The Conqueror

Criminal Past

Why wrestle with mystifying chains of cause and effect? There were times in his life when Jonas Wergeland was less concerned with questioning how the universe came into existence than with charting his own existence. As, for example, on one of the few trips he made together with his wife, when they managed no more on their first evening than to take a taxi across the bridge and ride up to the restaurant at the top of the Galata Tower where, thanks to Margrete’s whispered conversation with the mâitre d’, they were given a table by one of the windows overlooking the old town. And as Jonas was sitting there with his glass of raki and the taste of fried clams in his mouth, waiting for a helping of osmanli köftesi — recommended by Margrete — it struck him that he could have left for home the next morning, had he been an ordinary tourist, that is, because this, the sight before him, had to be the paramount and most enduring image of Istanbul: the silhouettes, the Oriental skyline — an almost stupefyingly beautiful prospect, triggering a myriad of associations. He ran his gaze over the array of domes and minarets and thought of Aunt Laura; thought how he was sitting in a city where Europe and Asia, and possibly also the medieval and the modern world, intertwined. And, in the midst of all this, as his eye fell on master architect Sinan’s massive, nigh-on tumescent, Süleymaniye Mosque, he felt a twinge of guilt because it reminded him of a dream, a calling which he had forsaken.

‘I think I like the Blue Mosque best,’ he said, his eyes flitting over the floodlit buildings on the other side of the water.

‘Just because it has six minarets?’ said Margrete. ‘You’re like a little boy. Going for the battleship with the most guns.’

Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? His travels had something to do with memory, with visiting places that were a part of him but which he could not recall. Jonas Wergeland always set off on a journey with a suspicion that he was, in fact, going home. And when they were making love in the hotel room in the old town, not very far from the large, covered bazaar, it seemed to him that Margrete was making love to him in a different way, as if she were bent on urging his imagination to follow new and eccentric paths, with the result that, afterwards, when he thought of the mosques, it suddenly struck him that they looked rather like giant crabs, either that or Samurai helmets flanked by the tips of lances. And this stroke of invention could not simply be ascribed to the shabby, though elegant and exotic interior — the ceramic tiles in the bathroom with their reproduction of a famed Iznik design, the bunch of tulips on the marble bedside table — which could have made him feel that one of the recurring dreams of his youth had come true and he was actually spending a night in the harem with one of the sultan’s slaves. There was something about this city itself, about making love here, which filled him with a rare and weighty awareness of being ‘in place’, as if he had completed an invisible circle. And as they lay there listening to the muezzins proclaiming the hour of late evening prayers Margrete asked him why he was so pensive, why he lay there smiling in the darkness, and he said, ‘Because I have roots here.’ For so it is: not only the sins of the fathers but also the blissful experiences of the parents are visited on the sons.

Neither the Blue Mosque nor the Topkapi was at the top of Jonas’s list of sights to see, however. The following day he took Margrete to a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn, the narrow inlet separating the old part of the city from the new; to the Pera Palas, a hotel built to accommodate passengers off the Orient Express in the days when Istanbul was the most cosmopolitan of all cities. Margrete laughed at his eagerness, thought he meant to show her the suite in which Kemal Atatürk or Mata Hari had stayed. ‘Why did we come here?’ she asked out of politeness. ‘Because…’ Jonas said and left a lengthy pause for dramatic effect, as they stood there, directly across from the pale-green, cubic building. ‘Because my parents once stayed here.’

Not many couples from Grorud visited Istanbul in the early fifties, but Åse and Haakon Hansen did. And it was mainly Jonas’s mother’s doing. Åse was an avid reader of detective novels, and there was one very good reason why Istanbul held such a particular appeal for her. It is true that Jonas came from a more or less bookless home, but that was only because these paperbacks, most of them in English, never made it onto any bookshelf; they came and they went, leaving no trace — the majority of them were of course borrowed. Most notably during the run-up to the Easter break, true to a singular Norwegian tradition for reading crime novels over this particular holiday, his mother would gather together a pile of dog-eared English books with garish covers — as if inspired by the Church’s gory Easter story; as if in need of a secular counterweight, so to speak. For a long time as a small boy Jonas felt that the Crimea would have to be the perfect spot for Norwegians to spend the Easter holidays.

One of his mother’s favourite writers was Agatha Christie, and of all her books she liked Murder on the Orient Express the best. So when — thanks to Uncle Lauritz the pilot and his connections with the newly formed SAS airline — she was offered the chance for her and Haakon to fly to Istanbul, she jumped at it. To cap it all they were to be put up at the Pera Palas hotel, where Agatha Christie had written the aforementioned book. Although the timing was not of the best, his mother insisted on making the trip — heartily supported by Aunt Laura, who offered to look after Rakel and Daniel, the latter of whom was still being bottle-fed. And I’m sure you can tell where this is leading, Professor.

