The Conqueror Read online

  Jonas Wergeland was, however, blissfully ignorant of Erik Dammann’s links with Samoa as he strolled along Beach Road, the main thoroughfare in Apia, looking for somewhere cheaper to stay than Aggie Grey’s Hotel. It was hot and humid, and a sweet scent filled the air – not from spices, but from flowers. Apia itself was not much more than a large village: the church towers and spires rising above the white, two-storey wooden houses with their corrugated iron roofs the only sign that this was, in fact, a town. Just five or ten minutes’ walk from the town centre the wooden houses gave way to fale, open-sided huts thatched with palm branches. The only familiar thing that Jonas could see was the bamboo, which called to mind his boyhood ski poles. He walked along Beach Road, clad in a neutral – one might almost say universal – tropical suit, glorying in the feeling of being a total stranger, a person whom none of the inhabitants of ‘Upolu or Apia knew anything about. For all they know, I could be a young scientist, he thought, or the rebellious son of a billionaire, or – why not? – a writer looking for romantic inspiration, an excuse to get sand between his toes.

  This sense of absolute anonymity was to some extent ruined the very next morning as he was eating breakfast at the guesthouse. When a young, hippie-looking man from New Zealand who, it transpired, had a neighbour of Norwegian descent, heard that Jonas was Norwegian, he immediately started blethering on about Ole Bull, wanting to know why in hell Ole Bull didn’t establish Oleanna, his Utopian colony, on Samoa. It would have had a much better chance of success here than in America, of all the stupid, bloody places. ‘Can’t you just hear it?’ he said. ‘Ole Bull’s violin interwoven with those lovely Samoan harmonies.’

  As a way of escaping from this conversation, later that day Jonas walked down to the market and took a bus out of town, a bus that looked more like a gaily decorated, open-sided shed on wheels. He got off at a random spot next to a banana grove, not far from a village, but these he skirted around and walked through breadfruit trees and bushes covered in exotic scarlet blooms, down to the sea, three to four hundred yards beyond the village. The beach was just as it ought to be, with palms bending over a crescent-shaped ribbon of golden sand. Jonas stopped to gaze in wonder at the lagoon, the seabirds sailing over the bands of foam where the Pacific broke against the reef. The sky was overcast. He discerned the top of a volcano beyond the hills, shrouded in mist, almost unreal.

  Jonas feels a faint pinching of his testicles and turns around: a group of men are walking towards him. All are clad in lava-lavas, gaily-patterned sarongs, most are bare to the waist, a couple are wearing shirts. Some of them are carrying palm-leaf baskets on poles across their shoulders. Several are clutching sapelu knives, the kind used for splitting coconuts. Jonas’s first thought is that his life is in danger, that he must have committed some dire offence against something or someone – thoughts of broken taboos flash through his mind – but he quickly realizes that the men seem happy to see him, that they aren’t just happy, they look as if they can hardly believe their luck, they are all talking at once, pointing excitedly and yet respectfully, as if he were a stranded emperor. They keep up a constant stream of chatter, smiling broadly. He doesn’t know what to make of it all. He says something. None of them speak English. They point to the sand, the palms, the reef offshore, nod their heads. They point to his tropical duds, laugh, point to his sunglasses, his hat. ‘Matareva,’ they say again and again. And then, pointing to him: ‘Mr Morgan.’

  Jonas introduced himself, pronouncing his name slowly, said that he was from Norway, repeated this in all the languages he knew, said that he studied the stars: this was at a little-known period in his life when Jonas Wergeland was attending classes at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. He pointed to the sky, pronounced the words ‘Southern Cross’, and wasn’t it true, he said, or tried to say, that these islands were home to master navigators who sailed by the so-called ‘star paths’, the kaveinga? They merely laughed, not understanding a word, smiled, bowed, went through the motions of embracing an imaginary woman, mimicking romantic scenes. ‘Mr Morgan,’ they insisted. Jonas waved his hands in protest, but it made no difference; their expressions said he couldn’t fool them, they knew who he was. So when Jonas heard the sound of a bus in the distance he jabbed at his watch and excused himself, then jogged off through the grove and up to the road. The men followed him, beckoning, as if inviting him to come with them to the village. He mimed a polite no, but this did not stop them from staying with him until the bus drew up, and when he waved goodbye, it was clear from their gestures that they were urging him to come back soon.

