He gave a start. He could not believe it. He started because he was hearing his own piece. Not exactly the same, obviously. And the parts that were similar were, of course, a lot better. An awful lot better. But still. His own piece. The concept. They stood and heard it to the end. A torment and a shock. He thought of a puck skimming silently across the ice, appearing out of nowhere, and an exquisite monument crashing down in a cascade of light, shards flying in all directions, a pearl he would never find again.
‘Igor Stravinsky,’ Fru Brøgger said. ‘We haven’t played anything by him yet.’
‘When?’ was all he said, his last hope – a straw – that the answer would be last year, yesterday.
‘Before the First World War,’ she said. ‘Fifty-five years ago.’ She didn’t need to add this last, but she said it, knew she had to say it.
Jonas stood there in the centre of the room with ‘the four greats’ in their frames behind him. He heard a quick laugh. A devilish harmony played high up on the descant. A dragon. Or a chord from a piano crashing to the ground from the fifth floor – he could not say. Someone had had his groundbreaking idea about music half a century ago. For years, someone, a whole world had inhabited that landscape which he had imagined to be deserted. The concept had been perfected, used up, milked of all potential.
He was devastated. He felt – and only a poet’s analogy can capture his state of mind – like a Napoleon crippled in his first battle. In his mind, his whole future had been based on this: that he had the power to create something new. He could always improve upon his technique, but he now knew that he did not possess the one thing that really counted: a capacity for original thought. One could of course say that Jonas Wergeland was not being fair to himself, that one cannot judge one’s life at the age of fifteen, that it is perfectly possible to think along new lines even when one has never done so before – the early works of many great composers weren’t all that impressive either – but for Jonas the impatient, for Jonas Wergeland the perfectionist, this, this composition was his to be or not to be. Fru Brøgger’s revelation confirmed what he had, deep down, feared most of all: he was a mediocrity. The commonest little mongrel, as his uncle had once said. That was his fate. He just knew it. He could postpone it, fight for ten years at least against this knowledge, but the verdict would still be the same: he would always be a charlatan. One who, although he managed to hide it from an audience – other mediocrities – merely imitated the creations of true conquerors. He would have to wrestle with the worst of all fates: to have planted within him a lofty goal, a goal so manifestly right, so enticing that he could never forsake it, but at the same time lack the aptitude to achieve it.
He could not bear to stay there, Fru Brøgger walked him to the door, stroked his back again. Wordlessly she handed him a slice of coffee ring, as if he were a little kid, he thought, a little kid in need of comforting. ‘Give it to the birds,’ he said and was gone.
He had never seen as many great tits as he did on the way home. The males were strung out like infuriating yellow notes along the black lines of the tree branches. The words rang in his head: Great tit! You great tit! He swore that he would never touch a piano again.
It was snowing. On impulse he made for the church, thinking of suicide, thinking that he was on his way to his own funeral.
What cracked so loud? He heard the question sung out all around him? Norway from my hand, he thought.
Bronze Age
But then there came those unexpected ups, signs that there was more to him. Could be more. He might be standing, let’s say, in the middle of a heap of stones and suddenly feel a pressure building up, feel all of his ordinariness, the various bits that went to make up his self shuffle themselves around and fall into a new pattern – or, why not: crystallized in a different way – so that he positively sensed, in every bit of himself, the possibility of assuming a different carat. Or, to be more specific: I’m talking about the summer out on Hvaler when he met Liv H. up at Røsset, a girl with a peeling nose and hair pulled into a thick plait that hung down her back, as bright as burnished copper. She was in high school like him, came from Larvik and was holidaying on a neighbouring island. Jonas felt a button being pushed. Her I’ve got to have, he thought. No matter what.
