Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

They tended to stay close to the shore, where the water was shallow, crouched or lay down to scan the pond bottom and the fish beneath them. Jonas and Ørn played that they were lying on top of a gigantic television screen, immersing themselves in it from top to toe. Either that or they felt like Captain Nemo drawing back the curtains on his submarine, the Nautilus , to suddenly be brought face to face with the drama of the deep.

Once the ice was safe and before the first snow had fallen, the lakes in the surrounding countryside became a Mecca for skaters; it was on Steinbruvannet, with the aroma of his parents’ beef tea in his nostrils, that Jonas learned to master the Norwegian national sport, stage by stage, so to speak, working his way from triple-bladed trainer skates to speed-skates. From the very first he loved it, adored the zing of the fresh, clean ice, the vibrant chime each time the blades sliced through. Most of all he loved to spin — not least when he was skating across ice-bound water where no one had been before him — and examine the patterns left by his skates. ‘It’s a sort of secret writing,’ he said to himself. ‘Symbols that have to do with conquest.’

It was on such a day, late in the autumn of the year when he was going with Margrete, that Jonas made his first tentative attempt to build a monument, a monument of glittering ice — an impulse which ought probably to be viewed in the light of the new-won self-confidence with which he had been filled after the incident in the quarry eighteen months earlier. And I really do not think, Professor, that we should attach too much importance to the fact that this monument was founded on frost, on cold.

The way had been paved for this sudden entrepreneurial urge by a bet made by the grownups at Solhaug. Late one night during a gents-only get-together in Five-Times Nilsen’s cosy living room to christen the normally so diffident salesman’s latest acquisition — a magnificent bookcase complete with that last word in luxury: an integral drinks cabinet — Five-Times Nilsen had got a little above himself and announced that he was going ice bathing, so help him he was. And since the others didn’t believe he would do it, they ended up making a bet — with a fair bit of money in the pot, I can tell you, a sum that confirmed the Norwegian people’s strange mania for gambling and penchant for lotteries of any description. Jonas had, in fact, seen the drinks cabinet on one occasion, one time when he was selling flags, which is to say: suffering the torture to which all children are subjected, of having a tray full of flags hung on a cord around his neck and being shooed off to sell or, no, not sell: beg. Jonas hated this, hated standing on people’s doorsteps with his head bowed, this yoke around his neck, and a ‘Pleasewillyoubuy’ on his lips. It ought to be said, though, that Mrs Nilsen was the saving of every desperate flag-seller, or their victim rather; the textured wallpaper in the Nilsen’s hall was like a pincushion, studded with flowers from the TB Association, Lifeboat flags, pins for Cancer Research and the Children’s Ski Foundation. And it was on one such call, while Mrs Nilsen was fumbling with her small change, that Jonas caught a glimpse of the new marvel in the living room, a proper little Soria Moria Castle, with a lid that folded down, built-in lighting and a mirror at the back, giving the impression of double — nay — infinite enjoyment, not least due to the brightly coloured contents of the various bottles, which reminded Jonas of his father’s extraordinary collection of aftershave lotions, since this too was connected with scents, with men in white shirts and braces getting all het up; and on a shelf at the very top, if it was not a mirage, Jonas discerned the most renowned items of all: the highball glasses with the scantily clad ladies on the outside who, when viewed from the inside, were stark naked. So Jonas had no problem, later, in understanding how Five-Times Nilsen could have become a mite loose-tongued after a few highballs — and this was in the days when a highball really was a highball, served in a raffia sleeve which conjured up thoughts of grass skirts, lagoons and warm water — that Five-Times Nilson should declare, possibly while peering through his whisky at the naked lady on the inside of the glass, like an enticing reward in the distance, that he was going ice bathing, so help me, anyone wanna bet that I won’t!

And go ice bathing he did. One Sunday morning, at a relatively early hour to save attracting an embarrassing crowd, a few of the fathers made their way up to Steinbruvannet. Chairman Moen had even got hold of an ice bore and a good old-fashioned ice saw, so it didn’t take long to cut out a fairly large, square hole — the ice wasn’t all that thick at that time anyway. And let it be said right at the outset, since this is only a side-story, that Five-Times Nilsen actually did take a dip in the icy water — carried it off with considerable panache, in fact, and to the great glee of his neighbours. Not only that, but his wife, the rather pettish, but kind-hearted Mrs Nilsen, insisted on him staying home from the shop for a week, quarantined him, would not open the door to anyone, not even a poor flag-seller with his yoke around his neck; she was too busy squeezing oranges to save her husband from catching a cold or perhaps to give him the illusion of more tropical climes as he lay on the sofa with his face turned to the drinks cabinet’s scintillating solar system. There were those who were sure that he too was well and truly squeezed that week; word was that Mrs Nilsen would stop at nothing to warm him up again — there were even a few on the estate who wondered whether they ought not to rename him Ten-Times Nilsen.

In any case, the upshot of it all was that lots of blocks of ice — fragments of ice is possibly a better description — of all sizes lay strewn around the hole where the ice bathing had taken place, when Jonas and Margrete went up to Steinbruvannet to skate, on the afternoon of that same Sunday.

With Lego, Jonas had always found the transparent bricks the most fascinating — as a small boy he constantly dreamed of being able to build a whole house solely out of them — so the minute he saw those beautiful, gleaming blocks lying there all ready and waiting he knew he had to build something out of them. If he were honest with himself, he had been rambling on about doing something of the sort as they were walking up to the lake; after Margrete had turned those black and faintly Oriental eyes of hers on him and told him that when she was nine — before the family moved back to Norway, that is — she had visited Harbin in China with her father the diplomat and seen the fabulous ice sculptures and ice lanterns created for the New Moon Festival held there: thirty degrees below and a whole park full of shimmering ice structures. ‘It was like being on another planet. Triton, or somewhere like that,’ she said.

Only a girl like Margrete could think of mentioning one of the moons of Neptune in a sentence. She was wearing earmuffs over hair so black that it had a bluish sheen to it, like Cleopatra’s in the strip cartoons. Jonas stole a glance at her, so in love that it hurt.

What makes a murderer?

He forgot all about his skates. There weren’t many people on the ice apart from them anyway, only a couple of guys playing ice hockey way down by the dam. Jonas carried the blocks away from the hole, further out onto the ice, seeing in his mind’s eye a palace the like of which had never been seen before. On this particular Sunday the temperature was hovering just above — rather than below — zero, so the pieces of ice had not had a chance to freeze solid, instead they were slippery and slightly wet on the surface. Jonas started to build something, took a sheath knife from his rucksack, cut and pared the ice as he saw fit. Although for the most part he could use the pieces as they were, since they were all different shapes to start with. The hardest part was to stop the blocks from sliding off one another. ‘What do you think I should make?’ he called to Margrete. ‘Oslo Town Hall?’