Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Until the evening in June when he stood outside the door of Axel’s apartment, unannounced and a lot more breathless than the several flights of stairs could warrant. He notes the Trio lock, rings the bell. Axel opens the door, opening also onto muted jazz and a faint whiff of garlic. Jonas had expected Margrete to be standing there, had been coiled and ready to spring, lithe as a wild beast, push the door wide open, squash the louse, before storming through every room, but he could tell straight away that she was not there. Axel let him in, looking surprised, pleased, expectant. And perhaps — in the suspicious eyes of Jonas Wergeland at least — a shade nonplussed.

‘Can you hear what that is?’ Axel asked once they were standing in the living room. ‘The Oscar Pettiford Trio, “Bohemia After Dark” — just like in the old days at Seilduksgata,’ he said, answering his own question, pleased by this coincidence: this music, and Jonas suddenly turning up on his doorstep. He is already on his way over to the drinks cabinet, across a pinewood floor strewn with little rugs, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, studiedly asymmetric. He could bake some potatoes, he joked, but he was all out of aquavit. Instead he returned with glasses and a rare malt whisky, a name Jonas had never heard before, a name that was hard to memorize, get one’s tongue round.

It was a bright summer evening, not a cloud in the sky, and yet standing in that room Jonas felt an ominous darkness stealing in. Three of the walls in the room were filled, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves; the fourth was dominated by windows and some paintings that looked like windows. Filmy white curtains fluttered gently over the deep window embrasures, casting shifting patterns over the rugs in a sort of double-exposure. In one corner stood the double bass. Jonas had a painful, recurring fantasy, in which Axel was making love to Margrete in the same way that he played the double bass, standing behind her, with his hands on her breasts, passionately intent on turning her into an unusual bass line under those probing fingers of his: Oscar Pettiford, ‘Bohemia After Dark’. Jonas had always wondered why Axel, such an attractive man, had never married. Now he knew. There was nothing Axel needed: he had Margrete. And any man who had Margrete had no cause to ask for more.

‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ Axel says, pouring some whisky. ‘Water? Ice?’

‘No, nothing,’ Jonas mumbled, knowing he ought to have asked for ice, take something to cool him down. There was a tinkle as Axel dropped ice cubes into his own glass. Jonas observed his friend’s clothes, the same old ‘uniform’: the tweed jacket draped over a chair, the white cotton shirt, baggy trousers and thick-soled shoes, as if he were still a boy who walked the streets at night, a nomad as in his student days — a person who had never grown up, a man who still lived in a world of fanciful chatter and airy-fairy dreams of being able to rock the Milky Way on its axis. Irresponsible bastard.

‘Sit down, please,’ Axel pointed to an armchair, a Stressless Royal identical to the one that Viktor used to sit in, staring at a blank television screen, there and yet not there.

Jonas put out a hand, as if to ward off such a fate, or as if realizing that for a very long time he had been as insensible and distant as Viktor.

‘Something struck me the other day when I was watching a repeat of your programme on Nansen,’ Axel said in his usual quick, intense fashion. ‘D’you remember the time after that mock exam when Viktor gave Napoleon what for, when we were sitting talking? I said there were no heroes any more, and you quoted something by Carlyle, from that rag of his which you’d probably never read, Heroes and Hero Worship or whatever it was called; something to the effect that history was simply the biographies of great men — I think maybe that was more or less what you were trying to say with your television series. Or am I wrong?’

‘Axel stop it, please,’ was all Jonas could say, he had a momentary urge to laugh, barely managed to stifle a hoarse and pathetic ‘ Etiam tu, mi fili Brute .’

It was light outside, and yet it was growing dark, very dark. Jonas stood in the centre of the room, trying to make time stand still, looking at the shelves, all those book spines. Behind glass doors. As if they were treasures. Or as if this were some sort of hall of mirrors. A den of narcissism. When did Jonas first begin to have doubts about Axel? It must have been when he dropped out of university and started writing. Jonas could not understand it. Laughed at his friend, teased him, sneered at him even. What a waste. Axel, with his matchless gifts, his flair for combining biology and chemistry. Jonas had been baffled by his decision. His flight from DNA to fiction, from the genetic to the grammatical. ‘You, who would rather uncover a chain of cause and effect than be the King of Persia,’ Jonas had sneered. ‘Yes, that’s just why I did it,’ Axel said.

Jonas had never got more than halfway through any of Axel’s books; they did nothing for him. Axel himself claimed that his novels were inspired by DNA, that the search for a structure, a bass line in life played a part in his stories too. But Jonas could make nothing of them, was not even turned on by the rather pernicious, raw eroticism that pervaded some of the stories, this element which a number of critics found so intriguing and which they called ‘perversion as innovation’. In recent weeks Jonas had, however, nurtured a reluctant interest in — almost a fear of — this darker aspect; at home he had leafed with trembling fingers through some of Axel’s novels, hardly daring to read for fear of coming upon something he recognized. He remembered only too well what Axel had once said about writing: ‘Being a writer comes of being a liar,’ he said. ‘Books are the paths where deceit, lies and truth intersect. When two lies meet a truth is born, and when two truths meet, a lie is generated.’

Jonas is still standing in the centre of the room, rocking back and forth as though teetering on the brink of a precipice. The faint tang of malt whisky invades his nostrils, the music of the Oscar Pettiford Trio streaming from concealed loudspeakers coils itself around him. ‘Are you just going to stand there gawping all evening?’ Axel says. ‘Come on, sit down.’ Again the hand motioning towards the chair, as if he were offering Jonas a vacant throne.

Axel was wearing a pair of old, black-rimmed glasses, with tape wrapped round one arm. All of a sudden his friend, this former friend of his, seemed such a tragic figure to Jonas. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s just too fucking awful, it’s just too…’

He could not look Axel in the eye. He still had his gaze fixed on the bookshelves. He had always been suspicious of people who had a lot of books, who spent such a large part of their lives reading. From the very start he had disliked Margrete’s reading. She read whenever she had the chance, read with an avidity, an ardour that was written all over her face. And in all sorts of positions, often more or less on the spot where she came across the book: standing, sitting, lying down, as if the book immediately hypnotized her body into a state of immobility, total concentration. Sometimes, when she had hunted for and found a novel on the bottom shelf of the bookcase at home, Jonas would find her kneeling on the floor, bent over the book, her behind in the air, as if she were performing a devout act, praying. Or maybe it was an invitation, an expression of a secret longing to be taken from behind. Lately, with the jealous man’s amazing gift for visualizing, sticking certain images onto the mind’s eye so that they overshadow everything else, he had pictured Axel finding her like that, here, on one of those little rugs.