The Conqueror
Jan Kjærstad
The Conqueror
Translated from the Norwegian
by Barbara J. Haveland
Contents
Title Page
This is your life
The whole world in his hand
Carl the Great
The Pursuit of Immortality
The Vertebral Disc
The Jewel
Sonja and the Stars
Napoleon
Outer Land
Made in Norway
Criminal Past
Little Eagle
Cain and Abel
Disoriented
Possessed
Radio Theatre Presents
Mysteries of the Milky Way
The Erogenous Battle Zone
My Dear Fellow Countrymen
From the Caucasus? Beams my soul from the Caucasus?
A National Monument
Venus and Mars
Cold, calm, clittering as Ararat’s topmost chunk of ice
Blowin’ in the Wind
The Tail and the Sheath
It looks down on Earth while my heart stands still
Because it was there
Cape
You should have heard that chord
Bronze Age
The Academic
The Empress
In Transylvania
From the Annals of the Potato Monarchy
$$
The Interpreters’ Kaiser
Due East
Monopoly Capital
4’33”
And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon
Final Episode
Brain Power
Norway’s Gold Reserve
Trio
The Snow Planet
Branching Out
Living Death
The Loop
The Great Bear
Pyrrhus
The Battle of Thermopylae
Penalty Kick
In Seventh Heaven
Norwegian Baroque
The Ark of the Covenant
Master of the Art of Survival
Midpoint of the World
Purpose
The Silk Road
About the Author
Copyright
This is your life
‘I thought he was going to rape me,’ the woman said, reporting the incident later. No point beating about the bush: we might as well begin at the end, or the beginning of the end. So, before the bout of erotic vertigo in the chemist’s shop, even before the story of the stinking monster in the basement, we have to start with this man, as he sits in the back of a taxi driving through a summery Oslo night; on the surface of it a perfectly ordinary situation, a situation this man has been in thousands of times before, the rule more than the exception: he is on his way home, late at night in a taxi.
Initially the driver, a woman, an attractive woman, an English undergraduate who did the odd shift, had only caught a glimpse of the man who flagged down her cab in the city centre, not far from a bar, and muttered something about Bergen, leading her to think, to begin with, that she had picked up a fare to the west coast – what a fantastic piece of luck – until she realized that of course he meant Bergensveien, in Grorud, because at that same moment she recognized him. The person in the back seat was one of those few Norwegians who did not need to give his address: who could, if they wished, simply say: ‘Take me home.’
She was thrilled, and not a little proud of the fact that, of all the possible cabs for hire on the streets, he should have chosen hers; she sneaked a peek at him in the mirror, noted that he had not bothered to fasten his seatbelt, as if seatbelts were, in his case, unnecessary; he sat there with a happy, almost beatific, smile on his face like he was on a high, had just been presented with a grand award or something. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends, her fellow taxi drivers: guess who I drove home the other night, no, honestly, it was him. She kept peeking in the mirror, racking her brains for something to say, something about one of his programmes, a compliment that wouldn’t sound as glib as all the other words of praise that were no doubt heaped on him every day. For, at a time when television turned everything of any importance into entertainment, when television, even Norwegian television, was dominated by mindless game shows and quiz programmes, gushing chat shows and primitive debates: confirming, in other words, every misanthrope’s assertions that all the people want is bread and circuses – he, her passenger, had restored her faith in television as an art form in its own right. She had something on the tip of her tongue, something she felt was pretty original, something about his programme on Sonja Henie, about how suggestive they were, those pirouettes and the ice flying up, how erotic, she had the urge to add, although she didn’t know if she dared. It would be like addressing His Majesty the King. Because the man in the back seat was none other than Jonas Wergeland.
They drove along Trondheimsveien, across Carl Berners plass. She hoped he had noticed the paperback copy of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow lying between the two front seats, a book which she read when she was sitting on the rank. The scent of a restaurant filled the cab: spices, wine, cigars, he had obviously just risen from an excellent dinner. She glanced in the mirror, could no longer make out his features, his face lay in shadow, it looked blank. She remembered with what interest and delight – yes, delight – she had watched This Is Your Life not that long ago, on the evening when Jonas Wergeland was the star guest, the youngest ever; what a show that was, a glittering tribute for which everybody had turned out, from an unwontedly animated Minister for the Arts to the legendary writer Axel Stranger; what a life, she had thought, what a man. As if to heighten the thrill she looked in the mirror again, but there was something about the look in his eyes, his whole expression, which did not fit with the face she knew from the television screen, from This Is Your Life, the face that had so often held her mesmerized, a face she had even fantasized about, dreamed of, had rude thoughts about.
