Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

No applause. Utter silence.

Haakon Hansen clears his throat. Claps.

God bless fathers like Haakon Hansen.

Fru Brøgger begins to clap too. Everyone else claps, hesitantly and not for long. Fru Brøgger smiles. A genuine smile. ‘Well, I must say…’ she begins, ‘that really was…’ She has to let her long, slender fingers form the words she cannot find. ‘But now it’s time for a bite to eat,’ she says, because refreshments were always served after the actual concert: smørbrød, incomparable freshly-baked coffee ring, of course, lemonade and coffee, before the evening continued with some informal games, usually including one in which you had to run around finding little pictures of birds and putting names to them.

Jonas walked home with his father, the latter with his arm round his son’s shoulder. Haakon started to say something then stopped and instead gripped Jonas’s shoulder even tighter, gave him a little shake.

God bless fathers like Haakon Hansen. Fathers who could say something, and would be quite right, but do not say anything.

So it was left to Fru Brøgger to bring Jonas back down to earth, or whatever you want to call it. He had one lesson left before Christmas and was looking forward to discussing his composition. When he entered the living room Fru Brøgger was standing with her back to him, watching some great tits hopping about among the bushes in the snow-covered garden — an idyllic Christmas-card scene. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Look.’ Jonas positioned himself next to her. Without turning she stroked his back once.

‘I’m not sure I ought to be doing this,’ she said, walking over to a cupboard and taking out a record. ‘But I think it’s for the best. In the long run.’ Jonas watched as those long, slender fingers removed the black record from its sleeve and right away he knew that this was another puck, a black disc that would shatter a dream. She put on the record, turned up the sound. Loud. Jonas listened with pounding heart to the music that poured out of the two loudspeakers at the other end of the room.

He gave a start. He could not believe it. He started because he was hearing his own piece. Not exactly the same, obviously. And the parts that were similar were, of course, a lot better. An awful lot better. But still. His own piece. The concept. They stood and heard it to the end. A torment and a shock. He thought of a puck skimming silently across the ice, appearing out of nowhere, and an exquisite monument crashing down in a cascade of light, shards flying in all directions, a pearl he would never find again.

‘Igor Stravinsky,’ Fru Brøgger said. ‘We haven’t played anything by him yet.’

‘When?’ was all he said, his last hope — a straw — that the answer would be last year, yesterday.

‘Before the First World War,’ she said. ‘Fifty-five years ago.’ She didn’t need to add this last, but she said it, knew she had to say it.

Jonas stood there in the centre of the room with ‘the four greats’ in their frames behind him. He heard a quick laugh. A devilish harmony played high up on the descant. A dragon. Or a chord from a piano crashing to the ground from the fifth floor — he could not say. Someone had had his groundbreaking idea about music half a century ago. For years, someone, a whole world had inhabited that landscape which he had imagined to be deserted. The concept had been perfected, used up, milked of all potential.

He was devastated. He felt — and only a poet’s analogy can capture his state of mind — like a Napoleon crippled in his first battle. In his mind, his whole future had been based on this: that he had the power to create something new. He could always improve upon his technique, but he now knew that he did not possess the one thing that really counted: a capacity for original thought. One could of course say that Jonas Wergeland was not being fair to himself, that one cannot judge one’s life at the age of fifteen, that it is perfectly possible to think along new lines even when one has never done so before — the early works of many great composers weren’t all that impressive either — but for Jonas the impatient, for Jonas Wergeland the perfectionist, this, this composition was his to be or not to be. Fru Brøgger’s revelation confirmed what he had, deep down, feared most of all: he was a mediocrity. The commonest little mongrel, as his uncle had once said. That was his fate. He just knew it. He could postpone it, fight for ten years at least against this knowledge, but the verdict would still be the same: he would always be a charlatan. One who, although he managed to hide it from an audience — other mediocrities — merely imitated the creations of true conquerors. He would have to wrestle with the worst of all fates: to have planted within him a lofty goal, a goal so manifestly right, so enticing that he could never forsake it, but at the same time lack the aptitude to achieve it.

He could not bear to stay there, Fru Brøgger walked him to the door, stroked his back again. Wordlessly she handed him a slice of coffee ring, as if he were a little kid, he thought, a little kid in need of comforting. ‘Give it to the birds,’ he said and was gone.

He had never seen as many great tits as he did on the way home. The males were strung out like infuriating yellow notes along the black lines of the tree branches. The words rang in his head: Great tit! You great tit! He swore that he would never touch a piano again.

It was snowing. On impulse he made for the church, thinking of suicide, thinking that he was on his way to his own funeral.

What cracked so loud? He heard the question sung out all around him? Norway from my hand, he thought.

But then there came those unexpected ups, signs that there was more to him. Could be more. He might be standing, let’s say, in the middle of a heap of stones and suddenly feel a pressure building up, feel all of his ordinariness, the various bits that went to make up his self shuffle themselves around and fall into a new pattern — or, why not: crystallized in a different way — so that he positively sensed, in every bit of himself, the possibility of assuming a different carat. Or, to be more specific: I’m talking about the summer out on Hvaler when he met Liv H. up at Røsset, a girl with a peeling nose and hair pulled into a thick plait that hung down her back, as bright as burnished copper. She was in high school like him, came from Larvik and was holidaying on a neighbouring island. Jonas felt a button being pushed. Her I’ve got to have, he thought. No matter what.

‘Røsset’ — the reason why Liv H. had made the trip across the sound — was a Bronze Age barrow, one of those man-made mounds of stones that can be found up and down the Norwegian coast. ‘Wouldn’t that be wonderful,’ she said, sitting down on the top of the landmark and looking out across the fjord towards Færder lighthouse. ‘To be buried under thousands of round stones shaped by the sea. And in such a fabulous spot.’ Jonas eyed her curiously. It turned out — he could almost have guessed it — that she wanted to study archaeology after she finished high school; nothing could be more exciting than digging into the past, she declared. And Liv H. would stay true to her dream, would in fact end up as an archaeologist of wide renown, an authority on ancient Norwegian settlements abroad, in England, Normandy, America, dating from the time when the Norsemen were usurpers, when they were conquerors. She would become famous for taking direct issue with the established research community, and for the unorthodox methods she employed in order to prove her theories: adventures that eventually also secured her membership of the celebrated Explorers Club. ‘It must have been some job,’ she said — now, I mean, talking to Jonas. ‘Lugging all those stones up here. I bet there’s a great story hidden in this mound.’