‘Røsset’ – the reason why Liv H. had made the trip across the sound – was a Bronze Age barrow, one of those man-made mounds of stones that can be found up and down the Norwegian coast. ‘Wouldn’t that be wonderful,’ she said, sitting down on the top of the landmark and looking out across the fjord towards Færder lighthouse. ‘To be buried under thousands of round stones shaped by the sea. And in such a fabulous spot.’ Jonas eyed her curiously. It turned out – he could almost have guessed it – that she wanted to study archaeology after she finished high school; nothing could be more exciting than digging into the past, she declared. And Liv H. would stay true to her dream, would in fact end up as an archaeologist of wide renown, an authority on ancient Norwegian settlements abroad, in England, Normandy, America, dating from the time when the Norsemen were usurpers, when they were conquerors. She would become famous for taking direct issue with the established research community, and for the unorthodox methods she employed in order to prove her theories: adventures that eventually also secured her membership of the celebrated Explorers Club. ‘It must have been some job,’ she said – now, I mean, talking to Jonas. ‘Lugging all those stones up here. I bet there’s a great story hidden in this mound.’
It had never occurred to him that these stones could be more than stones. It was a weird phenomenon, certainly, but the main thing was that it offered a great view of the island and the sea beyond. ‘Ships could probably sail in through there in the old days,’ she said, pointing out to the channel where the sun turned the water into silver paper. ‘Strange-looking vessels once dropped anchor down there and Bronze Age people came ashore to bury a great man, a chief maybe.’ Jonas tried to picture it, boats like the ones you saw on rock engravings, maybe with prows shaped like dragons heads. ‘Do you think we would find anything valuable if we managed to move away all these stones?’ she asked brightly, as if she really wouldn’t mind having a go, would start right away, in fact.
Although she did not know it she had made Jonas feel better. His grandfather was dead, and Jonas felt heartsick at being here now, and a bit disappointed too perhaps, since now he would never learn Omar Hansen’s secret: what had been concealed in the canvas bag they found in the safe. Not only that, but he missed all the stories, the yarns from his grandfather’s days with the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line. Jonas took a long look at his companion. Her skin was like bronze, her hair thick with salt, with wind and weather. Although a fresh sou’wester was blowing, she was wearing shorts and a thin, old anorak. He could clearly see that there was nothing under the anorak but her own soft curves. ‘Where do you think these stones come from?’ she asked. ‘And how many years did it take the waves to grind them so smooth?’ She clasped a stone in each hand, as if they were large eggs which she intended to hatch, reveal their secret. There was something in her eyes, a curiosity, an eagerness to learn which he found immensely attractive. ‘Archaeologists dig and dig, brush the dirt off thousands of fragments in different places,’ she said. ‘But somebody has to put all of the pieces together.’ He knew who she was talking about.
Liv H. had a small and rather rickety sailboat of indeterminate make, and Jonas accompanied her on several expeditions around the skerries in the weeks that followed. He soon found out that there could hardly be anything lovelier – for a teenage boy, at any rate – than a sun-bronzed girl with a peeling nose, her hand on the tiller and her eyes screwed up against the sun. One day when they had pretty much left the boat to make its own way around the marker buoys, steered by the wind and the current, they ended up off Akerøy, further north in the archipelago, with Akerøy Fort lying on an islet next to it, a building which had lain in ruins for years but was now to be restored. Liv H. scanned the fort closely and m
ade some observations about ancient fortress styles that made Jonas’s mind boggle, before they went ashore on Akerøy itself, a nature reserve with only one white house nestling among rocky knolls and soft grassy hills, a cottage used in the spring and autumn by ornithologists because the island was a vital resting place for migrant birds.
They were alone, apart from a figure walking to and fro among the heather and juniper some way off. ‘A thinker,’ Liv H. asserted after watching him for a while.
At one point they crossed paths with this other person, who proved to be an elderly man in an old-fashioned windcheater: tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses under a deeply furrowed brow. They fell into conversation with him, and he told them that he had recently bought a place down by the sound that ran between the two large islands just to the east, but that he had spent many a summer in the house they saw here on Akerøy. The man looked a bit like a bird himself, he had a lean head that was never at rest but kept dipping this way and that – as if he couldn’t help it, Jonas thought, maybe he had some disease.
