Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The Indian shifted a bale of hay. Would Jonas like to see some tricks? Was Jonas a brave man? Come! Follow your dharma! The man drew Jonas over to the elephant; it really was huge, much taller than he remembered elephants as being. He mustn’t be afraid, the man said. Jonas felt its trunk nuzzling him; he stiffened. The man said something to the animal, then Jonas felt the trunk wrap itself round his waist, like a belt, before he was lifted up to dangle flat out in midair, face down, as if he were a log. At first Jonas was panic-stricken, abruptly reminded of something else, an encounter with another, a more malignant trunk, but then the fear left him; this was different, and bigger, bigger in all ways, truly an experience second to none. He was caught in a knot, the sort of knot his grandfather had taught him and Veronika when they were children. The scent of wild beasts filled his nostrils. The elephant could have shaken him to bits, but it didn’t, Jonas felt more as if it was caressing him, and he heard strange sounds coming from the creature, from its throat, a kind of thrum, almost like a cat purring, only deeper, stronger; he was encircled by a living force, one which endowed him with a crystal-clear insight, something to do with at long last being an active participant, not just a spectator, a voyeur; and then, when he was least expecting it, he was lifted through the air — no, not lifted: swung and somehow or other, by dint of mighty forces, he found himself sitting on the elephant’s back. Jonas always felt, later, that in that split-second when he was flying through the air, he was lifted out of himself — which is, by the way, the aim of Hindu meditation. When he dropped down onto the broad shoulders, it was as if he embraced the world anew, the way he had done with the globe of his boyhood; and although he could not explain it, he knew that his landing on that solid back, with his hands planted on skin rough as sandpaper, also marked a new beginning, that this sudden shift brought about a transformation, pure and simple. Because, and in case anyone should be in doubt: Jonas Wergeland did not travel in search of himself or his soul, as they said where he came from — Jonas Wergeland travelled in search of a different self. Jonas sat on the elephant’s back, stroking the coarse hide, the short, sparse hairs feeling more like pins pricking the palm of his hand. He wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake. He was alive. The animal knelt down, and he slid off. I am an enlightened one, he thought. I am a Buddha.

The thrill of this was still singing in his limbs when he got back to the hotel room. Inga V. was not there, but she had obviously been in at some point and left behind a newly-purchased book on Indian sculpture. Jonas got himself a drink in a plastic bottle, his mouth and throat were thick with dust; he was forever thinking about ice and water here in Jaipur. He settled himself on the bed with some chapatis, got out his sketchbook and looked at the drawings he had done the day before. Just before dusk — the loveliest time of the day, when the colours were so limpid and luminous — nigh-on transparent — he had gone to Jantar Mantar, the largest of Jai Singh’s astronomical observatories. He had strolled around among those abstract, dreamlike, stone structures, thinking of Meccano sets or gigantic building blocks. There were tilting sundials, strange holes in the ground, ramps resembling truncated stairways to the sky, gangways to ships that had already sailed. Jonas sensed that he was standing at a personal crossroads, that he was particularly well equipped to understand this, since both his areas of study, astronomy and architecture, met and melded here, in Jai Singh’s observatory. He had always wanted to make a conquest, create something new, something no one would have thought possible. Maybe that was why he had stopped studying astrophysics — because he realized he was never going to discover a new celestial body, and nothing less could satisfy his ambitions: a totally new planet, called after him or a god of his choosing. But here, in these weird grounds, he walked about in a daze, making sketches, feeling promising ideas welling up, possibly because these two areas apparently so remote from one another — the firmament and the observatory buildings — cross-pollinated one another in his imagination. Maybe I can discover a new planet after all, he had thought — in the architectural universe.

But a day later when, sitting in a cheap hotel room onto the walls of which a rapidly sinking sun was casting shadow pictures, he examined the forms in his sketchbook, considered these rough ideas for a new type of building, he realized that they were as uninspired as the musical vision he had once had. He would always be a monkey, an imitator, at best a monkey god. His schemes would never be anything but pie in the sky. Like the monument of ice he had built as a boy, fragile and transparent, doomed to be short-lived. Sitting there, in Jaipur, in India, Jonas knew — perhaps because he had just been hurled through the air by an elephant — that he would never be an architect, that before too long he would have to give up this course of study too, because he would, as it were, be slung over into something else. I am tempted to go further, Professor: maybe even at this point, on his visit to Jantar Mantar, he had a suspicion that television represented a possible combination of the heavens and building styles, or an extension of same. That television was a kind of projection of architecture into space. That it was in this his talent lay. His only talent.

He had lost all notion of travelling on to Chandigarh in the Punjab, Le Corbusier’s great city. He ate some more chapatis, drank some water, flicked through the book Inga V. had bought, with its pictures of erotic sculptures from the temples of Khajuraho: bodies twining around one another or captured in the act of fellatio. The heat was almost unbearable. A fan on the ceiling spun ineffectually. It would soon be evening. Through the window drifted the reek of vegetable refuse mingled with the smell of fires and spices. The monsoon was in the offing. I’m sitting inside a transformer, he thought, at the moment before someone flicks a switch off, or on. He wriggled out of his damp clothes and took a shower, and when he came out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped round his waist, Inga V. was sitting on the bed, glistening with perspiration and enveloped in the smoke from a cigarillo. She was trying on some slender bracelets she had bought in a market, loads of them, a whole orchestra. She kept them on, smiled at him, an odd smile, a different kind of smile, he thought. She wore her hair in a ponytail. Her neck was moist. Little wisps of hair coiled damply against her skin. She picked up her book, a mite distractedly, leafed through it, put it down, Jonas caught a glimpse of naked bodies in unusual positions. Darkness was falling fast outside. They chatted a little about their respective days. There was going to be dancing the following evening, she told him with a flourish of her arm. Jonas sensed that something had changed between them, felt something seize hold of his body, like a trunk wrapping itself around him, groping its way toward a point on his back, pressing. He told her about the elephant, tried to describe the feeling of being swung through the air. She laughed, told him about a little temple, described it in a way which perhaps revealed that, to the surprise of all her fellow students, she would one day be a world-class architect, with a host of awards to her name, best-known for her views on the setting of a building within its surroundings — some people actually compared them to sculptures in a landscape.

She gets up. It is dark in the room. Her bracelets smoulder, the brass and copper. The odour of tobacco and sweat comes at him in waves from her. Without thinking about it he too gets up, stands motionless in the centre of the room. They crash into one another, collide in a fierce embrace, as if each means to press their body through the other. For a long time they stand there, kissing as though each kiss provokes a still more ardent kiss. The way Jonas saw it — this, at least, is how he rationalized it later — it may have been the danger he had been in, or thought he had been in, which had heightened his libido, the way war was said to do.