Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And when no one answers the door he feels relieved, steps inside, reads a letter, listens to a bit of a CD of Bach fugues before Margrete comes in and all hell breaks loose, inside him I mean, and he goes into the bedroom, then into the workshop, where he picks up the pistol, then back to the living room where she is sitting watching TV, and Jonas Wergeland stands there and looks at her hefting an orange in her hand, while his life falls apart, and that is why he has to spit out that accusation about Axel, that he knows about them, and what makes him snap, the thing that is to have such fatal consequences is that, instead of admitting it, or swearing it isn’t true for that matter or dissolving into floods of tears, she gets to her feet and asks him a question, and then he has to bawl her out because she pretends not to know what he’s talking about, but still he does not become really mad, his brain doesn’t really cloud over, until she is standing right in front of him, in his dressing-gown, his dressing-gown, giving him that look, and naturally she doesn’t say anything about being tired of his being away so much, tired of his selfish lack of consideration, or that she wants a divorce, she just stands there looking at him, her eyes bore into him, and he has no trouble reading the message in them: ‘You are not worthy of me,’ they say, ‘You don’t deserve me,’ they say; she casts a swift glance at the television screen then fixes her eyes on him again, eyes which tell him, which have always told him, that he might be able to fool the whole of Norway but not her, because she knows, has always known, who he is, that only a couple of simple dodges, a couple of twists, separate his conquest from his mediocrity. But she says nothing. Merely stands there looking at him, and this makes him even more furious or bewildered or downright sad. And suddenly Jonas knows what it is, why he has to kill her, it’s got nothing to do with jealousy, not jealousy at all, it’s something else; he has simply tricked himself into thinking it was jealousy, because underneath that there lay something dreadful, something appalling that he hadn’t thought of, or certainly never been plagued by since that day, at the age of fifteen, when he was ‘converted’ in Grorud Church; it’s not the idea of losing Margrete to another man that is driving him insane, it is the loss of his own illusion of being extraordinary, an illusion which — he sees this now — does not rest on his success in television but on one thing and one thing only: her. Because any man with whom Margrete Boeck chose to share her life was, by definition, special; he was bound to be different. Without her he stood revealed as something other than what he imagined himself to be. He could not stand it: first to seduce, to conquer, an entire nation and then nonetheless to see himself stripped bare, to stand naked in all his vacuity before his wife, the woman he loved, the only person he really wished to conquer; he was a conquistador who had won everything, then suddenly found himself confronted with a culture which he did not understand and which he therefore had to destroy, and so he had to disguise his rage, his terror, as something more probable — like jealousy.

And as the light died outside the window, he was overcome, or blessed, he thought, by the necessary seconds of black hate. Seconds when a switch was turned off and everything went dark, seconds when anything could happen. With a hate so fierce that it shocked him, he grabbed her by the arm and pushed, almost threw her to the floor, causing her head to crash into the brick wall with a dull, metallic thud, like the sound of a tin can being squeezed; she had been totally unprepared, lay in a heap on the floor with a bloody graze on her forehead, lay for a long time with her eyes closed before at last she got up, stood facing him with an air of defiance, stood with her eyes closed, stood there swaying, only semiconscious, and he was glad she kept her eyes closed, he knew he couldn’t shoot her if her eyes were open; and he pulled out the pistol, cocked it and took aim and seeing her standing there in his dressing-gown it was like pointing the gun at himself, and he curled his finger round the trigger, feeling that all the threads of his life came together here, in the sickle of the trigger, and that they were pulling it back, and he knew that whatever his motive in doing it, this act, firing this gun, would be the last, irrevocable proof of his abortive originality: taking the easiest way out, a pistol, killing his wife, one of the eternal clichés in life and in crime; and yet one cannot rule out the possibility of a little method in his madness, because he may have guessed, at that moment, that while everything else he had conquered, his status as a television genius, would eventually be torn to pieces, this, this monstrous act and the circumstances surrounding it would assure him, his name, a place, at least as a footnote, in the history of Norway for all time.

And I, Professor, I feel no urge to gloat, I feel only sorrow because I have failed, and because Jonas Wergeland did not understand that a man could embody elements which seemed to be mutually exclusive: did not understand that his own achievement, the fact that he had stretched his own meagre abilities, done something brilliant with them, lifted himself up by his bootstraps, and by so doing had given hope to a lot of people, to all of us who would like to do great things with our ordinariness; I can only apologize for the fact that it should end here — a whole life spent in becoming a conqueror, and all he wants to conquer is a dead body, the corpse of the person whom he has fought hardest to hold onto: Jonas Wergeland pulls back the trigger and out of the corner of his eye he searches for the light outside the window, that band on the horizon, that unspeakably beautiful, last gleam of light before everything goes dark.

And as he readies himself for the recoil, the bang, the big bang, it occurs to him that this trigger is not necessarily the consequence of a whole life, a hunt for the buttons, the switches, that set things in motion — that, if he pulls it back far enough, it might instead be the starting-point for a new world, another life. This is where it all began, he thinks, this is the cause of everything that has gone before. He was standing not at the end, but at the beginning.

He had found himself in a similar situation, though he did not know it, that day when he stumbled out of the last piano lesson before Christmas, convinced that his life was over, even though time went on passing and his body was dragged along a road by what seemed like a chain of seconds. His shoulders were hunched, he felt as though he was running the gauntlet between trees full of mocking great tits; lowered his head against the snow that was falling softly and heavily, flakes that felt like lead. He had spoken to Fru Brøgger about the Pupils’ Evening, when he had played ‘Dragon Sacrifice’, and she had given him a little lecture in which she had very gently, but nonetheless ruthlessly, exposed him: showed him that his new ideas were actually pretty old. He was beaten before he could even begin. So now he was plodding home, fifteen years old but feeling burned out, and yet — to challenge the standard conceptions yet again — the following story need not result from an event in the immediate past, that Pupils’ Evening when he had ‘failed’; it could just as easily be the outcome of the account you have just heard, Professor, of the return from Seville or, if you will, of the whole network of stories I have told so far.

Jonas had the urge to go up to the granite quarry where once, at the sight of two stupid snakes, he had been tempted to believe that he had it in him to do something extraordinary — as though he had suddenly pulled a king’s sword out of a stone; he would sit up there and let himself be covered by the falling snow, lose himself in all that whiteness. He was a dwarf. Just before his confirmation he had inherited a very smart suit from his cousin, one of the Brothers Grimm, but when he tried it on it almost drowned him — everyone had just about died laughing. That was how he felt now: he did not have the stature to fit his ambitions. He might discover gunpowder anew. Or reinvent the paperclip. Or the cheese-slice. That was about all a Norwegian could manage. That or poor imitations. On the Norwegian border sits a huge, invisible transformer, he thought: a transformer that converts great, high-voltage concepts into small, manageable ideas, the sort we can cope with. He walked along with his head bowed, through the flock of great tits, kicked a chunk of ice so hard that he hurt his toes. Wrong, he thought, or a voice inside him screamed: if there’s a transformer then it’s inside me.