The Conqueror Page 16
So what sort of sound does a dragon make? Like a hundred lions? Or like a peach stone scraped across a blackboard?
The voices for the play about St George presented no problems, because Jonas did them all. Jonas was a master when it came to mimicry, to putting on different voices. And after the visit to the Pentecostalists’ tent he was even more conscious of containing a whole gallery of role models within himself; it was almost as if he had been ‘possessed’ by the spirit to perform radio plays involving a host of voices.
The challenge therefore lay in the sound effects. And Jonas and Little Eagle were perfectionists. For months they had been completely taken up with this new hobby, every day after school. They could spend a week finding the right sound for their own dramatization of the ascent of Tirich Mir, based on the book by Arne Næss. At last they hit upon it: to give the listener the picture of a mountaineer digging his crampon into ice, they stuck the tip of a pocket-knife into a lump of resin. In their eyes this was an achievement on a par with the ascent itself, and they were quite sure that philosopher Arne Næss would also have applauded it, perhaps even embarked on fruitful speculations as to the link between resin and Tirich Mir – looked upon it as an incitement to climb still further in his thoughts. ‘I probably get as much pleasure from a good sound effect,’ Ørn once said, ‘as a counterfeiter gets from looking at a perfect forgery of a hundred-kroner note.’
So far nothing had had them stumped, not thunder, not lightning, not fire – they used rustling cellophane for that – not even steamy love scenes: Ørn’s simulated kiss was in the Casanova class. Ørn was also a wizard at imitating cars – right down to the different marques. They walked about with their ears on stalks; every noise was a potential sound effect for a radio play. It reached the point where they begged Ørn’s mother to let them cover the living-room walls in egg boxes to get rid of an annoying echo. And although she refused, she had to turn a blind eye to the mysterious disappearance of a whole host of things from the kitchen: a hand whisk, greaseproof paper, brushes and pans – even the vacuum cleaner. You needed more than a few measly props for a masterpiece such as In the Sultan’s Harem or Napoleon and the Battle of Austerlitz.
In the play about St George, they endeavoured to get to the forest scene as quickly as possible. This was the part where they could give their imaginations free rein. They pretended that they were inventors, freely experimenting with every conceivable, and inconceivable, device from bicycle pumps to balloons. They did not, however, use coconut shells to emulate the sound of a horse walking or galloping, Ørn reproduced this perfectly by drumming his fingertips on the coffee table. One small stroke of genius, though, was the chirping of the birds at the beginning, before things began to get creepy, which Ørn produced by rubbing a damp cork against a bottle – for a whole afternoon they amused themselves with producing the distinctive calls of various different birds, taping them and chortling delightedly at all the lifelike results. As the drama grew darker they added more wind – the radio tuned to a station that was off the air – and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. Peas in a cardboard box sounded like a shower of rain, a couple of tin cans gave the chink of armour. Ørn was a sight to be seen, bouncing back and forth like a yoyo between his various ‘instruments’. ‘When you’re finished with this you’ll be able to get a job as the ball in a pinball machine,’ Jonas said.
The real – the nigh-on insoluble problem – was still the dragon itself. For what does a dragon say? They both tried roaring in different ways, but it sounded as silly as having a lion bark like a poodle. They tried using Ørn’s mother’s Mixmaster, they tried spray cans, they considered – talking of hissing sounds – dripping water onto the cooker hotplate, but were not allowed into the kitchen. Their best solution involved Ørn sitting with his head inside a tin pail, it sounded bloodcurdling enough and would do at a push. By shaking Ørn’s dad’s leather jacket in the air – didn’t it even reek a little of dragon? – they managed to replicate the sound of leathery wingbeats. Finally, Jonas added the crowning touch to their inventiveness by bringing along Daniel’s kerosene lamp which, when they lit it, gave the most glorious sense of fire being breathed.
After numerous dry runs, mainly to get the coordination right, they were ready for the final take. If it turned out well, they were to let the little kids hear it; with any luck they’d scare the socks off them. The introduction went like clockwork, Ørn struck the largest pot lid with a ladle, and Jonas announced in a deep, dramatic voice: ‘Grorud Radio Theatre presents’ – then left a nice pause for effect before intoning in an, if possible, even deeper voice: ‘St George and the Fearful Dragon.’ Another clang of the pot lid. The first part also passed without a hitch, went better than ever before; Little Eagle flew back and forth between the various articles scattered around the room and on the table, screwed and scraped, wafted and rattled, he was the soul of confidence, drumming with his fingers on the tabletop and shaking boxes, ripping clothes – it all sounded quite professional.
