Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas could not know that he was, at that moment, living proof of this statement. Because although Gabriel could not, in fact, tell a foresail from a mainsail, for a year and a half he had led Jonas to believe that he was an old salt, simply by learning the jargon — ‘after leech’ and ‘gaff end’ and ‘barber hauler’ — in the same way that an actor memorizes his lines. And Jonas had allowed himself to be taken in. ‘Are you mad!’ Gabriel had roared, looking genuinely appalled, once when Jonas was trying to coil a rope. ‘Don’t you know that all ropes have to be wound sun-wise, you landlubber.’ And this from a man who had never been to sea.

And now, only a couple of hours after listening to Gabriel’s urgings, Jonas was lying with his nose pressed into the mattress of one of the bunks, with Gabriel on top of him, puffing and panting. He was drunk but lucid enough to feel like a puppet, with a big hand stuck up inside him.

He turned his head to the side, to scream, to say something, but still could not utter a sound, nor did he want to; instead his eye fell on a glass standing on a small table next to the bunk, he saw the false teeth lying in it, caught the glint of a gold tooth, but still it took a few seconds for him to connect this with Gabriel, for him to realize that even the man’s teeth were false. And as Gabriel took him harder and harder, driving into him, uncontrollably, groaning, Jonas saw the gnashers cackling at him from the glass, as if they were laughing at his naivety, at how easily he had allowed himself to be hoodwinked.

And yet, in the midst of this humiliation, or act of atonement, or pleasure, or reparation, or liberation, or whatever it was — maybe he was quite simply being put to the test — the glass reminded Jonas that Gabriel had also stressed the importance of willpower, the need for reckless defiance. Because even if you could only tie one knot, through perseverance something great could be created: by tying that same knot again and again — until at last you had a magnificent rug. ‘You’ve got the stubbornness that’s needed,’ Gabriel said. ‘I know. I’ve seen it.’

Yes, it was true. He lay with the sour smell of the mattress in his nose, proving it now. Unless it was Gabriel who was demonstrating it to him now. Showing him that he could stand it, this penetration that went beyond the tentacles of words. Jonas recalled how even as a little boy he had been capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness from some unknown source. Like the time when they were playing down by the stream and they found a swarm of tadpoles. They caught as many as they could in a jam jar, gazed at them wide-eyed, those tiny pucks with tails. Then somebody bet Jonas that he didn’t dare drink them. Bet him a flick-knife — a novel and dangerously cool item at that time. Jonas drank the whole jar of tadpoles down without so much as blinking, he could still remember the feeling and the taste as they slipped down his throat. ‘They’re gonna turn into toads in your stomach,’ the boy who had bet him said in an attempt to save his flick-knife. ‘If you throw up, it doesn’t count.’ Jonas could veritably feel the tadpoles crawling up his gullet, but he did not throw up. He exercised his willpower.

And as if to illustrate the link between that memory of the tadpoles and the situation on board the lifeboat, Gabriel was shaken by some violent spasms and Jonas felt something running down between his legs. At that same moment, Gabriel jerked him roughly backwards, as if he were pressing, trying to squeeze the breath out of him, or doing something to his back, snapping something into place, the way a chiropractor would do, causing an agonizing stab of pain to run right through him, accompanied by a flash of light. Gabriel rolled off him, grunted and slapped his backside. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’ll never happen again. I promise.’ He got up and fell in to the other bunk.

Jonas was left lying there, feeling sure that he was going to die; but gradually he felt the pain give way to a pleasant warmth and a realization that, for some minutes, he had been bounded in a nutshell but was now a king of infinite space, to paraphrase another of Gabriel’s favourite sayings. Almost against his will he was dragged down into a deep, peaceful sleep, into a dream of sailing through a long, unnavigable passage.

Coming up through the hatchway the next morning was, nonetheless, like climbing out of the belly of a whale. Jonas felt sticky, smelly. He stood on the deck, gazing into white space. It was misty and perfectly still. Some large seabirds came gliding towards him, skimming the waves. Other than that, everything round about had disappeared, like the images on an overexposed picture.

Gabriel rowed him ashore straight away, knew there could be no talk of breakfast. The bowtie was gone, but the false teeth were in place — and on his head he wore an idiosyncratically moulded Borsalino. He sat there looking like the eternal cosmopolitan, wearing a dark coat over a chalk-striped suit, out of place in a little rowboat, sitting hunched on a thwart, handling the oars. The dinghy slid slowly through the white light. Just before they reached the beach, Gabriel broke his silence, quoted yet again from Ophelia’s monologue, whispering it, so it seemed, to the mist: ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown…’

Jonas stepped ashore and began to walk towards Drøbak. ‘Will I see you again?’ Gabriel called after him.

Jonas turned. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Three years were to go by before the reaction came: in the form of a power saw.

Back home in Grorud he went to bed. He felt sick in every cell of his body; he sank into a white mist, a luminous nothingness. He lay more or less in a daze the whole weekend, with a terrible ache in his back, an ache that gradually became more in the nature of a pressure. It was almost as if he was pregnant, carrying a foetus in the marrow of his spine. Or as if he was about to sprout wings. Jonas both knew and did not know that something was happening to the button, the button of dragon’s horn that he had swallowed as a little boy, and which he had persuaded himself had lodged in his spine like an extra vertebra.

On the Monday morning, when he got out of bed and took his first faltering steps across the room, he felt, in some strange way, ‘switched on’.

Speaking of that white light over the water, the mist — speaking of the lifeboat: I have not given up hope of being able to do it, to save him, save her, because Jonas Wergeland is still standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete’s heart, has got no further than this, because he is thinking about the seconds it took him to walk from the workshop with the pistol in his pocket, a pistol he really did not want to use, into the living room, where he stood and watched the light fading outside the window, a dark-blue sky with a band of yellow on the horizon, before he noticed that Margrete was now sitting on the sofa with an orange in her hand, staring at the television which she had switched on; he stood there watching how she shifted the orange fruit, absentmindedly, from hand to hand, how she seemed to be suspended in a vacuum between the glare from the television and the unspeakably beautiful, fading light outside the window, in a place where he cannot reach her, and he remembers her way of peeling an orange, slowly and deftly, in such a way that the fruit itself becomes a ball of light with a spiral-shaped tail hanging below it, like a big, pearly spermatozoon, a symbol of life, ‘Axel,’ she says out of the blue, and he starts. ‘Axel popped by the other day to borrow the programme on Amundsen,’ she says and nods at the screen as if to explain what brought it into her mind, ‘but I couldn’t find the cassette,’ she says, cupping both hands protectively around the orange.