The Conqueror Page 2

On ordinary days Anne Beate often wore a traditional Setesdal sweater, and maybe it was its beautiful pattern which made Jonas feel that Anne Beate’s tits had an ornate look about them, that their swelling contours underneath her jersey were somehow the embodiment of the perfect breast’s form, just as the metre rod in Paris was the ur-prototype of a metre. Jonas was devoutly, or perhaps more accurately, hormonally convinced that the greatest joy in the world would be granted to whoever was permitted to lay hands on those breasts. Suddenly he remembered a song from Sunday School: ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’. Jonas knew that that was just how it must feel.

  Ironically, two obstacles lay between Jonas and the two objects of his dreams. For one thing, Anne Beate Corneliussen, the ABC of Sex, was alarmingly fickle and unpredictable. On one occasion, when a certain bold lad plucked up the courage to make an impertinent suggestion as they were walking through the front gate of Grorud Elementary School, she calmly removed his glasses, snapped them in two, then stamped on them, leaving the hapless lad to grope his way home, more or less blindly. Secondly, and possibly worse, she was sort of going out with Frank Stenersen, or Frankenstein as he was known, since children – like a lot of adults – confuse Dr Frankenstein with Frankenstein’s monster. Frank was nicknamed Frankenstein because of his size and his somewhat formidable appearance, to which a barbwire-like dental brace added a particularly striking touch. In other words, Anne Beate preferred the tougher lads, the kind with Beatles boots and long hair, who smoked and swapped condoms in the bike shed.

  Frank Stenersen fitted this profile perfectly, his meanness was the stuff of legend; he had a soul like a bloody beefsteak. Every other day he earned himself a visit to the headmaster, on one occasion because, in the dining room, he had gone so far as to deface the portrait of Trygve Lie, Grorud’s famous son, with a stump of carrot. The most glaring example of his brutality was, however, the rumour that he had a fondness for hunting for songbirds’ nests so that he could smash the eggs, those harmless little blue eggs. Who could do such a thing? To cap it all – although perhaps this really explained it all – his parents were communists. And everybody knows that to be a member of the NKP, the Norwegian Communist Party, in the sixties was truly to be an outsider; it was tantamount to hanging a sign on your door proclaiming utter godlessness.

  How does one become a conqueror?

  Jonas wanted to try to be one; he wanted to act like one of the tough guys, wanted to act big in front of Anne Beate Corneliussen, the ABC of Sex. He commenced his offensive during the autumn when they were in eighth grade, during a curious event known as ‘Get in on the Act’. Jonas, who normally never performed in public, not even to play the piano, which he did rather well, had put his name down for this, and after having presented something quite different, something safe, at rehearsal, he made his move when they went live, so to speak, on the evening itself, in a stuffy gym hall so jam-packed that people were hanging from the wall-bars. Jonas did a kind of stand-up comedy act, with a routine that, in essence, involved reading out various fictitious letters to the headmaster from parents and fellow pupils. He put on a different voice for each letter, according to who had supposedly sent it, eliciting loud whoops and cheers from the audience – and from the other eighth graders in particular. The success of his turn may have been due not so much to the originality of his script, but to the lamentably low standard of the other acts. But if truth be told, Jonas had developed a certain talent for putting on different voices. This dated from the days when he had produced radio plays – a subject to which I shall return – and he won a well-merited round of applause for a lisping rendition of a letter complaining about how shocking it was, a proper disgrace to the school, that Miss Bergersen should have been seen coming out of Mr Haugen’s room with her hair all mussed up during last year’s class trip. That this was not so far from the truth did not make the ‘letter’ any the less piquant, nor did the fact that those lisping tones could so easily be traced to the staff room. The following lines were uttered through pinched nostrils, as Jonas mimicked one prim mamma: ‘Dear Headmaster: Please ask Miss Rauland to stop wearing blouses made from transparent fabric – my little Gunnar is forever locking himself in the bathroom these days.’ Stamping and clapping. Poor Guggen managed to slip out during the ensuing uproar. For a few seconds Jonas felt as if he had the hall, nay the whole world, in the palm of his hand.