St George draws near to the dragon’s lair, in the middle of a dark and forbidding forest; the wind howls, the leaves tremble, the air is rent by a scream: Jonas makes his voice as high-pitched as possible, a princess’s cry for help, a maiden in distress, Jonas switches to the narrator’s neutral, but no less compelling tone, tells how St George leaps off his horse, walks through dry leaves – Little Eagle rakes through strips of paper – sees the dragon come flying towards him – Ørn waves the leather jacket frantically in the air, it sounds good, it sounds really great, this is going to be such a success – the dragon lands with a thud – Ørn jumps off the sofa onto the floor, the dragon comes charging through the undergrowth – Ørn stamps orange boxes to smithereens – they had practically had to go down on their bended knees to get these particular, orange boxes, with slats of just the right thinness, from the grocer – it sounded diabolical, like an elephant, a dinosaur, or yes, a dragon approaching. ‘Now you shall die!’ Jonas cries in St George’s heroic, fearless voice, a challenge which is supposed to be followed by the dragon’s spine-chilling, stupefying fiery breath; Ørn is right on schedule with a lighter held in front of a blowlamp which has so far been used for nothing more exciting than melting Swix ski-wax, but which will now make small children turn weak at the knees; in his mind Ørn is already over by the pail that will lend resonance to the dragon’s hideous roar, but first a terrible blast of flame, the only problem is that suddenly the lighter won’t work, it only goes click, click, Ørn tries frantically, but it’s no good, click click it says, Jonas gazes at him in desperation, it had all been going so beautifully up until now, and there is something about this situation which makes Ørn laugh, to roar with laughter, to laugh in a most particular way, almost gloatingly, spitefully is perhaps the word or carelessly, because he doesn’t take this quite so seriously as Jonas; Little Eagle laughs and laughs, as if he can’t believe this is happening, laughs resignedly, in disbelief, howls with laughter, pops the tin pail over his head in an attempt to smother his mirth, but carries on laughing inside it. ‘You don’t scare me, vile dragon, foul abductor of innocent women,’ Jonas continues in St George’s voice, doing the sword-out-of-scabbard sound, wanting to see the play through to the end for the practice, if nothing else, runs a bread knife over the vacuum’s metal tube, while Little Eagle just laughs and laughs, so hard that he topples off the sofa and knocks over the table, and all his props, including the microphone, making a deafening racket, and they have to stop, switch off the tape recorder. ‘Drat it, that’s just like you, Ørn,’ Jonas fumed, ‘ruining the very end.’
Jonas runs the tape back, though, wanting to hear the recording anyway, to be on the safe side. And it is then, when they come to the fatal point, that it dawns on him: It’s perfect! The clicks sound sinister, you would never guess it was a lighter, it sounds as if the dragon is doing something venomous, working up to something, with its forked tongue. And Ørn’s laughter heightens the tension, not least because it is unintentio
nal, and preceded by a hair-raising pffffft – Ørn’s involuntary reaction actually gave the impression of an honest-to-goodness dragon, a rather menacing, utterly surprising sound, from inside the pail in particular it bordered on something beyond their understanding, a kind of smiling malice, something even more dangerous than a roaring, fire-breathing dragon. Brilliant. And the din produced when Little Eagle knocked everything over provided the cataclysmic soundtrack to a swift but fierce battle in which – no one could be in any doubt – the dragon was killed.
What sort of sound does a dragon make?
An apologetic little laugh?
This was the day on which Jonas learned that creativity can lie in the unexpected, in things one hadn’t thought of, and above all else: in simplicity. Not only that but it might even be that a dragon was killed – for real. He felt proud when he stood with that tape in his hands. To some extent he understood that this spool of tape, this discus of invisible tracks, was more important, that in the long run it also stood for something more valuable than the actual machinery, the tape recorder. At the back of his mind he was also haunted by the thought that these background noises, when isolated, would form the basis for a very different story.
They ran the play for some of the little kids as planned – against their mothers’ will, no doubt – and scared the living daylights out of them. No one could understand why a number of younger children at Solhaug suddenly started waking up in the night, crying and muttering about dragons and not letting them get them. ‘There, there,’ their mothers said. ‘There’s no such thing as dragons.’ And having thought about it for a moment they might have added: ‘Not in Norway anyway.’
Mysteries of the Milky Way
Jonas, too, once had a nightmare. But he was not dreaming. Someone presented him with a dragon, an unnatural creature, and said it was his brother. No talk here of the wrong sound, though, this was a total misconception, a minor addition at the most elementary level of life: one ‘x’ too many so to speak.
Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?
More than one person has been prepared to state that Jonas Wergeland was incapable of loving anyone. I don’t know what to say to that, Professor – there were undoubtedly a lot of people whom he truly, deeply loathed. But there was no one whom he hated more bitterly than Buddha.
When Buddha was born Jonas was devastated. Buddha might have been a meteorite from above which, small though it is, can inflict mysteriously large wounds on a landscape. Usually it is the parents who suffer from shock in the wake of such a birth, who are left stunned by the doctor’s announcement that their new baby is not like other babies, but in the Hansen family no one was harder hit by this news than Jonas. He was so stricken that he took to his bed. It was he, not his mother, who had trouble with the ‘afterbirth’.
For weeks Jonas lay in bed, tossing and turning in anguish. Why? Because he felt responsible for this child. In his own eyes, Jonas was the boy’s father.
