The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  Daniel had had an idea: one of nigh-on Faustian proportions. He would pick out all the Jahwist passages, like threads out of a weaving, and splice them together to form one unbroken account. And not only that: he would uncover a new and more primordial narrative in this story, especially concerning the wandering in the desert, from Exodus onward, believing as he did that the current version was illogical. Daniel, who only a few years earlier had cherished dreams of the proletariat’s armed revolution, now sat in his office contemplating a work that would revolutionize Old Testament research, all but disarm white-haired professors, including the ghosts of such great authorities as Wellhausen and Gunkel. Thus he set about the hard, painstaking slog – not altogether unlike a tramp through the desert – of cutting up copies of the Hebraic text and laying what he believed to be the Jahwist passages round about him in various, tentative sequences. But before he could glue them together again – in their new order, I mean – he had to work out the correct sequence.

  Excuse me for laughing, Professor, but this reminds me that Daniel’s interest in cutting things out had started long before this and continued for a good while after – and we’re not talking Biblical texts here. Daniel was what one would have to call over-sexed; it was as if listening to the chapel hymn with the refrain ‘Dare to stand like Daniel’ had left him with a permanent erection.

  While his father was an organist, Daniel was an onanist on the grand scale, obsessed throughout his adolescence with whatever could get him worked up, inwardly and outwardly. The one thing he had in common with his father was an interest in fingering: which fingers to place where on the instrument – in his case what the Chinese referred to as the ‘jade flute’ – and the tempo, which Daniel also defined in musical terms, from the lingering andante of the overture to the allegro furioso of the last movement. As a teenager, lying in the bunk bed above Jonas, Daniel would launch into half-whispered discussions, or monologues, on what would be the optimum substitute for a vagina. A padded mitten? A roll of elastic bandage? ‘Boy, do I envy Guggen,’ he said one night. ‘Finding Anne Beate Corneliussen’s scarf, carrying it about in a daze, pressing it to his nose like a glue-sniffer, then coming up with the idea of tying it round his dick – can you imagine it, the softness and the scent of it!’ What Daniel did not know was that this experiment had left Guggen with a member so swollen and covered in friction burns that his anxious parents had had to take him to the doctor. According to Daniel, Guggen had also experimented with minced meat in a plastic bag which had first been submerged in warm water – a forerunner to such phenomena as the ‘Throbber battery-operated, travel-size vagina’ which appeared on the Norwegian market ten years later.

  And yet nothing got Daniel more worked up than pictures. He began collecting them at an early age – starting with innocent lingerie ads, then progressing to various rather more daring publications, acquired partly on secret summer expeditions to Strömstad and partly through chums who stole them from suspect stepfathers: pornography of a raunchier flavour, in keeping with the names of the magazines for which Daniel swapped it: Texas and Wild West. From these magazines he cut his favourite pictures, which is to say the ones that stood the test of turning him on time after time, inducing that hot itch in his groin. Because that was the whole point; to get a big hard-on, to stock up on pictures which could act as an aid to masturbation, photos which – when laid out in the right order, that is – contributed to an accumulated randiness which in turn, as he ran his eye down the line, prompted a more vigorous working of the hand: a pictorial plot which culminated in the perfect orgasm, setting a full stop in the form of a warm discharge fired at the cleavage of the dream woman who was the sum of all the pictures in front of him.

  For Daniel, masturbation was not – as it was for other boys – a pursuit conducted in the manner of the baboons in the zoo. No, for him it was a science – not least when it came to the selection of pictures. He had a particular preference for breasts, and these were evaluated according to the most stringent criteria. Breasts constituted the leitmotif in Daniel’s otherwise so inconstant life, from suckling onwards. Besides having a preference for a very specific and totally irrational shape and size, he had a breathless fascination for the nipples and the area round about them, and for their colour, as if there was talk here of a target, or – with a bit of good will – a kind of mandala on which to meditate.

  But where to hide the porn? This brings us to one of the many singular challenges posed to the boyish imagination, and there were endless strategies: one could, for example, cover the magazines, camouflaging them as jotters in one’s schoolbag; or one could conceal the judicious selection of pictures in a hollow tube, in itself an erotic act, or simply slip one’s issue of Cocktail, most symbolically, inside the sixth volume of My Treasury of Tales. For months Daniel’s collection reposed safely in Paradise.

  In the days when Daniel’s radicalism extended only to his learning the songs of Bob Dylan, he used to practise playing the guitar in the loft at Solhaug – an arrangement which suited him perfectly, since this was also where he kept the cut-outs of his favourite women, tucked inside a dilapidated old mattress, a real lulu, which some smart advertising people had dubbed the Paradise Mattress. Daniel was a terrible singer, even if his nasal drone did sound a bit like Dylan’s, and could produce from his harmonica no greater range of notes than a little kid pretending to be a fire engine. So he often ended up sinking down onto the mattress’s battered springs to console himself with his imaginary hordes of female fans, allowing them to pass before his eyes in the preferred, well-tried order, warbling at him à la Roy Orbison and thereby inciting his hand to move faster and faster until the picture of the last girl, with her – according to Daniel’s subjective yardstick – divine tits caused his balls to contract in a blissful blow-out. Poets have written of that stuff of which dreams are made. For Daniel they were made of paper.

