Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

He had reached the top of a gentle dip, one of those miles-long, dead-straight stretches of motorway just north of Moss. A couple of hundred yards ahead of him was a trailer-truck. No cars in front of them or behind them. Suddenly he noticed something odd. The opposite lane was also completely empty, apart from a trailer-truck at the other end of the straight stretch, this too with a car about two hundred yards behind it. Jonas realized that he and ‘his’ truck would pass the other two vehicles pretty much at the very bottom of the dip. The symmetry of this intrigued him, though he did not know why; he watched as they slowly closed on one another. There was something magical, almost awe-inspiring, about the balance that was at all times maintained. To his surprise he saw that the oncoming car, the one behind the trailer-truck, was also a Ford Sierra estate, a white one, a fact which made him even more keyed-up, as if he understood that something was about to happen, that such a correspondence was too weird, too perfect — like yin and yang — to be a coincidence. And as the two cars neared one another, Margrete came into his mind, possibly prompted by Axel’s name, since both were bookworms, ready at the drop of the hat to put their heads together in long, intimate conversations; and yet there was something deeper, more ominous, which had nudged her to the forefront of his thoughts, something associated with these four vehicles, two travelling in either direction, something to do with a dangerous symmetry, or rather: a symmetry close to breaking point, a niggling suspicion; and he had no idea why he should have thought of this right now, but he was thinking about it right now, about her anarchic, not to say destructive, impulses, like the time when she had smashed one of her father’s, the ambassador’s, valuable Chinese vases, one with a blue dragon spiralling around it — on purpose, Jonas believed; she just sort of elbowed it, quite casually, and said ‘Oops!’ — an incident which had left him with the worry that she might one day do something similar to him, since promises, morals, apparently did not mean the same to her as they did to other people; and without knowing why, and even though he tried to concentrate on his driving, he found himself connecting that memory with her tendency to lie, possibly inspired by the novels she read, lie for no reason whatsoever, and not only to him, but to everybody, as if this lent her an air of mystery. Or maybe simply because it amused her: to see whether she could manage to keep track of the web of lies she spun around herself; there was something about all of this, Jonas feared, that he had not taken seriously enough, that he had underestimated, just as he had underestimated the situation in which he now found himself on the motorway, in a car, driving at high speed.

The two trucks passed one another, and Jonas knew he ought to have taken note of what it said on the sides of them: a slogan or sign, the name of the company, as if knowing what they carried would have given him some kind of warning; on the other hand he already knew something was up, even before the twinge in his balls, before the white Ford in the opposite lane, which was sitting a couple of hundred yards behind the trailer-truck, shattered the mirror image and veered across the white line into his lane, then came racing towards him at sixty miles per hour. It all happened so quickly, of course — banally so — but for Jonas each tenth of a second seemed like minutes — as I say: it is in the spaces in between that things happen — he had plenty of time to think about all sorts of things: from the time, as a boy, when he used to amuse himself by smashing toy cars into one another head-on, to something that had happened only the other day, when he had been searching through Margrete’s pocket for the garage key and found a strange key, a Trio key — for some unknown reason his first thought was that this was the key to her secret, that there was danger here. And in the second or two that it took his subconscious, working at lightning speed, to convert years of driving experience into muscle action in feet and arms, Jonas had all the time in the world to reflect on such things as where Buddha might be right now, or consider the car radio on which Axel’s name was being mentioned again, which in turn reminded him that he often wondered how Margrete could know so much about Axel: not just about his books, which came to her inscribed with highly personal dedications, and in which she totally engrossed herself, but about where he was, what he was doing, and at the same time there was a different light, a new colour almost, in her eyes, even the smell of her had changed, it reminded him of how she smelled during their first happy years together; she actually walked differently, briskly, with more of a spring in her step; and meanwhile, at an even deeper level, he was frantically trying to recall what sort of lock Axel had on his door — all these reflections were flying around inside his head as the two cars, two identical cars, one black and one white, sped towards one another; all these thoughts, and chaotic though they were, nonetheless they formed a whole of sorts, an explosive conviction that the symmetry had been broken, that it had been broken for a long time, that something did not fit; a puck was skimming towards a fragile construction, only this time he was the puck.

The collision left no memory of a bang in Jonas’s mind. It was more of a soft pop, like the sound when you squash a tin can, accompanied by a sickly smell, as of tainted meat — he had no idea where that came from — and when he at last looked out of the window, the car was sitting nowhere near where he would have expected it to be. Only later did he realize that his body had, of its own accord, braked sharply — he remembered catching a glimpse of Kristin’s cuddly toy flying through the space between the seats — and that, almost simultaneously, he had managed to swerve out of the way, to the left, because his car had been hit in the rear end and sent flying, spiralling, round to the right, though without being spun off the road. Some guardian angel must also have been watching over the other driver, who escaped with nothing worse than an injured knee. It transpired that he had dozed off for a few seconds, but that he too, when he woke up, had managed to decelerate enough, although he did lose control of the car. Naturally the incident made the headlines in several newspapers. There was no way Jonas Wergeland could be involved in a crash on the E6 without it being duly reported by the media; it was even believed that he had saved the other man’s life, thanks to his admirable driving skills. But none of this is of any relevance to our undertaking, Professor.

What is really interesting here is the space in between: what happened when Jonas Wergeland’s car had come to a halt after the crash, before other cars arrived on the scene and help was called. Jonas has been out cold for a few seconds, and the first thing he registers, before he opens his eyes, is that his fingers are touching glass; he instinctively thinks that he has gone blind, that he is unhurt, but blind, that he is going to spend the rest of his life in the dark, the one thing he dreads most of all. And as he opens his eyes and realizes that he is not blind after all, it strikes him, with the force of a blow that he has been blind. That Margrete is seeing another man. And that man is Axel.

He was unhurt, but his world had changed. The dramatic occurrence here was not the collision between the two cars, but the collision inside his head, the thoughts which, by dint of chemistry, by dint of physics, had been released only in order to become all tangled together in a shower of sparks. This was his gift, to be able to take two unrelated elements and make a story out of them, a story that was greater than the sum of its parts — and now, as if there were a curse attached to it, a price he had to pay, he had been forced to use this gift on himself, his own life; the realization ran round and round inside his head in a merciless loop, as if spelled out by 9,000 light bulbs on an electronic headlines sign: It was not just him and Margrete; it was not just the two of them, there were three of them. Margrete was cheating on him; she was having an affair with Axel. And he knew something else, too: it had been going on for some time. They had had every possible opportunity, for years. The conditions had been perfect. So perfect that there could be no doubt. It was this, the fact of Margrete’s infidelity — together with the recognition of his own inadequacy — that crashed into him, made him feel like dropping down dead, even though he had sustained no physical injury. In his own eyes he had been a past master when it came to fooling people. And all the time it was he who was being made a fool of, betrayed. This must be what they call being hoist with one’s own petard, he thought to himself later.