Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Not many couples from Grorud visited Istanbul in the early fifties, but Åse and Haakon Hansen did. And it was mainly Jonas’s mother’s doing. Åse was an avid reader of detective novels, and there was one very good reason why Istanbul held such a particular appeal for her. It is true that Jonas came from a more or less bookless home, but that was only because these paperbacks, most of them in English, never made it onto any bookshelf; they came and they went, leaving no trace — the majority of them were of course borrowed. Most notably during the run-up to the Easter break, true to a singular Norwegian tradition for reading crime novels over this particular holiday, his mother would gather together a pile of dog-eared English books with garish covers — as if inspired by the Church’s gory Easter story; as if in need of a secular counterweight, so to speak. For a long time as a small boy Jonas felt that the Crimea would have to be the perfect spot for Norwegians to spend the Easter holidays.

One of his mother’s favourite writers was Agatha Christie, and of all her books she liked Murder on the Orient Express the best. So when — thanks to Uncle Lauritz the pilot and his connections with the newly formed SAS airline — she was offered the chance for her and Haakon to fly to Istanbul, she jumped at it. To cap it all they were to be put up at the Pera Palas hotel, where Agatha Christie had written the aforementioned book. Although the timing was not of the best, his mother insisted on making the trip — heartily supported by Aunt Laura, who offered to look after Rakel and Daniel, the latter of whom was still being bottle-fed. And I’m sure you can tell where this is leading, Professor.

His parents had been given a room on the fourth floor with a view of the Golden Horn above the Atatürk Bridge and the Fatih Mehmet mosque, the mosque of the Conqueror himself, sitting dead centre on the hill on the other side. They had never said anything, but Jonas had worked it out for himself: ‘I must have been conceived in the Pera Palas Hotel,’ he told Margrete exultantly and drew her through the dark wooden doors into a hotel where, though it had lost something of its lustre, one could still catch a whiff of bygone grandeur, not least if one peeked into the banqueting hall just off the lobby: like something out a dream with its pillars in two sorts of pale-brown marble and a cupola clad with wood panelling inset with latticed windows. ‘Imagine being granted the gift of life right here,’ he said. But when Margrete tried to lead him round the side of the reception desk and over to the ancient, openwork wooden lift to see Agatha Christie’s room on the fourth floor, he would not go; instead he dragged her into the Orient Express Bar where they found a table next to the octagonal aquarium in the centre. To see the fourth floor, where his parents had also stayed, the prospect of the Conqueror’s mosque, would be going too far, it would be a form of sacrilege, like poking one’s nose into the mystery of life itself, much as today’s genetic scientists are doing. And besides, Jonas’s own feelings on the matter were a mite ambivalent. Both because a book, even a bad book, could prompt a person to travel to a distant country — hence the reason, perhaps, that Jonas, throughout his life mistrusted books so — and because he disliked the thought of being conceived, to all intents and purposes, out of the heady thrill induced by pulp fiction; of being not highborn, but lowborn.

As they sat in their armchairs in the Orient Express Bar, surrounded by terracotta walls covered in Islamic ceramics, each with a cup of Turkish coffee in front of them, he toyed with the idea of staying here, on this spot where Europe and Asia seemed to lie fondling one another. He had a vision of the exquisite drama which must have been enacted in the brass bed in his parents’ room, possibly even on the oriental rug with which he knew every room to be furnished, this act of love that had produced him, Jonas Wergeland. And in a way it fitted: there was something of the European about his mother and something of the Asian about his father, such an intertwining had to — was bound to — give rise to something extraordinary. This he liked, could not hear the name of the Golden Horn without feeling that it was in some way connected with his father, that his father must have had ‘a golden horn’ on that very night, since it had expelled the spermatozoa which fertilized his mother’s egg, thus tying the first knot on the carpet that would be his life. In olden days the area on this side of the Golden Horn was known as Pera — which means ‘the other side’. He, Jonas, had therefore come into being ‘on the other side’. He sat in a bar in Istanbul, in the hotel of his conception, and hugged the notion of being an outsider. Because, in case you haven’t yet realized it, Professor, Jonas Wergeland had an almost pathological need to feel different.

Is this, then, where the story of his jealousy begins?

