The Conqueror Page 19

  A journey need not be long, in terms of time, to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.

  A National Monument

  It takes no great stretch of the imagination to spot the connection between this point, a conversation in the Caucasus, and a winter’s tale from long before, in Norway – between two episodes so well-suited to demonstrating that each new moment is only one of many possibilities.

  Jonas liked ice, especially the ice in late autumn. After the first few days of hard frost he and Little Eagle always ran up to Steinbruvannet to see how the water had somehow stiffened, acquired a film of gleaming crystal. His limbs trembled with suspense as they slid warily out onto the ice, listening all the time, like animals, for a warning snap. Jonas never could understand how ice this thin did not break, not even when it gave underfoot: that this fraction of an inch was enough to bear his weight. Ice always gave him an uneasy sense of being part of the lightness of being.

  They tended to stay close to the shore, where the water was shallow, crouched or lay down to scan the pond bottom and the fish beneath them. Jonas and Ørn played that they were lying on top of a gigantic television screen, immersing themselves in it from top to toe. Either that or they felt like Captain Nemo drawing back the curtains on his submarine, the Nautilus, to suddenly be brought face to face with the drama of the deep.

  Once the ice was safe and before the first snow had fallen, the lakes in the surrounding countryside became a Mecca for skaters; it was on Steinbruvannet, with the aroma of his parents’ beef tea in his nostrils, that Jonas learned to master the Norwegian national sport, stage by stage, so to speak, working his way from triple-bladed trainer skates to speed-skates. From the very first he loved it, adored the zing of the fresh, clean ice, the vibrant chime each time the blades sliced through. Most of all he loved to spin – not least when he was skating across ice-bound water where no one had been before him – and examine the patterns left by his skates. ‘It’s a sort of secret writing,’ he said to himself. ‘Symbols that have to do with conquest.’

  It was on such a day, late in the autumn of the year when he was going with Margrete, that Jonas made his first tentative attempt to build a monument, a monument of glittering ice – an impulse which ought probably to be viewed in the light of the new-won self-confidence with which he had been filled after the incident in the quarry eighteen months earlier. And I really do not think, Professor, that we should attach too much importance to the fact that this monument was founded on frost, on cold.

  The way had been paved for this sudden entrepreneurial urge by a bet made by the grownups at Solhaug. Late one night during a gents-only get-together in Five-Times Nilsen’s cosy living room to christen the normally so diffident salesman’s latest acquisition – a magnificent bookcase complete with that last word in luxury: an integral drinks cabinet – Five-Times Nilsen had got a little above himself and announced that he was going ice bathing, so help him he was. And since the others didn’t believe he would do it, they ended up making a bet – with a fair bit of money in the pot, I can tell you, a sum that confirmed the Norwegian people’s strange mania for gambling and penchant for lotteries of any description. Jonas had, in fact, seen the drinks cabinet on one occasion, one time when he was selling flags, which is to say: suffering the torture to which all children are subjected, of having a tray full of flags hung on a cord around his neck and being shooed off to sell or, no, not sell: beg. Jonas hated this, hated standing on people’s doorsteps with his head bowed, this yoke around his neck, and a ‘Pleasewillyoubuy’ on his lips. It ought to be said, though, that Mrs Nilsen was the saving of every desperate flag-seller, or their victim rather; the textured wallpaper in the Nilsen’s hall was like a pincushion, studded with flowers from the TB Association, Lifeboat flags, pins for Cancer Research and the Children’s Ski Foundation. And it was on one such call, while Mrs Nilsen was fumbling with her small change, that Jonas caught a glimpse of the new marvel in the living room, a proper little Soria Moria Castle, with a lid that folded down, built-in lighting and a mirror at the back, giving the impression of double – nay – infinite enjoyment, not least due to the brightly coloured contents of the various bottles, which reminded Jonas of his father’s extraordinary collection of aftershave lotions, since this too was connected with scents, with men in white shirts and braces getting all het up; and on a shelf at the very top, if it was not a mirage, Jonas discerned the most renowned items of all: the highball glasses with the scantily clad ladies on the outside who, when viewed from the inside, were stark naked. So Jonas had no problem, later, in understanding how Five-Times Nilsen could have become a mite loose-tongued after a few highballs – and this was in the days when a highball really was a highball, served in a raffia sleeve which conjured up thoughts of grass skirts, lagoons and warm water – that Five-Times Nilson should declare, possibly while peering through his whisky at the naked lady on the inside of the glass, like an enticing reward in the distance, that he was going ice bathing, so help me, anyone wanna bet that I won’t!

