Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

The next day, just for fun, he tried to tie that trickiest of knots, the labyrinthine clove hitch, and got it right first time, as if he had been doing it all his life, as if he suddenly had those twists and turns of the rope at his fingertips.

Jonas kept the peach stone. He made believe that it was a dragon’s brain. Dragons had tiny brains, he knew, but they could harbour a secret, like the safe in the corner of the loft. A pearl, maybe. One day, with Veronika standing over him, he crushed it with a hammer and found another kernel inside the stone, something like an almond. ‘Would you like to have it?’ he asked Veronika.

‘If you plant it in the ground, it’ll grow into a dragon,’ she said. ‘Come on, I know a place in the woods, just next to our rope ladder.’ And on the way there she stays him and, with what might almost have been tears in her eyes, says: ‘Did it hurt?’

Allow me, in this connection — and remember: the connections between the stories in a life are as important as the stories themselves — to tell you about a time when Jonas Wergeland felt real hurt or more correctly, about an incident which took place in the midst of that pain. It happened in the emotionally charged year of the EEC referendum, the year when Jonas Wergeland was due to sit his university Prelim — although the thought of sitting an exam seemed the farthest thing from his mind, not to say an absolute impossibility, at that time. He found himself at the northern end of Norway’s largest lake, in the ‘dayroom’ of a hospital, to be more exact, one of those rooms which, with their spartan, simulated cosiness seem more depressing and godforsaken than any other place on earth. As a small boy, whenever he saw a diagram of the human circulatory system Jonas would think to himself that the heart must be like a knot, and that was how it felt now. A knot tightening. Jonas Wergeland sat there, swollen-eyed, twisting a handkerchief round his fingers. Outside it was winter, and dark — as dark and impenetrable as life when it seems most pointless.

Jonas thought he was alone, but when he looked up, as if through water, there she was. She took him as much by surprise as a car you haven’t seen in your wing mirror, one that’s been in the blind spot but which suddenly appears, seemingly materializing out of thin air, when you turn your head. He felt like asking her to go away, had a truculent ‘Piss off!’ on the tip of his tongue, but bit it back. He shut his eyes. He sniffed. It sometimes occurred to Jonas that the reason he didn’t take up smoking was because he was afraid he would lose the ability to inhale women: to let their scent flow into his bloodstream and excite visions. He had caught a whiff of this scent before, in Viktor’s room.

She spoke to him: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘No,’ Jonas said — curbing his irritation: ‘No, thanks.’ He kept his eyes shut, as if the world would grow even darker if he opened them.

But she didn’t go away, she sat down on a chair next to him and placed her hand over his, thinking perhaps that he was a patient. She said nothing. Jonas inhaled her scent. Even with his eyes shut, even amid a maelstrom of black thoughts, he felt something seize hold of him, not of his hand but of his body, that something was drawing him to it, was intent on worming its way inside him: her, this unknown woman.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

He kept his eyes shut, his head bowed, thought first of leaving, but something made him stay, made him speak, say something, tearfully to begin with, but without it being embarrassing, about his best friend, about himself and Viktor, about the Three Wise Men, the bare bones only but enough for her — possibly — to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. She said not a word, simply sat with her hand on his. Jonas had the feeling that her hand led to light.

When she gets to her feet he looks up. The first thing he sees is a high forehead. Rationality, he thinks. Exactly what I need right now: rationality. A white coat hangs open over her indoor clothes. Her badge reveals that her name is Johanne A. She has just come off duty, is on her way out, home. She nods, gives him a searching look before walking off down the corridor. He follows her with his eyes, feels a faint pressure on his spine, a pressure that spreads throughout his body, like a tremor in the nervous system.

Jonas skived off school and stayed for some days in Lillehammer, in a town he would always hate. He met Johanne A. again. She was in her mid-twenties, a resident on the surgical ward — this was her first post. She told him what the neurologist had said about Viktor, about the depth of the coma and the swelling. Viktor was still on a respirator in intensive care. She explained the uncertainty of his condition, what treatment they were giving him, how things were likely to go from here. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But there’s nothing more we can do.’

Shortly before he was due to return home to Oslo, Jonas was sitting on a bench in the Swan Chemist’s Shop on Storgata, staring listlessly at a wall hung with portraits of generations of chemists. All chemists’ shops reminded Jonas of his maternal grandmother, because always, on trips into town with her, they would purchase a mysterious ointment at the chemist’s, the apothecary, on Stortorvet in Oslo — that one, too, with a swan on its façade: the symbol of immortality. And every time they stepped inside that shop his grandmother would throw up her hands in delight at the sight of the tiled floors, the pillars of creamy-coloured marble and a ceiling decorated with symbolic paintings; and while they were waiting she would tell Jonas about the fine old fittings of mahogany and American maple, with drawers of solid oak. ‘Like a temple to medicine,’ she would whisper. For this reason, Jonas always felt there was something rather antiquated — something holy, almost — about chemist’s shops, also now, here in Lillehammer. There was also something about the atmosphere of the place, the odour of creosote, of aniseed and essential oils, which reinforced this sense of a bygone, somehow alchemical, age. Even so, as he was washing down a headache tablet with a drink of water, he instantly recognized that other scent, it was as if he had been caught up in a whirlpool. He turned around. It was her. And there was something about Johanne A.’s figure, her dress and, above all, her high forehead that made her seem utterly anachronistic in those surroundings, like an astronaut in the middle ages. Nonetheless, he knew that there was a connection between her and the chemist’s shop. Or to put it another way: all of Jonas Wergeland’s women represented an encounter with the past.

Johanne A. invited him back to her place for coffee. She lived above the hospital, not far from the open-air museum at Maihaugen. They strolled up the hill. It was cold; it was growing dark. She was wearing a big hat, the sort of hat that made heads turn. In the hall Jonas noticed a shelf holding several other eye-catching pieces of headgear.

The flat was furnished in an unusual style: ‘avant-garde’ was the word that sprang to Jonas’s mind. The furniture in the sitting room looked more like works of art, architectonic concepts sculpted into chairs and storage units. The lighting too was highly original: little flying saucers hovering over glass-topped tables. Products from Bang & Olufsen — a television set and an expensive, metallic stereo system — seemed to belong to a universe unlike any Jonas had ever seen. Jars, vases, ashtrays — even the salt and pepper shakers on the shelf between the kitchen and the sitting room — appeared to have been designed for the atomic age. Jonas felt as if he had stepped into a laboratory, a room which proclaimed that here, within these walls, some sort of experiment was being carried out. ‘The world is progressing,’ was all she said when she noticed the way his eyes ran round the room in astonishment, occasionally glancing out of the window, at the old buildings on the hill, the vestiges of tarred-brown, medieval Norway only a stone’s throw away.