The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  And his fears were not unfounded, as he discovered on Hvaler that summer, one weekend when the air was heady with the scent of the honeysuckle growing up the side of the house and they were alone out there at the mouth of the fjord, he and Veronika. Jonas still slept away from everyone else as he had done as a child, up in the little room in the attic. He slept soundly as always, and he slept in the raw, as always. On this Sunday morning he was woken by a faint clenching of his testicles, it felt as though someone had just clasped a firm hand around his balls. His duvet was gone. Veronika was standing over him, dark and smouldering, gazing down at his naked body. She smiled. Jonas had no idea what she was smiling at. Not until he tried to get up did he realize that his hands and feet were tied to the bars of the iron bedstead, bound with soft scarves, four knots. ‘Bowlines,’ said Veronika. ‘I could have chosen one of the trickier knots Grandpa taught us, but I like to keep things simple.’ She smiled again, teasingly, or was it desirously as she ran her eye over his body, as if he were a prize catch she had snared, rather like a unicorn. He tugged tentatively with one arm. ‘You’ll never be able to undo them,’ she said.

  She kneeled on the bed. She smelled of sun cream. Jonas cursed the fact that he was a sound sleeper, as she brushed his belly with her long dark hair. Jonas didn’t know whether to lie back and enjoy it or put up a fight. Put up a fight? He was helpless, bound to the bed by colourful silks and soft knots; in one way he felt like an ornament of sorts, a bit of decoration, in another like a victim of torture, like you saw in pictures. But torture? Who could possibly regard this as torture? Veronika Røed sweeping her long, black hair across his stomach and chest, stroking a finger along his thigh, slowly, upwards.

  Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life, the tales that are hidden deep down, like a ball of hibernating snakes, all potent and intertwined? She got to her feet and planted herself in front of him, gleaming black

  eyes and gleaming black hair, looked down at him lying there with arms and legs spread, like a big unknown ‘X’. She pulled off the baggy T-shirt that covered her to mid-thigh, stood there before him in just her panties: ninety-five per cent summer-bronzed skin, five per cent white silk. From a purely objective point of view – this much Jonas knew – this ought to have been one of the sexiest bodies one could ever imagine, an almost timelessly perfect figure in terms of breasts and curves – classical beauty, as they say. Something told him he would never see a more consummately lovely body. And yet he said no. By which I mean, he said no with his eyes. And with his undercarriage. It was not fear alone that prevented Jonas from rising to the occasion but also, and to as great an extent, contempt. ‘You’ll never get it up,’ he said.

  The sighing of the wind in the tops of the pines reached them through the open window. Veronika stood perfectly still in front of him, gleaming black eyes and gleaming black hair, and yet Jonas realized that she was offering herself to him. And he realized something else, too: that this was the peach all over again – temptation on a silver platter – only this time it was more serious, would have even greater consequences. Veronika stood on the wooden floorboards in a loft where the dust danced in the lovely morning light streaming in through the old lace curtains, stood there tattooed by light, a sight to take a man’s breath away, pure feminine beauty, pure sensuality; she let her panties slide to the floor then flipped them up to her hand with her foot before, with a light flick of the fingers, slinging, yes slinging them, with such perfect precision that they landed smack on his face, and he could not avoid inhaling that most distinct and possibly most arousing of all female smells, that blend of body odour, vaginal fluids and perfume. The very alchemy of this ought to have induced a solid erection. But Jonas’s nether regions remained unmoved.

  Veronika eyed him defiantly, picked up the wisp of silk and drew it slowly down over his belly, swished it around his groin, as though tickling him with a feather. When this did not produce any visible effect either, she bent down and proceeded to kiss him, grazing the inside of his thigh with her lips, her long tongue caressing that incredibly sensitive spot between the balls and the anus, a spot which, theoretically, ought to house the spring-release for an erection, but not in Jonas Wergeland, not now at any rate. And here, in a way, Jonas Wergeland showed the first sign of his genius: his inclination for viewing the penis not as hardware, but primarily as software. And, I may add, Jonas did not perceive this as the fulfilment of a vague piece of erotic wishful thinking, a kind of male fantasy, but quite simply as a most unpleasant experience – his main worry, his main fear, throughout all this was of what she might take it into her head to do.

  Veronika looked at him with gleaming black eyes. He caught a look of surprise, but also one of warning, in her eyes, a threat almost, before she lowered her head once more and took his penis into her mouth. I do not know, Professor – many people have, of course, spoken of Jonas Wergeland’s alarming stubbornness – but one has to wonder whether he ever gave a more convincing demonstration of his almost supernatural strength of will than at this moment: there was Veronika Røed, working the head of his penis into her warm, soft mouth, following all the instinctive rules, and still he managed, God knows how, not to get the world’s most eagerly throbbing hard-on. So I do not rule out the possibility that there could have been more to this; that in refusing Veronika – this gorgeous girl who had stripped off and offered herself to him – Jonas Wergeland also humiliated her: that behind that demonstration of will there lay a not inconsiderable dose of malice.

