Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The rhythm, the movements grew more and more frantic, hers too, she appeared to have lost all her inhibitions, willingly gave herself up to a long pent-up lust, as if, having once become a sinner she could not get enough of sinning — like a missionary suddenly throwing herself, stark naked, into the ritual dances of the natives. He was growing more and more inflamed — yes, just that: inflamed, he felt his penis swelling to a size that astonished him, he could see it clearly from this position, and yet she was gripping him so tightly, despite his long, deep thrusts, that he was put in mind of a stallion he had once seen covering a mare, how the mare visibly held the stallion in place with her powerful internal muscles. He could not help groaning, growling, out of sheer, raw, ruttishness; he could see why Taoists gave sexual positions names such as ‘wild horse rearing’, ‘white tiger leaping’ or ‘the dragon’s claws’; half in a fog he saw that the condom was sliding off, or not sliding, being pulled off, the friction was simply too great, she was sucking it off him and he had to toss the rubber sheath to the floor before thrusting his cock inside her again, he could not stop, was working in a narcotic haze of pleasure, or in a sphere where powerful, dangerous, forces prevailed, out of the blue he remembered something about a transformer, and this should come as no surprise since all memories are stored away and can be recalled, as it were, at the turn of a key, but for some, perhaps the most important ones, a password is required, and that was what his women gave Jonas, which is to say a handful of them, whom — thanks to a gift, an extra vertebra of dragon horn in his spine, a gift of grace — he was able to recognize; if, that is, it was not the other way round: that that was how they recognized him. Be that as it may, their lovemaking had a special effect on him: something unfolded, or rose up from the dark recesses of his memory, like a genie from a lamp. Which explains why, as he hunched over Anne S. in that bed in the Inner Mission Hotel, his mind was split between the pleasure and a memory which was more or less pumped up to the surface, a not exactly happy memory, something to do with a switch, a lethal button; and even as he was struggling to assemble these fragments, from somewhere far off he caught what at first he took to be a stream of gibberish, like the glossolalic outbursts from the tent meetings of his childhood, then he realized that it was her, Anne S., that she was screaming dick, dick, crying out for more dick; again he was astonished, astonished by this word, dick, only common girls said dick, but here she was, yelling it out, what a lovely dick, she cried, he heard it quite clearly with one part of his mind but was too busy trying to remember, or to come, come in a way that was so gloriously, breathtakingly out of this world, somewhere deep inside among her powerful, blood-red, sucking muscles. You’ve just got to say fuck it, was the thought at the very back of his mind; you’ve just got to press a button and go for it, even if it kills you.

He slumped down, rolled over onto his back, thought he was going to pass out. She got up; Jonas lay with his eyes shut, going over his climax again in his mind, the convulsions of his orgasm which had also enabled him to complete a leap, bring to life a memory. She had been miraculously good. He felt like doing it again, as soon as she returned from the bathroom. He dozed off, started at the sound of the outer door slamming. When he looked up her clothes were gone — she had simply vanished into thin air. Jonas lay where he was, mind working, heard muffled sounds from the meeting in the Grand Hall. He got dressed, checked to see if she had forgotten anything but found nothing. She had, however, left her mark in the form of some good-going gonococci that, less than a week later forced him to make the trip to the fifth floor of the Oslo Health Centre. That really is so typical of Jonas Wergeland, Professor: to contract gonorrhoea after going to bed with a girl he was sure had to be the safest in the world.

Is it possible, as a 24-year-old, to experience one day of your life as a nine-year-old, and in such a way that it affects the rest of your life?

The memory Anne S. gave him — a story which is a result of all the stories I have told so far, and a prerequisite for all of those still to come — goes something like this: it is a Saturday, and Jonas and Ørn have just been home to dump their schoolbags when something exciting happens, one of those welcome breaks in the humdrum routine of the housing estate, on a par with the tarmacking of footpaths or the emptying of cesspits: funny little steamrollers and sewage trucks with hoses which gave off a stench that seemed to come from the nethermost regions of hell itself. A van pulled up beside the electricity substation, or ‘transformer’ as they called it, at the foot of the hill known as Egiltomta — which was, by the way, a spot as central to boyhood games of Cowboys and Indians as Monument Valley was to the westerns of John Ford — and out stepped a man in a smart, grey-blue uniform with shiny buttons and the letters ‘O’ and ‘L’ on a badge on his cap, though these initials had nothing to do with de Olympiske Leker — that is, the Olympic Games — they stood, instead, for Oslo Lysverker — the Oslo Electricity Board; this man was a technician, doing a routine check. You see we’re talking here about a springtime in the days when children went to school on Saturday morning and when, for most people, though they’ve forgotten it now, the working week did not end until early Saturday afternoon.

Jonas spied a golden opportunity and acted fast; that the Oslo Electricity Board should have come along just at this moment fitted so perfectly that his heart skipped a beat. He ran back into the building, having first given instructions to Ørn, who stayed where he was and watched, as enthralled as Ali Baba himself, as the man opened the door on the low-voltage side of the substation, positioned himself in front of what looked like a row of porcelain door handles — in fact these were the so-called ‘knives’ used to break the circuit — and checked something with an instrument that hung on a cord around his neck, then he took a reading from something else with what looked rather like a square pair of pliers — it was all a mystery to Little Eagle. The technician had just stepped from behind the double-doors in the middle, where he had been inspecting the actual transformer, when Jonas emerged from the entry carrying a torch and a packet of Gjende biscuits; by sneaking round the foot of Egiltomta in a wide arc he managed to reach the back of the little brick building without being seen. Once the man had opened the third heavy, metal door to carefully examine whatever lay behind it, even making some notes in a little book, and was about to lock up — he had swung the door to again — Ørn attracted his attention, as arranged, by shouting: ‘Hey, there’s some kids fiddling with your wing-mirror!’ The man ran to his van, and at that moment Jonas darted inside the door of the transformer station and pulled it to, as it had been before.

Over by the van, the man shook his head in exasperation at Ørn, who was thumbing his nose at him from a safe distance. He walked back to the substation, where the door in the side was still standing slightly ajar, shut and locked it. Then he drove away, shaking his fist at Ørn.

But inside the transformer sat Jonas Wergeland, and Jonas Wergeland was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky, because only on this side of the substation could he do what he had in mind. Unlucky because he was in the most hazardous part of it, a highly dangerous area, to put it mildly, for anyone who didn’t know what they were doing, a fact which he instinctively knew, as he sat there with his back against the metal door, as if perched on a mountain ledge with a sheer drop in front of him. He had all the time in the world now. He was waiting for the evening, and he waited with the patience of an avenger, because this was not just any Saturday, it was an evening on which everyone was thinking about just one thing: the radio. Or to be more exact, the eleventh and final episode of the radio series Dickie Dick Dickens , which is to say, the first of three series which had been made, a golden moment in the history of Radio Theatre, with an unforgettable Frank Robert in the leading role — not to mention the score, composed by Gunnar Sønstevold, the man who had once heard a piano crash to the ground from a fifth-floor window.