Jan Kjærstad: The Conqueror

Up to this point in my life, he thought, I’ve always been a hairsbreadth away from being a loser. Now I’m sure. I’m going to be a winner.

For a whole week Jonas puzzled over what he could give her in return, or no: not in return, in reply — something precious, beyond compare. He could not stop thinking about it, even when they were lying in the white room, running their hands over each other’s skin. Then one morning she was lying there telling him about a secret place she had had as a child, down by the seashore among a cluster of solid, little pine trees, where she could lie surrounded by a confusion of scents, with the sound of the waves in her ears, looking at the way in which the pine-branches formed a fretwork screen against the sky — and as she was telling him this, it came to him what she should have, and that evening he went to fetch it and gave it to her, like Marco Polo presenting a gift to Kublai Khan: the latest dragon head he had carved, a copy of the Academic’s fine head, his best attempt so far.

‘What is it?’ she asked with a smile that said she liked it.

‘It’s the start of a ship,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any further.’

‘Where do you mean to go on this ship?’

‘To a new land,’ he said. ‘Somewhere no one else has ever been.’

For a long time she lay saying nothing, stroked his back, working her way slowly upwards, over every vertebra, sending waves of well-being right through him.

‘Do you know what I like best about you?’ she said.

He didn’t know what to say.

‘Your weakness,’ she said. ‘You’re so weak that you could seduce a whole nation.’

Jonas both understood and did not understand what she meant. He was lying with his back to her, just about falling asleep. All of a sudden she wrote something on the tablet of his back with her finger, a swift, intricate flourish that induced a quite unique thrill of pleasure, a ripple that ran from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. ‘What was that?’

‘The Chinese character for dragon,’ she said.

So the days passed. They lay closely entwined in bed, stroking each other and telling stories. And while they lay there, while she was talking, Jonas was considering her skin, and all at once he knew what it reminded him of — it reminded him of the layers of lacquer on his grandfather’s old casket; he had the same sense of peering into something unfathomable, incomprehensible and yet infinitely beautiful; and as she went on talking, telling him about her life abroad, about university, about books, a realization gradually welled up inside him: Margrete was the golden fleece for which he had always been searching, she was what stood at the end of the longing that had taken vague form that time in the granite quarry. Everything else would only be stopping-off places on the way to this goal, even eventual celebrity, even international celebrity.

‘I want to have a baby,’ Margrete said one day.

‘Why?’

‘So there’ll be someone to be the saving of you when I’m gone.’

‘Were you thinking of going somewhere?’

‘That’s up to you.’

This, these weeks, these years, were the fullest in Jonas Wergeland’s life. He lay there clinging to that body, stroking that skin again and again, in circles, in spirals, happy because he realized that through her he had found a way which also led to possibilities so fundamentally different from any that had gone before; but still there was this hollow dread, a fear that it would not last, as if, for all their happiness, he could not help thinking that even Silk Roads can become overgrown.

Nevertheless, Jonas Wergeland gave up the chance of a completely different life, a different destiny when, on one of those quiet evenings, he placed both hands gently on her skin and said: ‘I’ve always thought that I would kill you if you left me. But now I know I would never do that. From this moment on my life begins anew.’

Jan Kjærstadwas born in Oslo in 1953. He read theology at the University of Oslo and made his debut as a writer in 1980 with a short story collection, The Earth Turns Quietly. The Conqueror forms the second part of a trilogy which also includes The Seducer (Arcadia Books, 2003) and The Discoverer . These novels have achieved huge international success. Jan Kjærstad is also the author of essays, a children’s book and editor of the literary magazine Vinduet . He was the recipient of the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001 and was also awarded Germany’s Henrik Steffen Prize for Scandinavians who have significantly enriched Europe’s artistic and intellectual life.

Barbara J. Havelandwas born in Scotland, and now lives in Denmark with her Norwegian husband and teenage son. She has translated works by several leading Danish and Norwegian authors, including Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Leif Davidsen.