Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

As the man was finishing a harangue on what an indelible impression Hamsun’s novel Hunger had made on him, a poor man from the slums of Istanbul — Jonas thought he could almost see tears in the mugger’s eyes — Margrete came walking down the alley. Jonas turned his head: ‘Get out of here,’ he hissed as loudly as he could. ‘He’s got a knife.’ Margrete did not react, calmly strolled straight up to them. This seemed to throw the man too. He crammed the money into his pocket, shifted his focus from Jonas to Margrete, even lunged at her with the knife. It all happened very fast, but later Jonas tried to recall those seconds, which gave him yet another reason to marvel at his wife. For as the man darted towards her, jabbing with his hand, she sidestepped, and Jonas seemed to recall that it had been a graceful movement, more like a dance step, backwards; a little jink which stood, in his memory, as a greater feat than the hold that she suddenly took on the man’s arm and the way she positioned her body in relation to his, in order, the next instant, lightly, as if it cost her no effort, to hurl him through the air, positively send him flying — as Jonas saw it — while still keeping a firm grip on his arm, thus forcing him to let go of the knife, with a hideous shriek of pain betraying that she had in fact hurt him in the process, and all of this before he hit the ground with a thud and, hurt or no hurt, promptly scrambled to his feet and vanished with the same baffling suddenness as he had appeared.

Margrete took Jonas’s hand and, with a faint air of impatience, strode out of the alley, leaving the knife where it lay. ‘He took my money,’ Jonas said when they had turned the corner. ‘Who cares, it wasn’t that much, was it?’ she said. ‘Come on in here, I think I’ve found something for Kristin — look at this lovely brass dolls’ tea-set!’

For the rest of the day, while walking round sunken palaces and subterranean mosques, the ruins of the city walls and aqueducts, in the spice bazaars and the mosaic museums, Jonas thought about Margrete, about how little he knew of her. Against his will, he recalled some of the rumours he had heard about the years when she was living abroad, as the daughter of a diplomat and later as a student: rumours he had tried to ignore, to suppress, but which had stuck to his subconscious nonetheless. What he had seen back there in the alley accorded with the story that, as a teenager, somewhere in the Far East, she had studied the martial arts. Occasionally in the summer he had noticed how, when she thought no one was looking, she would do what looked like callisthenics on the lawn, smooth, controlled movements, like a balancing act in slow motion. He had heard so many things, didn’t know what to believe. Not even of what she told him herself. Jonas walked around Istanbul with his mind in turmoil, a state which possibly mirrored the confusion of smells in the city streets: everything from mimosa, exhaust fumes and roasted nuts to the eternally rotating kebabs on the roadside stalls and every kind of fried fish. It was said that she had once written a wonderful book — someone had heard her read bits of it — the manuscript of which she had thrown away or lost, or burned and then scattered the ashes on the Ganges — accounts varied. Was it true that at one point she had had a pet snake? And had she really danced with a famous rock star, on the stage, during a concert? When he asked her about such things, she would laugh. ‘You’re just jealous,’ she would say. And she was right, that is exactly what he was. Because she was the sort of woman you saw, even in the heaving mass of bodies in front of a stage.

With Margrete you never knew what to expect. While Jonas wandered reverently around the Topkapi Palace, feasting his eyes on everything from Mohammed’s footprints in a stone to the beautiful doors of the harem, patterned with tortoiseshell and mother of pearl, Margrete was more interested in the guards and their tiny, crackling walkie-talkies and all the Turkish women with their covered heads: ‘Do you remember what sort of headscarf your mother used to wear?’ she would whisper to Jonas, as if all of this only served to remind her of Norway’s recent past.

It may have been in the harem itself that a troubling thought entered his head: all that talk about how sexually liberal she had been. ‘She just can’t get enough of it,’ someone had once said, a man whose teeth Jonas had only just managed to stop himself from knocking out. He had tried to close his ears to the snippets of information he had picked up, of other boyfriends she had had; talk of men who, literally or figuratively, would have cut off their ear lobes for her. Fragments which, when he put them together, formed a picture of a monster. He had been more alarmed than impressed by the little display she had given in the alley, feared that she might one day do to him what she had done to that thief. She’s downright dangerous, he told himself.

Jonas walked through a city on the border between two continents, teetering between doting admiration and a niggling sense of uncertainty. He couldn’t make her out. He found this blend of naivety and sophistication particularly confusing. She was an ingenuous reader, a bit like Axel; prepared to believe anything — this woman, a rational doctor who wrote articles for medical journals, could lie stretched out on the sofa, so absorbed in the plot of even the worst book that she would utter screams, cries of protest, cheers. Jonas hardly dared to go to the theatre with her; she always seemed on the verge of shouting at the actors, like a child almost falling of its seat in its excitement: ‘Watch out, the fox is right behind you!’ And yet she was such a woman of the world. Jonas had noticed with what aplomb and savoir-faire she had eaten all of the exotic dishes set before them in Istanbul — whether it was sucuk: fried garlic sausages, or a pilaff of lamb and almonds, or aubergines done in every conceivable way. Margrete’s nostrils quivered with delight when she cut into a börek, as if it were a lucky bag of aromas, and she could judge a square of freshly-baked baklava purely on its appearance: knew whether the syrup would ooze out if she pressed the paper-thin layers gently. Jonas could only shake his head at the ease, the poise, with which she made her way through the Kapali Carsi, the huge bazaar right next to the hotel, where the little domed roofs gave one the feeling of being inside a gigantic beehive. He followed her with his eyes as she stood amid glittering gold or soft falls of carpet, fragile alabaster or warlike swords, depending on which passage she happened to find herself in; he watched as she demonstrated the use of an astrolabe to the owner of an antique shop, taking it apart, disc by disc — an astrolabe! Jonas beheld her as though he were watching a film about a stranger: how, in another shop, she began to haggle lightly and laughingly over the price of a chessboard with Ottoman pieces of brass and copper, while the stallholder plied her with apple tea. To Jonas the place was a maze and a daunting one at that. To her, it was obviously a familiar world, one that she could read like the back of her hand; she seemed, in fact, to come to life, like a creature suddenly rediscovering its proper and much longed-for element. Something she could not find in Oslo, not in Norway. And what Jonas feared most of all: not with him.

On the plane home, with Margrete asleep in the seat next to him, a book lying open in her lap — a second-rate detective novel, Jonas guessed — he sat gazing out at the layer of cloud and thinking: I can never be good enough for her. I’m going to lose her. The optimism he had felt in the Pera Palas seemed to have deserted him. Just before they landed in Copenhagen he stole a glance at her again, with a love so desperately deep that it was almost like torture to him: If you leave me, I’ll kill you, he thought.