The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  He wanted to scream, but no sound came out. He tried to roll out of the bunk, or shove Gabriel off him, but the old man was strong, gripped him tight. Jonas felt totally helpless. Or was that how he wanted to be? And did he, nonetheless, hear a cry for help? Did it escape his lips, or did it only sound inside his head, like an echo of the scream he had heard in a grove of trees only a few months earlier, a scream that still resounded inside him? He relaxed. Let it happen. Knew, as Gabriel penetrated him from behind, that he would never fathom that sensation, say whether it hurt like hell or felt like heaven, whether he was being punctured or pumped full of something, whether he would die or live when it was over. For a moment it felt as if something long and thick was being pushed inside him, a baseball bat, a beer bottle, any one of the things with which, in their fantasies, Laila, Mamma Banana, had pleasured herself, something which made him think his body was going to rip apart, be pulverized. It was not just a feeling in his bowels; it was like having something stabbing into his brain. Like being given a lobotomy, the thought shot through his mind.

  Say it did hurt – how did he endure it? Jonas Wergeland endured it because in a split-second of clarity he saw what this was: it was something he had to go through. It was a sacrifice. It was something he had to do because of Laila, in order to live down the shame, the fact that he had watched her suffer in Transylvania and had not intervened. And yet that was only half the truth, because he also knew that his lack of resistance now would be to his advantage later. It was part of a tacit agreement. If I had managed to get out of there before it happened, I’d have been Mr Average, nothing but a dilettante, for the rest of my life, he thought later.

  Earlier that evening, in a moment of weakness possibly induced by his first glass of whisky, Jonas expressed a certain doubt as to his abilities. He really wanted to make his mark in some field or other, he had to, he told Gabriel – rather bumptiously perhaps – but he wasn’t sure whether he had what it took. I feel it’s worth pausing here for a moment, because Jonas Wergeland made this admission even though he was actually in the midst of composing his ‘Dragon Sacrifice’, the musical work which, with remarkable self-confidence, he assumed would cause a sensation or at least a scandal. As I say, it may have been said in a moment of weakness, but it does indicate that behind the cocky façade, Jonas Wergeland was not blind to the fact that he tended to overestimate himself.

  It was then that Gabriel pointed out to him that he had a rare gift. He straightened his bowtie as he was speaking – in addition to his usual, outmoded, chalk-striped suit he was wearing a bowtie, perhaps to mark the fact that this was a big day. Gabriel reminded him of the first time they had met, at the Torggata Baths. Did Jonas know why Gabriel became interested in him?

  ‘Because I didn’t dare to dive off the five-metre platform?’

  ‘No, because I peeked into your cubicle and saw the pictures you had drawn on your schoolbag. They were fantastic. Where did you get the idea for them?’

  ‘From a dragon head I saw once.’ Jonas had drawn the Academic’s designs on the flap of his leather satchel with a black Magic Marker.

  Gabriel looked as though he was turning something over in his head, an impression reinforced by the creaking of the rigging. He took a hefty swig of his whisky before saying: ‘Now listen carefully, Jonas, because what I’m going to say now you have to write down on a piece of paper and put it in a casket and guard it well because it is worth more than pearls. Write: “You have to put a twist on everything you do.”’ Gabriel took another mighty swig from his ship’s tumbler. ‘D’you follow me?’ he asked urgently. ‘You have to let yourself be inspired by those crisscross patterns of yours.’

  ‘Carvings,’ Jonas said.

  ‘I don’t give a bugger what they are, as long as you put your money on those lines. Metaphorically speaking, if you know what I mean. You’ve no idea how much difference a little twist can make. You’re a Napoleon, lad. Wake up!’

  Beyond the skylight it was pitch black, but the paraffin lamp cast a warm, if dim, light on the table. Jonas noticed how Gabriel’s gold tooth glinted as he talked; it seemed to him that it was glinting more than usual, as if to underline the importance of his words.

  These figures, Gabriel went on, these figures which Jonas had mastered, were more than enough. Jonas had to get it into his head that he could be ordinary and brilliant at one and the same time. It was like good, old Bohr’s theory of complimentarity: there were two explanations which, while they might well be mutually exclusive, were both essential in order to arrive at a full description of him. Most ‘great’ individuals were also perfectly ordinary people in many ways, exceptional only in a few, crucial areas. That was what it came down to: excelling within a narrow field.