  So it is perhaps understandable that Veronika saw red, and something about Jonas’s immunity to her advances, or apparent impotence, infuriated her still further, moved her to climb on top of him, making Jonas think for a second, with something approaching horror, that she was about to start masturbating, in a last attempt to turn him on: fondle herself, make it glisten with moisture, right there in front of him, but after taking a deep breath through her nose, as if coming to a decision, she began instead to kiss his stomach, then worked her way up across his chest until she came to his shoulder where, quite unexpectedly, she bit down, hard, so hard that Jonas cried out in pain. At that she jumped off the bed in exasperation. When she looked down at him, looked down at the shoulder where the blood was welling up, her eyes were still black and gleaming – and perhaps bewildered – as if they reflected her thoughts: the knowledge that this was a critical situation, possibly the most baffling experience she had ever had: a situation in which everything had gone ‘right’ but which, nevertheless, had turned out ‘all wrong’.

  The problem with Veronika was, though, that she simply could not lose, she had a knack for doing something at the very moment of defeat that cancelled out the whole game, just as you could tilt the old pinball machines or knock over a chessboard when you got yourself into a tight corner. That was Veronika Røed’s strategy for life.

  And now she was standing in an attic on an island at the mouth of a fjord, aged seventeen, looking at Jonas stretched out on the bed, tied down with soft knots, looking the picture of defeat. For some unknown reason Jonas felt more afraid now than when she had been bending over him with her black eyes and moist lips, or when she had bitten down, cutting through his skin with her flawless teeth.

  ‘What do you think he had in that safe?’ Veronika said. Her voice was low, but Jonas could tell that she was struggling to control herself. Her tone, those words, aroused in him something of the same panic as the sound of a horsefly could do; he knew that what was coming had nothing to do with memories of kittens or redcurrants with custard. He refused to listen, felt like humming loudly, the way they used to do as boys when they didn’t want to hear the result of a sporting event before it was shown on TV.

  ‘What do you think Grandpa had in that canvas bag he kept in the safe?’ she said, standing there naked on the wooden floor, a perfect body, a remorseless body tattooed by light in the lacy patterns of the curtains.

  Jonas knew that something terrible was lying in wait. Worse than
a dragon. ‘He’s dead,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t you just let him rest in peace?’

  ‘A Luger,’ said Veronika. ‘Fancy that, Jonas, a Luger.’ Veronika edged right up close to him; Jonas was looking up at her already full breasts. ‘How on earth could that pistol, that detested pistol, so bound up with the Germans, have landed in Grandpa’s safe?’ she said, oozing ruthlessness.

  ‘Please don’t,’ Jonas said. The minute she mentioned the Luger he had known that this was a piece that would change everything. Possibly even the future. Intuitively he understood that his life too could be altered by the mention of this Luger.

  ‘Too late,’ Veronika retorted smartly, as if she knew that Jonas might go to very great lengths to be spared having to hear the rest. But this was another of Veronika’s talents – once she had started something there was no stopping her, no matter how fateful the consequences.

  So she told him, stood there naked in the morning light, in the very loft where Daniel and Jonas had once succeeded in opening the safe, and where their grandfather had snatched the canvas bag out of the lacquer casket before they had a chance to touch it. And for the first time Jonas heard, from Veronika’s lips, the story of their grandfather’s treachery during the war, of the day when two men dressed as islanders and carrying forged border resident papers, stepped off the ferry. Omar Hansen had seen at a glance that behind their disguise they were really fearful city folk on their way to Sweden; all they had to do was wait for nightfall and a rowboat that lay waiting, but they never got that far, because when their grandfather spotted the German border police’s patrol boat out in the fjord he wasted no time in rowing out and hailing it; and then, out of a sadly misplaced sense of duty, he actually reported them, those two fugitives, and hence gave the Germans no choice, even though they were amazingly tolerant out here, turning a blind eye to this, that and the other. Thanks to this zealous and enterprising action on the part of Jonas Wergeland’s grandfather, the two men, who also turned out to be Jewish, were found and arrested. Fortunately, for Omar Hansen that is, no one had witnessed the brief meeting out in the sound except his two mortified sons, William and Haakon, who knew better than to say anything, not least because in May 1945 other informers had already been jailed and given a very hard time of it. It was just after this incident with the Jews that Omar Hansen secretly acquired a gun from the Germans. Maybe he felt threatened, or maybe he wanted to be prepared in case any more fugitives showed up and he had to escort them back to the German garrison at Gravningsund.

  ‘And what do you think happened to those two Jews?’ Veronika said when she was finished. ‘D’you think they came back to Hvaler for their summer holidays after the war?’

  In his mind Jonas saw a boat sinking, slowly and softly into the deep. At this point he had no idea how Veronika knew all this, whether there were other people besides their fathers who remembered it, or whether it was simply something she had dug up herself, evidence of the talent which had shown itself in her at an early age and would one day make her a top-notch reporter. But, knowing the Veronika who stood before him as he did, he also knew that it was the naked truth.