  And go ice bathing he did. One Sunday morning, at a relatively early hour to save attracting an embarrassing crowd, a few of the fathers made their way up to Steinbruvannet. Chairman Moen had even got hold of an ice bore and a good old-fashioned ice saw, so it didn’t take long to cut out a fairly large, square hole – the ice wasn’t all that thick at that time anyway. And let it be said right at the outset, since this is only a side-story, that Five-Times Nilsen actually did take a dip in the icy water – carried it off with considerable panache, in fact, and to the great glee of his neighbours. Not only that, but his wife, the rather pettish, but kind-hearted Mrs Nilsen, insisted on him staying home from the shop for a week, quarantined him, would not open the door to anyone, not even a poor flag-seller with his yoke around his neck; she was too busy squeezing oranges to save her husband from catching a cold or perhaps to give him the illusion of more tropical climes as he lay on the sofa with his face turned to the drinks cabinet’s scintillating solar system. There were those who were sure that he too was well and truly squeezed that week; word was that Mrs Nilsen would stop at nothing to warm him up again – there were even a few on the estate who wondered whether they ought not to rename him Ten-Times Nilsen.

  In any case, the upshot of it all was that lots of blocks of ice – fragments of ice is possibly a better description – of all sizes lay strewn around the hole where the ice bathing had taken place, when Jonas and Margrete went up to Steinbruvannet to skate, on the afternoon of that same Sunday.

  With Lego, Jonas had always found the transparent bricks the most fascinating – as a small boy he constantly dreamed of being able to build a whole house solely out of them – so the minute he saw those beautiful, gleaming blocks lying there all ready and waiting he knew he had to build something out of them. If he were honest with himself, he had been rambling on about doing something of the sort as they were walking up to the lake; after Margrete had turned those black and faintly Oriental eyes of hers on him and told him that when she was nine – before the family moved back to Norway, that is – she had visited Harbin in China with her father the diplomat and seen the fabulous ice sculptures and ice lanterns created for the New Moon Festival held there: thirty degrees below and a whole park full of shimmering ice structures. ‘It was like being on another planet. Triton, or somewhere like that,’ she said.

  Only a girl like Margrete could think of mentioning one of the moons of Neptune in a sentence. She was wearing earmuffs over hair so black that it had a bluish sheen to it, like Cleopatra’s in the strip cartoons. Jonas stole a glance at her, so in love that it hurt.

  What makes a murderer?

  He forgot all about his skates. There weren’t many people on the ice apart from them anyway, only a couple of guys playing ice hockey way down by the dam. Jonas carried the blocks away from the hole, further out onto the ice, seeing in his mind’s eye a palace the like of which had never been seen before. On this parti
cular Sunday the temperature was hovering just above – rather than below – zero, so the pieces of ice had not had a chance to freeze solid, instead they were slippery and slightly wet on the surface. Jonas started to build something, took a sheath knife from his rucksack, cut and pared the ice as he saw fit. Although for the most part he could use the pieces as they were, since they were all different shapes to start with. The hardest part was to stop the blocks from sliding off one another. ‘What do you think I should make?’ he called to Margrete. ‘Oslo Town Hall?’

  ‘The Crystal Palace,’ she laughed.

