The Conqueror Page 11

  Is this, then, where the story of his jealousy begins?

  Immediately afterwards, as they were strolling down to the harbour on the Bosphorus to watch the people fishing and the ferries coming and going, with the mosques straight ahead of them again, Jonas was seized by a sudden euphoria. He had come into existence between two continents. Suddenly it came to him: that was why he had been so drawn to that peach as a boy – because it belonged to him, a child of the Orient. It was as if Jonas had suddenly been presented with the explanation for his feel for mosaics, for ornamentation. From then on he would never have any trouble understanding the criticism of his television series Thinking Big: that the individual programmes were not all that special in themselves, that the impact derived from the element of repetition, which caused these twenty-odd programmes to form such an intriguing pattern. And wasn’t the television picture, if magnified, a mosaic of coloured dots? ‘Ich bin ein Byzantiner,’ Jonas cried, his words directed at the panorama before him, with something of the rhetorical fervour once evinced by the blessed John F. Kennedy in another city.

  A couple of days later, still filled with this euphoria, this heaven-sent euphoria, he was strolling with Margrete along the main street, Istiklal Caddesi. On impulse, just beyond Galatsaray Square, he turned down a side street and found himself in a stinking, pulsating fish market that ran out into a maze of narrow lanes and alleyways; at this time, early in the day, it was surprisingly quiet. Margrete had stayed behind in a shop to look for a present for Kristin. Jonas sauntered on, marvelling again, for the umpteenth time, at Margrete, this person whom he loved with an almost blasphemous passion, with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. The previous day they had been standing inside the Great Church of Hagia Sofia, contemplating the light that appeared to come more from within than without, looking up at the dome which everyone said appeared to hang down from heaven, to float in midair. Jonas was gazing open-mouthed at this sight, utterly enraptured – for one thing because the dome seemed to be wheeling round, spun by the light – when Margrete nudged him in the side and said: ‘Let’s get out of this geometric bunker, I feel like I’m inside the stomach of a giant beetle.’ He could not make her out. À propos Kristin – à propos conception, come to that – he remembered the day when Margrete had stood before him and announced: ‘I am with child.’ What an anachronistic way to put it. With child! And yet so like Margrete. As if she quite naturally wished to elevate these tidings into something wonderfully solemn and Biblical.

  Jonas was halfway down the narrow back street, a curving downhill slope, an alley where washing was hung to dry on lines stretched out high above, beneath cockeyed television aerials, and the air reeked of cooking oil and rotten melons. His interest had been caught by some dilapidated oriel windows jutting out from the house walls. Suddenly there’s a man standing right in front of him, asking Jonas, quite politely really, to hand over his cash. A knife hovering dangerously close to Jonas’s stomach makes it clear that he is not fooling around. Jonas remains surprisingly calm, despite a horrid contraction of his testicles. In a way, it seems only right and proper that he should be confronted with crime in some shape or form in this city, bearing in mind his mother’s motives in visiting it. In any case, something about this man tells Jonas he’d better not try anything, that this is one of the Beyoglu quarter’s shadier sons. He takes out his wallet and promptly hands the man all his paper money. The man glances at it, seems satisfied, is about to stick it in his pocket when he notices one banknote that is not Turkish – a Norwegian thousand-kroner note. He studies it, the reproduction of Peder Balke’s dramatic painting of Vardø lighthouse, turns it over, lowers the hand clutching the knife. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks in excellent English. ‘Norway,’ says Jonas. ‘Who is this?’ he says. ‘Henrik Ibsen,’ Jonas says. ‘What about Knut Hamsun – is he on a banknote too?’ the man says. Jonas shakes his head. The man’s face suddenly darkens, he points the knife at Jonas. ‘Are you telling me that Hamsun, one of the greatest writers in the world, doesn’t appear on your banknotes? What sort of a country do you call that?’ he says, then launches into what sounds like a virulent lecture, or indictment, delivered at such a speed that Jonas doesn’t manage to catch it all – partly, of course, because he is so terrified, because of the knife and because of a thief who, instead of hightailing it out of there, proceeds to discuss which writers deserve to appear on Norwegian banknotes. This latter aspect actually scares him most of all, since he takes it as a sign that the guy must be stark raving mad and capable of absolutely anything.

