The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  Almost inadvertently he lifted some sheet music off his father’s pile: Rikard Nordraak’s ‘Purpose’ from Mary Stuart. They played it at weddings, he knew, so why not at a funeral too. He sat down on the bench and set the music up in front of him. He switched on the organ and heard the air rushing into the pipes. There was something invigorating about this. As if the organ meant to revive him. Fill him with oxygen. His father had explained to him how the organ was really a huge wind instrument. The sound was made by air vibrating. ‘Playing the organ is like steering a full-rigger,’ his father always said – then he would place his hands on the keys: ‘Listen, Jonas! Can you feel the wind filling the sails?’ To Jonas, it seemed more like making contact with a mighty spirit. When Daniel told him, after he started studying theology, that the Hebrew word for ‘spirit’ was the same as the word for ‘wind’, Jonas was not surprised, he had known it all along.

  He started to play; played Nordraak’s beautiful ‘Purpose’ from the sheet music and felt something happen. As he played, as he changed the registration, allowing more and more voices to chime in with the surging music, as he got to grips, what is more, with the booming bass notes, working the pedals – it was easy using the pedals in this piece – he could hear how grand it sounded, how impressive. It reminded him of an experience he had had in the attic on Hvaler, with the harmonium, when the octave couplers had been engaged, and the keys had been pressed down without him touching them. It had been like having a spirit playing alongside him. For a while, sitting at the organ in Grorud Church, his feeling of transparency left him. Something about this instrument, the exultant tutti effect, the tremendous cascades of sound created at the touch of a finger, convinced him that he was better, greater, than he was. And he knew that this had to be the solution: to find a niche in life, a job, a business, in which he would have access to something similar to the organ, an instrument which could, as it were, inflate his ideas, in such a way that his thoughts, simple though they might be, would seem astounding, would touch people’s hearts like the sea of notes now encircling him, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

  I do not know whether I need to say this, Professor, but there is at least a chance that it was here, on this organ bench, that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of the career you have seen unfold on the television screen. If, for Haakon Hansen, the organ was a full-rigger, for Jonas Wergeland, it was more like a lifeboat. Because, in the same way as the organ, television presented the most wonderful demagogic opportunities – for manipulation, for trickery even. Although he would never have said so, and although he was genuinely proud of his programmes, this thought did sometimes occur to Jonas, particularly when he was sitting at the main control desk in the NRK studios – he found it ominously reminiscent of sitting at the console of an organ.

  But as he sat there, a fifteen-year-old, at the organ in Grorud Church, still bursting with the loftiest ambitions of his life, he would not – could not – accept it: the possibility of another strategy, that is. The longer he played, the more the granite crystals of the church seemed to oscillate with the music, the walls positively vibrating, the less the thought appealed to him. It’s all a big sham, he thought grumpily. He could well see why the organ had been called the Devil’s Instrument. To sit here playing ‘Purpose’ as if he were a whole orchestra wasn’t true originality. He was still a performer, not a creator.

  With a discordant crash he stopped playing and switched off the organ, in panic almost, as if wishing to strangle at birth the monster he had been coaxing into existence. He got up from the bench and pulled out the puck – the puck he sometimes removed from the lacquer casket and carried in his pocket, especially in wintertime. He was standing contemplating it, staring at the scratches on it, those illegible hieroglyphics, when he felt eyes on the back of his neck. He turned to look down the church but could see nothing but the eye of God on the large fresco behind the altar at the far end. The eye of God inside a triangle. Jonas looked at the puck; it crossed his mind that it was a pupil. That the puck was this black thing that he could see through.

  Just then he noticed a figure breaking free of the altarpiece, the painting entitled ‘The Great White Flock’, gliding out of the crowd and perching on the window-ledge overlooking one of the side-aisles, under the church’s magnificent, new stained-glass window, its pride and joy – anyone who has read Martin Luther may well recognize the phenomenon: a wee devil sat there laughing at him, leering and thumbing its nose. Jonas knew what it was: a little Hansen devil. A monkey. A gnome who was telling Jonas that there was only one path open to him in life: to imitate others. To be a sham.