  While Jonas was building, with no particular plan to begin with, Margrete danced around him on her figure skates, like a good fairy giving the work her blessing. She could do some simple figure skating, and she was a lovely, and really quite sexy sight in her stretchy ski pants and tight woollen sweater. But Jonas had no eyes for her, or rather: he was more keen on showing her that he was a conqueror, that he could create something magnificent, something of which she would never have dreamed him capable; he was totally engrossed, worked like a soul possessed, saw that the structure was starting to resemble a stave church, or maybe it was more like a slender ziggurat, a sacred building; he employed his knife like a woodcarver’s gouge on the hard ice, endowing those pieces which were to sit on the top with a more distinctive form, like little spires. On the very pinnacle he placed one chunk, totally transparent, and as he lifted it into place he noticed that there was a pearl embedded in it. Or not a pearl, but one of those little pearl ear-studs. He couldn’t imagine how it came to be there: trapped, as it were, inside an ice-cold giant clam. Maybe someone had dropped it; there was no way of telling. Most likely it wasn’t a real pearl either, he thought. Probably just some cheap junk. He wasn’t going to check right now, anyway, because he was finished, just as the last rays of the sun made the ice palace almost luminous; its walls and towers glittered and gleamed as if they were made from precious gems, or prisms. It was the sort of structure in front of which, at a later date, someone would place a vodka bottle, to produce a fabulous advertising shot. Jonas, for his part, thought fleetingly of a mirrored drinks cabinet.

  Jonas calls out happily to Margrete, who is circling around further out on the ice. She does not hear him, is practising a jump. They are alone now; Jonas cannot see anyone down by the dam. It’s getting colder. He is glad of that, knows that this will cement his rather frail, unsteady construction. He calls out again, feeling proud, wanting to show off his masterpiece, a marvel of consummate symmetry. The sun is sinking lower and lower, soon only the tops of the spires will flash in the light of the last rays piercing the tops of the fir trees in the west. But it looks fantastic, a combination of stave church and a sort of ziggurat – truly a national monument – that might have been built out of transparent white marble, or air. A building from the land of fable. Jonas beholds it in the light, totally transparent, almost floating above the ice.

  He heard the sound of skates, turned round, and at that very moment, as Margrete was making her way towards him, arms outstretched, smiling, black hair shot with blue – in his moment of triumph – disaster struck. Jonas would never understand how it could have happened, where it came from, who had sent it – although hadn’t he perhaps seen a shadow after all, someone who hadn’t gone home, down by the dam? For just then a puck came gliding towards him; Jonas spied it while it was quite a long way off, a dot, a tadpole, it should have ground to a halt long ago, but it glided on and on, not moving all that fast, but not slow enough for Jonas to get to it and stop it, he was too far away from the ice structure, he tried, but his legs kept giving way on the ice, it looked hilarious, and meanwhile the puck, ‘out of nowhere’ he thought, glided relentlessly towards the ice palace – which at that moment was shimmering with an almost unearthly lustre, as if it were made from frozen air – and rammed one of the nethermost blocks sideways on, knocking it just enough out of place to bring Jonas’s work of art tumbling down, with infinite slowness so it seemed to him, and with a lovely tinkling sound, like sleigh bells, he thought later, sending all the little pieces slithering in every direction, a long, long way in every direction; and in some measure – Jonas had to admit it, even though he was half in shock – the actual destruction was as fascinating an experience as the building of it, that glorious instant of utter collapse, a shower of bright sparks and the music created by the sound of tinkling ice.

  And Margrete, what did she do? Margrete had almost reached him when the structure collapsed, she stopped and stared at Jonas, but while he was still standing there, stunned, long after the shards of ice had ceased to jangle and halted in their star-shaped flight, she did a few neat steps on her figure skates, began, in fact, to dance around him, as if through this, her dancing, she was trying to tell him something, forcing him to view this fiasco from another angle. Not only did she dance, she smiled, smiled in a way that, for the first time, led Jonas to suspect that there was a complex, possibly even dangerous, side to her: something he would never understand no matter how hard he tried. She started laughing, could see Jonas was hurt by this but could not stop herself, laughed at him, danced round and round him, laughing out loud, a laughter he would never forget.

  So I ask you, Professor: is it possible, if one considers it from a great enough distance – I was on the point of saying from the ice planet Triton – that Jonas Wergeland killed her way back here?