  And it worked. Jonas actually got to speak to Anne Beate. She sauntered up to him while he was at the drinking fountain during the lunch break the following day, bent her head down next to his and placed her fingers over the neighbouring holes to make the jet of water leap higher. Out of the corner of his eye Jonas saw how her Setesdal sweater bulged under her open anorak. ‘Why are you so interested in your English teacher when you could be friends with me?’ she said through moist lips. ‘Why don’t we get together after school?’ And when Jonas, after two seconds’ thought, suggested that they meet in the basement of his block of flats, she agreed without hesitation, and Jonas knew what she was indirectly agreeing to: he would get to feel her tits.

  During the last classes of the day he wasn’t really there. He was an astronaut just before lift-off. He was going to see the far side of the moon. He was going to hold Venus and Jupiter in his hands. And Frankenstein didn’t know a thing. That he might ever find out was not something Jonas wanted to think about. But he couldn’t back out now; this was, as a Norwegian writer once put it, the whisper of the blood and the prayer of the bones, this was his chance, at long last, to discover for himself how ‘her ripe breasts shot out like lightning bolts from her body’, as Daniel had read, whispered, from the top bunk, his nose buried in a book by Agnar Mykle. Jonas ran all the way home from school. Anne Beate had finished school an hour before him, he saw her bike parked outside the entry – balloon tyres, everything about her was big; he opened the door and took a deep breath before descending into the underworld.

  The basements. Many a tale could be told of the gloomy basements of Solhaug, the housing estate where Jonas grew up. They had served as the burial chambers inside pyramids where Jonas and Little Eagle had hunted for treasure, equipped with intricately drawn maps, scorched at the edges. They had been dripping caves inhabited by beasts and dragons, especially dragons. Those basements had formed the setting for the most wordless mystery plays, the venue for the meetings of secret clubs, where code words were whispered over flickering candle flames and rings set with glass diamonds changed fingers. They had been bunkers, especially after the weighty bombproof doors were installed – a delayed result of the Cold War. It is, by the way, quite amazing when one thinks, today, of all those bombproof doors and bomb shelters that suddenly became mandatory. The whole of Norway prepared for a life in the catacombs. Because it has already been forgotten that, although the fifties and sixties may in many ways have seemed a time of optimism, people – or at any rate all those who kept abreast of things – really did believe that an atom bomb could be dropped at any minute; it was an unpleasant fact of life, giving rise to a constant sense of insecurity which rendered the growing prosperity somehow even more intense.

  So, behind those bombproof doors, Jonas and Little Eagle had also been the sole survivors, new versions of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, consigned to living in a dark, desolate basement. But now Jonas was willingly going to let himself be bombarded. He thought of the explosion that would occur as he laid his hands on Anne Beate. ‘Her breasts were like explosives under her jersey…’

  He would not, of course, switch on the light, that went without saying. He closed the door, heard the hollow echo resound down the basement passage, the sort of sound used in films to create a sense of dread, of claustrophobia. It was cold. It was pitch-dark. The air was so fraught with tension that he could hardly breathe. He bit his lip, groped his way along the walls in which wooden doors, rough and flaking, punctuated the stippled surface at regular intervals.

  They had arranged to meet in the centre, on a landing that opened onto
the next basement passage. His whole body was one great, pounding heart. Something was about to happen. He could hear a buzzing sound, like that from a transformer. Sensed danger. Lightning bolts shooting from breasts. High voltage. Something was about to happen. Two big tits, two hard nipples, switches that would turn his life around. He caught a whiff of something, the scent of an animal, a wild beast. Woman, he thought. A willing woman.

  Something was wrong. But he could not turn round. He had to fight. He knew now what it was. He was ready to fight and not, in fact, afraid. He was all but expecting to be tackled from behind, for his legs to be knocked from under him. Nothing happened. He heard heavy breathing in the darkness. A fury. A fury that breathed. He was prepared to run into a body but was caught completely unawares by a fierce grip. A demonstration of raw power. A huge hand closes around his balls and pushes him up against the wall, a grip that holds him there, his limbs are paralysed. He knows who has him pinned up against the wall. Frank Stenersen. A communist, a real, live communist, and inside the bomb shelter. What one fears most of all. An enemy within.

