Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

He was terrified. To be perfectly straight — and this should come as no surprise — Jonas Wergeland was afraid of the dark from that day onwards. Down in the grave, the darkness crept over him, usurped him, left a black mark on his cerebral cortex, a hole he would never quite be rid of.

But in the midst of his terror, a terror which was like a physical pain, like having a needle stuck into the spinal cord itself, he learned something, just as Dante’s character in The Divine Comedy learns something from his visit to Hell: the darkness showed him that it was not the eyes, but the brain which was the wellspring of all the images that really count. And in the depths of that awful terror he had caught an inkling — I say an inkling because it was the merest glimpse of something which he would later have confirmed — that in some cases the darkness is necessary if one is to experience, or perceive, something important.

Later he was to link this experience to one of the stories his grandfather had told again and again, although Jonas had no idea why — unless it was because this story was the key to the tale, the Story of Stories, which underlay everything; the story which his grandfather was constantly feeling his way towards. Once, when he was sailing the seas, Omar Hansen had witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. At first, as he stood on the deck, in some far-off harbour, gazing through soot-blackened glass at the moon slowly slipping across the sun, like a lid, he felt afraid, as people in ancient times were horror-struck when the sun’s light was extinguished. But then he noticed something else, something that completely took his mind off the black hole which, for some minutes, took the place of the sun: all of a sudden he could see the stars. He saw something else, something he normally didn’t see during the day. His grandfather told Jonas that he did not remember that day for the solar eclipse, but for the fact that, in the middle of the day, he saw the stars twinkling. The momentous thing was not that one light went out, but that thousands of others came on.

This association lay, however, some years in the future. Right now, Jonas was sitting in a grave, shivering, with cold and with fear. The thought of rats came into his mind, the thought that there had been several sightings of rats in the graveyard. They fed off the bodies, it was said. What if they picked up his scent, suddenly started digging their way through the walls, a whole pack of them, hundreds of eyes in the darkness.

He was very close to losing his mind. But he knew it was up to him, to his powers of imagination. He could make this black hole into a heaven or a hell. He felt something in his pocket: the box of matches he had taken from the big boys’ den. As proof that he had been there. He fumbled with the box, hands trembling, managed to strike a match, flinched at the sound and was taken by surprise at what good light a single match could give, it was as though he had come out of an endless swoop through endless space to find that he was sitting in a narrow grave with damp, clay sides. The light brought him a moment’s comfort — warmth too, in fact. He gazed into the flame, seemed to see visions within it, distinct images, a film. Then the match went out, he burned his fingers.

Darkness again. Deeper than before. Vertigo. Once more that vast, black space which knew no bounds. Swooping. Falling, even as he sat there motionless.

He lit another match. Wanted to wait, but couldn’t. How many did he have? Twenty-odd? How long was he going to be here? He shuddered at the thought of having to stay in the grave until midnight, when the dead rose up.

He sat in the dark until his nerves were so frayed that his limbs shook with pain before he lit another match.

How long did he sit there? An hour? Two? He did not know.

He had used up all the matches.

The darkness. A darkness that wormed its way inside him and became a part of him. A darkness that never left him.

He was surrounded by screaming. So loud that it sounded like silence. Or like a hum, a transformer. And in the midst of all this, in the midst of the terror — as the cold pinched his pee-soaked groin — he thought about revenge.

He heard a light footfall. And something that sounded like sluggish, scrabbling claws on the wood above his head. Someone was struggling with the bench. A plank was lifted away. Jonas saw the sky, a night sky studded with stars, and the outline of an animal’s head.

‘Are you there? Are you alive?’ It was Ørn. And Colonel Eriksen.

Jonas was overjoyed, felt like laughing. But instead he said: ‘What took you so long?’

Ørn merely slid the bench down into the grave until it wedged fast, giving Jonas something to climb up. ‘They followed me all the way home,’ Ørn said. ‘And I didn’t dare come back to the graveyard on my own in the dark. Then I had the idea of bringing the dog. It took a bit of time.’

Jonas finally managed to clamber out. Colonel Eriksen the old elkhound stood there wagging his tail. ‘Flippin’ heck,Ørn, I could’ve been a goner,’ Jonas said.

‘Thought you were Houdini,’ said Ørn. Jonas looked at him. Little Eagle had a sly, lopsided grin on his face, clearly he thought humour would be good medicine right now. Jonas gave him a clout round the ear, harder than he intended, but didn’t succeed in wiping the smile off his friend’s face.

There was something about the expression on Ørn’s face that Jonas couldn’t quite fathom. A look that said he thought Jonas had deserved this punishment, that he saw nothing wrong with it. As if Ørn, without saying a word, was openly admitting that he had deliberately waited as long as possible.

Jonas won a certain respect from Petter and the big boys after this incident. Simply for having survived perhaps. Or because he didn’t tell on them. Petter even stopped tormenting Jonas, became almost friendly towards him.

Jonas, for his part, thought of only one thing: revenge. For over six months he puzzled over how to get his own back. Just you wait, Petter, he thought. I’ll put out your light, so I will, you slimy, rotten, low-down sadist.

Little did he know that he would, in fact, manage to do just that on the Saturday evening when the Radio Theatre broadcast the final episode of Dickie Dick Dickens .

And if you think his time in that grave made a murderer of Jonas Wergeland, Professor, then you’re wrong. It would be truer to say that this was what made a television producer of him.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then I must ask yet again: why did Jonas Wergeland travel? I know it sounds strange, but this does actually tie in with his fear of the dark. There was a period, after his hours in that grave, when Jonas suffered real torments, dreading the moment each evening when the light had to be put out, because Daniel — merciless as always — refused point blank to have a lamp burning all night. But one Christmas Aunt Laura gave the boys a globe — a rarity at that time — a glass sphere on which a wonder of topographical details, mountain ranges and wide plains, the various depths of the ocean, stood revealed in rich, warm colours when the light inside was switched on. In a fit of compassion Daniel agreed that this could be kept on at night. ‘What did you get for Christmas?’ the teacher asked after the holidays. ‘The whole world,’ Jonas replied.

After that the nights were not so bad. Seen from his bed at night, the globe must have been as beautiful and comforting to Jonas as this blue planet seemed to the first astronauts viewing it from space. Jonas might wake with a start in the middle of the night, and when he sat up in fright he saw the world shining at him. Sometimes after a particularly upsetting nightmare, in which rats’ eyes stared at him from the cold, damp clay walls, he would get out of the bottom bunk and hug the luminous globe, hold the warm sphere to his breast. It gave him what a certain Norwegian musician would later teach all the people of Norway to experience: ‘lots of light and lots of warmth’.