Because that is what Undset had taught him: that Norwegians, even those people walking down Karl Johan with their mobile phones and their laptop computers, were living in the Middle Ages, mentally at least and to a greater extent than other nations in Europe; that they were barely done with the sagas, that deep down they were at odds with their own time. Norway had gone from the Middle Ages to a welfare state in the atomic age in just one century — in other words, so quickly that they were still stuck, psychologically speaking, in the medieval peasant society, still had their roots in the earth. Like Undset, most Norwegians cherish an ineradicable mistrust of everything that smacks of a belief in progress and hope for the future. Like Undset, deep in their souls they believe in a static human nature, a heart that never changes. Undset had, in fact, made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the Norwegian identity: the citizens of Norway — even those sitting back in their comfy new Stressless chairs — are medieval people. There is a very simple reason why Norwegians perceive Sigrid Undset’s historical novels as contemporary fiction: the people of Norway are still living in the past.
To be fair, though: viewed from another — one might almost say, opposite — angle, it could just as well be that, by dint of that same device, Jonas Wergeland wished to say something about what was possibly Sigrid Undset’s greatest achievement: she dragged the Middle Ages out of the darkness so to speak, out of oblivion. She believed that the Middle Ages should be able to shed light on modern-day problems — individualism, materialism, the idea that mankind could be used as a yardstick for the universe — since many of the things lacking in modern society could still be found in medieval beliefs and culture. Sigrid Undset’s positive view of this era anticipated the general reassessment of the Middle Ages made by researchers many years later.
In any case, Jonas Wergeland also realized something else: that there could be no better reason for working with television than this, since television was the perfect medium for ‘medieval people’, folk who lost themselves in fictions, who yearned for simplicity and coherence. Now and again he had the feeling that Norwegians did not regard the unique individuals around whom he built a television series as heroes, but as saints: that in all secrecy, when no one was watching, they kneeled down in front of the TV screen and kissed those images.
Cold, calm, clittering as Ararat’s topmost chunk of ice (Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)
Jonas sometimes wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing outside the Matenadaran, a building not unlike a temple, situated a little way up a hillside in the north of the city, surveying the scene below and feeling a kind of light washing over him, something which, for want of a better word, we will have to call a religious experience. It was December, but not uncomfortably cold. Beneath the landscape there sounded a low, barely audible note, or a hum, as if from a colossal dynamo lying somewhere deep under his feet.
In his memory he could see a person, a man smoking a pipe, but occasionally all he recalled was the sight of the mountain before him. Because there, just across the border from Turkey, lay Ararat’s vast massif — Little Ararat to the left, Great Ararat to the right, the latter almost 17,000 feet high, Little Ararat roughly 4,000 feet lower and more conical in shape, not unlike Mount Fujiyama in Japan. It was not hard to guess that this had in the past been a volcanic region. From where Jonas was standing, right below the Matenadaran, the two peaks seemed almost transparent, like a mirage, and the way the sunlight glittered on the glacier at the very top of Great Ararat made Jonas think of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of the boy standing gazing at Soria Moria Castle, the golden glow on the ridge facing him: ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’ Jonas stood there, quite certain of what he would find in the sparkling chunk of ice at the very top — were he suddenly, magically, to find himself up there: a pearl, a pearl ear-stud encased inside the ice.
But there was something else too: something special about that mountain. Tradition had it that Noah’s ark had been left high and dry on the top of Mount Ararat when the floodwaters subsided. A number of expeditions had set out to search for remains of the ark in the glacier at which Jonas was gazing. He had always been fascinated by the story of Noah. It was a tale of survival. About being many and then all at once so few. Being chosen. Like being born again, being given a second chance. Jonas gazed at Mount Ararat, was put in mind of a slumbering dragon, could not take his eyes off that mighty silhouette. He had planned to spend a couple of days in Armenia, but suddenly he felt like staying longer, in some way that he could not explain he felt at home here. If one believed in the legend of Noah, this place was also the cradle of mankind. And there were plenty of down-to-earth historians who maintained that the Indo-European race had its origins in this part of the world. If they were right, and if he were to go far enough back in time, Jonas actually had a distant link with this place.
He stands there gazing out across the town, listening spellbound to the deep thrum beneath or above the landscape, like the note produced by the pedals of an organ: a dark note, or voice, emanating from the very bedrock. The confirmation of a calling. Anything, absolutely anything can happen, thinks Jonas. Anything is possible. At any moment.
Why had he gone to Yerevan? He went there to see this almost transparent mountain on the horizon, an unbelievably wondrous sight. Jonas stood under a distant sky and looked at a mountain, let it take up residence inside him, seep into his body. Jonas Wergeland was struck by the pure sense of being alive and the knowledge that the meaning of life could be something as simple as four minutes one morning in December when one is thirty-five years of age, at the zenith of one’s life — that the intensity and beauty of those four minutes could define an entire life, in the same way that a pretty unexceptional book of seven hundred pages might have four lines on page 351 which lift the whole thing up onto another plane, which have the power to transform both past and future.
A journey need not be long, in terms of time, for it to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.
Blowin’ in the Wind
What a wealth of cross-connections! I can see a hundred paths we could take from here, but for the moment we must stay with matters Biblical, albeit with a Bible of a different sort. No one was surprised when Jonas’s brother, Red Daniel, that uncompromising Marxist-Leninist, virtually took refuge aboard a Noah’s Ark of sorts by finally completing the university course he had dropped out of in the seventies — in theology. The leap from theology to the Marxist-Leninist movement had been as painless as the somersault back again — in both cases because of an unshakeable faith, also known as fundamentalism: Das Kapital by Marx, volume I, page 49, the Gospel according to Mark, chapter four, verse nine.
I think I ought to say something about why Daniel forsook the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist Party, since this did not, as some have maintained, have anything to do with him falling out with those cadres who defended the support given to strikes staged by well-paid workers — people earning two or three times as much as Daniel knew he could ever hope to make. And even though this ought to have been reason enough — since only a fool could claim that the aim of socialism is to line the pockets of prosperous high-achievers — it was a lesser, but equally shocking matter which finally made Daniel see the Marxist-Leninist movement for what it was: sheer cretinization masquerading as ideology.