Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And as if that weren’t enough, they then found something scribbled in the margin in pencil next to Vinje’s paragraph on ‘duality’. Viktor promptly dug out the copy of Bohr’s letter, a treasured relic, and compared the writing. With a bit of good will one could see a resemblance. And with a little more good will one could swear that the letters formed the following words: ‘complementary but mutually exclusively characteristics’ — a phrase which Viktor immediately recognized as coming from a key passage in the Como lecture.

The Three Wise Men were able to crawl into bed, very drunk, but with clear consciences. They had proved that Norway, the Snow Planet, was at least good for something. Although it was never uttered out loud, all three fell asleep with a ten-aquavit argument on their lips: the concept of complementarity was Norwegian! In fact the whole of quantum theory could be said to be Norwegian! Bohr’s epoch-making concept was nothing other than Vinje’s duality, transcribed into cosmopolitan and scientific terms.

‘Well, the holiday’s not over yet, so while we’re here why don’t we stop off in Lillehammer for a day or two,’ said Axel the following morning, when they were standing at Tretten station, all feeling slightly hung-over. Jonas was all for it. Viktor wasn’t so sure — it was almost as if he sensed that this would be pushing his luck, that the Snow Planet might have a chunk of ice all ready and waiting: that the Snow Planet not only imparted ideas, it also snuffed them out.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then it is Sunday, a holiday — holy day — in the true sense of the word, and Jonas is reverently at work in a room that smells of wood-shavings and beeswax. He is standing at a bench in the little workshop in the Villa Wergeland, working on his seventh dragon’s head — a new version but still inspired by the old prototype in the Viking Ship Museum, those sinuous coils which posed the eternal challenge. For Jonas, the Academic’s masterpiece was testimony to duality: a head capable of embodying both a fearful dragon and four beautiful swans — and only when you could see it as both did it look right, did it look good. At a desk next to him Kristin is sitting drawing, as he had once sat drawing in Aunt Laura’s rug-clad living room. It is summer, afternoon, and outside the window the trees shine brightly in the grove of trees, the spot that, as a boy, Jonas had called Transylvania.

You might accuse me of leaving out all the ordinary days, Professor. But no occurrence, no day in a person’s life is so trivial that it might not be crucial. Important things happen all the time. And so this day too, like the others I have described, can be regarded as being the centre of Jonas Wergeland’s life. All days are, in a way, holy days.

So it is very appropriate that it should be a Sunday, that Jonas should be in the workshop that is his sanctuary, his temple. As Margrete took refuge in the kitchen and ransacked the well-stocked spice rack when she wanted to relax, Jonas came here, to his bits of wood and the cupboard containing all his carving tools. It was in here, while he was sawing the wood, a crude three-dimensional form, while he was wielding knife, file or rasp in an effort to get closer to the form of the creature’s head, while he was drawing the design and while he was making a start on the actual carving — that he did his best thinking, was aware of how his head simply teemed with ideas, like echoes of, or parallels to, the patterns he was coaxing out of the wood which, no matter how stylised they might be, took on the appearance of a living thing. It often struck Jonas that his pleasure in this was the same as he had felt in nursery school, the first time he was allowed to work with a fretsaw and some plywood, and cut out a big heart, a heart that beat in his hand.

He went over to Kristin, stood and watched her. She was drawing a tree, sat there in a world of her own, drawing with a stick of charcoal on a large sheet of paper — there was charcoal on her cheek, too. Her hair glinted in the light falling through the window. It came to Jonas: she, his daughter, was a diamond; she was him, metamorphosed into diamond. Kristin almost always drew trees. He did not know why, but he liked it. They were both working with trees, with wood. He stood for a long time just watching her, a little girl with branches growing under her hand, charcoal, dust, coming alive. He noticed how big she was getting, it didn’t seem any time since she had been lying in her cradle while he played ‘I Have a Little Lass with Eyes of Blue’, lay there in her cradle smelling of milk and encouraging him to search out new harmonies on the piano, create a tree of notes in each chord, while at the same time varying the melody, playing it in every key, endeavouring to make the verses stretch out, each in its own direction. She always inspired him; he never worked better than when she was with him in the workshop. And in the living room Margrete would be lying on the sofa, reading, trees turned into books. From one kind of leaf to another. Sunday was a holy day.

Jonas stood behind Kristin, studying the sheets of paper covered in finished or half-finished drawings spread in a semicircle round about her. Some showed rows of bare trees, networks of branches converging on a vanishing point. On the sheet in front of her the contours of a strange tree were taking shape, roots and all. Jonas thought of the many times they had sat in the living room talking about trees. Sometimes they had music playing in the background. ‘Listen to this one, it’s about willow trees,’ he might say, putting on Billie Holiday’s ‘Willow Weep For Me’. Or it might be Bach — Bach was perfect for looking at pictures of trees. Jonas brought out art books and showed his daughter how the Chinese painted the leaves of bamboo trees, or how the Japanese drew the branches on the cherry tree. ‘It looks so easy, and yet awfully difficult,’ Kristin said.

They could sit for hours, with the piles of art books growing up around them like a hedge and the music of Bach encircling them with a fretwork of notes. They pored over Caspar David Friedrich’s spiky, romantic trees and I. C. Dahl’s weeping birch; they compared Edvard Munch’s majestic oak with Lars Hertervig’s gnarled pines. Kristin was particularly fond of Claude Monet’s poplar trees painted in different lights and of Piet Mondrian’s apple tree, progressing in stages from a recognizable tree to a totally abstract shape. ‘It’s like a magic trick,’ she crowed, running her eyes over the pictures again and again — but, unlike Jonas as a child, she never tried to copy what she saw, she came up with her own ideas.

‘Have you ever chopped down any trees?’ she asked him once.

‘Only one,’ he said. ‘It was on a boat.’

Kristin seemed almost bewitched by trees. Jonas always envied her that childish knack of picking a maple leaf off the ground and becoming genuinely lost in wonder: staring at her hand, her fingers, then back at the leaf, placing them against one another. Or the gift for stopping short and standing rooted to the spot, nostrils vibrating, when she passed a lilac bush in bloom. She was a great climber too. Now and again, when she was big enough, she would go off with Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales under her arm to sit up among the branches and read about the hollow tree in ‘The Tinder Box’ or ‘The Old Oak Tree’s Last Dream’. ‘She has to be a distant descendent of the druids,’ Margrete always said. ‘Those Celtic priests who held certain groves of trees to be sacred. ‘Hm,’ said Jonas. ‘Either that or she’s living proof of what it says in Norse mythology: that mankind was born out of the trees, like Ask and Embla.’