The day before, the afternoon had been close and thundery too. When it thundered, Jonas sat on a pouf in the house’s open-sided porch. Thunder and lighting held a magnetic attraction for him, that meteorological drama; he thought about radio plays, how on earth to create that sound? It would be even more of a challenge because of the stereo effect: the thunder rolling like a landslide from skyline to skyline, followed by ear-splitting bangs. Jonas particularly liked those wonderful moments before the storm broke, the silence and the tension in the air. The pressure. Blue-grey clouds building up menacingly one behind the other. The colours of the landscape pulsating, as if they were under attack from some hidden darkness. Then came the rain, and the lightning. He sat on his pouf – sheltered from the showers but outside all the same – and counted the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder. He was never scared, not even when the crash came almost immediately after the lightning and it sounded as if someone was ripping up a sheet right next to his ear, while at the same time hammering on the bottom of a zinc tub. Jonas thought it might even be a vague dream of his: to be struck by lightning – and survive, of course. He had the idea that this must surely leave you charged up for the rest of your life; you’d be able to stick a light bulb in your mouth and make it light up, the way they did in the comics. He sat on the soft pouf on the stone step and gazed almost yearningly at the lightning flashes. Two dragons playing with a pearl, that – so his grandfather had told him – was what people in China believed caused thunder and lightning and rain in general. Jonas had never swallowed the story about Thor and his hammer. ‘The lightning is the glittering beams from an enormous pearl, tossed across the sky by dragons playing among the clouds,’ he had once told wide-eyed classmates at Grorud School.
Afterwards, when the rainbow hung over the neighbouring island and the landscape was looking all fresh and new, as if it had just been run through a gigantic, electric washing machine, Jonas usually went fishing. The day before, too, he had taken out his rod and gone down to the boathouse, walked barefoot along the path through a meadow that smelled like a spice market after the thunderstorm. He had taken the little rowboat: Jonas was good at rowing, he could row for hours without tiring, flicked the oars like an old seadog; he rowed all the way out to Flaket and beyond, through the farthermost inlet at Svanetangen point, to sit bobbing on the waves on the outer side of the island, with the sea – the ocean, he thought to himself – stretching out before him.
Here, after taking a cross-bearing, he let out his line, a good solid construction of his own devising: a combination of weighted line and gig; not spoon bait, but hooks baited with mussels, a sinker, thick nylon, sound knots. Jonas always dreamed of the Big One, had heard that there were supposed to be Greenland shark out here – in his mind’s eye he saw the little shark from the book on fishing, shuddered. It would be something to show off, though, and take photographs of, the way they did in tropical waters. He had fantasies of one day sitting with his children on his lap: ‘And here’s a picture of me standing next to the biggest shark ever caught off the coast of Norway.’
The truth is that Jonas seldom got a bite. But he liked fishing anyway, liked raking up the mussels, liked drifting in the rowboat, listening to the water lapping at its sides. Sometimes he simply tied the line to a tholepin and left the swell to keep the gig dancing while he opened more mussels, he liked that too, found it exciting to open them with his stumpy-bladed knife, erotic even – the sight of the soft, aromatic innards, at any rate. ‘Did you know there’s a sort of pearl that’s found in mussels?’ his grandfather had once said.
He has just decided to turn for home when he feels the boat beginning to drift out to sea, even though there is a light onshore breeze and no current to speak of. He has been sitting no more than twenty yards from the headland, directly off a break in the rocks, a small pebble beach. The water isn’t all that deep here, either, nine or ten fathoms maybe. But his line is sitting at an angle that fits with the direction in which he is drifting. Jonas feels the nylon cord. Taut as Einar Tambarskjelve’s bowstring, he thinks, and straight away he knows: it’s a fish – the Big One itself. ‘A whale!’ he thinks at first, overjoyed, then terror-stricken. He puts out his oars and rows for shore but doesn’t budge an inch: in fact, he is actually drawn further out. He doesn’t know what’s going on, is growing frightened, pulls for all he is worth, churning up the water but goes on drifting slowly but surely away from the shore, out onto the open sea, out into the deep.