  Then, one Midsummer’s Eve – ironically enough just after Daniel had more or less mastered Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ – something terrible happened. Moments before the bonfire was to be lit, Daniel was standing on the green, waiting expectantly with everyone else from the estate when, to his horror, he saw his father running out with the old mattress, to throw it on the pyre, knowing nothing, of course, about its precious stuffing. Acting almost on instinct, or maybe more like a sultan attempting to save his harem, Daniel leaped forward and gave the mattress a hefty tug, trying to wrest it out of his father’s hands, with the result that the ticking ripped even more and out fluttered all of Daniel’s treasured pictures, to be caught by the breeze and sent flying into the air, and for a moment the heavens seemed, from Daniel’s point of view at any rate, to be filled with a host of angels, before they were hastily collected by the estate’s more morally upright residents, not least the mothers, and thrown onto the fire, where they were, so to speak, burned as witches.

  I have, as it happens, an alternative explanation for why Red Daniel returned, like the prodigal son, to the study of theology. The fact is that he experienced a belated high point in his cut out career as late as 1975, which is to say long after he had given up collecting pictures. Some will remember 1975 as the year when the Suez Canal was reopened; Daniel remembered it for Ingeborg Sørensen. There are times when I think that there was only one point in his life when Daniel was proud of being Norwegian: when Ingeborg Sørensen graced the centrefold of America’s Playboy magazine and, in a sense, conquered the United States. Several Norwegian women have in fact been Playmate of the Month, but Ingeborg Sørensen was the only one to come to Daniel’s attention. He sneaked into a newsagent’s, despite nightmares of being spotted by one of the Women’s Libbers, and bought the March issue, to bring him comfort in his bleak, self-proletarianized existence; secure in the knowledge that Ingeborg Sørensen had not prostituted herself to a worse degree than he himself had been doing for some years – in one shot she was even pictured wearing a hard hat and boiler suit, like a worker. Daniel was so bowled
over by her beauty that he actually cut out the picture of her in the bath with her breasts sticking out of the water like two island paradises in a sea of foam. So perhaps it was really Ingeborg Sørensen, and the lines of what, for Daniel, represented the embodiment of the perfect breasts which – that same year – showed him the way home; persuaded him to drop the Marxist-Leninist Party and resume his theological studies, as if she represented the naked truth, drove him back to the genesis of Paradise, to the GT and the Jahwist source.

  It is not, therefore, beyond the bounds of possibility that – by demonstrating the heights a Norwegian could attain – she also fired Daniel’s scholarly ambitions; that the thought of Ingeborg Sørensen and his youthful hobby also lay at the back of his mind when he was cutting passages out of the Old Testament in his efforts to discover a new, an utterly brilliant sequence which would overturn everything hitherto postulated by researchers on the subject of the Jahwist source. For months Daniel pored over scraps of Hebraic scripture spread out on the large table he had set up in his office, switching the slips of paper about again and again, continually altering the pattern – until one day, almost by accident and so abruptly that it came as a shock, it all fell into place, or nearly into place. The obvious sequence, just around the corner. For a few seconds he felt as light-headed as Crick and Watson must have felt the moment before they stood back and surveyed their completed model of the DNA structure. He could hardly believe it; had a vision of what this would mean. ‘I’m famous,’ he thought to himself. ‘My God, I’m about to become famous.’

  But as the saying goes: ‘how long was Adam in Paradise?’ It is a warm spring day, just after Easter, the world is full of hope, and Daniel is sitting by an open window. And of course a girl comes in – a lot of female students tended to pop into his office – and in her eagerness to ask some burning question she knocks on the door then walks straight in, causing all of the scraps of paper spread out on the table to fly up, positively whirl into the air, some of them even vanishing out of the window, before coming to rest again in the most woeful disarray; he finds the whole thing suspiciously reminiscent of that time, as a boy, when he was stupid enough to unscrew the workings of a clock and all the parts were sent flying around the room. Daniel knew he was beaten. He would never get so close to the right sequence again. He eyed the jumble of paper around him – suddenly, with merciless clarity, it seemed to illustrate the futility of the entire undertaking and in many ways also anticipated developments in Pentateuchal research, which came more and more to assert the impossibility of ‘going from the omelette back to the eggs’. In other words: he gave up. There was more to life than bits of paper. A new challenge, not to say two new challenges, stood before him, in the flesh.

  I should perhaps remind you here of Daniel’s idiosyncrasies, again where breasts were concerned: remind you of the time when, as a boy, he used to lie in bed briefing Jonas on which fabric provided the most provocative covering for the female breast. Daniel, as we have seen, favoured wool and it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, as they say – because the woman who had opened the door and caused the draught was wearing nothing but a fine wool sweater over her breasts: two gambolling lambs, Daniel thought, putting a little twist on The Song of Solomon’s paean to the same phenomenon. Daniel never did anything by halves, and this whole story eventually culminated in a happy Exodus: he married the agent of his downfall, this girl who even as a small child had been described as ‘a whirlwind’ – and, I might add, they had four sons in rapid succession, whom Daniel with a certain self-irony, called the Four-Source Hypothesis.

