The Conqueror Read online

  She broke off in the middle of a sentence: ‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ she said. ‘You seem so ordinary and yet at the same time so different. There’s a look in your eyes. Not at first, there wasn’t, but now.’

  ‘It might have something to do with my back,’ he said. And because she was a doctor, he did not consider it unreasonable to tell her about an episode from his childhood, from the time when he would not eat. His parents had come up with all sorts of ploys to distract him during mealtimes, to get Jonas – inadvertently almost – to swallow a few morsels of food. On one occasion on Hvaler they had given him a box of buttons to play with while they shovelled food into him as best they could. Among all these different and interesting buttons one in particular caught Jonas’s eye. His grandfather said that he had bought it in China and that it came from a dragon. ‘Imagine that, you little starveling: genuine dragon horn!’ The Chinaman in the shop had told him that farmers sometimes came across dragon skeletons in desolate spots and sold the bones and horns. The apothecaries ground the bones into powder and craftsmen made things from the horns, including buttons. Jonas clearly enjoyed this story, because he promptly popped the button into his mouth – and swallowed it, to everyone’s dismay. Jonas vaguely remembered his mother forcing him to sit on the potty, then examining his stools as keenly as a customs officer looking for bags of heroin, or as if he was the Emperor of China and his shit was sacred – but found no button. His parents were worried sick. They took him to the hospital and had him X-rayed. Nothing showed up on the X-ray plates either. No button had come out, and no button could be detected inside him, not by the X-rays at any rate. It wouldn’t necessarily do any harm, the doctor reassured them, though secretly he guessed that the button had come out the other end long ago. ‘The body can cope with a lot more than we think,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard stories of surgeons leaving this or that inside patients after an operation, folk have survived worse things than a button.’ Jonas, for one, felt reassured. As the years passed and he read about all the odd things that were inserted into people’s bodies, from heart valves to silicone, he came to the conclusion that the body could accept one measly button, even a horn one. When he grew older, he would dream that it had slotted itself into his spine like a disc, that he was, in other words, equipped with an extra vertebra – had suffered more or less the opposite of a slipped disc. He recalled how proud he had been on attending one of his first school medicals: ‘You’ve got a remarkably straight back, boy!’ the doctor had said. Several times, during bouts of depression, Jonas was to take comfort in this – in his belief that, in spite of everything, the button made him special. His grandfather had told him about a tribe in Brazil: when they reached a certain age the young boys of the tribe had wooden plugs put in their ears to enable them to pick up the dreams of the tribe. ‘Sometimes I think of the button as a pill,’ he told Johanne A. ‘A pill that didn’t take effect for a long time.’ What he did not tell her, Professor, was that the effect of the pill was to exert a pressure on his spine, a pressure which sometimes altered his perception completely and gave him a glimpse of a world rich in possibilities.

  ‘I knew there was something,’ she says, and without more ado she proceeds to switch off the lights, as if this anecdote has inspired her to undertake some unorthodox operation that needs to be conducted in the dark. She puts out all the lights, apart from one lamp in a corner, a sphere encircled by a metal ring, like another Saturn suspended over a table bearing little pyramids of coloured glass. Normally, Jonas was frightened by dark rooms but not now, not with her beside him, not with that scent infiltrating his nostrils, filling him with a mounting sense of exhilaration. She sat on the white sofa, faint reflections from her eyes in the shadows. Two geometric earrings hung like satellites on either side of her face. She reached out her hands to him, he went to her, kissed her, felt a lock turn smoothly, as if they each possessed half of the key to something important which they could only open together, like you saw in films, where two keys were required in order to open a safety deposit box or fire a rocket.

  She drew him into an adjoining bedroom, got undressed without a word, made him do the same. Her legs were smooth-shaven, she must have trimmed her pubic hair too, it looked a little too perfect in shape, or artificial, like something out of a retouched, chocolate-box picture. In the dim light the two halves of her buttocks looked to be made of crystal, twin globes that harboured secrets, future prospects, intimations that Jonas was about to make love to a being superior to himself, a visitor from a planet where evolution had reached a more advanced stage, where they did not play the old brutish game involving lots of primitive pawing and pumping in and out.

  She did not invite any foreplay, pulled him down onto the bed, resolutely and yet controlled, almost cool, he thought to himself, and as he slipped inside her, he felt, as he always felt at those first, tentative thrusts, a friction that puts him in mind of a dynamo, a dynamo running against a bicycle wheel, activating a lamp, flooding everything with light; and he drifts around in this light, savouring not just the physical euphoria, but also the thoughts that promptly begin to come pouring into his head, thoughts of a most unusual nature, as if the extra disc in his spine – whether imaginary or real – also contains a secret programme, impulses which only a woman can trigger.

  Johanne A. was also in a state of extreme well-being, indeed she would later say that – although she had no idea why – this time with Jonas caused her to change her mind, revived her wish to become a research scientist after all, with the result that – as well as doing some remarkable work for Doctors for Peace and carrying out some pretty risky assignments for the Red Cross in war-torn regions – she wound up as an international expert on tropical diseases, a conqueror within medicine, within a field in which the study of microbes was central, the investigation of the influence of these minute organisms on people’s lives, something which was about as hard to fathom as love, or the desire she was feeling now, a desire which, without any warning, almost made her take leave of her senses, to lie writhing under a man, hardly more than a boy, to whom she had only spoken for a few hours.

