Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

She poured coffee for him from a transparent jug in which the grounds were pressed down to the bottom by a shining strainer. He pointed to an old microscope over by the window. ‘I’ve had that since I was a child,’ she said. ‘Pasteur was my great hero. These days, of course, viruses are the thing — electron microscopes.’ For a long time, while at university, she had considered a future as a research scientist but had abandoned this idea, was happy where she was now, expected to end up in general practice. As she was talking, Jonas studied the pictures hanging on the walls: reproductions of Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson and The Raising of Lazarus and a fine selection of Leonardo’s studies of different parts of the body, all rendered strange and different by gleaming steel frames and by being interspersed with a number of stringently abstract pictures by Malevich. In one spot hung an artistic representation of the human head’s development through various palaeontological stages, as if her pictures also aimed to underline her statement about the world progressing.

She broke off in the middle of a sentence: ‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ she said. ‘You seem so ordinary and yet at the same time so different. There’s a look in your eyes. Not at first, there wasn’t, but now.’

‘It might have something to do with my back,’ he said. And because she was a doctor, he did not consider it unreasonable to tell her about an episode from his childhood, from the time when he would not eat. His parents had come up with all sorts of ploys to distract him during mealtimes, to get Jonas — inadvertently almost — to swallow a few morsels of food. On one occasion on Hvaler they had given him a box of buttons to play with while they shovelled food into him as best they could. Among all these different and interesting buttons one in particular caught Jonas’s eye. His grandfather said that he had bought it in China and that it came from a dragon. ‘Imagine that, you little starveling: genuine dragon horn!’ The Chinaman in the shop had told him that farmers sometimes came across dragon skeletons in desolate spots and sold the bones and horns. The apothecaries ground the bones into powder and craftsmen made things from the horns, including buttons. Jonas clearly enjoyed this story, because he promptly popped the button into his mouth — and swallowed it, to everyone’s dismay. Jonas vaguely remembered his mother forcing him to sit on the potty, then examining his stools as keenly as a customs officer looking for bags of heroin, or as if he was the Emperor of China and his shit was sacred — but found no button. His parents were worried sick. They took him to the hospital and had him X-rayed. Nothing showed up on the X-ray plates either. No button had come out, and no button could be detected inside him, not by the X-rays at any rate. It wouldn’t necessarily do any harm, the doctor reassured them, though secretly he guessed that the button had come out the other end long ago. ‘The body can cope with a lot more than we think,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard stories of surgeons leaving this or that inside patients after an operation, folk have survived worse things than a button.’ Jonas, for one, felt reassured. As the years passed and he read about all the odd things that were inserted into people’s bodies, from heart valves to silicone, he came to the conclusion that the body could accept one measly button, even a horn one. When he grew older, he would dream that it had slotted itself into his spine like a disc, that he was, in other words, equipped with an extra vertebra — had suffered more or less the opposite of a slipped disc. He recalled how proud he had been on attending one of his first school medicals: ‘You’ve got a remarkably straight back, boy!’ the doctor had said. Several times, during bouts of depression, Jonas was to take comfort in this — in his belief that, in spite of everything, the button made him special. His grandfather had told him about a tribe in Brazil: when they reached a certain age the young boys of the tribe had wooden plugs put in their ears to enable them to pick up the dreams of the tribe. ‘Sometimes I think of the button as a pill,’ he told Johanne A. ‘A pill that didn’t take effect for a long time.’ What he did not tell her, Professor, was that the effect of the pill was to exert a pressure on his spine, a pressure which sometimes altered his perception completely and gave him a glimpse of a world rich in possibilities.

‘I knew there was something,’ she says, and without more ado she proceeds to switch off the lights, as if this anecdote has inspired her to undertake some unorthodox operation that needs to be conducted in the dark. She puts out all the lights, apart from one lamp in a corner, a sphere encircled by a metal ring, like another Saturn suspended over a table bearing little pyramids of coloured glass. Normally, Jonas was frightened by dark rooms but not now, not with her beside him, not with that scent infiltrating his nostrils, filling him with a mounting sense of exhilaration. She sat on the white sofa, faint reflections from her eyes in the shadows. Two geometric earrings hung like satellites on either side of her face. She reached out her hands to him, he went to her, kissed her, felt a lock turn smoothly, as if they each possessed half of the key to something important which they could only open together, like you saw in films, where two keys were required in order to open a safety deposit box or fire a rocket.

She drew him into an adjoining bedroom, got undressed without a word, made him do the same. Her legs were smooth-shaven, she must have trimmed her pubic hair too, it looked a little too perfect in shape, or artificial, like something out of a retouched, chocolate-box picture. In the dim light the two halves of her buttocks looked to be made of crystal, twin globes that harboured secrets, future prospects, intimations that Jonas was about to make love to a being superior to himself, a visitor from a planet where evolution had reached a more advanced stage, where they did not play the old brutish game involving lots of primitive pawing and pumping in and out.

