The Conqueror Read online

  Jonas was feeling down in the dumps. For the first time in his life he was truly depressed. The previous weekend they had had a visit from Sir William and family, who would shortly be leaving for Africa. And during Sunday dinner, the usual cold roast with brown sauce, his uncle had turned to the subject of Veronika and her rare gifts. ‘Mark my words, one day that girl is going to make it big,’ he intoned, while Jonas’s cousin kept her eyes fixed coyly on the tablecloth. ‘What about me?’ Jonas was foolish enough to ask to the obvious, malicious glee of the Brothers Grimm. ‘You, Jonas,’ Sir William had replied at length, after adjusting his silk cravat – as if he, this heartless individual, was for once considering biting back a spiteful remark – ‘you’ll never amount to anything. You’re the commonest little mongrel I’ve ever met, you’re a perfectly ordinary little boy and you should be content with that.’ Although none of the others took this as anything more than a jovial quip, or at least: no more than just another of his uncle’s almost pathologically crass remarks, his words had echoed in Jonas’s head for the rest of the meal: ‘Perfectly ordinary.’ The words ran round and round his head in a never-ending loop, like an electric headlines sign. ‘Perfectly ordinary…common…’

  Jonas knew why Sir William’s summation of his character had affected him as it had. It was because he had realized – only at that moment, in fact – that for him, Jonas Wergeland, to be ordinary was the worst of all possible fates. At the same time it had dawned on him that his uncle was right. He was ordinary, he was common. And not only that: he was as common as common could be. He had known it for some time, although he couldn’t have put it into words. His only talent lay in his voice. And maybe an extra vertebra in his spine. Hardly the makings of a Father of the People. The best he could hope for was to be an announcer at the Eastern Station. Better, then, to be like Ørn, he thought hopelessly. Better to be a loser. Sooner a ‘Fail’ than a ‘Fair to Middling’.

  So here he was, sitting in the amphitheatre, in a granite grandstand, as if in illustration of his fate: he was to be a spectator, he was doomed to be a spectator for the rest of his life. He slumped back, feeling flat, felt himself becoming one with the bedrock, grey on grey. The sun was so hot that the air actually smelled of sun, of spring, of stone. The living world seethed round about him, like in a laboratory, giving him a sense of tremendous pressure, a feeling that something stupendous was about to take place. He sat, or sprawled, there, filled with a burning desire to be transformed.

  This yearning, or rather, this heartfelt prayer, could be traced back to a crucial flash of insight which he had been granted not long before – he must have been in a particularly receptive state, antennae working frantically, after his uncle’s prophecy. In biology class their teacher had been talking about diamonds, told them that diamond, the hardest of all substances, was a mineral consisting of pure carbon, as was graphite – except that graphite was very soft. ‘Carbon is, therefore, polymorphous,’ the teacher said. Although Jonas did not know the meaning of this expression: that carbon could crystallize in different ways – in other words, that diamond could be formed only under great pressure, while graphite was a low-pressure variant of the same substance – he got the main point: that carbon could assume a number of forms. This had brought him much-needed comfort – to know that plain, ordinary graphite, as he knew it, for example, in his own pencil, when subjected to a different level of pressure could become a diamond – become what the Greeks called ‘adamas’, meaning invincible. Was there any reason why he might not contain similar potential?

  How does one become a conqueror?

  Jonas is lying there in a drowse when he becomes aware of a movement on the edge of the clearing below him. He opens his eyes wide and sees two adders slithering towards a flat rock dead ahead of him, only ten yards away. He sits stock-still, feels how his heart pounds at the sight of the snakes – not because they are dangerous, but because he knows that a drama of the utmost significance is about to be played out on the stage before him.

  Suddenly the two snakes raise the front parts of their bodies into the air and begin to sway towards one another, for some time they do this, as in some strange dance, before they almost – so it seems to Jonas – twine themselves around one another, though without touching, and still with their bodies lifted off the ground. Jonas was thrilled. He had heard of snakes ‘wrestling’: rival males wrapping themselves round one another. But as far as he knew this usually happened in the grass, horizontally. The confrontation he was witnessing here was being conducted in a semi-vertical position, this surely had to be something of a miracle; adders were not actually all that flexible, they didn’t have the cobra’s ability to raise its body high into the air. The snakes seemed to Jonas to be bathed in light, a golden glow. A promise, he thought to himself, it’s a promise.

  Jonas knew right away that this sight, this upward-straining intertwinement was vitally important, that it had the power to heal him, in the same way as the serpent of brass Moses set on a pole in the desert. The way he saw it, this moment, those seconds when they raised themselves into the air and formed a double spiral, had been created for him – and him alone. These creatures were doomed to crawl on their bellies, but they had risen up, right in front of him, held up their heads as it were, defied the biblical curse, did the impossible – yes, that was it: the impossible – defied their biological limitations and lifted themselves up, a zoological miracle on a stage of granite. Later it would occur to Jonas that they had formed what looked like a section mark, that he had caught a glimpse of the essence of life, of the first clause in the law of life.

