The Conqueror Page 4

  Late that night – a warm, almost tropical night – after they had gone to bed, Veronika padded upstairs to where Jonas lay in the old bed in a small room in the attic. It’s not easy to describe the relationship between two children, but there was something between Jonas and Veronika, something which caused their lips automatically to bump together when they played hide-and-seek in the dark in the barn, or when they came face to face in the tunnels formed by the dense tangle of juniper bushes on Tower Hill.

  Outside of Jonas’s room, the wide loft extended like a wilderness beyond the bounds of civilization. Here, old clothes hung over battered trunks plastered with labels from exotic cities, and weather-beaten chests from Zanzibar full of faded copies of Allers Family Journal and The Illustrated Weekly. And in one corner, under some nets, stood the most mysterious thing of all: an old safe, heavy and forbidding. An unopened treasure.

  At the other end of the loft, deep in shadow, loomed a harmonium – what in Norway used to be called a ‘hymn-bike’ – a memento of their grandmother who had, by all accounts, been a God-fearing woman whose heart had burned for the mission service. Actually it was on this instrument that Jonas’s father had begun his musical career, one that had since led him to the organ in Grorud Church. When it was light, Jonas had been known to slip into the shadows and play triads, his feet pumping away at the pedals for dear life. It surprised him to find what a lot of noise it made; he pulled out some knobs and observed how more keys than he had fingers for were then pressed down, as if an invisible spirit were sitting playing alongside him. His grandmother, Jonas thought. The choral songbook, which for a long time he had believed to be full of songs about the sea and fish, was still there, shrouded – appropriately enough – in gloom and open at her favourite hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

  Jonas sits up in bed, can tell right away what Veronika has in mind. She cuddles up close to him, wearing a thin cotton nightdress with blue dolphins on it. ‘Why do we have to wait till tomorrow to eat the peach?’ she says, smelling like no one else: sweet, confusing. Jonas isn’t sure, he wavers: ‘But Granddad has to have a bit too, doesn’t he?’ he says. ‘He’s going to let us have it all anyway,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t you at least go and get it?’

  Jonas tiptoes down to the kitchen, stands for a moment on the linoleum floor gazing in awe at the fruit on its silver platter, hovering in the bright summer night. A planet called China. He feels the pull it exerts on him. As if they belong together, he and the peach. He is Marco Polo. He picks it up and climbs back up to the loft, places it on the sheet in front of Veronika. They look at it. Jonas thinks it is divinely beautiful.

  From an early age Jonas was always on the lookout for objects that were more than they seemed, things that in some way illustrated something he could not put into words. At home he had taken the works out of an old alarm clock. They sat on top of the chest of drawers. A tiny, transparent factory. He liked to look at the gears inside the metal frame, how the cogs turned, how they meshed with one another, not to mention the balance wheel, which pulsated like a little heart. Most mysterious of all was the spring, the spiral that powered all the cogs by slowly expanding. A coiled steel sling. ‘The only thing that spoils it a bit,’ Jonas told Little Eagle, ‘is that the works have to be wound up, that they don’t run by themselves all the time.’

  Daniel had a similar set of clock workings, but he, of course, just had to try to unscrew the frame, with the result that bits went flying in all directions, a bit like splinters from an exploding shell. Jonas had gazed respectfully at the spring lying on the floor, ostensibly harmless and insignificant, almost a yard in length. He saw what force, what driving force it possessed. The secret lay simply in coiling it up.

  The peach had some of this same quality about it. A tension. As of something compressed and capable of expansion.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ Veronika says. Jonas does as he is told, tells himself that the peach demands this, it is a crystal ball which will not reveal anything if he keeps on his pyjamas. Veronika promptly puts one warm hand around his balls. Jonas watches in amazement as his penis rises up, skinny and eager. She puts the other hand around the peach and shuts her eyes. Then she lifts the peach to his mouth. Jonas feels the soft, furred skin against his lips: down, velvet, silk, all at once. He is filled with a fierce hunger. He’s got to have a bite of this fruit. The juice runs down his chin as he sinks his teeth into the skin. It’s good, deliriously good. Veronika takes a bite before offering it to him again. They take bites turn and turn about, sharing it, with her hand cupped around his balls all the while.

