Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

I do not know where all this is leading, Professor, for when Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his thoughts returned to the minutes just before when, after arriving home from Seville, he had sat on the sofa and told himself that everything was going to be fine; sat and read a letter, an inconsequential inquiry, while Bach’s organ music filled the room as in a church, seeming to soothe his frayed nerves and once again give him hope; until, that is, Margrete suddenly walked out of the bedroom, wearing a dressing-gown, his dressing-gown, and this really upset him, the fact that she was wearing his dressing-gown, as if she were saying that she was him, that she was his self; so he turned off the music — she had shattered the cocoon of music in which he had been endeavouring to wrap himself, the one that was meant to shield him from the wrath which was once more starting to stir inside him, terrible and unstoppable; and he turns beseechingly to the portrait of Buddha, as if to elicit from it another angle on his troubles, but it does no good, and he looks at the coltsfoot in an egg-cup on the coffee table, but it does no good, and she looks at him as if she is the one who is surprised and not the other way round, as if she were accusing him, and not the other way round, as if she were about to come out with a sarcastic ‘A-ha, so you thought you might pop home, did you?’, but she doesn’t; instead she tells him, very quietly — demonstratively so, he thinks — that Kirsten is spending the long weekend with her grandmother, on Hvaler, and that she, Margrete that is, had been lying reading but must have dropped off; all of this said with such bloody control, as if she can see that she is dealing with somebody who is close to cracking, a man struggling to curb his uncontrollable aggression. ‘Did you have a good trip?’ she asks. ‘Good to be home,’ he says, and feels himself falling into the dark abyss between these two trivial and completely inane remarks, but still he believes that he can do it, cool down, all he needs is a hot shower, a brandy, a big brandy, more Bach fugues, everything was going to be fine, and as a means of distracting himself he picks up his suitcase and carries it through to the bedroom, looking and looking all the time, looking, round about him, as if searching for something, some object, some clue, something that will give her away, give them away: this book on her bedside table, for example, which is probably not hers, probably his, and he looks round about, confused, as if he is also searching for something else, anything at all, something that will help him, anything at all, which could give him back his hope.

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas knew that he had been searching for something all his life. Everyone is searching for something. Life is a search. As children, they had rooted around in the rubbish tip at home, a landfill lying right behind Solhaug that was owned by a local entrepreneur and market gardener. Every time the trucks drove up and tipped all sorts of rubbish onto the edges of the tip, the kids had swarmed down the sloping sides like beggar children in Rio to hunt through it, because someone had once — no one remembered when — found a big box full of enormous film posters, a forgotten treasure hidden among discarded fixtures and fittings from an office building in town. So for years they had hunted diligently, combing every inch. But it probably didn’t matter so much whether they found anything — although there was always the chance of stumbling over an unexposed film or a brilliant tin of paint — what mattered most was the search.

That was how it had been that time out on Hvaler. At first he hadn’t wanted to go on the trip to Berby. It was more fun to play on the island and eat bread and syrup at old Arnt’s place, to sit there surrounded by the most fantastic model ships and listen to his yarns than to lie in the bow of the peter boat, peering down into the water all the way there. But when his grandfather asked him again on the morning when he was going over there, Jonas said yes. He knew something would happen. I’m going to find something, he thought. And thanks to a woman, Suzanne I. to be exact, he would one day understand what it was that he found: a story. His own story. Late in life, but not too late, Jonas realized that he was not only doomed to uncover the reasons for who he was — he could actually invent them, make up his own reasons.

On the sail across to Halden, Jonas was sunk in an expectant stupor, didn’t even look up when they slipped under the stunning Svinesund Bridge, hardly heard the stories his grandfather was telling him as he pointed up to the white bell tower at Fredriksten Fort or over at the granite quarries which they passed. Something’s going to happen, Jonas thought. His hopes were high; he was in stonemason country, just like in Grorud.

His hopes rose even further when they reached the head of Idde Fjord, and the face of the landscape somehow changed, acquired a somehow magical cast, possibly because of the light. A storm was brewing, black clouds towered up around them. Jonas felt as if they had entered a secret valley, a sort of hidden paradise, because only here was the sun shining. Many people think that Norway stops at Svinesund and Halden, but to the east and south of Idde Fjord there is an enclave — an appendix, you might say — jutting right into Sweden. It would be only natural for him to find something completely out of the ordinary here, in such an out-of-the-way part of Norway, Jonas thought. At the very top of the fjord the water was so shallow that they had to follow the marker posts to the mouth of the River Berby, then sail some way up a channel in the river before tying up at a little jetty attached to the sawmill. His grandfather had to deliver an old sewing machine to a relative who worked at Berby sawmill, and once that was done he asked Jonas if he wanted to come with him up to the manor house, to pick up a lilac bush at the nursery there.

‘Is it okay if I just stay here and have a look around?’ Jonas asked.

‘Alright,’ his grandfather said. ‘But promise me you’ll be careful.’

As Omar Hansen fell into step with somebody further up the road, Jonas turned back to the broad, quietly flowing river. He followed it upstream, under a bridge and up to the first, shallow rapids and stood there staring into the dark waters. He could see the bottom, stones which looked golden in the strong sunlight. Here, he thought, it has to be here. It was like walking with a dowsing stick in your hands, and suddenly it dips. The weather had turned bad, black clouds all around; only the spot on which he stood was bathed in a glorious light. If I dive in here, I’ll find treasure, he thought. He knew.

The day before, the afternoon had been close and thundery too. When it thundered, Jonas sat on a pouf in the house’s open-sided porch. Thunder and lighting held a magnetic attraction for him, that meteorological drama; he thought about radio plays, how on earth to create that sound? It would be even more of a challenge because of the stereo effect: the thunder rolling like a landslide from skyline to skyline, followed by ear-splitting bangs. Jonas particularly liked those wonderful moments before the storm broke, the silence and the tension in the air. The pressure. Blue-grey clouds building up menacingly one behind the other. The colours of the landscape pulsating, as if they were under attack from some hidden darkness. Then came the rain, and the lightning. He sat on his pouf — sheltered from the showers but outside all the same — and counted the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder. He was never scared, not even when the crash came almost immediately after the lightning and it sounded as if someone was ripping up a sheet right next to his ear, while at the same time hammering on the bottom of a zinc tub. Jonas thought it might even be a vague dream of his: to be struck by lightning — and survive, of course. He had the idea that this must surely leave you charged up for the rest of your life; you’d be able to stick a light bulb in your mouth and make it light up, the way they did in the comics. He sat on the soft pouf on the stone step and gazed almost yearningly at the lightning flashes. Two dragons playing with a pearl, that — so his grandfather had told him — was what people in China believed caused thunder and lightning and rain in general. Jonas had never swallowed the story about Thor and his hammer. ‘The lightning is the glittering beams from an enormous pearl, tossed across the sky by dragons playing among the clouds,’ he had once told wide-eyed classmates at Grorud School.