  But what cheered him most of all was that this spectacle corresponded with – you might almost say, consolidated – an image he had had in his head for a long time, an image or a tactile sensation which stemmed from a feverish dream and which could be compared only to the feeling of running a finger along a corkscrew. Also, he had immediately made the connection between the two snakes in the clearing and the ball of snakes he had stumbled upon the year before. This dance was a continuation of that incident, a clarification of something of which the ball had allowed him a mere glimpse: two spirals intertwined. The principle of leverage, of something that could set mighty things in motion, raise him to undreamed-of heights. He stared at the snakes for so long that they slithered through his eyes and into his head. At any rate, suddenly they were gone, dissolved into thin air so it seemed. The snakes, or a double helix, had taken up residence in his brain. ‘Inside me I carry a new way of thinking,’ his heart sang. ‘I am different.’

  At that very moment – believe me, it’s true – Jonas heard a voice, or perhaps something more akin to the deep scale of notes from an organ, which said, or told him, in no uncertain terms that he would be a conqueror. He always maintained that that voice or sonorous peal came from the very granite on which he was sitting, almost oozed from the crystals – so clearly that he could positively feel the vibrations, as from the membrane of a loudspeaker. And at that instant he knew, as if it were an integral part of the experience, what his weapon in this conquest would be: that intertwining form.

  I know this sounds a bit high-flown. But everyone experiences – to a greater or lesser degree – mystical moments, when they receive a clear and inescapable message – or whatever you want to call it – and for Jonas Wergeland this was how it happened. From that day onwards he knew for sure. He was not going to be a chef or a pilot, nor even the Father of his Country; he was going to be a conqueror. By the time he stood up and set off for home he had carved out a calling for himself, as solid as a granite church.

  You look surprised, Professor, because you have never heard of this, such a pivotal episode. Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I might have done on an earlier occasion, when I said that Jonas Wergeland did not recognize the significance of these events until they cropped up again, thanks to some woman. What if he had not experienced these things at all? What if he had merely imagined them, dreamed them up, during those
acts of love, but so vividly and with such powerful conviction that he seemed to have experienced them. Whatever the case, Jonas Wergeland felt that these women somehow enabled him to relive many fundamental stories upon which he was able to draw later, use as springboards to a changed life. It was as if he had been given the chance to travel back in a train and get off at stations he had run past first time round. So you see it could well be that Jonas Wergeland’s later success, his inimitable chain of television programmes was forged from causes – stories – which never were but which could be reconstructed, like Gleipne, the chain in Nordic mythology: it too was made from things that did not exist.

  It might be more correct to say that at a certain point – possibly not until that coupling in a dim room in the Museum of Cultural History – it was brought home to Jonas Wergeland that one was not doomed to be the person one was, or at least not only that person. One could become more. We are not, he thought, we form ourselves.

  One thing that is certainly true is that when he got home from the quarry he wrote his name on a sheet of paper, and to his amazement he found that his handwriting had changed. On impulse he had also put a ‘W’ between his first and last names, ‘Jonas W. Hansen’ he wrote and discovered that he had made a new name for himself: that one letter could be all it took to change everything, just as the little prefix ‘un’ before the word ‘common’ produces something uncommon. As he contemplated the ‘W’ Jonas could not help thinking of a machine of some kind which could cause him too to stretch himself, much as a leg that is too short can sometimes be made longer. The ‘W’ had the appearance of a coat of arms or a royal emblem – Jonas VI or something of the sort. His initials, too, looked exceptionally powerful, nigh-on divine. There was something about the sight of these three characters which instinctively prompted him to clear his throat and say, in all seriousness, as if carrying out a voice test: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’

  The next day he cycled to school, even though he hadn’t passed the proficiency test. He was bursting with newfound self-confidence. At the school gate he collided with Margrete Boeck, the new girl in the parallel class to his own. Turn a ‘W’ on its head and you get an ‘M’. He didn’t know it then, but his life had already changed.

  From the Caucasus? Beams my soul from the Caucasus?

  (Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)

  Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? It cannot simply be because he wished to conquer new lands? Or change his life, come to that. Jonas himself believed that he made each journey merely so that he could tuck it away in his memory and bring it out again later, always as a different journey, because it altered character from one time to the next. Viewed at a distance, a journey became something different, often something vague and, above all, pungent, like the aftertaste of a fine cognac.

  Jonas sometimes wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing on the hillside outside a remarkable-looking building known as the Matenadaran, looking out across the city. The Armenian Soviet Republic had come as a pleasant surprise, despite the time of year and its strained relations with its neighbour state, the Muslims to the East. Yerevan had proved to be an astonishing oasis after the barren desert of Moscow, with a completely different atmosphere and mentality – and the shops here were full of merchandise. Jonas had walked to the Matenadaran from the Hotel Armenia and the impressive circular Lenin Square in the city centre, so that he – the architect in him, that is – could take in the exceptionally well thought-out and well-executed layout of the city along the way. He nibbled on dried apricots sprinkled with honey and almonds as he strolled along admiring the buildings, many of them – like the hotel – built from the local tufa stone in varying tones of red and pink and decorated with fine carvings: interwoven branches laden with fruit. This, like Grorud, was stonemason country. Jonas felt very much at home here, from the very start he had felt a powerful sense of belonging: here, he thought, here I could actually settle down for good.

