Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

It had never occurred to him that these stones could be more than stones. It was a weird phenomenon, certainly, but the main thing was that it offered a great view of the island and the sea beyond. ‘Ships could probably sail in through there in the old days,’ she said, pointing out to the channel where the sun turned the water into silver paper. ‘Strange-looking vessels once dropped anchor down there and Bronze Age people came ashore to bury a great man, a chief maybe.’ Jonas tried to picture it, boats like the ones you saw on rock engravings, maybe with prows shaped like dragons heads. ‘Do you think we would find anything valuable if we managed to move away all these stones?’ she asked brightly, as if she really wouldn’t mind having a go, would start right away, in fact.

Although she did not know it she had made Jonas feel better. His grandfather was dead, and Jonas felt heartsick at being here now, and a bit disappointed too perhaps, since now he would never learn Omar Hansen’s secret: what had been concealed in the canvas bag they found in the safe. Not only that, but he missed all the stories, the yarns from his grandfather’s days with the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line. Jonas took a long look at his companion. Her skin was like bronze, her hair thick with salt, with wind and weather. Although a fresh sou’wester was blowing, she was wearing shorts and a thin, old anorak. He could clearly see that there was nothing under the anorak but her own soft curves. ‘Where do you think these stones come from?’ she asked. ‘And how many years did it take the waves to grind them so smooth?’ She clasped a stone in each hand, as if they were large eggs which she intended to hatch, reveal their secret. There was something in her eyes, a curiosity, an eagerness to learn which he found immensely attractive. ‘Archaeologists dig and dig, brush the dirt off thousands of fragments in different places,’ she said. ‘But somebody has to put all of the pieces together.’ He knew who she was talking about.

Liv H. had a small and rather rickety sailboat of indeterminate make, and Jonas accompanied her on several expeditions around the skerries in the weeks that followed. He soon found out that there could hardly be anything lovelier — for a teenage boy, at any rate — than a sun-bronzed girl with a peeling nose, her hand on the tiller and her eyes screwed up against the sun. One day when they had pretty much left the boat to make its own way around the marker buoys, steered by the wind and the current, they ended up off Akerøy, further north in the archipelago, with Akerøy Fort lying on an islet next to it, a building which had lain in ruins for years but was now to be restored. Liv H. scanned the fort closely and made some observations about ancient fortress styles that made Jonas’s mind boggle, before they went ashore on Akerøy itself, a nature reserve with only one white house nestling among rocky knolls and soft grassy hills, a cottage used in the spring and autumn by ornithologists because the island was a vital resting place for migrant birds.

They were alone, apart from a figure walking to and fro among the heather and juniper some way off. ‘A thinker,’ Liv H. asserted after watching him for a while.

At one point they crossed paths with this other person, who proved to be an elderly man in an old-fashioned windcheater: tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses under a deeply furrowed brow. They fell into conversation with him, and he told them that he had recently bought a place down by the sound that ran between the two large islands just to the east, but that he had spent many a summer in the house they saw here on Akerøy. The man looked a bit like a bird himself, he had a lean head that was never at rest but kept dipping this way and that — as if he couldn’t help it, Jonas thought, maybe he had some disease.

‘What do you do?’ asked Liv H., direct as always.

‘I’m writing a book,’ the man said.

‘A book about birds?’

‘A novel.’

‘But why all this roaming round and round?’

‘Because I think best when I’m walking, it has something to do with the rhythm.’

‘So in a way your walks generate stories,’ she said, the idea seeming to excite her.

‘Well, I don’t think I’d put it quite as strongly,’ he said. ‘But sentences, yes.’

He had obviously taken a liking to Liv H., smiled when she told him she meant to study archaeology and especially the links between ancient cultures. ‘Impressive. The whole world as your field,’ he said. ‘Personally I find the question “Who am I?” is more than enough for me. You might say I’m an archaeologist who investigates the complexities of the mind. That I search for connections there.’

‘Such as what?’ Jonas ventured to ask.

‘Such as the inexplicable leaps, the hidden link, between childhood and adulthood. The bridges between the continents of the psyche are challenge enough for me.’ He regarded Jonas, appeared to be enjoying himself. ‘What if one were two? Had two identities? What would be the link, then, between “self” and “self”? Would it be possible to sail a conciliatory raft between the two? Show that they did still belong together, were part of the same civilization, so to speak?’

The man gazes at them intently, as if he envies them — a boy and a girl on an islet at the mouth of the fjord. ‘I’m thinking of bequeathing my body to the archaeologists of medicine,’ he says, ‘let them dig around a bit in there. I’d like to know what they would find. Maybe that I have a Chinese heart. That I have the large intestine of a Negro.’

Although they did not know it, Jonas and his new girlfriend were standing on one of the most important islands in the history of Norwegian literature — on that island, I think it is safe to say, where most of the loveliest short stories about love have been conceived. And this man was of course Johan Borgen, who had just purchased Knatten House on Asmaløy and who, this summer, was working on a new novel.

Maybe it was Johan Borgen who really brought these two young people together, who can say? At any rate they began going for evening strolls with other teenagers, a number of them equipped with transistor radios that, because of their aerials, reminded Jonas of creatures with feelers, alternative modes of communication. They sauntered along a cart-track, buoyed up by the strains of that summer’s hits, only one of which Jonas would be able later to recall: ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Because he was becoming more and more besotted with Liv H., yearned for her body, although he didn’t let it show, walked beside her among fir trees and wild flowers, laughing and joking and wondering how on earth he was going to conquer her.

One bright summer evening when they are standing on the jetty waiting for the last ferry, surrounded by seagull cries and the pungent smells of a beach at low tide, the talk comes around to school and this brings her back to her archaeology plans. ‘I’ve always wanted to seek out similarities,’ she says. ‘Some sort of correspondence, even across great distances.’

‘The way it is with boys and girls,’ he says, inspired by Johan Borgen. On his spine: that pressure, a crystal-clear sign.

She looks at him. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ And then: ‘But now you mention it.’

Why did these girls fall for Jonas Wergeland? I think it must have had something to do with that pressure inside him; it made an almost chemical impact on them which was as unmistakeable and effective as the visual signals of the animal kingdom, like the elephant seal’s inflated nose or the peacock’s tail.

One evening they wound up on Svanetangen, right on the tip, looking out to the open sea, just the two of them. Far out on the water an old fishing smack chugged past, thud, thud, thud, like a sea-borne heart. They sat down on a pebble beach, a sudden break in the rocks on which Jonas had spent many a day with his grandfather, and with Daniel who liked to build huge bonfires out of all the driftwood, onto which he could throw any tin cans that had been washed up and see the flames send them shooting gloriously skywards. To Jonas this was a beach rich in adventure and explosions, a view that evening would do nothing to diminish.