Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas sat with both hands round the oyster, as if he were holding a thing of great potency. Alive. A heart. He pulled out a pocket knife, so excited he could hardly breathe. He had no problem seeing how this situation could branch out into two totally different lives. Depending on what was inside.

As if he read Jonas’s mind, his grandfather said: ‘There’s maybe one pearl for every hundred shells. And maybe a perfect pearl in every hundred pearls.’

Jonas gazed at the gnarled oyster. But if it was one of those shells… It was one of those shells. He just knew it, could already picture the fabulous dull-sheened sphere embedded in the soft flesh, was already wondering what he should do with it, whether he should have it made into a pearl earring to give to somebody he loved, or what. This was not just a question of a pearl. It was a button. Something that could trigger unimaginable processes.

He sat with the oyster in one hand, the knife in the other. Then, all of a sudden, he stretched his fist out over the rail, uncurled his fingers and let the oyster slip into the water. It floated for a moment before it sank.

His grandfather eyed him. Said nothing. Not until they were level with Halden did he point to the shore: ‘Look, Jonas, over there’s the quarry that supplied the granite block for the Monolith in Vigeland Park.’

Jonas nodded. Proudly. As proudly as if they were towing the stone for the Monolith behind them. Or the stone for something much bigger than the Monolith.

I still do not know, Professor, whether I shall succeed in this ambitious undertaking of mine, because when Jonas Wergeland stood with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Bøeck’s heart, so excited he could hardly breathe, just as he had felt as a boy that time when he found a pearl oyster, he thought of what had taken place only minutes earlier, when he was in the bedroom, trying to collect himself, determined that everything was going to be fine; and yet, even while he was struggling to calm down, he could not help himself: he picked up the novel lying on her bedside table, and he opened it, and he saw the handwriting, and he read the owner’s name, and he saw that the book belonged to the very person he least wanted it to belong to, and this provided him with a kind of final proof, proof which he did not need, because it was true, it had always been true, only he, in his hopeless naivety had not realized that it was true; and it must have been then that he conceived the idea which propelled his feet from the bedroom to the little workshop where he dug out the pistol tucked well away in the cupboard, behind all the gouges, a pistol which Jonas’s father, Haakon Hansen, had found among Omar Hansen’s possessions when they were going through the house on Hvaler after his grandfather’s death and which Jonas and Daniel had, in their turn, found hidden away, still in its thick wrappings, in the Villa Wergeland, when their father, Haakon, died and which, that day, with trembling fingers they unwound from the oilcloth, to at long last lay eyes on the weapon, a Luger P-08, the unequivocal proof of their grandfather’s, their family’s, crime, long hidden in a safe, and this they immediately wrapped up again, almost shaking in their shoes, a pistol which they obviously should have handed over to the authorities but which Jonas, with Daniel’s blessing, kept safe for many years, like a shameful relic, and which, in an overreaction to some threatening letters only a few weeks before he went to Seville, he had taken out and wiped the grease off, a skill he had learned while doing his national service, from a gunsmith who could never have known why Jonas was so keen to see a Luger, never mind learn how to take it apart and clean it; and this was before he actually saw his grandfather’s pistol at a time when all of his curiosity and interest — not to say, anxiety — was founded on intelligence supplied by Veronika; but Jonas had learned everything there was to know about this gun, applied himself so single-mindedly to it, you would have thought that by taking that pistol apart and cleaning it he was also dismantling an act of treachery, in order, if possible, to understand some inner logic, and as if that weren’t enough: he had also committed these skills to memory so well that later, even ten years after completing his stint with N Brigade, at any given time he was not only able to clean the old grease off a similar weapon but could also coat all of the Luger’s movable parts with a thin, thin layer of oil, and slot seven bullets, from an ammunition box which had also been kept perfectly dry all those years, into the magazine and push it into place, so that suddenly the gun was ready for use again, a fact which makes it possible for him now, newly returned from Seville, to walk into the workshop and slip the pistol into the pocket of his roomy trouser pocket, before trying once again to stop everything, stop time, stop the green pictures in his head, pull himself together and ride it out; he looks at a half-finished dragon head sitting on the bench, and he looks at the ornamentation on which he has barely begun, the dragon not yet come to life, and he shuts his eyes, and breathes in the powerful odours in the room, wood and beeswax, not unlike the smell on board a boat; and he asks himself, as I have asked myself, whether there was a safe in his own life too, or rather: a secret that was locked away? In other words: what could possess a boy to cut down the mast of an old lifeboat?

The following incident took place during one of the first years after Jonas started hanging out with Gabriel Sand, and please note, Professor, that I am still not sure whether this is a dark story or a light one. Whatever the case, the evening had begun as usual. It was autumn and the miserable weather outside only made it seem all the more cosy on board the Norge , where they were sitting in the saloon, amid the rumblings of the stove, talking about everything under the sun. There were few places where Jonas felt freer than on that ancient vessel, a place as crammed with oddities as Strömstad market and the attic on Hvaler put together. ‘This is my ark,’ Gabriel often said. ‘Here I’ve got everything I need to survive the deluge.’ After a game of chess, which Jonas won with the help of his knights, Gabriel had gone through to the galley and cut some thick slices of bacon, which he fried and served up, with the grease, on slabs of bread — with tomatoes and diverse obscure relishes on the side. They had a good laugh, while they were eating, at a picture that Jonas had found of Gabriel standing at a microphone next to Frank Roberts during a recording of Dickie Dick Dickens , a photograph which prompted Gabriel to trot out some of the most outrageous stories from his time with Radio Theatre. Jonas had had his first taste of whisky that evening, and although he didn’t drink much, he could feel his head getting fuzzy. From somewhere far off he heard Gabriel say: ‘We even had one guy there who could imitate any kind of animal — right down to different breeds of dog!’

Maybe it was his own fault, for collapsing into the starboard bunk, the skipper’s bunk, as leading seaman Jonas’s place was, according to Gabriel, in the port bunk. But Jonas had been so worn out that he had had no idea where his feet were taking him. He was already drifting into a dream when he became aware, even though half-asleep, even in his drunken stupor, that Gabriel was climbing into his bunk; something bristly, a mouth that reeked of spicy relish was breathing on the back of his neck. All at once the bunk seemed claustrophobically small, he felt himself being pressed up against the wall, against the inner shell of the hull. It was pitch-black too, and Jonas didn’t like the dark, he was scared of disappearing, falling into a black hole. The amazing thing, he managed to think to himself, was that it hadn’t happened before, because he had known it all along, really: that it would come to this, to Gabriel’s groping paws. I’m dead, he thought. I’m in a coffin, I’ve been buried alive.