She did not invite any foreplay, pulled him down onto the bed, resolutely and yet controlled, almost cool, he thought to himself, and as he slipped inside her, he felt, as he always felt at those first, tentative thrusts, a friction that puts him in mind of a dynamo, a dynamo running against a bicycle wheel, activating a lamp, flooding everything with light; and he drifts around in this light, savouring not just the physical euphoria, but also the thoughts that promptly begin to come pouring into his head, thoughts of a most unusual nature, as if the extra disc in his spine — whether imaginary or real — also contains a secret programme, impulses which only a woman can trigger.

Johanne A. was also in a state of extreme well-being, indeed she would later say that — although she had no idea why — this time with Jonas caused her to change her mind, revived her wish to become a research scientist after all, with the result that — as well as doing some remarkable work for Doctors for Peace and carrying out some pretty risky assignments for the Red Cross in war-torn regions — she wound up as an international expert on tropical diseases, a conqueror within medicine, within a field in which the study of microbes was central, the investigation of the influence of these minute organisms on people’s lives, something which was about as hard to fathom as love, or the desire she was feeling now, a desire which, without any warning, almost made her take leave of her senses, to lie writhing under a man, hardly more than a boy, to whom she had only spoken for a few hours.

Jonas knew nothing of this, so preoccupied was he with the vigorous way in which she had gradually begun to move, with her vagina, which gripped him so tenderly, with the light, with the thoughts drifting into his mind, with words that passed into new words, images, a whole network of sudden similarities between widely differing entities. For if there was one thing Jonas had learned back in the days when Daniel used to lie in the top bunk and read aloud from Agnar Mykle’s works, it was that sex is all to do with metaphors, with executing unexpected pirouettes in the imagination: to be able, one moment, to say that her small breasts ‘had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass’ and the next to gasp out the words: ‘her breasts were like explosives under her jersey’. Jonas grasped very early on that sex had something to do with broadening the mind, of giving it span, that sex was not an end in itself, but a means by which to achieve something else, perhaps quite simply a means to creativity, a conviction which was now confirmed for him, here, as he lay on his back on the bed and she sank down onto him again and again, so warm and powerful that he could almost feel the springs in the mattress, even as something similar was happening to his thoughts, as she, or they together, transformed them into spirals, springs, with the ability to hop, free themselves from a chain that ran from A to B to C, and that was why he lay there, as she exerted a greater and greater pull on him, engulfing him even while seemingly trying to restrain herself, and felt how he built a bridge of metaphors, as from A to X to K, a bridge which suddenly led him to espy a similarity between his own erect penis and a lever, the sort of tool that enabled one to move objects heavier than oneself; and perhaps that was why, at that same moment, Jonas felt himself, or her, Johanne A., shrugging off something heavy, exposing some object that lay buried, braiding various fragments into larger chunks, and eventually a story, something about being in a forest, not in a modern flat, but in a primeval forest, much as this white apartment might conceal a mahogany chemist’s shop, because lovemaking was alchemy, a commingling of irreconcilable elements, a fact which she proved by entwining herself around him with greater and greater ardour, surprising ardour, perhaps, uncontrolled even; by casting herself over him with an intensity that generated light and linked him to a story he both remembered and did not remember, thus he could recall that milk cartons had also been around ten years before, but not whether they had been printed with a red four-leaf clover design or not, and yet he knew, as he lay there savouring the light, drifting in it, that together they could set it rolling — the story that was hidden and yet right there: in the blind spot, you might say. And while Jonas was concentrating on remembering, or seeing; on letting his movements spark off associations, as they were weaving their limbs together into a writhing knot, he heard Johanne A., involuntarily, and possibly unwittingly, begin to snort, to utter sounds, hoarse grunts which, in a parenthesis in his train of thought, afforded room for surprise that a girl like her, the owner of this ultra-modern apartment, a woman who obviously believed wholeheartedly in man’s potential for evolving into an even more intelligent being, that this woman could lie there like that, grunting wildly underneath him, as if her white coat came complete with a witch-doctor’s mask. Howsoever that might be, this only made him even more aroused; he was conscious of how his thoughts struggled to get a grip on some sense of a whole, wove themselves together, how the friction slid over into a feeling of lightness, as if she were lifting him up and at the same time urging him to move with greater intensity, until she could hold back no longer, though she bit her lip until it bled — she came with a long drawn-out howl, a downright bestial scream which ended with her letting her arms flop to the floor, like someone fainting away, and whether this was what it took, or whether Jonas was just about there anyway, at that very second, thankfully and with his mind in giddy freefall, he discerned the thread connecting the whirl of thoughts which she, or the two of them together, had generated inside his head.