  Jonas knew nothing of this, so preoccupied was he with the vigorous way in which she had gradually begun to move, with her vagina, which gripped him so tenderly, with the light, with the thoughts drifting into his mind, with words that passed into new words, images, a whole network of sudden similarities between widely differing entities. For if there was one thing Jonas had learned back in the days when Daniel used to lie in the top bunk and read aloud from Agnar Mykle’s works, it was that sex is all to do with metaphors, with executing unexpected pirouettes in the imagination: to be able, one moment, to say that her small breasts ‘had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass’ and the next to gasp out the words: ‘her breasts were like explosives under her jersey’. Jonas grasped very early on that sex had something to do with broadening the mind, of giving it span, that sex was not an end in itself, but a means by which to achieve something else, perhaps quite simply a means to creativity, a conviction which was now confirmed for him, here, as he lay on his back on the bed and she sank down onto him again and again, so warm and powerful that he could almost feel the springs in the mattress, even as something similar was happening to his thoughts, as she, or they together, transformed them into spirals, springs, with the ability to hop, free themselves from a chain that ran from A to B to C, and that was why he lay there, as she exerted a greater and greater pull on him, engulfing him even while seemingly trying to restrain herself, and felt how he built a bridge of metaphors, as from A to X to K, a bridge which suddenly led him to espy a similarity between his own erect penis and a lever, the sort of tool that enabled one to move objects heavier than oneself; and perhaps that was why, at that same moment, Jonas felt himself, or her, Johanne A., shrugging off something heavy, exposing some object that lay buried, braiding various fragments into larger chunks, and eventually a story, something about being in a forest, n
ot in a modern flat, but in a primeval forest, much as this white apartment might conceal a mahogany chemist’s shop, because lovemaking was alchemy, a commingling of irreconcilable elements, a fact which she proved by entwining herself around him with greater and greater ardour, surprising ardour, perhaps, uncontrolled even; by casting herself over him with an intensity that generated light and linked him to a story he both remembered and did not remember, thus he could recall that milk cartons had also been around ten years before, but not whether they had been printed with a red four-leaf clover design or not, and yet he knew, as he lay there savouring the light, drifting in it, that together they could set it rolling – the story that was hidden and yet right there: in the blind spot, you might say. And while Jonas was concentrating on remembering, or seeing; on letting his movements spark off associations, as they were weaving their limbs together into a writhing knot, he heard Johanne A., involuntarily, and possibly unwittingly, begin to snort, to utter sounds, hoarse grunts which, in a parenthesis in his train of thought, afforded room for surprise that a girl like her, the owner of this ultra-modern apartment, a woman who obviously believed wholeheartedly in man’s potential for evolving into an even more intelligent being, that this woman could lie there like that, grunting wildly underneath him, as if her white coat came complete with a witch-doctor’s mask. Howsoever that might be, this only made him even more aroused; he was conscious of how his thoughts struggled to get a grip on some sense of a whole, wove themselves together, how the friction slid over into a feeling of lightness, as if she were lifting him up and at the same time urging him to move with greater intensity, until she could hold back no longer, though she bit her lip until it bled – she came with a long drawn-out howl, a downright bestial scream which ended with her letting her arms flop to the floor, like someone fainting away, and whether this was what it took, or whether Jonas was just about there anyway, at that very second, thankfully and with his mind in giddy freefall, he discerned the thread connecting the whirl of thoughts which she, or the two of them together, had generated inside his head.

  He was still inside her. ‘Didn’t you come?’ she asked on recovering consciousness, so to speak. Her voice was tinged with guilt. She was still out of breath, and one corner of her mouth was red with blood. ‘Did you get satisfaction?’ she asked, as if it were important to her.

  He lay there smiling: he too, out of breath, smiling for the first time in days. ‘Yes, I got satisfaction,’ he said at last. And it was true, although this word did not cover the phenomenon of orgasm in the normal sense. It’s true that he was also interested in gaining satisfaction, but not the sort that could be measured in millilitres of semen produced. For Jonas Wergeland – and I hope to return to this – the act of love was not necessarily about ejaculation but about enlightenment, about being lit up, about seeing.

  The Jewel

  So what sort of stories were they that Jonas Wergeland recalled, or suddenly understood, while this woman was biting herself until the blood ran from sheer pleasure underneath him? Your wrist is aching, Professor, I can see that, but we cannot stop now. Remember, we’ve embarked on a serious undertaking here. It is quite simply a matter of life or death.

  For years, Jonas dreamed the same dream. For a period during his childhood he would start out of sleep several times in a month with a particular picture in his head, an image he could not, however, make anything of, since it was somewhat abstract. It had no recognizable thread to it; it was more of an impression.

