Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

He was still inside her. ‘Didn’t you come?’ she asked on recovering consciousness, so to speak. Her voice was tinged with guilt. She was still out of breath, and one corner of her mouth was red with blood. ‘Did you get satisfaction?’ she asked, as if it were important to her.

He lay there smiling: he too, out of breath, smiling for the first time in days. ‘Yes, I got satisfaction,’ he said at last. And it was true, although this word did not cover the phenomenon of orgasm in the normal sense. It’s true that he was also interested in gaining satisfaction, but not the sort that could be measured in millilitres of semen produced. For Jonas Wergeland — and I hope to return to this — the act of love was not necessarily about ejaculation but about enlightenment, about being lit up, about seeing.

So what sort of stories were they that Jonas Wergeland recalled, or suddenly understood, while this woman was biting herself until the blood ran from sheer pleasure underneath him? Your wrist is aching, Professor, I can see that, but we cannot stop now. Remember, we’ve embarked on a serious undertaking here. It is quite simply a matter of life or death.

For years, Jonas dreamed the same dream. For a period during his childhood he would start out of sleep several times in a month with a particular picture in his head, an image he could not, however, make anything of, since it was somewhat abstract. It had no recognizable thread to it; it was more of an impression.

Jonas had this dream for the first time when he was sick with a fever — he must have been around four at the time — on a night when his temperature rose to almost 105 and the sheet was in a tangle from all his tossing and turning. In his head, and possibly also in his fingertips, he had a sense of forms, strands of wool or piano strings, which coiled themselves around one another, changing from a tight knot into looser, more amorphous formations, as from a ball of yarn to a tangle of string. The odd thing was that these shapes did not only represent something bad, a nightmare, but also something beautiful, like the reflections in a kaleidoscope: a mesmerizing pattern, ceaselessly shifting, though still within certain limits. Maybe I’m dreaming about God, Jonas thought.

Then, quite by chance, he stumbled upon a clue to the obscure signals from his nervous system. It happened on one of those Sunday outings that a number of the families in Solhaug used to go on together. And in the spring. For it wasn’t just in the autumn that people went for walks in the woods — the autumn being the time when everyone seemed almost genetically programmed to start gathering in stores like mad, by means of berry-picking and mushroom-gathering. In springtime too, on Sundays after church, Åse and Haakon Hansen, Jonas’s parents, would don their well-worn walking clothes and rubber boots, not to mention rucksacks redolent of wartime and countless Easter skiing trips, gather the children together, meet up with the others and troop off to Lillomarka. Here, at different — but usually regular spots — practised hands would light a campfire; then they would make coffee, cook food and sit around and talk — feeling, in short, that they were doing what was only right and proper: what was, so to speak, expected of them as good Norwegians. Picnicking in the woods was a part of their national heritage: you only had to look at Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen and his love for the woods and the hills to see that. If you ask me, Professor, I think it would be just as fair to say that they were performing a ritual in memory of a not so distant past in which they had been hunters and gatherers, a theory which the stories they told round the campfire bore out, since these often had to do with hunting and fishing and the secret haunts of the chanterelle, interspersed with local legends about people who had lived here before and given the place its name. Be that as it may, Jonas loved being in the forest. He loved the smell of campfires and the unique flavour of grilled meat and roast potatoes served on scratched plastic plates along with slices of white bread covered in ash. He loved the way the adults were so keen to pass on the art of making pussy-willow flutes or bark boats. He loved sitting up in a tree and listening to the hum of the grownups’ voices, mingled occasionally with the squawk of a portable radio as some major sporting event got under way. Even Five-Times Nilsen and Chairman Moen relaxed and forgot for a while the plans for communal garages when they sat on a log with their eyes resting on a black coffee pot set over a campfire.

Ørn — nicknamed Little Eagle — usually tagged along with Jonas’s family. The forest was a fabulous place in which to play. Cowboys and Indians no taller than your finger looked perfectly lifelike if you just found the right slope, little ledges that played the part of cliff-top villages in Arizona or Utah. And if Little Eagle brought along his plastic animals, half the fauna of Africa, they could create a savannah among the tufts of grass. Just a box of used matches was enough. Tip the contents into a tiny stream and they had an arduous and perilous log-run that could keep them occupied for hours.

Ørn wasn’t with them on this particular day. Little Eagle was sick. At least they said he was sick. The thought of Ørn bothered Jonas. The forest wasn’t the same without Ørn.

What sort of sound does a dragon make?

It was a hot day, hotter than the day before, and while one of the fathers was telling off a couple of the bigger boys for setting light to a clump of heather — ‘Fire is dangerous, boys; remember what just happened at the Coliseum cinema!’ — Jonas wandered about on his own, first playing at Robin Hood, with a long staff in his hands, then Tarzan: Tarzan heading deeper and deeper into the jungle. But he missed Little Eagle, and this niggled at him, turned him into a very destructive Tarzan, a king of the jungle who made ferocious swipes with his staff, knocking the top off bush after bush — gorillas, actually — while trying to find a suitable heroic deed to commit. And then there it was, his chance, dead ahead of him: a weeping woman in a ripped safari suit with her foot caught between the roots of a fir tree and a large rock. Jonas — or rather, Tarzan — had to roll the rock away, and there was no time to waste: for a lion, or better still, a fearsome dragon with slavering jaws was closing in on the woman. ‘Courage, noble maid,’ Jonas muttered and set his hip against the rock, it wobbled back and forth, but he still couldn’t budge it, or only very little. He took his staff, stuck one end well under the stone and rested the other on a nearby hummock, to act as a lever, and when Jonas bore down on the other end he was quite surprised to find how easily the rock allowed itself to be dislodged, along with a fair amount of soil, a great clump, before rolling thunderously down the south-facing slope, leaving behind it a gaping hole.

Jonas knew right away: he had unearthed hidden treasure just as Oscar Wergeland, his maternal grandfather, had done in his youth. There was a smell of gunpowder, a smell of raw earth, a smell of gold.

He got down on his knees and peeked into the hole — possibly half-expecting to be disappointed — then he started back, just as he would do later in life when unexpectedly confronted with television footage of operations, shots of the brain or glistening intestines staring him in the face. A dragon’s lair, that’s what it must be: the thought flashed through his mind. There was an infernal roaring in his ears, but he wasn’t sure that he had heard anything roar.

After the initial shock he simply kneeled there, staring. He could see deep into the heart of the tree root. Eventually, he realized what it reminded him of, this thing down in the depths: it reminded him of his mother’s brooch. And I really ought to say a few words here about this jewel, since it played such an important part in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Children have a unique capacity for being fascinated by things, for regarding — for inexplicable reasons — certain objects as magical. For an Albert Einstein, it was a compass, for others it might be a special stone. For Jonas Wergeland, it was a silver brooch.