Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

I should perhaps remind you here of Daniel’s idiosyncrasies, again where breasts were concerned: remind you of the time when, as a boy, he used to lie in bed briefing Jonas on which fabric provided the most provocative covering for the female breast. Daniel, as we have seen, favoured wool and it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, as they say — because the woman who had opened the door and caused the draught was wearing nothing but a fine wool sweater over her breasts: two gambolling lambs, Daniel thought, putting a little twist on The Song of Solomon ’s paean to the same phenomenon. Daniel never did anything by halves, and this whole story eventually culminated in a happy Exodus: he married the agent of his downfall, this girl who even as a small child had been described as ‘a whirlwind’ — and, I might add, they had four sons in rapid succession, whom Daniel with a certain self-irony, called the Four-Source Hypothesis.

Daniel left research and entered the church. And even though he was tone deaf he insisted on singing the Litany during services. When Daniel was droning on in that hoarse, nasal voice of his, it always sounded to Jonas as if, standing there behind the Communion-rail, leading the congregation, his brother was singing: ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.’

Supposing one were a conqueror — what would one win? The world? A little peace of mind? A name? Immortality? Oneself? Power? Women? There were times in Jonas Wergeland’s life when he felt there was only one thing worth striving for: Health. To be fit and well.

Despite all of Daniel’s sexual excesses — and as an adult he committed many sins far worse than fornicating with paper images — he never made, I almost said, a complete balls-up of things. Jonas, on the other hand, did.

Some stories have to be told more than once. You think you are finished with them, but then they pop up again like twists and turns that have lain low all the way along, only suddenly to wriggle up to the surface again. So this, Professor, is of course a continuation of the Istanbul story — and do not be misled into thinking that it deals with an earlier experience.

The more Jonas learned about his wife, the more he knew how much he didn’t know. There are two types of people: those who know how to mix a dry Martini and those — by far the biggest group — who do not. Margrete knew how to make a proper dry Martini, and this troubled Jonas; it gave rise to all sorts of misgivings as to what else she was capable of but kept secret from him. And yet Margrete was the last person Jonas would have suspected of infidelity, and while you may laugh at such naivety, Professor, do not forget what she worked with day in, day out. She was a dermatologist, or to put it another way: she worked with sexually transmitted diseases.

Does the story of the jealousy start here? Deep down?

Jonas himself had only visited the Oslo Health Centre once. True, he had walked past the striking new building on St Olavs plass every day on his way to and from the Cathedral School, but he had never given any thought to what delicate matters and contrite souls lay hidden behind the natural concrete of its facade.

Five years later, however, he had no choice but to take the Canossa way or, as some would have it, the Casanova way to the inner chambers of the aforementioned Health Centre: which is to say he was saved from having to crawl, and instead took the lift to the fifth floor and pushed open the door bearing the daunting sign ‘Department of Dermatology and Venereal Diseases’. The reason for this ignominious visit was, as far as Jonas himself could tell, a good old-fashioned dose of the clap. Well, not good — of the worst possible kind.

Tempting though it is, I do not propose to dwell at any length on the psychological gauntlet many people feel they are running when they enter the waiting room of such a department, with pus seeping into their underwear. Nor am I going to make fun of the sudden reluctance to give one’s name to the nurse filling out the card, as if one is half expecting to be charged with some dreadful penance or imagines that one’s name is being entered in some sort of Sinners’ Register.

What Jonas remembered most clearly was the moment when he walked into the doctor’s surgery, a rather poky, nondescript office, to find himself looking at a woman — and not only that, but looking at what he would later describe as a fine figure of a woman, who — on the basis of a postcard tacked to the wall, of Van Gogh’s Starry Night — he immediately assumed to be a connoisseur of art. He had automatically envisaged a male doctor but promptly thought to himself: why not? Why shouldn’t a female doctor treat male patients too?

She — Dr Kleveland, according to the badge on her white coat — greeted him politely before inquiring what the trouble was, asking a few professional and yet personal questions which instantly gave him full confidence in her: nay, filled him with gratitude almost for being allowed to get things off his chest, somehow confess, as if he were a Catholic and she was the priest behind the screen in the confessional. He explained, a little longwindedly perhaps, while she nodded and told him to take down his trousers and lie down on the couch over against the wall. And I’m sure quite a few people in Norway would have liked to witness this sight — Jonas Wergeland lying there with his pants down, presenting his afflicted member, humbly and possibly a little shamefully. ‘I’d never have thought it of her,’ he said.

Dr Kleveland put on a pair of latex gloves with a snap that made Jonas think of washing-up, or feel that at any minute she was going to pick up a scalpel and remove the whole lot, cut the evil off at the root, as it were. For a fleeting moment it seemed to him that she weighed his penis in her hand, as if comparing it to others she had seen, or as if it was a fine work of art and the whole point of the gloves was to prevent it from being sullied by sweaty or greasy fingers, just as curators wore gloves when restoring valuable old masters. It would probably be truer to say that Dr Kleveland was much more interested in the inner state of Jonas Wergeland’s penis than in its outward appearance. ‘Could you pull back the foreskin?’ she said. This he did, feeling as though he were raising the curtain on a tragic drama.

I will not go into the details of Dr Kleveland’s skilful handling of the urethral spatula, or attempt to describe the tiny stab of pain or the thoughts that go through one’s head when a charcoal brush is pushed almost an inch into the urethra, merely say that Dr Kleveland — making no comment and closely observed by a rather worried Jonas, brushed the pus onto a cover slip which she then dried before coating it with a so-called Löffler dye and put her eye down to the microscope — it was all over in a couple of minutes.

‘Ah, yes, gonorrhoea,’ said Dr Kleveland.

After Jonas had swallowed half a dozen tablets and given the name of the infection source — something about which he had no qualms — and been told to contact the person concerned himself and ask her to call at the Health Centre, he made a remark, out of relief really, which clearly annoyed Dr Kleveland and caused her, for once, to lose a little of her professional demeanour: ‘Oh well, that’s not so bad really,’ he said.

Like other doctors, Dr Kleveland was adept at differentiating between the performance of her duties and the temptation to lecture her patients. But on this particular day, prompted perhaps by sheer wisdom or what is known as feminine intuition, Dr Kleveland simply saw red and did something she had never done before and would never do again — she took down a book from the office bookcase: it immediately put Jonas in mind of Ørn’s stamp album or the family Bible at home, but he could not have been further off the mark, because it proved to be a textbook on venereal diseases, a classic work in fact, as Jonas would later discover, and this she dropped with a demonstrative thud onto the desk in front of him: ‘Have a look in here,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll see if you’re still saying “Oh well”.’