  He stood on a terrace at the top of a long run of steps leading down to the road. He shut his eyes and listened. Possibly because of his early interest in sounds, listening was one of the first things he did in a new place – as if endeavouring to wring from the background noise some secret about the landscape, some knowledge hidden from the eyes; or he may have thought that, just as the same sound effects can be used in different plays, these sounds could form the background to more memories of the place.

  As he was standing there, ears pricked up, just as he was actually thinking that he had heard a sigh, somewhere under or over the ground – a sigh reminiscent of the sound created when his father switched on the organ, which is to say, started up the fan, allowing the air to flow into the pipes – a figure approached him, slowly and with an inquiring look on his face. A man in a heavy, military-style overcoat with a sort of beret on his head. ‘You are a tourist, perhaps?’ he asked hesitantly in French good enough for Jonas to understand him. Jonas was doing a tour of those parts of the Soviet Union that lay close to the Black Sea, under the reassuring auspices of Intourist. The trip was intended as a relaxing break, not to say a reward, after years of working himself half to death on NRK’s prestige project, Thinking Big, which was to be broadcast in the New Year – a television series which may have had its beginnings in a stone quarry, an amphitheatre of reddish granite.

  Jonas told the man where he came from. The man nodded, had managed to light his pipe, stood looking out across the city in the same direction as Jonas, his rich enjoyment of the tobacco written large on his features. ‘Do you know what my name is?’ he said at last. Jonas shrugged, how could he possibly know? The only Armenian name he knew was Khachaturian, because as a boy he had played some unusual pieces for the piano by this composer.

  ‘My name is Nansen Sarjan,’ the man said and eyed Jonas expectantly, as if awaiting a reaction from Jonas, although he could not have known that it was precisely because of Fridtjof Nansen that Jonas had wanted to come here; it was because of him that Armenia, or rather the Armenian people, were so much on his mind.

  ‘Your first name is Nansen?’ Jonas said.

  ‘My father was so grateful for what Nansen did for our people that he named me after him,’ the man said. ‘There are quite a number of people in Armenia whose first name is Nansen.’

  Jonas was touched; he found this very moving. He had heard of people in Brazil calling their children after national football players, no matter how farfetched their professional names might be. If one admires a person, no name is too improbable. An Armenian boy could well be christened Nansen.

  The man seemed gratified by Jonas’s interest and proceeded to tell him about his father, the hardships his father had suffered in the years after the First World War, and about himself. He pointed to the other side of the city. ‘I work in the distillery you can see over there. Have you tried our famous brandy? The very finest quality.’

  Jonas was feeling a little chilly; he wouldn’t have minded a small glass of cognac.

  ‘Troubles or no troubles, you have to learn to enjoy life,’ the Armenian said, pointing to his pipe. ‘Have you read Nansen’s book, First Crossing of Greenland?’ Jonas shook his head, did not dare to mention that in his programme on Nansen he had focused on things that had absolutely nothing to do with skiing.

  ‘You know,’ Nansen Sarjan said, ‘the truly great achievement, where the Greenland expedition is concerned, is not the actual ski crossing. The real work of art is the book, especially the passages in which Nansen describes the team’s pipe-smoking: how they spun out their Sunday ration of tobacco. Do you remember? First they smoked the tobacco, then they smoked the ash and wood in the bowl of the pipe, and after that they stuffed in tarred rope and smoked that.’ The man laughed. ‘And when they finally reached the west coast and the icecap was behind them… I’ll never forget how Nansen describes the pleasure of feeling earth and rock under his feet again, the glorious smell of grass. And then, to crown it all, how they s
tretched out in the soft heather and, with the greatest relish, puffed on pipes filled with moss. You have to read it; it’s quite amazing. It must have something to do with the joy of being alive. It was after reading that book that I took up the pipe.’

  Jonas smiled. For some reason he found this quite splendid. Standing here. Him and this man. Why had he come to Yerevan? Perhaps to hear a total stranger wax eloquent about a passage from a book that extolled the joys of pipe-smoking or to hear that name, Nansen, to hear that it lived on here, had survived here, hundreds of miles from Norway. Was a part of the language. Flesh and blood. For some unknown reason, Jonas felt a rapport with the man standing next to him, as if, although he didn’t know it, he owed his life to Nansen Sarjan; he stands there surveying the lovely city of red stone, still listening to the sighing all around him: it sounds like the hum of a huge fan, a hum that carried within it a sense of anticipation, of preparing for something big, in exactly the same way as when his father pulled out the stops on the organ before, like a delicious shock, he broke into the prelude. Jonas remembered that there had been a little organ on board Nansen’s ship, the Fram, on the first polar expedition. Was it Nansen himself who had played it? Jonas peered down at the city. It was winter, but there was hardly any snow. He took a deep breath, felt powerful, confident, as if he were at a point in his life when anything, absolutely anything, could happen.