested. Fortunately, for Omar Hansen that is, no one had witnessed the brief meeting out in the sound except his two mortified sons, William and Haakon, who knew better than to say anything, not least because in May 1945 other informers had already been jailed and given a very hard time of it. It was just after this incident with the Jews that Omar Hansen secretly acquired a gun from the Germans. Maybe he felt threatened, or maybe he wanted to be prepared in case any more fugitives showed up and he had to escort them back to the German garrison at Gravningsund.
‘And what do you think happened to those two Jews?’ Veronika said when she was finished. ‘D’you think they came back to Hvaler for their summer holidays after the war?’
In his mind Jonas saw a boat sinking, slowly and softly into the deep. At this point he had no idea how Veronika knew all this, whether there were other people besides their fathers who remembered it, or whether it was simply something she had dug up herself, evidence of the talent which had shown itself in her at an early age and would one day make her a top-notch reporter. But, knowing the Veronika who stood before him as he did, he also knew that it was the naked truth.
He lay there, tied to the bed, involuntary tears streaming down his cheeks — cursing those tears, that Veronika should see them — and all at once he understood that this — this — was the Story behind the stories, the tale his grandfather had been searching for as he rocked back and forth in his chair, flanked by the dark, carved sideboards in the parlour, like a knight fighting shadowy monsters. His grandfather did not only have a dragon tattooed on his arm, he also had an invisible tattoo on his heart. And the reason he screwed up his eyes when he told a story was that he always had his sights on that one story, as if he were frantically trying to alter it by telling all those other stories. That was also why he always backed when he was rowing, because he so desperately wanted to turn back time, travel backwards and maybe one day reach the point, that total eclipse of the sun, when he had made his terrible mistake.
Veronika had scored a bull’s-eye. If she hated Jonas for spurning her she could not have found a better way of taking her revenge — not even the pleasure she derived later from seeing Jonas gamble away a whole bundle of money on worthless shares could compare to the triumph she felt at the sight of Jonas’s stricken face on that pillow. His grandfather was as good as a god to him; she knew this must hurt him dreadfully.
‘Christ, you’re mean Veronika, you’re so mean,’ was all Jonas managed to blurt out.
‘And you, Jonas, you’re such a loser,’ retorted Veronika, as if alluding to the pleasure that could have been his but which he had lost all chance of now. ‘In fact you’re worse than that: you’re a mediocrity. Even your cock gives you away.’ She picked up her panties and T-shirt, disappeared down the stairs. By the time Jonas had worked himself free, two hours later, she was gone.
But there was one thing Veronika had not reckoned on. She thought she had dealt Jonas’s image of Omar a mortal blow. But Jonas would only grow to love his grandfather even more after this disclosure, because now he understood his grandfather’s air of vulnerability, his desperate bent for telling stories, the effort it took to go on living in spite of his act of treachery: an occurrence which no amount of remorse could atone for. In time Jonas came to see that this was his story too, since it had to do with his roots. Hence the reason he kept returning to the question of whether a story about evil could, by some strange metamorphosis, some day become a beautiful story, whether Hitler could even become Homer or, as he thought of it when working at his carving bench, whether a dragon could become a swan.
Jonas Wergeland never really rid himself of the fatal suspicion that you had to be a criminal to be a good storyteller. Or that behind the best stories there was always a hurt, a wound, much in the same way as a foreign body will, in the course of time, cause an oyster to make a pearl; which, when you get right down to it, means that a pearl is disease transformed into beauty.
The Battle of Thermopylae
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must start with words: Tenerife, Tortugas, Tancred, Touraine. All through the programme this catalogue of names was recited, like beautiful alliterations, stanzas from a patriotic poem everyone used to know and which Jonas Wergeland meant to bring to life once more — lines as memorable as ‘You must not take so much to heart, that injustice which touches not your own part.’
Many have remarked on Jonas Wergeland’s ability to keep the viewers’ eyes glued to the screen from the first flicker, to stop them from zapping to another channel within those first, critical thirty seconds. The opening sequence of the programme on Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was no exception: it is the Second World War; a German submarine is seen firing a torpedo at a merchant ship. Thanks to an absolutely brilliant montage of clips from old documentaries, seen partly through the periscope, partly from the surface, Jonas created an almost unbearable cliff-hanger of a scene, rendered doubly effective by a shot in which the camera actually seemed to be following the torpedo through the water to its target, to the accompaniment of a spine-chilling soundtrack not unlike the theme from Jaws. The whole thing culminated in a grim, long drawn-out explosion and a dreamlike sequence in which the ship slipped down into the deep — a brilliant illusion created by an underwater camera filming a sinking model ship in the clear water of a swimming pool.