The Conqueror

It looks down on Earth while my heart stands still (Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)

Sometimes Jonas wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing outside a distinctive building called the Matenadaran, an institute for the preservation of ancient documents. And although he vaguely recalled something about a conversation, and possibly something about a mountain — like a white arc in the blue — if he thought hard enough about it, all he remembered was the script.

He had stopped without thinking next to a statue on the terrace just below the entrance, struck by a feeling that his body was full of letters. The statue showed a pupil kneeling before Mesrop Mashotots, the man who was reputed to have created the Armenian alphabet, the characters that were carved into the wall behind him: an alphabet that had never been used by any other people. It was a script that appealed to Jonas; the capitals in particular had an unusually regular and stylized form that at the same time made the characters seem somehow to have been reversed. A script for outsiders, thought Jonas, befitting a proud and hard-pressed people.

Inside the copper doors of the Matenadaran he and the guide had wandered through its rooms, looking at ancient manuscripts from monasteries, handwritten copies of the works of Armenian scholars and of foreign books. Some texts from antiquity had only survived in their Armenian translations — a chronicle by Eusebios of Caesarea, a treatise on nature by Zeno. As if the script itself were a sort of Noah’s ark, thought Jonas, examining one fragile parchment volume: the Gospel of Lazarus. He felt as though the lovely letters were exerting an influence on him, trying to tell him something, although he did not know what.

Why had he gone to Yerevan? Perhaps simply to see this wilful alphabet. For the first time since elementary school he felt something for letters, had the urge to write, abandon television, even. It may be that this was precisely what this almost otherworldly script was telling him: that nothing was fixed. That anything was possible. What if I were to settle down here, he thought, break all ties and do something completely different?

Jonas had remained standing outside the institute, gazing down on the city and listening to a deep murmur emanating from beneath or above the landscape, as if some massive plates he could not see were turning or grinding against one another. He thought of Fridtjof Nansen, pack ice, he thought of Ararat, the glacier, he thought of the year ahead of him, he thought of the television series which was shortly to be broadcast, he thought of Margrete — he thought of Margrete, not knowing that, because of her, he would find himself at the centre of a sensational scandal, that he would discover how it felt when something he believed to be solid and permanent suddenly shifted under his feet. He could not know, was too busy savouring this slow moment of revelation, the sensation of being at a point where everything trickles down and converges, like sand in the narrow neck of an hourglass.

His reverie was interrupted by a man — because there was something else, not only a script, not only a mountain, but a person. Nansen Sarjan — almost having to shake Jonas awake and telling him that he had to leave, now, this very instant. ‘But why?’ Jonas asks lightly, despite a faint contraction of his testicles, ‘I’m leaving for Leninakan this evening.’ Leninakan was the largest city in Armenia after Yerevan, and Jonas meant to visit the university there the next morning. ‘Because you must,’ the man says adamantly and knocks out his pipe against his heel. ‘I just know, that’s all. You must not stay here one second longer.’

Jonas did not know why he allowed himself to be persuaded, why he permitted himself to be escorted, led by the hand almost, back to his hotel, where an impatient Nansen Sarjan had an earnest conversation with the Intourist representative, whereupon Jonas’s ticket was changed and he was driven straight off to the airport, without even stopping for a bite of lunch — maybe it was the thought of Nansen, Fridtjof that is, or of Noah, or of that enigmatic script which stopped him from protesting. Whatever it was, a sudden shunt, he arrived in Moscow that same afternoon. As the plane bumped down onto the runway he seemed to wake from a hypnotic trance.

Sometimes Jonas Wergeland doubted whether he had been to Yerevan at all.

The following day he heard rumours, but it wasn’t until he returned to Norway that he heard the full story: news of the disaster was all over the papers and on television. The morning after he left, Armenia had been hit by a severe earthquake, the worst experienced in the Caucasus in eighty years; 25,000 people had been killed, 12,000 were hospitalized, half a million people had been left homeless. The quake had wreaked particular havoc in Leninakan; large parts of the city, including the university, had been completely flattened.

Jonas Wergeland knew it: we owe our lives to other people.

A journey need not be long, in terms of time, for it to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.