  Later in life, Jonas would say that nothing could hold a candle to those first bites of a peach. It was a delight, a treat, the like of which he would never experience again – not even when he dined at Bagatelle in Oslo, in those days the first and only restaurant in Norway to be awarded two stars in the Michelin guide. As the juice and the flesh glided over his tongue and down his throat Jonas felt a glow emanating from the very cortex of his brain, along with a taste in his mouth, which gave him an inkling of continents, spheres, of which he knew nothing.

  Veronika looked adorable, sitting there in her flimsy nightie with its pattern of blue dolphins. Jonas beheld the soft lines of her body, her ankles, calves, the blonde hairs on her arms, brown summer skin covered in golden down. They snuggled up together, taking turns to eat, licking and sucking up every shred, every drop.

  At last all that was left was the stone. It looked like a minuscule, worm-eaten brain. ‘Can I have it?’ he asked, not knowing whether it was because the stone looked nice, or because he wanted to make sure that the evidence of the theft lay in his hands, even though he knew they could never wangle their way out of this particular jam.

  Veronika let go of his balls, lifted up her nightie. She wasn’t wearing any panties. She displayed her genitals. Jonas sat quite still and took in this sight, didn’t touch her, just sat and looked, studying those lines, the gentle swelling, the fleshy softness, the dark slit. She spread those fleshy lips and showed him the inside. It occurred to him that the clitoris – not that he knew that word for it, of course – was a sort of fruit kernel. That this too lay at the heart of something juicy, a fruit, something that could cause the cortex of the brain to glow. At the same time, for some reason he thought of the Turk’s Head knot, saw this thing before him as a knot, a circular knot. Veronika slid her finger a little way into her slit, or knot, then stuck it into Jonas’s mouth. ‘Now we’re spliced forever,’ she said. ‘Now nothing can part us.’

  Jonas slept soundly that night and wasn’t really feeling at all guilty when he came down to breakfast. Veronika and their grandfather were already sitting in the blue kitchen, staring as if in mutual sorrow at the empty silver platter. Jonas knew right away that his cousin had told their grandfather a tale in which all the blame rested with him, Jonas, alone – all alone; no matter what he said, he would not be believed. So he said nothing. They ate in silence, bread with cold mackerel from dinner the day before, and he was on the verge of telling a story, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He realized that the story was no good.

  And afterwards? I don’t know what to say about what happened afterwards, Professor. It would be far too easy to psychoanalyse it. His grandfather was calm, he was perfectly calm when he went out into the forest with a knife: ‘Only one thing’ll do any good here – and that’s a good old-fashioned taste of the birch,’ as he said; he was calm when he took Jonas up to the attic and demonstrated the use of the birch twigs on the boy’s bare backside, rolled up his sleeves, giving Jonas the feeling that it was the tattooed dragon that was angry, that lashed and lashed at his behind; his grandfather brought down the birch again and again, beating steadily, with the same rhythm as when he rowed, as if he could keep it up for hours, but it was this very calmness that vouchsafed Jonas a glimpse of the towering rage, the almost berserker-like frenzy beneath the surface. There was something altogether a little too relentless, a little too self-righteous
, a little too much solemn conviction in the blows his grandfather rained down on Jonas’s behind. For, no matter how he looked at it, Jonas could not see how the eating of this peach, however cheated his grandfather might feel, could justify a grown man with a lifetime of experience behind him putting a terrified little boy over his knee and thrashing him – on his bare behind, at that, and for a long time, for far too long – with a bundle of birch twigs, ceasing only just before the skin broke and the blood ran. It was a brutal, nigh-on wicked act, thought Jonas, young though he was. And it was during those seconds that it dawned on him that there was something wrong, possibly even seriously wrong, with his grandfather. That behind all those stories and yarns, behind the patient backward rowing, there lurked some dark secret, a tricky, inextricable knot. And this suspicion grew no less when his grandfather stood up and gave a sort of a sigh before walking over to the harmonium in the shadows and, with his back to Jonas, proceeded to play ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

  Don’t put down your pen, Professor, I’m not finished. Because even when it hurt the most, Jonas knew that it was worth it. He would have done it again. For he had eaten the peach not just to find out how it tasted but also for another reason: to feed a craving that was more than physical hunger – just as the clock workings on the chest of drawers at home were more than just clock workings – and suddenly he knew that he was willing to endure a great deal in order to satisfy that craving. As he lay there, feeling the birch twigs strike his backside again and again, he sensed a mysterious power building up inside him, and when his grandfather allowed him to get up he felt a jolt run through his body, as if he had taken a huge leap forward, aged several years in one minute.

