Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas leans over the balcony, looks back and forth between the vandalized stained-glass window and the two adults standing in the central aisle down below. He knows he has to come up with a story. And not just any story. When he sneaked up to the big boys’ den he got beaten up for not being a good enough liar. He knows he’s going to be in trouble now too, if he doesn’t think of something quick. That he will be thrown into a black pit, only this time he’ll have to stay there for ever, for the rest of his life.

He had a couple of things to work with: he had a shattered window and a puck lying outside in the snow, and he had — he ran his eye around the church — the church silver on the altar, set out for the evening service. He remembered the year when Daniel had a chapter accepted for the Children’s Hour Storybook. The idea was that you had to carry on the story from where the last chapter left off. Daniel had concocted the next part of what was a pretty corny story; he really laid it on thick. Jonas almost killed himself laughing at all the hilarious, over-the-top descriptions, the unbelievable coincidences, when Daniel read it aloud to him in their room. But on the radio, as the latest instalment of the Children’s Hour Saturday Serial, with sound effects and good actors, it sounded great, almost feasible.

Jonas raced down the stairs and along the scarlet runner in the centre aisle, as if he were treading the red carpet to a new career. He came to a breathless halt in front of the men — two powerful individuals who could have cause to suspect him of all sorts of misdemeanours.

‘Who’s this?’ the chairman of the parish council whispered.

‘Jonas Hansen, the organist’s son,’ the vicar said.

‘Jonas Wergeland,’ Jonas corrected him, taking his new name, his mother’s, right then and there. The ‘W’ he had inserted in fifth grade had now ripened into a whole name. A word. A future.

‘Can you tell us what happened?’ the vicar asked, pointing to the wall where the remaining stained-glass windows shone with an added, almost accusing, glow.

‘I saw a man over there, a stranger. He was sneaking up to the chancel,’ Jonas said, nodding in the direction of the corner off the side-aisle, under the windows. ‘He looked like a burglar, and I shouted at him, but he didn’t stop, he was heading for the candlesticks, so I threw the only thing I had handy at him, a puck, but it kind of went the wrong way and smashed the window instead, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it, but it did make the burglar turn and run, I’m really, really sorry…’

Pause. Rather a long pause. Both adults looked him in the eye. ‘Which way did he go?’ the vicar asked.

That put him on the spot; he hadn’t got this far in his thinking. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing to a door onto a corridor leading to one of the church’s side entrances.

‘But that door’s locked,’ the chairman said.

‘No, he ran through there,’ Jonas said, for some reason convinced that this was true. A pressure on his spine.

The vicar had already walked across to the door and out into the corridor. He came back.

The moment of truth.

‘It’s right enough, the door was open,’ he said. ‘And there are tracks in the snow.’

Jonas could have fallen to his knees and given thanks to the person who must have forgotten to lock the door. And who had only just left. On the other hand, he had known it would be that way.

‘It’s a shame about the window, but I realize you must have been scared, I don’t think anyone could blame you for doing as you did, although it’s going to cost a fortune to have it repaired,’ the vicar said, gently running a hand through his hair.

Jonas stood on the red carpet, feeling the warmth spread from the top of his head right down to his toes, as if something, a leaden destiny, had melted and now offered the possibility of another form. Here before him were these two powerful men, pillars of the community, and they believed him: he had laid it on really thick, but they believed him. You do not conquer your uncommonness, it is granted you as a gift, he thought. At that moment, and even more in the days that followed — when, despite the breaking of the window, he was made out to be the saviour of the day, a minor hero — Jonas perceived the chances that now lay before him. That this — rather than the sham of the organ playing — might be an alternative path, a way to survive. He had discovered the generosity of people’s imaginations. Their willingness to believe him. And furthermore: that lying was not a sin, but a talent. In principle, at least. He gazed up at the organ in gratitude, as if it were a laboratory. He felt like a scientist who had drawn a blank but who, in the course of his experiment, or thanks to a by-product of it, had nonetheless spied a new, and perhaps even more revolutionary, possibility.

Because that is how it was: very simple elements, boldly interwoven, could open doors — in two ways. Inside people’s heads. In the real world. Who was to say that somebody had forgotten to lock the side door? The way Jonas saw it, it could just as easily be the story that had opened it. Left its tracks in the snow. In fact, it really wouldn’t have surprised him if the vicar had come back and announced that he had seen an angel, a real live angel.

Jonas went out to look for his puck in the fresh snow. Hunted for it as if it was an irreplaceable pearl. He found it at last, was so happy that he kissed it. He had known it all along: this puck was not a puck at all, it was a button, something he could press, mightier than the biggest organ. From now on he would be able to get away with just about anything. All he needed was a simple melody and the right instrument. It felt as though God was dead and anything went. He could conquer a whole world.

The final, the ultimate, proof was granted him with his conquest of Margrete Boeck. Although, conquest is absolutely the wrong word. And as he lowers the pistol, not knowing whether he has shot or not, he thinks of life with Margrete.

What was it like, life with Margrete?

For a long, long time, life with Margrete consisted simply of lying in a big bed, in a nest of duvets and pillows and sheets which reminded Jonas of the atmosphere in his Aunt Laura’s exotic flat in Tøyen, where her goldsmith’s bench smouldered in the far corner of the living room. He would lie in this big bed, having his body stroked by Margrete’s warm hands — when it wasn’t the other way round and he was trying to stroke her skin, cover it with caresses, a skin that was never the same twice, a body whose rises and hollows were always changing, changing with different times of day, different times of the year, of life. Whenever he lay like this, running his fingers and the palm of his hand over Margrete’s limbs, he thought of travels, of riches. One time when he was lying there, fondling her ankle, that exquisite spot, she asked him if he knew how many bones there were in the foot, and when he shook his head she answered herself: twenty-six. ‘That says something about how complex we are,’ she said. ‘And how vulnerable.’

If there was one thing Jonas learned, or ought to have learned, from his very first second with Margrete, it was that love is not blind, but seeing. That love gives you fresh eyes.

It never ceased to amaze Jonas how Margrete could make him forget old habits, and hence memories too, so that each time they made love it seemed to him — no matter how unlikely this may sound — like the first time, or rather, like something new. And, perhaps an even greater miracle: she taught him, a man, to set greater store by those long interludes when they explored each other’s skins than by the act itself. She helped him to see, or learn, that sometimes it can be better to touch a shoulder than a breast. And although Margrete could also wrap her arms around him, make love to him with a passion which almost frightened him, this gentle stroking of the skin was a pleasure above all others, a thrill which transmitted itself to the very smallest of cells. When Margrete laid her hand on his body and ran it over his skin from the sole of his foot to his crown, he understood what life was about: intensity, a heightened awareness of the moment, of his own breathing even, as if by placing her hands on his skin she put him into an unknown gear. It was a kind of education. ‘Be a vessel,’ she whispered to him again and again. ‘Be a vessel, not a sword; learn to take, Jonas.’