He left the church and went back to roaming around, restlessly, aimlessly, and yet on the alert. He wandered along lost in thought, though with no idea what he was thinking about. When he looked up, he found himself in front of the antiquarian bookshop outside which he had stopped several times before, the one with Kristin Lavransdatter in the window. Inside he saw the girl from the church. Without stopping to think he opened the door and entered premises which summoned up once more the feeling he had had in the church. He found himself in a blessedly peaceful room. Of another order. A place in which an age-old, almost Ptolemaic view of things prevailed.
With the young woman was an elderly man. Both of them stared blankly at him. By way of explanation, or apology, Jonas pointed to the bulky novel by Sigrid Undset in the window, went so far as to pick it up, flick through it — an edition printed in Barcelona, part of a series of Nobel prize-winners. ‘Undset,’ he said. And then, in halting Spanish ‘I am from the same country.’ For some reason it sounded to him as if he was confessing. As if a whole story were contained within those few words. Something happened. The faces of the two others broke, as one, into big smiles. They both started talking, very fast. When they realised that he did not understand they switched to English, or rather: the young woman did the talking. He had to answer a great many eager questions — he could not help but smile at such avid curiosity — and in return he learned that the old man was the owner of the bookshop and the woman, Ana, was his granddaughter. Close to, she was even more attractive, or appealing. She wore amethysts in her ears, bluish-violet like the flowers on the jacaranda trees. Her name sounded like a vow. A sort of prefix. He did not know that she also embodied a golden opportunity — that she could be what Mr Dehli had called a catalyst. She had only popped in to pick up a book, was just leaving. In the doorway she paused, thought for a moment. Had Jonas eaten? Would he like to have lunch with her? Jonas glanced uncertainly at her grandfather, thinking to himself that the people here were a bit old-fashioned, Catholics, such a thing might be frowned upon, but the old man merely nodded, waved his arms at them: Go, go!
As they strolled through the streets of the old town, from the Plaza Zabala down to the harbour, she told him more about herself. She had lived in Europe for many years. Her father had gone into exile with his family for the twelve years of the dictatorship, a time full of fear and terrible brutality. Thousands had been imprisoned, many were tortured, many more simply vanished. But now the country had a new government, only recently elected. Ana had returned home to study sociology. She lived with her grandparents.
When she stopped to point out an enormous bank building to him they heard the clatter of pots coming from an open window. Unnaturally loud, as if someone was pretty mad about something. This prompted a laughing Ana to tell him about an unusual form of protest practised during the dictatorship. At a prearranged time — or quite spontaneously, following a speech on the radio — crowds of women would pour out into the streets, banging on pots and pans, making an ear-splitting din, as a demonstration against the ruling power. Ana explained proudly how, by refusing to be silent, refusing to cooperate, or quite simply by gossiping, by relaying stories, her grandmother and other women, ordinary housewives, had made the most effective, and indeed the only possible protest against the regime. Jonas could see it in his mind’s eye, hear it. Very funny, was his first thought, but then he thought again: to tell tales, to go out into the streets and bang on saucepans, that had to be just about the diametric opposite of lazing in a deckchair.
As Ana led him closer and closer to the harbour, towards one of the most crucial — catalytic — incidents in his life, Jonas realised that this was a story he had heard before. Of strong women and weak, corrupt men. He thought of his own grandmother and the German occupation. As with most Norwegians, Jørgine’s feelings about the war were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand it had been her finest hour. On the other, those five years had left their traumatic mark. Once, when Jonas accidentally used the word ‘Buchtel’ of one of the prisms on the chandelier, he almost got his ears boxed. ‘No German in this house!’ his grandmother had admonished fiercely.
Had Jørgine Wergeland told her grandchild a little more, he might have learned an important lesson about human beings. She could have taught him that there’s no telling how your life will turn out, even though you might already be, let’s say, sixty. You might look like a pretty ordinary character, a failure even, with a career that was well and truly over, only for some external circumstance to suddenly turn you into a person of paramount importance to an entire nation, possibly even mark you out as the saviour of civilisation. Seen in that light, one person’s long, commonplace life might sometimes simply be a preparation for the momentous deeds of their latter years, once he or she had discovered their true mission.
Up until the Second World War, Jørgine Wergeland had led a normal, happy life with her Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather, in a smallholding out at Gardermoen, the old drill ground. When the war came to Norway one of the occupying force’s first moves was to extend the airfield at Gardermoen. Jørgine and Oscar lost their farm and Jonas’s grandfather dropped dead — he did not get much pleasure out of the compensation paid to them by the Germans. Granny always said that he ‘exploded with rage’. And apropos that destiny the outlines of which she was beginning to discern, inspired by a British statesman she added: ‘Losing the farm was my Dardanelles, my life’s lowest point.’
Jørgine moved into Oslo, and in honour of her husband she took possession of a spacious flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. But only a year later, in 1943, to everyone’s surprise — and consternation — she married an elderly, childless man and moved into his palatial residence in nearby Inkognitogata. No one could have suspected that Jørgine Wergeland had embarked upon a cunning sabotage operation, an operation she was determined to carry out even if it meant selling her soul to the devil.
Then, in the early autumn of the year the war ended, her second husband died. It was to all appearances a natural death — if a coronary can be considered a natural death. ‘It’s hardly surprising his heart failed him,’ Jørgine remarked conspiratorially to Jonas’s mother, ‘when you think how black and treacherous it was.’ It should perhaps be added that Jørgine had known full well that this man had a bad heart. The last thing she had wanted was to have to spend the rest of her life with him.
The fact was that her new husband was a building contractor. And in the self-same war which had caused Jonas’s grandfather to ‘explode with rage’ this other man had made a mint. Jonas’s grandmother had not been idle during the year in which she lived alone in Oscars gate. Like a spy she had infiltrated certain circles and, with great care and a surprising degree of cynicism, selected a person who had made money primarily by building airfields for the Germans. There is no point in naming this man or in listing the airfields in question — the country was swarming with such types, and there were airfields all over the place. But for Jørgine Wergeland, who had lost both smallholding and husband because the Germans decided to cover more of Gardermoen with concrete, it was essential that the man of her choice had been contracted to lay runways. Had she lived, Jørgine Wergeland would, I’m sure, have appreciated the irony of it when the time came to build a new main airport in Norway and Gardermoen once more became a goldmine for building contractors.