And just as they are approaching the Sinsen junction, the largest intersection in Norway, it happens. At first all she, the driver, hears are some odd sounds, a kind of gurgling, then she realizes what is happening and pulls to an abrupt halt on the hard shoulder. But it is too late. Jonas Wergeland throws up, a jet of vomit shoots from his mouth, hitting her on the back of the head at the point where the headrest doesn’t block the spray, and even then, even as she feels this slimy, foul-smelling substance on her own skin and sees, out of the corner of her eye, how the cover of The Rainbow too, has been splattered with sick, she thinks that he must have been taken ill; she has only one thought in her head, she must help him, she is full of concern, tenderness, because she is in his debt, in debt to a man who has caused her to change her views on many things, on the nature of Norway, possibly even on the nature of life itself; she pictures to herself how this dramatic turn of events will only make the story that much better. Just then she catches sight of his face again, two eyes staring at her in the mirror, and she realizes that he is not ill, but drunk, as pissed out of his skull as anybody can be, and not just with alcohol but with hate.
Before she could do a thing, it happened again. Slumped in the back seat, Jonas Wergeland spewed out the contents of his stomach, the stream broken only by short pauses to gasp for breath. He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was throwing up. He was like an out-of-hand fire hose, writhing and spraying in all directions. Before she could get out and open the door for him, he had filled the inside of the Mercedes with an unappetizing swill – she could already hear the dressing-down she was going to get from the owner: ‘Miss Kielland, do you realize that I have just had the inside of this
car thoroughly cleaned by Økern Auto Cosmetic?’
But at that moment she was more concerned about Jonas Wergeland, as he fell out of the cab, mumbling and laughing to himself. ‘My television programmes are just as useless as the pyramids,’ he snorted. ‘They stay in the desert, jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeoisie climb up on them.’ Then he raised his head: ‘Gustav Flaubert,’ he bawled. ‘I pinched that from Flaubert, so I bloody did.’ As if to show that his wits weren’t totally befuddled, that there was still something going on up there, he pointed to a sign hanging over the entrance to a restaurant across the street. ‘Rendezvous’ it said. ‘I met a girl there once,’ he said, even as he was racked by another violent and painful bout of retching, as if he had toadstools in his stomach and was trying to bring them up. And then, in an unfamiliar, dark, rasping tone: ‘To hell with all girls.’
What was he thinking? What was going on inside Jonas Wergeland’s head? I know. I know everything, almost everything. It is a bright summer’s night in June. There lies Jonas Wergeland, just down the road from Aker Hospital where he was born, just down the road from the Sinsen junction, Norway’s largest interchange, an enormous loop of concrete and tarmac. As a child his heart had always sung when he had driven across here, this point where Oslo spread out beneath him, presented the illusion of itself as a glittering metropolis, rich in possibilities. And now he lay sprawled on that very spot, on high and yet laid low, and felt as if he were spewing over Oslo, over the whole of Norway, in fact.
The taxi driver didn’t know which way to turn. She noticed that his jacket was spattered with damp stains, bits of food. It was a slightly old-fashioned jacket and one she recognized: one that, on numerous television chat shows, had lent him the air of an English gentleman. She felt like a witness to an act of blasphemy. ‘I would honestly never have thought this of you, Mr Wergeland,’ she said, for want of anything better, and with a hint of sharpness. ‘I really did not expect this of you.’
In response he discharged a final volley of vomit, a solid mixture of bile and food. There was something about the illusory density of this stream of vomit that put her in mind of films about exorcism, made her think that Jonas Wergeland was acting like a man possessed. ‘I’ve been celebrating,’ he grunted, gazing curiously at the chunks of partially digested lamb and Brussels sprouts in the claret-coloured puddle on the ground. ‘I’ve been celebrating a great deed,’ he said as she struggled to haul him into a sitting position, propped up against the wheel of the cab. She looked down at herself. Her clothes were in an awful mess. She was just wondering what she was going to say to the owner of the taxi, what she was going to say to anybody, when Jonas Wergeland keeled over again, to land with his face in his own vomit.
It could have ended there, as a minor – still and all, just a minor – scandal, but then he started shouting, first hurling abuse at the woman who was trying to pick him up. ‘Get away from me, you fucking whore,’ he snarled, pulling himself to his feet unaided, as if he had suddenly sobered up. He stood facing her with a menacing look in his eyes – it was at this moment that the thought of rape crossed her mind. And as he stood there he began to hiss something that at first she could not make out, but which gradually became clearer: ‘I killed a man,’ he said. ‘I killed a man, d’you hear? I kicked the balls off him, the bastard.’
Then his legs gave way again, he slumped against the wheel. It was a bright summer’s night in June, just down the road from the Sinsen junction. A taxi driver stood looking down on Jonas Wergeland, a man who, at a time when television channels had to have a logo up in the corner of the screen so you could tell them apart, at a time when television seemed intent only on satisfying mankind’s basest needs, suddenly appeared on the scene and showed her, showed everyone that television could raise their level of cultivation. A young Norwegian woman, a viewer, stood there sadly regarding a man she admired, sitting on the ground in his own vomit, cursing and swearing. ‘It was as though I was suddenly looking at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ she said later. ‘Or rather, that he was Mr Hyde, that the Dr Jekyll bit was just something he had persuaded me to believe in for a long time.’ She was, as I mentioned earlier, studying English, so this analogy had not been plucked entirely out of thin air.
‘I made mincemeat of the son of a bitch,’ Jonas Wergeland gibbered, laughing all the while – laughing and laughing, roaring with laughter if, that is, he wasn’t sobbing. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t cut off his dick while I was at it!’
