Or, as she said when she began upon the last story of the evening: ‘There has to be another way.’ And after a long pause: ‘There is another way.’
In Seventh Heaven
So it is with pounding heart, Professor, that I now continue. For, as Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his mind went back to the moment when he had stepped through the door of the villa, only half an hour earlier, thinking that everything was going to be fine, even though he had just got back from the World’s Fair in Seville and was still recovering from a rough flight home. He was upset, certainly, furious in fact, but when he rang the bell and no one answered the door, he calmed down. Everything’s going to be fine, he told himself, I just need to get some sleep, have some time to myself. He felt relieved, unspeakably relieved, the way you do when you’ve got out of doing something you’ve been dreading for ages. He let himself in, flicked the switch for the outside light, but the bulb wasn’t working, he didn’t like that, never liked it when a switch was turned on and nothing happened, everything would be fine, he was alone, he would sit down in the living room, he would put his feet up, sift through his mail and listen to a CD of Bach fugues, he would ride it out, he would take a shower, stand under the hot water for a long, long time, he would be alright, he just needed a little time. He left his suitcase and his duty-free bag in the hall and wandered into the office he shared with Margrete, looked away sharply on seeing her textbooks on the shelf, a number of them on dealing with venereal diseases, far too many of them, didn’t want to think about that now, didn’t want to think about that, or about Margrete at all, instead lifted the bundle of letters lying on the desk and took a quick look through them, then on the way into the living room he stops at one, the only one which comes as a surprise, an envelope stamped ‘Oslo University’, from which he can tell that the sender is a woman, a well-known name in academic circles.
It would be untrue to say that Jonas Wergeland was totally unprepared for the bleakness of prison life. Once — one winter — he had spent hours listening to details from the Inferno, to the description, for example, of how Brutus, Cassius and Judas were chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Satan. Or how those who had accepted bribes wound up in a bath of seething pitch, a molten mass like the tar they used to boil up in the old shipyards, with little demons holding them down in the mire with the help of forks, like a cook would prod bits of meat bobbing to the surface of a stew. Jonas knew what happened to murderers too — though he had no idea, of course, what the future held in store: they were doomed to boil forever in a river of blood. Jonas had sat in a blue auditorium, in the front row, with his ears pinned back, while next to him Axel was busy taking notes — when, that is, he wasn’t leafing frantically through a book in order to score yet another exclamation mark in the already overcrowded margin. Round about them, solemn-faced souls were writing as if their lives depended on it. They were all students, attending a series of lectures on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.
The mid-seventies was not exactly a time when students flocked, of their own free will, to lectures on Dante and the medieval worldview — not if it wasn’t on the syllabus, at any rate. The university was draped and hung, inside and out, with banners screaming out demands and declarations of support to all points of the compass. To some extent, the Norwegian version of the Cultural Revolution could, I’m sure, be characterized as a divine comedy, although as far as the students were concerned, modern-day Albania was a great deal closer to the ideal than Dante’s Italy. In Norway it was the imaginary Vømmøl Valley that set the standard for both paradise and poetry. So it goes without saying that it was Axel — Axel, who had for some time known that he would never be a biochemist and who had secretly sent his first clumsy, literary efforts to several publishers — who had sniffed out the Dante lectures in their students’ course list and managed to lure Jonas into making the leap, so to speak, from the revolutionary university routine to the Middle Ages — or was it, perhaps, the other way round? But the bait which Axel used to snare Jonas was not the content of the lectures, it was the lecturer — none other than Suzanne I., who is now known to everyone in Norway but who at that time, despite the fact that she had by then turned forty, had not yet found her calling and was recognized only within a very narrow circle. Axel had, however, heard of her through some literary friends and saw right away that she was one of those women who fulfilled all the strict criteria required to merit the distinguished epithet ‘sophisticated’ which he and Jonas had thrashed out while wandering aimlessly through the city late at night.
And from the word go, Jonas, who had really just come along for the fun of it, was hooked, in spite of the fact that he was the only person in that auditorium who had not read a word of Dante — he had never been any closer to a classical text than his big brother’s Illustrated Classics. He wasn’t entirely ignorant, though. As a little boy at Aunt Laura’s he had — speaking of picture books — found a volume containing Gustav Doré’s engravings for Dante’s Inferno, and these illustrations were still clear in his mind; indeed they enabled him, perhaps to a greater extent than the others, to follow Suzanne I.’s increasingly complex constructions and tempestuous zigzagging between the allegorical and the literal planes, which, by the way, showed him that hell, like the eroticism in Agnar Mykle’s books, was on the whole a matter of metaphor.
That said, there is no concealing the fact that for Jonas the most fascinating part of it all was Suzanne I. herself; she fascinated him as only very few women did, more specifically: those who could lift him up onto a higher level — to stick to the Dantean imagery. While Suzanne I. was talking about the hideous torments of hell and the striking correlation between crime and punishment, while she was explaining Dante’s overall plan and the conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and the teachings of the Church, Jonas, sitting in the front row, felt a button in his spine being pressed, felt his entire nervous system being put on red alert. While the rest were reading Dante, he was studying her, not least the austere face in which one eye seemed to look inward while the other gazed outward. There was something oddly anachronistic, not to say aristocratic, about her, partly also because of the way in which her hair was pinned up, like an elaborate snail’s shell, and her rather old-fashioned, though stylish, taste in clothes, which made her look like a wealthy, conservative, middle-class lady. It was winter, and exceptionally cold, with ice everywhere — a fitting climatic backdrop to the lectures, inspired by the nethermost circle of the Inferno — and usually, when she stepped out of the lift, always bang on time, so punctual that you could have set your watch by her, she was clad in an almost demonstratively voluminous fur, making no attempt to hide her vanity. Axel said she was reckoned to be something of an eccentric and that she had only recently come home to live in Norway after many years abroad, in Italy among other places — hence the reason that she was liable, every now and again, to recite a few stanzas in vibrant Italian, making Jonas feel that behind her mask she concealed many more passionate sides to her character.