Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘The Crystal Palace,’ she laughed.

While Jonas was building, with no particular plan to begin with, Margrete danced around him on her figure skates, like a good fairy giving the work her blessing. She could do some simple figure skating, and she was a lovely, and really quite sexy sight in her stretchy ski pants and tight woollen sweater. But Jonas had no eyes for her, or rather: he was more keen on showing her that he was a conqueror, that he could create something magnificent, something of which she would never have dreamed him capable; he was totally engrossed, worked like a soul possessed, saw that the structure was starting to resemble a stave church, or maybe it was more like a slender ziggurat, a sacred building; he employed his knife like a woodcarver’s gouge on the hard ice, endowing those pieces which were to sit on the top with a more distinctive form, like little spires. On the very pinnacle he placed one chunk, totally transparent, and as he lifted it into place he noticed that there was a pearl embedded in it. Or not a pearl, but one of those little pearl ear-studs. He couldn’t imagine how it came to be there: trapped, as it were, inside an ice-cold giant clam. Maybe someone had dropped it; there was no way of telling. Most likely it wasn’t a real pearl either, he thought. Probably just some cheap junk. He wasn’t going to check right now, anyway, because he was finished, just as the last rays of the sun made the ice palace almost luminous; its walls and towers glittered and gleamed as if they were made from precious gems, or prisms. It was the sort of structure in front of which, at a later date, someone would place a vodka bottle, to produce a fabulous advertising shot. Jonas, for his part, thought fleetingly of a mirrored drinks cabinet.

Jonas calls out happily to Margrete, who is circling around further out on the ice. She does not hear him, is practising a jump. They are alone now; Jonas cannot see anyone down by the dam. It’s getting colder. He is glad of that, knows that this will cement his rather frail, unsteady construction. He calls out again, feeling proud, wanting to show off his masterpiece, a marvel of consummate symmetry. The sun is sinking lower and lower, soon only the tops of the spires will flash in the light of the last rays piercing the tops of the fir trees in the west. But it looks fantastic, a combination of stave church and a sort of ziggurat — truly a national monument — that might have been built out of transparent white marble, or air. A building from the land of fable. Jonas beholds it in the light, totally transparent, almost floating above the ice.

He heard the sound of skates, turned round, and at that very moment, as Margrete was making her way towards him, arms outstretched, smiling, black hair shot with blue — in his moment of triumph — disaster struck. Jonas would never understand how it could have happened, where it came from, who had sent it — although hadn’t he perhaps seen a shadow after all, someone who hadn’t gone home, down by the dam? For just then a puck came gliding towards him; Jonas spied it while it was quite a long way off, a dot, a tadpole, it should have ground to a halt long ago, but it glided on and on, not moving all that fast, but not slow enough for Jonas to get to it and stop it, he was too far away from the ice structure, he tried, but his legs kept giving way on the ice, it looked hilarious, and meanwhile the puck, ‘out of nowhere’ he thought, glided relentlessly towards the ice palace — which at that moment was shimmering with an almost unearthly lustre, as if it were made from frozen air — and rammed one of the nethermost blocks sideways on, knocking it just enough out of place to bring Jonas’s work of art tumbling down, with infinite slowness so it seemed to him, and with a lovely tinkling sound, like sleigh bells, he thought later, sending all the little pieces slithering in every direction, a long, long way in every direction; and in some measure — Jonas had to admit it, even though he was half in shock — the actual destruction was as fascinating an experience as the building of it, that glorious instant of utter collapse, a shower of bright sparks and the music created by the sound of tinkling ice.

And Margrete, what did she do? Margrete had almost reached him when the structure collapsed, she stopped and stared at Jonas, but while he was still standing there, stunned, long after the shards of ice had ceased to jangle and halted in their star-shaped flight, she did a few neat steps on her figure skates, began, in fact, to dance around him, as if through this, her dancing, she was trying to tell him something, forcing him to view this fiasco from another angle. Not only did she dance, she smiled, smiled in a way that, for the first time, led Jonas to suspect that there was a complex, possibly even dangerous, side to her: something he would never understand no matter how hard he tried. She started laughing, could see Jonas was hurt by this but could not stop herself, laughed at him, danced round and round him, laughing out loud, a laughter he would never forget.

So I ask you, Professor: is it possible, if one considers it from a great enough distance — I was on the point of saying from the ice planet Triton — that Jonas Wergeland killed her way back here?

Right then, Jonas — as he saw it, at least — was less concerned with Margrete’s odd behaviour than with finding the piece of ice containing the pearl stud. He hunted frantically, he ran hither and yon, combing a wide radius, lifting blocks of ice up to the fading light, but no matter how hard he looked he did not find that one piece. He was desperate, it was as if he knew that he had to find this fragment of ice again, that for some reason it was absolutely vital, that if he could lay hands on it he would be able to avert a catastrophe, that no matter how fake and cheap the pearl was, something of tremendous value would be lost if he did not find it.

It was a very crestfallen Jonas who slid back to the centre, to the point where the ice monument had stood and where the puck now lay, like a full stop on a huge sheet of paper, putting an end to his endeavour to make an impression. He picked it up, hefted it in his hand, studied it. And I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that this black disc was to become a talisman for Jonas Wergeland. Indeed, he was instantly intrigued by all the scratches, the patterns on its surface. ‘It looks like a scarab,’ Margrete said, looking over his shoulder. ‘The sort of beetle they used to place over the hearts of the dead in Ancient Egypt.’

After saying a bewildered goodbye to Margrete at the junction with Bergensveien, with the dreadful feeling that their relationship was unlikely to survive the skating season, Jonas went home and took out his own personal Kaba, the black lacquer casket with the mother-of-pearl dragon on its lid. Acting on instinct he lifted out his mother’s round brooch and set it on top of the puck. It was almost the same size in diameter; it fitted astonishingly well. A silvery disc and a black disc. Jonas looked. And what he was looking at was bafflingly beautiful. A brooch, with all of its associations, atop a puck with all of its possibilities, not to say stories. He immediately perceived that, like alchemy, when put together these two became something more than a gem and a puck. A spark had been ignited inside him as he placed the silver brooch on top of the black surface; ideas had taken shape, so disjointed and inexplicable that it made him jump. Maybe that was why the next second he picked up the clock workings from their place next to the box on top of the chest of drawers and threw them into the wastepaper bin. All of a sudden the frame and all those cogs seemed somehow hopelessly old-fashioned and mechanical. Like a psychological steam engine, he thought, something that is no longer of any use to me.