  Frank Stenersen. Frankenstein. There was no doubt about it. A monster on some kind of high, induced by an adrenalin-coursing lust for revenge. The other’s foul breath rammed Jonas’s nostrils; he thought to himself that the stench must stem from bits of food stuck between the metal wires of his brace. Then he felt the grip on his balls tighten and a sickening pain spread throughout his body. Every boy knows what I’m talking about, every one who has been rammed in the groin by a football or a knee. ‘Please,’ Jonas gasped. ‘Try to talk your way out of this,’ Frankenstein hissed through the wiring on his teeth. ‘Stop messing about,’ Jonas groaned. ‘So you wanted to grope Anne Beate’s tits, did you?’ Frankenstein said, squeezing harder, a little bit harder all the time. Jonas thought of Frankenstein and the story about the birds’ eggs. A soft squeal of pain escaped him. The pain was so bad that he saw stars in the darkness. Jonas felt that this entity that was him was merely a fragile illusion, that a firm grip on his balls was all it took to shatter it. ‘Write a letter to the Head about this, you lousy little prick!’ snarled Frankenstein. He squeezed still tighter for a second, before letting go – tossed Jonas aside like a fish with a broken neck. Jonas heard footsteps, heard the heavy bombproof door open and bang shut again. He lay there in the darkness, weeping, consoling himself with the fact that there had been no one to see. I ought perhaps to add that, after this incident, Jonas would always feel a tightening of his testicles whenever he found himself in a tricky situation, not only that, but a contraction of his balls could actually warn him that trouble was brewing. Like a Geiger counter detecting uranium, his testicles signalled danger.

  Jonas got up, tottered over to the door, afraid for a moment that he had been locked in; he screwed up his eyes against the light, dragged himself up the steps. It seemed to him that he climbed upwards and upwards, that he made the ascent of something more than just a flight of steps leading to an exit. He had been dead, and now he was alive again. Either that or he had undergone a transformation, emerged as another person. And already at this point, long before he would learn that Frankenstein was not the name of the monster but of its creator, Jonas divined that by shooting a bolt of lightning through his balls, as it were, Frank Stenersen had turned him into a monster, or more accurately: had made him see that he had always been a beast, that the drool-making thought of conquering two strutting breasts was, at heart, monstrous. And above all, in a flash, when the pain was its height, Jonas Wergeland had perceived how dangerous, how wonderfully fiendish and artfully treacherous and yet how indescribably delightful and desirable and, not least, mysterious, girls were.

  As Jonas staggered like a cripple out into the light, he realized that Frankenstein’s squeezing of his balls was not so much a punishment for chatting up Anne Beate as the penalty for having shown off on stage. For having made a boast that he could not live up to or for which he was not prepared to take the consequences. So even then, at the age of thirteen, Jonas Wergeland ought to have understood that performing in public, in the strangest, most roundabout ways, can get your balls in a squeeze.

  Carl the Great

  Is it possible to find a beginning, something that might have prepared us for the episode that shook, nay, stunned the whole of Norway? Might it lie in something as innocent as a journey abroad?

  When, after four days surrounded by nothing but water, Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck and watched the green island slowly rise up out of the sea before him, truly rise up, as if it had been made for this moment, it occurred to him that this must have been how Columbus felt when he spied the first islands of the Caribbean – although he had been sailing for much longer and towards a quite different destination. Jonas had, nonetheless, the feeling that he was approaching an unknown continent. And as they slipped through the opening in the coral reef and found themselves, all at once, in Apia harbour, encircled by greenery, a green as bright as the slope running up to peaks he could not see – hidden as they were behind the first range of hills – the island on which he was about to set foot seemed to him like another Eden, a fresh start.

  Why did Jonas Wergeland travel?

  One day, Professor, someone will write a weighty treatise on the influence of Carl Barks on generations of Europeans. That’s right: Carl Barks – not Karl Marx. No one should be surprised when, one day, some individual becomes, say, Secretary-General of the United Nations and, to the question as to what his or her greatest influences have been, does not, as expected, say The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis or the works of Leo Tolstoy but quite simply replies: some cartoon ducks. In other words: those incomparable stories from the pen of American chicken farmer Carl Barks.

