Professor Andersen's Night

by Dag Solstad

  Professor Andersen paced round his apartment, from early morning to late at night. At midday he usually lay down in bed and, as a rule, he then slept for a few hours, in a kind of doze. The same at night. He slept fitfully, his dreams reduced to muddled thoughts, milling around. Nevertheless, he felt alert as he wandered restlessly around the apartment, and he also passed the time by doing daily chores, such as making food, eating, washing up, vacuuming, tidying. Indeed, he even made the bed, although he knew that he was going to lie in it most of the day, and that he would lie down in it again in a few hours’ time, for a rest of sorts after dinner. He felt his mind was crystal clear, but despite that he was at his wits’ end. He couldn’t understand his reluctance to report Henrik Nordstrøm for the murder he had seen him commit. Well, yes, he understood that he hadn’t reported him when it had happened, but why he was unable to report him now, when he had experienced, bodily and mentally, the impossible consequences it held for him was more than he could fathom. His sin of omission couldn’t be defended. Every civilisation is built on such actions being indefensible. That goes without saying. In all circumstances. When he didn’t report it, he had become an outcast, along with the murderer. An outcast in his own eyes, along with the murderer. And he deserved this. And behind it all was God. As the ultimate reason why breaking this natural order was a taboo which no living person can explain, touch or wipe from their memory. Professor Andersen was not a religious man, he was fairly unfamiliar with thinking along those lines, but now he couldn’t stop himself blurting out, when he thought and thought about what he had become entangled in, and couldn’t get untangled from, even though he desperately wanted to, ‘No one can have their own God. Not even the godless.’ He was startled when that thought struck him. But he was forced to realise that it was self-evident, and that he had no alternative but to take heed of it.

  The thought had emerged completely spontaneously, as a vision, which had burst its way through his broodings, as he paced around his apartment, in pyjamas, with a dressing gown on, right in the middle of the day. It was an inner voice which called out, and he felt both taken by surprise and uncomfortable. It wasn’t the first time he had been entangled in a train of thought that made him feel uncomfortable, and which he didn’t like. Ever since the murderer had entered his life, he had had a tendency to get hung up on impossible abstractions, ones which quite simply made him feel sick. For instance, having made up his mind, urgently and repeatedly, that Henrik Nordstrøm had commited a ‘primordial crime’, he could find himself staring intently at his watch in order to see, or feel, if there might be a connection between ‘primordial time’ in the sense of early origin, and ‘time’ as measured by the apparatus which ticks your own time and which is strapped around your wrist. It was, in any case, a connection which Professor Andersen found repulsive and far from fascinating, particularly because he was the one who had been distracted by such a notion. And it was probably this resistance in his own mind to speculative thinking which had made him so immune to metaphysical and religious thinking, from his twenties onwards. He might indeed listen with interest when others expressed metaphysical ideas, but if they cropped up in his own head, in his own work as it were, he was repulsed. But this time he wasn’t. He didn’t discard the thought immediately, as he usually did, but found that he had to take it into account, as existing in his mind. For several months now he had been troubled by the thought of lifting up the telephone receiver, only to lay it down again, because he couldn’t report Henrik Nordstrøm for the murder of the young woman, which he had seen him commit, and afterwards he constantly felt the blast of society’s demands and noticed the strength of society’s effect, even on its essentially disloyal servant, Professor Pål Andersen, dizzy at the thought of what he had done, or neglected to do, and at the meeting with the murderer, which he couldn’t rid himself of, and which made him exclaim, addressing his inner self, crying out loud, ‘No one can have their own God! Not even the godless!’ and as he voiced this in his mind, it seemed to him to be so self-evident and correct that he was startled, while at the same time he felt uncomfortable, even dejected, about his own manner of speaking, which had appeared so spontaneously, and had been his own work.

  By doing so, Professor Andersen had recognised God: not God’s existence as such, but God as an abstract concept, and as a necessity which goes beyond social considerations, but all the same an abstraction of the kind that could in the final instance issue Professor Andersen with a kind of divine command in connection with the difficult situation into which he had manoeuvred himself on account of his sin of omission. At the deepest level of meaning, in the ultimate instance, God had appeared, and in Professor Andersen’s mouth. He just had to affirm that. Accordingly, Professor Andersen was fully aware of what had happened to him. Despite his dejection arising from the manner of speaking he had spontaneously adopted, this recognition by no means needed to cause any radical change in his life, as he had lived it up to now. His self-evident thought did not require him to kneel down or pray or adopt a false mildness in his normal manner of behaviour, or any pious church appearance, or denial of life, or meekness, only a certain awe and respect for the divine dimension of existence. It also required him to do his duty with regard to the ‘divine command’, which he had just recognised. He was also able to admit that this self-evident thought could be seen as liberating, since it involved a divine dimension in one’s way of thinking that ought to have a broadening rather than a limiting effect on one’s consciousness. He understood all of this immediately, but all the same he had felt dejected, because of the form of expression he had used so spontaneously, which was such an exact expression of the thought that had appeared so readily and aptly in his brooding, indeed haunted, mind. Instead of counting himself fortunate for gaining insight into the necessity of God in that way – without even seeking such insight! – he felt uncomfortable. Because he couldn’t follow the ‘divine command’ demanded by this undeserved insight into the necessity of God. Because it would have led him to set off for Majorstua Police Station and report Henrik Nordstrøm for the murder he had seen him commit two months ago. And he still couldn’t do that. Not because it would now have been downright embarrassing to enter Majorstua Police Station and say that on the night before Christmas Day last year (last year! sic!) he had seen a murder from his window, and that the murderer’s name was Henrik Nordstrøm, and that the murdered person was a young woman with fair hair; mind you, that’s what it was, extremely embarrassing, as it was unlikely there would be any trace of this murder: no body, and no woman reported missing who could fit the description. But it would have been possible to live with that. Henrik Nordstrøm would have got away, and he would have been left standing with his excuses; both of them would have been regarded as ‘suspicious characters’ by the police force, and that would be all. But at any rate he would have reported it, followed the ‘divine command’, and in that way confirmed that he had understood the words he uttered when on the extreme brink. Nonetheless, he couldn’t report him. It was impossible for him to do it. It was out of the question. Divine command or not, it was impossible for him to do it. And thus his insight came to no avail, this strange, undeserved gift of grace was completely wasted on him, if one wished to interpret it in that way, and Professor Andersen was certainly not unfamiliar with that way of interpreting it, because he had received his own rather surprising words, directed inwardly at himself, with great awe, even if they had also made him dejected, but this dejection lay precisely in the fact that the words he had expressed so spontaneously had issued from the lips of a man who was utterly unable to appreciate them, when all was said and done, it turned out, because he wasn’t able to do so.

