The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  What he did not say – having had his fingers burned before – was that he had built up a new stamp collection, an assemblage of Norvegiana so fine it could have been put on display in the Norwegian pavilion. The pride of the collection was a stamp from Chad, depicting Jan Egil Storholt, gold medallist at the 1976 winter Olympics. From Chad. And there may have been a connection here. For surely it is no less logical for the poverty-stricken inhabitants of Chad to be treated to the sight of Jan Egil Storholt’s mysteriously crouching figure on their envelopes – a skier, in the heart of hottest Africa – than for a company in Norway to become world-leaders in satellite communication.

  His meeting with Ørn-Henrik shook Jonas awake. It was time to head for home, but first he had to go to Cordoba, because Margrete had been adamant that he should not leave that part of Spain without having seen La Mezquita, the magnificent mosque in that city. So the very next day he took the train to Cordoba. I could do with a couple of hours in some quiet backwater, he thought to himself, a bit of peace after all the hurly-burly.

  There wasn’t to be much peace or quiet, though. Even as he was strolling through the arcade, alongside a garden thick with orange trees, he had the feeling that something was going to happen, that the time of reckoning, as they say, had come. A debt was about to be called in. He walked through one of the doors and promptly found himself in the vast expanse of the mosque’s prayer hall. It was dim inside, with surprisingly few people around. Slowly he ventured further in, fascinated, the very sight taking his breath away. No two pillars were the same, but from a distance, in the half-light, they looked identical. And they were all linked to one another by double horseshoe arches decorated with light and dark rectangles, as if to illustrate that everything is connected, in at least two ways. This is the midpoint, he instantly thought. This is the midpoint inside me. He was surrounded by invisible mirrors, an endless succession of possible duplications stretching in all directions. He knew right away that he was going to go astray in here – not in the sense of losing his way but of losing himself. Or, as it is written: losing his soul.

  And yet he went on, proceeding step by step into something which seemed more and more like a subterranean chamber, an enormous basement, as if Expo ’92, that megalomaniacal manifestation of the five hundred years of civilization since Columbus, was the surface and this was the bottomless pit below it, an empty grave, a black hole, a place fraught with mirages, illusions, temptations, things beyond understanding, things no invention could ever encompass or put a name to, a place which forced one to see that in the course of a life a person merely conquered air, wind and nothing, that all the things one thought represented expansion, in fact constituted contraction.

  He had the constant feeling that he was not alone, that a shadow was following close on his heels, lurking behind the pillars. He reached a point where the sense of gazing into infinity became overwhelming, where the symmetry of the pillars made his head spin, and the light threatened to go out altogether. I’ve been here before, he thought, it’s the bomb shelter all over again. At that same moment he felt an unseen hand squeeze his testicles. He turned and saw a figure standing facing him, just a step away, strangely familiar and yet indistinct. ‘Who are you?’ Jonas asked, thinking for a moment that he recognized this person, caught the glint of a gold tooth, but then the face changed to that of someone else he knew and then to yet another face, which again changed, and so it went on until the figure had once again merged into the shadows and Jonas relaxed, sure that he had been seeing things. Just then a voice sounded from the darkness, like the hiss of a reptile – if, that is, it was not simply some incidental noise, something to do with the acoustics which led him to hear what he wanted to hear, just like a radio play: ‘I know something you ought to know,’ the voice said, or what he thought was a voice.

  Standing there, in what had once been a mosque, a massive Moorish edifice, Jonas had a vision, not of light this time, but of darkness, as if a stream of black ink had come surging towards him and eventually engulfed him. He was overcome by the very opposite of what he had always striven for, felt something radiant and adamantine inside himself, his diamond, turning into graphite, black and terribly friable. Looking back on it, he would not be able to recall what language they spoke or how long the conversation lasted, nor indeed whether he had actually spoken, whether there had been a conversation at all, not that it mattered, as long as he got the message, and in a nutshell the message was that Margrete was still having an affair with Axel Stranger, that no matter what Jonas thought, they had not broken it off.

  He was stunned. Thought of Axel whom he had knocked senseless a year before, or tried to knock senseless at any rate. In spite of that, thanks to Axel’s bigheartedness, or what Jonas saw as bigheartedness, they had managed to reach a sort of reconciliation, become friends again – to the point, at least, where they would call one another now and again. But the moment those words were spoken, whispered, hissed, among the pillars, inside his head, Jonas knew that they were true and that he had suspected it all along; he would never be able to keep them apart and not only that: Axel was more worthy of Margrete than he was, they made a good pair, they were, as they say, made for each other; the whole Expo, all of the world’s advances and civilization were nothing but a joke compared to that brutal fact and no magnificent cultural achievements could rid him of the primitive feelings that raged inside him, there, in the gloom, among those rows of pillars in Cordoba. He had had to come all this way, to the midpoint of his flat world, before the penny finally dropped: Margrete preferred someone else. He could accept that, as others might do. But he did not accept it. Would not accept it. He stood in the shadows, surrounded by a stupefying, neurosis-inducing array of pillars, as if he had gone astray in a forest of mirror-images, had got lost inside himself, and he noticed that he was seething inside – was not even surprised to find that he welcomed back this state of demented fury like a long-lost friend. He looked round about him; saw the rows of pillars extending in all directions. These, he thought, these are not pillars, they are bars, this is my dwelling-place from now on.

