Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Axel was sitting in the corridor when Jonas arrived at the hospital; distractedly running his fingers through his hair, as if trying to straighten out his black curls. Viktor was still unconscious, undergoing clinical tests in Admissions. The X-rays of his head had revealed nothing. They could hope. But both Axel and Jonas knew that a head was every bit as fragile as an electric bulb. They sat wordlessly side by side. Jonas rubbed his forehead; Axel fiddled with his hair. A kindly doctor asked them to come back the next day. Axel had called Viktor’s mother. She was on her way to Lillehammer.

At the guesthouse the chunk of ice had almost melted away. Jonas told Axel about the earring, but when he looked for it, it was gone. ‘Don’t kid around with me now,’ Axel said.

After a week Viktor regained consciousness, but that was all. He said nothing. He was somewhere else. Even though he could dress himself, could walk, could eat, he still needed help. He was there, and yet not. There was no reason why it should have been so, but so it was. He was a mystery to medical science, as they said. Jonas took it hard, even harder than Axel. Six months later, when he went to Timbuktu, there were those who said it was because he felt so bad about Axel.

Axel eventually wound up in an institution in Oslo, and it was here that Jonas visited him regularly, year after year. ‘Behind hill the monk’s bell/borne on the wind./Sail passed here in April;/may return in October/Boat fades in silver; slowly.’ No response. Viktor sat utterly motionless, staring into space. An extinguished light bulb.

Ironically enough, Viktor’s mother had bought him a Stressless Royal. Here, in this chair, Viktor spent the greater part of his life from then on. All he did was eat and watch TV, nothing else. He, who had never looked at a television before, who was never still, sat there like an inert king. One might almost say he had become the perfect Norwegian, Jonas thought. The quintessential spectator. Who saw and yet did not see. Who could watch anything at all without it making any impression. An exponent of wu-wei , non-action. And even now, ten years after the accident, Viktor looked as young as ever; he might still have been in his third year at high school, about to sit his university Prelim. It was true: Viktor had gained eternal life but at what a price.

‘Do you remember Master Tung-hsüan-tzû and the art of love?’ Jonas said.

No glow in the eyes before him, eyes which had sparkled when Viktor had told Jonas about the Taoist metaphors for the different ways of thrusting into a vagina — like a wild horse leaping into a river, like a sparrow pecking up rice in a field, like large rocks sinking into the sea, or like the wind filling a sail — images which showed Jonas, as Daniel’s examples had done, that the act of love posed the greatest challenge to the imagination, or was it the other way round?

‘You know Svein Rossland, my old teacher, knew Niels Bohr?’ Jonas said. ‘They worked together in Copenhagen.’

No response. For the first few years, Jonas had talked a lot about this, hoping that it would ring a bell somewhere inside Viktor’s head, hoping to find a switch that might turn him on.

‘I often said that Pluto had to have a moon, but everybody laughed at me,’ Jonas said. ‘Now they’ve discovered it, the Americans.’

No response.

In a final attempt to rouse his friend, and one that was about as dangerous as tampering with an unexploded bomb, Jonas asked, ‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’

No response.

After the accident, after the Prelim, after Timbuktu and after national service, Jonas started at Oslo University. Jonas suspected that he might have chosen to study astrophysics because he wanted to learn more about the universe, that universe which causes two people to swap places, then makes a chunk of ice drop out of the sky. He wanted to learn the ways of the universe — or its Tao, as Viktor would have put it — and mankind’s place in this design.

‘Comes then snow scur on the river/And a world is covered with jade.’

Why wrestle with mystifying chains of cause and effect? There were times in his life when Jonas Wergeland was less concerned with questioning how the universe came into existence than with charting his own existence. As, for example, on one of the few trips he made together with his wife, when they managed no more on their first evening than to take a taxi across the bridge and ride up to the restaurant at the top of the Galata Tower where, thanks to Margrete’s whispered conversation with the mâitre d’, they were given a table by one of the windows overlooking the old town. And as Jonas was sitting there with his glass of raki and the taste of fried clams in his mouth, waiting for a helping of osmanli köftesi — recommended by Margrete — it struck him that he could have left for home the next morning, had he been an ordinary tourist, that is, because this, the sight before him, had to be the paramount and most enduring image of Istanbul: the silhouettes, the Oriental skyline — an almost stupefyingly beautiful prospect, triggering a myriad of associations. He ran his gaze over the array of domes and minarets and thought of Aunt Laura; thought how he was sitting in a city where Europe and Asia, and possibly also the medieval and the modern world, intertwined. And, in the midst of all this, as his eye fell on master architect Sinan’s massive, nigh-on tumescent, Süleymaniye Mosque, he felt a twinge of guilt because it reminded him of a dream, a calling which he had forsaken.

‘I think I like the Blue Mosque best,’ he said, his eyes flitting over the floodlit buildings on the other side of the water.

‘Just because it has six minarets?’ said Margrete. ‘You’re like a little boy. Going for the battleship with the most guns.’

Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? His travels had something to do with memory, with visiting places that were a part of him but which he could not recall. Jonas Wergeland always set off on a journey with a suspicion that he was, in fact, going home. And when they were making love in the hotel room in the old town, not very far from the large, covered bazaar, it seemed to him that Margrete was making love to him in a different way, as if she were bent on urging his imagination to follow new and eccentric paths, with the result that, afterwards, when he thought of the mosques, it suddenly struck him that they looked rather like giant crabs, either that or Samurai helmets flanked by the tips of lances. And this stroke of invention could not simply be ascribed to the shabby, though elegant and exotic interior — the ceramic tiles in the bathroom with their reproduction of a famed Iznik design, the bunch of tulips on the marble bedside table — which could have made him feel that one of the recurring dreams of his youth had come true and he was actually spending a night in the harem with one of the sultan’s slaves. There was something about this city itself, about making love here, which filled him with a rare and weighty awareness of being ‘in place’, as if he had completed an invisible circle. And as they lay there listening to the muezzins proclaiming the hour of late evening prayers Margrete asked him why he was so pensive, why he lay there smiling in the darkness, and he said, ‘Because I have roots here.’ For so it is: not only the sins of the fathers but also the blissful experiences of the parents are visited on the sons.

Neither the Blue Mosque nor the Topkapi was at the top of Jonas’s list of sights to see, however. The following day he took Margrete to a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn, the narrow inlet separating the old part of the city from the new; to the Pera Palas, a hotel built to accommodate passengers off the Orient Express in the days when Istanbul was the most cosmopolitan of all cities. Margrete laughed at his eagerness, thought he meant to show her the suite in which Kemal Atatürk or Mata Hari had stayed. ‘Why did we come here?’ she asked out of politeness. ‘Because…’ Jonas said and left a lengthy pause for dramatic effect, as they stood there, directly across from the pale-green, cubic building. ‘Because my parents once stayed here.’