Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

She began to sway slowly around the floor, dancing to ‘Ask the Angels’, looked at him as he sat there, befuddled by drink and with the taste of roe and raw onion in his mouth, looked at him with blue eyes, blue eyes and black, black hair, as she raised her arms over her hair, disclosing dark tufts under her arms and filling the room with a faint odour of perspiration. He got up and danced with her, they said nothing, merely glided around to the intense music, husky vocals, lyrics Jonas couldn’t quite catch, only a mystifying phrase here and there: ‘pissing in a river’. He put his arms around her, felt the pressure rise, felt both sure and unsure, wanted to conquer, or be conquered, was never certain which was which; there came a point, at any rate, when, by his reading of the situation, all he had to do was to lead her over to the bed, she would lie back unresistingly, surrender to a boy with experience, she was desperate for it, had been desperate for it for ages, but at that moment she suddenly stopped dancing, said something to the effect that she was tired, that she had things to do the next day, Sunday, those blue eyes once more apologetic, troubled. ‘Kiss me just once,’ she said before he left. He did so, greedily, pressing her up against the wall. ‘I said kiss,’ she whispered, ‘not crucify.’

Poor girl, he thought to himself on the way home, as confused as he was exasperated; all that vodka, and she was still terrified of her own sexuality.

Some weeks later he received a letter. Anne S. asked him to meet her in the Grand Hall. Jonas Wergeland knew that this was an offer he could not refuse, so on the Saturday evening he walked up Staffeldts gate to the Inner Mission Hotel — a building he had always admired for its clean lines — where a youth club meeting was under way in the Grand Hall. The mood in the lobby was lively; he had to hang about until the people in the hall broke into exultant song, and when she eventually appeared, dressed in a neat pleated skirt and a black leather biker jacket, she surprised him by leading him outside and round to the hotel side of the building, on the upper floors. Everything is happening much too fast for Jonas, but it seems to him — he would swear to it — that she doesn’t have a key, that she actually picks the lock on one of the doors. All of a sudden he finds himself alone in a hotel room with Anne S., black hair and blue eyes, with a look in them that speaks to him of a colossal hunger, either that or sheer, evangelical zeal. As if she were somehow out to convert him. And speaking of conversion: Anne S. never did become a missionary; in later years she was appointed to a top post with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, became a leading figure in the fight for the furtherance of women — not before time — in ultraconservative religious circles, and as such a missionary of sorts for her sex in a field full of inveterate heathens.

The way Jonas construed it — or as he realized as soon as he received her letter — she had made up her mind to say goodbye to her virginal existence. She had opted for the Inner Mission Hotel, he thought, its safe, familiar surroundings, so that the transition would not be too abrupt. For once he was nervous, felt almost as if he were the instrument of higher powers. To a certain extent he had been chosen to take her virtue. He had a responsibility. He had to see to it that that an untouched girl received a gentle introduction into the intoxicating mysteries of sex. This was not like other adventures — not an outer, but an inner mission.

She undresses quickly, clearly embarrassed and yet at the same time impatient, climbs into bed and pulls the quilt up to her chin. Only one thing is worrying Jonas: that she will change her mind. But a moment later she lifts up the quilt for him — as if welcoming him into a tent — or perhaps I should say a tabernacle.

The faint sound of singing reached their ears from somewhere down below. It occurred to Jonas that he might have misunderstood. Maybe she wanted their encounter, the sex, to be a sin: a sin she committed with her eyes open, well aware of what she was doing, as if it were an act of blasphemy.

He felt her tremble and regretted this thought, felt a rush of tenderness, ran his hands gently, soothingly over her body, her skin, which was strangely cool. He was very aroused, possibly because she lay there so passively, so still, as if she did not know how to respond, or did not dare respond as her body was telling her to do. Only when, after many a long detour, his fingers reached her crotch, and he felt how moist, how wet she was, how ready as it said in the passages Daniel had read aloud to him when they were boys, only when he could not hold back any longer, but twisted round to the bedside table, where he had with the greatest discretion left out a condom which he now rolled onto his cock, deftly, with none of the clumsy fumbling of the first-timer, although the ring felt tighter than usual, his cock bigger; the condom sheathed it like a sausage skin as he rolled on top of her with a primitive pounding in his veins, placed his forearms against the inner sides of her thighs and spread them apart, a little roughly perhaps, and just for a moment there he thought she offered some resistance, tried to push him away, as if to say that he was taking her against her will, he could never be sure, because it only lasted a few seconds, then she relaxed and he slid as deep inside her as he could, but with such lack of control that he could not help seeing how her brow creased in pain. There might even have been tears in her eyes.

He managed to restrain himself, lay still, as if to give her time to get used to being filled for the first time, come to terms with the thought of having lost the seal upon her virgin status, it may have come as a shock, something over which one ought really to shed a tear. Jonas, for his part, had more than enough to do just enduring that warmth, as blissful as always, that almost stupefyingly good feeling, and when he began to move he was pleasantly surprised to find how well she clenched the muscles of her vagina together, so hard that the friction instantly gave rise to an itching sensation, an exceptionally powerful illuminating force, along with a fear that he was going to come right away, so turned on was he by being inside a nervous, naïve virgin.

All this time she lay with her eyes closed, unmoving, just crossing her arms over his back, her palms on his shoulder-blades, lightly pressing him down onto her, as if she were getting used to it, beginning to enjoy it, learning that sex was not only a part of God’s creation, but also a foretaste of the splendours of the world to come — something which the Islamic religion had long understood, of course, with its paradise pervaded with erotic dreams.

Then she turned away, and Jonas, worked-up to bursting point, felt sick with disappointment. He thought she’d had enough. But she simply turned around, onto all fours, inviting him to take her from behind, maybe because she didn’t want to be reminded of the word ‘missionary’ he mused and gazed hungrily at the long cleft, the swollen lips surrounding it, the damp, black tufts of pubic hair, before driving into her, panting with impatience; he watched his whole length disappear, right up to the ring of the condom and was again amazed by the way in which she gripped him with her muscles, how beautifully she pushed back against him, almost without moving; he took in the sight of her breasts swaying, dare one say, titillatingly, back and forth, a tiny gold cross dangling in the air in front of them, helpless-looking, forgotten; and when she twisted her head to the side, he noted with triumph the moment when her mouth dropped open, though no sound came out, as if a mask had fallen from her face, and she could no longer conceal from herself how wonderful this was, how absolutely heavenly, how divinely Jonas made love to her.