  The next day, just for fun, he tried to tie that trickiest of knots, the labyrinthine clove hitch, and got it right first time, as if he had been doing it all his life, as if he suddenly had those twists and turns of the rope at his fingertips.

  Jonas kept the peach stone. He made believe that it was a dragon’s brain. Dragons had tiny brains, he knew, but they could harbour a secret, like the safe in the corner of the loft. A pearl, maybe. One day, with Veronika standing over him, he crushed it with a hammer and found another kernel inside the stone, something like an almond. ‘Would you like to have it?’ he asked Veronika.

  ‘If you plant it in the ground, it’ll grow into a dragon,’ she said. ‘Come on, I know a place in the woods, just next to our rope ladder.’ And on the way there she stays him and, with what might almost have been tears in her eyes, says: ‘Did it hurt?’

  The Vertebral Disc

  Allow me, in this connection – and remember: the connections between the stories in a life are as important as the stories themselves – to tell you about a time when Jonas Wergeland felt real hurt or more correctly, about an incident which took place in the midst of that pain. It happened in the emotionally charged year of the EEC referendum, the year when Jonas Wergeland was due to sit his university Prelim – although the thought of sitting an exam seemed the farthest thing from his mind, not to say an absolute impossibility, at that time. He found himself at the northern end of Norway’s largest lake, in the ‘dayroom’ of a hospital, to be more exact, one of those rooms which, with their spartan, simulated cosiness seem more depressing and godforsaken than any other place on earth. As a small boy, whenever he saw a diagram of the human circulatory system Jonas would think to himself that the heart must be like a knot, and that was how it felt now. A knot tightening. Jonas Wergeland sat there, swollen-eyed, twisting a handkerchief round his fingers. Outside it was winter, and dark – as dark and impenetrable as life when it seems most pointless.

  Jonas thought he was alone, but when he looked up, as if through water, there she was. She took him as much by surprise as a car you haven’t seen in your wing mirror, one that’s been in the blind spot but which suddenly appears, seemingly materializing out of thin air, when you turn your head. He felt like asking her to go away, had a truculent ‘Piss off!’ on the tip of his tongue, but bit it back. He shut his eyes. He sniffed. It sometimes occurred to Jonas that the reason he didn’t take up smoking was because he was afraid he would lose the ability to inhale women: to let their scent flow into his bloodstream and excite visions. He had caught a whiff of this scent before, in Viktor’s room.

  She spoke to him: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘No,’ Jonas said – curbing his irritation: ‘No, thanks.’ He kept his eyes shut, as if the world would grow even darker if he opened them.

  But she didn’t go away, she sat down on a chair next to him and placed her hand over his, thinking perhaps that he was a patient. She said nothing. Jonas inhaled her scent. Even with his eyes shut, even amid a maelstrom of black thoughts, he felt something seize hold of him, not of his hand but of his body, that something was drawing him to it, was intent on worming its way inside him: her, this unknown woman.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  He kept his eyes shut, his head bowed, thought first of leaving, but something made him stay, made him speak, say something, tearfully to begin with, but without it being embarrassing, about his best friend, about himself and Viktor, about the Three Wise Men, the bare bones only but enough for her – possibly – to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. She said not a word, simply sat with her hand on his. Jonas had the feeling that her hand led to light.

  When she gets to her feet he looks up. The first thing he sees is a high forehead. Rationality, he thinks. Exactly what I need right now: rationality. A white coat hangs open over her indoor clothes. Her badge reveals that her name is Johanne A. She has just come off duty, is on her way out, home. She nods, gives him a searching look before walking off down the corridor. He follows her with his eyes, feels a faint pressure on his spine, a pressure that spreads throughout his body, like a tremor in the nervous system.

