Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

I really ought to make it quite clear, here, since it could be misinterpreted, that it was not escapism, all this, but a form of communication. Or an advanced sort of game. Not only that, but it was something these two had conceived of together. Which is to say: to begin with Jonas thought that Buddha had picked it up from him, from all the stories he had told his brother over the years, about the uses of such curious inventions as the pole lasso or the sweat scraper, or about camel nose pegs and the laborious process of felt-making. But as time went on Jonas began to wonder. Because Buddha reacted in an unaccountable manner to some things. When just a little boy he had evinced an unusual fondness, not to say passion, for some coral and turquoise stones at Aunt Laura’s flat. It was all they could do to get them away from him. Only later did Jonas discover that stones like these were used in Mongolian jewellery. Another time, or rather lots of times, Buddha was to be found sitting in some green spot, arranging a circle of stones around himself. Every now and again Jonas would count the stones: there were always 108, neither more nor less. And the first time Buddha used chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, he — this boy who had fumbled for so long with knives and forks — ate perfectly with them, as if he had never done anything else. And who could explain his astonishing way with horses? Not to mention his talent for archery?

In the evenings, after long, hard days spent milking, branding cattle, breaking in horses, whittling pieces of wood into horse-head violins and so on, they would lie in the tent and eat juicy lamb chops — it had to be sheep meat — cooked in a frying pan over the primus stove in the centre and drink kefir from a thermos — kefir was the closest they could get to the Mongolians’ fermented mare’s milk. ‘Have some more arkhi ,’ Jonas might say before pouring kefir into Buddha’s little wooden bowl. Other meals consisted mainly of yellow cheeses: Gouda, Cheddar, Emmenthal, although they weren’t dried like the Mongolian cheeses. They also drank tea, tea mixed with a little butter and salt and new milk.

‘Tell me the story about Basaman,’ Buddha would say, as they lay like this in the tent, regaling themselves. And for the hundredth time Jonas told him the tale of how, in 1936, Basaman the shaman from Solon was killed by a Japanese locomotive when he attempted, a mite optimistically, to stop it. Alternatively, Jonas might tell of the time when Dölgöre the shaman magicked all of the spirits over which he had control into two Russian padlocks. At such moments Buddha would lie fingering the animal bones he had found, raising them to his lips as if they were flutes, or contemplating the elk’s antlers that he had been hanging on to for so long.

They had made many such treks across the Mongolian steppes. The previous day had been no different in that respect. But this morning Jonas had woken with a fever, and it was getting worse and worse; he didn’t know what was wrong, only that it was something to do with his head, at the very worst meningitis, something serious, something that progressed fast and could be fatal. ‘Help,’ he managed to say to Buddha, or whisper, or think.

He had slipped into a delirium, slipped down among sinuous shapes, lay reeling in his sleeping bag with his head sticking out of the tent opening, above and below the clouds at one and the same time. Buddha kept his head; first he sat for a while drumming with a stick on a saucepan. From when Buddha was very small, Jonas had remarked on his brother’s way of playing his toy drums: monotonously, mysteriously, as if he struck them not to make a noise like other children but to generate silence. And now, as he drummed on the saucepan, Buddha had gone into a sort of trance, had been transformed, this much Jonas grasped. Buddha fixes the elk antlers on his head, gets to his feet and starts to dance, even puts a stick between his legs so it looks as if he is riding a horse, dances, or rides around Jonas, not Buddha himself that is, but this thing inside Buddha, this thing of which Jonas knows nothing, this thing that hails from other, outer, spheres; and Jonas becomes aware, after an hour, possibly two, when Buddha is once more sitting quietly by his side, holding his hand, of how the fever slowly loosens its grip, of how his thoughts begin to run along their normal lines, of how the breeze suddenly feels cool and refreshing on his brow. ‘Thanks,’ he says, or whispers, or thinks.

Jonas never found out whether this nasty turn in the woods — or up on the Mongolian steppes, depending on your point of view — could have proved fatal. And it was never mentioned between the two boys. Jonas suspected that Buddha had saved his life that day. Not that it made much difference, really. Buddha had saved his life anyway. When you get right down to it, there was only one true hero in Jonas Wergeland’s life, and that hero’s name was Buddha.

Which reminds me: I must tell you about the attack in Istanbul, but first I need to recount the tale of the Three Wise Men. You see, Jonas himself once had a go at being a shaman. Not by dancing but by reading. For even though Jonas Wergeland only rarely opened a book, there was a period — a long period — when he used to sit with the same thick book in his hands. And he wasn’t reading to himself, either; he was reading aloud, to another person, for the ears of that person who sat, or as good as lay, in a chair. And despite the fact that his companion’s eyes were fixed on a blank television screen, Jonas read: ‘For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:/Rain; empty river; a voyage,/Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight,’ he read and scanned the face opposite him, a face that remained as immobile as ever, eyes that never blinked.

Jonas Wergeland was sitting in an institution in Oslo, reading to one of his best friends. He read aloud and at length. Jonas Wergeland was not a good reader, he recited in a flat monotone, softly, nonetheless he read, read with a dogged determination, from an endless poem, laying stress on, nay, instilling hope into, every word. As far as I know, this was the only time when Jonas Wergeland read because he felt that it really mattered, although he did not understand one word of what he was reading. He would read from this weighty tome, read these, to him, incomprehensible stanzas, for decades, at least once a month. Words such as: ‘Under the cabin roof was one lantern./The reeds are heavy; bent/and the bamboos speak as if weeping.’

Jonas put down the book and stared deep into Viktor’s pupils, as if hoping for some sign of life, much as coals can sometimes give off a faint glow just when you think the fire has gone out. ‘I wish I could have brought you a bottle of aquavit — a bottle of Gilde’s Non Plus Ultra,’ he says. ‘But it’s not allowed, you see.’ No answer. Never any answer. Black coals.

‘I’m married now,’ Jonas said. ‘D’you remember I told you about Margrete, the one who dumped me in seventh grade?’ he said. ‘We have a baby,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to be doing a programme for television soon — got any good ideas?’ Jonas refused to give up, always spent a long time talking to Viktor, pausing briefly every now and again, as if listening to his friend’s replies: ‘You were right,’ he might say. ‘ Pet Sounds is a more important album than Sergeant Pepper .’ Short pause. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it: as an ideology, Merckxism could definitely take over from Marxism.’ He may also have endeavoured to develop his argument, although not, of course, the way Viktor Harlem himself would have done it — if those coals had not been extinguished.