On one such evening, when Margrete had just finished a long story about the International School in Bangkok, Jonas leaned back, his body heavy with contentment: ‘Do you think that one day’s happiness could save a whole life?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Margrete. And a moment later: ‘Just as a second’s hate can destroy it.’
He didn’t understand what she meant, that she may have been trying to forestall something, make him see that any fruitful transaction can be ruined the minute one of the parties starts to feel dissatisfied and decides they would prefer to be in charge, become a conqueror, have the upper hand.
One evening, one bright evening when the scent of spring was drifting through the open bedroom window, after he had told her about the strange fish and the oyster he hadn’t opened, she got out of bed and disappeared for a couple of minutes. When she returned she held out a clenched fist to him. ‘Open it,’ she said. ‘Pretend it’s an oyster.’
Jonas prised open her fingers, one by one, really had to work at it, because she truly seemed to be trying to make her fist as hard to open as an oyster shell. In the palm of her hand lay a pearl, a small, slightly irregular, natural pearl. She had found it in Japan when she was a little girl. ‘Here take it, it’s yours,’ she said. Jonas looked at it, noted the way in which the light was both absorbed and reflected by it, sat gazing at it for ages, with his throat constricting and his lips tightening. ‘It may not be perfect, but it is a real pearl,’ she said.
Jonas looked and looked. The pearl seemed to be made of white silk. But to Jonas, the incredible thing was not the pearl itself but the thought of the steady, painstaking process by which the oyster converts the foreign body – strokes it, if you like – into a pearl.
‘It takes a long time,’ Margrete said, as if reading his mind. ‘It takes a long time to become a person.’
The next day, back at his bedsit, Jonas unearthed his old lacquer casket, the casket which he had once found in a safe and which had been carted along with him every time he moved, like a portable altar. It contained just two things: a silver brooch and a puck. Two sacred relics. When he placed the pearl between them, luminous and clear, but at the same time impenetrable, it became a multiplication sign between two unknown quantities, an ‘x’ and a ‘y’, but somehow this tiny white sphere brought about a massive increase in their combined import. He shifted the pearl around, tried every possible combination. When he placed it after the brooch and the puck it made him think of a full stop, a sign that his search was at an end; and when he set the pearl on top of the puck he observed how the white dot seemed to fertilize all the black, turning it into a totally different object. Jonas felt as though an entire past, a string of stories, had suddenly acquired a new and brighter character.
And it is on this same day, on his return to Ullevål Garden City, that it happens, as he is lying quietly, on a perfectly ordinary evening, it happens quite undramatically, the thing which on several occasions he thought he was on the track of, but which he now knows he was never on the track of, because it is now that it happens, while Margrete is stroking him, endlessly, reading his body intently and single-mindedly, the way she would read a book, running her hands all over him, caressing every single inch of his skin with her fingertips; it is at this moment that he experiences something so all-pervading that it would not be unreasonable to associate it with what, in his diary, Søren Kierkegaard described as an upheaval ‘which suddenly pressed upon me a new and infallible Interpretation of all Phenomena…’
And that night, on his way to the bathroom, naked, he passed the large mirror in the dim hallway and gave a start. He did not recognize himself. He met his reflection in the dark surface of the mirror and saw that his face had changed. And not only that: his face, the whole of his naked body shone with a kind of inner light. He knew what it was. An afterglow. A product of her love. It was something her hands had stroked into being in him. Because even when they made love he was more conscious of her hands than her vagina: the feeling when they had sex was that of being stroked, caressed, rather than a physical sensation of sliding in and out. He stared at his reflection, at his body, which seemed almost luminous, surrounded by a halo. Jonas stood in the dark hallway studying his own face in the mirror, smiled to himself, she had made him glow; and although he could not know that what he was actually witnessing here was the dawning of his career as a charismatic television personality, he did feel that the pressure, or the sum of all the instances of pressure, had at long last turned the carbon within him into diamond, that he was finally ready, and had the ability, to do something extraordinary.
Up to this point in my life, he thought, I’ve always been a hairsbreadth away from being a loser. Now I’m sure. I’m going to be a winner.
