Armand V Read online

  Armand knew what sort of flyers Hagemann was distributing and what sort of materials he had on the table beside him. They were flyers that strongly opposed the Death Penalty in the United States. Today they dealt with an individual whose execution was scheduled within a week, and Hagemann was collecting signatures in favor of a reprieve. Piled on a simple, worn-out card table were brochures, photo magazines, books, and other items. There were statistics on how many people in the U.S. were on death row and waiting to be executed. How many had been executed since 1976, when the Death Penalty had been reintroduced. Photographs of prisoners on death row. Photographs of those who had been executed. Armand had understood that Hagemann was no longer employed. He had taken early retirement, and Hagemann’s old friend the attorney Julius Hansen had helped him to obtain a good pension, after navigating a lot of red tape.

  “I used to make pretty good money,” Hagemann said now, and mentioned Julius Hansen, the attorney. “You probably remember him. Well, they finally gave in.” That was when he’d started distributing information protesting the Death Penalty. But his involvement had started well before that. In fact, it must have started not long after Hagemann had been released from prison, or maybe a few years later.

  Armand shared a number of opinions with Hagemann. Including his view of the Death Penalty in the States, but Armand had to tread lightly there, considering his profession. The Death Penalty in America wasn’t really something he wanted to discuss on the street. But he couldn’t help voicing his indignation over some of the cases that Hagemann showed him. The photo series from all the states that had used the electric chair made a huge impression on him. As well as the lethal injection chambers. And the glass walls where witnesses could watch the victim. As well as the last meals. The developmentally challenged who had been executed, along with the insane, and there were minors who were put to death. But Armand tried to change the subject to other topics they could discuss. Today, for instance, Armand thought he ought to tell Hagemann about what had happened just earlier, when for reasons he didn’t entirely understand he had tripped a junkie purse-snatcher so that the youth landed on his face and the two men who were chasing him caught him and called the police. He wanted to hear Hagemann’s opinion, what he thought was his motive — Armand’s motive, that is, not the pale junkie’s motive. But as he started to tell him about this incident he stopped, because his account would include mention of the arrest, the police, and inevitably the trial and verdict. So he said instead that he had just been paying rent for his son, who was in the military.

  “He’s a soldier now,” Armand said. “All of a sudden he enlisted, and I thought he should keep his rented room to use when he’s on leave; a grown son shouldn’t have to live with his father when he’s home, or with his mother for that matter,” Armand said, recalling that once he had asked Hagemann: “Do you see your kids nowadays?” And remembering that he could have bitten his tongue because the question was so tactless, that’s not what he should have asked. Instead: “How are your kids?” That was something altogether different, with no insinuations like the first question, which revealed a superior attitude toward Hagemann, implying that he didn’t see his kids very often, something that was really none of his business unless Hagemann brought up the topic.

  It’s obvious that Armand really wanted to treat Hagemann with respect. Hagemann who had fallen. What Armand had realized, and he thought this was the remarkable thing about Hagemann, was that it was his time in prison, those two or three years, that had led him to protest against the Death Penalty in the U.S. with greater intensity each passing year, it seemed. It was in his capacity as a humbled ex-convict that he reacted to the Death Penalty in the U.S.A. He would prefer life in prison, then he’d at least be alive, thought the former convict Hagemann, who, it must be assumed, had scarcely had a chance to forget that he was an ex-convict, at least not for many minutes at a time. Everyone viewed him that way and felt sorry for him, even Armand. He knew that everyone felt the same, and there was nothing he could do about it. Once Hagemann had been a trusted politician, a member of one of Norway’s foremost parties, but he had betrayed this trust in order to feather his own nest. There was no question, he had to take the fall. But was it any wonder that it was as a member of the party supporting a world power (which allowed the Death Penalty) that Hagemann had become a leading figure; support that provided the final, decisive proof that he and his party existed, or lived in the world of reality, and that after his release he used so much of his remaining strength to oppose that policy? Armand didn’t know. He tried, as he was doing now, to challenge Hagemann a little about the political position of the United States in the world today, under its new administration, but received merely a polite, almost indifferent response to the view Armand was trying to elicit. Hagemann didn’t seem interested, or at least he preferred not to appear particularly interested.