  Jonas acted instinctively. And in fury. He hurled the puck at the figure with all his might – and remember, Jonas Wergeland really could throw, so the puck hit the tiny devil smack in the face, and not only that, it also hit the stained-glass window. The sound of tinkling glass went on for ages. Who would have thought one small puck could do so much damage; it looked as though the whole window had spilled out, like water, to make patterns in the snow, like the glitter they sprinkled on plaster Christmas ornaments. And it occurred to Jonas – horror-stricken though he was, conscious though he was of what a dreadful scandal, what sacrilege this was – that the tinkling of the glass had sounded like his ice palace when it came crashing down, that there was some connection here, a connection between everything that fell and everything that was created in the moment of that fall.

  For at that same moment he hears the main door opening, hears someone enter the church beneath him, shocked voices, he peeps over the edge of the balcony, sees the vicar and the chairman of the parish council, with snow on their shoulders and the hats they hold in their hands. They look up, spot him. ‘Who’s there?’ they shout.

  A second passes. A whole life is shaped in that moment. You always think you have years in which to plan your path in life, and then, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, the choice is made.

  Because it is now, for the first time and with unmistakeable clarity, that Jonas feels that pressure on his spine, that pressure which was to have such a determining influence on him later in life – not least where women were concerned. And all at once he understands the reason for this: it was Gabriel who had activated it, the button Jonas once swallowed, made of dragon horn, when he had squeezed his back earlier in the autumn; or at least that could be the reason, but whatever the case, Jonas realized that it was a gift, that he had discovered an uncommonly sensitive spot within himself. Something which would alert him to crucial situations, moments when a distinctive pressure, a great potential, made itself felt: episodes which, when considered as a whole, over time, might show him how, and in which fields, he could, with his endowments, become a conqueror.

  Jonas leans over the balcony, looks back and forth between the vandalized stained-glass window and the two adults standing in the central aisle down below. He knows he has to come up with a story. And not just any story. When he sneaked up to the big boys’ den he got beaten up for not being a good enough liar. He knows he’s going to be in trouble now too, if he doesn’t think of something quick. That he will be thrown into a black pit, only this time he’ll have to stay there for ever, for the rest of his life.

  He had a couple of things to work with: he had a shattered window and a puck lying outside in the snow, and he had – he ran his eye around the church – the church silver on the altar, set out for the evening service. He remembered the year when Daniel had a chapter accepted for the Children’s Hour Storybook. The idea was that you had to carry on the story from where the last chapter left off. Daniel had concocted the next part of what was a pretty corny story; he really laid it on thick. Jonas almost killed himself laughing at all the hilarious, over-the-top descriptions, the unbelievable coincidences, when Daniel read it aloud to him in their room. But on the radio, as the latest instalment of the Children’s Hour Saturday Serial, with sound effects and good actors, it sounded great, almost feasible.

  Jonas
raced down the stairs and along the scarlet runner in the centre aisle, as if he were treading the red carpet to a new career. He came to a breathless halt in front of the men – two powerful individuals who could have cause to suspect him of all sorts of misdemeanours.

  ‘Who’s this?’ the chairman of the parish council whispered.

  ‘Jonas Hansen, the organist’s son,’ the vicar said.

  ‘Jonas Wergeland,’ Jonas corrected him, taking his new name, his mother’s, right then and there. The ‘W’ he had inserted in fifth grade had now ripened into a whole name. A word. A future.

  ‘Can you tell us what happened?’ the vicar asked, pointing to the wall where the remaining stained-glass windows shone with an added, almost accusing, glow.

  ‘I saw a man over there, a stranger. He was sneaking up to the chancel,’ Jonas said, nodding in the direction of the corner off the side-aisle, under the windows. ‘He looked like a burglar, and I shouted at him, but he didn’t stop, he was heading for the candlesticks, so I threw the only thing I had handy at him, a puck, but it kind of went the wrong way and smashed the window instead, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it, but it did make the burglar turn and run, I’m really, really sorry…’

  Pause. Rather a long pause. Both adults looked him in the eye. ‘Which way did he go?’ the vicar asked.

