Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas let the towel fall to the floor as she pulled off her clothes. They plunged straight into mad, passionate lovemaking, clinging to one another, Jonas did not know if he was standing or sitting or lying, felt like part of a giant knot of erect flesh and soft muscle, that together they became something greater, mirroring the ornamentation they saw all around them. The little flashes of light from her bracelets accentuated her nakedness, made her seem seductively foreign. And there was something about the combination of the street smells filtering through the open window and the pungent scent of her body, not least from her crotch, which made him think of the oracle at Delphi, imagine that he too was sitting above a deep cleft, breathing in fumes which put him into a trance, induced visions. Suddenly they were on the bed, where she threw herself on top of him, but she didn’t bounce up and down, she slid back and forth on him, so damp, so oily, that it could hardly be called friction, just warmth, a warmth which generated light; she rolled about on top of him, crumpling the sheets, pulled him down onto the floor where they wrapped themselves around one another, wrestling, while the sweat poured off them — not that they noticed; they tore at one another, almost coming to blows, to the music of jingling metal and the moist slap of limb on limb. They were like two irreconcilable ideas, unexpectedly juxtaposed, like a silver brooch and a puck, a union that set sparks flying; Jonas felt his thoughts crackling, flowing along unwonted lines, and he concentrated, with one part of his mind, on following them, giving them room, believed that he noticed a difference in the images in his head, depending on whether he thrust deep inside her or only a little way in, began to feel his way forward, alternating between slow and rapid strokes, growing more and more urgent, as if this was a search of some sort, as if he was rummaging frantically in a drawer, until all at once the thought of athletics came into his mind, perhaps prompted by their strenuous exertions, the heat, the sweat: either that or the fact that a few of the brickwork circles at Jantar Mantar — the memory simply floated to the surface — had reminded him of something for throwing: a reflection which led him to think of the elephant, something about the way in which the trunk had hurled him through the air, a recollection which, as he lay there, whipped up to bursting point by Inga V.’s movements, set him thinking about rotation and not only that, but feeling that something lay at the end of this, a story, an extremely important perception which held the key to some future event, a story about a device, an instrument; an occurrence which would say something about who he could be, someone he had not yet become — a persona which had nothing to do with astronomy, nothing to do with architecture. Underlying the pleasure he was now conscious of anger, or a desire to use the powers he felt inside him in some way; he would suddenly grab her by the hair, throw her over his shoulder or lift her up, hold her over his head, and it may have been these urges that caused something to happen to her, because she seemed to lift off, they both appeared to be floating in the air, and all at once she looked at him with eyes which did not really seem to see him; from the pit of her stomach there came a moan, stop, she said, stop, stop, I can’t take any more, she said, stop stop stop, she said, struck him, lashing out into thin air, oh, god, she said, grrr, the rest was drowned in gurgles that culminated in a little scream, a howl almost, as if she really had crossed over to the other side, propelled by a violent physical reaction, a surge spreading from her vagina outwards, and this made him feel proud, proud that together, through the combination of their inner fantasies and a few simple movements, two people could experience such pleasure, take themselves to such heights of ecstasy; and at the same time, this he knew, she might have been faking it, and he could never have told the difference, he would still have believed it to be an orgasm, and this did not depress him, on the contrary, he had always liked the thought of how little it took to persuade someone to make up their version of things, their own story, turn something small into something great.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then it must be emphasized that later in life when Jonas Wergeland closed his eyes and thought of the women he had been with, he did not remember them as lovers but as storytellers. Through his encounters with these exceptional representatives of Norwegian womanhood he finally came to understand what Rakel, his sister, had been trying to drum into him for years: that sex and storytelling went hand in hand. And Eros came first, then the stories — not the other way round. Such was the doctrine of the Arabian Nights , according to Rakel. So Jonas Wergeland’s women did not just make love to him, they activated, they transformed the stories within him. A story that had been lying there for ages, like boring black graphite, suddenly stood revealed as a scintillating diamond — as here:

While Daniel’s promising athletics career was brought to a halt only by a serious case of tenosynovitis, a strained calf muscle which caused even Kjell Kaspersen — the former Skeid goalkeeper who was now treating sports injuries in a room at Bislett Stadium — to raise his eyebrows, Jonas’s career was relatively short and painless. In any case, he did not have his brother’s self-destructive determination, still less his motivation, because, as with everything else, when you got right down to it, Daniel’s sporting endeavours were just a way of showing off in front of the girls, a kind of strenuous foreplay before the foreplay. If Jonas was mad about athletics, then it was for the sport’s sake, for its inherent beauty.

For the last time I shall tell the story of the Radio Theatre.

Jonas tended to take up sports in which the competition in his age group was not too stiff. He went in for high-jumping for a while but soon switched to a discipline for which he had some small aptitude and which did not appeal to very many other people: throwing, more specifically discus throwing. There were things that Jonas did for spells in his life, without quite knowing why he did them. Like this thing with the throwing. Maybe it was the discus itself that attracted him. He had stumbled upon it on the playing field down by the stream, a makeshift arena the big boys had made with their own hands. The discus had been lying on the ground next to the equipment shed, and when Jonas came by, on his way to catch minnows, this circular object seemed to catch his gaze — the metal core, the laminated wood body and the steel rim — no, not just his gaze, his whole being. Like an eye. A magical thing. Something which might have had its place in the lacquer casket along with the puck and the brooch — if it hadn’t been so big. In any case he simply had to pick it up, just as you pick up lovely round, polished stones on the beach. And not only that — he had to throw it, or at least try to throw it. It was asking for it. And although Jonas did not pivot, he had an intuitive understanding — possibly derived from the picture of a Greek statue in his history book — of how he should hold the thing and how he should swing from side to side a bit before throwing it; and although the discus did not go far there was something about the sight of this object’s glide through the air — because it really did glide, albeit with a bit of a wobble — which won over Jonas completely. Perhaps also because he realized straight away that it was not a matter of throwing but of whirling. And once he had thrown it once, he had to try again, to see whether he could whirl it a little further. From that day onwards, for a couple of years, he devoted a lot of time to the mysteries of discus throwing, indeed you might even say that Jonas Wergeland remained a discus thrower for the rest of his life, that this was his only real talent. For a second, when he spotted the disc lying there in the grass, he had actually perceived something that only later, during a heated discussion with Viktor, would he manage to put into words: ‘The discus is akin to the vertebrae of the spine,’ Jonas declared. ‘This disc is also in some way related to the central nervous system.’