After the adjournment necessitated by Jonas Wergeland’s confession — the place was in uproar — the counsel for the defence finished examining the last witnesses; then came the presentation of documentary evidence and statements from expert witnesses. Thereafter, the prosecuting counsel could make his final remarks, now revised and much abbreviated. The newspapers were, however, all agreed that the lawyer appointed to defend Wergeland came more into her own now, after his confession, even though all the signs were that Jonas Wergeland would be found guilty as charged. In her summation she claimed with impressive eloquence that at the moment when the crime was committed the balance of her client’s mind had been disturbed, that he had been driven into a black rage by a fickle woman’s sudden and unreasonable demand for a divorce. Fortunately, as her last witness before the final remarks, she was able to call the writer Axel Stranger — Jonas’s high-school classmate and a close friend of the couple — who, in answering the defence counsel’s questions, coolly and astutely built up a reasoned argument to the effect that the murder was totally inexplicable, that it had to be the result of a terrible fit of temper, sudden and irrational. This testimony was the defence counsel’s one strong card, and she made the most of it: she pleaded that this was not a premeditated crime, but that it was the product of a sudden impulse; she attempted in other words to have the prosecution’s charge changed from wilful murder to involuntary manslaughter. And in this she succeeded. Jonas Wergeland got off, as I’m sure everyone knows, with seven years’ imprisonment.
‘It takes imagination to understand evil,’ the dark-robed woman said when she called on me on Maundy Thursday. ‘No rational theory can explain why Jonas Wergeland did what he did,’ she said and then, after gazing for some time at the tops of the fir trees outside, she added: ‘But a story can. Or several stories. If only we can put them in the right order.’ She was still gazing out of the window, as if seeking inspiration from the night, or the comings and goings at Fornebu. I also had the impression that her stories followed one another as much according to plan as the planes, that the slightest deviation could spell disaster.
I had started looking forward to it getting dark, because I knew she would appear then. In my mind I had begun to call her ‘my muse’. I lit the fire well in advance, got everything organized, the jug of water, the glass, the chair, knew by now what would please her. She also seemed to feel at home here, she roamed soundlessly around the room while I pretended to be getting ready, so that I could eye her surreptitiously — not a little fascinated — saw how she picked up a sheet of paper here and there, flicked through a book, smiled briefly to herself. I had never seen anyone like her, dressed in such black garments, with such black-lined eyes, such a white face, such blood-red lips. And enveloped in that strange, somehow smoky, scent: a scent I had never come across before, but which as time went on I found intriguing, attractive even.
‘Shall we begin?’ she said, though without her usual brusqueness.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I ventured to ask, yet again.
‘I told you: to save a life.’
‘From punishment?’
‘Of course not. Something far more difficult. From pointlessness.’
It occurred to me that she had also come to save me, save me from the chaos in that room. Because each time she started to tell one of her stories, she seemed to cast a net over all the mounds of paper, the piles of books, and gather them up, making them hang together. And yet I was not sure. Sometimes I felt that the stream of words that fell from her lips swept me up into a spiral, and I found myself asking whether we were working away from or towards a centre. Occasionally I would think that the story she was telling lay at the heart of it all, only then to realize that it was more peripheral — other times the opposite was the case. And my understanding of Jonas Wergeland’s life grew or dwindled accordingly.
As if sensing my frustration, every so often she would resort to the idea of the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for our endeavour. ‘This is an important piece of the puzzle,’ she might say out of the blue, in the midst of a story. I knew that she was referring not to one of those degenerate, modern jigsaw puzzles consisting of machine-produced, almost identical pieces, but a real jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has a shape all of its own, means something in itself, independent of the whole. The sort of jigsaw puzzle that only a master can design. Full of traps, where two pieces that may fit together do not actually belong together, or where details on one piece mislead you into thinking that it should go somewhere else. Or where you fit a piece into place and find that it changes everything, the whole picture. ‘Imagine if you were to find a box full of jigsaw-puzzle pieces in an old attic,’ she had said on our very first evening, ‘but you don’t know what the picture should look like, you don’t even know if you have all the pieces…’
Well, that was true enough. It felt more as if several jigsaw puzzles had been tipped into the same box. So far I had not discerned any overall picture. And I missed all the identical pieces of sky or grass, the everyday bits or whatever you want to call them. And she did not present the stories, the pieces, as if they were meant to form something two-dimensional, a picture, a rectangle, but rather as though the pieces fitted into different places in a long chain, a chain that coiled around the room, striving to take on three dimensions.
I regarded her as she stood by a desk that was close to collapsing under all that material. Despite her pallor, she had an Oriental look about her. She was reading a copy of a newspaper article published just after the verdict was announced — yet another jigsaw piece — a survey in which the majority of those asked condemned Jonas Wergeland in the strongest terms. Because the people of Norway were outraged by his confession. They had believed in him right to the bitter end, and now they felt let down. He had woven a colourful magic carpet under their TV chairs, and when he pulled it from under them they lost their balance. ‘If you ask me, I think that trial was more like a sacrificial rite in which Jonas Wergeland was made the scapegoat for the embarrassing naivety of a whole nation,’ my guest said.
I did not altogether agree. Because although after the verdict was announced some people did take part in demonstrations of the sort seen in fundamentalist countries in which protesters burn dummies, portraits or flags to show their deep contempt — in this case it was videotapes which were thrown onto the flames or down the rubbish chute — there were others, women in particular, a remarkable number of women, who wrote to Jonas Wergeland in prison to say that they understood him, that he had deserved a better wife, a woman who realized that when you lived with a genius you had to make sacrifices. Several of these women, intelligent women, made proposals of marriage to him.
I have sometimes wondered what it must have been like for Jonas Wergeland to be imprisoned — a man used to travelling, to constantly changing his outlook, and then the same slice of the world day in day out, year in year out, broken only by day release, the odd outing: a life in which everything was done according to a strict timetable, so that you felt you were perpetually waiting for a tram. To the best of my knowledge, Jonas Wergeland has never complained. And Norwegian prisons are, of course, among the best in the world. I don’t know much about his day-to-day routine, although some information does slip out, a drop here and there in the papers at yearly intervals. A number of these have, for example, remarked on the lacquer casket — displayed in his cell like some sort of sacred relic — in which, word had it, he kept an ice-hockey puck, a round silver brooch and a slightly imperfect pearl. He allegedly spends his free time — under supervision — in the woodwork room, hard at work on a fresh copy of the Academic’s dragon head. On a couple of occasions, while out on day-release, he appears to have visited sports grounds where — and this may surprise a few people — he has practised throwing the discus.