  That put him on the spot; he hadn’t got this far in his thinking. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing to a door onto a corridor leading to one of the church’s side entrances.

  ‘But that door’s locked,’ the chairman said.

  ‘No, he ran through there,’ Jonas said, for some reason convinced that this was true. A pressure on his spine.

  The vicar had already walked across to the door and out into the corridor. He came back.

  The moment of truth.

  ‘It’s right enough, the door was open,’ he said. ‘And there are tracks in the snow.’

  Jonas could have fallen to his knees and given thanks to the person who must have forgotten to lock the door. And who had only just left. On the other hand, he had known it would be that way.

  ‘It’s a shame about the window, but I realize you must have been scared, I don’t think anyone could blame you for doing as you did, although it’s going to cost a fortune to have it repaired,’ the vicar said, gently running a hand through his hair.

  Jonas stood on the red carpet, feeling the warmth spread from the top of his head right down to his toes, as if something, a leaden destiny, had melted and now offered the possibility of another form. Here before him were these two powerful men, pillars of the community, and they believed him: he had laid it on really thick, but they believed him. You do not conquer your uncommonness, it is granted you as a gift, he thought. At that moment, and even more in the days that followed – when, despite the breaking of the window, he was made out to be the saviour of the day, a minor hero – Jonas perceived the chances that now lay before him. That this – rather than the sham of the organ playing – might be an alternative path, a way to survive. He had discovered the generosity of people’s imaginations. Their willingness to believe him. And furthermore: that lying was not a sin, but a talent. In principle, at least. He gazed up at the organ in gratitude, as if it were a laboratory. He felt like a scientist who had drawn a blank but who, in the course of his experiment, or thanks to a by-product of it, had nonetheless spied a new, and perhaps even more revolutionary, possibility.

  Because that is how it was: very simple elements, boldly interwoven, could open doors – in two ways. Inside people’s heads. In the real world. Who was to say that somebody had forgotten to lock the side door? The way Jonas saw it, it could just as easily be the story that had opened it. Left its tracks in the snow. In fact, it really wouldn’t have surprised him if the vicar had come back and announced that he had seen an angel, a real live angel.

  Jonas went out to look for his puck in the fresh snow. Hunted for it as if it was an irreplaceable pearl. He found it at last, was so happy that he kissed it. He had known it all along: this puck was not a puck at all, it was a button, something he could press, mightier than the biggest organ. From now on he would be able to get away with just about anything. All he needed was a simple melody and the right instrument. It felt as though God was dead and anything went. He could conquer a whole world.

  The Silk Road

  The final, the ultimate, proof was granted him with his conquest of Margrete Boeck. Although, conquest is absolutely the wrong word. And as he lowers the pistol, not knowing whether he has shot or not, he thinks of life with Margrete.

  What was it like, life with Margrete?

  For a long, long time, life with Margrete consisted simply of lying in a big bed, in a nest of duvets and pillows and sheets which reminded Jonas of the atmosphere in his Aunt Laura’s exotic flat in Tøyen, where her goldsmith’s bench smouldered in the far corner of the living room. He would lie in this big bed, having his body stroked by Margrete’s warm hands – when it wasn’t the other way round and he was trying to stroke her skin, cover it with caresses, a skin that was never the same twice, a body whose rises and hollows were always changing, changing with different times of day, different times of the year, of life. Whenever he lay like this, running his fingers and the palm of his hand over Margrete’s limbs, he thought of travels, of riches. One time when he was lying there, fondling her ankle, that exquisite spot, she asked him if he knew how many bones there were in the foot, and when he shook his head she answered herself: twenty-six. ‘That says something about how complex we are,’ she said. ‘And how vulnerable.’

  If there was one thing Jonas learned, or ought to have learned, from his very first second with Margrete, it was that love is not blind, but seeing. That love gives you fresh eyes.

