‘Up to now I’ve just been wrestling with shadows, now I want to work with light.’ And when he stepped out onto the street, his head buzzing with undreamed-of possibilities, he unconsciously made a kind of discus-throwing movement with his body: a pirouette combined with a leap in the air — rather like the triumphant gesture with which an exultant footballer expresses his delight at scoring an almost staggeringly unexpected, yet quite magnificent goal.
~ ~ ~
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?’