Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘Where do you do it?’ Jonas said, finally fixing his eyes on Axel, skewering him. ‘Here?’ He waves his arms in the direction of the chequerboard of rugs. It was the perfect place. Axel’s flat. A man living alone, working at home. ‘Or have you been going along on all these weekend trips she’s been taking over the past few years — to London, Paris, Amsterdam?’

He could have sworn there was fear in the look Axel sent him: ‘Sit down, Jonas. Let’s talk about this.’

This was the proverbial last straw, this partial admission, because it may be — let us be honest, Professor, and give Jonas Wergeland the benefit of the doubt — it may be that deep down he had hoped that Axel would deny the whole thing, obdurately, even if it was true, refute everything, and then end it with Margrete, pretend it had never happened, so that they could still be friends; or at the very least that he would go down on his knees and ask forgiveness, burst into tears, beg Jonas not to think too harshly of him, but now, after what he had already taken to be a confession, Jonas lost control completely, gave vent to two weeks of accumulated wrath, hailed accusations down on Axel’s head, peppered with all of the worst expletives he had been storing up, vitriol and gall, while Axel stood there quietly, taking it, knew that he had to stand quietly and take it, stood there wearing those old glasses with the taped arm, like one who was already wounded, a pathetic figure in Jonas’s eyes, a man who, in between Jonas’s volleys of abuse, still managed to break in to say that this, this whole performance, was unworthy of a man of Jonas’s intelligence, of such a brilliant doyen of the arts, couldn’t Jonas see that he was reducing himself to the oldest cliché of them all; and after Jonas, maddened still further by such an ill-timed reproof, ducked his head and knocked back all of his whisky in one gulp, to slake his parched throat as much as anything; and after Axel had nodded approvingly, as if he thought Jonas had at last come to his senses, and after Jonas had set his glass down neatly, almost gently, on the table, and after Axel had promptly lifted the bottle and refilled it, and after Jonas had straightened up and just stared at Axel, and after Oscar Pettiford’s music, the bass lines which had accompanied the whole carry-on, had come to an end, and after Axel had said something funny, and after Jonas had smiled, yes, laughed, and after Axel had walked over to Jonas, possibly meaning to get him finally to sit down, or to hug him, Jonas kicked Axel in the groin — in his mind, in the nuts — as hard as he could, with a power and precision comparable only to that of a kicker in American football, and his thoughts went to an incident in a basement in his childhood when he had experienced on his own person the full force of such an unspeakably painful mode of attack, learned that the sac containing his precious testicles was a button which, when subjected to remarkably little pressure, could put the whole body out of action: a trick which he had, therefore, memorized carefully, although he had never had need of it till now, the perfect opportunity, a swingeing boot to the balls, to the very solar plexus of sex, unexpected and hence supremely effective — and Jonas savours, truly savours, the moment when Axel, that unspeakable son of a bitch, first doubles up then sinks to the floor like an empty sack, a felled mast, with a long-drawn groan of pain.

Axel lay writhing on the floor. But Jonas couldn’t stop there, he was working in a red haze, he kicked him, heard something crunch, was suddenly reminded of the collision on the E6, the feeling that it was not just a matter of a crash, but of squeezing a pliant tin can; he kicked and kicked at Axel as he lay curled up on the floor in a sort of foetal position, moaning, kicked him as hard as he could, in the chest, in the back, the thighs, the head, till the glasses broke and the blood ran from Axel’s nose. And even as he showered Axel with the foulest curses he could think of, went totally, verbally, berserk, while kicking away at what, as far as he was concerned, was a miserable worm — once his friend, now a traitorous worm — he was filled with a strange sense of release which made him stop.

When he left, Axel was lying lifelessly amid a tangle of rugs, as if buried in a broken up jigsaw puzzle. Jonas considered smashing the double bass but managed to restrain himself. Don’t go too far, he told himself, well aware that he couldn’t possibly go any further than he already had. He staggered out of the flat, out into Oslo, wandered around aimlessly, found a restaurant where he gorged himself like a Roman emperor, out again, on to a bar; he felt like celebrating, got as sloshed as it is possible for a man to get, before he was all but thrown out, politely, but firmly, and as good luck would have it managed to flag down a taxi right outside, a taxi with an inexperienced woman driver. ‘Bergensveien,’ he said, hearing how he slurred the word. And then, muttering to himself: ‘Or to hell. I’ve just killed a man.’

I — the Professor — had long suspected that there was something odd about the confession Jonas Wergeland made in court. That he should have killed his wife in a fit of uncontrolled aggression brought on purely by her unexpected request for a divorce did not fit, or fitted only in part, with the red — or rather, green — thread of jealousy that wound its way through so many of the stories, a thread which was bound, in the end, to be drawn tight, like the noose on a gallows.

Modern physics is right: observation alters the thing being observed. I was confused. On the one hand, I had — there was no denying it — a bundle of exceedingly unpleasant stories; on the other hand, I had all the positive things I myself had experienced — learned, in fact — thanks to Jonas Wergeland. Could I–I mean during that year when I, like most Norwegians, let everything else go hang in order to catch every single programme in the Thinking Big series — really have been wrong about Jonas Wergeland’s talent for television? Would his programmes too have evinced other, very different, qualities, maybe even fallen completely flat, if viewed in the light of what I now knew? I unearthed the folder containing comments on Jonas Wergeland’s television work, flicked through the bundles of cuttings and copies of articles. Superlatives all the way: ‘He has created a new National Portrait Gallery inside our head,’ wrote one critic. Despite the controversies that were sure to be sparked off by such programmes, there was no doubt that, prior to his arrest at any rate, Jonas Wergeland was regarded by expert media researchers as a television genius — not because he had gathered an entire nation around the TV, but because he had produced original programmes, films which broke with the usual, tired old fare. ‘A born natural,’ as several commentators put it. He was proclaimed television’s Copernicus because he upset prevailing ideas of what should lie at the centre of a programme. ‘Jonas Wergeland did not just transform the media,’ one writer concluded, ‘he reinvented it.’

But still I was not sure. I got out one of his programmes — I have them all on video, ranged on the shelf next to my own biographies; picked one at random: ‘The Dipper’, the programme on Sam Eyde, and slotted it into the video machine. I felt tense, afraid almost, as I sat in my Stressless chair, eyes riveted on the opening sequence, the close-up of a stylised form, a Viking ship, a logo on a plastic bag, before the camera pulled back to reveal a factory and then, from above, the surrounding countryside, a foreign landscape — the viewer would automatically place it in the Middle East — and right enough, it was Qatar, a fertilizer plant in Umm Said, part-owned by Norsk Hydro: a Viking ship in the desert, a strange conquest, like a fantasy, not to say a mirage. One could not help asking what was the connection here? And as if in reply the camera homed in once more on the drawing of the Viking ship, which gradually began to change, clearly working backwards through various graphic incarnations until it ended up at the original, far more figurative Viking ship logo, now on a barrel containing Hydro’s first major product: what was known as Norwegian saltpetre.