  He lay there, tied to the bed, involuntary tears streaming down his cheeks – cursing those tears, that Veronika should see them – and all at once he understood that this – this – was the Story behind the stories, the tale his grandfather had been searching for as he rocked back and forth in his chair, flanked by the dark, carved sideboards in the parlour, like a knight fighting shadowy monsters. His grandfather did not only have a dragon tattooed on his arm, he also had an invisible tattoo on his heart. And the reason he screwed up his eyes when he told a story was that he always had his sights on that one story, as if he were frantically trying to alter it by telling all those other stories. That was also why he always backed when he was rowing, because he so desperately wanted to turn back time, travel backwards and maybe one day reach the point, that total eclipse of the sun, when he had made his terrible mistake.

  Veronika had scored a bull’s-eye. If she hated Jonas for spurning her she could not have found a better way of taking her revenge – not even the pleasure she derived later from seeing Jonas gamble away a whole bundle of money on worthless shares could compare to the triumph she felt at the sight of Jonas’s stricken face on that pillow. His grandfather was as good as a god to him; she knew this must hurt him dreadfully.

  ‘Christ, you’re mean Veronika, you’re so mean,’ was all Jonas managed to blurt out.

  ‘And you, Jonas, you’re such a loser,’ retorted Veronika, as if alluding to the pleasure that could have been his but which he had lost all chance of now. ‘In fact you’re worse than that: you’re a mediocrity. Even your cock gives you away.’ She picked up her panties and T-shirt, disappeared down the stairs. By the time Jonas had worked himself free, two hours later, she was gone.

  But there was one thing Veronika had not reckoned on. She thought she had dealt Jonas’s image of Omar a mortal blow. But Jonas would only grow to love his grandfather even more after this disclosure, because now he understood his grandfather’s air of vulnerability, his desperate bent for telling stories, the effort it took to go on living in spite of his act of treachery: an occurrence which no amount of remorse could atone for. In time Jonas came to see that this was his story too, since it had to do with his roots. Hence the reason he kept returning to the question of whether a story about evil could, by some strange metamorphosis, some day become a beautiful story, whether Hitler could even become Homer or, as he thought of it when working at his carving bench, whether a dragon could become a swan.

  Jonas Wergeland never really rid himself of the fatal suspicion that you had to be a criminal to be a good storyteller. Or that behind the best stories there was always a hurt, a wound, much in the same way as a foreign body will, in the course of time, cause an oyster to make a pearl; which, when you get right down to it, means that a pearl is disease transformed into beauty.

  The Battle of Thermopylae

  Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must start with words: Tenerife, Tortugas, Tancred, Touraine. All through the programme this catalogue of names was recited, like beautiful alliterations, stanzas from a patriotic poem everyone used to know and which Jonas Wergeland meant to bring to life once more – lines as memorable as ‘You must not take so much to heart, that injustice which touches not your own part.’

  Many have remarked on Jonas Wergeland’s ability to keep the viewers’ eyes glued to the screen from the first flicker, to stop them from zapping to another channel within those first, critical thirty seconds. The opening sequence of the programme on Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was no exception: it is the Second World War; a German submarine is seen firing a torpedo at a merchant ship. Thanks to an absolutely brilliant montage of clips from old documentaries, seen partly through the periscope, partly from the surface, Jonas created an almost unbearable cliff-hanger of a scene, rendered doubly effective by a shot in which the camera actually seemed to be following the torpedo through the water to its target, to the accompaniment of a spine-chilling soundtrack not unlike the theme from Jaws. The whole thing culminated in a grim, long drawn-out explosion and a dreamlike sequence in which the ship slipped down into the deep – a brilliant illusion created by an underwater camera filming a sinking model ship in the clear water of a swimming pool.

  More than once during the shooting of this episode Jonas was reminded of what a thrill, what a boost he had got from making his first ever programme. Because, although Wergeland’s colleagues have insisted that he was a natural for television, that he had a sixth sense for where a camera ought to be placed, which passages were good and which were bad, this was not the case. When NRK, with some reservations, offered Jonas Wergeland, the increasingly popular television announcer, the chance to make programmes, he just about panicked, his mind went blank. The story is that he went to London and stayed there for a month, and that when he came home there was nothing he didn’t know about TV. No one knows w
hat he got up to in London, not even I – whether, as some people maintain, he sat through Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo fifty times, or whether, as others say, he spent every single day and night at the BBC’s Broadcasting House – but I am pretty sure that there, in his mysterious fashion, he found a key to the secret of television broadcasting. However that may be, he returned to Norway possessed of a self-confidence worthy of a television Einstein. And in the first programme he made for NRK, about the Norwegian elkhound – yes, that’s right, the Norwegian elkhound – he discovered, to his heartfelt delight, or relief, what a perfect medium television was for a person like him, one with such limited abilities; he gave thanks for the fabulous stroke of luck that had led him to such an enormously suggestive medium: a single twirl of the camera and people saw a UFO, their eyes just about starting out of their heads. Jonas Wergeland had found his arena, a field in which he could become a conqueror. Despite the fact that he created a series of what were – objectively speaking – outstanding programmes, definite milestones in television history, Jonas knew something which he never told to a living soul: making television programmes was the easiest job in the world – the TV studio the perfect refuge of the mediocre. Television was the salvation of Mr Average.