  Jonas read very, very little as a child and adolescent, but he did devour every single Donald Duck comic issued from the fifties until well into the sixties – for reasons to which I shall return – and although he knew nothing about the contributing writers and illustrators, it was Carl Barks’s strips which made the biggest impact on him. So much so that certain stories were read as many as a hundred times, to the point where he knew them by heart; one might almost say they settled themselves as ballast inside him. Just as children of an earlier age had their hymns off pat, verse upon verse, Jonas knew the adventures of Donald Duck. Carl Barks opened wide the door not only onto the history of the world, including all its myths and legends, but also onto its geography. The countless expeditions Jonas undertook in the company of Barks’s heroes represented a grand tour not unlike that made by Niels Holgersson and his geese. Barks’s comic strips presented a first impression of regions and countries that never faded from Jonas’s mind. Considered from a certain angle, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Carl Barks who gave Jonas the urge to travel and to travel far.

  Of all Carl Barks’s fantasies, there were few which Jonas liked better than those involving journeys to faraway places, to virtual Utopias no one knew existed: for example, that famed epic of the trip to Tralla La in the Himalayas, where money was unheard of, or the expedition into the forests of the pygmy Indians who talked in rhyme; or the trek into the mists of the Andes, where they stumbled upon the weird geometric universe of the square people. But Jonas also had a penchant for some of the shorter traveller’s tales, especially those that took Carl Barks’s trouserless ducks to the isles of the South Seas, to islands where the people sang ‘Aloha oe!’ and wealth was measured in coconuts. He particularly enjoyed the hair-raising trip to Tabu Yama, a volcanic island, where Uncle Scrooge had gone to search for black pearls in the lagoon.

  I think, therefore, it is safe to say that Jonas Wergeland went – albeit unwittingly – to Polynesia to look for Carl Barks or to compare Carl Barks’s creations with the real thing, although I’m sure this is not the reason he would have given. On this, one of his first long trips in the seventies, his prime aim was to visit a place that was as unspoiled as possible, relatively speaking at least. And when he stood by the rail of the boat
, looking towards Apia and those green hillsides, the landscape really did seem to have a virginal air about it, the air of some last remaining paradise: ‘Upolu, Apia, Utopia. But no sooner had that ostensible goal been achieved than he realized that he did not, in fact, have any idea why he had come here. In a way – and this is how Jonas Wergeland regarded most of his travels – he went there to discover why he had gone there.

  Samoa may seem a long way away, Professor: very far, at any rate from everyday life in Norway. But we live in an age when all countries have become a part of all other countries. So I would just like to mention here that Samoa was, of course, not as unspoiled as Jonas Wergeland had thought or hoped: that Samoa has also had its part to play in the history of Norway. For it was here that a Norwegian by the name of Erik Dammann came to stay with his family for a while in the sixties, for much the same reason that Uncle Scrooge went to Tralla La, and to some extent it was here that he gained the insight which, not long afterwards, inspired him to write a book and, prompted by the overwhelming response to this book, to found a popular movement calling itself The Future In Our Hands, one of the oddest phenomena in the history of post-war Norway, a movement which, at its height at any rate, seemed to suggest that a surprisingly large number of Norwegians were receptive to the idea of another way of life and a very different global distribution of commodities. So Samoa could, in fact, be seen as the starting point for this movement; it might not be going too far, either, to say that Erik Dammann was actually trying to turn the whole of Norway into another Samoa. Jonas’s brother Daniel got particularly carried away – as was his wont – by such prospects for a couple of years, a phase which more or less overlapped with his involvement with the more extreme and far more puritanical and ascetic variant of these same ideals, namely, the Marxist-Leninist movement. Daniel subscribed to the more practical aspects of Dammann’s credo with a fanatical fervour; he even gave up drinking Coca-Cola, something which, considering the amount of Coke he consumed at that time, must be regarded as the doughtiest of all his doughty feats in life and indeed one of the few times when, opportunistic bastard that he was, he actually made a sacrifice.