Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The mere thought of borrowing money from Sir William tied Jonas’s stomach in knots. And yet. This could be his big chance, maybe his only chance, to make a staggering amount of money very quickly, salt away funds for many a worry-free year.

The next day he plucked up the courage to call his uncle, Sir William, who was now working for Statoil and had long since forsaken Gråkammen in Oslo for Stokka in Stavanger, where he had 4,000 gilt-edged square feet all to himself. When the family moved to Africa in the sixties as part of a development aid programme, Sir William’s wife had taken leave from her job with Norges Bank. In Kenya, however, she met an American working with the World Bank and allowed him to break into her vault on numerous occasions while she was lying around, bored stiff in Nairobi; it ended, you might say, with a merger between Norges Bank and the World Bank — in other words, she left Sir William. Jonas had always had the feeling that his uncle’s fantastic commitment to Statoil sprang from bitter thoughts of revenge: fewer Norwegians should be dependent on American oil companies.

It was easier to speak to Sir William on the phone than to meet him face to face, although Jonas shuddered at the thought of his uncle’s appearance: he looked not unlike Count Dracula with his hair brushed back and canines that spoke of a man who, after his spell in Africa at any rate, had acquired the taste for sucking up commodities. Jonas outlined the situation, more or less in Veronika’s inviting terms, and his uncle sounded very positive, in fact he almost seemed pleasantly surprised that his ne’er-do-well nephew was finally beginning to take things seriously. Jonas was promptly granted a short-term loan. ‘Of course I’ll help you, you’re family, after all!’ There was only one condition: his uncle wanted it in writing. Jonas agreed; he’d be able to pay the money back as soon as the share price rose and he had sold his shares at a massive profit. He had made up his mind that this would be a short-lived adventure, a one-off.

The contract came by post. Jonas signed it, and the agreed sum was duly credited to an account in Jonas’s name with a well-known brokerage firm in Oslo. Jonas called the stockbrokers and asked them to put all of the money forthwith into Tandberg shares. Later, when he received the share certificate and regarded this visual proof that he owned 3,000 shares in Tandberg Radios he felt much the same pleasure as when they had played Monopoly as kids and he had picked up the title deed to see what astronomical sum the person who had landed on his street now owed him. The thought of possibly losing money may well have crossed Jonas’s mind, but the prospect of making a fabulous profit eclipsed all else. Only a few years earlier Tandberg shares had been worth over two hundred kroner. Jonas was doing sums in his sleep and dreaming of becoming a rich man. Behind his eyelids, irises and pupils had once more been supplanted by dollar signs.

His dream of a big killing was short-lived. The shares did not rise in value. At the end of August trading on them was suspended, and in December Tandberg was removed from the Oslo stock exchange. Still Jonas did not give up hope. But then, in March of the following year, the shares were written down to nil. Everything was lost. Vebjørn Tandberg, the company’s idealistic founder, committed suicide. Later that same year Tandberg Radios was declared bankrupt.

With hindsight it is, as always, easy to see what went wrong. Tandberg was a victim of over-expansion, lack of capital and poor long-term planning. Above all else they underestimated how vulnerable the company was to competition from commercial electronics products from Asia. It was right what I wrote in that mock Norwegian essay, Jonas thought. ‘Autonomy’ is a bloody illusion.

Nevertheless, Jonas — typical Norwegian that he was — had fallen prey to nostalgia and unrealistic notions about the world: which is to say, the state of the market. But for Jonas there was also another side to this tragedy: an entire childhood had gone bankrupt, all those radio plays, all those happy radio days, an infatuation with wood nymphs. He felt that he had lost, and lost big-time, because — like a naïve child — he had had too much faith in Norway.

As for Veronika, in case anyone was wondering, she did not buy one single share in Tandberg.

The bitterest pill of all was that he was now in debt to a detested uncle. Jonas managed, nonetheless, to push the problem to the back of his mind, almost blocked it out completely, until the cold January day when he was sitting in his own flat in Hegdehaugveien, and Sir William called from Stokka in Stavanger, from the desolate reaches of his 4,000 square-foot stronghold, and said that he wanted his money back, now: made this demand with a curt brutality that wounded Jonas deeply, as if his uncle were some monstrous Shylock, calling for a pound of his actual flesh. For Jonas, this was a matter of pride. He muttered something about taking out a bank loan to free himself from Sir William’s contemptuous clutches.

It was at this point, after Jonas had spent several evenings at the flat in Ullevål Garden City, surrounded by brass Indian gods and jade Chinese dragons, sitting gazing into the fire, with something obviously weighing on his mind, that Margrete put down a book on Istanbul and persuaded him to tell her what was bothering him. And when he told her how he had gambled away his kingdom, just like that, with one throw of the dice, she suggested, with typical assertiveness that she should go down to Stavanger and speak to Sir William: she, who did not know his uncle, who was not one of the family. ‘Maybe I can fix it somehow.’ She had looked at him for a long time. He had looked at her for a long time. He heard what she was saying. He knew what she was saying. Or at least he thought he knew what she was saying.

A couple of days after this she went off, and twenty-four hours later she returned. ‘It went fine,’ she said the minute she walked into the kitchen where he was sitting over a late breakfast. And then, on her way to the bedroom: ‘The debt’s cancelled.’

‘How did you manage it?’ he asked.

‘I talked to him,’ she said.

He asked no more questions.

It could be, as I say, that not long after this brief confrontation, which left him in a state of quivering uncertainty, Jonas Wergeland walked out of the house, because on that afternoon, the very day, that is, on which the Ayatollah Khomeini landed in Iran, a former friend of Jonas Wergeland appears to have met him in the basement of Grøndahl’s in Øvre Slottsgate, where he had been busily intent on trying out a number of pianos — the friend remembered how a couple of radically beautiful fragments of ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ had sounded pensively on everything from a Bechstein to a Schimmel. Jonas had said he was going to take up music again, that from now one he was going to devote himself solely to this, to ‘harmonies like shining constellations’, and thereafter, still according to this other person, he asked, or supposedly asked, a sales assistant whether it would be possible to pay in instalments and to have a piano delivered to his bedsit in Hegdehaugsveien.

But as far as I can tell, this has to be a pack of lies, Professor, at any rate if it is true that instead, on that afternoon, Jonas followed Margrete into the bedroom where they made love, briefly, but with extraordinary passion, and where afterwards Jonas lay on the bed thinking about how she had been aflame with desire when he came to her, as if she wished to hide something or ease some hurt. And the more he thought — not least about her capacity for acting impulsively and improperly, like the time when she was dared into stripping for some mutual friends, almost taking his breath away with her shameless behaviour, and afterwards simply shrugged it off, said it was no big deal — the more he thought about that and about other things, the more he found himself picturing what must have happened in Stavanger, somewhere in Sir William’s lonely labyrinth of a mansion. He was also painfully aware of what a temptation it must have been for his uncle, a man without a wife, a man of temperamental longings and no scruples, and then there she is — Margrete, that dazzling creature, right in front of him, in his own barren home, a woman who politely asks a favour of him, with a look in her eye that says she is willing to do anything in return. Jonas lay there, tossing and turning, thinking, conscious that he did not know Margrete, only knew that there was so much he did not know, she was full of secrets; he could not lie still, shook her, woke her up, began to probe, to ask what had really happened down there in Stavanger, ‘Are you telling me that he actually waived the debt, just like that?’