Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The sighing of the wind in the tops of the pines reached them through the open window. Veronika stood perfectly still in front of him, gleaming black eyes and gleaming black hair, and yet Jonas realized that she was offering herself to him. And he realized something else, too: that this was the peach all over again — temptation on a silver platter — only this time it was more serious, would have even greater consequences. Veronika stood on the wooden floorboards in a loft where the dust danced in the lovely morning light streaming in through the old lace curtains, stood there tattooed by light, a sight to take a man’s breath away, pure feminine beauty, pure sensuality; she let her panties slide to the floor then flipped them up to her hand with her foot before, with a light flick of the fingers, slinging, yes slinging them, with such perfect precision that they landed smack on his face, and he could not avoid inhaling that most distinct and possibly most arousing of all female smells, that blend of body odour, vaginal fluids and perfume. The very alchemy of this ought to have induced a solid erection. But Jonas’s nether regions remained unmoved.

Veronika eyed him defiantly, picked up the wisp of silk and drew it slowly down over his belly, swished it around his groin, as though tickling him with a feather. When this did not produce any visible effect either, she bent down and proceeded to kiss him, grazing the inside of his thigh with her lips, her long tongue caressing that incredibly sensitive spot between the balls and the anus, a spot which, theoretically, ought to house the spring-release for an erection, but not in Jonas Wergeland, not now at any rate. And here, in a way, Jonas Wergeland showed the first sign of his genius: his inclination for viewing the penis not as hardware, but primarily as software. And, I may add, Jonas did not perceive this as the fulfilment of a vague piece of erotic wishful thinking, a kind of male fantasy, but quite simply as a most unpleasant experience — his main worry, his main fear, throughout all this was of what she might take it into her head to do.

Veronika looked at him with gleaming black eyes. He caught a look of surprise, but also one of warning, in her eyes, a threat almost, before she lowered her head once more and took his penis into her mouth. I do not know, Professor — many people have, of course, spoken of Jonas Wergeland’s alarming stubbornness — but one has to wonder whether he ever gave a more convincing demonstration of his almost supernatural strength of will than at this moment: there was Veronika Røed, working the head of his penis into her warm, soft mouth, following all the instinctive rules, and still he managed, God knows how, not to get the world’s most eagerly throbbing hard-on. So I do not rule out the possibility that there could have been more to this; that in refusing Veronika — this gorgeous girl who had stripped off and offered herself to him — Jonas Wergeland also humiliated her: that behind that demonstration of will there lay a not inconsiderable dose of malice.

So it is perhaps understandable that Veronika saw red, and something about Jonas’s immunity to her advances, or apparent impotence, infuriated her still further, moved her to climb on top of him, making Jonas think for a second, with something approaching horror, that she was about to start masturbating, in a last attempt to turn him on: fondle herself, make it glisten with moisture, right there in front of him, but after taking a deep breath through her nose, as if coming to a decision, she began instead to kiss his stomach, then worked her way up across his chest until she came to his shoulder where, quite unexpectedly, she bit down, hard, so hard that Jonas cried out in pain. At that she jumped off the bed in exasperation. When she looked down at him, looked down at the shoulder where the blood was welling up, her eyes were still black and gleaming — and perhaps bewildered — as if they reflected her thoughts: the knowledge that this was a critical situation, possibly the most baffling experience she had ever had: a situation in which everything had gone ‘right’ but which, nevertheless, had turned out ‘all wrong’.

The problem with Veronika was, though, that she simply could not lose, she had a knack for doing something at the very moment of defeat that cancelled out the whole game, just as you could tilt the old pinball machines or knock over a chessboard when you got yourself into a tight corner. That was Veronika Røed’s strategy for life.

And now she was standing in an attic on an island at the mouth of a fjord, aged seventeen, looking at Jonas stretched out on the bed, tied down with soft knots, looking the picture of defeat. For some unknown reason Jonas felt more afraid now than when she had been bending over him with her black eyes and moist lips, or when she had bitten down, cutting through his skin with her flawless teeth.

‘What do you think he had in that safe?’ Veronika said. Her voice was low, but Jonas could tell that she was struggling to control herself. Her tone, those words, aroused in him something of the same panic as the sound of a horsefly could do; he knew that what was coming had nothing to do with memories of kittens or redcurrants with custard. He refused to listen, felt like humming loudly, the way they used to do as boys when they didn’t want to hear the result of a sporting event before it was shown on TV.

‘What do you think Grandpa had in that canvas bag he kept in the safe?’ she said, standing there naked on the wooden floor, a perfect body, a remorseless body tattooed by light in the lacy patterns of the curtains.

Jonas knew that something terrible was lying in wait. Worse than a dragon. ‘He’s dead,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t you just let him rest in peace?’

‘A Luger,’ said Veronika. ‘Fancy that, Jonas, a Luger.’ Veronika edged right up close to him; Jonas was looking up at her already full breasts. ‘How on earth could that pistol, that detested pistol, so bound up with the Germans, have landed in Grandpa’s safe?’ she said, oozing ruthlessness.

‘Please don’t,’ Jonas said. The minute she mentioned the Luger he had known that this was a piece that would change everything. Possibly even the future. Intuitively he understood that his life too could be altered by the mention of this Luger.

‘Too late,’ Veronika retorted smartly, as if she knew that Jonas might go to very great lengths to be spared having to hear the rest. But this was another of Veronika’s talents — once she had started something there was no stopping her, no matter how fateful the consequences.

So she told him, stood there naked in the morning light, in the very loft where Daniel and Jonas had once succeeded in opening the safe, and where their grandfather had snatched the canvas bag out of the lacquer casket before they had a chance to touch it. And for the first time Jonas heard, from Veronika’s lips, the story of their grandfather’s treachery during the war, of the day when two men dressed as islanders and carrying forged border resident papers, stepped off the ferry. Omar Hansen had seen at a glance that behind their disguise they were really fearful city folk on their way to Sweden; all they had to do was wait for nightfall and a rowboat that lay waiting, but they never got that far, because when their grandfather spotted the German border police’s patrol boat out in the fjord he wasted no time in rowing out and hailing it; and then, out of a sadly misplaced sense of duty, he actually reported them, those two fugitives, and hence gave the Germans no choice, even though they were amazingly tolerant out here, turning a blind eye to this, that and the other. Thanks to this zealous and enterprising action on the part of Jonas Wergeland’s grandfather, the two men, who also turned out to be Jewish, were found and arrested. Fortunately, for Omar Hansen that is, no one had witnessed the brief meeting out in the sound except his two mortified sons, William and Haakon, who knew better than to say anything, not least because in May 1945 other informers had already been jailed and given a very hard time of it. It was just after this incident with the Jews that Omar Hansen secretly acquired a gun from the Germans. Maybe he felt threatened, or maybe he wanted to be prepared in case any more fugitives showed up and he had to escort them back to the German garrison at Gravningsund.