Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Rain streamed down the windowpanes, soundlessly. Buddha looked at him. He looked at Jonas in a new way. For a long time Buddha looked at his brother, deep into his face, right through his face.

Then he said it. So banal and yet so obvious: ‘Jonas,’ he said. Not all that clearly. His tongue rather in the way but clear enough all the same: ‘Jonas.’

Jonas tried later to describe what happened next. It was as if a landslide swept through him, he said, backwards, upwards, slowly. It was as if a dozen different emotions flowed through him, all shooting off in different directions, or were dispersed, leaving a huge hollow space in the centre, and then it all flowed back again, only this time as one feeling: warmth. An abundance of warmth.

All that hate, all that cursing, and Buddha’s first word was a name. A declaration of love.

Buddha was on his feet, stood with his arms wrapped around his big brother. Said it again, his name. The rain streamed down the windowpanes. The landscape outside was little more than a blur, glimpsed as if through a plastic bag full of water. Jonas cupped his hands around Buddha’s face. Had the whole world in his hands. He realized that he was crying. He could have been crying for some time, he didn’t know, he cried his eyes out, soundlessly. Filled with a sudden, all-pervading emotion he had not known that he owned, a quite inconceivable love that would surely endure everything, hope everything, move mountains and things still bigger. And the object of this incomprehensible love was the figure before him. The defenceless bundle that he hated so much.

Buddha stroked Jonas’s damp cheek with his finger. ‘Milk,’ he said. ‘Milk.’

It is no exaggeration to say that, not counting his parents and Kristin, in all his life Jonas Wergeland loved only person, and by that I mean with all his heart and without any ulterior motive: Buddha. Possibly because he had never hated anyone as fiercely either.

Buddha was a genius. A genius at love.

And I think I know why: Buddha was the product of a broken heart.

Now we have to tread warily, Professor, because this — the fateful consequences of that broken heart, I mean — constitutes a story that belongs elsewhere, though an imprudent narrator might have told it here, not realizing that such an artificial splicing would put the whole account of Jonas Wergeland’s life at risk. One tiny alteration can make all the difference; Buddha is living proof of this.

At this juncture, however, another tale impinges, so strongly that I can positively feel how it — physically — grabs hold of the last sentences above. Ergo, the following story is also about love, or about what, for a long time, Jonas mistook for love.

In the latter half of the seventies, during the years when he was studying architecture, Jonas often visited the Museum of Cultural History on the island of Bygdøy, to sketch the historic buildings on exhibit there. He had a peculiar weakness for this place, always felt, as he passed through the tunnel-like entranceway with its ticket windows, that he was entering another zone, a zone in which several ages existed simultaneously — rather like the three levels of the human brain. And what he felt most in touch with, as he strolled among old buildings reeking of creosote, sketching a cog joint from Numedal here, a corner post from Hallingdal there, was his reptile self, the oldest level of his consciousness. Given the choice he would have said he liked the Setesdal farmstead best, possibly because it was situated close to the entrance, or because it had the look of a street, with a row of buildings on either side of the path — either that or it could have had something to do with the notion of Setesdal as somewhere so totally cut off, the thought that here he had found the perfect picture of Norway and the nation’s history.

That afternoon, a weekday in early summer with sunshine and scudding clouds, he happened to wander into the Åmlid farmhouse, into a room that was surprisingly cool. There were no windows in the house; the only light fell through the smoke hole in the ceiling. He stood with his feet on hard-packed earth, studying the open hearth in the centre of the room, trying to imagine all the smoke that must collect in the room when a fire was burning. The ceiling beams were completely blackened. This was how people had lived in the Middle Ages — although in Setesdal, because it was such an out-of-the way spot, people had lived liked this until well into the nineteenth century. Jonas could not rid himself of the thought that, in their minds, many Norwegians were still as cut off from the rest of the world.

An elderly couple, Danish pensioners, climbed over the high threshold and a guide, a girl whom Jonas had not noticed, stepped out of the shadows clad in folk costume. Jonas stayed where he was and listened to the way in which she explained to the Danes about the gjøya , a thick pole suspended over the hearth on which to hang pots. ‘As you can see,’ she said, pointing, ‘the pole is shaped like a horse, because on the farm the horse was regarded as a fertility symbol.’ Jonas saw how she glanced in his direction, giving him the once-over even as she went on talking, showing the Danish tourists how the pole pivoted on a huge wooden hinge. One of her eyebrows sat higher than the other, as if in constant surprise.

Once they were alone she walked over to him: ‘I know you,’ she said. To begin with, due to the respectful look in her eye, he thought she had mistaken him for someone else, that this was a variant on the Samoan incident. ‘We went to the same school,’ she said. Her voice was commanding but pleasant. Jonas fixed his eyes on a corner, thought of cog joints, thought of the perfect way of fitting wooden logs together. As if she felt it was time to switch from defence to attack, she reminded him of something he had apparently said once, during a discussion with the Young Socialists in the schoolyard, something to the effect that war could be limited because it was merely the continuation of politics, albeit by other means. She was not to know that this was based on a quotation, the only brief passage from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War that he had read and memorized. ‘I’ve thought a lot about that and decided that I don’t agree,’ she said.

Recognition was slowly dawning on Jonas; he remembered that her father was in some top post in the government. He also recalled something about a conspicuous scar on her neck, looked for and found it even in the gloom. She had been in a parallel class to his; they had met at a few parties — he even remembered seeing her in folk costume at a May 17 breakfast.

He had wondered at this, a city girl with a fondness for wearing the traditional bunad. And here, in the gloomy Åmlid farmhouse he noticed what a difference the folk costume made to her, all at once she was a girl from old Setesdal. She told him that she was at university, writing a dissertation on the Soviet Union. He never took his eyes off her. Although he had seen her before he had never really taken any notice of her. But now — the folk costume, this room seemed to present her in a strange new light or endowed her with a shadowiness she had not previously possessed.

He went outside, had to duck his head to get through the low doorways. He strolled on, looked into rooms on other farmsteads, peered through ancient leaded windowpanes, buckled glass that made the world look different, distorted it, turned it into the setting for a drama about buried instincts. He sauntered about, made a few sketches in his book, of details, the design on the door of a storehouse, the lines of a bowl, the rose painting on a cabinet, but found it impossible to concentrate; snakes writhed in his stomach, he could think of only one thing, contemplated the planks, the boards, staves and logs, the traditional Norwegian building style; wherever he turned, staves and logs and the landscape outside the ridged windowpanes taking little leaps when he moved his head, just for the fun of it, he thought, out of sheer, giddy wantonness.