Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas sits with his back against the door. It is twenty-five minutes past eight. Up and down the blocks people were settling themselves next to the radio to listen to Dickie Dick Dickens , eager to know whether Dickie would win through to become king of the Chicago underworld, and no one was more keen to know the outcome than Petter. Hence the reason Jonas was sitting there — despite being afraid of the dark, despite the high-voltage sign. At long last he was going to have his revenge on the dirtiest, rottenest pig of them all. And if this surprises you, Professor, if you are wondering what act of villainy could possibly drive a child to plunge a whole housing estate into darkness to get at just one person, then you will have to wait, because this is not the place for the answer to that question.

Jonas sat inside something big, dark, dangerous, perhaps sensing even now that this was the fundamental situation in his life: to sit inside something totally unfamiliar, looking for the point from which one could, nonetheless, make an impact, set something in motion. If, that is, this was not a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness inside him. To become someone else, become something. He shone the torch this way and that and finally caught sight of a little red button on the side of the metal box with the wheel on the front. He edged over to it. One last chance. He knew it was foolhardy. Thought of all that tremendous power. What if he was wrong, and he dropped down dead the minute he touched that button? Or perished in a shower of sparks as the whole thing short-circuited. Jonas pictured how they would find him lying there, all charred and shrivelled, like the potatoes they wrapped in tinfoil and then forgot to take off the bonfire. He looks at his watch. At eight-thirty on the dot he presses the button. He registers the fact that he is still alive. And that something is happening with a chain and a cog, that the wheel is turning, that the word ‘Off’ is now showing on a green semicircle. I did it, he thinks. There is dead silence, the hum has stopped: it’s as if the electricity supply to life itself had been shut off. I hope you’re pissing yourself, he thought, with Petter in mind.

He could not see the result of his handiwork himself, but Ørn told him what a magnificent sight, or anti-sight, it had been; he had stood at the window watching the area served by the substation, the whole of Solhaug, being blacked out, and, far more importantly as far as Jonas was concerned, the green cat’s-eyes of the wireless sets being extinguished, at the same time as the voices died away. Fortunately very few people had portable radios, Petter certainly didn’t, and neither did any of the neighbours in his building who happened to be at home. In any case, all thoughts of Radio Theatre were forgotten in the general confusion caused by a power cut, a minor catastrophe, when people had more than enough to do just trying to find out what had happened and remembering where they had put the candles. It wasn’t until the next day that Petter was heard complaining loudly over the fact that he had missed Dickie Dick Dickens : ‘Aw, bugger it, and it was the last episode, too!’

In just a little under half an hour two men from the Oslo Electricity Board turned up outside the substation on Hagelundveien. They went into the low-voltage side first. Jonas could see the light from their torches, heard them talking to one another, muttering something about a possible overload. When they eventually unlocked the door on the high-voltage side they got such a shock, such a fright, that Jonas managed to nip between them and run up Egiltomta, which he knew like the back of his hand, before they could get a good look at him.

Word that somebody had been inside the transformer soon spread and was the subject of much comment among the residents of Solhaug — there was some talk of communists — but no one ever found out who it was. Jonas did, however, have the feeling that Petter regarded him with some surprise, as if he had discovered that Jonas was charged in a totally different way, had become a different person. In years to come Jonas would be plagued by the fear that this sweet revenge would have grim consequences — a fear which was borne out six years later when he took that walk through Transylvania with Laila. Deep down, and despite the time gap, Jonas always felt that the assault on Laila was prompted by something he had done, that it came as a consequence of Petter’s missing the final episode of a radio detective series.

But his immediate feeling was one of pleasure. He caressed the thought of how pressing such a little button could do so much, how easy it was to make an impact on so many people at once in the society in which he lived. This was the first time on which Jonas Wergeland synchronized people’s attention. Later he would do so again, on a much bigger scale, the only difference being that then people, the inhabitants of an entire country, would voluntarily put off lights so that they could sit in semidarkness and switch off from everything else in order to concentrate on the light which his television programmes bestowed on them.

I have the suspicion, after having told such a story, that I have changed Jonas Wergeland’s life completely — and that I ought, therefore, to tell all the stories I have told so far over again. However that may be, this brings us to a new beginning:

There are various conflicting accounts as to how Jonas Wergeland got the idea for his great television series, but all confusion on this score is dispelled if one goes back to an incident in the mid-eighties when Wergeland, frustrated by his respected — but rather isolated — position within NRK, granted himself a ‘thinking trip’ — if, that is, this was not an instance of sheer escapism, a sudden and desperate urge to get away, seeing that he felt totally flat and longed, in a metaphorical sense, to touch a high-voltage cable. Having completed a feature in New York on Arnstein Arneberg’s and Per Krogh’s work on the Security Council Chamber at the United Nations building, he embarked, hopefully — or as tremulously as someone making their first parachute jump — on this quest, travelling almost in a loop around the earth; but not until he was flying in over Tokyo was he struck by the sense that something big was about to happen, as if it was because of him that they landed — as if he had been sitting dozing, then suddenly shouted to the pilot: ‘For God’s sake, go down here!’ It might also have had something to do with the fact that they were put into a holding pattern, that they had to circle over Narita airport several times, and as they were coming in to land Jonas felt a fluttery, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he were being dragged down by an airy maelstrom towards a centre, a gravitational point for which he had always been searching.

How does one become a conqueror?

The sight of all those cables and wires hanging in midair, so unlike Oslo — like being inside an enormous transformer — confirmed his feeling that it must be possible to change one’s way of thinking in such a metropolis; Jonas walked around, rejoicing in the fact that, as always in a new place, he had to be guided by his nose, ears, mouth, eyes; that for a few days he would need to recapture the sensual intelligence he had relied on as a child. And so he wandered, at all times strangely on the alert, into the abundantly-stocked stores, with sales assistants bowing and murmuring ‘ Irasshaimase ?’ at every turn; he breathed in the aroma of noodle soup behind black curtains in little bars, peeked inside garishly lit parlours where hundreds of pachinko machines filled the air with their ear-splitting din, watched people on the underground standing totally engrossed in erotic comics, gazed expectantly at tempting displays of wax food in restaurant windows before stepping inside and letting his taste-buds decide for themselves, put his fingertips to those flimsy walls of rice paper which reminded him of the model gliders of his childhood, stood outside in the evening gawking in disbelief at streets where shops rigged out like pure son et lumière extravaganzas sat right across from tiny, moss-grown temples that might have been portals to unknown regions. And all the while he was instinctively looking for a centre, with no success, because Tokyo was the most bewildering city he had ever visited, it had no obvious centre to it, or rather: it had so many centres, below ground too — Shinjuku station, for example, or the underground Yaesu arcades. Jonas had the feeling that forces were sweeping him round in a spiral and that the centre was everywhere and nowhere.