Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And Jonas, who understood right away why he had sat through nine long lectures, and who had in fact also seen what she was getting at, that The Divine Comedy was actually a gigantic love poem, said that he was going take a walk into town. He knew what was coming. And it came: she suggested that they could walk down together. Jonas realized that he had made an impression, though of what sort he did not know; but we, Professor, acquainted as we are with the inexplicable frailties of the female of the species, know that simply by holding out through nine separate sessions, sitting up straight with his eyes aglow, by giving her his steadfast attention, he had won her in much the same way as a woman, no matter what she may say, is always bowled over by a man who gives her nine bouquets of red roses in quick succession.

It was the last really cold day of the year. She walked beside him wrapped in her black fur — mink, as far as he could tell. In the sunlight, however, it had a kind of golden sheen to it. Jonas caught her checking her reflection in a number of shop windows with undisguised self-absorption. He tried to bring up various topics of conversation as they walked down Bogstadsveien but was surprised to find that she appeared to be ignorant of most subjects: seemed, in fact, rather prickly, disagreeable. Only when he came out with one of his quotations did she show any interest. It was a thought lifted from Friedrich Nietzsche, taken from the only book by Nietzsche that Jonas had dipped into — or rather, from the only passage by Nietzsche which he had ever read: ‘Someone once said,’ said Jonas, ‘that anyone who fights with monsters must take care that he or she does not become a monster themselves.’ Suzanne I. looked at him in some amazement. ‘I was thinking of Dante and the Inferno ,’ Jonas went on. ‘But what about the Paradiso ? Would it also be the case that, when wrestling with angels, you would have to be careful not to become an angel?’ Suzanne I. had a wise answer to this. A very wise answer, Professor. And when they get to Homansbyen, where she lives, she invites him in for a cup of tea — typical: a cup of tea, what else?

Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

The decor of the attic flat was surprisingly impersonal, almost as if she were just passing through. The paintings on the walls were pretty pedestrian efforts, more like pseudo-art. A window was open. It was cold in the room. She made tea. They sat facing one another in two old-fashioned armchairs. Light poured strong and intense through a skylight. Jonas thought she was waiting for him to say something about her lectures, the last one in particular perhaps — or maybe he should tell her that he had been to Ravenna — but when he made to speak she raised her hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ she says, sounding weary, as if outside the auditorium she wanted to stay silent — and preferably alone. She holds both hands around her cup; her fingers are plainly ice-cold.

Jonas got up to look at a well-thumbed Bible lying on the table behind her chair. As he walked past her she suddenly put down her cup and drew him to her, drew him down to her, firmly, commandingly almost, and kissed him fiercely, and awkwardly, he thought to himself, yes: awkwardly, as if she had never kissed anyone before, or not in a very long time; it was the kiss of someone who has been starved, he thought. She pressed his head down to her breast, to the silky fabric of her blouse, panting heavily, tugging at the buttons herself, fingers shaking; she swore when a couple of buttons popped off and landed on the floor; she swore, he told himself again, surprised, as she pulled up her bra and ground his face against her skin with greedy determination, as if, after all those lectures, she had finally got to the heart of the matter, to what lay behind all that talk of sin and redemption. There was nothing banal about all of this though, what happened next is as difficult to describe as the abstract concept of paradise; Jonas himself had the impression that this was a unique and very special occasion, that she had possibly never done this before, had never wanted to do it before, had been too inhibited, maybe too proud, but now, at long last, had decided that the time had come, because she pushed him further down, impatiently, down to her crotch, as if it were an order, all shyness gone now; she swiftly undid her skirt, tore off her tights and panties and pressed his face against her vulva as if this was a gateway to salvation, inviting him to browse his way to her innermost secrets, and as she did so she grabbed the fur coat, which was hanging over the chair right behind her and spread it over herself and Jonas: it was still cold in the room.

