We stood with our backs to the old sanatorium, a brick colossus honeycombed with long corridors and little rooms. Most of the Bosnians had had to stay at Harastølen for a year and a half, some of them for almost two years. I shot a glance at Jonas Wergeland. I could see that he was moved. He knew what it was like to live in isolation, in degrading conditions. He had no trouble imagining how it would feel to have to live here for any length of time. The refugees’ Norwegian hosts did not, however, have the benefit of this experience or such insight. Here, in what had once been a treatment centre for TB sufferers and the insane, a desolate spot five hundred metres up a mountainside, these poor people had been stashed away, as if they were either dangerously infectious or crazy. As one of them so neatly put it: ‘I feel I have gone from one prison camp to another.’
We stood outside Harastølen, next to the remains of what had once been a cable railway, just the sort to run up to an ‘eagle’s nest’, and gazed across the fjord to the mountains on the other side. In the distance we could hear the sound of sheep bells, like the ones Norwegian supporters ring when cheering their skiers on to more gold-medal victories. Jonas was very quiet. Then, as I was making to leave he said: ‘Is it possible, do you think, to understand everything about Norway from such a marginal position as this, in the grounds of a disused asylum?’
And then he began to talk, to talk eagerly and at great length. It was years since I had heard him speak with such commitment. He spoke of how incredibly lucky he had been to grow up in an age marked by the greatest economic, social and cultural changes since the Stone Age. And in that era of unbelievable prosperity he had also had the good fortune to be living in the most privileged and sheltered corner of the globe. But that was also, he said, why he felt so ashamed.
Readers will, I hope, bear with me here, if I slip in a few thoughts on modern Norway plucked from that monologue, that confused blend of praise and blame, delivered by Jonas Wergeland at Harastølen, near Luster. Because, he said, standing here outside this old TB hospital, this erstwhile mental home and, briefly, refugee centre, he felt compelled to consider the growth of modern Norway. And the conclusion he had reached was that it had all happened too fast. That was why we had become so unsympathetic, so intolerant, so callous and forbidding, all affected by a collective, almost panic-stricken case of tunnel vision which permitted us to see only what we wanted to see and which, in our misguided struggle to safeguard what belonged to us, caused us to lose sight of the need for human solidarity and common decency. He simply could not get his head round the fact that little more than a century ago Norway had been a country so poor, so doomed to scrimp and save, that the few gas lamps in the streets of its towns were not lighted on moonlit nights. Would he ever be able to understand this nation which, in the regatta of history, started out hopelessly far behind at the beginning of the twentieth century as a rot-ridden longboat with moth-eaten sails, and rounded the millennium buoy, suddenly in the lead, as a luxury yacht in a class by itself, all gassed up and bristling with electronic equipment — all of this almost without having to lift a finger, and with no one knowing quite how it had happened. Anyone would think a good fairy had flown over us and with a wave of her wand transformed a draughty log cabin into a chalet-style villa with ten rooms and underfloor heating in the bathroom. What had happened to us? Or rather: was it any wonder we didn’t know how to deal with our wealth? ‘We’re like a nation of stunned lottery winners,’ Jonas Wergeland said. ‘When people get rich too quickly they almost always lose their perspective. In this case a whole society was hit.’
So what did we do? That’s right, we cut ourselves off. Suddenly we had become so stinking rich that we could afford to shut out the rest of the world. For although the Harastølen story is not all black and white — things had had to be organised at very short notice and so many people had arrived at one time — Jonas Wergeland found it a disgraceful and highly symbolic tale. ‘Think about it,’ he said to me. ‘It took over fifty years for Norway to take in as many refugees as we ourselves produced — Norwegians who fled to Sweden — during the five years of the Second World War. What’s happened to our memories? What’s happened to our capacity for fellow-feeling? Why didn’t we so much as blush when the UN’s high commissioner felt obliged to point out that it was more difficult to gain asylum in Norway, the birthplace of Fridtjof Nansen, than in most other countries in Europe.’
Jonas scanned the deserted hillsides on the other side of Lustrafjord as he pointed to the most paradoxical thing about Norway: such wide-open spaces and such closed hearts. We could, it is true — had they been Europeans, and had their sufferings been given enough television exposure — have taken in thousands in almost no time at all. It was the least we could do. If we were to divide the country up among us every Norwegian would have 70,000 square metres of land all to himself. And yet deep down inside we wanted to keep ourselves to ourselves. Stay a rich man’s reserve. The accumulated value of our national costumes alone, complete with all their silver ornaments, would exceed the gross national product of many a Third World country. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, modern Norway was suffering from the King Midas syndrome. Everything we touched turned to gold. But we could no longer embrace our fellow men. We kept our mouths shut and walled ourselves in, applauding the government’s efforts to build a Great Wall around our borders, constructed out of what were — by its lights — unassailable legal niceties. To Jonas it was a sad fact: what Adolf Hitler could not do, we had managed for ourselves. We had built our own Festung Norwegen.
Bearing in mind what happened at the tail end of the millennium, when the Norwegian people were given the chance to respond spontaneously and unselfishly to the new stream of refugees from the devastation of the Balkans at least, I have thought a lot about the impassioned monologue which Jonas Wergeland delivered at Luster. Because even though he was right in what he said about Norwegians and their long-standing mistrust of asylum seekers, I have the suspicion that in talking about this he was, in fact, talking about something else. The Norwegian government’s unfortunate consignment of Bosnian refugees to Harastølen was effected during Jonas’s first months in prison, which is to say at a time when he was taking a harder look at his own life than ever before. Although I cannot express this very clearly, I am convinced that in his monologue at Harastølen — his condemnation of such isolationism — Jonas Wergeland was actually talking about himself.
I started walking towards the car and when he did not follow, I looked back. I turned just in time to see him kneeling on the steps leading up to the building, outside what he had described as a monument to our brutish attitude towards everything that was not Norwegian. I was instantly reminded of the German chancellor, Willy Brandt, going down on his knees on behalf of the German people before the monument to those who died in the Warsaw ghetto in the Jewish uprising of 1943. I believe Jonas Wergeland felt the need to do something similar here, albeit on a smaller scale: to beg forgiveness for his nation’s foolishness, for its eagerness to turn Norway into an impregnable fortress. Although, when you get right down to it, it could be that this, too, was done for personal reasons.
Jonas had first encountered this mistrust of strangers when just a little boy. In elementary school he had had a very strict, very proper, headmaster who, due to the fact that his initials were HRH, was simply referred to as His Royal Highness. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman with an aquiline nose and eyebrows like canopies, who walked with chest out and chin up. He was notorious for reciting never-ending poems at the drop of a hat, poems that no one could understand a word of, or at least none of the pupils on whom he kept such a strict eye and whom he punished so zealously for the slightest misdemeanour.