Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

In the second part of this ritual, which was almost a way of conquering the town, they trooped after their father up to Bergstaden’s mighty white Ziir, which is to say the octagonal stone church. Their father had called from the guest house and made an appointment with the organist, so that he could at least see the famous old baroque organ that, sadly, had just broken down and would have to be repaired. Instead he was allowed to try out the brand-new, Czechoslovakian main organ. ‘Play some Bach, Dad!’ Daniel yelled up at the little door in the side, behind which his father was taking his seat, as if here too the whole point was to put the speedometer into the red. And their father played Bach while the rest of the family sat proudly in a pew in the centre of the lovely, light church, listening. Thinking back on it as an adult, it seemed to Jonas that his father made love to churches when he played. That his father made conquests of churches rather than women. That his aim in life was to play in as many churches as possible. Haakon Hansen may have been a sober-minded character, but when it came to organs he was a real Don Juan.

So, for Jonas, Norway was a network of organs and ironmongers, music and steel — he had a feeling that life itself must consist of just such a combination, of something soft and something hard. And no weekend jaunt was more perfect than on those occasions when his mother’s and his father’s interests conjoined, in places that had both a fine organ and an ironmonger stocking a wide range of G-MAN saws — plus, since this was of course their excuse for being there, an interesting rune stone.

Although Jonas liked Røros — the buildings and the landscape appeared so alien and intriguing that he pretended he was in Ulan Bator in Mongolia — he was feeling a bit despondent that night as he stood alone in front of the mirror in the bathroom. They had booked in to one of those atmospheric inns in the museum-piece street that ran down to the church, a place that had retained some breath of history from the days when Røros had been a pulsating mining community. His parents were sleeping in one room, the three children in another, with a shared bathroom.

As Jonas stood there in his pyjamas, brushing his teeth, his thoughts turned to Margrete, back to Margrete, who had chucked him; and it was then, as he was standing there, cosseting his broken heart, that he noticed the strange box on the shelf below the mirror, and it couldn’t possibly be a powder compact, so he had to open it. He was not so stupid that he didn’t recognize it for what it was. His mother’s diaphragm. He gazed at the rubber ring, at first panic-stricken because for a second or so he thought that it was the same size in diameter as the vagina and could not imagine how his little penis could ever fill such a huge space. On reflection, though, he realized that that could hardly be the case. A sudden surge of excitement hit him, a sense of expectation not unlike the thrill he had felt the first time he found his mother’s pack of sanitary towels on top of the geyser in the bathroom at home: Sheba, the name alone had set his spine jangling, set him thinking about realms which seemed as exotic and remote as the queen’s little blue face, Egyptian-like on the pack.

Jonas stands in that bathroom in Røros, staring at himself in the mirror, then drops his gaze and spies something else lying next to the diaphragm. His father’s razor. These two objects represented a mysterious beauty, like a dome and a minaret. Or something soft and something hard. Jonas felt that this situation called for a creative act, a combining of these two objects. The sight he beheld here cried out for a make-believe fight, with the razor as a sword and the diaphragm a shield clashing together in a great battle — on the field at Stiklestad for example. Alongside the razor lay a razorblade. With his fingertips Jonas lifted it, made a cut in the thin rubber membrane of the diaphragm, not very long and close up against the elastic ring, where it was all but invisible; he put the diaphragm back in its box, closed the lid. The way he saw it he had pressed a button. Now what would happen?

He lay in bed — Rakel and Daniel were already fast asleep — listening to his mother and father in the bathroom, could hear that they were in high good humour, laughing softly, that it was one of those nights. Jonas lay on his back, looking up at some knotholes in the boards of the ceiling and smiling to himself in the grey half-light. It was as if only now did he understand the wisdom of the sagas, those pithy sayings. Because if he had ever been asked why he had done what he did, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with any other explanation either, except: ‘Because it was there.’

At breakfast, while Rakel was studying the map and his father was wondering whether he would be allowed to play the organ in Nidaros Cathedral, their mother told them about a dream she had had. ‘I met a white elephant,’ she said. ‘And would you believe, I dreamed that it wrapped its trunk around me and lifted me high into the air.’ She laughed, nudged their father in the arm. ‘Pass me the jam, Daniel, and stop playing the Battle of Stiklestad here at the table at least.’

Only Jonas suspected that she might have been impregnated by that white elephant, that for several hours now a Buddha had been in the making.

Whence come our dreams? The past or the future?

It is a bright, clear morning, already warm, and he is making his way into the centre with all his senses in top gear. He strolls through the vestiges of the Company’s Gardens and on down Adderley Street, then turns right into Golden Acre, the new, ultra-modern shopping centre and there, ahead of him, is the Grand Parade, an open square with a low and not particularly impressive fortress in the background. The air is heavy with unfamiliar smells. He is tense, tries to shake the feeling off, but he is tense. He sees stalls selling fruit and vegetables and, on closer inspection — yes, sure enough — next to them a flea market. It all fits, he thinks. So far.

It was the first morning in a new city, and the dream had been fresh in his mind when he woke up. He had dreamed that he met a woman dressed in white at a flea market and that she had asked him the way to Greenmarket Square — he remembered this with strange clarity: Greenmarket Square. And that she was wearing a labyrinthine brooch. Jonas did not set any great store by his dreams, unless it was for their entertainment value, but suddenly it occurred to him that this could be important, not to say crucial, as far as his life was concerned. After breakfast, just to be on the safe side, he enquired at reception as to whether there was a flea market in the city. He was in luck, they said, it was Wednesday, so there was a market on the Parade. ‘Do you have a map?’ Jonas asked, not so much intrigued as perturbed.

So there he was, threading his way between tables that were, for the most part, covered in junk, when a young woman — obviously a tourist like himself and dressed in clothes that seemed far too white, giving her the appearance of an angel paying a visit to a trouble-torn world — approached him and asked him the way to Greenmarket Square. Jonas had studied the map and gave her exact directions, possibly too long and involved — partly to mask his own inner turmoil — on how to get there, all the while with his eyes riveted on her brooch, as if a much more interesting map lay hidden there, in its pattern. She thanked him with a laugh, she too a little confused. For the rest of the day he walked around in a daze, with no idea of where he was; he was simply waiting for the night, for new dreams.

No one can say that Jonas Wergeland rested on his laurels. In the midst of his triumph, in the year when the television series Thinking Big was broadcast to great general jubilation, he was to be found in South Africa, armed with a visa and the blessing of the Norwegian Foreign Office. He was on his way home from South Georgia where they had just finished shooting a programme on the old Norwegian whaling stations and had made a brief stopover on the Cape. To celebrate the success of the shoot he checked into the hotel in Cape Town, the Mount Nelson, which, with its stately atmosphere and its situation on the hillside above the city centre truly was a place fit for a lord.