  And here I too have reached a point, Professor, where it pains me – more than you could ever know – to have to admit defeat, because until now, till this very second indeed, I have hoped against hope that Jonas Wergeland’s stories, when told in this carefully worked out sequence, would lead somewhere else – rather as if, by taking a different path through the labyrinth, one could avoid coming face to face with the monster at its heart. Or as if, by allowing a child to find a pearl in an oyster, you could prevent a lump of ice from falling off a roof years later. I have always believed that it must be possible to tell the same stories in a different order and thus arrive at a different ending, just as evolution would produce quite different beings were it to start all over again, from the beginning, even when working with the exactly the same raw material. I still think it is possible – but it is beyond my powers. Forgive me. I have done what I could to prevent a murder.

  So it is with anything but a light heart that I force myself to continue, to say that the flight home was a nightmare, that even a few drinks on the plane could not dampen Jonas Wergeland’s inner turmoil. His head was not a head; it was a ball of snakes, or a tangle of high-voltage cables, more like. In his mind’s eye all he could see was Margrete and Axel, Axel and Margrete, not only locked in steamy sexual embraces but also deep in intimate conversations, yes, that more than anything else, their well balanced discussions, their laughter, their total identification with each other’s thoughts, their mutual admiration. He could not stop shaking in the taxi from Fornebu to Grorud, asked to be set down at the station so that he could collect his thoughts, collect himself, while walking the last couple of hundred yards up Bergensveien. With his suitcase in tow he strolls slowly through the landscape of his childhood, with a memory at every step, and the air smells of spring, the evening is mild and coltsfoot glows on the grassy banks, and he walks more and more slowly, and when h
e catches sight of the Villa Wergeland sitting under Ravnkollen’s brooding granite face, he has no sense of coming home, only of facing another long journey – because, he thinks or fears, all journeys begin with a death. But still, despite the terrible clenching of his testicles, he rings the bell with that same old feeling that a cable is about to snap, that he is about to plummet into the abyss, that the dream he had in Cape Town all those years ago is about to come true after all.

  And when no one answers the door he feels relieved, steps inside, reads a letter, listens to a bit of a CD of Bach fugues before Margrete comes in and all hell breaks loose, inside him I mean, and he goes into the bedroom, then into the workshop, where he picks up the pistol, then back to the living room where she is sitting watching TV, and Jonas Wergeland stands there and looks at her hefting an orange in her hand, while his life falls apart, and that is why he has to spit out that accusation about Axel, that he knows about them, and what makes him snap, the thing that is to have such fatal consequences is that, instead of admitting it, or swearing it isn’t true for that matter or dissolving into floods of tears, she gets to her feet and asks him a question, and then he has to bawl her out because she pretends not to know what he’s talking about, but still he does not become really mad, his brain doesn’t really cloud over, until she is standing right in front of him, in his dressing-gown, his dressing-gown, giving him that look, and naturally she doesn’t say anything about being tired of his being away so much, tired of his selfish lack of consideration, or that she wants a divorce, she just stands there looking at him, her eyes bore into him, and he has no trouble reading the message in them: ‘You are not worthy of me,’ they say, ‘You don’t deserve me,’ they say; she casts a swift glance at the television screen then fixes her eyes on him again, eyes which tell him, which have always told him, that he might be able to fool the whole of Norway but not her, because she knows, has always known, who he is, that only a couple of simple dodges, a couple of twists, separate his conquest from his mediocrity. But she says nothing. Merely stands there looking at him, and this makes him even more furious or bewildered or downright sad. And suddenly Jonas knows what it is, why he has to kill her, it’s got nothing to do with jealousy, not jealousy at all, it’s something else; he has simply tricked himself into thinking it was jealousy, because underneath that there lay something dreadful, something appalling that he hadn’t thought of, or certainly never been plagued by since that day, at the age of fifteen, when he was ‘converted’ in Grorud Church; it’s not the idea of losing Margrete to another man that is driving him insane, it is the loss of his own illusion of being extraordinary, an illusion which – he sees this now – does not rest on his success in television but on one thing and one thing only: her. Because any man with whom Margrete Boeck chose to share her life was, by definition, special; he was bound to be different. Without her he stood revealed as something other than what he imagined himself to be. He could not stand it: first to seduce, to conquer, an entire nation and then nonetheless to see himself stripped bare, to stand naked in all his vacuity before his wife, the woman he loved, the only person he really wished to conquer; he was a conquistador who had won everything, then suddenly found himself confronted with a culture which he did not understand and which he therefore had to destroy, and so he had to disguise his rage, his terror, as something more probable – like jealousy.