  Right then, Jonas – as he saw it, at least – was less concerned with Margrete’s odd behaviour than with finding the piece of ice containing the pearl stud. He hunted frantically, he ran hither and yon, combing a wide radius, lifting blocks of ice up to the fading light, but no matter how hard he looked he did not find that one piece. He was desperate, it was as if he knew that he had to find this fragment of ice again, that for some reason it was absolutely vital, that if he could lay hands on it he would be able to avert a catastrophe, that no matter how fake and cheap the pearl was, something of tremendous value would be lost if he did not find it.

  It was a very crestfallen Jonas who slid back to the centre, to the point where the ice monument had stood and where the puck now lay, like a full stop on a huge sheet of paper, putting an end to his endeavour to make an impression. He picked it up, hefted it in his hand, studied it. And I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that this black disc was to become a talisman for Jonas Wergeland. Indeed, he was instantly intrigued by all the scratches, the patterns on its surface. ‘It looks like a scarab,’ Margrete said, looking over his shoulder. ‘The sort of beetle they used to place over the hearts of the dead in Ancient Egypt.’

  After saying a bewildered goodbye to Margrete at the junction with Bergensveien, with the dreadful feeling that their relationship was unlikely to survive the skating season, Jonas went home and took out his own personal Kaba, the black lacquer casket with the mother-of-pearl dragon on its lid. Acting on instinct he lifted out his mother’s round brooch and set it on top of the puck. It was almost the same size in diameter; it fitted astonishingly well. A silvery disc and a black disc. Jonas looked. And what he was looking at was bafflingly beautiful. A brooch, with all of its associations, atop a puck with all of its possibilities, not to say stories. He immediately perceived that, like alchemy, when put together these two became something more than a gem and a puck. A spark had been ignited inside him as he placed the silver brooch on top of the black surface; ideas had taken shape, so disjointed and inexplicable that it made him jump. Maybe that was why the next second he picked up the clock workings from their place next to the box on top of the chest of drawers and threw them into the wastepaper bin. All of a sudden the frame and all those cogs seemed somehow hopelessly old-fashioned and mechanical. Like a psychological steam engine, he thought, something that is no longer of any use to me.

  He eyed this new object, a tracery of silver on a black circle. He stared at it for a long time, so long that he began to discern the corner of something unforeseeable. He felt almost afraid, as if he had dis
covered something dangerous, an unknown weapon with enormous potential.

  Jonas Wergeland had produced his first programme.

  Venus and Mars

  It would not be totally amiss to look upon Jonas Wergeland’s magnificent television series as an extension of sorts of the project at Steinbruvannet, slivers of ice set at different angles to one another to create a three-dimensional space. Or, if you will: a national monument constructed out of crystalline fragments.

  Jonas Wergeland’s programmes were, as I say, subjected to vigorous reassessment after his arrest. Suddenly it seemed that everybody and their uncle could see that Thinking Big was a mass of transparent segments and felt, therefore, duty-bound to sing out like the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. One after another they came forward to prove that this ‘monumental work’, as it had been called, was both cold and cynical and fell into a million pieces at the slightest, critical touch.

  One of the few things which might merit our attention is an interview with one of Jonas Wergeland’s closest colleagues – an exception, this article, in that the emphasis was placed not on Wergeland’s arrogance and effrontery, or his brutality: the fact that he would trample over anyone who got in his way, not unlike the case of the Emperor Qin Shihuang and the Great Wall of China. Instead what was communicated here was an ill-concealed bitterness over the fact that Jonas Wergeland had taken all the credit. This colleague claimed that Wergeland never knew where to draw the line; while he might well have been a wizard once everything was in the can and the post-production work begun, he needed the assistance of a critical eye at the actual planning stage. Jonas Wergeland’s great failing was his tendency to want to include too much, to bite off more than he could chew. His colleague used the programme on Sigrid Undset as an example, and I think it is worth our while to dwell for a moment on this programme, seeing that it turned out to be one of the series’ real tours de force, the one which was bought by the greatest number of television channels worldwide.