  When Professor Andersen realised that he wasn’t able to report Henrik Nordstrøm, even on account of a divine command, he grew annoyed. ‘But it is just ridiculous,’ he thought, ‘really, all I want is to report the guy. It would be a relief pure and simple and now there’s nothing to stop it, either. What o
n earth is the reason that I’m unable to do it? It’s just stubbornness and inflexibility,’ he thought, irritated, ‘an insufferable obstinacy that is in my mind, unfortunately, and sets its mark or holds it upright, as I’m certainly leading myself to believe. It is quite insufferable. If only I had one sensible reason, but I haven’t. All the reasons I have or have had, I have removed at once, so that I’m left standing naked and almost trembling,’ he mumbled. ‘What am I trembling for?’ he thought, dejected, shaking his head while he walked restlessly around the apartment, still in pyjamas and dressing gown, in the middle of the day. Now and then he suddenly came to a stop, and remained standing dead still, in the middle of the room, motionless, and he could remain standing like this for several minutes, while he was thinking, as far as his wits would allow him. ‘Perhaps my poor arguments are an expression of my not daring to face the real reasons on which I base this decision,’ he thought quietly. ‘What on earth can they be? Why do I say that it isn’t right to report him? I must mean it, after all, since I maintain it so strongly, without a proper argument.’

  He went through it all once again in his mind. A murder has taken place. The murdered person is dead; the murderer is alive. It was not the murderer’s responsibility, but the murderer’s consternation that it hinged on, that was undoubtedly how it was, viewed from Professor Andersen’s angle, therefore he had laid down the receiver again, after first lifting it up, after he had witnessed the crime and rushed to the telephone, which stood out in the hall on a little table there. When he now thought carefully through all this and urgently asked himself ‘why?’, he noticed that he had a tendency to refer to his actions, or lack of action, in turns of speech which were clearly erroneous, such as answering that he didn’t want to ‘inform on’ the murderer, or that he didn’t want to ‘add stones to his burden’, something which, on second thoughts and subjected to critical testing, couldn’t stand being presented openly as sensible reflections. ‘To report a murder one has seen isn’t informing,’ thought Professor Andersen, slightly taken aback at having to go to the lengths of putting himself right about such an obvious matter. But such notions as these were lodged, quite entrenched, in his consciousness. ‘I don’t want to stone him,’ he might catch himself exclaiming in his own defence, ‘it’s too primitive.’ He then had to admit that deep within him was the notion that there ought to be something primitive about the act of reporting that one has witnessed a primordial crime, because this notification would lead to the criminal’s arrest, with criminal proceedings and punishment. It ought to mean ‘throwing the first stone’. If one set these notions against the clear, self-evident idea Professor Andersen had thought of quite spontaneously, and which involved a recognition of a divine principle, with which he was now faced, and had to see his own sin of omission in light of, Professor Andersen had to admit that this indicated that he did have a notion that this insight into the necessity of God was strongly interwoven with the feeling that he was now standing face to face with the Desert God, and that it was the Desert God’s command to stone the murderer, even throw the first stone, which he so strongly hesitated from following. A primitive feudal God orders Professor Andersen from the university at Blindern in Oslo, the capital city of the modern state of Norway towards the end of the twentieth century, to carry out a primitive action ordered by God. ‘No wonder I hesitate,’ he thought, ‘but the fact is that it doesn’t add up. I haven’t met the Desert God, and the action I have been commanded to carry out isn’t primitive, but necessary in order to uphold civilisation.’

  All the same. Professor Andersen wasn’t able to report him. No matter how easily all the arguments for not doing it were punctured and exposed, reporting him was out of the question. ‘It makes me furious,’ he thought. ‘I get disgusted at the thought. I don’t want to be the person who does it.’ Even if he could show that by focusing on the murder victim, the young woman, and envisaging her last seconds, which he saw with his own eyes, when she knew that she was on the point of losing her life, being murdered, strangled by a man she knew, indeed was celebrating Christmas Eve with, the pain and the completely incomprehensible and, in her case, irreversible, nature of this, then there was nothing left which could justify any sympathy or pity for the person who had done it; ‘It must have been terribly painful,’ he exhorted himself, ‘both bodily, and not least mentally. No human being should be allowed to inflict such fear in another person and go unpunished,’ he cried out inwardly. ‘Admit at least that it is rash of you not to report him,’ he pleaded. But to no avail. For Professor Andersen she was dead, and no punishment could make her rise up again and reappear at the window of the apartment on the other side of the street, where she stared out, on the evening before Christmas Day. His concern was for the murderer, the person who was left there, with the body in front of him, the murderer chained to his own misdeed, which he had witnessed.