Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must focus on the challenge facing Jonas Wergeland. Because, while his woodcarving concerned seeing swans on a dragon’s head, Jonas Wergeland’s problem was rather the opposite: whether you could be a swan even if you were carved with dragons. Can you be composed of dragons and still be good?

As a little boy, Jonas had thought that the cave in Ravnkollen’s sheer face was a dragon’s lair. As time went on it was reduced to being the big boys’ secret den — which was daunting enough, in its own way. It wasn’t actually a cave as such, but a deep fissure directly above the bomb shelter. It may well have been this last which had given Petter and his gang the idea, because the Civil Defence Corps’s exercises were such a mystery: days when the massive steel doors in the hillside were opened, and the kids got to peek inside that hidden labyrinth, an enormous tunnel with narrow passageways running off it; trucks and jeeps driving in and out, fathers suddenly appearing in grey uniforms and yellow helmets, as if all at once real life had been turned into science fiction.

How does one become a conqueror?

It was of course absolutely forbidden for anyone else to go in there: into the big boys’ secret den, that is. Getting up to it was also a tricky business and not a little risky. No one of Jonas’s age knew what the cave looked like inside; some nurtured fantasies of a temple of sorts, with an array of ghastly objects at the very back; others whispered of crossbones on the floor and signs written in blood on the walls.

Jonas had wondered just as much about the cave and what it contained as he had about the canvas bag which he and Daniel had found in the safe on Hvaler, but which their grandfather had snatched away from them before they had a chance to lift it out of the lacquer casket. They often lay in bed at night trying to guess what was in it. ‘Pearls, for sure!’ said Daniel. ‘No, I think it was probably a bundle of love letters,’ said Jonas. Because, of course, they hadn’t been able to weigh the bag in their hands. It could have contained anything.

One autumn afternoon, Jonas braved his fear of heights and stole up to the den. He simply had to find out what lay beyond that black cave mouth, even if it turned out to be something indescribably nasty. But as so often happens in such cases, it was a disappointment: apart from a primitive cave painting on one wall — not of an elk or a wolf, I grant you, but of what Jonas took to be a girl with no clothes on — the den was totally bare. A couple of bits of plank served as a table. On a natural shelf in the granite lay a box of matches. Jonas looked about, but all he could find was the paper off a bar of chocolate, some orange peel, a few stumps of candle and four sparkplugs. Nothing really exciting. Not even a Swedish porn mag.

Down on Bergensveien once more, he did not know whether to feel let down or relieved. At any rate he was glad that no one had seen him. But someone had seen him, in such situations someone always sees you, and this ‘someone’ tattled. So Jonas discovered the very next day, during the lunch break; he could tell by the looks they sent him, Petter and his chums. They were three or four years older than him, and three or four years is an awfully big gap at that age, like the difference between Goliath and David — at least.

Jonas was going to get his hair cut that afternoon, and Little Eagle accompanied him to the shop down by the bend in the road, to a hairdresser who bore a striking resemblance to David Niven, with his pencil moustache and hair slicked back like a South American bandit. Although, of course, they didn’t say ‘hairdresser’, they said ‘barber’, possibly because they liked the word’s manly connotations, the associations with facial hair. I ought perhaps to say something here about boys and their hair, since the history of the sixties could probably also be written as the saga of parents’ constantly nagging at their sons to get a haircut. But these events took place in the time before the Beatles, when the length of a boy’s hair had not yet become a source of domestic conflict; the barber employed his clippers as much as his scissors in order to produce such drastic works of art as the ‘buzz-cut’ and the ‘flat-top’. In those days a mother’s main concern was for the need for thrift, a virtue that also led to the buying of clothes and shoes that were invariably too big. The aim, therefore, when going to the hairdresser, was plain: that haircut had to last as long as possible.

Nonetheless there was something special about these visits; even before you stepped inside, the sign flashing in the salon window conjured up thoughts of ritual acts, of guilds or the Freemasons; the brass basin was actually a leftover from the days when the barber did far more than cut hair and shave faces, when he was, in fact, a ‘barber-surgeon’. The barber’s emblem was actually a bleeding bowl, and from this the boys knew, right from the start, that a visit to the hairdresser was a deadly serious matter.

Jonas particularly liked the moment when the sweet-smelling proprietor pumped the barber’s chair, that miracle of hydraulics, high into the air and began the treatment by placing a collar made of stretchy paper around his neck — as if initiating Jonas into a brotherhood. Glee and horror mingled inside Jonas at the thought of putting his appearance for some weeks ahead into the hands of this slick-haired man, but he eased his mind by running his eyes expectantly over the posters hung above the mirror, depicting men with perfectly groomed hair — the Arab stallions of the hairdressing world; at the same time he could not help admiring the barber’s professional talent for making small talk, even with children: remembering certain things about you, asking after your dad, your mum, your sister and brother, your sporting activities, how you were getting on at school, and for the fact that he told the same joke every time: a man pops his head round the door of a barbershop and asks: ‘Doc Willis here?’ The barber says: ‘No, we only cut hair.’ And through it all, Jonas stared and stared at the carton of condoms on the counter, which seemed to say that a haircut also boosted your virility, necessitating, as it were, that one’s next call should be on one’s fancy woman; and this brings me to the most mysterious part of all, namely the wordless sign used to ask for a ‘packet of three’. The boys had taken it into their heads that this consisted of holding up a fifty-øre between the index and middle fingers — a V-sign, possibly anticipating a sexual victory — while dropping the other hand sharply to the thigh. Where did they get that idea, the boys? And what becomes of this marvellous imagination, the ability to read signs in everything: the way a watch sitting squint on a wrist was code for ‘just got screwed’, for instance? I’m simply trying to say something here, Professor, about boys and their love of mysteries, to tie this up with the secret cave, because even if that black crevice really wasn’t all that exciting, woe betide you if you crawled inside it. Such mysteries were no joke.

Jonas left the barber’s looking like a crew-cut Elvis all set to do his military service, with Little Eagle like a shadow right on his heels, to find Petter and the gang waiting outside, arms crossed, gum-chewing in top gear — and Petter looking more like St Peter the Reckoner than a future Sgt Petter. And as if the hour of reckoning truly had come — it was starting to get dark — Jonas was grabbed by the arm and half-carried across Grorudveien and into the Memorial Grove, downhill from the church.

‘So you’ve been up in our den, have you?’ Petter says