Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

One day Jonas Wergeland was quite suddenly sent reeling. He knew he was seriously ill but was incapable of doing anything, nor did he feel like doing anything, hardly seemed to care. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky, up at the clouds, up at woolly floes that were forever changing, moving too fast, careening towards him. He was far from all help, far out on the Mongolian steppes, surrounded by nothing but a rippling sea of grass and a sky fraught with wind.

An odd-looking face leaned into his field of vision, a Mongol, but he had something on his head, antlers; he looked like some sort of weird hybrid, a dragon, was Jonas’s first thought, no, a spirit creature, half-elk, half-man, a figure which began to move, dance in a circle around Jonas.

He was ill, dangerously ill, had been suddenly stricken, something to do with his head, his brain maybe, an inflammation of his most vital organ, deep in a foreign country. He was afraid, and yet not. His body had been invaded by worms, ribbons that slithered around, wove in and out of one another, ribbons that slowly tipped him over into an abstract state, a reality in which undulating patterns took over from the known world. ‘Help,’ he cried, or whispered, or thought.

He tried to pull himself together. He recognized the dancer. It was Buddha. He had to hold on to that thought. Buddha. And Mongolia.

Only the day before, everything had been fine. Not just fine. Wonderful. Jonas and Buddha had been stretched out on the heights of Karakorum, as was their wont, peering down into the valley below. ‘Isn’t that a caravan we can see down there?’ Jonas might say. Buddha would gaze long and hard, as if listening for something on the wind, might pluck a blade of grass and proceed to chew on it: ‘No, I think it’s a procession of monks on their way to the temple,’ he would say at last. When Jonas strained his eyes he could catch a glint of gold from the roof of a temple in the distance.

They lay back on the grass and gazed up at the clouds, at the birds in flight, and listened to the sounds of the wind. They had all the time in the world and no particular plans. ‘There’s a good dragon flying over us today,’ said Buddha, meaning simply that the weather was nice, with clouds drifting by overhead. They were in the midst of a boundless space, with wide plains stretching out on all sides. From their ger fluttered a long, fringed pennant. Buddha lay there purring like a cat. Or a prayer wheel. Buddha was the only person Jonas knew who had this ability. He could curl up in a ball and be so content that he positively thrummed inside. And nowhere did Buddha feel happier than up here on the heights, on the steppes, in a landscape where the sky dominated one’s field of vision — if they were lucky it was breezy too; and the wind seemed to enhance Buddha’s sense of freedom and well-being. ‘Know what I like best about Mongolia?’ Jonas said. ‘You’d have to walk a hundred miles if you wanted to hang yourself.’

The day before, Jonas had dozed off for a while when they were lying like this, had not woken until Buddha was standing over him yelling, ‘Get up, lazybones, time to wrestle.’ Buddha was ten years old but already strong. They wrestled Mongolian-style. The first one whose knee or elbow, back or shoulder touched the ground had lost. Jonas allowed a puffing, panting Buddha to bring him down, whereupon Buddha proceeded to run around, whooping triumphantly. ‘Hey, stop all that jumping about and come and help me get things ready for the night,’ Jonas said, wanting to calm him down.

They crawled into the ger , through a door facing due south. They always carried a compass. A ger was supposed to be an image of the universe — the ancient universe, that is — with the stove, like the sun, at its centre. There was a place for everything; Jonas and Buddha slept in the area that faced west. To the north lay the sacred objects; Buddha usually brought a box full of different bits and pieces or maybe a picture. On this occasion it was a portrait of Agnetha Fältskog from the pop group ABBA.

All of this had originally been Jonas’s idea. Or so he thought. Ever since Buddha was a baby, whenever his brother had been taken along to social gatherings, it had vexed Jonas to see how people automatically looked down on him. As Buddha grew older and began to display what were, by his own standards, rare gifts, they had hatched a plan. In any given situation Jonas might ask the others present if they knew what a dell was, or a gurtum — and naadam , ladies and gentlemen, what might that be? The others could not, of course, answer. But Buddha, aged seven or eight, could hold forth for minutes on end, describing a dell , a national costume in a variety of different styles, the trimmings, the nine buttons, the bright blue, red, yellow and green hues; or explain in detail what took place during the naadam festival, not least the horse-riding competition. This soon put paid to that slightly indulgent, benign attitude; and Buddha was treated, if not exactly the same as everyone else, then certainly with a new respect, not to say awe. And awe was, after all, better than condescension or that unappetizing blend of pity and curiosity which reduced Buddha to a cute, innocent mascot.

As time went on, Jonas and Buddha created a common domain that was theirs alone; they were both citizens of an imaginary Mongolia, ‘land of the brave, proud men’. As often as possible they would take themselves off to Lillomarka to indulge their Mongolian inclinations: to be nomads on a boundless plain, nomads who loved the wind and the freedom found under those clear skies, who would quite spontaneously compare sheep viewed against a lush pasture with pearls on green velvet. Over his bed in the new villa, just a stone’s throw from Solhaug and their old flat, Buddha had a large-scale map of Mongolia and across this they made many an arduous trek before he went to sleep. In due course, Buddha memorized the names of most of the country’s towns and provinces, mountains and rivers. He was also one of the very few people in Norway who knew the meaning of such utterly elementary words as ‘khalka’, ‘tugrik’ and ‘urga’. Jonas never could tell how much of all this his brother understood, but he certainly remembered it, used the words properly — it could of course have been put down to his marvellous gift for mimicry, which also made him an uncommonly good ABBA imitator — his renderings of numbers such as ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’ were quite priceless. Buddha could well be called an expert in his field. Jonas took a certain pleasure in this: that, in one area at least, his brother knew more than most people. The strange thing was that Jonas, too, became captivated by this universe, as if it were an outer land, an Outer Norway, just beyond the boundaries of the realm in the same way as there was an Outer Mongolia. Jonas had, in fact, known it from the start: his brother possessed valuable gifts into which it would be difficult for him, Jonas, to gain any insight.

Jonas lies in his sleeping bag, bathed in sweat, understanding everything and understanding nothing, both remembering and not remembering where he is. He is burning up inside his skull. His heart is beating irregularly. His thoughts are in a whirl, drifting with the clouds, causing him to forget that he may be mortally ill, that this could be the end — if, that is, the figure dancing round him, the figure with the antlers on its head, cannot save him. ‘Help,’ he cries, whispers, thinks.

Who was the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life? It was Buddha. Of this I am in no doubt, Professor: it was Buddha.

Over a number of years in the mid-seventies, Jonas and Buddha created a little slice of Mongolia for themselves in the heart of Lillomarka. They would strike off from the forest track down at Breisjø Lake, cut through the ruins of the monastery in Bispedalen — which turned, as if by magic, into a lamasery filled with the sounds of murmured prayers and resounding gongs — and continued up the slope until they reached the top of Revlikollen. Being so high up, on what was, in those days, a bare hilltop, gave them a pretty good illusion of standing on a mountain plateau, and it was easy to make believe that they were not far from Karakorum, site of Genghis Khan’s old camp, the very heart of the world. Here they pitched their tent — not a felt ger , unfortunately, but a tent all the same. It was no coincidence that Jonas should have written, around this time, a singular and controversial study paper on the architecture of tents. ‘I do believe you could have stirred up a minor revolt among the Bedouins with that,’ commented one of his tutors at the School of Architecture.