Immediately afterwards, as they were strolling down to the harbour on the Bosphorus to watch the people fishing and the ferries coming and going, with the mosques straight ahead of them again, Jonas was seized by a sudden euphoria. He had come into existence between two continents. Suddenly it came to him: that was why he had been so drawn to that peach as a boy — because it belonged to him, a child of the Orient. It was as if Jonas had suddenly been presented with the explanation for his feel for mosaics, for ornamentation. From then on he would never have any trouble understanding the criticism of his television series Thinking Big : that the individual programmes were not all that special in themselves, that the impact derived from the element of repetition, which caused these twenty-odd programmes to form such an intriguing pattern. And wasn’t the television picture, if magnified, a mosaic of coloured dots? ‘ Ich bin ein Byzantiner ,’ Jonas cried, his words directed at the panorama before him, with something of the rhetorical fervour once evinced by the blessed John F. Kennedy in another city.

A couple of days later, still filled with this euphoria, this heaven-sent euphoria, he was strolling with Margrete along the main street, Istiklal Caddesi. On impulse, just beyond Galatsaray Square, he turned down a side street and found himself in a stinking, pulsating fish market that ran out into a maze of narrow lanes and alleyways; at this time, early in the day, it was surprisingly quiet. Margrete had stayed behind in a shop to look for a present for Kristin. Jonas sauntered on, marvelling again, for the umpteenth time, at Margrete, this person whom he loved with an almost blasphemous passion, with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. The previous day they had been standing inside the Great Church of Hagia Sofia, contemplating the light that appeared to come more from within than without, looking up at the dome which everyone said appeared to hang down from heaven, to float in midair. Jonas was gazing open-mouthed at this sight, utterly enraptured — for one thing because the dome seemed to be wheeling round, spun by the light — when Margrete nudged him in the side and said: ‘Let’s get out of this geometric bunker, I feel like I’m inside the stomach of a giant beetle.’ He could not make her out. À propos Kristin — à propos conception, come to that — he remembered the day when Margrete had stood before him and announced: ‘I am with child.’ What an anachronistic way to put it. With child! And yet so like Margrete. As if she quite naturally wished to elevate these tidings into something wonderfully solemn and Biblical.

Jonas was halfway down the narrow back street, a curving downhill slope, an alley where washing was hung to dry on lines stretched out high above, beneath cockeyed television aerials, and the air reeked of cooking oil and rotten melons. His interest had been caught by some dilapidated oriel windows jutting out from the house walls. Suddenly there’s a man standing right in front of him, asking Jonas, quite politely really, to hand over his cash. A knife hovering dangerously close to Jonas’s stomach makes it clear that he is not fooling around. Jonas remains surprisingly calm, despite a horrid contraction of his testicles. In a way, it seems only right and proper that he should be confronted with crime in some shape or form in this city, bearing in mind his mother’s motives in visiting it. In any case, something about this man tells Jonas he’d better not try anything, that this is one of the Beyoglu quarter’s shadier sons. He takes out his wallet and promptly hands the man all his paper money. The man glances at it, seems satisfied, is about to stick it in his pocket when he notices one banknote that is not Turkish — a Norwegian thousand-kroner note. He studies it, the reproduction of Peder Balke’s dramatic painting of Vardø lighthouse, turns it over, lowers the hand clutching the knife. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks in excellent English. ‘Norway,’ says Jonas. ‘Who is this?’ he says. ‘Henrik Ibsen,’ Jonas says. ‘What about Knut Hamsun — is he on a banknote too?’ the man says. Jonas shakes his head. The man’s face suddenly darkens, he points the knife at Jonas. ‘Are you telling me that Hamsun, one of the greatest writers in the world, doesn’t appear on your banknotes? What sort of a country do you call that?’ he says, then launches into what sounds like a virulent lecture, or indictment, delivered at such a speed that Jonas doesn’t manage to catch it all — partly, of course, because he is so terrified, because of the knife and because of a thief who, instead of hightailing it out of there, proceeds to discuss which writers deserve to appear on Norwegian banknotes. This latter aspect actually scares him most of all, since he takes it as a sign that the guy must be stark raving mad and capable of absolutely anything.