Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Afterwards, when the rainbow hung over the neighbouring island and the landscape was looking all fresh and new, as if it had just been run through a gigantic, electric washing machine, Jonas usually went fishing. The day before, too, he had taken out his rod and gone down to the boathouse, walked barefoot along the path through a meadow that smelled like a spice market after the thunderstorm. He had taken the little rowboat: Jonas was good at rowing, he could row for hours without tiring, flicked the oars like an old seadog; he rowed all the way out to Flaket and beyond, through the farthermost inlet at Svanetangen point, to sit bobbing on the waves on the outer side of the island, with the sea — the ocean, he thought to himself — stretching out before him.

Here, after taking a cross-bearing, he let out his line, a good solid construction of his own devising: a combination of weighted line and gig; not spoon bait, but hooks baited with mussels, a sinker, thick nylon, sound knots. Jonas always dreamed of the Big One, had heard that there were supposed to be Greenland shark out here — in his mind’s eye he saw the little shark from the book on fishing, shuddered. It would be something to show off, though, and take photographs of, the way they did in tropical waters. He had fantasies of one day sitting with his children on his lap: ‘And here’s a picture of me standing next to the biggest shark ever caught off the coast of Norway.’

The truth is that Jonas seldom got a bite. But he liked fishing anyway, liked raking up the mussels, liked drifting in the rowboat, listening to the water lapping at its sides. Sometimes he simply tied the line to a tholepin and left the swell to keep the gig dancing while he opened more mussels, he liked that too, found it exciting to open them with his stumpy-bladed knife, erotic even — the sight of the soft, aromatic innards, at any rate. ‘Did you know there’s a sort of pearl that’s found in mussels?’ his grandfather had once said.

He has just decided to turn for home when he feels the boat beginning to drift out to sea, even though there is a light onshore breeze and no current to speak of. He has been sitting no more than twenty yards from the headland, directly off a break in the rocks, a small pebble beach. The water isn’t all that deep here, either, nine or ten fathoms maybe. But his line is sitting at an angle that fits with the direction in which he is drifting. Jonas feels the nylon cord. Taut as Einar Tambarskjelve’s bowstring, he thinks, and straight away he knows: it’s a fish — the Big One itself. ‘A whale!’ he thinks at first, overjoyed, then terror-stricken. He puts out his oars and rows for shore but doesn’t budge an inch: in fact, he is actually drawn further out. He doesn’t know what’s going on, is growing frightened, pulls for all he is worth, churning up the water but goes on drifting slowly but surely away from the shore, out onto the open sea, out into the deep.

He could, of course, have cut the line, but that would have been too bad. He rowed and rowed with all his might and finally succeeded in keeping the boat still. The line was running straight down. Jonas thought the fish must have got away from him, he rowed almost all the way to shore before pulling in his oars and putting a finger to the line. There was still something there. He managed to haul the fish in a bit, then put another half-hitch around the tholepin, repeated this process several times, until he glimpsed a shape down in the depths, a huge shape, something that gave him a jolt before the line again shot away from the boat and the — creature — that was on his hook broke the surface. Jonas all but fell over the side. He saw humps. Actual humps! About ten yards away he could see several humps sticking up out of the water. The first thing he thought of was an anaconda. Then he decided it must be a sea serpent. Time and again his grandfather had told him the story of the Hvaler sea serpent, told it so vividly that Jonas had huddled up against him in fright. ‘The beast has been sighted off both Torbjørnskjær and Akerøya and later on out between Tisler and Heia,’ he said. ‘Even a dean of the church, the soul of reliability, once wrote about the sea serpent, and wait till you hear this, Jonas, it was forty feet long and as big round the middle as a potbellied stove.’ Jonas stared at the spot in the waves where the incredible creature had appeared. Whatever it was, it was too big. And this close to land? It could have been sunning itself, Jonas thought. It had been a chilly start to the summer, cold in the water.

After a fierce tussle — Jonas could not have said whether it went on for minutes or hours — he managed to reach the beach, where he tied up the boat, grabbed the line and hopped ashore. Thanks to a combination of luck and skill Jonas succeeded — despite its weight — in dragging the monster up onto the shingle. It writhed and squirmed so ferociously that it wriggled right off the hook. Before the fish, or the serpent, could get to the water, though, it worried its way down among some large stones and got stuck, lay there helplessly.

Jonas regarded this fearsome creature from a safe distance. It had to be at least six feet long and weigh a good sixty or seventy pounds. The jaws were the scariest part. For ages Jonas stood there, spellbound, staring at those teeth.

What was he to do? How was he going to get it home? He could just see the pictures in Fredrikstad Blad . The sensation of the summer. He picked up a heavy stone, meaning to throw it at the beast.

Then something happened. What it was Jonas would never say. But he put the stone down, jumped into the rowboat to fetch an oar, and using this as a lever he managed, a bit at a time, to nudge, or help, the creature down to the water’s edge and out among the clumps of seaweed, where it revived and disappeared with a splash.

Jonas knew no one would believe him, so he never told a soul. Except me, Professor. Likewise I am the only one, apart from Margrete, to have heard what happened up at the top of Idde Fjord.

Because, as I say, the next day, with a sense of crossing a boundary, Jonas had padded — like a Red Indian, so he thought — up the bank of the River Berby, in this somehow alien Norwegian landscape, until something made him stop, a feeling that here, right here, he would find something precious. It was oppressively hot. He stood on the riverbank and watched dark clouds swelling up on all sides, saw the sun breaking through here and there, the apocalyptic radiance you see depicted on altarpieces, with the sun’s rays falling like lighthouse beams on the earth. He stepped into the river, just next to the first stretch of rapids, waded out a bit before taking a header into a deep pool. Jonas was a good diver, and he was diving now, looking for unusual stones. Instead he spied something else, he didn’t know what they were, but they looked like shells. He had had no idea that shells could be found in freshwater, too. He picked one up at random and carried it ashore.

Jonas sat on the bank examining his find. Almost four inches wide. And heavy. Like a piece of slate. He sat by a dark, gently flowing river and knew, with solemn conviction, that this thing could decide his fate.

He met up with his grandfather as the latter was coming down the road with the lilac bush, and once they were back in the rowboat and heading for home, Jonas took out the shell and showed it to his grandfather. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Omar Hansen only needed to take one glance at it. ‘A freshwater pearl oyster,’ he said.

Jonas almost dropped it into the water he was so taken aback. Really? His grandfather nodded. Jonas studied the shell. Never in all his wildest dreams had he imagined that it was possible to find something like this in Norway. A pearl oyster. Something so — he searched for the word — un-Norwegian. And he, Jonas, had found one. His whole conception of what Norway had to offer in the way of new frontiers instantly changed. It was as though Norway had expanded with a jolt round about him, as he sat there in the peter boat, sailing down Idde Fjord. And who knows, perhaps it was here, in a secret corner of Norway, that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his career, a career that was rooted in the belief that the impossible was possible. Because, as I am sure most people will understand, no one who has found a pearl oyster in Norway can ever have any doubts about this country.