  Jonas skived off school and stayed for some days in Lillehammer, in a town he would always hate. He met Johanne A. again. She was in her mid-twenties, a resident on the surgical ward – this was her first post. She told him what the neurologist had said about Viktor, about the depth of the coma and the swelling. Viktor was still on a respirator in intensive care. She explained the uncertainty of his condition, what treatment they were giving him, how things were likely to go from here. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But there’s nothing more we can do.’

  Shortly before he was due to return home to Oslo, Jonas was sitting on a bench in the Swan Chemist’s Shop on Storgata, staring listlessly at a wall hung with portraits of generations of chemists. All chemists’ shops reminded Jonas of his maternal grandmother, because always, on trips into town with her, they would purchase a mysterious ointment at the chemist’s, the apothecary, on Stortorvet in Oslo – that one, too, with a swan on its façade: the symbol of immortality. And every time they stepped inside that shop his grandmother would throw up her hands in delight at the sight of the tiled floors, the pillars of creamy-coloured marble and a ceiling decorated with symbolic paintings; and while they were waiting she would tell Jonas about the fine old fittings of mahogany and American maple, with drawers of solid oak. ‘Like a temple to medicine,’ she would whisper. For this reason, Jonas always felt there was something rather antiquated – something holy, almost – about chemist’s shops, also now, here in Lillehammer. There was also something about the atmosphere of the place, the odour of creosote, of aniseed and essential oils, which reinforced this sense of a bygone, somehow alchemical, age. Even so, as he was washing down a headache tablet with a drink of water, he instantly recognized that other scent, it was as if he had been caught up in a whirlpool. He turned around. It was her. And there was something about Johanne A.’s figure, her dress and, above all, her high forehead that made her seem utterly anachronistic in those surroundings, like an astronaut in the middle ages. Nonetheless, he knew that there was a connection between her and the chemist’s shop. Or to put it another way: all of Jonas Wergeland’s women represented an encounter with the past.

>   Johanne A. invited him back to her place for coffee. She lived above the hospital, not far from the open-air museum at Maihaugen. They strolled up the hill. It was cold; it was growing dark. She was wearing a big hat, the sort of hat that made heads turn. In the hall Jonas noticed a shelf holding several other eye-catching pieces of headgear.

  The flat was furnished in an unusual style: ‘avant-garde’ was the word that sprang to Jonas’s mind. The furniture in the sitting room looked more like works of art, architectonic concepts sculpted into chairs and storage units. The lighting too was highly original: little flying saucers hovering over glass-topped tables. Products from Bang & Olufsen – a television set and an expensive, metallic stereo system – seemed to belong to a universe unlike any Jonas had ever seen. Jars, vases, ashtrays – even the salt and pepper shakers on the shelf between the kitchen and the sitting room – appeared to have been designed for the atomic age. Jonas felt as if he had stepped into a laboratory, a room which proclaimed that here, within these walls, some sort of experiment was being carried out. ‘The world is progressing,’ was all she said when she noticed the way his eyes ran round the room in astonishment, occasionally glancing out of the window, at the old buildings on the hill, the vestiges of tarred-brown, medieval Norway only a stone’s throw away.

  She poured coffee for him from a transparent jug in which the grounds were pressed down to the bottom by a shining strainer. He pointed to an old microscope over by the window. ‘I’ve had that since I was a child,’ she said. ‘Pasteur was my great hero. These days, of course, viruses are the thing – electron microscopes.’ For a long time, while at university, she had considered a future as a research scientist but had abandoned this idea, was happy where she was now, expected to end up in general practice. As she was talking, Jonas studied the pictures hanging on the walls: reproductions of Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson and The Raising of Lazarus and a fine selection of Leonardo’s studies of different parts of the body, all rendered strange and different by gleaming steel frames and by being interspersed with a number of stringently abstract pictures by Malevich. In one spot hung an artistic representation of the human head’s development through various palaeontological stages, as if her pictures also aimed to underline her statement about the world progressing.