The story could have ended there, but this incident was to have consequences that are known to me, and me alone — consequences that would affect an entire world. The fact is that when Jonas broke that little circle of stones on the top of Mount Sinai, he intervened decisively in history for the first and last time.
At some point in our lives we all do it. It is just that we do not see it.
So I will give it to you straight: it was Jonas Wergeland who was responsible for the president of Egypt, Muhammed Anwar Al-Sadat, flying to Jerusalem, thereby taking one of the most sensational initiatives of the latter half of the twentieth century. I know, and I understand, that many people will find this hard to believe. Nonetheless: look at the date. Jonas Wergeland was sitting on the top of Mount Sinai at the beginning of November 1977. And on November 20 President Sadat spoke to the Knesset in Jerusalem.
Everyone, not least the experts, has wondered about this trip and how it could have come about — a trip which led in a roundabout way to the meetings at Camp David and a peace treaty between arch-enemies Egypt and Israel. It is no exaggeration to say that Sadat’s offer to fly to Jerusalem took the whole world by surprise, bypassing as it did all of the formalities and questions of protocol and thus vaulting over the solid barriers of mutual distrust. Absolutely no one could have predicted such a courageous action, indeed all knowledge of the Middle East conflict pointed to the exact opposite. Sadat himself had roundly dismissed any idea of such a thing only months before making the trip. Nor does the myth of an invincible Israel serve as an explanation: that was quashed by the October war.
So what, if I might ask, prompted this unprecedented and totally unexpected decision on the part of Sadat, this unique attempt to breach the walls of a rigid mindset, and indeed to change actual events? Because behind this journey lay an idea that sought to alter Israel’s fundamental attitude, its way of thinking, its arrogance: a vision which, and deservedly so, was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. The Arab world had had thirty years of living at loggerheads with Israel, fought four wars, witnessed a succession of massacres and acts of terrorism, felt hate, bitterness. A huge psychological barrier had grown up, a wall of suspicion and fear between the two parties. They were, as Sadat himself put it, in the process of being ‘caught in a terrible vicious circle’. Note that expression: ‘vicious circle’.
All written and oral sources affirm that Sadat said not one word about this extremely bold initiative until just a few days before November 9, when he announced his intention at the opening of the new session of the national assembly. A look at Sadat’s activities immediately prior to this date shows, however, that he set out on a round trip to Rumania, Iran and Saudi Arabia just as Jonas was arriving in Sinai. Hence, I can reveal that it was on the flight from Saudi Arabia back to Egypt, while he was in the air directly above Jonas Wergeland, who was sitting atop Mount Sinai breaking a circle of stones, that Sadat was struck by the impulse which would, only a couple of days after his landing in Cairo, burst into full bloom: the idea that he should go to Jerusalem alone.
How can I possibly make such an assertion? Because I know it is so. And since for many people such a notion goes against the grain, I merely offer it as one theory to be set alongside all other explanations: that way at least it can be considered. That is all I ask.
So, how do the pieces of a life fit together?
Jonas Wergeland returned to Norway and after a few weeks he went to see the doctor, even though he knew there was no need. He was quite healthy. The X-rays, the tests, revealed a perfectly normal inner landscape. The doctors were baffled. And who can blame them? After all, medical science has not really advanced all that far.
The Knot
The year after he graduated from high school, Jonas Wergeland received a letter from Axel Stranger, who was in India. And even though Axel’s witty description of his run-ins with the Indian multitudes is worthy of a whole story to itself, Jonas’s attention was caught by something else, a detail; the stamp, or rather, one of the stamps on the envelope. This stamp bore the picture of an elderly, bearded man in profile, looking into a microscope. In the upper left-hand corner of the stamp hovered a circle, like a full moon, surrounded by shady patches. ‘Chromosomes’ was Jonas’s first thought, seeing that the letter was from Axel — in Axel’s life even the choice of a stamp was a conscious action. But among the foreign characters he made out some other words in Roman letters: ‘Dr Hansen,’ he read, and ‘Centenary of the discovery of leprosy bacillus’.
It is a shameful admission to have to make, but Jonas knew next to nothing about ‘Dr. Hansen’. On the whole I suspect that if you were to stop a representative selection of Norwegians in the street and confront them with the name ‘Dr Hansen’, you would receive a lot of strange responses. If you said ‘Dr Armauer Hansen’, more people would probably be able to place the name. Jonas for his part had only the vaguest notion of who Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen was. Leprosy was something one associated with Jesus and RI classes in grade school. Only once or twice in his life had he come across the name of the Norwegian doctor who had ‘discovered’ the lepra bacillus, for all the world as if he were some sort of explorer and the lepra bacillus an unknown continent, not to say a planet, a bit like the moon.
Only now, when brought face to face with a stamp that was clearly intended as a tribute to this Dr Hansen issued, what is more, by a country that contained a seventh of the world’s population, did Jonas begin to take a greater interest in his countryman. Armauer Hansen was obviously a byword, particularly in countries that were still dogged by poverty and disease, and Jonas soon found that in those parts of the world, ‘Dr Hansen’ had had both streets and research institutes named after him.
Thanks to that little stamp on a letter from India, Jonas came to entertain a certain respect for Armauer Hansen and, over the years, he read every little piece he came across on this man’s life and work. But even this does not entirely explain why the programme on Armauer Hansen in the Thinking Big series should have been such a success — the distinctive pulse and intensity of the programme must be attributed as much to Jonas Wergeland’s own confrontation with a fatal illness. After his incomprehensible and indescribable experience on that mountain in the Sinai desert, he had conceived an almost fond interest in the body’s mysterious powers — or continents, to stick with the metaphor of the research scientist as an explorer.
I have to admit that I find it hard to describe the television programme on Armauer Hansen, because it has so much to do with form. To say that Jonas built the programme around the key story in Armauer Hansen’s life — a perfectly ordinary visit to a bookshop in Vienna — does not tell you much; for one thing it goes no way to explaining why that particular scene should have been perceived by the viewers as the high point in an electrifying psychological thriller.
This seems like an apt juncture at which to bemoan the Norwegian attitude towards experimental, or perhaps I should say, investigative art: any and all art forms which, to a greater or lesser degree, generate something new or different. More than any other people, the Norwegian nation appears to have a fear of such a thing that seems, from an objective point of view at least, rather comical. I mean, what is one to make of a professor of ethics from the faculty of theology attacking the English playwright Harold Pinter’s rather intriguing play The Lover — staged in Norway back in the sixties — by maintaining that the majority of people are incapable of discerning the artistic merits of warped and morbid works by eccentric writers, and that this play could only be regarded as part of the general social decline, dealing as it did with married couples and infidelity? This does, however, show that, when you come right down to it, the average Norwegian does not regard avant-gardism in the arts as ‘incomprehensible’, but as a clear sign of immorality. As something decadent. I think this stems from the overweening Norwegian need to feel secure. Anything that deviates from the norm is interpreted as a threat to this security. Why else would someone read an unconventional poem from the lectern in the Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, to be met with jeers and derision? And where else but in Norway could one envisage members of the literati ever bringing a ‘lawsuit’ against the movement known as modernism, a ‘lawsuit’ which, I grant you, was not really meant to be taken too seriously but which, if one reads the prosecutor’s statement, betrays a genuine indignation and outrage and, above all else, moral condemnation, as if ‘modernism’, a literary movement that has in due course become a quite conventional and respectable literary style, were actually a criminal offence deserving of punishment.