‘What do you do?’ asked Liv H., direct as always.
‘I’m writing a book,’ the man said.
‘A book about birds?’
‘A novel.’
‘But why all this roaming round and round?’
‘Because I think best when I’m walking, it has something to do with the rhythm.’
‘So in a way your walks generate stories,’ she said, the idea seeming to excite her.
‘Well, I don’t think I’d put it quite as strongly,’ he said. ‘But sentences, yes.’
He had obviously taken a liking to Liv H., smiled when she told him she meant to study archaeology and especially the links between ancient cultures. ‘Impressive. The whole world as your field,’ he said. ‘Personally I find the question “Who am I?” is more than enough for me. You might say I’m an archaeologist who investigates the complexities of the mind. That I search for connections there.’
‘Such as what?’ Jonas ventured to ask.
‘Such as the inexplicable leaps, the hidden link, between childhood and adulthood. The bridges between the continents of the psyche are challenge enough for me.’ He regarded Jonas, appeared to be enjoying himself. ‘What if one were two? Had two identities? What would be the link, then, between “self” and “self”? Would it be possible to sail a conciliatory raft between the two? Show that they did still belong together, were part of the same civilization, so to speak?’
The man gazes at them intently, as if he envies them – a boy and a girl on an islet at the mouth of the fjord. ‘I’m thinking of bequeathing my body to the archaeologists of medicine,’ he says, ‘let them dig around a bit in there. I’d like to know what they would find. Maybe that I have a Chinese heart. That I have the large intestine of a Negro.’
Although they did not know it, Jonas and his new girlfriend were standing on one of the most important islands in the history of Norwegian literature – on that island, I think it is safe to say, where most of the loveliest short stories about love have been conceived. And this man was of course Johan Borgen, who had just purchased Knatten House on Asmaløy and who, this summer, was working on a new novel.
Maybe it was Johan Borgen who really brought these two young people together, who can say? At any rate they began going for evening strolls with other teenagers, a number of them equipped with transistor radios that, because of their aerials, reminded Jonas of creatures with feelers, alternative modes of communication. They sauntered along a cart-track, buoyed up by the strains of that summer’s hits, only one of which Jonas would be able later to recall: ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Because he was becoming more and more besotted with Liv H., yearned for her body, although he didn’t let it show, walked beside her among fir trees and wild flowers, laughing and joking and wondering how on earth he was going to conquer her.
One bright summer evening when they are standing on the jetty waiting for the last ferry, surrounded by seagull cries and the pungent smells of a beach at low tide, the talk comes around to school and this brings her back to her archaeology plans. ‘I’ve always wanted to seek out similarities,’ she says. ‘Some sort of correspondence, even across great distances.’
‘The way it is with boys and girls,’ he says, inspired by Johan Borgen. On his spine: that pressure, a crystal-clear sign.
She looks at him. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ And then: ‘But now you mention it.’
Why did these girls fall for Jonas Wergeland? I think it must have had something to do with that pressure inside him; it made an almost chemical impact on them which was as unmistakeable and effective as the visual signals of the animal kingdom, like the elephant seal’s inflated nose or the peacock’s tail.
One evening they wound up on Svanetangen, right on the tip, looking out to the open sea, just the two of them. Far out on the water an old fishing smack chugged past, thud, thud, thud, like a sea-borne heart. They sat down on a pebble beach, a sudden break in the rocks on which Jonas had spent many a day with his grandfather, and with Daniel who liked to build huge bonfires out of all the driftwood, onto which he could throw any tin cans that had been washed up and see the flames send them shooting gloriously skywards. To Jonas this was a beach rich in adventure and explosions, a view that evening would do nothing to diminish.