  Jonas put the whole incident out of his mind until his penultimate day on the island. He had hitched a ride on a yacht bound for Fiji; he would have to leave earlier than planned. On impulse he grabbed something from his bag and caught the bus back to the village. He got there an hour before sundown. The littlest children spotted him straight away and led him around smoking cooking fires and through the aroma of baked taro to the headman’s fale, to an elderly man lying on a mat with his head on a neck rest. When the formalities had been got out of the way Jonas was once more addressed by one of the young men from the beach – Jonas guessed that he must be the headman’s son – and then invited to enter his fale. Before long more men appeared. Jonas was ushered to one of the mats inside the hut, an open construction sitting on a coral-stone platform, with a roof made from the leaves of the coconut palm. The others sat down, smiled at him as they had done before. One of them touched him, as if to check whether he was real. Beyond the uprights of the hut a bunch of kids followed the proceedings. A woman brought in a bowl of kava. As far as Jonas could make out this was not a traditional kava ceremony, they had some other reason for passing the half coconut shell to him, as if sealing a contract, or celebrating something that went beyond any stretch of his imagination, but he drank, he drank and nodded, felt it behove him to do so, drank the greyish-white liquid which tasted chalky and made his whole mouth numb. The men sat cross-legged, speaking sometimes to him, sometimes to one another, Jonas made out certain words: ‘Matareva’ cropped up again and again, as did ‘Mr Morgan’. Jonas also thought he heard Gary Cooper’s name mentioned more than once. He remembered that a number of films had been shot on the island and things began to fall into place.

  As darkness fell some women came in carrying freshly cooked dishes wrapped in banana leaves and woven coconut-fibre baskets of fruit. The sky was the colour of the hibiscus blossoms they wore in their hair. Soon the stars, too, appeared: unfamiliar constellations, seeming to offer endless possibilities for new ways of navigating. Jonas realized that he was a guest of honour. That this was no ordinary act of Samoan hospitality. No, it was more than that. They mistook him for someone else. He did not know who or what. Nor whether there was any risk attached to this case of mistaken identity. The men chattered incessantly, eyed him closely, nodded, smiled. He was an empty shell. They piled things into him. They turned him into someone else, a great man perhaps. All he did was to put up no resistance, make no protest.

  Someone lit a paraffin lamp that hung from the ceiling. An array of dishes was set before him. He recognized fish in leaves, possibly octopus too, together with some indeterminate creamy paste. He spotted baked breadfruit, slices of taro in coconut milk, papaya and whole pineapples – he had no idea what the other things were. One person kept wafting the flies away from the food. Another brought him a dented cup containing some sort of cocoa.

  The men cast curious glances at Jonas as he ate. On one of them he could see the edge of a big tattoo, the rest was concealed by his lava-lava. Maybe it was the glimpse of this strange design – either that or the night sky – that brought home to him something he had, without knowing it, learned from Carl Barks’s traveller’s tales: that we will always have the wrong idea about other cultures. We can never really understand them. We think we have understood something, but in fact we understand nothing.

  The talk flew back and forth around him, the word ‘Hollywood’
cropped up at regular intervals, and by putting two and two together Jonas suddenly grasped that, despite his youth, they thought he was a director, a film director searching for a location for a film. They thought he meant to choose their beach. He felt laughter well up inside him. Or was it fear? How amazing. They took him for a film director. Or so he thought. And in that instant Jonas Wergeland knew why he had come here: he had come here to be part of this very experience, to sit on a mat in a fale under a mind-reeling, star-studded sky and be treated like a great man, a film director. And suddenly all his embarrassment was gone and instead he found himself seeing this entire, grandiose misapprehension as an edifying experience, as something important, something from which he had to learn. This experience might prove to be every bit as valuable as a black pearl, he thought.