He could, of course, have cut the line, but that would have been too bad. He rowed and rowed with all his might and finally succeeded in keeping the boat still. The line was running straight down. Jonas thought the fish must have got away from him, he rowed almost all the way to shore before pulling in his oars and putting a finger to the line. There was still something there. He managed to haul the fish in a bit, then put another half-hitch around the tholepin, repeated this process several times, until he glimpsed a shape down in the depths, a huge shape, something that gave him a jolt before the line again shot away from the boat and the – creature – that was on his hook broke the surface. Jonas all but fell over the side. He saw humps. Actual humps! About ten yards away he could see several humps sticking up out of the water. The first thing he thought of was an anaconda. Then he decided it must be a sea serpent. Time and again his grandfather had told him the story of the Hvaler sea serpent, told it so vividly that Jonas had huddled up against him in fright. ‘The beast has been sighted off both Torbjørnskjær and Akerøya and later on out between Tisler and Heia,’ he said. ‘Even a dean of the church, the soul of reliability, once wrote about the sea serpent, and wait till you hear this, Jonas, it was forty feet long and as big round the middle as a potbellied stove.’ Jonas stared at the spot in the waves where the incredible creature had appeared. Whatever it was, it was too big. And this close to land? It could have been sunning itself, Jonas thought. It had been a chilly start to the summer, cold in the water.
After a fierce tussle – Jonas could not have said whether it went on for minutes or hours – he managed to reach the beach, where he tied up the boat, grabbed the line and hopped ashore. Thanks to a combination of luck and skill Jonas succeeded – despite its weight – in dragging the monster up onto the shingle. It writhed and squirmed so ferociously that it wriggled right off the hook. Before the fish, or the serpent, could get to the water, though, it worried its way down among some large stones and got stuck, lay there helplessly.
Jonas regarded this fearsome creature from a safe distance. It had to be at least six feet long and weigh a good sixty or seventy pounds. The jaws were the scariest part. For ages Jonas stood there, spellbound, staring at those teeth.
What was he to do? How was he going to get it home? He could just see the pictures in Fredrikstad Blad. The sensation of the summer. He picked up a heavy stone, meaning to throw it at the beast.
Then something happened. What it was Jonas would never say. But he put the stone down, jumped into the rowboat to fetch an oar, and using this as a lever he managed, a bit at a time, to nudge, or help, the creature down to the water’s edge and out among the clumps of seaweed, where it revived and disappeared with a splash.
Jonas knew no one would believe him, so he never told a soul. Except me, Professor. Likewise I am the only one, apart from Margrete, to have heard what happened up at the top of Idde Fjord.
Because, as I say, the next day, with a sense of crossing a boundary, Jonas had padded – like a Red Indian, so he thought – up the bank of the River Berby, in this somehow alien Norwegian landscape, until something made him stop, a feeling that here, right here, he would find something precious. It was oppressively hot. He stood on the riverbank and watched dark clouds swelling up on all sides, saw the sun breaking through here and there, the apocalyptic radiance you see depicted on altarpieces, with the sun’s rays falling like lighthouse beams on the earth. He stepped into the river, just next to the first stretch of rapids, waded out a bit before taki
ng a header into a deep pool. Jonas was a good diver, and he was diving now, looking for unusual stones. Instead he spied something else, he didn’t know what they were, but they looked like shells. He had had no idea that shells could be found in freshwater, too. He picked one up at random and carried it ashore.
Jonas sat on the bank examining his find. Almost four inches wide. And heavy. Like a piece of slate. He sat by a dark, gently flowing river and knew, with solemn conviction, that this thing could decide his fate.
He met up with his grandfather as the latter was coming down the road with the lilac bush, and once they were back in the rowboat and heading for home, Jonas took out the shell and showed it to his grandfather. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
Omar Hansen only needed to take one glance at it. ‘A freshwater pearl oyster,’ he said.
