Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

This, our last evening, was Easter Saturday, and again her arrival was heralded by a distant rumble and the feeling that the whole house was shaking. I knew this would be our last meeting. I could tell it also by the way she glided slowly around the room, as if taking her leave of everything, before sinking into her chair and closing her eyes, as though gathering herself for a final, mighty push. It was with some sadness that I scribbled down notes in shorthand as she spoke, telling stories in a sequence, and with a conclusion, that made me gasp at the thought of a hitherto unimagined possibility.

No sooner was she done than she got to her feet, clearly exhausted. ‘I have to go now,’ she said, stopping by the window. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, but I have a long journey ahead of me.’ She looked out across the fjord, where it lay shimmering in the darkness, as if wishing to brand that view into her memory. Or — this occurred to me later — as if she were weighing up something important, something she was about to say, but didn’t.

Before she left I signed the contract she had drawn up. She waived her claim to any royalties — she didn’t want the publicity, she said — but I undertook to transfer part of my fee to a certain person. I was both surprised and not surprised when I saw the name. A girl.

I had known it all along, really, I thought to myself. She swathed herself in her black cloak, like a magician about to make his exit, and moved towards the spiral staircase, then turned, with almost surprising abruptness, and clasped my hand — as if she knew that I guessed who she was and with this gesture was begging me never to divulge it. But I think she also took my hand in order to thank me. She confirmed my sense of having been her muse, as much as she had been mine. That for some reason she needed me in order to tell this story. ‘Several times you’ve asked me why I was doing this,’ she said at the last. ‘And I could just as easily have said: out of love. And sheer desperation. Because I do not understand it. I have also told it for my own sake. Not just for yours, or Jonas Wergeland’s.’

For the first time I remained standing by the window, watching her leave, the black figure walking down the driveway and through the gate. I could sense that I was more than fascinated: I was close to falling in love. Amazed and yet not so, I saw her climb into the cab of a semi-trailer, the biggest I’d ever seen: or rather, it was just the truck part, without the trailer. I couldn’t see what colour it was, but I would bet anything that it was black. The enormous cab, and the naked, little rear section made the vehicle look very alien, oddly empty. At first I thought someone was collecting her, but then I saw her slide behind the wheel herself, heard the mighty roar as the engine started up, and a sea of lights came on. She must have spotted me, because she beeped the horn, loud as the siren on a massive boat, and drove off. I watched the truck fade from view, gleaming and formidable, as though she were lifting off in a spaceship. I stood there, feeling that a great obligation had been placed on me, feeling as though she had uncoupled her trailer and dumped a heavy load in the garden: in my study, as it were.

And while all this was going on, or had gone on, late on an Easter Saturday, my thoughts went to the central character, a man sitting in his cell a couple of miles away — once the emperor of Norway, now emperor of a hundred square feet, whose final, curt comment to the press had been: ‘I got off too lightly.’ But if he really did have the creative powers which I had discerned in his programmes — and plenty of breathing space — it could be that a few square feet was enough. I stood in my ‘control tower’ wondering who he was. Could be. I gazed at a plane, possibly the last one of the evening, coming in to land; a plane which Jonas Wergeland might also have followed with his eyes if his window was facing in the right direction, and I reflected upon another possibility which my visitor had chanced to mention: that the real Jonas Wergeland was to be found somewhere in between all these stories. Maybe — in reality — he wasn’t even in a cell at all.

Or, as she said when she began upon the last story of the evening: ‘There has to be another way.’ And after a long pause: ‘There is another way.’

So it is with pounding heart, Professor, that I now continue. For, as Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his mind went back to the moment when he had stepped through the door of the villa, only half an hour earlier, thinking that everything was going to be fine, even though he had just got back from the World’s Fair in Seville and was still recovering from a rough flight home. He was upset, certainly, furious in fact, but when he rang the bell and no one answered the door, he calmed down. Everything’s going to be fine, he told himself, I just need to get some sleep, have some time to myself. He felt relieved, unspeakably relieved, the way you do when you’ve got out of doing something you’ve been dreading for ages. He let himself in, flicked the switch for the outside light, but the bulb wasn’t working, he didn’t like that, never liked it when a switch was turned on and nothing happened, everything would be fine, he was alone, he would sit down in the living room, he would put his feet up, sift through his mail and listen to a CD of Bach fugues, he would ride it out, he would take a shower, stand under the hot water for a long, long time, he would be alright, he just needed a little time. He left his suitcase and his duty-free bag in the hall and wandered into the office he shared with Margrete, looked away sharply on seeing her textbooks on the shelf, a number of them on dealing with venereal diseases, far too many of them, didn’t want to think about that now, didn’t want to think about that, or about Margrete at all, instead lifted the bundle of letters lying on the desk and took a quick look through them, then on the way into the living room he stops at one, the only one which comes as a surprise, an envelope stamped ‘Oslo University’, from which he can tell that the sender is a woman, a well-known name in academic circles.

It would be untrue to say that Jonas Wergeland was totally unprepared for the bleakness of prison life. Once — one winter — he had spent hours listening to details from the Inferno , to the description, for example, of how Brutus, Cassius and Judas were chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Satan. Or how those who had accepted bribes wound up in a bath of seething pitch, a molten mass like the tar they used to boil up in the old shipyards, with little demons holding them down in the mire with the help of forks, like a cook would prod bits of meat bobbing to the surface of a stew. Jonas knew what happened to murderers too — though he had no idea, of course, what the future held in store: they were doomed to boil forever in a river of blood. Jonas had sat in a blue auditorium, in the front row, with his ears pinned back, while next to him Axel was busy taking notes — when, that is, he wasn’t leafing frantically through a book in order to score yet another exclamation mark in the already overcrowded margin. Round about them, solemn-faced souls were writing as if their lives depended on it. They were all students, attending a series of lectures on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

The mid-seventies was not exactly a time when students flocked, of their own free will, to lectures on Dante and the medieval worldview — not if it wasn’t on the syllabus, at any rate. The university was draped and hung, inside and out, with banners screaming out demands and declarations of support to all points of the compass. To some extent, the Norwegian version of the Cultural Revolution could, I’m sure, be characterized as a divine comedy, although as far as the students were concerned, modern-day Albania was a great deal closer to the ideal than Dante’s Italy. In Norway it was the imaginary Vømmøl Valley that set the standard for both paradise and poetry. So it goes without saying that it was Axel — Axel, who had for some time known that he would never be a biochemist and who had secretly sent his first clumsy, literary efforts to several publishers — who had sniffed out the Dante lectures in their students’ course list and managed to lure Jonas into making the leap, so to speak, from the revolutionary university routine to the Middle Ages — or was it, perhaps, the other way round? But the bait which Axel used to snare Jonas was not the content of the lectures, it was the lecturer — none other than Suzanne I., who is now known to everyone in Norway but who at that time, despite the fact that she had by then turned forty, had not yet found her calling and was recognized only within a very narrow circle. Axel had, however, heard of her through some literary friends and saw right away that she was one of those women who fulfilled all the strict criteria required to merit the distinguished epithet ‘sophisticated’ which he and Jonas had thrashed out while wandering aimlessly through the city late at night.