Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And did he? Is it at all possible to sum up a life such as Jonas Wergeland’s? Whatever the case, I hope that any assessment of this man will depend upon which story we place last, Professor. And might it not be — I ask you at least to consider the possibility — that there are other branches to this story, that what I am describing here forms the real starting point for Jonas Wergeland’s future life?

So let us end, or begin again, with the years when they were living together in the ambassador’s lavishly appointed apartment in Ullevål Garden City, in rooms painted in different colours, terracotta, ochre, cobalt: rooms as different from each other as the continents themselves, not least because, taken as a whole, they constituted a proper little museum of ethnography, filled as they were with objects from a goodly number of the earth’s more far-flung cultures — even in the garden, moss-covered statues sat half-concealed among the shrubbery, as if the ambassador had attempted to recreate a corner of some overgrown temple. The bedroom was all white, right down to the sheets and duvet covers — a white broken only by a gold statuette from Thailand. Particularly during those first weeks after they — a student of architecture and a medical student — met one another again and entered into a new relationship, the bed in this room was their domain. In his mind Jonas called it the Silk Road. It was Aunt Laura who had first told him about the miracle of silk — about the silk worms and the way the silk was turned into soft, smooth, shining fabrics — and about the Silk Road, the name given to the trade route, the historic link, between Asia and Europe. And once when he was sitting in his aunt’s flat in Tøyen, lolling back against soft cushions, surrounded by oriental rugs and the glimmer of gold and silver from her workbench, she had suddenly said: ‘The road that runs from a woman to a man, that too could be called a Silk Road.’

And only now, years later, as they lay there in a white room, blessed by a golden idol, lay stretched out alongside one another in a big bed, like two continents, like west and east, did he see what she meant — for with them too, it was as much a matter of exchanging gifts, just as cultures swap inventions, ideas, historical knowledge. This was what Margrete meant when she whispered to him: ‘Be a vessel, learn to take.’ And he took. For many weeks he lay beside her in bed and took from her the equivalent of fine porcelain, peaches, rich fabrics and strange spices, while he gazed at her eyebrows, which looked as though they had been brushed with black ink by a Japanese master of calligraphy. And in the same way he tried as best he could to give, to shower her with the equivalent, from his world, of grapes, walnuts, metals and fragile glass. Because what they were doing as they lay there side by side, with their fingers wandering like caravans over the landscapes of their bodies, was telling stories; for hour upon hour they took it in turns, as all lovers do, to tell each other stories from their lives. A good many of Jonas’s were about Buddha, about how clever he was at imitating people on the television, not to mention his repertoire of ABBA songs, and there was a lot about Daniel: the account, for example, of the bizarre incident which had converted him to Christianity; and Margrete told him about her parents, about her mother’s unhappy life, or about the time when she, Margrete, supported herself for a whole year in Paris by doing street theatre: stood on an upturned rubbish bin outside Saint Germain des Prés, dressed as Buster Keaton and doing a doleful but hilarious imitation of him which elicited both roars of laughter and money from passers-by; or about the walking tour she made, not in the mountains of Norway, but of China, not from hut to hut, but from temple to temple. She told him, not least, about all that she had read, all the books, and when Jonas asked her why she read so much she replied: ‘Because I’m lonely, and reading helps me learn to live with my loneliness.’

On one such evening, when Margrete had just finished a long story about the International School in Bangkok, Jonas leaned back, his body heavy with contentment: ‘Do you think that one day’s happiness could save a whole life?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Margrete. And a moment later: ‘Just as a second’s hate can destroy it.’

He didn’t understand what she meant, that she may have been trying to forestall something, make him see that any fruitful transaction can be ruined the minute one of the parties starts to feel dissatisfied and decides they would prefer to be in charge, become a conqueror, have the upper hand.

One evening, one bright evening when the scent of spring was drifting through the open bedroom window, after he had told her about the strange fish and the oyster he hadn’t opened, she got out of bed and disappeared for a couple of minutes. When she returned she held out a clenched fist to him. ‘Open it,’ she said. ‘Pretend it’s an oyster.’

Jonas prised open her fingers, one by one, really had to work at it, because she truly seemed to be trying to make her fist as hard to open as an oyster shell. In the palm of her hand lay a pearl, a small, slightly irregular, natural pearl. She had found it in Japan when she was a little girl. ‘Here take it, it’s yours,’ she said. Jonas looked at it, noted the way in which the light was both absorbed and reflected by it, sat gazing at it for ages, with his throat constricting and his lips tightening. ‘It may not be perfect, but it is a real pearl,’ she said.

Jonas looked and looked. The pearl seemed to be made of white silk. But to Jonas, the incredible thing was not the pearl itself but the thought of the steady, painstaking process by which the oyster converts the foreign body — strokes it, if you like — into a pearl.

‘It takes a long time,’ Margrete said, as if reading his mind. ‘It takes a long time to become a person.’

The next day, back at his bedsit, Jonas unearthed his old lacquer casket, the casket which he had once found in a safe and which had been carted along with him every time he moved, like a portable altar. It contained just two things: a silver brooch and a puck. Two sacred relics. When he placed the pearl between them, luminous and clear, but at the same time impenetrable, it became a multiplication sign between two unknown quantities, an ‘x’ and a ‘y’, but somehow this tiny white sphere brought about a massive increase in their combined import. He shifted the pearl around, tried every possible combination. When he placed it after the brooch and the puck it made him think of a full stop, a sign that his search was at an end; and when he set the pearl on top of the puck he observed how the white dot seemed to fertilize all the black, turning it into a totally different object. Jonas felt as though an entire past, a string of stories, had suddenly acquired a new and brighter character.

And it is on this same day, on his return to Ullevål Garden City, that it happens, as he is lying quietly, on a perfectly ordinary evening, it happens quite undramatically, the thing which on several occasions he thought he was on the track of, but which he now knows he was never on the track of, because it is now that it happens, while Margrete is stroking him, endlessly, reading his body intently and single-mindedly, the way she would read a book, running her hands all over him, caressing every single inch of his skin with her fingertips; it is at this moment that he experiences something so all-pervading that it would not be unreasonable to associate it with what, in his diary, Søren Kierkegaard described as an upheaval ‘which suddenly pressed upon me a new and infallible Interpretation of all Phenomena…’

And that night, on his way to the bathroom, naked, he passed the large mirror in the dim hallway and gave a start. He did not recognize himself. He met his reflection in the dark surface of the mirror and saw that his face had changed. And not only that: his face, the whole of his naked body shone with a kind of inner light. He knew what it was. An afterglow. A product of her love. It was something her hands had stroked into being in him. Because even when they made love he was more conscious of her hands than her vagina: the feeling when they had sex was that of being stroked, caressed, rather than a physical sensation of sliding in and out. He stared at his reflection, at his body, which seemed almost luminous, surrounded by a halo. Jonas stood in the dark hallway studying his own face in the mirror, smiled to himself, she had made him glow; and although he could not know that what he was actually witnessing here was the dawning of his career as a charismatic television personality, he did feel that the pressure, or the sum of all the instances of pressure, had at long last turned the carbon within him into diamond, that he was finally ready, and had the ability, to do something extraordinary.