  They did exchange opinions, although mostly about neutral topics like the weather and geography, historical phenomena from the point in time when those of us most obsessed with modernity began identifying anything before January 1, 2000, as the last century, especially relating to international issues, which included the death sentence in the United States. They stood there on the corner of Bogstadveien and Industrigata, in front of a modern office building from the aforementioned previous century. They also discussed the Champions League, and soccer in general on TV. Armand was enjoying chatting with Hagemann, who would occasionally accost a passerby and hand him a flyer about the latest execution in the States. But when Armand glanced at his watch he realized that he was running out of time. The important conference at the Department was going to start in fifteen minutes. Fortunately there was a cab stand right around the corner, so he could make it in time. The two gentlemen in their sixties said goodbye and shook hands, and as they did, Armand was reminded of his own Appointment back when he was forty-two. It was around the time when Hagemann had met his downfall, almost at the same time. He wondered whether Hagemann might have been arrested on the very day when he received his Appointment. More than twenty years ago they had both been successful men in the public life of their small country, one employed in the civil service, the other leading a political life. Then one of them suffered a merciless fall, and the other received an Appointment. Is it therefore possible to regard these two gentlemen taking their leave of each other, on a residential street corner in a little northern European capital, as representing no less than two different fates? Whether Armand was capable of viewing himself as representing a fate, however, is doubtful. But was that how he viewed Hagemann? Or did Armand view Hagemann, despite his attraction to him, as mere coincidence? For me, writing this, it’s important to ask such questions.

  * * *

  5. Is a novel something that has already been written, and is the author merely the one who finds it, laboriously digging it out? I have to admit that with each passing year I have come to realize more and more clearly that I am enveloped in such a notion. But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered and excavated it? This is a comment to a place in the text above that deals with, or conceals, a metaphysical concern of the highest order.

  5B. It is timely to ask this question because a finished novel, authored and published under my name, was actually completed by me as well. How many drafts do I write before a particular section turns out the way it should in the published book? At least twenty! Over and over again. I keep on until it looks the way I want it to look. I keep revising until it’s the way it should be. As if it were predicted beforehand. Sometimes I’m surprised, but weren’t those surprises also forecast in advance?

  Most of these drafts aren’t very interesting, they’re part of a normal procedure in which something that isn’t very good eventually finds its proper form through laborious effort. Once it evolves into something good, it becomes crystal clear that it’s much better than it was in the initial attempt. But there are also instances when it’s
not so clear at first glance, and even though these instances might be negligible in number, they’re the ones on which we now have to train our spotlight.

  It’s a matter of those instances where there is apparently no particular qualitative difference between the first attempt and the final one, the one that remains standing; yes, in some cases I may even suspect that from an outside viewpoint the first version was actually just as good. It’s a matter of one section that has nothing wrong with it and another section that has nothing wrong with it either, except for the fact that in the first case I say: No, I don’t think so, and in the second I say: Yes! Finally!

  What standard do I use to make such strongly contradictory judgments of clear disapproval vs. firm acclamation? Because that’s what I’m doing, it’s a fact. I could have written that I don’t know, yet I have a sense the novel I’m working on is already done, and my task is to lead it forward. Let’s cut to the chase: I’m well aware of why I rejected the first draft. It’s because no matter how well written it may be, no matter how high the literary temperature, etc., etc., I could just as well have written the exact opposite. All that’s missing is necessity. That and nothing more.