  As the man was finishing a harangue on what an indelible impression Hamsun’s novel Hunger had made on him, a poor man from the slums of Istanbul – Jonas thought he could almost see tears in the mugger’s eyes – Margrete came walking down the alley. Jonas turned his head: ‘Get out of here,’ he hissed as loudly as he could. ‘He’s got a knife.’ Margrete did not react, calmly strolled straight up to them. This seemed to throw the man too. He crammed the money into his pocket, shifted his focus from Jonas to Margrete, even lunged at her with the knife. It all happened very fast, but later Jonas tried to recall those seconds, which gave him yet another reason to marvel at his wife. For as the man darted towards her, jabbing with his hand, she sidestepped, and Jonas seemed to recall that it had been a graceful movement, more like a dance step, backwards; a little jink which stood, in his memory, as a greater feat than the hold that she suddenly took on the man’s arm and the way she positioned her body in relation to his, in order, the next instant, lightly, as if it cost her no effort, to hurl him through the air, positively send him flying – as Jonas saw it – while still keeping a firm grip on his arm, thus forcing him to let go of the knife, with a hideous shriek of pain betraying that she had in fact hurt him in the process, and all of this before he hit the ground with a thud and, hurt or no hurt, promptly scrambled to his feet and vanished with the same baffling suddenness as he had appeared.

  Margrete took Jonas’s hand and, with a faint air of impatience, strode out of the alley, leaving the knife where it lay. ‘He took my money,’ Jonas said when they had turned the corner. ‘Who cares, it wasn’t that much, was it?’ she said. ‘Come on in here, I think I’ve found something for Kristin – look at this lovely brass dolls’ tea-set!’

  For the rest of the day, while walking round sunken palaces and subterranean mosques, the ruins of the city walls and aqueducts, in the spice bazaars and the mosaic museums, Jonas thought about Margrete, about how little he knew of her. Against his will, he recalled some of the rumours he had heard about the years when she was living abroad, as the daughter of a diplomat and later as a student: rumours he had tried to ignore, to suppress, but which had stuck to his subconscious nonetheless. What he had seen back there in the alley accorded with the story that, as a teenager, somewhere in the Far East, she had studied the martial arts. Occasionally in the summer he had noticed how, when she thought no one was looking, she would do what looked like callisthenics on the lawn, smooth, controlled movements, like a balancing act in slow motion. He had heard so many things, didn’t know what to believe. Not even of what she told him herself. Jonas walked around Istanbul with his mind in turmoil, a state which possibly mirrored the confusion of smells in the city streets: everything from mimosa, exhaust fumes and roasted nuts to the eternally rotating kebabs on the roadside stalls and every kind of fried fish. It was said that she had once written a wonderful book – someone had heard her read bits of it – the manuscript of which she had thrown away or lost, or burned and then scattered the ashes on the Ganges – accounts varied. Was it true that at one point she had had a pet snake? And had she really danced with a famous rock star, on the stage, during a concert? When he asked her about such things, she would laugh. ‘You’re just jealous,’ she would say. And she was right, that is exactly what he was. Because she was the sort of woman you saw, even in the heaving mass of bodies in front of a stage.

  With Margrete you never knew what to expect. While Jon
as wandered reverently around the Topkapi Palace, feasting his eyes on everything from Mohammed’s footprints in a stone to the beautiful doors of the harem, patterned with tortoiseshell and mother of pearl, Margrete was more interested in the guards and their tiny, crackling walkie-talkies and all the Turkish women with their covered heads: ‘Do you remember what sort of headscarf your mother used to wear?’ she would whisper to Jonas, as if all of this only served to remind her of Norway’s recent past.