His parents had been given a room on the fourth floor with a view of the Golden Horn above the Atatürk Bridge and the Fatih Mehmet mosque, the mosque of the Conqueror himself, sitting dead centre on the hill on the other side. They had never said anything, but Jonas had worked it out for himself: ‘I must have been conceived in the Pera Palas Hotel,’ he told Margrete exultantly and drew her through the dark wooden doors into a hotel where, though it had lost something of its lustre, one could still catch a whiff of bygone grandeur, not least if one peeked into the banqueting hall just off the lobby: like something out a dream with its pillars in two sorts of pale-brown marble and a cupola clad with wood panelling inset with latticed windows. ‘Imagine being granted the gift of life right here,’ he said. But when Margrete tried to lead him round the side of the reception desk and over to the ancient, openwork wooden lift to see Agatha Christie’s room on the fourth floor, he would not go; instead he dragged her into the Orient Express Bar where they found a table next to the octagonal aquarium in the centre. To see the fourth floor, where his parents had also stayed, the prospect of the Conqueror’s mosque, would be going too far, it would be a form of sacrilege, like poking one’s nose into the mystery of life itself, much as today’s genetic scientists are doing. And besides, Jonas’s own feelings on the matter were a mite ambivalent. Both because a book, even a bad book, could prompt a person to travel to a distant country — hence the reason, perhaps, that Jonas, throughout his life mistrusted books so — and because he disliked the thought of being conceived, to all intents and purposes, out of the heady thrill induced by pulp fiction; of being not highborn, but lowborn.

As they sat in their armchairs in the Orient Express Bar, surrounded by terracotta walls covered in Islamic ceramics, each with a cup of Turkish coffee in front of them, he toyed with the idea of staying here, on this spot where Europe and Asia seemed to lie fondling one another. He had a vision of the exquisite drama which must have been enacted in the brass bed in his parents’ room, possibly even on the oriental rug with which he knew every room to be furnished, this act of love that had produced him, Jonas Wergeland. And in a way it fitted: there was something of the European about his mother and something of the Asian about his father, such an intertwining had to — was bound to — give rise to something extraordinary. This he liked, could not hear the name of the Golden Horn without feeling that it was in some way connected with his father, that his father must have had ‘a golden horn’ on that very night, since it had expelled the spermatozoa which fertilized his mother’s egg, thus tying the first knot on the carpet that would be his life. In olden days the area on this side of the Golden Horn was known as Pera — which means ‘the other side’. He, Jonas, had therefore come into being ‘on the other side’. He sat in a bar in Istanbul, in the hotel of his conception, and hugged the notion of being an outsider. Because, in case you haven’t yet realized it, Professor, Jonas Wergeland had an almost pathological need to feel different.

Is this, then, where the story of his jealousy begins?

Immediately afterwards, as they were strolling down to the harbour on the Bosphorus to watch the people fishing and the ferries coming and going, with the mosques straight ahead of them again, Jonas was seized by a sudden euphoria. He had come into existence between two continents. Suddenly it came to him: that was why he had been so drawn to that peach as a boy — because it belonged to him, a child of the Orient. It was as if Jonas had suddenly been presented with the explanation for his feel for mosaics, for ornamentation. From then on he would never have any trouble understanding the criticism of his television series Thinking Big: that the individual programmes were not all that special in themselves, that the impact derived from the element of repetition, which caused these twenty-odd programmes to form such an intriguing pattern. And wasn’t the television picture, if magnified, a mosaic of coloured dots? ‘Ich bin ein Byzantiner,’ Jonas cried, his words directed at the panorama before him, with something of the rhetorical fervour once evinced by the blessed John F. Kennedy in another city.

A couple of days later, still filled with this euphoria, this heaven-sent euphoria, he was strolling with Margrete along the main street, Istiklal Caddesi. On impulse, just beyond Galatsaray Square, he turned down a side street and found himself in a stinking, pulsating fish market that ran out into a maze of narrow lanes and alleyways; at this time, early in the day, it was surprisingly quiet. Margrete had stayed behind in a shop to look for a present for Kristin. Jonas sauntered on, marvelling again, for the umpteenth time, at Margrete, this person whom he loved with an almost blasphemous passion, with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. The previous day they had been standing inside the Great Church of Hagia Sofia, contemplating the light that appeared to come more from within than without, looking up at the dome which everyone said appeared to hang down from heaven, to float in midair. Jonas was gazing open-mouthed at this sight, utterly enraptured — for one thing because the dome seemed to be wheeling round, spun by the light — when Margrete nudged him in the side and said: ‘Let’s get out of this geometric bunker, I feel like I’m inside the stomach of a giant beetle.’ He could not make her out. À propos Kristin — à propos conception, come to that — he remembered the day when Margrete had stood before him and announced: ‘I am with child.’ What an anachronistic way to put it. With child! And yet so like Margrete. As if she quite naturally wished to elevate these tidings into something wonderfully solemn and Biblical.

