Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

There wasn’t to be much peace or quiet, though. Even as he was strolling through the arcade, alongside a garden thick with orange trees, he had the feeling that something was going to happen, that the time of reckoning, as they say, had come. A debt was about to be called in. He walked through one of the doors and promptly found himself in the vast expanse of the mosque’s prayer hall. It was dim inside, with surprisingly few people around. Slowly he ventured further in, fascinated, the very sight taking his breath away. No two pillars were the same, but from a distance, in the half-light, they looked identical. And they were all linked to one another by double horseshoe arches decorated with light and dark rectangles, as if to illustrate that everything is connected, in at least two ways. This is the midpoint, he instantly thought. This is the midpoint inside me. He was surrounded by invisible mirrors, an endless succession of possible duplications stretching in all directions. He knew right away that he was going to go astray in here — not in the sense of losing his way but of losing himself. Or, as it is written: losing his soul.

And yet he went on, proceeding step by step into something which seemed more and more like a subterranean chamber, an enormous basement, as if Expo ’92, that megalomaniacal manifestation of the five hundred years of civilization since Columbus, was the surface and this was the bottomless pit below it, an empty grave, a black hole, a place fraught with mirages, illusions, temptations, things beyond understanding, things no invention could ever encompass or put a name to, a place which forced one to see that in the course of a life a person merely conquered air, wind and nothing, that all the things one thought represented expansion, in fact constituted contraction.

He had the constant feeling that he was not alone, that a shadow was following close on his heels, lurking behind the pillars. He reached a point where the sense of gazing into infinity became overwhelming, where the symmetry of the pillars made his head spin, and the light threatened to go out altogether. I’ve been here before, he thought, it’s the bomb shelter all over again. At that same moment he felt an unseen hand squeeze his testicles. He turned and saw a figure standing facing him, just a step away, strangely familiar and yet indistinct. ‘Who are you?’ Jonas asked, thinking for a moment that he recognized this person, caught the glint of a gold tooth, but then the face changed to that of someone else he knew and then to yet another face, which again changed, and so it went on until the figure had once again merged into the shadows and Jonas relaxed, sure that he had been seeing things. Just then a voice sounded from the darkness, like the hiss of a reptile — if, that is, it was not simply some incidental noise, something to do with the acoustics which led him to hear what he wanted to hear, just like a radio play: ‘I know something you ought to know,’ the voice said, or what he thought was a voice.

Standing there, in what had once been a mosque, a massive Moorish edifice, Jonas had a vision, not of light this time, but of darkness, as if a stream of black ink had come surging towards him and eventually engulfed him. He was overcome by the very opposite of what he had always striven for, felt something radiant and adamantine inside himself, his diamond, turning into graphite, black and terribly friable. Looking back on it, he would not be able to recall what language they spoke or how long the conversation lasted, nor indeed whether he had actually spoken, whether there had been a conversation at all, not that it mattered, as long as he got the message, and in a nutshell the message was that Margrete was still having an affair with Axel Stranger, that no matter what Jonas thought, they had not broken it off.

He was stunned. Thought of Axel whom he had knocked senseless a year before, or tried to knock senseless at any rate. In spite of that, thanks to Axel’s bigheartedness, or what Jonas saw as bigheartedness, they had managed to reach a sort of reconciliation, become friends again — to the point, at least, where they would call one another now and again. But the moment those words were spoken, whispered, hissed, among the pillars, inside his head, Jonas knew that they were true and that he had suspected it all along; he would never be able to keep them apart and not only that: Axel was more worthy of Margrete than he was, they made a good pair, they were, as they say, made for each other; the whole Expo, all of the world’s advances and civilization were nothing but a joke compared to that brutal fact and no magnificent cultural achievements could rid him of the primitive feelings that raged inside him, there, in the gloom, among those rows of pillars in Cordoba. He had had to come all this way, to the midpoint of his flat world, before the penny finally dropped: Margrete preferred someone else. He could accept that, as others might do. But he did not accept it. Would not accept it. He stood in the shadows, surrounded by a stupefying, neurosis-inducing array of pillars, as if he had gone astray in a forest of mirror-images, had got lost inside himself, and he noticed that he was seething inside — was not even surprised to find that he welcomed back this state of demented fury like a long-lost friend. He looked round about him; saw the rows of pillars extending in all directions. These, he thought, these are not pillars, they are bars, this is my dwelling-place from now on.

And here I too have reached a point, Professor, where it pains me — more than you could ever know — to have to admit defeat, because until now, till this very second indeed, I have hoped against hope that Jonas Wergeland’s stories, when told in this carefully worked out sequence, would lead somewhere else — rather as if, by taking a different path through the labyrinth, one could avoid coming face to face with the monster at its heart. Or as if, by allowing a child to find a pearl in an oyster, you could prevent a lump of ice from falling off a roof years later. I have always believed that it must be possible to tell the same stories in a different order and thus arrive at a different ending, just as evolution would produce quite different beings were it to start all over again, from the beginning, even when working with the exactly the same raw material. I still think it is possible — but it is beyond my powers. Forgive me. I have done what I could to prevent a murder.

So it is with anything but a light heart that I force myself to continue, to say that the flight home was a nightmare, that even a few drinks on the plane could not dampen Jonas Wergeland’s inner turmoil. His head was not a head; it was a ball of snakes, or a tangle of high-voltage cables, more like. In his mind’s eye all he could see was Margrete and Axel, Axel and Margrete, not only locked in steamy sexual embraces but also deep in intimate conversations, yes, that more than anything else, their well balanced discussions, their laughter, their total identification with each other’s thoughts, their mutual admiration. He could not stop shaking in the taxi from Fornebu to Grorud, asked to be set down at the station so that he could collect his thoughts, collect himself, while walking the last couple of hundred yards up Bergensveien. With his suitcase in tow he strolls slowly through the landscape of his childhood, with a memory at every step, and the air smells of spring, the evening is mild and coltsfoot glows on the grassy banks, and he walks more and more slowly, and when he catches sight of the Villa Wergeland sitting under Ravnkollen’s brooding granite face, he has no sense of coming home, only of facing another long journey — because, he thinks or fears, all journeys begin with a death. But still, despite the terrible clenching of his testicles, he rings the bell with that same old feeling that a cable is about to snap, that he is about to plummet into the abyss, that the dream he had in Cape Town all those years ago is about to come true after all.