  There’s also another circumstance on which I have to shine the spotlight. Sometimes I wake up in the night, having denounced my own novel, as far as I’ve gotten with it. This will happen in the dream from which I have just emerged, and I realize that I have to deal with the consequences. In a waking state I noticed nothing, but at night, having sunk into a dream state, it churns and churns inside of me. I have to get up, although it’s the middle of the night, and retrieve my manuscript. I slowly read back until I find the spot where the whole thing went off the rails. It might be thirty or forty pages back, and let’s say a month of hard work has passed since I’ve noticed any detours. I’ll have to start over from that point. It would have seemed incomprehensible to others that I’m now throwing away these pages, and to me as well, until I rejected these pages in my dreams, and now I understand why I’m doing it. Maybe it could be called intuition. But what is intuition really? That I intuitively had the whole novel ready even before I began to write down the first line, and that it clearly signals from deep inside my bad dreams, time after time, when I’ve gone astray?

  5C. The novel takes place partly in Oslo, partly in the high mountains, and partly during an ocean voyage. And large parts of it take place abroad. The novel is invisible to the author in the sense that he is unable to write it. He can see it, see into it, but he can’t write it. He has to relate to, and also write, “the text up there,” or “the text out there.” It obviously deals with Armand V., whom the author pretends to know, or pretends to have known. The shape the novel takes is unknown, since the author at some early point refused to enter into it and lead it forward.

  5D. This novel, which is invisible, we can call the original novel. In contrast to what is here on paper, which is the novel as it now exists. It consists of footnotes to the original novel. The compositional principle of the present text cannot be deduced from the form of the original novel, but it must be sought, and has already been sought by the author, through that which exists, i.e., the footnotes, which, unlike the original novel, have been written by the author, meaning me.

  5E. It is indisputable that this novel, the sum of the footnotes to the original novel, which is invisible because the author refused to delve into it and make it his own, is about Armand V. It is most probable that the original novel also dealt with Armand V., at least that’s what the author asserts, based on the tiny glimpses he claims to have had of it, that which he believes to have perceived, in part crystal clear, in part as a faint flicker. The fact that I will later claim that it’s far from certain that Armand V. has the same name in the original novel, “the text out there,” as here below in the footnotes, is an entirely different matter. What is germane, however, is that it is by no means certain that the theme of this novel is the same as that of the original novel. I am not even thinking solely of the extent to which the themes are identical, but rather to what extent they have anything to do with each other at all. Yet the footnotes remain footnotes to this unwritten, possibly incommensurable novel.

  5F. Why this disavowal? Why does the author refuse to enter into the original novel, and lead it forward, word by word, the way he usually does? Put more directly: Why don’t I do it, since I’m the one who’s writing this? Why do I refuse, and why have I been refusing for almost two years now? Because I am no longer capable of writing down the novel I have been given the privilege to dig up, but must be content with writing footnotes to this work, in which I obviously no longer believe. It must have something to do with my age. Long ago I passed the age of sixty, and I’m occupied with looking forward, not to the future, but to the end. I can no longer change the world, but I can terminate it.

  5G. I no longer think that I’m in any condition to write novels the way I used to. My day is over. It appears that I talk about “the original novel,” or “the text up above,” or “the text out there.” But what about the novel’s Plan? It no longer exists. I can no longer refer to the Plan, and why not? Because I have no future in what I write. Even my darkest novels were not without a future. They may have been without hope, but they weren’t without a future. Now they have no future; that time is past, and now my time is up. So what do I do? . . . This.

  5H. I’m so free that I suspect someone might be playing a prank on me, as if I begin to dig up what is now available to me as the original novel, or the Plan. It’s possible I’m being completely fooled by someone or other, or rather by something or other. In order to avoid that, I’m proceeding with this. Responding in like manner, as they say.

  5I. An ocean voyage. The eternal cabin girl, the so-called waitress. Conversations on board. The ship’s route. A November cruise off the coast of northern Europe. He received an invitation.

