Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘Why are you so worried?’

‘Because…’ He chopped the air helplessly with one hand, listening as he did so to her voice, as if it were complex chord, on the very edge of dissonance.

‘No more questions,’ Margrete said, getting up.

Jonas was suddenly seized by a pain in his stomach, his back, his shoulders. He stood up, grabbed hold of her arms and swung her round, slapped her face hard with the flat of his hand. The crack resounded around the room. ‘Say it, I want to hear it,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Did you?’ He looked, he glared at her. ‘You really did it?’

‘What if I did?’ Margrete said defiantly, running her fingers over her cheek. ‘You certainly wanted me to. I could see it in your face.’

He hit her again, so hard that she fell back onto the bed. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he did it anyway. She could have stood up, walked out, but she lay where she was.

‘I want to know what happened,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything.’

‘I remember once…’

He hit her again, hated how she always told stories instead of answering.

I do not know if it is true — I have to express my doubts — because there are, there’s no hiding it, people who this selfsame afternoon, which is to say while Jonas was, as I have explained, standing in that bedroom, hitting Margrete again and again in his desperation and trying to worm out of her something he really did not want to hear — there are those who believe that, at exactly the same time, they met Jonas Wergeland on the Sognsvann line with all his skiing gear, on his way up to Nordmarka, and who maintain that he remarked, a mite flippantly, that one might just as well ski off the track a way and plonk oneself down in the snow. ‘Then you have to decide what to believe in,’ he said, or supposedly said. ‘The cold or the light?’

I ought perhaps to allow for the possibility that this really did happen, I mean that Jonas Wergeland actually was in several places at once, although — and I hate having to admit my own limitations — I only know about the one strand: the goings-on in the bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, where he went on torturing Margrete.

‘What was he like?’

‘You know him better than I do,’ Margrete said.

‘Was he good?’

‘For God’s sake, Jonas, what do you want me to say? No matter what answer I give you, it’ll be the wrong one. You’ll only see what you want to see anyway. The debt’s cancelled. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘Did you?’ he repeated.

Margrete waited a long time before answering, lay gazing at the golden idol against the end wall. ‘Whatever I did, I did it for you,’ she said.

‘I’ll kill you,’ he said and struck her again, only just managing to overcome the urge to clench his fist. He was seething inside, and yet somehow distanced from it all, so he could see that he still had those dollar signs in his eyes, not a sign of avarice, but of blindness: a serpent in each eye. He struck and struck again, feeling that he was punishing himself, that this was a form of suicide, but he could not stop himself; it was like the sexual encounters of youth when the ecstasy of the moment outweighs any possible consequences that could last a lifetime. She could have put up a fight, but she did not. She lay there and allowed herself to be beaten, lay there and allowed Jonas Wergeland’s suspicions to grow and grow, curling herself up into a ball, tighter and tighter, as if practising for a future situation, or kept hoping that this would be the last time he would hit her, that this had to be done, to ensure that it never happened again; which is why, she was already willing to forgive him, even while the blows were raining down on her.

It may well be that the path from one point to another; from — say — a kitchen table in Ullevål Garden City to an office in Marienlyst, has to be understood as being the sum of all the possible paths one could take from that table to that office; if, that is, it is not the case that of all the likely routes only one becomes a reality, for one fact which a great many people can corroborate — indeed it is pretty much common knowledge — is that, no matter what happened on the day in question and wherever else he might have been, not long afterwards, during a quite unseasonal shower of rain, and after having had lunch with Margrete at the university, a lunch which was rounded off with a Napoleon cake, Jonas Wergeland presented himself at the Marienlyst office of NRK’s head of programming, to ask whether they were looking for new announcers, and thereafter — according to later rumours — not only did he come out with a story which made the normally rather reserved TV director burst out laughing, but to the latter’s question he replied that he was fed up studying architecture, fed up with the whole bloody business and felt like starting on something totally different, like television, for instance.

‘Up to now I’ve just been wrestling with shadows, now I want to work with light.’ And when he stepped out onto the street, his head buzzing with undreamed-of possibilities, he unconsciously made a kind of discus-throwing movement with his body: a pirouette combined with a leap in the air — rather like the triumphant gesture with which an exultant footballer expresses his delight at scoring an almost staggeringly unexpected, yet quite magnificent goal.

I — the professor — sat for a long time, thinking things over, after she had gone that evening. If the last thing she had told me proved to be true, then perhaps it was not so surprising for someone to ask themselves how such a person could have become the object of an entire nation’s abject adoration. This set me thinking once again about Jonas Wergeland’s description of Norwegian people — myself included — and I had to agree with him: we are a nation of laid back viewers, laid out in our Stressless chairs.

During the night, as I was frantically working to transcribe my pages and pages of notes in shorthand while her words were still fresh in my mind, I was struck by a twinge of doubt. What should I call the pages I was covering with writing: a biography or a novel? It worried me, from a professional point of view almost, that I so often — much more than usual — slid over into fiction, gave myself up so unreservedly to the narrative. Now and again I glanced around at the piles of information on Jonas Wergeland: everything from family trees, family photographs, copies of report cards and of the speech he had made on his thirty-fifth birthday, to the list of all the addresses at which he had stayed and statements of earnings and assets for every year, as well as that mountain of other notes and clippings which I had fleetingly imagined would illuminate a whole culture. It galled me to think that I had not managed to use more of all that meticulously gathered material, that almost without noticing it I had acceded to another, very different set of terms, had in some way not stayed true to an original plan. Not infrequently I had the feeling that I had been well and truly seduced by this woman’s stream of stories. Or perhaps I should say conquered.

And when the book was published — would it be her story or mine? I comforted myself with the thought that she had forbidden the use of a tape recorder, had left the final selection up to me. At the end of the day it was my memory and my associations that counted; even as her audience I was the real narrator. She told these stories so that I would understand — there were actually times when it struck me that she told them so that I could form the understanding she herself lacked.

For a long time the trial looked like being an affair which hinged upon forensic evidence — with the focus on strands of hair, fingerprints and times of day — and a prosecutor who put all of his energy into building up a viable chain of circumstantial evidence. So people went on hoping that Jonas Wergeland was innocent, as if they realized that if he were to be convicted, they too, their blindness, would be exposed. And as I say — more and more people had the feeling that somewhere along the line something was scandalously wrong, that an appalling injustice was being committed, a suspicion which seemed to be borne out by Jonas Wergeland’s inexplicable silence. Folk stubbornly refused to believe, for example, one of the witnesses for the prosecution who, in the midst of explaining something else, had launched an attack on Jonas Wergeland’s credibility, his ‘amazing fund of knowledge’ by telling the court about a red notebook in which Jonas Wergeland had apparently copied down twenty-odd extracts from books written in the nineteenth century. Even when the press followed up this assertion and showed how one saying, variations on which Jonas Wergeland had employed in countless different situations and which was even attributed to him in a Norwegian edition of Modern Quotations — ‘The essence of lying is in deception, not in words’ — that this maxim had actually been coined by John Ruskin, people refused to believe it. The more Jonas Wergeland was exposed to view, the more mud was slung at him, the more the mood seemed to turn in his favour.