Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas leafed through the book while Dr Kleveland prepared the sample which, to be on the safe side, was to be sent somewhere else for testing. The sight that met Jonas’s eyes was not a pretty one, but the pictures were mesmerizing, every bit as mesmerizing as Gustav Doré’s illustrations in the family Bible, in fact they could have been used as an addendum to the chapter on Sodom and Gomorrah: black, avenging angels, photographs illustrating the different venereal diseases, including those cases which had gone too long without treatment. In full colour. More than anything else they made him think of leprosy, especially the male organs, which looked as if they were about to drop off, like half sawn-off branches. These images were in fact so hideously grotesque and spoke of such pain that Jonas could not bear to look at them — possibly also because it was the most sensitive area of the body which was affected and because, paradoxically, what he was seeing here was, in many cases, the fruits of pleasure. He had been given a glimpse into a gruesome world that was the exact opposite of Daniel’s Mykle universe, the whispered recitals of his youth, lines such as ‘with deeply tremulous reverence to fondle her secret recesses’.

Jonas closes the book, or rather: his body closes the book, refuses to see any more. Dr Kleveland is also finished with what she was doing, says nothing, can tell from Jonas’s face that she doesn’t need to, she simply gives him a couple of practical instructions before he bows out backwards.

It was, therefore, this not exactly pleasant story that lay behind Jonas’s nigh-on blind trust in Margrete, his firm belief that she would never be unfaithful. The way he saw it, she simply had to be immune to adultery. She worked at the Health Centre, after all, he reasoned, in the same department, Dermatology and Venereal Diseases, which he himself had once attended, shaking in his shoes. And how, he asked himself, could a woman who saw that sort of thing every day, those rot-infested, throbbing, suppurating, fungus-ridden genitals — a great many of them the result of infidelity — how could she ever contemplate exposing herself to or even get anywhere close, to such an eventuality?

Margrete seldom talked about her work at home. Jonas all but forgot that she was even a doctor, never mind a derma-venereologist. Or maybe he simply blocked it out, had no wish to think about what went through the heads of the men who had the honour of resting their penises, occasionally healthy penises at that, in Dr Boeck’s lovely hand, as if on scales of purest gold. If she did mention her job, it was usually to tell some anecdote about skin, or skin disorders — a safer topic. Because she did work with these too, for half of each day to be exact, dealing with everything from acne to all manner of rashes and eczemas, carrying out prosaic little operations camouflaged by such obscure terms as ‘biopsy’ and ‘cryotherapy’. Jonas always felt that this must be why she attached such great erotic importance to skin, she would spend whole evenings just stroking him with her fingers, enabling him to experience a closeness he had never known before. ‘No sexual organ can hold a candle to the skin,’ she said. At such moments he thanked his lucky stars, to be so privileged: to be married to a woman unlike any other in the world.

Jonas didn’t ask much about Margrete’s work either — his experience at the Health Centre, the knowledge of what hurts that elegant façade could conceal seeming to have scared him off such topics for good and all. He followed her career more or less on the sly, knew for example how interested she had been, when he met her — at the time when she was doing a supplementary course at the University Hospital — in a ‘new’ disease called chlamydia. He could not rid himself of the suspicion that her pleasure lay, as it were, in the venereal. How else to explain why she sometimes came home all-aglow to tell him that they had had a case of syphilis that day — a rare occurrence now — and then launched into a gripping and very detailed description of the image in the microscope, in which the corkscrew forms of the spirochaete stood out clearly against the dark background: an image which, by the way, she compared to a starry sky, delighting in the discovery in a way that reminded Jonas of his own days as an enthusiastic student of astronomy. But normally she said very little. Understandably. ‘Well, it’s hardly the most scintillating dinner-party conversation is it — entertaining everyone with the latest news on the condylomata or herpes fronts,’ was the excuse she gave on one occasion.

If she said anything about the everyday goings-on at the Health Centre, it usually had to do with what she saw or heard, rather than with the diseases as such. She might, in strictest confidence, tell him about the medical students who came by the centre, the questions they were liable to blurt out in the heat of their enthusiasm, not to mention the embarrassing, often astonishing, networks disclosed by particularly active infection sources. ‘It’s at times like those that you realize how much mischief one person can do, how quickly things spread,’ she said. ‘Or see that, at the genetic level, we are still ninety per cent animal.’ But more often than not, when Margrete gave in to temptation, it was to tell the stories that men in particular, patients that is, could come out with when they stood there with their trousers round their ankles, unwinding the bandages from their cocks, as if they felt that only the most fantastic tale could explain how on earth their bowsprit could have sustained such damage. Jonas knew that Margrete was in a class by herself when it came to the greatest challenge in her profession: establishing a rapport with a patient. She could make a shamefaced boy relax, an unscrupulous, cynical man open up and give her his confidence. And there were times when Jonas suspected that this was the underlying reason, maybe even the real reason, why she enjoyed her work so much: the fact that she got to hear all those amazing tales, as if she were working not at the Health Centre but in a bazaar. ‘Do you know anything about taking precautions?’ Margrete had asked one man with a severely wounded penis. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘After I’ve been with a woman I always wash my dick with cognac.’ Margrete had eyed the man up and down: ‘And do you think that’s good enough?’ she said. ‘Well, it should be,’ the man replied indignantly, ‘it’s three-star!’

But to get back to where we came in: Jonas Wergeland had got it into his head that, with her day-to-day insight into the grislier aspects of sex, Margrete would never allow another man to stick his penis inside her. He had, in other words, forgotten with what warmth and devotion she had welcomed his rigid manhood — that same organ which had once run with pus. It never occurred to Jonas that in the very course of her work Margrete would have learned some simple way of protecting herself. Or that this was exactly why she appreciated having a nice, clean man with a healthy, pulsating member between his legs.

Sometimes Jonas wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing outside a distinctive building called the Matenadaran, an institute for the preservation of ancient documents. And although he vaguely recalled something about a conversation, and possibly something about a mountain — like a white arc in the blue — if he thought hard enough about it, all he remembered was the script.

He had stopped without thinking next to a statue on the terrace just below the entrance, struck by a feeling that his body was full of letters. The statue showed a pupil kneeling before Mesrop Mashotots, the man who was reputed to have created the Armenian alphabet, the characters that were carved into the wall behind him: an alphabet that had never been used by any other people. It was a script that appealed to Jonas; the capitals in particular had an unusually regular and stylized form that at the same time made the characters seem somehow to have been reversed. A script for outsiders, thought Jonas, befitting a proud and hard-pressed people.