Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘St Olaf,’ said Ørn, suddenly a mine of information. ‘With his cross and a lance to run through the foul enemy, the dragon.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Jonas. ‘We still haven’t found out what sound a dragon makes.’

‘Why don’t we just flap a big fat bundle of banknotes,’ said Ørn. ‘That ought to sound spooky enough.’

(Suddenly she falls silent. She has never done that before. Stayed quiet for so long. I think she is crying. No, she is not crying. Just looking out into the darkness, staring. As if at an aeroplane, a craft, with no lights, no sound. Angels. All stories deal with what cannot be said, cannot be written. Time for stillness. Time to feel the weight of one’s own body. Time to listen to the beating of the heart. This miracle. To live. To be granted another second. And another. Another. Another.)

In my capacious head I set this next piece in the wrong position several times before finding its rightful place: before the dangerous sabotage mission, after the boys’ expedition to Trosterudveien. Because Jonas had just realized his old dream of studying at the College of Architecture when he was witness to a very strange scene in Vestre Aker Church. Daniel’s church practicum group was holding a service there, and Daniel — half in jest — had invited his brother to come along. Jonas had the huge church pretty much to himself; he felt like an observer at a military exercise.

The idea of these meetings in the church every Monday morning was to give the students in the Faculty of Theology a chance to practice holding a church service, in authentic surroundings as it were. The students split up the various duties among themselves and on this day it was Daniel’s turn to give the sermon — which was, of course, why he had invited Jonas to attend — so now Jonas was sitting there with a smile on his lips listening to his brother, the boy who had with ruthless consistency beaten him black and blue throughout their childhood, delivering a sermon based on the words from Matthew 5 about turning the other cheek. Jonas had to admit that he had never heard the like of that sermon, it wasn’t like any of the rants to which he had lent half an ear while nodding off in the balcony of Grorud church; it really was a most original sermon — at that moment Jonas felt genuine, warm affection for his brother. Come down here afterwards and apologize for all the trouble you’ve caused, and I’ll be blowed if I don’t forgive you, he thought.

But Jonas was, if he was honest, far more interested in the student who led the actual liturgy before and after the sermon, a girl in an ankle-length white surplice, a beauty who held him enthralled even with her back to him; he could not take his eyes off the dark tendrils that had broken free from the hair pulled up into a topknot and curled, little-girl fashion, over the nape of her neck. She moved in a solemn, almost trancelike manner behind the altar rail, looking so lovely against the backdrop of church silver and stained glass: embodying a kind of consummate innocence. She reminds me of a nun, Jonas thought, wishing it were communion, so he could sneak up and have a wafer placed on his tongue by her hand.

During the break before the students were to discuss each other’s performance and hear the voice coach’s comments, he mentioned her to Daniel. His brother didn’t know much about her, only that her name was Anne S., that she came from Fåberg in Gudbrandsdalen, from a strict Evangelical family, and that she was a wizard at Latin, Greek and Hebrew; she adored grammar, there was no one to beat her when it came to detailed exegeses. ‘She chose witches as her topic for her ecclesiastical history project, you know,’ Daniel said with a sly grin. ‘She wrote with particular insight on those witches who were accused of having sexual intercourse with an incubus — the devil — while asleep.’

‘She should have a go at you, then?’ Jonas said.

Daniel didn’t laugh: ‘I’d watch out for her if I were you,’ was all he said.

Jonas took this last remark as a joke. As he walked down Kirkeveien he could still see her in his mind, Anne S. behind the altar rail, those ethereal features, the rather timid eyes.

Jonas was not at all surprised to meet her again, later that autumn, at a wild party thrown by one of Axel’s many friends, a medical student — Anne S. had been invited because she lived in the same bedsit complex. While the others found escape from the daily round of lectures and cramming by letting their hair down in all manner of ways, she sat in a corner all by herself; she was wearing a white, embroidered blouse; her eyes were an almost uncanny blue. She seemed a little anaemic and rather out of place, like a Sunday-School girl among a crowd of hooligans, not to say bedevilled souls. When almost everybody else had collapsed on the floor in a state of hedonistic exhaustion and lay there surrounded by lighted candles, holding hands and listening to Keith Jarrett’s endless, introspective improvisations on the piano, Jonas went over to speak to her. As they talked he noticed how she searched him with those blue eyes, how she filled him with substance, qualities of which he knew nothing, but which — having learned from experience — he allowed her to pour into him, after which she asked him, with eyes demurely downcast, if he would like to come up to her place. And when Jonas said yes it was by no means simply because he felt sorry for her.

He thought the party had been too noisy for her taste, but it must have had more to do with the choice of music, or the quasi-religious mood, because once inside her bedsit she put on an album called Horses by the pretty innovative poet and rock musician Patti Smith — she played it quite loud, even though the music was raw and intense, with Smith’s rather nasal, singsong vocals. There was something primitive, shamanistic about the whole thing that seemed to fit Anne S., his memory of her silhouetted against the fragile glass altarpiece in Vestre Aker Church, that is.

He was no less surprised when she suddenly appeared carrying a tray of caviar and thin slices of toasted white bread. She then produced two small, fogged glasses containing what Jonas took to be iced water. She passed a hand over them: ‘It was water, but now it’s vodka,’ she said with a smile. ‘I just got off the boat from Denmark,’ she added, almost apologetically. Jonas eyed the wedges of toast heaped with black pearls, the goblets of ice-cold vodka. I managed to celebrate communion with her after all, he thought.

While they chatted, and the vodka was making his brain lighter, he drank her in with his eyes, the combination of blue eyes and hair blacker than ebony, aware as he did so that the button had been activated, felt an insistent pressure spreading from his spine out into the rest of his body, a pressure which told him in no uncertain terms that he was faced here with a woman who could help to steer his life in an unexpected direction. On her desk lay some books that aroused his interest. ‘I’m learning Chinese,’ she said.

‘What are you going to do with that?’

‘I want to become a missionary,’ she said. ‘I’ve applied to the Missionary College. Why stay here, casting pearls before swine, when China poses such a big challenge? A billion animists hiding behind a nonreligious façade.’

‘They’ll never let you in there to do missionary work,’ he said.

‘Patience,’ she said. ‘It’s only a matter of biding my time. It won’t be long before China starts opening up again. And until it does, there’s always Taiwan.’

Once again Jonas was taken by surprise. There was something about her that he couldn’t quite make out, the clash between her delicate appearance and the vodka, which she was really knocking back, although without getting as drunk as he was. Her eyes were veiled with sensuality, but at the same time full of innocence, or no, not innocence, but a lack of experience, an ignorance of young men’s lust. More records by Patti Smith were placed on the turntable, Radio Ethiopia he read on one sleeve, as if this too had to do with missionary work.