‘I remember how cheap fillet steak was in Nairobi,’ said Sir William after sampling the food. ‘Cost next to nothing — and quite out of this world. We’ll never have meat like that again.’
The reason for my dwelling at such length on Sir William is, of course, that this man happens to personify a crucial element in the story of Jonas Wergeland’s life. Sir William is not merely an uncle, Sir William is Norway, disguised in a blue blazer and gold cravat, a nouveau riche upstart. To Jonas, Sir William represented the very key to vital chapters in his nation’s most recent history. So when his uncle sat there, droning on and on about Emperor Haile Selassie, wearing an expression of superiority, authority and moral infallibility, in Jonas’s eyes it might just as well have been Norway sitting there talking.
Sir William had lived and worked in Kenya for three years and, speaking of this, I would like, if I may, to insert here a brief discourse on Norway. I am, as I am sure some of you will already have guessed, not Norwegian. I am an objective observer. I do not know what I would have to say to shake a Norwegian out of his fixed ideas about his nation’s history, but I might perhaps say that Norway and the sudden prosperity experienced by this country during the second half of the twentieth century could, in fact, be likened to the Netherlands — that, too, a small country bounded by the North Sea — and its almost unbelievable heyday during the seventeenth century. But unlike the Netherlands, Norway has been able to rake in the fruits of the rest of the world without — and this is the amazing thing — armed intervention, so that its people, almost unseen by the international community, have been able to sit back and revel in the riches which have poured into the country and which they themselves have, so to speak, merely processed, not altogether unlike a rat stowing away on a ship laden to the gunwales with food. Nor, I should perhaps point out in parenthesis, has Norway experienced any flourishing of the arts in conjunction with this material surfeit, as was the case in the Netherlands — and I suppose there is some justice in that. Little good does it do for an overexcited journalist once to have described Jonas Wergeland as the Rembrandt of his medium, on account of his innovative use of colour and wealth of detail.
I would like, in other words, to defend a point of view which holds luck to be the key factor in the history of Norway in the twentieth century; and when I say luck, I do not just mean the fluke by which, by being in the right place, at the right time, a nation quite unexpectedly finds itself enjoying a golden age. I am also thinking of the sort of good fortune which makes it possible to commit a crime and not be punished for it: crime without punishment, to twist the words of one of Russia’s greatest writers. And I have asked myself — please do take this as being well-meant, as a working hypothesis — whether it might not be this self-same good fortune, or the suppression of such, that has turned the Norwegian people so clearly into a nation of spoiled children, to the point where they have utterly lost sight of one of the most important facets of human nature: a sense for the tragic.
Sir William — who had studied civil engineering at the Norwegian Technical College, as it then was, in Trondheim — was the embodiment of this same combination of luck and criminal tendencies, of what one might call the ‘lucky sod’ syndrome. In the mid-sixties he had signed up as a so-called expert with the newly established and extremely lucrative undertaking that went by the name, not to say alias, of Norwegian Development Aid. So Sir William belonged, in fact, to the first generation of Norwegians to leave the country as perfectly ordinary Norwegian citizens and to come back rolling in money — not so much helping others as helping themselves, as Rakel put it — so much so that they could go right out and buy a better car or build a bigger house, the latter also necessary in order to have room for all those enormous zebra hides and rugs, all the chests and weapons, lion-claw necklaces and stuffed baby crocodiles, drums and stone figurines, the whole of Africa reduced to bric-à-brac, as if their stay there had been one long safari, several years of tourism, with the Norwegian state footing the bill. It was his time as an aid worker in Kenya that did for Sir William, although he had evinced incipient signs of snobbery early on: as, for example, when he exchanged his original surname for that of Rød, a place near Hvaler, and as if that weren’t enough had added an extra letter, giving Røed. But it was in Africa that he really had the chance to be on top in both material and social terms, where he could savour to the full the pleasure of belonging to a social elite with people bowing and scraping to you both in your own home and at the office. So by the time Sir William returned home, ironically enough from a commission entrusted to him by the Norwegian state, all of his socialist upbringing with its ideals of equality and distribution of goods had been about as thoroughly undermined as it could possibly be.
And yet the most amazing thing, and the reason why Jonas always kept a very close eye on Sir William in case he should inadvertently let slip some clue to the mystery, was that this long sojourn in a poverty-stricken African country had not instilled in him a greater sense of humility and gratitude. Instead, Sir William could sit there and talk as if he were the world’s greatest expert on Africa, when, that is, he was not pouring scorn on Norway as if intent in some way upon renouncing his country’s excellent infrastructure and relatively well-developed democracy in favour of a misgoverned dictatorship on the verge of collapse simply because it accorded such paradisiacal privileges to people of his (i.e. Sir William’s) calibre. Sir William did not return home, as did the individuals in Jonas Wergeland’s television series Thinking Big, intellectually enriched; he came home laden with prejudices, even more narrow-minded than before — and, not only that, but espousing a baffling brand of morality which amounted, basically, to straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. He could, for instance, never understand — indeed it was quite beyond his powers of comprehension — how his brother, Jonas’s father, could have chosen a profession in which the chances of making any real money were so slim.
And it was for this reason that he reluctantly concluded his peroration on Emperor Haile Selassie with a sort of prophetic pronouncement to the effect that tomorrow’s Ethiopia was going to go down the toilet and only then deigned to congratulate his brother on his new villa: ‘Splendid house, our kid, splendid,’ he said, glancing around. And even though Sir William earned five times as much as Jonas’s father and lived in a mansion, he could not quite conceal yet another character trait which he had honed to perfection while mixing with the other foreigners in Kenya: envy. ‘But where the hell did you get the money for it,’ he asked. ‘Did you rob a bank? Or have people suddenly started paying you for creating an atmosphere in their church?’
‘Winston Churchill helped us,’ said Jonas.
‘No, it was art,’ Haakon Hansen said, his fingers fluttering fretfully along the edge of the table as if longing for the piano keys. ‘I know you’ll find this hard to believe, William, but we came by the money through art.’
‘It’s not exactly what you’d call a prime location, is it?’ one of the Brothers Grimm chipped in.
‘The fact that it’s Grorud knocks half a million off the price,’ added the other.