And yet – this sense of responsibility was soon overshadowed by hate. Pure, unadulterated hate. The kind of hate he had once seen in Little Eagle’s eyes. For days and days Jonas sat on his own, wondering, quite seriously, how he could do away with his brother. You often hear about the jealousy felt by the older children in a family when a new baby arrives and steals all the attention. But this was different: Jonas was fourteen years old.
Time and again he stood over Buddha’s crib, looking down on that unsuspecting face and despising himself because he could not bring himself to put his hands around the infant’s throat and squeeze or place a pillow over that awful visage, hideous in its innocence. Alternatively, he considered taking his mother’s brooch from the black lacquer casket and poking out his own eyes with the pin: that way he would at least be spared having to see that apparition, the head whose tiny ears were already starting to take on the protuberant form that prompted thoughts of other planets, but he couldn’t do that either. The only thing he was capable of was hating, subjecting this little toad to black, bottomless hate.
Over the years that followed, Jonas noticed how his whole body would contract at the slightest glimpse of his brother – that moon face, those ghastly ears, the slanted, slightly skelly eyes, the tongue that flicked in and out like that of some long extinct lizard. The others accepted the drooling creature right from the word go, they were perfectly happy with Buddha. ‘A baroque gem,’ Rakel said. The new member of the family had even winkled his parents out of their TV chairs. ‘He’s saved us from the magic mountain,’ his mother said one evening when she and his father were sitting chatting the way they used to do, with their armchairs facing one another. It was actually Daniel who started calling their little brother Buddha, because of the brat’s fondness for rice. And even though there were times when Daniel might be embarrassed by Buddha, Jonas was alone in his murderous antipathy.
In terms of natural gifts, Buddha was very well endowed, but as one might expect he did develop more slowly than other children. At the age of three he was only just starting to toddle about on little bandy legs, and he said nothing, apart from some sounds or cryptic onomatopoeics that could have been interpreted as ‘Mamma’. Something did, however, happen to his concentration when he played with the sugar tongs or chess pieces, particularly the knights. Little mirrors and bells also elicited an animation, accompanied by loud crows of delight.
Mainly as a means of humiliating his brother, Jonas decided to try to teach Buddha to say just one word. In order to prove that it could not be done, that – as an act of pure compassion – the poor soul ought to be done away with as soon as possible, either that or be consigned to some distant solitary cell. In a flash of spite Jonas decided that he would get the boy to say ‘milk’, the most basic element in any child’s life. ‘Milk,’ said Jonas each time he handed Buddha his feeder cup. ‘Milk, milk, milk, milk. Can you say it? Milk. M-i-l-k.’
Buddha merely broke into his usual happy grin. Like a dog about to be fed. This was something else Jonas hated: that Buddha could not sense his hate.
‘Milk. It’s milk. Say it, stupid.’
Buddha just smiled.
For six months they went on like this. Jonas must have said that word to Buddha a thousand times, and each time Buddha responded by smiling blankly, when even a dog, out of sheer exhaustion almost, would have been moved to utter the word ‘milk’. Jonas should have been satisfied – he had proved beyond a doubt that his brother could not be taught – and yet Jonas was not happy. It became an obsession with him, to get his brother to say at least one word. Then they could get rid of him.
One Saturday morning Jonas was at home alone with Buddha. It was raining outside, rain bucketing down, the windows seemed to be covered in transparent, wet plastic. As usual when they were eating, Jonas placed the cup next to Buddha’s stubby fingers and said, almost without thinking – as if he had long since given up: ‘Milk. Look. Milk. This is milk. Say milk, blast you. Milk, milk, milk. It’s not that hard. Look at my lips. Milk. Mmmm-iiii-lk. MILK. Milk, you rotten little sod, you moon-faced little git!’ He felt like smashing the cup into the face of the creature sitting across from him.
Rain streamed down the windowpanes, soundlessly. Buddha looked at him. He looked at Jonas in a new way. For a long time Buddha looked at his brother, deep into his face, right through his face.
Then he said it. So banal and yet so obvious: ‘Jonas,’ he said. Not all that clearly. His tongue rather in the way but clear enough all the same: ‘Jonas.’
Jonas tried later to describe what happened next. It was as if a landslide swept through him, he said, backwards, upwards, slowly. It was as if a dozen different emotions flowed through him, all shooting off in different directions, or were dispersed, leaving a huge hollow space in the centre, and then it all flowed back again, only this time as one feeling: warmth. An abundance of warmth.
All that hate, all that cursing, and Buddha’s first word was a name. A declaration of love.
Buddha was on his
feet, stood with his arms wrapped around his big brother. Said it again, his name. The rain streamed down the windowpanes. The landscape outside was little more than a blur, glimpsed as if through a plastic bag full of water. Jonas cupped his hands around Buddha’s face. Had the whole world in his hands. He realized that he was crying. He could have been crying for some time, he didn’t know, he cried his eyes out, soundlessly. Filled with a sudden, all-pervading emotion he had not known that he owned, a quite inconceivable love that would surely endure everything, hope everything, move mountains and things still bigger. And the object of this incomprehensible love was the figure before him. The defenceless bundle that he hated so much.