  It never ceased to amaze Jonas how Margrete could make him forget old habits, and hence memories too, so that each time they made love it seemed to him – no matter how unlikely this may sound – like the first time, or rather, like something new. And, perhaps an even greater miracle: she taught him, a man, to set greater store by those long interludes when they explored each other’s skins than by the act itself. She helped him to see, or learn, that sometimes it can be better to touch a shoulder than a breast. And although Margrete could also wrap her arms around him, make love to him with a passion which almost frightened him, this gentle stroking of the skin was a pleasure above all others, a thrill which transmitted itself to the very smallest of cells. When Margrete laid her hand on his body and ran it over his skin from the sole of his foot to his crown, he understood what life was about: intensity, a heightened awareness of the moment, of his own breathing even, as if by placing her hands on his skin she put him into an unknown gear. It was a kind of education. ‘Be a vessel,’ she whispered to him again and again. ‘Be a vessel, not a sword; learn to take, Jonas.’

  And did he? Is it at all possible to sum up a life such as Jonas Wergeland’s? Whatever the case, I hope that any assessment of this man will depend upon which story we place last, Professor. And might it not be – I ask you at least to consider the possibility – that there are other branches to this story, that what I am describing here forms the real starting point for Jonas Wergeland’s future life?

  So let us end, or begin again, with the years when they were living together in the ambassador’s lavishly appointed apartment in Ullevål Garden City, in rooms painted in different colours, terracotta, ochre, cobalt: rooms as different from each other as the continents themselves, not least because, taken as a whole, they constituted a proper little museum of ethnography, filled as they were with objects from a goodly number of the earth’s more far-flung cultures – even in the garden, moss-covered statues sat half-concealed among the shrubbery, as if the ambassador had attempted to recreate a corner of some overgrown temple. The bedroom was all white, right down to the sheets and duvet covers – a white broken only by a gold statuette from Thailand. Particularly during those first weeks after they – a student of architecture and a med
ical student – met one another again and entered into a new relationship, the bed in this room was their domain. In his mind Jonas called it the Silk Road. It was Aunt Laura who had first told him about the miracle of silk – about the silk worms and the way the silk was turned into soft, smooth, shining fabrics – and about the Silk Road, the name given to the trade route, the historic link, between Asia and Europe. And once when he was sitting in his aunt’s flat in Tøyen, lolling back against soft cushions, surrounded by oriental rugs and the glimmer of gold and silver from her workbench, she had suddenly said: ‘The road that runs from a woman to a man, that too could be called a Silk Road.’

  And only now, years later, as they lay there in a white room, blessed by a golden idol, lay stretched out alongside one another in a big bed, like two continents, like west and east, did he see what she meant – for with them too, it was as much a matter of exchanging gifts, just as cultures swap inventions, ideas, historical knowledge. This was what Margrete meant when she whispered to him: ‘Be a vessel, learn to take.’ And he took. For many weeks he lay beside her in bed and took from her the equivalent of fine porcelain, peaches, rich fabrics and strange spices, while he gazed at her eyebrows, which looked as though they had been brushed with black ink by a Japanese master of calligraphy. And in the same way he tried as best he could to give, to shower her with the equivalent, from his world, of grapes, walnuts, metals and fragile glass. Because what they were doing as they lay there side by side, with their fingers wandering like caravans over the landscapes of their bodies, was telling stories; for hour upon hour they took it in turns, as all lovers do, to tell each other stories from their lives. A good many of Jonas’s were about Buddha, about how clever he was at imitating people on the television, not to mention his repertoire of ABBA songs, and there was a lot about Daniel: the account, for example, of the bizarre incident which had converted him to Christianity; and Margrete told him about her parents, about her mother’s unhappy life, or about the time when she, Margrete, supported herself for a whole year in Paris by doing street theatre: stood on an upturned rubbish bin outside Saint Germain des Prés, dressed as Buster Keaton and doing a doleful but hilarious imitation of him which elicited both roars of laughter and money from passers-by; or about the walking tour she made, not in the mountains of Norway, but of China, not from hut to hut, but from temple to temple. She told him, not least, about all that she had read, all the books, and when Jonas asked her why she read so much she replied: ‘Because I’m lonely, and reading helps me learn to live with my loneliness.’