  Jonas sat there shaking his head, shaking his head in an effort to ward of this temptation or offer; but this only added fuel to Gabriel’s fire. Had Jonas forgotten what country he was living in, dammit? The most egalitarian society on earth, a land with an almost pathological bent for equality. And what did that mean? It meant that any talent that was the slightest bit above the average stood out like a red fox among a pack of grey lemmings. Had Jonas truly never noticed that? Norway was a paradise for charlatans. In no other country in the world did it take so little to catch the attention of a whole nation.

  ‘In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,’ Jonas said, repeating a saying that Gabriel was fond of quoting.

  ‘Exactly,’ Gabriel said, gratified. ‘Everybody makes the same mistake. They think they have to be Leonardo da Vinci in order to do great things. But you don’t need to strive for brilliance; an ounce of originality will do the trick. At the moment, anyway. Because you should think yourself lucky: we’re living in an era when the most heroic thing you can do is to appear on the telly! Here, take the bottle – it’s time you grew up. That’s it: fill it up. You have to have an eye for the main chance, Jonas, see how far you can get even with very limited resources. A nose for how to weave a few commonplace elements into something greater is all it takes.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it still be commonplace?’ Jonas asked, sitting back on the bench, his head growing more and more befuddled, from the whisky, from the smells of the boat: smoke, tar, paraffin – and from Gabriel’s words.

  ‘Wrong again. Put a number of ordinary things together and you can get something pretty phenomenal. Not to say, terrifying. Take a dragon, for instance. What is it, except a dog with a twist? A dog with wings. Or four or five animals put together to form something extraordinary.’

  His gold tooth glinted, flashed. Jonas liked what he was hearing, liked it a lot. But he felt scared too.

  ‘It doesn’t take much,’ Gabriel said. ‘Look at me.’ He stood up, pulled out a key and wound up the ship’s clock before going out to slice more bacon. ‘I’m an actor, remember,’ he called from the galley. ‘I know what I’m talking about.’

  Jonas could not know that he was, at that moment, living proof of this statement. Because although Gabriel could not, in fact, tell a foresail from a mainsail, for a year and a half he had led Jonas to believe that he was an old salt, simply by learning the jargon – ‘after leech’ and ‘gaff end’ and ‘barber hauler’ – in the same way that an actor memorizes his lines. And Jonas had allowed himself to be taken in. ‘Are you mad!’ Gabriel had roared, looking genuinely appalled, once when Jonas was trying to coil a rope. ‘Don’t you know that all ropes have to be wound sun-wise, you landlubber.’ And this from a man who had never been to sea.

  And now, only a couple of hours after listening to Gabriel’s urgings, Jonas was lying with his nose pressed into the mattress of one of the bunks, with Gabriel on top of him, puffing and panting. He was drunk but lucid enough to feel like a puppet, with a big hand stuck up inside him.

  He turned his head to the side, to scream, to say something, but still could not utter a sound, nor did he want to; instead his eye fell on a glass standing on a small table next to the bunk, he saw the false teeth lying in it
, caught the glint of a gold tooth, but still it took a few seconds for him to connect this with Gabriel, for him to realize that even the man’s teeth were false. And as Gabriel took him harder and harder, driving into him, uncontrollably, groaning, Jonas saw the gnashers cackling at him from the glass, as if they were laughing at his naivety, at how easily he had allowed himself to be hoodwinked.

  And yet, in the midst of this humiliation, or act of atonement, or pleasure, or reparation, or liberation, or whatever it was – maybe he was quite simply being put to the test – the glass reminded Jonas that Gabriel had also stressed the importance of willpower, the need for reckless defiance. Because even if you could only tie one knot, through perseverance something great could be created: by tying that same knot again and again – until at last you had a magnificent rug. ‘You’ve got the stubbornness that’s needed,’ Gabriel said. ‘I know. I’ve seen it.’