  Daniel left research and entered the church. And even though he was tone deaf he insisted on singing the Litany during services. When Daniel was droning on in that hoarse, nasal voice of his, it always sounded to Jonas as if, standing there behind the Communion-rail, leading the congregation, his brother was singing: ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.’

  The Tail and the Sheath

  Supposing one were a conqueror – what would one win? The world? A little peace of mind? A name? Immortality? Oneself? Power? Women? There were times in Jonas Wergeland’s life when he felt there was only one thing worth striving for: Health. To be fit and well.

  Despite all of Daniel’s sexual excesses – and as an adult he committed many sins far worse than fornicating with paper images – he never made, I almost said, a complete balls-up of things. Jonas, on the other hand, did.

  Some stories have to be told more than once. You think you are finished with them, but then they pop up again like twists and turns that have lain low all the way along, only suddenly to wriggle up to the surface again. So this, Professor, is of course a continuation of the Istanbul story – and do not be misled into thinking that it deals with an earlier experience.

  The more Jonas learned about his wife, the more he knew how much he didn’t know. There are two types of people: those who know how to mix a dry Martini and those – by far the biggest group – who do not. Margrete knew how to make a proper dry Martini, and this troubled Jonas; it gave rise to all sorts of misgivings as to what else she was capable of but kept secret from him. And yet Margrete was the last person Jonas would have suspected of infidelity, and while you may laugh at such naivety, Professor, do not forget what she worked with day in, day out. She was a dermatologist, or to put it another way: she worked with sexually transmitted diseases.

  Does the story of the jealousy start here? Deep down?

  Jonas himself had only visited the Oslo Health Centre once. True, he had walked past the striking new building on St Olavs plass every day on his way to and from the Cathedral School, but he had never given any thought to what delicate matters and contrite souls lay hidden behind the natural concrete of its facade.

  Five years later, however, he had no choice but to take the Canossa way or, as some would have it, the Casanova way to the inner chambers of the aforementioned Health Centre: which is to say he was saved from having to crawl, and instead took the lift to the fifth floor and pushed open the door bearing the daunting sign ‘Department of Dermatology and Venereal Diseases’. The reason for this ignominious visit was, as far as Jonas himself could tell, a good old-fashioned dose of the clap. Well, not good – of the worst possible kind.

  Tempting though it is, I do not propose to dwell at any length on the psychological gauntlet many people feel they are running when they enter the waiting room of such a department, with pus seeping into their underwear. Nor am I going to make fun of the sudden reluctance to give one’s name to the nurse filling out the card, as if one is half expecting to be charged with some dreadful penance or imagines that one’s name is being entered in some sort of Sinners’ Register.

  What Jonas remembered most clearly was the moment when he walked into the doctor’s surgery, a rather poky, nondescript office, to find himself looking at a woman – and not only that, but looking at what he would later describe as a fine figure of a woman, who – on the basis of a postcard tacked to the wall, of Van Gogh’s Starry Night – he immediately assumed to be a connoisseur of art. He had automatically envisaged a male doctor but promptly thought to himself: why not? Why shouldn’t a female doctor treat male patients too?

  She – Dr Kleveland, according to the badge on her white coat – greeted him politely before inquiring what the trouble was, asking a few professional and yet personal questions which instantly gave him full confidence in her: nay, filled him with gratitude almost for being allowed to get things off his chest, somehow confess, as if he were a Catholic and she was the priest behind the screen in the confessional. He explained, a little longwindedly perhaps, while she nodded and told him to take down his trousers and lie down on the couch over against the wall. And I’m sure quite a few people in Norway would have liked to witness this sight – Jonas Wergeland lying there with his pants down, presenting his afflicted member, humbly and possibly a little shamefully. ‘I’d never have thought it of her,’ he said.

  Dr Kleveland put o
n a pair of latex gloves with a snap that made Jonas think of washing-up, or feel that at any minute she was going to pick up a scalpel and remove the whole lot, cut the evil off at the root, as it were. For a fleeting moment it seemed to him that she weighed his penis in her hand, as if comparing it to others she had seen, or as if it was a fine work of art and the whole point of the gloves was to prevent it from being sullied by sweaty or greasy fingers, just as curators wore gloves when restoring valuable old masters. It would probably be truer to say that Dr Kleveland was much more interested in the inner state of Jonas Wergeland’s penis than in its outward appearance. ‘Could you pull back the foreskin?’ she said. This he did, feeling as though he were raising the curtain on a tragic drama.

  I will not go into the details of Dr Kleveland’s skilful handling of the urethral spatula, or attempt to describe the tiny stab of pain or the thoughts that go through one’s head when a charcoal brush is pushed almost an inch into the urethra, merely say that Dr Kleveland – making no comment and closely observed by a rather worried Jonas, brushed the pus onto a cover slip which she then dried before coating it with a so-called Löffler dye and put her eye down to the microscope – it was all over in a couple of minutes.