Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

This leads me on quite naturally to the next tale — because I have not yet spoken of the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Not that I have unconsciously been wishing to put it off, since it is so dark, overshadowing all else, but simply because only now does this part slot into place, even though everything is in fact interwoven with everything else, just as in the Academic’s carvings. Each story can only really be told by telling the lot.

It was night, and Jonas Wergeland was standing with a power saw in his hands. With one part of his mind he could see the inordinacy of the situation, saw himself from the outside, like a character in a low-budget melodrama. And one that dealt with the most primitive of all impulses: revenge. An eye for an eye. So bloody theatrical, he thought. Gabriel was asleep in a bunk down below, helped along by a half-bottle of whisky. Jonas could hear him snoring all the way up here on the deck. He was on board the lifeboat Norge , a weather-beaten circumnavigator riding at anchor in Vindfanger Bay, just north of Drøbak, at the head of Oslo fjord. And he was not standing just anywhere; he was standing at the boat’s heart, before the mainmast.

He almost jumped out of his skin when the power saw started up. It sounded hellish in the darkness, as if the ghost of the Blücher itself had risen again from the deep. Jonas has already cut the lanyards of the shroud on the one side, and it won’t take him long to fell the mast, he knows what to do, cuts into the wood between the mast step and the fife rail; stands there in a cloud of exhaust fumes, watching the saw blade slice through the mast. No sign of Gabriel, although by the racket you would have thought someone was driving a motorbike around the deck. Jonas watched the mast slowly topple over. Not the tearing apocalyptic crash he had expected, had possibly been hoping for, something akin to a lightning strike, ropes flying in all directions with furious whiplash cracks; instead it was all very quiet, like an echo from that time when a pine tree fell somewhere deep in a Norwegian forest, in a snow-covered landscape perhaps. The boat didn’t even tilt as the mast hit the manrope and the rail; it was more like a great soft bump. What cracked so loud? Jonas thought, nevertheless, as he stared at the damage he had wrought. Norway from your hand, a voice sniggered somewhere inside him.

Jonas was in the dinghy and some distance away from the boat by the time he saw a white figure come stumbling through the hatchway and heard this person grunting into the darkness, asking whether Hell’s Angels were on the go or what. It was Gabriel — Gabriel in anachronistic long johns and long-sleeved undershirt, eccentric to the bone, you might say.

‘You bastard,’ Jonas hisses. ‘You fucking bastard. I should have sunk her, but you don’t get off that easy.’

Jonas didn’t know if the elderly man on the deck could see him, knew what was going on, or whether he was too drunk. As he became more and more mired in the rigging now lying on the deck Gabriel began to declaim, as if he were on a stage, as if this too was a drama, though one more rooted in reality. ‘A knife! I am blunt,’ he ranted in a voice hoarse with sleep and booze, ‘mend me and slit me! The world will go to ruin if they don’t mend my point for me.’

Jonas realized that Gabriel had some idea of what was going on, because he remembered where he had heard those words for the first time, the ones which were now being roared out into the night.

It had all begun, as so often before, with a conversation down below in the saloon on board the Norge , not — according to Gabriel — a decommissioned lifeboat, but a true-blue royal yacht. From the minute Jonas first met Gabriel the two had been firm friends, but back then he had known nothing about this man’s profession. In his manner Gabriel was rather like a distinguished old major-domo. It was only when Jonas came aboard the boat, Gabriel’s domicile, that he discovered the man had been an actor. On one of the bulkheads, next to a sea chart of Western Samoa, he noticed some photographs which made him smile: stills from an earlier era showing Gabriel in the oddest rig-outs, wearing crowns and ridiculous-looking tights, pictures in which the faces looked like masks and the figures cast sinister shadows.

Also in the saloon was a bookshelf containing nothing but plays; Gabriel called it ‘Nemo’s library’. It held no more than about twenty volumes. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘And I could probably chuck ten of them.’

Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, Gabriel would treat Jonas to a one-man show on board the Norge , in a crossfire of unfamiliar odours — tar and paraffin, birch logs and whisky — which lulled Jonas into lounging back contentedly on the bench seat. Amid the creaking of the rigging and the gaff, in a floating proscenium of fir, pine, oak and teak and with the minimum of props — possibly no more than a walking stick and a handkerchief — Gabriel acted out, and played all the parts in, scenes from some of the world’s great dramatic works, from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Phaedra by Racine to Pirandello’s Henry IV and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape — masterpieces in which he had also performed, so Jonas was given to understand, in his formerly so renowned, now legendary, one-man theatre, ‘The Tower Company’, in its mouldering premises on Storgata. Jonas sat in the dimly lit saloon, as enthralled as a child at a pantomime, all but falling off its tip-up seat. He could well believe the story that stated Gabriel had once played an Iago so vicious that he had been beaten up after the show by an incensed member of the audience.

Every time he was on the boat Jonas would also hear Gabriel reciting a brief monologue — it might be while he was in the galley, spreading marmalade on toast, or stoking the stove, while he was winding up his fine gold pocket watch or rowing Jonas ashore; he hollered it, sang it, whispered it. ‘I recite it every day, for practice,’ he said. It was, moreover, a woman’s monologue, Ophelia’s speech after Hamlet has humiliated and tricked her, making her believe that he is mad: ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,’ and so on: lines which Jonas eventually knew by heart and hence was even more impressed by the fact that Gabriel was forever bringing out fresh nuances in them, thus presenting a different picture of Ophelia, or of Hamlet, each time — perhaps simply by dint of a pause, a cheery grin at the wrong moment, or with those hands of his, a tiny gesture which suddenly made everything clear, words redundant. But Gabriel was never satisfied, he altered the tone of every word, the set of the head, every aspect that was open to variation, year after year, as if it was of the utmost importance to come up with the perfect rendering of these particular lines. ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here…o’erthrown.’

On several occasions it was evident that Gabriel found Jonas’s open admiration irksome. One day when they were each sitting with a somewhat tardy ploughman’s lunch in front of them in the penumbra of the saloon, Gabriel broached this subject: ‘I am not — and you’ll never hear me admit this again — a great actor.’ He pointed to an ugly scar under one eyebrow, as if this were proof of his statement. ‘Why am I good? Because of you. It’s your generosity that turns my acting into more than empty gestures, cheap effects created by the contrast between words and expression. The roles lie within you, I merely bring them to life. Do you want some pickle? More whisky? Help yourself. Now listen: how much stuff do you have to put onto a stage in order to create a forest?’ His gold tooth gleamed. ‘One stick is enough. The audience’ll see to the rest. The audience is the real creative element in a play.’ He got to his feet, picked up a log, opened the stove door: ‘And this, my friend, is all it takes to give a glimpse of hell.’ He tossed the log into the stove. ‘Thanks to the audiences, people like you, I learned early on to what heights even a second-rate actor can rise.’ He crossed the room and tapped the barometer, which did not budge, however, from its perpetual ‘Fair Weather’. Then he added: ‘I’m telling you: it’s a temptation worthy of Lucifer himself.’