A fresh breeze was blowing, but it was not cold. She settled herself with her back against his legs, sat quietly for a long time, just watching the waves that came rolling in to break on the shingle at the water’s edge, seemed mesmerized by this, the sea spray falling just short of them. All at once she began to tell him about the Gulf Stream, about a theory she had come up with, a crazy notion as to how Norway had been populated. What if people had drifted here with the Gulf Stream? From England, Scotland, Ireland. They might have done, if they had had seagoing vessels earlier than we thought. She launched into a long discourse on the possible Celtic influence on Norwegian culture, but Jonas lost the thread of it, was too preoccupied with other forces, stronger than any ocean drift: the current that flows from a boy to a girl.
She found a hollow among the pebbles, like a sort of large deckchair still warm from the sun: smooth globes patterned with lichen, like maps of unknown worlds. He lay down, she remained sitting: or rather, she put a finger to her lips, silently shushing him, before unbuttoning his trousers and pulling them down to his knees. She stroked him tentatively with her fingers, making his penis rise up, studied it for a long time, as if she were surprised, as if his member was an obelisk covered in hieroglyphics, a unique archaeological discovery. And as if intent on examining it more closely she proceeded to lick him, all over, lingeringly, paying particular attention to his testicles, sucking his stones into her mouth one after the other, as if to shift them, to uncover a treasure.
He lay back in the hollow, lapping it up: the tang of seaweed and salt, the warm fingers on the thin skin of his penis, her lips, the tip of her tongue endeavouring to trace figures on his genitals, the wind brushing over the damp patches, all while he listened to the waves breaking on the shore, a slow, steady rhythm which matched the way she was kissing him, long kisses, until – as if wishing to assure herself of a share in that organ’s potency – she whipped off her shorts and climbed on top of him with her back to him, and guided his penis inside her, beginning, as she did so to roll away from him, then back towards him, heaving up and down until he began to hear gurgling sounds, or the waves made him think he heard gurgling sounds.
He looked at her naked bottom below the hem of her anorak, eyed the back of her neck, the thick plait swinging back and forth on her back. His senses were so alive, so receptive, that he was sure he could feel her clitoris rubbing against his glans as she all but rolled away from him, he remembered that the Romans had had another name for the clitoris – naviculus, little boat, which seemed most apt, since he had the feeling that she was taking him on a voyage, across a great ocean.
Jonas experienced an indescribable pleasure from
being made love to like this, amid sea pinks and driftwood, sea spray and round, warm stones which by now seemed quite soft. She rocked and heaved before his eyes, and each time she sank down he felt as though warm water were washing over him. Jonas had never made love to anyone who moved like this, sailing off with him, you might say, riding him over the rolling waves, an image which was enhanced by the fact that the wind buffeted her anorak, so that she appeared to be sitting on a little raft, using her own body as the sail. And then it came, as it always did; she must have activated him, he thought, just as the puck was activated when he laid the brooch on top of it; something rose to the surface, suddenly, and with utter clarity. It may have been the sight of his penis that made him think of a post he had once seen. And something about a ship. Because when he made love like this he truly did feel that he was drifting along, travelling, going beyond himself. Or shortened the distance between what he was and what he could become. He sailed on until he felt that he was floating, that with her body she had lifted him into the air, that they were flying, like swans, yes, that was it, swans, into the realms of the imagination, to find a connection, the actual story, between his self and his self. For within his own stones too a tale lay buried.
In a flicker of delight he saw how she raised her hands, as if she too wanted to rise upwards; she was a boat, half-flying, half-drifting along, in a way that might have prompted her to say, as another girl did say in a similar situation: ‘It’s like your cock has wings.’ Because not even in the midst of the most passionate lovemaking did any woman see Jonas Wergeland’s penis as an organ built for striking or stabbing. None of his women would ever have thought of crying, as they do in the fantasy world of porno movies: ‘Fuck me harder!’ They were more likely to say: ‘Love me lighter, softer.’ Or, as they frequently said: ‘Lift me higher!’
The Conqueror Page 26