  Jonas had this dream for the first time when he was sick with a fever – he must have been around four at the time – on a night when his temperature rose to almost 105 and the sheet was in a tangle from all his tossing and turning. In his head, and possibly also in his fingertips, he had a sense of forms, strands of wool or piano strings, which coiled themselves around one another, changing from a tight knot into looser, more amorphous formations, as from a ball of yarn to a tangle of string. The odd thing was that these shapes did not only represent something bad, a nightmare, but also something beautiful, like the reflections in a kaleidoscope: a mesmerizing pattern, ceaselessly shifting, though still within certain limits. Maybe I’m dreaming about God, Jonas thought.

  Then, quite by chance, he stumbled upon a clue to the obscure signals from his nervous system. It happened on one of those Sunday outings that a number of the families in Solhaug used to go on together. And in the spring. For it wasn’t just in the autumn that people went for walks in the woods – the autumn being the time when everyone seemed almost genetically programmed to start gathering in stores like mad, by means of berry-picking and mushroom-gathering. In springtime too, on Sundays after church, Åse and Haakon Hansen, Jonas’s parents, would don their well-worn walking clothes and rubber boots, not to mention rucksacks redolent of wartime and countless Easter skiing trips, gather the children together, meet up with the others and troop off to Lillomarka. Here, at different – but usually regular spots – practised hands would light a campfire; then they would make coffee, cook food and sit around and talk – feeling, in short, that they were doing what was only right and proper: what was, so to speak, expected of them as good Norwegians. Picnicking in the woods was a part of their national heritage: you only had to look at Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen and his love for the woods and the hills to see that. If you ask me, Professor, I think it would be just as fair to say that they were performing a ritual in memory of a not so distant past in which they had been hunters and gatherers, a theory which the stories they told round the campfire bore out, since these often had to do with hunting and fishing and the secret haunts of the chanterelle, interspersed with local legends about people who had lived here before and given the place its name. Be that as it may, Jonas loved being in the forest. He loved the smell of campfires and the unique flavour of grilled meat and roast potatoes served on scratched plastic plates along with slices of white bread covered in ash. He loved the way the adults were so keen to pass on the art of making pussy-willow flutes or bark boats. He loved sitting up in a tree and listening to the hum of the grownups’ voices, mingled occasionally with the squawk of a portable radio as some major sporting event got under way. Even Five-Times Nilsen and Chairman Moen relaxed and forgot for a while the plans for communal garages when they sat on a log with their eyes resting on a black coffee pot set over a campfire.

  Ørn – nicknamed Little Eagle – usually tagged along with Jonas’s family. The forest was a fabulous place in which to play. Cowboys and Indians no taller than your finger looked perfectly lifelike if you just found the right slope, little ledges that played the part of cliff-top villages in Arizona or Utah. And if Little Eagle brought along his plastic animals, half the fauna of Africa, they could create a savannah among the tufts of grass. Just a box of used matches was enough. Tip the contents into a tiny stream and they had an arduous and perilous log-run that could keep them occupied for hours.

  Ørn wasn’t with them on this particular day. Little Eagle was sick. At least they said he was sick. The thought of Ørn bothered Jonas. The forest wasn’t the same without Ørn.

  What sort of sound does a dragon make?

  It was a hot day, hotter than the day before, and while one of the fathers was telling off a couple of the bigger boys for setting light to a clump of heather – ‘Fire is dangerous, boys; remember what just happened at the Coliseum cinema!’ – Jonas wandered about on his own, first playing at Robin Hood, with a long staff in his hands, then Tarzan: Tarzan heading deeper and deeper into the jungle. But he missed Little Eagle, and this niggled at him, turned him into a very destructive Tarzan, a king of the jungle who made ferocious swipes with his staff, knocking the top off bush after bush – gorillas, actually – while trying to find a suitable heroic deed to commit. And then there it was, his chance, dead ahead of him: a weeping woman in a ripped safari suit with her foot caught between the roots of a fir tree and a large rock. Jonas – or rather, Tarzan – had to roll the rock away, and there was no time to waste: for a
lion, or better still, a fearsome dragon with slavering jaws was closing in on the woman. ‘Courage, noble maid,’ Jonas muttered and set his hip against the rock, it wobbled back and forth, but he still couldn’t budge it, or only very little. He took his staff, stuck one end well under the stone and rested the other on a nearby hummock, to act as a lever, and when Jonas bore down on the other end he was quite surprised to find how easily the rock allowed itself to be dislodged, along with a fair amount of soil, a great clump, before rolling thunderously down the south-facing slope, leaving behind it a gaping hole.

  Jonas knew right away: he had unearthed hidden treasure just as Oscar Wergeland, his maternal grandfather, had done in his youth. There was a smell of gunpowder, a smell of raw earth, a smell of gold.

  He got down on his knees and peeked into the hole – possibly half-expecting to be disappointed – then he started back, just as he would do later in life when unexpectedly confronted with television footage of operations, shots of the brain or glistening intestines staring him in the face. A dragon’s lair, that’s what it must be: the thought flashed through his mind. There was an infernal roaring in his ears, but he wasn’t sure that he had heard anything roar.