  Yes, it was true. He lay with the sour smell of the mattress in his nose, proving it now. Unless it was Gabriel who was demonstrating it to him now. Showing him that he could stand it, this penetration that went beyond the tentacles of words. Jonas recalled how even as a little boy he had been capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness from some unknown source. Like the time when they were playing down by the stream and they found a swarm of tadpoles. They caught as many as they could in a jam jar, gazed at them wide-eyed, those tiny pucks with tails. Then somebody bet Jonas that he didn’t dare drink them. Bet him a flick-knife – a novel and dangerously cool item at that time. Jonas drank the whole jar of tadpoles down without so much as blinking, he could still remember the feeling and the taste as they slipped down his throat. ‘They’re gonna turn into toads in your stomach,’ the boy who had bet him said in an attempt to save his flick-knife. ‘If you throw up, it doesn’t count.’ Jonas could veritably feel the tadpoles crawling up his gullet, but he did not throw up. He exercised his willpower.

  And as if to illustrate the link between that memory of the tadpoles and the situation on board the lifeboat, Gabriel was shaken by some violent spasms and Jonas felt something running down between his legs. At that same moment, Gabriel jerked him roughly backwards, as if he were pressing, trying to squeeze the breath out of him, or doing something to his back, snapping something into place, the way a chiropractor would do, causing an agonizing stab of pain to run right through him, accompanied by a flash of light. Gabriel rolled off him, grunted and slapped his backside. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’ll never happen again. I promise.’ He got up and fell in to the other bunk.

  Jonas was left lying there, feeling sure that he was going to die; but gradually he felt the pain give way to a pleasant warmth and a realization that, for some minutes, he had been bounded in a nutshell but was now a king of infinite space, to paraphrase another of Gabriel’s favourite sayings. Almost against his will he was dragged down into a deep, peaceful sleep, into a dream of sailing through a long, unnavigable passage.

  Coming up through the hatchway the next morning was, nonetheless, like climbing out of the belly of a whale. Jonas felt sticky, smelly. He stood on the deck, gazing into white space. It was misty and perfectly still. Some large seabirds came gliding towards him, skimming the waves. Other than that, everything round about had disappeared, like the images on an overexposed picture.

  Gabriel rowed him ashore straight away, knew there could be no talk of breakfast. The bowtie was gone, but the false teeth were in place – and on his head he wore an idiosyncratically moulded Borsalino. He sat there looking like the eternal cosmopolitan, wearing a dark coat over a chalk-striped suit, out of place in a little rowboat, sitting hunched on a thwart, handling the oars. The dinghy slid slowly through the white light. Just before they reached the beach, Gabriel broke his silence, quoted yet again from Ophelia’s monologue, whispering it, so it seemed, to the mist: ‘Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown…’

  Jonas stepped ashore and began to walk towards Drøbak. ‘Will I see you again?’ Gabriel called after him.

  Jonas turned. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Three years were to go by before the reaction came: in the form of a power saw.

  Back home in Grorud he went to bed. He felt sick in every cell of his body; he sank into a white mist, a luminous nothingness. He lay more or less in a daze the whole weekend, with a terrible ache in his back, an ache that gradually became more in the nature of a pressure. It was almost as if he was pregnant, carrying a foetus in the marrow of his spine. Or as if he was about to sprout wings. Jonas both knew and did not know that something was happening to the button, the button of dragon’s horn that he had swallowed as a little boy, and which he had persuaded himself had lodged in his spine like an extra vertebra.

  On the Monday morning, when he got out of bed and took his first faltering steps across the room, he felt, in some strange way, ‘switched on’.

  Master of the Art of Survival

  Speaking of that white light over the water, the mist – speaking of the lifeboat: I have not given up hope of being able to do it, to save him, save her, because Jonas Wergeland is still standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete’s heart, has got no further than this, because he is thinking about the seconds it took him to walk from the workshop with the pistol in his pocket, a pistol he really did not want to use, into the living room, where he stood and watched the light fading outside the window, a dark-blue sky with a band of yellow on the horizon, before he noticed that Margrete was now sitting on the sofa with an orange in her hand, staring at the television which she had switched on; he stood there watching how she shifted the orange fruit, absentmindedly, from hand to hand, how she seemed to be suspended in a vacuum between the glare from the television and the unspeakably beautiful, fading light outside the window, in a place where he cannot reach her, and he remembers her way of peeling an orange, slowly and deftly, in such a way that the fruit itself becomes a ball of light with a spiral-shaped tail hanging below it, like a big, pearly spermatozoon, a symbol of life, ‘Axel,’ she says out of the blue, and he starts. ‘Axel popped by the other day to borrow the programme on Amundsen,’ she says and nods at the screen as if to explain what brought it into her mind, ‘but I couldn’t find the cassette,’ she says, cupping both hands protectively around the orange.