Jonas almost dropped it into the water he was so taken aback. Really? His grandfather nodded. Jonas studied the shell. Never in all his wildest dreams had he imagined that it was possible to find something like this in Norway. A pearl oyster. Something so – he searched for the word – un-Norwegian. And he, Jonas, had found one. His whole conception of what Norway had to offer in the way of new frontiers instantly changed. It was as though Norway had expanded with a jolt round about him, as he sat there in the peter boat, sailing down Idde Fjord. And who knows, perhaps it was here, in a secret corner of Norway, that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his career, a career that was rooted in the belief that the impossible was possible. Because, as I am sure most people will understand, no one who has found a pearl oyster in Norway can ever have any doubts about this country.
Jonas sat with both hands round the oyster, as if he were holding a thing of great potency. Alive. A heart. He pulled out a pocket knife, so excited he could hardly breathe. He had no problem seeing how this situation could branch out into two totally different lives. Depending on what was inside.
As if he read Jonas’s mind, his grandfather said: ‘There’s maybe one pearl for every hundred shells. And maybe a perfect pearl in every hundred pearls.’
Jonas gazed at the gnarled oyster. But if it was one of those shells… It was one of those shells. He just knew it, could already picture the fabulous dull-sheened sphere embedded in the soft flesh, was already wondering what he should do with it, whether he should have it made into a pearl earring to give to somebody he loved, or what. This was not just a question of a pearl. It was a button. Something that could trigger unimaginable processes.
He sat with the oyster in one hand, the knife in the other. Then, all of a sudden, he stretched his fist out over the rail, uncurled his fingers and let the oyster slip into the water. It floated for a moment before it sank.
His grandfather eyed him. Said nothing. Not until they were level with Halden did he point to the shore: ‘Look, Jonas, over there’s the quarry that supplied the granite block for the Monolith in Vigeland Park.’
Jonas nodded. Proudly. As proudly as if they were towing the stone for the Monolith behind them. Or the stone for something much bigger than the Monolith.
The Ark of the Covenant
I still do not know, Professor, whether I shall succeed in this ambitious undertaking of mine, because when Jonas Wergeland stood with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Bøeck’s heart, so excited he could hardly breathe, just as he had felt as a boy that time when he found a pearl oyster, he thought of what had taken place only minutes earlier, when he was in the bedroom, trying to collect himself, determined that everything was going to be fine; and yet, even while he was struggling to calm down, he could not help himself: he picked up the novel lying on her bedside table, and he opened it, and he saw the handwriting, and he read the owner’s name, and he saw that the book belonged to the very person he least wanted it to belong to, and this provided him with a kind of final proof, proof which he did not need, because it was true, it had always been true, only he, in his hopeless naivety had not realized that it was true; and it must have been then that he conceived the idea which propelled his feet from the bedroom to the little workshop where he dug out the pistol tucked well away in the cupboard, behind all the gouges, a pistol which Jonas’s father, Haakon Hansen, had found among Omar Hansen’s possessions when they were going through the house on Hvaler after his grandfather’s death and which Jonas and Daniel had, in their turn, found hidden away, still in its thick wrappings, in the Villa Wergeland, when their father, Haakon, died and which, that day, with trembling fingers they unwound from the oilcloth, to at long last lay eyes on the weapon, a Luger P-08, the unequivocal proof of their grandfather’s, their family’s, crime, long hidden in a safe, and this they immediately wrapped up again, almost shaking in their shoes, a pistol which they obviously should have handed over to the authorities but which Jonas, with Daniel’s blessing, kept safe for many years, like a shameful relic, and which, in an overreaction to some threatening letters only a few weeks before he went to Seville, he had taken out and wiped the grease off, a skill he had learned while doing his national service, from a gunsmith who could never have known why Jonas was so keen to see a Luger, never mind learn how to take it apart and clean it; and this was before he actually saw his grandfather’s pistol at a time when all of his curiosity and interest – not to say, anxiety – was founded on intelligence supplied by