Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas followed the sounds of weeping. Laila was sitting on the ground, her trousers still round her ankles, her sweater rucked up above her waist. There were scratches under one breast, blood on the back of her hand. Jonas noticed some pine needles on her white thigh, wanted to brush them off, but didn’t. ‘Laila?’ he said.

No answer. Nothing but heartrending sobs.

‘Was it horrible?’ he asks.

She looked at him. Despite the darkness he saw it. Despite the tears. A hate he had only seen once before. In Ørn’s eyes that time when they fought and Jonas held him down.

She got up, clearly in pain. Crying soundlessly. He tried to help her, but she turned away, it took her a while to straighten her clothes, then she started making her way back through the trees, so unsteady on her feet that she had to stop every so often and prop herself up against a tree trunk. He heard her throw up. He followed slowly after her. Only once did she turn round, and though she didn’t say anything, from the look in her eyes he knew what she was thinking. The most horrible thing about it, those eyes said, was him.

Jonas stayed right behind her the rest of the way home, benumbed by conflicting emotions. Guilt turned his legs to lead. A rhythm galloped around in his head. He could not rid himself of it. Then: Dickie, he thought. Why did Sgt Petter call me Dickie?

He knew it. It was bound to happen. He had known it all along.

‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’

The idea, usually, was to come up with the best strategy for life in general: or rather, to achieve immortality, but on this particular evening the matter in hand was the more prosaic one — in both senses of the word — of the tactics for getting the best possible mark for the mock Norwegian exam held just before Christmas, a rehearsal for the actual university Prelim, an essay which tested not only one’s command of the finer points of the Norwegian language, but the whole of one’s shaky way of thinking. The Prelim essay was simply one of those trials that had to be undergone, like the BCG vaccination or the army’s long-distance endurance march.

Viktor and Axel had just finished playing a duet: ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’, meant as a kind of time-out. Viktor played the piano — no one played the piano like Viktor Harlem, the king of melancholy; he could elevate the blandest tune into a melodic heaven or make any tired old standard sound like you’d never heard it before — set free somehow, brand new. His left hand in particular spoke of a true gift, playing around with triads and switching about the notes in the chords as though the possibilities were endless. Axel’s double-bass playing was not up to the same standard, but it was impressive enough. Axel had always sought out the bass line in life anyway — Jonas regarded his fervent interest in the DNA molecule as a variation on this same theme.

Speaking of bass lines in life, I ought perhaps to intimate my doubts regarding the previous story. Because, knowing you, Professor, you will automatically assume that such an apparently shocking incident must have a decisive effect on a person’s development. But what if that were wishful thinking? The episode can, of course, provide some clue as to how Jonas Wergeland sowed the seeds of an acknowledgement that the spectator is the guiltiest of all criminals, but such an insight could also spring from other experiences. At this juncture I am tempted to ask you to forget all about the story from the wood, for the moment at least. I am afraid that it may distract your attention. For what if the really dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life lay in the bright stories, or in perfectly ordinary days, or in an incident akin to the one I am about to describe, one that revolves, not around Laila but around the love of Beate?

The Three Wise Men were at Viktor’s place, in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, in a cinnabar-red room known as ‘The Bamboo Grove’. Every Friday evening they gathered here — and often stayed all night — to talk and toast his illustrious patron, in the form of an icon on the wall. It was actually Viktor’s mother’s flat, but she had moved in with a new man, so he had the place to himself. At the end of the street stood a proud, old building that had once been a sailcloth factory. Appropriately enough, since they often felt that they were setting sail up there in Viktor’s flat, that they were weaving the fabric for great intellectual voyages.

The living room resembled a combination of bar, travel agency and joiner’s workshop. On the only wall not painted cinnabar red — but instead covered in wallpaper with a bamboo design — hung an enormous map of the world marked with a distinctly meandering line which looked as if it were following the round-the-world voyage of another Captain Cook, and the floor was covered in tools, off-cuts of timber and wood shavings. Aside from the table — two still pungent halves of an old oak sherry cask — Viktor had made all his own furniture, not least the bookshelves he was constantly having to extend to accommodate new books bought to provide more insight into Ezra Pound’s The Cantos . Viktor claimed that everything, absolutely everything, he had ever learned — right down to the fact that he could, at the drop of hat, sum up the ins and outs of phenomenological, hermeneutic and analytical philosophy — derived from his tussles with Ezra Pound’s poetic conglomerate. It is also worth noting here that there was no television in the room. ‘The salvation of the world is bound to come from a corner other than the one in which the TV stands,’ said Viktor.

There was also another, less philosophical, explanation for the absence of a television. Having first entered the gates of the Cathedral School and instantly homed in on one another — rather like ants, by dint of chemical secretions — Viktor and Axel eventually discovered that they had a common bond in their fathers. It was hard for Jonas to see how a director with the Akers Mek shipyard in Oslo and a manager at the Løiten Distillery in Hedemarken could have anything in common, but the key here was the Wilhelmsen shipping line. ‘If it weren’t for our fathers,’ the two said, arms wrapped round one another, ‘Norway would never have had its most famous product: Line Aquavit.’

Furthermore, both Axel and Viktor loathed television — again because of their sires. Axel’s father had had a brief, but hectic political career and in connection with this had once had to take part in an edition of Open to Question , in its day an extremely popular discussion programme on NRK. On this he was given such a lambasting by the programme’s aggressive chairman that he never got over it.

Viktor’s father worked, as I say, at the Løiten Distillery but cherished a distilled passion for another subject — Napoleon. In the very early sixties he took part in the quiz show Double Your Money , answering questions on this multifaceted topic. It went like a dream until they got to the 10,000-kroner question — a hairsbreadth away from winning a fortune, and he gave the wrong answer, or rather his mind went a complete blank when it came to one part of a multiple question, namely: ‘What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon’s I Corps at the battle of Austerlitz?’ He could remember both Soult and Davout and even Lannes but not the last one. And of course it was Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte, no less, the future Karl Johan, with a street in the centre of Oslo named after him and all. Viktor’s father lapsed into such a deep fit of depression after this that eventually his mother could not take it any more; she divorced him and moved to the capital, leaving her husband on his St Helena. Viktor soon followed his mother: in the long run it wore you down to be reminded every other day that you were the son of ‘the man who got the 10,000-kroner question wrong’ and on Karl Johan of all people. He developed a complex about it. If you said one word about Napoleon to Viktor, if you so much as hummed the Double Your Money theme tune or that old favourite, ‘Do You Still Care for Me, Karl Johan?’, you risked being strangled on the spot. They never went anywhere near the royal palace and the equestrian statue of the marshal, and walked down the street named after him only if absolutely necessary. Jonas had a suspicion that Viktor had sworn to avenge his father some day, and that it was Napoleon who would be on the receiving end.