  It’s an alternative ocean voyage. The one that occurs simultaneously, in the text above, follows a different course than the one taking place here; for example, the ports of call and the characters that appear here, except for the protagonist himself, are different from those that appear up in the novel, in that story itself.

  * * *

  6. The Appointment took place before the King at the cabinet meeting. He was quite young to be appointed as an ambassador, only forty-two. But one of the reasons was that he knew the region well from before, since he had served there previously, as the ambassador’s secretary, and he’d served as a ministerial councilor in two of the neighboring countries.

  Just before he departed, his credentials were transferred to the foreign ministry, where he received them in order to hand them over in person to the head of state in the country to which he was now appointed ambassador. It was a small country located in the desert in the Middle East. The country was separated from one neighbor by a river that bore the same name as the state to which he had been appointed ambassador. He arrived at the capital of this country and was picked up at the airport and taken to the Norwegian Embassy. Here he spent a few days while he waited to be summoned to the Palace to deliver his credentials. When the call came, he got into the back seat of the official Norwegian Embassy limousine and was driven to the Palace, while the attaché case containing the credentials rested solemnly on his lap. At the Palace he was led into a hall to wait, where a number of other ambassadors were also waiting. One by one they were formally summoned and ushered into an adjoining room. At last it was Armand’s turn. He was escorted into the audience hall of the Palace, where he personally delivered the letter from the King of Norway to this country’s head of state. The King of Jordan accepted it, offering Armand a few friendly words. He was now Norway’s ambassador to Jordan.

  * * *

  7. In the mid-1960s, Paul Buer and his best friend Armand arrived in Oslo to study at the university at Blindern. Paul ended up among the physical scientists, known as the “realists,” while Armand settled down with the “hum
anists.” After two years they could be found at their respective tables with their respective cohorts in the enormous Frederikke student cafeteria, far apart from each other. Armand hung out at the eastern end of the cafeteria, which was closer to the humanities buildings named for Henrik Wergeland and Sophus Bugge, while Paul sat at the far west end by the wall, at a big round table, and ate his brown-bag lunch among his colleagues. Occasionally the two would run into each other in the cafeteria line. The lines could be long, and Armand would go from one line to another to find the shortest, which was often in the part of the cafeteria where Paul hung out. When they met like this and had to wait with their trays in their hands, Armand would often invite Paul to come sit at his table. In the course of their years of study, Paul would sometimes, on his own initiative, venture over to the other end to join Armand, but Armand hardly ever left his table to sit with the physical scientists.

  Paul felt shy whenever he sat with Armand and his fellow students. He couldn’t manage to say a single word. He had developed an inferiority complex because he knew he’d look like a fool if he said anything. During those years when he sporadically sat at Armand’s table he uttered very few words, and if he searched his memory he could probably remember them all. The only times he spoke were when one of the other humanists tried to be kind to him because he was Armand’s friend and asked him a direct question, and then he might reply: “Yes, we’ve been friends since we were kids,” “mathematics (and later geophysics),” “yes, that wouldn’t surprise me,” “no, I wouldn’t think so!” and “yes, I agree completely.” Otherwise he mostly paid attention to Armand, with whom he tried to keep a conversation going, and Armand tried to do the same but couldn’t really manage it because suddenly he would have to keep interrupting their private exchanges by calling out across the table some comment to something the others were discussing, and this would make Paul feel even more superfluous. There was always a bunch of women at Armand’s table, something that couldn’t be said about Paul Buer’s own table with the physical scientists, and that made Paul feel shy, coupled with the fact that everyone was so impressive, including the female humanities students. They knew how to express themselves with such wit. Which really wasn’t so strange, Paul told himself, since that’s what they’re studying, learning how to express themselves, even in foreign languages. It’s different with us, who usually end up in what are to everyone else incomprehensible combinations of symbols, sort of like the way Donald Duck would swear in the comics when I was a kid. That’s what he would think (afterwards, always afterwards, when he got back to his own table, or to his own seminar in the Physics building on the other side of Blindernveien).