  Jonas sat listening to a distant song, not knowing how to thank his hosts for their hospitality. But he did as he always did on such visits, a gesture which also accorded well with what was expected on Samoa. He gave them a present. The same present as always. When Jonas Wergeland went on his travels he invariably took with him a G-MAN saw, a frame and a blade, a product for which his family, or at any rate his mother, was, in a manner of speaking, responsible So now he presented a G-MAN saw from the Grorud Ironmongers to these natives on an island in Samoa, in the South Pacific.

  When Jonas stood at the rail of the yacht the next day, having spent the night in a palm-thatched hut before taking the bus back to town; when Jonas stood there and watched Apia and the rest of the island dwindling to nothing – tropical green sinking into blue – he felt relieved, happy. The previous evening he had lain awake, gazing out between the wooden uprights of the hut, and he carried away with him the memory of that vast, glittering night sky, which also represented an acknowledgment of the infinite potential for other names, other paths to take through the stars. And now, as ‘Upolu vanished from view, he also found it possible to laugh at the whole crazy episode, although he could not rid himself of the thought that deep down there had been a danger there too, that one wrong word, one wrong move could have spelled disaster for him. He thanked God, in a way, that he had escaped before the misunderstanding had been discovered.

  On the other hand his heart was heavy. He had a feeling that this confusion, being mistaken for someone else, was a formative experience, that in different guises this incident would keep on recurring throughout his life. His despondency was prompted by the thought that perhaps he should not bemoan this fact: that it was, on the contrary, his only hope.

  Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck of a boat and watched a Polynesian island disappear. He had left Norway with hardware and was returning with software, to use terms that were not common parlance back then. You set out carrying goods and come back with ideas. And unlike Erik Dammann, Jonas Wergeland did not return home with a Utopian ideal of Norway, of a new way of life, but with a Utopian ideal of himself. This might be a side of himself – the great director, metaphorically speaking – of which he knew nothing. Maybe, he thought, I’ve been wrong about myself all this time.

  And somehow Jonas sensed that this journey was not over, that no journey is ever over, that they go on, that, like Carl Barks’s most thrilling adventures, they often end with a ‘to be contd.’.

  The Pursuit of Immortality

  The natural thing would, therefore, be to proceed to the trip to Jerevan, but if we’re to follow the sequence I have in mind – that sequence that will, I hope, explain everything – then this is not the place for it. Nor for the story of the stamps, which another – dare I say? – less seasoned narrator might have presented at this point. Here, instead, we must turn to another island. This same thought had also occurred to Jonas Wergeland himself while he was in Samoa: that all the seashells around him reminded him of the large, burnished shells in the parlour of the house on Hvaler, souvenirs of his paternal grandfather’s seafaring days, shells which, when Jonas held one to each ear, brought him the sound of the sea in stereo.

  Jonas was not always alone with his grandfather on the island at the mouth of the fjord. His cousin, Veronika Røed, was often there too, especially in the last summers before they both started school, the house being just as much the childhood home of her father, known as Sir William because of his way of dressing and his aristocratic leanings. There were the two of them, Jonas and Veronika, and their grandfather. Just them and a storybook island abounding with treasure and dragons, with hedgehogs and kittens and bowls of milk, with baking hot rocks and jetties where you could spend half the day fishing for a troll crab only, when you finally caught it, to let it go again.

  They often went out in the rowboat. Jonas loved to watch his grandfather rowing, loved to hear the rasp of skin on wood, the creak of the rowlocks; Jonas would sit on the thwart, admiring his grandfather’s technique, noting how he flicked the blades of the oars and rested on each stroke, rowing with a rhythm that seemed to take no effort and made Jonas feel that they could go on rowing for ever. Actually, it was a funny thing about his grandfather’s rowing: he didn’t row forward, as was usual, he backed the oars, rowed backward so to speak, or rather, the reverse – he said it was easier that way.

  Jonas’s grandfather had once built a model of a Colin Archer lifeboat, an exact replica with the red Maltese Cross ringed in blue on the bow and all, and sometimes they would gently set this in the water. When the wind filled the tiny sails it would sail so well that, seen against the right bit of the background, it could have been taken for a real boat. They would row alongside it, and Jonas played that they were gods, watching over it, that his grandfather was Poseidon and he and Veronika his attendants. Which was not so far from the truth, because to Jonas his grandfather really was a god.