He began to kiss her, fired by a potpourri of scents, not unlike a blend of perfume and ammonia, or — the thought flashed through his mind — heaven and hell; and he instinctively knew, perhaps because of the way she held his head, that Suzanne I. had never been kissed like this before. He remembered Daniel, how Daniel had given a lecture, an actual lecture, on the art of what in scientific parlance is referred to as ‘cunnilingus’. That too had been in an attic, on Hvaler, in his grandfather’s house, one rainy summer’s day when they were sitting reading — it might even have been the Illustrated Classics . Daniel had pointed to the safe where they had once found the lacquer casket containing a canvas bag which they had thought might hold pearls but which had in fact concealed a pistol, a Luger. Daniel had walked over to the safe, and as he was struggling yet again to open it, turning the dial in the centre as gingerly as if he were attempting to locate ‘Lux’ on the radio’s chaotic medium wave, he described to an inexperienced Jonas the challenges which that place between a girl’s legs held in store for him. Because, according to Daniel, there was a certain similarity between the manipulation of such a combination lock and the licking of a girl’s pussy. Every woman had her own code; no two were exactly the same. ‘There’s nothing more complex than a woman’s privates,’ he said. ‘And yet you can give any girl, even the hardest nut, an orgasm just by using your tongue — if you’ve had enough practise, that is.’ It was like a robber being faced with a safe and saying to himself ‘Aha, a Diebolt from the thirties’ or ‘Great, a Chubb from England’, instantly calling to mind all the technical subtleties and special features of the make in question and how to open it — that, said Daniel was exactly what it was like for him when he ran a tentative finger over a girl’s delights; he knew right away exactly what was needed, how many licks in one direction, how many in another, the requisite number of light or penetrating flicks of the tongue, when to take a break, when to up the tempo. That evening, out in the yard, Daniel had pointed to the cat, which was lapping milk from a bowl: ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s how to do it.’

And now Jonas was lying between a woman’s legs, and not just any woman, but Suzanne I. who, only a few years later, would publish her first major critical work, the fruits of learning accumulated and allowed to ripen over years of silence, as if she had suddenly found release, as if the pieces had suddenly fallen into place for her, enabling her to publish several books one after the other in rapid succession, most of them in English. Thus Suzanne I. in fact became the first ever Norwegian critic of true international standing: a scholar who won worldwide acclaim for her original approach to her subject matter and a distinctive style bordering on fiction.

Lying there, Jonas saw how the light coming through the skylight fell, like a spotlight, on the area between her legs, in such a way that her clitoris seemed almost to glow, like the chunks of amber around her neck. And he accepted the challenge with pleasure, accepted the privilege and set to his task with a resolve and, not least, patience, that Daniel would have applauded; it also seemed as if she was now expecting him to make up for the fact that he not spoken, asked a question, used his tongue at all, during her lectures; and he loved the feeling of being able to drive her wild with nothing but these simple oral exercises, causing her to shed the role of prim and proper middle-class lady — so much so that she began to mutter what sounded like gibberish, obscenities and taboo words mixed with phrases from other languages; she’s speaking in tongues, he thought groggily, either that or these were utterly elementary words and sounds, the whistling of air through her teeth and visceral grunts that issued from her as she tore at the fur with her fingers, pulling it further and further down over him, so that for a moment he felt as if he was making love to a black beast. I admit it is tempting to draw comparisons with Dante: the idea of making a circular descent into a dark hole, to finally wind up in paradise, but images were, nonetheless, beginning to take shape in Jonas’s head, like a vision almost, if I may be allowed to pursue this same thread. As he lay there in a kind of stupor, weird thoughts came into his mind, words which, by means of metaphorical leaps, or — why not — an erotic discus throw, transported him to that other attic, to the house on Hvaler, even as those thighs turned into sinuous creatures and his tongue into a line plunging into a vast deep, an ocean containing things of which he knew nothing, objects that gleamed dully in the darkness, and when she came, when at long last she reached a climax, and Jonas had placed his hands on her breasts, thinking perhaps that there was a connection between her nipples and her clitoris, or that her whole body was a complex locking mechanism, like the ones in the ancient pyramids, where you had to press several spots at the same time in order to make the heavy stone doors pivot on their axis — when the culmination came, when her body began to signal that she was about to come, Jonas felt more words and images inside his own head coiling themselves together to form something bigger, turning into a story, a story that he understood even more clearly perhaps because — the darkness between her legs notwithstanding — his head was closer to a light source than normal; and as she, after an assiduous oral onslaught on Jonas’s part, spread her legs even further apart, tipped up her pelvis and stiffened — soundlessly, but as if it took tremendous effort — a corresponding convulsion, or mental release, occurred inside him and left him, for the first few moments thereafter lying, damp-faced and as lifeless as she. He did not come to his senses until he heard her whisper: ‘Go — please go.’ She regarded him with eyes so heavy that she might have been drugged. And with a flash of resentment, he would think later. ‘Get out,’ she said. On his way out, as he was closing the outer door, with the scent of vaginal juices still in his nostrils, Jonas heard her swear, a couple of times, swear loudly and clearly, almost infernally.