Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas is lying there in a drowse when he becomes aware of a movement on the edge of the clearing below him. He opens his eyes wide and sees two adders slithering towards a flat rock dead ahead of him, only ten yards away. He sits stock-still, feels how his heart pounds at the sight of the snakes — not because they are dangerous, but because he knows that a drama of the utmost significance is about to be played out on the stage before him.

Suddenly the two snakes raise the front parts of their bodies into the air and begin to sway towards one another, for some time they do this, as in some strange dance, before they almost — so it seems to Jonas — twine themselves around one another, though without touching, and still with their bodies lifted off the ground. Jonas was thrilled. He had heard of snakes ‘wrestling’: rival males wrapping themselves round one another. But as far as he knew this usually happened in the grass, horizontally. The confrontation he was witnessing here was being conducted in a semi-vertical position, this surely had to be something of a miracle; adders were not actually all that flexible, they didn’t have the cobra’s ability to raise its body high into the air. The snakes seemed to Jonas to be bathed in light, a golden glow. A promise, he thought to himself, it’s a promise.

Jonas knew right away that this sight, this upward-straining intertwinement was vitally important, that it had the power to heal him, in the same way as the serpent of brass Moses set on a pole in the desert. The way he saw it, this moment, those seconds when they raised themselves into the air and formed a double spiral, had been created for him — and him alone. These creatures were doomed to crawl on their bellies, but they had risen up, right in front of him, held up their heads as it were, defied the biblical curse, did the impossible — yes, that was it: the impossible — defied their biological limitations and lifted themselves up, a zoological miracle on a stage of granite. Later it would occur to Jonas that they had formed what looked like a section mark, that he had caught a glimpse of the essence of life, of the first clause in the law of life.

But what cheered him most of all was that this spectacle corresponded with — you might almost say, consolidated — an image he had had in his head for a long time, an image or a tactile sensation which stemmed from a feverish dream and which could be compared only to the feeling of running a finger along a corkscrew. Also, he had immediately made the connection between the two snakes in the clearing and the ball of snakes he had stumbled upon the year before. This dance was a continuation of that incident, a clarification of something of which the ball had allowed him a mere glimpse: two spirals intertwined. The principle of leverage, of something that could set mighty things in motion, raise him to undreamed-of heights. He stared at the snakes for so long that they slithered through his eyes and into his head. At any rate, suddenly they were gone, dissolved into thin air so it seemed. The snakes, or a double helix, had taken up residence in his brain. ‘Inside me I carry a new way of thinking,’ his heart sang. ‘I am different.’

At that very moment — believe me, it’s true — Jonas heard a voice, or perhaps something more akin to the deep scale of notes from an organ, which said, or told him, in no uncertain terms that he would be a conqueror. He always maintained that that voice or sonorous peal came from the very granite on which he was sitting, almost oozed from the crystals — so clearly that he could positively feel the vibrations, as from the membrane of a loudspeaker. And at that instant he knew, as if it were an integral part of the experience, what his weapon in this conquest would be: that intertwining form.

I know this sounds a bit high-flown. But everyone experiences — to a greater or lesser degree — mystical moments, when they receive a clear and inescapable message — or whatever you want to call it — and for Jonas Wergeland this was how it happened. From that day onwards he knew for sure. He was not going to be a chef or a pilot, nor even the Father of his Country; he was going to be a conqueror. By the time he stood up and set off for home he had carved out a calling for himself, as solid as a granite church.

You look surprised, Professor, because you have never heard of this, such a pivotal episode. Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I might have done on an earlier occasion, when I said that Jonas Wergeland did not recognize the significance of these events until they cropped up again, thanks to some woman. What if he had not experienced these things at all? What if he had merely imagined them, dreamed them up, during those acts of love, but so vividly and with such powerful conviction that he seemed to have experienced them. Whatever the case, Jonas Wergeland felt that these women somehow enabled him to relive many fundamental stories upon which he was able to draw later, use as springboards to a changed life. It was as if he had been given the chance to travel back in a train and get off at stations he had run past first time round. So you see it could well be that Jonas Wergeland’s later success, his inimitable chain of television programmes was forged from causes — stories — which never were but which could be reconstructed, like Gleipne, the chain in Nordic mythology: it too was made from things that did not exist.

It might be more correct to say that at a certain point — possibly not until that coupling in a dim room in the Museum of Cultural History — it was brought home to Jonas Wergeland that one was not doomed to be the person one was, or at least not only that person. One could become more. We are not, he thought, we form ourselves.

One thing that is certainly true is that when he got home from the quarry he wrote his name on a sheet of paper, and to his amazement he found that his handwriting had changed. On impulse he had also put a ‘W’ between his first and last names, ‘Jonas W. Hansen’ he wrote and discovered that he had made a new name for himself: that one letter could be all it took to change everything, just as the little prefix ‘un’ before the word ‘common’ produces something uncommon. As he contemplated the ‘W’ Jonas could not help thinking of a machine of some kind which could cause him too to stretch himself, much as a leg that is too short can sometimes be made longer. The ‘W’ had the appearance of a coat of arms or a royal emblem — Jonas VI or something of the sort. His initials, too, looked exceptionally powerful, nigh-on divine. There was something about the sight of these three characters which instinctively prompted him to clear his throat and say, in all seriousness, as if carrying out a voice test: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’

The next day he cycled to school, even though he hadn’t passed the proficiency test. He was bursting with newfound self-confidence. At the school gate he collided with Margrete Boeck, the new girl in the parallel class to his own. Turn a ‘W’ on its head and you get an ‘M’. He didn’t know it then, but his life had already changed.

Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? It cannot simply be because he wished to conquer new lands? Or change his life, come to that. Jonas himself believed that he made each journey merely so that he could tuck it away in his memory and bring it out again later, always as a different journey, because it altered character from one time to the next. Viewed at a distance, a journey became something different, often something vague and, above all, pungent, like the aftertaste of a fine cognac.