  It was also while pottering about on the boats that their grandfather taught the children to tie knots: first a half-hitch and a bowline, then more complicated rope techniques such as splicing. He even showed them how to tie a double Turk’s Head, the sort of boy-scout knot that Daniel tied in his Cubs neckerchief. Veronika slipped the knotted rope onto her finger and gave Jonas a funny look: ‘Now we’re engaged,’ she said. Jonas had nothing against that. They were the same age, and Veronika was prettier than anybody else he knew, even darker and sultrier than Little Eagle’s mother.

  That summer Jonas was often to be found sitting against the sunbaked wall of the shed, looping bits of rope together. There was one particularly tricky knot which he never mastered: a clove hitch which, had he got it right, would have been almost as intricate in appearance as the drawings that Aunt Laura, the family’s artistic alibi, had shown him, with Arabic characters intertwining in such a way that it looked like a labyrinth. Far easier, and really just as lovely was the square knot. Jonas could not understand how two simple loops could produce something so strong. He never forgot how to do a square knot, not after his grandfather taught him how to tie it by telling him a story about two wrestlers and how the one wrestler won both times.

  But then Omar Hansen told stories almost non-stop, more often than not in the blue kitchen, in that room as full of gleaming copper as an Oriental bazaar. And sometimes when his grandfather was telling a story Jonas was allowed to pound cardamom pods in a brass mortar: spice to be added to the dough for buns. There was nothing quite like it, those thrilling tales combined with the knowledge that they would soon be having freshly baked buns. On his arm, his grandfather had a tattoo of a dragon, done in Shanghai, so he said, and before starting a story he always rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘The dragon has to have air under its wings if the imagination is to soar freely,’ he said. And whether it was the dragon’s flight that helped him or not, Omar Hansen never ran out of stories, he could go on telling them for as long as he could row; he seemed to have lived all his life for only this: to sit one day in a blue kitchen with saucer-eyed grandchildren sitting opposite him. And as he span his yarns, each one more amazing than the one before, he peered at a point that seemed somehow beyond time and space, in such a way that fine wrinkles f
anned out from his eyes to his temples, as if he were also, actually, endeavouring to twine these tales into one enormous clove hitch, into the story, the crucial knot, that lay behind all the others and bound them together.

  One day, when old Arnt had been left to keep an eye on Jonas and Veronika, Omar Hansen came back home from Strömstad – which is to say, all the way from Sweden – with a new treat, a wondrous thing: a peach. These days, when tropical fruit is taken for granted in Norway, when you can buy anything from mangoes to kiwis just about anywhere, no one would give it a second thought, but in those days peaches were a rarity – Jonas had certainly never seen one, nor had Veronika; they had eaten canned peaches with whipped cream on one occasion, but this was something quite different, this was the real thing. Their grandfather laid the peach on a silver platter. ‘This peach is from Italy,’ he said. ‘But originally the peach comes all the way from China.’

  It was one of the most beautiful things Jonas had ever seen: that groove in the flesh, the golden skin blushing pink on the one side. Their grandfather let them touch it, and Jonas held it tenderly, savouring the feel of the velvety surface; it reminded him of the fuzzy-felt pictures in Sunday School. From that day onwards he had no problem understanding how a complexion could be described as ‘peachy’. Grandfather said it had to sit a while longer, it wasn’t absolutely perfect yet. ‘We’ll share it tomorrow,’ he said and solemnly placed the peach back on its silver platter.

  They sat round the oilcloth-covered table, gazing at the fruit, which seemed almost to hover above the silver platter, while Omar Hansen outdid himself with a story featuring Marco Polo as its central character and Jonas and Veronika as his armour-bearers – or perhaps it was the other way round – and this peach as one of the props; it had something to do with a city in China called Changlu and a bit about the pursuit of immortality, a thrilling adventure, almost as thrilling as the peach itself.