Jonas was halfway down the narrow back street, a curving downhill slope, an alley where washing was hung to dry on lines stretched out high above, beneath cockeyed television aerials, and the air reeked of cooking oil and rotten melons. His interest had been caught by some dilapidated oriel windows jutting out from the house walls. Suddenly there’s a man standing right in front of him, asking Jonas, quite politely really, to hand over his cash. A knife hovering dangerously close to Jonas’s stomach makes it clear that he is not fooling around. Jonas remains surprisingly calm, despite a horrid contraction of his testicles. In a way, it seems only right and proper that he should be confronted with crime in some shape or form in this city, bearing in mind his mother’s motives in visiting it. In any case, something about this man tells Jonas he’d better not try anything, that this is one of the Beyoglu quarter’s shadier sons. He takes out his wallet and promptly hands the man all his paper money. The man glances at it, seems satisfied, is about to stick it in his pocket when he notices one banknote that is not Turkish — a Norwegian thousand-kroner note. He studies it, the reproduction of Peder Balke’s dramatic painting of Vardø lighthouse, turns it over, lowers the hand clutching the knife. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks in excellent English. ‘Norway,’ says Jonas. ‘Who is this?’ he says. ‘Henrik Ibsen,’ Jonas says. ‘What about Knut Hamsun — is he on a banknote too?’ the man says. Jonas shakes his head. The man’s face suddenly darkens, he points the knife at Jonas. ‘Are you telling me that Hamsun, one of the greatest writers in the world, doesn’t appear on your banknotes? What sort of a country do you call that?’ he says, then launches into what sounds like a virulent lecture, or indictment, delivered at such a speed that Jonas doesn’t manage to catch it all — partly, of course, because he is so terrified, because of the knife and because of a thief who, instead of hightailing it out of there, proceeds to discuss which writers deserve to appear on Norwegian banknotes. This latter aspect actually scares him most of all, since he takes it as a sign that the guy must be stark raving mad and capable of absolutely anything.

As the man was finishing a harangue on what an indelible impression Hamsun’s novel Hunger had made on him, a poor man from the slums of Istanbul — Jonas thought he could almost see tears in the mugger’s eyes — Margrete came walking down the alley. Jonas turned his head: ‘Get out of here,’ he hissed as loudly as he could. ‘He’s got a knife.’ Margrete did not react, calmly strolled straight up to them. This seemed to throw the man too. He crammed the money into his pocket, shifted his focus from Jonas to Margrete, even lunged at her with the knife. It all happened very fast, but later Jonas tried to recall those seconds, which gave him yet another reason to marvel at his wife. For as the man darted towards her, jabbing with his hand, she sidestepped, and Jonas seemed to recall that it had been a graceful movement, more like a dance step, backwards; a little jink which stood, in his memory, as a greater feat than the hold that she suddenly took on the man’s arm and the way she positioned her body in relation to his, in order, the next instant, lightly, as if it cost her no effort, to hurl him through the air, positively send him flying — as Jonas saw it — while still keeping a firm grip on his arm, thus forcing him to let go of the knife, with a hideous shriek of pain betraying that she had in fact hurt him in the process, and all of this before he hit the ground with a thud and, hurt or no hurt, promptly scrambled to his feet and vanished with the same baffling suddenness as he had appeared.

Margrete took Jonas’s hand and, with a faint air of impatience, strode out of the alley, leaving the knife where it lay. ‘He took my money,’ Jonas said when they had turned the corner. ‘Who cares, it wasn’t that much, was it?’ she said. ‘Come on in here, I think I’ve found something for Kristin — look at this lovely brass dolls’ tea-set!’