  And as the light died outside the window, he was overcome, or blessed, he thought, by the necessary seconds of black hate. Seconds when a switch was turned off and everything went dark, seconds when anything could happen. With a hate so fierce that it shocked him, he grabbed her by the arm and pushed, almost threw her to the floor, causing her head to crash into the brick wall with a dull, metallic thud, like the sound of a tin can being squeezed; she had been totally unprepared, lay in a heap on the floor with a bloody graze on her forehead, lay for a long time with her eyes closed before at last she got up, stood facing him with an air of defiance, stood with her eyes closed, stood there swaying, only semiconscious, and he was glad she kept her eyes closed, he knew he couldn’t shoot her if her eyes were open; and he pulled out the pistol, cocked it and took aim and seeing her standing there in his dressing-gown it was like pointing the gun at himself, and he curled his finger round the trigger, feeling that all the threads of his life came together here, in the sickle of the trigger, and that they were pulling it back, and he knew that whatever his motive in doing it, this act, firing this gun, would be the last, irrevocable proof of his abortive originality: taking the easiest way out, a pistol, killing his wife, one of the eternal clichés in life and in crime; and yet one cannot rule out the possibility of a little method in his madness, because he may have guessed, at that moment, that while everything else he had conquered, his status as a television genius, would eventually be torn to pieces, this, this monstrous act and the circumstances surrounding it would assure him, his name, a place, at least as a footnote, in the history of Norway for all time.

  And I, Professor, I feel no urge to gloat, I feel only sorrow because I have failed, and because Jonas Wergeland did not understand that a man could embody elements which seemed to be mutually exclusive: did not understand that his own achievement, the fact that he had stretched his own meagre abilities, done something brilliant with them, lifted himself up by his bootstraps, and by so doing had given hope to a lot of people, to all of us who would like to do great things with our ordinariness; I can only apologize for the fact that it should end here – a whole life spent in becoming a conqueror, and all he wants to conquer is a dead body, the corpse of the person whom he has fought hardest to hold onto: Jonas Wergeland pulls back the trigger and out of the corner of his eye he searches for the light outside the window, that band on the horizon, that unspeakably beautiful, last gleam of light before everything goes dark.

  Purpose

  And as he readies himself for the recoil, the bang, the big bang, it occurs to him that this trigger is not necessarily the consequence of a whole life, a hunt for the buttons, the switches, that set things in motion – that, if he pulls it back far enough, it might instead be the starting-point for a new world, another life. This is where it all began, he thinks, this is the cause of everything that has gone before. He was standing not at the end, but at the beginning.

  He had found himself in a similar situation, though he did not know it, that day when he stumbled out of the last piano lesson before Christmas, convinced that his life was over, even though time went on passing and his body was dragged along a road by what seemed like a chain of seconds. His shoulders were hunched, he felt as though he was running the gauntlet between trees full of mocking great tits; lowered his head against the snow that was falling softly and heavily, flakes that felt like lead. He had spoken to Fru Brøgger about the Pupils’ Evening, when he had played ‘Dragon Sacrifice’, and she had given him a little lecture in which she had very gently, but nonetheless ruthlessly, exposed him: showed him that his new ideas were actually pretty old. He was beaten before he could even begin. So now he was plodding home, fifteen years old but feeling burned out, and yet – to challenge the standard conceptions yet again – the following story need not result from an event in the immediate past, that Pupils’ Evening when he had ‘failed’; it could just as easily be the outcome of the account you have just heard, Professor, of the return from Seville or, if you will, of the whole network of stories I have told so far.

  Jonas had the urge to go up to the granite quarry where once, at the sight of two stupid snakes, he had been tempted to believe that he had it in him to do something extraordinary – as though he had suddenly pulled a king’s sword out of a stone; he would sit up there and let himself be covered by the falling snow, lose himself in all that whiteness. He was a dwarf. Just before his confirmation he had inherited a very smart suit from his cousin, one of the Brothers Grimm, but when he tried it on it almost drowned him – everyone had just about died laughing. That was how he felt now: he did not have the stature t
o fit his ambitions. He might discover gunpowder anew. Or reinvent the paperclip. Or the cheese-slice. That was about all a Norwegian could manage. That or poor imitations. On the Norwegian border sits a huge, invisible transformer, he thought: a transformer that converts great, high-voltage concepts into small, manageable ideas, the sort we can cope with. He walked along with his head bowed, through the flock of great tits, kicked a chunk of ice so hard that he hurt his toes. Wrong, he thought, or a voice inside him screamed: if there’s a transformer then it’s inside me.

  Only one thing could save him: if this longing to create something unique were to die inside him, if his aspirations sank to the level of his abilities. Then the problem would be solved and he could live a happy life, a normal life, just a face in the crowd.

  The snow came tumbling down as if to order: it was almost Christmas Eve. Enormous white crystals transformed the whole of Grorud into a pretty Advent calendar. Jonas trudged up to the church to see if his father was there, he needed a bit of comforting. Or to hear some Bach – it came to the same thing. But his father wasn’t there, and the parish clerk was on his way out. Jonas decided to wait. ‘My dad’s bound to be here soon,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll just shut the door after me.’ But his father didn’t come. Jonas plodded upstairs to the balcony, stopped in front of the organ, eyed the instrument. As a little boy he had had the idea that the organ was a dragon, that the ornamental pipes were metal wings that might start flapping at any minute and fly off with the whole lot. A dead dragon, he thought now. Somebody killed it before I could get there.