For a whole week Jonas puzzled over what he could give her in return, or no: not in return, in reply – something precious, beyond compare. He could not stop thinking about it, even when they were lying in the white room, running their hands over each other’s skin. Then one morning she was lying there telling him about a secret place she had had as a child, down by the seashore among a cluster of solid, little pine trees, where she could lie surrounded by a confusion of scents, with the sound of the waves in her ears, looking at the way in which the pine-branches formed a fretwork screen against the sky – and as she was telling him this, it came to him what she should have, and that evening he went to fetch it and gave it to her, like Marco Polo presenting a gift to Kublai Khan: the latest dragon head he had carved, a copy of the Academic’s fine head, his best attempt so far.
‘What is it?’ she asked with a smile that said she liked it.
‘It’s the start of a ship,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any further.’
‘Where do you mean to go on this ship?’
‘To a new land,’ he said. ‘Somewhere no one else has ever been.’
For a long time she lay saying nothing, stroked his back, working her way slowly upwards, over every vertebra, sending waves of well-being right through him.
‘Do you know what I like best about you?’ she said.
He didn’t know what to say.
‘Your weakness,’ she said. ‘You’re so weak that you could seduce a whole nation.’
Jonas both understood and did not understand what she meant. He was lying with his back to her, just about falling asleep. All of a sudden she wrote something on the tablet of his back with her finger, a swift, intricate flourish that induced a quite unique thrill of pleasure, a ripple that ran from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. ‘What was that?’
‘The Chinese character for dragon,’ she said.
So the days passed. They lay closely entwined in bed, stroking each other and telling stories. And while they lay there, while she was talking, Jonas was considering her skin, and all at once he knew what it reminded him of – it reminded him of the layers of lacquer on his grandfather’s old casket; he had the same sense of peering into something unfathomable, incomprehensible and yet infinitely beautiful; and as she went on talking, telling him about her life abroad, about university, about books, a realization gradually welled up inside him: Margrete was the golden fleece for which he had always been searching, she was what stood at the end of the longing that had taken vague form that time in the granite quarry. Everything else would only be stopping-off places on the way to this goal, even eventual celebrity, even international celebrity.
‘I want to have a baby,’ Margrete said one day.
‘Why?’
‘So there’ll be someone to be the saving of you when I’m gone.’
‘Were you thinking of going somewhere?’
‘That’s up to you.’
This, these weeks, these years, were the fullest in Jonas Wergeland’s life. He lay there clinging to that body, stroking that skin again and again, in circles, in spirals, happy because he realized that through her he had found a way which also led to possibilities so fundamentally different from any that had gone before; but stil
l there was this hollow dread, a fear that it would not last, as if, for all their happiness, he could not help thinking that even Silk Roads can become overgrown.
Nevertheless, Jonas Wergeland gave up the chance of a completely different life, a different destiny when, on one of those quiet evenings, he placed both hands gently on her skin and said: ‘I’ve always thought that I would kill you if you left me. But now I know I would never do that. From this moment on my life begins anew.’
About the Author
Jan Kjærstad was born in Oslo in 1953. He read theology at the University of Oslo and made his debut as a writer in 1980 with a short story collection, The Earth Turns Quietly. The Conqueror forms the second part of a trilogy which also includes The Seducer (Arcadia Books, 2003) and The Discoverer. These novels have achieved huge international success. Jan Kjærstad is also the author of essays, a children’s book and editor of the literary magazine Vinduet. He was the recipient of the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001 and was also awarded Germany’s Henrik Steffen Prize for Scandinavians who have significantly enriched Europe’s artistic and intellectual life.
Barbara J. Haveland was born in Scotland, and now lives in Denmark with her Norwegian husband and teenage son. She has translated works by several leading Danish and Norwegian authors, including Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Leif Davidsen.
Copyright
First published in the United Kingdom in 2007
by Arcadia Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
Originally published in Norwegian by H. Aschehoug & Co. in 1996
Translation from the Norwegian © Barbara J. Haveland
All rights reserved
© Jan Kjærstad, 1996
The right of Jan Kjærstad to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–908129–53–6
The Conqueror Page 56