Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Why had he gone to Yerevan? He went there to see this almost transparent mountain on the horizon, an unbelievably wondrous sight. Jonas stood under a distant sky and looked at a mountain, let it take up residence inside him, seep into his body. Jonas Wergeland was struck by the pure sense of being alive and the knowledge that the meaning of life could be something as simple as four minutes one morning in December when one is thirty-five years of age, at the zenith of one’s life — that the intensity and beauty of those four minutes could define an entire life, in the same way that a pretty unexceptional book of seven hundred pages might have four lines on page 351 which lift the whole thing up onto another plane, which have the power to transform both past and future.

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

What a wealth of cross-connections! I can see a hundred paths we could take from here, but for the moment we must stay with matters Biblical, albeit with a Bible of a different sort. No one was surprised when Jonas’s brother, Red Daniel, that uncompromising Marxist-Leninist, virtually took refuge aboard a Noah’s Ark of sorts by finally completing the university course he had dropped out of in the seventies — in theology. The leap from theology to the Marxist-Leninist movement had been as painless as the somersault back again — in both cases because of an unshakeable faith, also known as fundamentalism: Das Kapital by Marx, volume I, page 49, the Gospel according to Mark, chapter four, verse nine.

I think I ought to say something about why Daniel forsook the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist Party, since this did not, as some have maintained, have anything to do with him falling out with those cadres who defended the support given to strikes staged by well-paid workers — people earning two or three times as much as Daniel knew he could ever hope to make. And even though this ought to have been reason enough — since only a fool could claim that the aim of socialism is to line the pockets of prosperous high-achievers — it was a lesser, but equally shocking matter which finally made Daniel see the Marxist-Leninist movement for what it was: sheer cretinization masquerading as ideology.

One day Daniel heard something which he could not believe to be true but which did in fact prove to be so: that Dag Østerberg — whom Daniel, even in his most one-dimensional Marxist-Leninist phase, could not have brought himself to imagine was anything other than a brilliant sociologist, best known as the translator into Norwegian of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus , one of the books which had inspired Daniel to study theology — that this man did not get the post at the Architectural College in Oslo for which he had applied, a lectureship in architecture and sociology, tailor-made for a man of Østerberg’s calibre. The teachers had, of course, been all for Østerberg, but the members of the Students Council — which is to say, the people who would have derived the greatest benefit from being able to consult such a mine of information — were unanimous in rejecting him and instead ensured that the post was filled by an applicant with the right Marxist-Leninist credentials: a perfect example of Berufsverbot in reverse, one of the most shameful blunders in the history of Norwegian further education. It was too much, even for Red Daniel — after this demonstration of Maoism in practice he basically stopped taking any active part in things, although it was a while before he actually left the party.

What sort of person was Daniel? I admit that even I, of all people, find it hard to curb my curiosity when it comes to Daniel W. Hansen, the man who actually informed — if that is the right word — on Jonas, saying that it was for his conscience’s sake. Personally, I think Daniel must have felt very relieved to find himself back in the theology faculty reading room, cut off from the world by a wall of concordances and synopses, dogmatic outlines and summaries of ecclesiastical history, making great forays into the frontiers of language, or logic rather, where one had to walk the fine line between the concepts of Christ as being ‘uncreated’ and yet ‘born’ and be able, at the drop of a hat, to explain the impossible parity between tres personae and una substantia . Having first sought in vain for the truth somewhere in the gap between the historical figure of Jesus and the fantasy fostered by the early Christians, he began increasingly to home in on, or back towards, the study of the Old Testament because, as with the abbreviation for a certain type of car, the initials GT — standing in Norwegian for the Gamle Testamente — tell you that here you can step on the gas, here you can really have some fun.

After taking a first-class degree Daniel got a job as a research assistant, commonly known as an RA, and began to concentrate in earnest on the Pentateuch, which was neither an engine nor a camera, but the Greek name for the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses: a fretwork of accounts by different authors and a real treat, not to say a genuine playground, for any ambitious researcher. One soon realized that Moses could not possibly be the source of all these texts: very few writers actually describe their own deaths, after all, and it had gradually become customary to operate with at least four different levels of text — the Four-Source Hypothesis — denoted by the abbreviations J, E, P and D. With childlike enthusiasm, the student Daniel had made different coloured marks in the margins of his Bible Hebraica to indicate the different layers, interlocking like some intricately designed zip-fastener — there were places where the chapters looked exactly like rainbows. Anyway — to cut a long, a very long, story short, Daniel was most interested in J, which is to say the Jahwist strand, which probably also represents the oldest source. That a later theory also suggested that J was a woman only goes to show that Daniel had not lost his touch.

Daniel had had an idea: one of nigh-on Faustian proportions. He would pick out all the Jahwist passages, like threads out of a weaving, and splice them together to form one unbroken account. And not only that: he would uncover a new and more primordial narrative in this story, especially concerning the wandering in the desert, from Exodus onward, believing as he did that the current version was illogical. Daniel, who only a few years earlier had cherished dreams of the proletariat’s armed revolution, now sat in his office contemplating a work that would revolutionize Old Testament research, all but disarm white-haired professors, including the ghosts of such great authorities as Wellhausen and Gunkel. Thus he set about the hard, painstaking slog — not altogether unlike a tramp through the desert — of cutting up copies of the Hebraic text and laying what he believed to be the Jahwist passages round about him in various, tentative sequences. But before he could glue them together again — in their new order, I mean — he had to work out the correct sequence.

Excuse me for laughing, Professor, but this reminds me that Daniel’s interest in cutting things out had started long before this and continued for a good while after — and we’re not talking Biblical texts here. Daniel was what one would have to call over-sexed; it was as if listening to the chapel hymn with the refrain ‘Dare to stand like Daniel’ had left him with a permanent erection.

While his father was an organist, Daniel was an onanist on the grand scale, obsessed throughout his adolescence with whatever could get him worked up, inwardly and outwardly. The one thing he had in common with his father was an interest in fingering: which fingers to place where on the instrument — in his case what the Chinese referred to as the ‘jade flute’ — and the tempo, which Daniel also defined in musical terms, from the lingering andante of the overture to the allegro furioso of the last movement. As a teenager, lying in the bunk bed above Jonas, Daniel would launch into half-whispered discussions, or monologues, on what would be the optimum substitute for a vagina. A padded mitten? A roll of elastic bandage? ‘Boy, do I envy Guggen,’ he said one night. ‘Finding Anne Beate Corneliussen’s scarf, carrying it about in a daze, pressing it to his nose like a glue-sniffer, then coming up with the idea of tying it round his dick — can you imagine it, the softness and the scent of it!’ What Daniel did not know was that this experiment had left Guggen with a member so swollen and covered in friction burns that his anxious parents had had to take him to the doctor. According to Daniel, Guggen had also experimented with minced meat in a plastic bag which had first been submerged in warm water — a forerunner to such phenomena as the ‘Throbber battery-operated, travel-size vagina’ which appeared on the Norwegian market ten years later.