Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And yet nothing got Daniel more worked up than pictures. He began collecting them at an early age — starting with innocent lingerie ads, then progressing to various rather more daring publications, acquired partly on secret summer expeditions to Strömstad and partly through chums who stole them from suspect stepfathers: pornography of a raunchier flavour, in keeping with the names of the magazines for which Daniel swapped it: Texas and Wild West . From these magazines he cut his favourite pictures, which is to say the ones that stood the test of turning him on time after time, inducing that hot itch in his groin. Because that was the whole point; to get a big hard-on, to stock up on pictures which could act as an aid to masturbation, photos which — when laid out in the right order, that is — contributed to an accumulated randiness which in turn, as he ran his eye down the line, prompted a more vigorous working of the hand: a pictorial plot which culminated in the perfect orgasm, setting a full stop in the form of a warm discharge fired at the cleavage of the dream woman who was the sum of all the pictures in front of him.

For Daniel, masturbation was not — as it was for other boys — a pursuit conducted in the manner of the baboons in the zoo. No, for him it was a science — not least when it came to the selection of pictures. He had a particular preference for breasts, and these were evaluated according to the most stringent criteria. Breasts constituted the leitmotif in Daniel’s otherwise so inconstant life, from suckling onwards. Besides having a preference for a very specific and totally irrational shape and size, he had a breathless fascination for the nipples and the area round about them, and for their colour, as if there was talk here of a target, or — with a bit of good will — a kind of mandala on which to meditate.

But where to hide the porn? This brings us to one of the many singular challenges posed to the boyish imagination, and there were endless strategies: one could, for example, cover the magazines, camouflaging them as jotters in one’s schoolbag; or one could conceal the judicious selection of pictures in a hollow tube, in itself an erotic act, or simply slip one’s issue of Cocktail , most symbolically, inside the sixth volume of My Treasury of Tales . For months Daniel’s collection reposed safely in Paradise.

In the days when Daniel’s radicalism extended only to his learning the songs of Bob Dylan, he used to practise playing the guitar in the loft at Solhaug — an arrangement which suited him perfectly, since this was also where he kept the cut-outs of his favourite women, tucked inside a dilapidated old mattress, a real lulu, which some smart advertising people had dubbed the Paradise Mattress. Daniel was a terrible singer, even if his nasal drone did sound a bit like Dylan’s, and could produce from his harmonica no greater range of notes than a little kid pretending to be a fire engine. So he often ended up sinking down onto the mattress’s battered springs to console himself with his imaginary hordes of female fans, allowing them to pass before his eyes in the preferred, well-tried order, warbling at him à la Roy Orbison and thereby inciting his hand to move faster and faster until the picture of the last girl, with her — according to Daniel’s subjective yardstick — divine tits caused his balls to contract in a blissful blow-out. Poets have written of that stuff of which dreams are made. For Daniel they were made of paper.

Then, one Midsummer’s Eve — ironically enough just after Daniel had more or less mastered Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — something terrible happened. Moments before the bonfire was to be lit, Daniel was standing on the green, waiting expectantly with everyone else from the estate when, to his horror, he saw his father running out with the old mattress, to throw it on the pyre, knowing nothing, of course, about its precious stuffing. Acting almost on instinct, or maybe more like a sultan attempting to save his harem, Daniel leaped forward and gave the mattress a hefty tug, trying to wrest it out of his father’s hands, with the result that the ticking ripped even more and out fluttered all of Daniel’s treasured pictures, to be caught by the breeze and sent flying into the air, and for a moment the heavens seemed, from Daniel’s point of view at any rate, to be filled with a host of angels, before they were hastily collected by the estate’s more morally upright residents, not least the mothers, and thrown onto the fire, where they were, so to speak, burned as witches.

I have, as it happens, an alternative explanation for why Red Daniel returned, like the prodigal son, to the study of theology. The fact is that he experienced a belated high point in his cut out career as late as 1975, which is to say long after he had given up collecting pictures. Some will remember 1975 as the year when the Suez Canal was reopened; Daniel remembered it for Ingeborg Sørensen. There are times when I think that there was only one point in his life when Daniel was proud of being Norwegian: when Ingeborg Sørensen graced the centrefold of America’s Playboy magazine and, in a sense, conquered the United States. Several Norwegian women have in fact been Playmate of the Month, but Ingeborg Sørensen was the only one to come to Daniel’s attention. He sneaked into a newsagent’s, despite nightmares of being spotted by one of the Women’s Libbers, and bought the March issue, to bring him comfort in his bleak, self-proletarianized existence; secure in the knowledge that Ingeborg Sørensen had not prostituted herself to a worse degree than he himself had been doing for some years — in one shot she was even pictured wearing a hard hat and boiler suit, like a worker. Daniel was so bowled over by her beauty that he actually cut out the picture of her in the bath with her breasts sticking out of the water like two island paradises in a sea of foam. So perhaps it was really Ingeborg Sørensen, and the lines of what, for Daniel, represented the embodiment of the perfect breasts which — that same year — showed him the way home; persuaded him to drop the Marxist-Leninist Party and resume his theological studies, as if she represented the naked truth, drove him back to the genesis of Paradise, to the GT and the Jahwist source.

It is not, therefore, beyond the bounds of possibility that — by demonstrating the heights a Norwegian could attain — she also fired Daniel’s scholarly ambitions; that the thought of Ingeborg Sørensen and his youthful hobby also lay at the back of his mind when he was cutting passages out of the Old Testament in his efforts to discover a new, an utterly brilliant sequence which would overturn everything hitherto postulated by researchers on the subject of the Jahwist source. For months Daniel pored over scraps of Hebraic scripture spread out on the large table he had set up in his office, switching the slips of paper about again and again, continually altering the pattern — until one day, almost by accident and so abruptly that it came as a shock, it all fell into place, or nearly into place. The obvious sequence, just around the corner. For a few seconds he felt as light-headed as Crick and Watson must have felt the moment before they stood back and surveyed their completed model of the DNA structure. He could hardly believe it; had a vision of what this would mean. ‘I’m famous,’ he thought to himself. ‘My God, I’m about to become famous.’

But as the saying goes: ‘how long was Adam in Paradise?’ It is a warm spring day, just after Easter, the world is full of hope, and Daniel is sitting by an open window. And of course a girl comes in — a lot of female students tended to pop into his office — and in her eagerness to ask some burning question she knocks on the door then walks straight in, causing all of the scraps of paper spread out on the table to fly up, positively whirl into the air, some of them even vanishing out of the window, before coming to rest again in the most woeful disarray; he finds the whole thing suspiciously reminiscent of that time, as a boy, when he was stupid enough to unscrew the workings of a clock and all the parts were sent flying around the room. Daniel knew he was beaten. He would never get so close to the right sequence again. He eyed the jumble of paper around him — suddenly, with merciless clarity, it seemed to illustrate the futility of the entire undertaking and in many ways also anticipated developments in Pentateuchal research, which came more and more to assert the impossibility of ‘going from the omelette back to the eggs’. In other words: he gave up. There was more to life than bits of paper. A new challenge, not to say two new challenges, stood before him, in the flesh.