Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The big breakthrough came on May 17, on the morning of Constitution Day itself, after they had been running amok with firecrackers for hours, destroying diverse bike handlebars and postboxes, as well as scorching the stockings of some of the mothers quite badly with the more capricious ‘jumping-jacks’, which shot dangerously this way and that — exploding, as they did, several times. Jonas attended the traditional ceremony in the Memorial Grove, where the Grorud School girls’ choir arranged themselves on the steps of the church and sang — at the top of their voices, as they say — ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, no more, no less, and there stood Henny F., wreathed by green birch leaves, along with the other girls in their thin white sweaters and red skirts and, not least, red bonnets which looked so totally out of place and yet utterly irresistible, especially on Henny F., and they sang, they sang so beautifully that Jonas felt his body go numb with delight. For there was something mystical about songs sung in harmony, he had discovered this for himself in first grade, when their teacher had taught them to sing ‘All the Birds’ in two-part harmony. With tireless patience she had taken half of the class out into the corridor and rehearsed the second part with them one by one. And when they sang this song that they had been practising and practising, ‘All the Birds’, for the first time altogether, it went surprisingly well, it didn’t merely sound twice as beautiful, it sounded ten times as beautiful, so beautiful that it made Jonas’s scalp tingle. This was an aesthetic milestone and a preparation for the day when Jonas would discover how much finer things became when you simply wove two of them together. But here was the girls’ choir, not the world’s best girls’ choir perhaps, but they were singing in harmony, singing ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, a song Jonas had heard many times but which now, because of Henny F., standing there with a look of such fervour on her face, all-aglow in the midst of the group of girls, Henny F. with her throat straining eagerly and Jonas’s eyes fixed on her larynx, sensing as he did that this was the seat of her magic, acquired the semblance of pure beauty and gave Jonas a musical experience that not even Wagner at his most grandiose and extravagant could top. Standing there in the Memorial Grove, Jonas felt a pressure on his spine, felt something seizing hold of him body and soul, even though he had not yet deciphered the signals from the dragon-horn button he had swallowed as a little boy; and for the first time — or the second if one counts Margrete, a relationship which Jonas himself had pushed to the back of his mind — he understood that girls were different, that what he was now feeling, this longing, this throbbing, all-consuming desire, was something other than the more limited randiness triggered by Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pneumatic allurements. This was not the ABC of Sex; this was the Alpha and Omega of love.

He started walking home from school with Henny F., liked to hear her talk, this in itself enough: her voice caressing his ears, making him go all funny inside. Although these were the days of colourful, almost psychedelic, Flower-Power garb, she often wore more theatrical clothes than other girls, as if for her the world was a stage. On one occasion she invited him to her house, and he was introduced to her father, a violinist who, as one might expect, looked kindly on a son of the organist from Grorud Church. Jonas also got to see her room where, apart from a couple of diplomas for ski jumping, the walls were completely covered in pictures of pop groups cut from the countless music magazines that flourished during these years: groups Jonas knew next to nothing about, even though many of the same pictures were also stuck up on Daniel’s wall — and on the ceiling — at home. He noticed that the Hollies were much in evidence, a group which — as I’m sure even you are aware, Professor — was, not surprisingly, particularly strong on the vocals. She played him some singles: ‘Look Through Any Window’, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, ‘Bus Stop’, songs in which Allan Clark, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash created their distinctive harmonies, and to which Henny F. added an upper part, even higher than Graham Nash’s — no small achievement, had Jonas but known it. ‘Maybe you’ll be a star too one day,’ he said and pointed to a picture of Cilla Black sporting long, false eyelashes, ‘I mean, you’re so musical.’ She shook her head shyly: ‘Who me? No!’

Nevertheless she blossomed under his importunate attentions. To the surprise of her friends, at the eighth grade end-of-term party, to which their parents were also invited, she did a turn with another girl; they played nylon-stringed guitars and sung one of the year’s big hits, ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, in two-part harmony. For this they reaped, not surprisingly, a spontaneous burst of applause with lots of cheering, whistling and stamping of feet. Very few could have suspected, however, that at a later date this same girl — and this may not be entirely unconnected with her having known Jonas — would become one of Norway’s greatest singers — a lyric soprano, a diva, so they said — who spent part of each year abroad and had engagements on all the world’s most famous stages. Jonas stayed close to her throughout the evening. She was wearing an eye-catching and rather unusual mini-dress of deep-red velvet. In the crush he ran a stealthy finger over her shoulder, saw how it left a trail, like a signature.

On one of the first days of the summer holidays Jonas invited Henny F. to go orienteering with him. In a move to encourage people to try a different form of exercise, the Grorud Athletics Society orienteering club had set up a series of control points in Lillomarka. If you visited a certain number of control points in the course of the season, you won a badge. For Jonas this was, however, only an excuse; he borrowed Daniel’s map and compass and there they were, Jonas and Henny F., on a hot summer’s day in the woods, both tense with an expectancy that had nothing to do with orienteering.

Jonas wasn’t particularly handy with a map and compass and at one point, after finding five control points and punching their card amid rather exaggerated whoops of glee, they lost their way somewhere in the hilly terrain between Breisjøen and Alunsjøen Lakes: or rather, they had wandered on to the top of an out-of-the-way hill, a small mountain almost, where there should have been a control point, but where there was no control point, whereupon Jonas bombastically declared that this hill was not on the map, that they found themselves, in other words, in an uncharted region of Norway.

Henny F. has nothing against this. She removes her rucksack, pulls out a large chequered travelling rug and unfurls it, as one might cast a net, onto the grass. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s soak up the sun for a while.’ They are in a totally secluded spot and she promptly proceeds to take off her clothes, lies down in just her bra and panties, cotton garments with a pattern that gives them the look of a bikini. Jonas strips off too, sits down beside her in his underpants, which all of a sudden seem far too small. Both are pale-skinned.

‘What sort of sound does a dragon make?’ Jonas finds himself asking.

She turns and looks at him. Says not a word. Just looks.

‘That’s right,’ Jonas says. ‘No sound.’

He fell to studying the terrain, appearing terribly interested in something, placed the compass on the map and took his bearings, sat like this until Henny F. swept them off his lap with a resoluteness, bordering on resentfulness, that surprised him. ‘Forget that,’ she said, as if making a protest against all attempts to put the world in order at this moment. Jonas stayed perfectly still, forced himself not to glance down at Henny F., lying there next to him with her eyes closed, an outstretched girl’s body clad only in a few square inches of cotton. Jonas sat in a piece of uncharted Norway, feeling something he had not felt since Margrete: that he was positively shuddering with desire. Or confusion. Or bewilderment. If he had not realized it before, he saw now that behind all the fine theories about reason and intellect, human beings consisted to just as great an extent of chemicals and electricity, that people could at times be turned, at the push of a button, into a factory buzzing with hormones, all wilfully going their own way.