Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas sometimes wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing on the hillside outside a remarkable-looking building known as the Matenadaran, looking out across the city. The Armenian Soviet Republic had come as a pleasant surprise, despite the time of year and its strained relations with its neighbour state, the Muslims to the East. Yerevan had proved to be an astonishing oasis after the barren desert of Moscow, with a completely different atmosphere and mentality — and the shops here were full of merchandise. Jonas had walked to the Matenadaran from the Hotel Armenia and the impressive circular Lenin Square in the city centre, so that he — the architect in him, that is — could take in the exceptionally well thought-out and well-executed layout of the city along the way. He nibbled on dried apricots sprinkled with honey and almonds as he strolled along admiring the buildings, many of them — like the hotel — built from the local tufa stone in varying tones of red and pink and decorated with fine carvings: interwoven branches laden with fruit. This, like Grorud, was stonemason country. Jonas felt very much at home here, from the very start he had felt a powerful sense of belonging: here, he thought, here I could actually settle down for good.

He stood on a terrace at the top of a long run of steps leading down to the road. He shut his eyes and listened. Possibly because of his early interest in sounds, listening was one of the first things he did in a new place — as if endeavouring to wring from the background noise some secret about the landscape, some knowledge hidden from the eyes; or he may have thought that, just as the same sound effects can be used in different plays, these sounds could form the background to more memories of the place.

As he was standing there, ears pricked up, just as he was actually thinking that he had heard a sigh, somewhere under or over the ground — a sigh reminiscent of the sound created when his father switched on the organ, which is to say, started up the fan, allowing the air to flow into the pipes — a figure approached him, slowly and with an inquiring look on his face. A man in a heavy, military-style overcoat with a sort of beret on his head. ‘You are a tourist, perhaps?’ he asked hesitantly in French good enough for Jonas to understand him. Jonas was doing a tour of those parts of the Soviet Union that lay close to the Black Sea, under the reassuring auspices of Intourist. The trip was intended as a relaxing break, not to say a reward, after years of working himself half to death on NRK’s prestige project, Thinking Big, which was to be broadcast in the New Year — a television series which may have had its beginnings in a stone quarry, an amphitheatre of reddish granite.

Jonas told the man where he came from. The man nodded, had managed to light his pipe, stood looking out across the city in the same direction as Jonas, his rich enjoyment of the tobacco written large on his features. ‘Do you know what my name is?’ he said at last. Jonas shrugged, how could he possibly know? The only Armenian name he knew was Khachaturian, because as a boy he had played some unusual pieces for the piano by this composer.

‘My name is Nansen Sarjan,’ the man said and eyed Jonas expectantly, as if awaiting a reaction from Jonas, although he could not have known that it was precisely because of Fridtjof Nansen that Jonas had wanted to come here; it was because of him that Armenia, or rather the Armenian people, were so much on his mind.

‘Your first name is Nansen?’ Jonas said.

‘My father was so grateful for what Nansen did for our people that he named me after him,’ the man said. ‘There are quite a number of people in Armenia whose first name is Nansen.’

Jonas was touched; he found this very moving. He had heard of people in Brazil calling their children after national football players, no matter how farfetched their professional names might be. If one admires a person, no name is too improbable. An Armenian boy could well be christened Nansen.

The man seemed gratified by Jonas’s interest and proceeded to tell him about his father, the hardships his father had suffered in the years after the First World War, and about himself. He pointed to the other side of the city. ‘I work in the distillery you can see over there. Have you tried our famous brandy? The very finest quality.’

Jonas was feeling a little chilly; he wouldn’t have minded a small glass of cognac.

‘Troubles or no troubles, you have to learn to enjoy life,’ the Armenian said, pointing to his pipe. ‘Have you read Nansen’s book, First Crossing of Greenland ?’ Jonas shook his head, did not dare to mention that in his programme on Nansen he had focused on things that had absolutely nothing to do with skiing.

‘You know,’ Nansen Sarjan said, ‘the truly great achievement, where the Greenland expedition is concerned, is not the actual ski crossing. The real work of art is the book, especially the passages in which Nansen describes the team’s pipe-smoking: how they spun out their Sunday ration of tobacco. Do you remember? First they smoked the tobacco, then they smoked the ash and wood in the bowl of the pipe, and after that they stuffed in tarred rope and smoked that.’ The man laughed. ‘And when they finally reached the west coast and the icecap was behind them… I’ll never forget how Nansen describes the pleasure of feeling earth and rock under his feet again, the glorious smell of grass. And then, to crown it all, how they stretched out in the soft heather and, with the greatest relish, puffed on pipes filled with moss. You have to read it; it’s quite amazing. It must have something to do with the joy of being alive. It was after reading that book that I took up the pipe.’

Jonas smiled. For some reason he found this quite splendid. Standing here. Him and this man. Why had he come to Yerevan? Perhaps to hear a total stranger wax eloquent about a passage from a book that extolled the joys of pipe-smoking or to hear that name, Nansen, to hear that it lived on here, had survived here, hundreds of miles from Norway. Was a part of the language. Flesh and blood. For some unknown reason, Jonas felt a rapport with the man standing next to him, as if, although he didn’t know it, he owed his life to Nansen Sarjan; he stands there surveying the lovely city of red stone, still listening to the sighing all around him: it sounds like the hum of a huge fan, a hum that carried within it a sense of anticipation, of preparing for something big, in exactly the same way as when his father pulled out the stops on the organ before, like a delicious shock, he broke into the prelude. Jonas remembered that there had been a little organ on board Nansen’s ship, the Fram , on the first polar expedition. Was it Nansen himself who had played it? Jonas peered down at the city. It was winter, but there was hardly any snow. He took a deep breath, felt powerful, confident, as if he were at a point in his life when anything, absolutely anything, could happen.

A journey need not be long, in terms of time, to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.

It takes no great stretch of the imagination to spot the connection between this point, a conversation in the Caucasus, and a winter’s tale from long before, in Norway — between two episodes so well-suited to demonstrating that each new moment is only one of many possibilities.

Jonas liked ice, especially the ice in late autumn. After the first few days of hard frost he and Little Eagle always ran up to Steinbruvannet to see how the water had somehow stiffened, acquired a film of gleaming crystal. His limbs trembled with suspense as they slid warily out onto the ice, listening all the time, like animals, for a warning snap. Jonas never could understand how ice this thin did not break, not even when it gave underfoot: that this fraction of an inch was enough to bear his weight. Ice always gave him an uneasy sense of being part of the lightness of being.