For the rest of the day, while walking round sunken palaces and subterranean mosques, the ruins of the city walls and aqueducts, in the spice bazaars and the mosaic museums, Jonas thought about Margrete, about how little he knew of her. Against his will, he recalled some of the rumours he had heard about the years when she was living abroad, as the daughter of a diplomat and later as a student: rumours he had tried to ignore, to suppress, but which had stuck to his subconscious nonetheless. What he had seen back there in the alley accorded with the story that, as a teenager, somewhere in the Far East, she had studied the martial arts. Occasionally in the summer he had noticed how, when she thought no one was looking, she would do what looked like callisthenics on the lawn, smooth, controlled movements, like a balancing act in slow motion. He had heard so many things, didn’t know what to believe. Not even of what she told him herself. Jonas walked around Istanbul with his mind in turmoil, a state which possibly mirrored the confusion of smells in the city streets: everything from mimosa, exhaust fumes and roasted nuts to the eternally rotating kebabs on the roadside stalls and every kind of fried fish. It was said that she had once written a wonderful book — someone had heard her read bits of it — the manuscript of which she had thrown away or lost, or burned and then scattered the ashes on the Ganges — accounts varied. Was it true that at one point she had had a pet snake? And had she really danced with a famous rock star, on the stage, during a concert? When he asked her about such things, she would laugh. ‘You’re just jealous,’ she would say. And she was right, that is exactly what he was. Because she was the sort of woman you saw, even in the heaving mass of bodies in front of a stage.

With Margrete you never knew what to expect. While Jonas wandered reverently around the Topkapi Palace, feasting his eyes on everything from Mohammed’s footprints in a stone to the beautiful doors of the harem, patterned with tortoiseshell and mother of pearl, Margrete was more interested in the guards and their tiny, crackling walkie-talkies and all the Turkish women with their covered heads: ‘Do you remember what sort of headscarf your mother used to wear?’ she would whisper to Jonas, as if all of this only served to remind her of Norway’s recent past.

It may have been in the harem itself that a troubling thought entered his head: all that talk about how sexually liberal she had been. ‘She just can’t get enough of it,’ someone had once said, a man whose teeth Jonas had only just managed to stop himself from knocking out. He had tried to close his ears to the snippets of information he had picked up, of other boyfriends she had had; talk of men who, literally or figuratively, would have cut off their ear lobes for her. Fragments which, when he put them together, formed a picture of a monster. He had been more alarmed than impressed by the little display she had given in the alley, feared that she might one day do to him what she had done to that thief. She’s downright dangerous, he told himself.

Jonas walked through a city on the border between two continents, teetering between doting admiration and a niggling sense of uncertainty. He couldn’t make her out. He found this blend of naivety and sophistication particularly confusing. She was an ingenuous reader, a bit like Axel; prepared to believe anything — this woman, a rational doctor who wrote articles for medical journals, could lie stretched out on the sofa, so absorbed in the plot of even the worst book that she would utter screams, cries of protest, cheers. Jonas hardly dared to go to the theatre with her; she always seemed on the verge of shouting at the actors, like a child almost falling of its seat in its excitement: ‘Watch out, the fox is right behind you!’ And yet she was such a woman of the world. Jonas had noticed with what aplomb and savoir-faire she had eaten all of the exotic dishes set before them in Istanbul — whether it was sucuk: fried garlic sausages, or a pilaff of lamb and almonds, or aubergines done in every conceivable way. Margrete’s nostrils quivered with delight when she cut into a börek, as if it were a lucky bag of aromas, and she could judge a square of freshly-baked baklava purely on its appearance: knew whether the syrup would ooze out if she pressed the paper-thin layers gently. Jonas could only shake his head at the ease, the poise, with which she made her way through the Kapali Carsi, the huge bazaar right next to the hotel, where the little domed roofs gave one the feeling of being inside a gigantic beehive. He followed her with his eyes as she stood amid glittering gold or soft falls of carpet, fragile alabaster or warlike swords, depending on which passage she happened to find herself in; he watched as she demonstrated the use of an astrolabe to the owner of an antique shop, taking it apart, disc by disc — an astrolabe! Jonas beheld her as though he were watching a film about a stranger: how, in another shop, she began to haggle lightly and laughingly over the price of a chessboard with Ottoman pieces of brass and copper, while the stallholder plied her with apple tea. To Jonas the place was a maze and a daunting one at that. To her, it was obviously a familiar world, one that she could read like the back of her hand; she seemed, in fact, to come to life, like a creature suddenly rediscovering its proper and much longed-for element. Something she could not find in Oslo, not in Norway. And what Jonas feared most of all: not with him.

On the plane home, with Margrete asleep in the seat next to him, a book lying open in her lap — a second-rate detective novel, Jonas guessed — he sat gazing out at the layer of cloud and thinking: I can never be good enough for her. I’m going to lose her. The optimism he had felt in the Pera Palas seemed to have deserted him. Just before they landed in Copenhagen he stole a glance at her again, with a love so desperately deep that it was almost like torture to him: If you leave me, I’ll kill you, he thought.