  The programme on Amundsen opened with a scene from a lecture tour of America in 1907, a hall full of people and Roald Amundsen speaking and presenting a magic lantern show, as it was then known: a Roald Amundsen who clearly did not like doing this but was forced to go on these lucrative tours in order to pay off some of his debts. Jonas Wergeland had endeavoured to capture the atmosphere and the audience’s air of expectancy, remind people of a time when there were still – quite literally – white spots on the map; he shared with the viewers those faded, hand-tinted pictures of Amundsen and his men during their ordeals in that frozen wasteland: excellent photographs by the standards of the day but which, to Jonas Wergeland’s eyes, only made it clear that all they had left of those heroes now were some colourless snaps, and with one of the palest of these he let the light take over completely, turning the picture into dancing ‘snow’, a swirl of dots out of which the outline of a figure gradually emerged – like the picture used to do, back in television’s infancy, when you adjusted the aerial – until eventually the real live Amundsen stood revealed, standing in the polar light at Gjoa Haven in the far north of Canada. The washed-out photograph had been transformed into bright, colourful reality. Amundsen was seen from the side, but it was easy to tell just from that strong profile that his face was glowing with happiness; it was a true magic lantern picture: a magical, light-suffused picture of a man in his own personal paradise.

  I must say something about this light; it was of crucial significance to Jonas Wergeland. Not for nothing had he worked so hard on the lighting in his programmes. A lot of people have remarked on Jonas Wergeland’s inventiveness, his technical brilliance and, more than anything, his uniquely charismatic face, but for Jonas himself it
all came down to light, to darkness and light. From the moment he started in television he knew that here, in the flickering of the TV screen, he had found, as Amundsen had done in the radiance of the ice, the golden fleece he had always been endeavouring to win: unsuccessfully at first, through music, then the study of the stars, then architecture. To Jonas Wergeland, television was primarily light. He was at all times conscious of the TV screen’s dual function, as a projector of visual images and as a lamp: it often amazed him, when a television was switched on, to see how well it lit up a dark room. Making television programmes was storytelling with light. It was no coincidence that NRK celebrated the screening of the last programme in the series – in December, no less, on the darkest day of the year – with a little, internal, torchlight procession or that one, possibly rather overexcited, individual referred to Jonas Wergeland in a speech of congratulation as a Prometheus, an enlightener, the one who brought fire to mankind. Jonas himself was more modest: ‘All I’ve done is to strike twenty-odd matches in a dark grave,’ he said.

  Hence the reason that Jonas dwelled for so long on that picture of Roald Amundsen standing in the glaring light of the frozen wasteland, like a worshipper before a crucifix. Needless to say, Jonas Wergeland never came close to choosing the trek to the South Pole as the central element in his programme. He wanted to focus on another Amundsen, on the skills that were the secret behind the success of the South Pole expedition. Because, the way Jonas saw it, Amundsen was a collector. He did not simply collect artefacts from a foreign culture, though. Above all else, what he collected was knowledge, about everything that could help him to survive the cold. Jonas concentrated, therefore, on Amundsen’s first major expedition, the Gjøa’s voyage through the North-West Passage, that barrier of ice, and the programme placed little emphasis on the formidable fact that Amundsen and his six men were the first to sail all the way through this passage in one ship; instead it centred on the daily life of the team during the two years they spent in the country around Gjoa Haven, a little bay on King William Island, as they charted hitherto unknown areas and made scientific measurements close to the magnetic North Pole – activities which were as nothing compared to their encounter with the nomadic hunters of the region, an Eskimo tribe called the Netsilik: ‘people of the seal’. In the old days men had dreamed of a shortcut to the East, a hidden passage, possibly up here in the north, and like Columbus discovering America in his attempt to find another route to the East, Amundsen, too, found his New World, namely the world of the Inuit. Amundsen liked it here. He perceived that the Arctic was an enigma, that it harboured mysteries of which we knew little but which presented a challenge to our technological presumption, as an Arctic iceberg would take the Titanic itself by such grimly symbolic surprise.