The woman had long since called dispatch. She crouched down beside Jonas Wergeland, who now seemed almost out for the count, and she wept. She wept because she had seen something precious, something she truly cared about, shattered. And his last words to her before help arrives, as he opens his eyes and fixes his gaze on the pale-blue, taxi company shirt are: ‘By Christ, you’ve got great tits.’
The whole world in his hand
Jonas and the female breast – it’s a long story altogether, that of men and breasts. In Jonas’s case, however, it had something to do with his brother. I’ve given a lot of thought as to who might have been the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life – a question central to our undertaking – and it would not surprise me to find that it was his brother Daniel, one year his senior. Daniel – dedicated hypocrite that he was – was, after all, the bane of Jonas’s life, so to speak. I will have ample opportunity to touch on Daniel’s bizarre career later, but first I must address this issue of the breasts.
No matter how different they might have been, throughout their adolescence Daniel and Jonas had one common interest: tits. Boys have different fetishes, but for the brothers, breasts constituted the very crux of life. Scientists have propounded the theory that the female mammary glands got bigger as human beings began to walk more upright, taking over from the backside as the main focus of attraction during the mating season. Daniel and Jonas were living proof that this theory has much to recommend it. The sight of breasts, anytime, anywhere, quite simply set the hormones churning, within Daniel especially; something clicked inside his head. A mere glimpse of the cleavage between two breasts was enough. Newspaper and magazine ads for bras made him positively sick with excitement. Jonas always felt that Daniel’s impressive attempts to become Norway’s skiing king, the self-inflicted torture of trekking hundreds of miles across the hills around Oslo winter after winter, dated from the day when he saw an old photograph from the Cortina Winter Olympics of 1956, of Hallgeir Brenden, winner of the 15-kilometre cross-country event, with his arms round Sophia Loren’s tits. Daniel lived, not in Sophie’s World, but in Sophia’s.
Sophia, Sophia, tits as wisdom.
Every evening for years Daniel would lie in bed and read aloud to Jonas; he read from two books in particular, which he had in some mysterious way got hold of and which he kept hidden inside the air vent in the wall of their room, as if to symbolize that these books represented a sort of safety valve for the pressure that was playing havoc with the boys: these were Agnar Mykle’s Lasso Around the Moon and Song of the Red Ruby. Daniel read certain passages so often, and with such feeling, that Jonas would never forget Mykle’s song of praise to breasts of all shapes and sizes, from the modest: ‘Her small breasts under the white jersey had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass,’ to the more extravagant: ‘Her breasts were like explosives under her sweater, they looked as if they would blow up were anyone to touch the small, protruding detonator on each one.’ These uncommonly exalted bedtime readings, all these rousing metaphors, left Jonas, early on, with a suspicion – if not a vision – that, when all is said and done, eroticism and sexuality had to do with imagination and leaps of thought.
Many a time too, Daniel would lie panting in the top bunk, speculating on which material constituted the most provocative wrapping for breasts: what would form the optimum stage curtain for this greatest of all dramas. Silk? Flannel? Soft hide? Gleaming leather? Daniel could spend a whole night enlarging upon the cinematic cliché of ‘a wet shi
rt clinging to the skin’. Jonas suggested string vests, which would give the breasts the appearance of plump fruit in a net shopping bag. Daniel, for his part – where do they get it from? – was partial to wool. Each time he went to the lavatory, with that characteristic glazed look in his eyes, and turned the key in the lock, Jonas knew that his big brother had seen one of the estate’s well-built young mothers go jiggling past in a distractingly tight sweater.
Jonas, too, had his secrets: he daydreamed of how a breast would feel against the palm of the hand, he fantasized about its probable smoothness and warmth and wondered whether it would really be as Daniel said – a thought which prompted a dangerously warm flutter in the pit of the stomach: that a breast grew firm when touched, almost coagulated, to use a word he learned later in chemistry class; and above all perhaps, inspired by Agnar Mykle, he dreamed of nipples, their possible rigidity under the fingertip, like a switch; the mere thought caused his pelvic region to swell with anticipation. So potent was this fantasy that, when the time was ripe, Jonas attempted what could be said to be a pretty reckless marriage by capture.
This happened after Margrete, his first great love, had – as he saw it – ‘gone to blazes’, having dumped him in the most ignominious fashion before moving abroad. You had to pick yourself up. There were other girls. Jonas lived in Grorud, in northeast Oslo, which at that time was developing into an ever more populous satellite town. He had long had his eye on Anne Beate Corneliussen, known among the boys simply as the ABC of Sex. For if Anne Beate was remarkable for anything it was the two gravitational points under her jersey. Apples fell to the ground, and the boys’ eyes fell on Anne Beate’s breasts. She was, in short, the sort of girl who automatically becomes a drum majorette and marches ahead of the boys’ band in a tight uniform, holding that baton – oh, mind-boggling thought – with a firm, acrobatic grip and looking as though she had full control over the entire troop of boys, imperiously decreeing when they should raise their instruments and start to play.