  It may have been in the harem itself that a troubling thought entered his head: all that talk about how sexually liberal she had been. ‘She just can’t get enough of it,’ someone had once said, a man whose teeth Jonas had only just managed to stop himself from knocking out. He had tried to close his ears to the snippets of information he had picked up, of other boyfriends she had had; talk of men who, literally or figuratively, would have cut off their ear lobes for her. Fragments which, when he put them together, formed a picture of a monster. He had been more alarmed than impressed by the little display she had given in the alley, feared that she might one day do to him what she had done to that thief. She’s downright dangerous, he told himself.

  Jonas walked through a city on the border between two continents, teetering between doting admiration and a niggling sense of uncertainty. He couldn’t make her out. He found this blend of naivety and sophistication particularly confusing. She was an ingenuous reader, a bit like Axel; prepared to believe anything – this woman, a rational doctor who wrote articles for medical journals, could lie stretched out on the sofa, so absorbed in the plot of even the worst book that she would utter screams, cries of protest, cheers. Jonas hardly dared to go to the theatre with her; she always seemed on the verge of shouting at the actors, like a child almost falling of its seat in its excitement: ‘Watch out, the fox is right behind you!’ And yet she was such a woman of the world. Jonas had noticed with what aplomb and savoir-faire she had eaten all of the exotic dishes set before them in Istanbul – whether it was sucuk: fried garlic sausages, or a pilaff of lamb and almonds, or aubergines done in every conceivable way. Margrete’s nostrils quivered with delight when she cut into a börek, as if it were a lucky bag of aromas, and she could judge a square of freshly-baked baklava purely on its appearance: knew whether the syrup would ooze out if she pressed the paper-thin layers gently. Jonas could only shake his head at the ease, the poise, with which she made her way through the Kapali Carsi, the huge bazaar right next to the hotel, where the little domed roofs gave one the feeling of being inside a gigantic beehive. He followed her with his eyes as she stood amid glittering gold or soft falls of carpet, fragile alabaster or warlike swords, depending on which passage she happened to find herself in; he watched as she demonstrated the use of an astrolabe to the owner of an antique shop, taking it apart, disc by disc – an astrolabe! Jonas beheld her as though he were watching a film about a stranger: how, in another shop, she began to haggle lightly and laughingly over the price of a chessboard with Ottoman pieces of brass and copper, while the stallholder plied her with apple tea. To Jonas the place was a maze and a daunting one at that. To her, it was obviously a familiar world, one that she could read like the back of her hand; she seemed, in fact, to come to life, like a creature suddenly rediscovering its proper and much longed-for element. Something she could not find in Oslo, not in Norway. And what Jonas feared most of all: not with him.

  On the plane home, with Margrete asleep in the seat next to him, a book lying open in her lap – a second-rate detective novel, Jonas guessed – he sat gazing out at the layer of cloud and thinking: I can never be good enough for her. I’m going to lose her. The optimism he had felt in the Pera Palas seemed to have deserted him. Just before they landed in Copenhagen he stole a glance at her again, with a love so desperately deep that it was almost like torture to him: If you leave me, I’ll kill you, he thought.

  Little Eagle

  Jonas Wergeland did have his disturbing sides, no two ways about it. We have now worked our way forward – please note: not back, but forward – to his tenth year, so I could, in other words, tell the story of the accident on the ski-jump slope or the trip in the rowing boat with Veronika or the illicit climb up the tower on Robber Hill – many people would find this last one particularly appealing. There is, however, no doubt in my mind that I must opt for Jonas’s friendship with Ørn and in that connection not, as you might expect, the breathtaking dive in Grorud Pond or their fateful spying on Ørn’s mother – not even the terrible forest fire. The right approach, and not just because of the link with the banknote bearing Ibsen’s portrait, is to focus on Ørn’s interest in the javelin thrower Egil Danielsen.

  In Norwegian the word ‘ørn’ means ‘eagle’, so Jonas Wergeland’s best friend when he was a boy was, in fact, called Eagle, though he was no Red Indian. His full name was Ørn-Henrik, but he was known simply as Ørn – which is to say, Eagle – and hence, Little Eagle. And let it be said at the outset: no one could have been less suited to bear that imposing name, so redolent of history and Viking times. In Norway, you can get away with being called a bear – Bjørn – or even an elk – Elg. But an eagle – that’s a tough one. Sparrow would have been a better name for him. Not only was Ørn small for his age and scrawny for his age – he was also what can only be described as scruffy. And yet in certain situations, not unlike a lemming, he had an incongruously belligerent air about him that tended to have a provocative effect, especially on the bigger boys. To be called Eagle – and look the way Ørn did – was an insult, it was like asking to get beaten up. And beaten up he was.

