Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

How does one become a murderer?

If you knew how hard I have hunted, Professor, hunted for this story, this incident which, like one gene among thirty thousand, could be the cause of something out of the ordinary happening to a life.

Jonas had always been a little afraid of the electricity substation which lay between the blocks of flats: a building of the old type, a little house which hummed faintly, but tantalizingly, so that children often felt an irresistible urge to put their ears to the vents in the solid doors, as if faced here with a giant shell. Generally, though, the metal sign, the red lightning bolt and the legend ‘Danger — High Voltage’ were as good a deterrent as the Phantom’s skull. Any mention of the words ‘high-voltage’ tended to touch Jonas on the raw. It was not that long since his Uncle Lauritz, that cologne-scented man of the world, the SAS pilot who had sent his nephews postcards from every corner of the globe, had been killed when his private plane flew into a power cable: an occurrence which was rendered no less nightmarish by the fact that Jonas himself had once sat, rigid with terror, in that same, flimsy little Piper Cub. No one could see how the accident could have happened; his uncle was an experienced pilot. The way Jonas saw it, it must have been the forces contained within the high-voltage cable that had, in some mysterious way, lured his uncle into steering straight into it.

And now Jonas himself was only inches away from death. He sat listening to the hum, much louder in here than outside. Powers beyond his understanding, like in the Pentecostalists’ tent. After a while Ørn came over and talked to him through the air vents in the door, as if he were a prisoner in a condemned cell. ‘Everything’s fine,’ Jonas assured him, ‘but run up to my mum and tell her I’m spending the evening at your place.’ Nobody must know that he was hiding in here. Least of all Petter, that dirty louse Petter, later to become better known, not to say notorious, as Sgt Petter.

Jonas sat with his back against the door in the gloom and waited, ate some Gjende biscuits, ran his fingers over the raised shape of the reindeer on them as if it were Braille, telling the tale of a breathtaking ride on a reindeer’s back. He must have dozed off, because all at once it was pitch dark. He switched on the torch. Right in front of him was a baffling-looking device, and behind it sat the transformer itself — that he knew — he could also hear the humming of the copper coils inside it. The beam of the torch fell on thick cables covered in some sort of insulating tape that made them look like bloated anacondas. For some reason they reminded him of a constantly recurring dream. Or perhaps they aroused his curiosity, in the same way as the pipes of an organ. It had something to do with hidden connections. He had always been interested in cables, in where they went, the whole hydroelectric network; he could hardly put a plug into a socket without thinking of one the detested Petter’s many jokes. What’s real power? To blow into an electric socket and make the current flow backwards!

Recently he had also seen something that had made him even more curious about cables. Here — and apropos of all the speculations regarding Jonas Wergeland’s penchant for round-the-world voyages — it should perhaps be mentioned that a journey need not be very long in order to be of crucial importance. A journey of five yards can be enough.

Jonas was a bit scared of Samson Berg, their neighbour right across the hall, a burly widower with a bushy beard and a cigar butt almost invariably wedged in the corner of his mouth, not unlike Mickey Mouse’s archenemy Black Pete, in fact. One day when Jonas was outside, struggling ineffectually with a cable, Berg came along and offered to help. ‘Do you want to come up and see a real cable?’ he asked once the new Bosch lamp was wired up to the bike. Jonas wasn’t altogether sure; on the other hand, he liked the idea of seeing inside another house, because although the flats at Solhaug all had the same number of rooms, stepping inside any one of them, even those flats belonging to the most boring people, was like entering an alien universe, an absolute jungle — especially because of the smell which, in Samson Berg’s case, was predominantly that of Brylcreem and cigars. The central feature in Berg’s living room was a luminous green aquarium which stood next to the radiogram, like a sort of forerunner to colour television, but that was not what Samson wanted to show him: ‘Look at this,’ he said and led Jonas over to a table on which sat a circular thing with a sort of pyramid rising out of it. At first Jonas thought this was what he had heard referred to and ridiculed as ‘modern art’. But Samson Berg worked for the Standard Telefon og Kabel factory down in the Grorud Valley, and this was nothing less than a cross-section of a cable, a circle full of smaller circles, sliced through in such a way that the circles climbed higher and higher the closer you got to the centre: a brilliant teaching aid, for use in showing the different layers of the power cable: the copper conductor, the insulating lining of oil-impregnated paper, the lead sheath and so on — all of which Berg eagerly explained to him. ‘It looks like a brooch,’ Jonas said reverently, thinking of Aunt Laura’s gem. Berg was so pleased with this remark that he brought Jonas a bottle of Solo orangeade as a reward, and while he sipped on this he was regaled with a mass of information about electricity, about the ‘lighting-up celebrations’ of the old days, when electricity came to a country village, and about the cables that lay buried in the ground, like wormballs. Above all, though, he was treated to a whole lecture on the project Samson was most proud to have been a part of: the laying of the huge undersea cables across Oslo Fjord at Filtvet three years earlier. ‘You know what, Jonas, they used to talk about going around the world in eighty days — now all it takes is eight seconds,’ he said, then added: ‘There are people who think that power lies in guns, but these days it’s all about having control of the cables, the arteries of society. And d’you know something else? Soon we’ll be laying them — invisibly! — across the heavens.’

Thanks to Berg’s teachings, Jonas also knew a bit about transformers; in particular he remembered what Samson had told him about the windings, those copper coils: how, with something akin to a miraculous, electrical discus throw, they converted 5,000 volts — the standard high-voltage level in those days — to 230 volts. And even more importantly: that there was a switch somewhere inside the substation, a switch that could cut off the power to all six blocks of flats in Solhaug. I bet you can’t wait to hear what’s going to happen to Dickie Dick Dickens , Petter, you rotten devil — well, too bad, Jonas thought.

He flashed the torch over his surroundings. The big grey box right in front of him was the switch for an oil-immersed transformer, although he found it hard to believe — that a switch could be that big. Jonas had pictured it as being just an ordinary switch, something like the mains switch in a fuse box; this bulked as large as the engine compartment of a car. Cables carrying 5,000 volts, which might, in fact, have been supplied by Standard Telefon og Kabel, ran from the electricity pylons into the bottom of the switch, these first had to pass through ‘knives’ and fuses, then down into the relays and the white bushing insulators at the top of the switch. Jonas’s heart sank. He came to the conclusion that the switch must be worked by the cast-iron wheel fixed to the front of the box, because he could see the word ‘On’ printed on a red semicircle in the middle of it, and below an arrow pointing anticlockwise: ‘Off’. He tried turning the wheel in the direction indicated but couldn’t budge it an inch; he was conscious that he was now dangerously close to the cables running into the switch, 5,000 deadly volts. Although he did not know how much danger he was in: had he put his hand close enough to the connection points of any of the cables running into the switch, the current would have flashed over and he would have been killed on the spot.