Veronika; but Jonas had learned everything there was to know about this gun, applied himself so single-mindedly to it, you would have thought that by taking that pistol apart and cleaning it he was also dismantling an act of treachery, in order, if possible, to understand some inner logic, and as if that weren’t enough: he had also committed these skills to memory so well that later, even ten years after completing his stint with N Brigade, at any given time he was not only able to clean the old grease off a similar weapon but could also coat all of the Luger’s movable parts with a thin, thin layer of oil, and slot seven bullets, from an ammunition box which had also been kept perfectly dry all those years, into the magazine and push it into place, so that suddenly the gun was ready for use again, a fact which makes it possible for him now, newly returned from Seville, to walk into the workshop and slip the pistol into the pocket of his roomy trouser pocket, before trying once again to stop everything, stop time, stop the green pictures in his head, pull himself together and ride it out; he looks at a half-finished dragon head sitting on the bench, and he looks at the ornamentation on which he has barely begun, the dragon not yet come to life, and he shuts his eyes, and breathes in the powerful odours in the room, wood and beeswax, not unlike the smell on board a boat; and he asks himself, as I have asked myself, whether there was a safe in his own life too, or rather: a secret that was locked away? In other words: what could possess a boy to cut down the mast of an old lifeboat?
The following incident took place during one of the first years after Jonas started hanging out with Gabriel Sand, and please note, Professor, that I am still not sure whether this is a dark story or a light one. Whatever the case, the evening had begun as usual. It was autumn and the miserable weather outside only made it seem all the more cosy on board the Norge, where they were sitting in the saloon, amid the rumblings of the stove, talking about everything under the sun. There were few places where Jonas felt freer than on that ancient vessel, a place as crammed with oddities as Strömstad market and the attic on Hvaler put together. ‘This is my ark,’ Gabriel often said. ‘Here I’ve got everything I need to survive the deluge.’ After a game of chess, which Jonas won with the help of his knights, Gabriel had gone through to the galley and cut some thick slices of bacon, which he fried and served up, with the grease, on slabs of bread – with tomatoes and diverse obscure relishes on the side. They had a good laugh, while they were eating, at a picture that Jonas had found of Gabriel standing at a microphone next to Frank Roberts during a recording of Dickie Dick Dickens, a photograph which prompted Gabriel to trot out some of the most outrageous stories from his time with Radio Theatre. Jonas had had his first taste of whisky that evening, and although he didn�
��t drink much, he could feel his head getting fuzzy. From somewhere far off he heard Gabriel say: ‘We even had one guy there who could imitate any kind of animal – right down to different breeds of dog!’
Maybe it was his own fault, for collapsing into the starboard bunk, the skipper’s bunk, as leading seaman Jonas’s place was, according to Gabriel, in the port bunk. But Jonas had been so worn out that he had had no idea where his feet were taking him. He was already drifting into a dream when he became aware, even though half-asleep, even in his drunken stupor, that Gabriel was climbing into his bunk; something bristly, a mouth that reeked of spicy relish was breathing on the back of his neck. All at once the bunk seemed claustrophobically small, he felt himself being pressed up against the wall, against the inner shell of the hull. It was pitch-black too, and Jonas didn’t like the dark, he was scared of disappearing, falling into a black hole. The amazing thing, he managed to think to himself, was that it hadn’t happened before, because he had known it all along, really: that it would come to this, to Gabriel’s groping paws. I’m dead, he thought. I’m in a coffin, I’ve been buried alive.
Jonas was conscious of Gabriel pulling down his trousers. He half expected a hand to close over his balls and squeeze, but instead felt the touch of lips on him; even in his befuddled state he could tell that his penis was in somebody’s mouth, that he was being sucked off and that, in the state he was in, it was not as horrible as it might have been. He felt relieved, hoped it would stop there, things could maybe go on as before if it would just stop there, but it didn’t stop there; a remarkably muscular, hairy arm flipped him over onto his stomach. ‘Like an elephant’s trunk,’ Jonas thought wildly, not knowing what made him think of that.
The Conqueror Page 51