  As his nickname suggests, Ørn was doomed to play the Red Indian in all of the fierce battles fought by the children of Solhaug. Times without number he had hidden himself in some hopelessly obvious spot, with two crow feathers in his hair, only to receive a hard and ruthless knock on the back of the head with the butt of a revolver – absolute realism was the order of the day. For Little Eagle, it was an everyday occurrence to be thrown into patches of nettles or enormous anthills, or to be tied to trees and subjected to the cruellest torture, not least by Petter – later Sgt Petter – and his gang. On one occasion they even lit a fire at his feet – only the keen noses of a couple of vigilant parents averted a tragedy. Little Eagle didn’t do the scalping; he got scalped. Never did an eagle have its wings so well and truly clipped.

  In the playground, too, Ørn was the communal punch-ball. At least once a week he would get into a fight, find himself – always undermost – in the middle of a ring of boys which rapidly degenerated into a cheering, chanting mob until the teacher on playground duty finally broke the enchanted circle, and the two boys in the middle were grabbed by the scruff of the neck and marched off to the headmaster’s office, as if Little Eagle, he, the sparrow was as much to blame as the firebrand by his side. There would be a little smile on Ørn’s face, of defiance or possibly satisfaction. Such a character was hard to fathom because, despite that maddening aggressive streak, he had a fawning, almost servile, air about him. This may have been why he liked being with Jonas; they spent every day together – until the accident, the major collision, occurred.

  Why on earth did Jonas choose Ørn as his best friend? To say that Jonas wanted someone he could boss about, someone he could tell what to do, would surely be an oversimplification. Nor could it be compared to the phenomenon sometimes found among young girls, where a pretty girl will choose a plain friend, thus making her own good looks that much more apparent. Maybe – it’s a point worth considering – it all had to do with the chance of getting his hands on the treasures to be found in Eagle’s living room.

  Thanks to a well-placed relative, Eagle owned every Donald Duck comic issued from 1948 onwards, in bound volumes at that. These magnificent albums were ranged on the bookcase in the living room alongside Aschehoug’s splendid encyclopaedia and took up nearly as much space. Later in life, Jonas would regard this arrangement as a natural upgrading of the worth of these comics. One which was well-deserved, since they w
ere in many ways Jonas’s main work of reference, a source of information which came in handy in all sorts of situations, not least as an aid to the art of conversation. At the same time it gave Jonas an inkling that even an encyclopaedia is nothing but a pure fabrication. Not only that – if, for example, he looked up ‘The Flying Dutchman’ or ‘The Incan Empire’, he found the relevant entries dull and heavy-handed compared to the Uncle Scrooge stories concerning these same subjects.

  Jonas would always remember those hours spent lying on the carpet of the Larsen family living room as special moments, hours when his eyes were drawn unresistingly from picture to picture through the wondrous world of the cartoon strips, most of all in the fantastic stories by the aforementioned Carl Barks. This heady pleasure was, moreover, often accompanied by a sound that enhanced the sense of having embarked on a fabulous journey into the realms of fantasy. Because it so happened that Ørn’s dad, when he had time off from his pots and pans at the Grand Hotel, would often sit in the living room, listening to one of his numerous Linguaphone records. Every winter Ørn’s dad – Three-Star Larsen – dreamed of setting out an extended tour of Europe in the summer holidays, though he never went any further than the southern tip of the Royal Wharf, never got beyond these courses, the patient repetition of crackling recorded phrases in Italian, Spanish or Greek. Mr Larsen could say ‘What time is it?’ and ‘Can you recommend a restaurant?’ in eight languages, though he never got the chance to put his skills into practice. Nonetheless, like the sound effects in a radio play, he helped to expand the space around the reading boys.