The Conqueror

Cape

Whence come our dreams? The past or the future?

It is a bright, clear morning, already warm, and he is making his way into the centre with all his senses in top gear. He strolls through the vestiges of the Company’s Gardens and on down Adderley Street, then turns right into Golden Acre, the new, ultra-modern shopping centre and there, ahead of him, is the Grand Parade, an open square with a low and not particularly impressive fortress in the background. The air is heavy with unfamiliar smells. He is tense, tries to shake the feeling off, but he is tense. He sees stalls selling fruit and vegetables and, on closer inspection — yes, sure enough — next to them a flea market. It all fits, he thinks. So far.

It was the first morning in a new city, and the dream had been fresh in his mind when he woke up. He had dreamed that he met a woman dressed in white at a flea market and that she had asked him the way to Greenmarket Square — he remembered this with strange clarity: Greenmarket Square. And that she was wearing a labyrinthine brooch. Jonas did not set any great store by his dreams, unless it was for their entertainment value, but suddenly it occurred to him that this could be important, not to say crucial, as far as his life was concerned. After breakfast, just to be on the safe side, he enquired at reception as to whether there was a flea market in the city. He was in luck, they said, it was Wednesday, so there was a market on the Parade. ‘Do you have a map?’ Jonas asked, not so much intrigued as perturbed.

So there he was, threading his way between tables that were, for the most part, covered in junk, when a young woman — obviously a tourist like himself and dressed in clothes that seemed far too white, giving her the appearance of an angel paying a visit to a trouble-torn world — approached him and asked him the way to Greenmarket Square. Jonas had studied the map and gave her exact directions, possibly too long and involved — partly to mask his own inner turmoil — on how to get there, all the while with his eyes riveted on her brooch, as if a much more interesting map lay hidden there, in its pattern. She thanked him with a laugh, she too a little confused. For the rest of the day he walked around in a daze, with no idea of where he was; he was simply waiting for the night, for new dreams.

No one can say that Jonas Wergeland rested on his laurels. In the midst of his triumph, in the year when the television series Thinking Big was broadcast to great general jubilation, he was to be found in South Africa, armed with a visa and the blessing of the Norwegian Foreign Office. He was on his way home from South Georgia where they had just finished shooting a programme on the old Norwegian whaling stations and had made a brief stopover on the Cape. To celebrate the success of the shoot he checked into the hotel in Cape Town, the Mount Nelson, which, with its stately atmosphere and its situation on the hillside above the city centre truly was a place fit for a lord.

The following morning he sat at the breakfast table deep in thought, reviewing his night. He had dreamed that he was a hairsbreadth from being run down by a white Ford. The grapefruit he was eating reinforced a sour-sweet sensation inside him; he also noted how the halved fruit resembled a wheel. He was possibly overreacting, but he decided to tread warily, took care when crossing the road that same morning when looking around the Bokaap district of the city, the old Malay quarter where the city’s Muslims had made their homes. Having first visited the Auwal Mosque on Dorp Street he then attacked the steep, narrow streets climbing up the slope to Signal Hill.

He was about to cross the street just next to one of the little mosques in Chiappini Street when his attention was caught by a spicy aroma. This moment’s distraction was all it took for him almost to be hit by a white Ford that came racing down the hill. The driver banged on his horn, and Jonas jumped back onto the pavement. And as he was standing there gasping for breath, with people staring at him and his heart pounding, he realized that he liked this, these sudden tie-ups between dreams and reality. He was actually more exhilarated than shaken, as if he had just come alarmingly close to an irascible rhino on a safari where everything, even those things which seemed dangerous, was safe and stage-managed.

But he did not know what to think when he was jolted out of sleep at dawn the next morning in his bed at the Mount Nelson; his testicles felt has if they had been caught in a nutcracker. He had dreamed of falling, of riding on a cable railway, dreamed that the car he was in fell down, fell and fell until it smashed to pieces on the ground.

Jonas had not been planning to do it, to take the trip up Table Mountain, he was afraid of heights. Now he had to. His whole body craved it, his throat constricted with excitement. Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? To say that he wanted to expose himself to risk, to rebel against his innate penchant — not least as a Norwegian — for security, is only half the truth. There were some moments when Jonas Wergeland actually believed that travel was training for death. Training in cutting all ties. As a boy, when they played ‘knifey’ he was never as interested in winning a bigger slice of territory as he was in the knife itself, everything which the knife, the sharp steel, represented in terms of danger and fateful possibilities; one quick slash through normality and all at once you found yourself in the complete unknown.

While still in the taxi on the way up to the lower cableway station on Taffelberg Road he noticed how his senses were stimulated by the forthcoming feat of daring, how he was seeing in a new way, spotting the oddest details in his surroundings. He also registered a flutter of impatience, as if he were keen to get this over as quickly as possible, as if he were longing to die. Once he was actually inside the gondola he forced himself to look down into the void while he thought about his dream, all the way up, for six or seven minutes, even thought he hated it, felt sick with fear. Or no, not fear. The whole experience was more like being on a high: being hauled through the air by a cable while the seconds tick away, a question of will it, won’t it, will it, won’t it; but nothing happened. Naturally nothing happened. And yet: it could have happened.

He alighted at the upper station, wandered around for half an hour on the top of the vast landmark, over three and a half thousand feet above sea level, a mountain so flat that from the sea it looked like a table covered with a tablecloth. His grandfather had raved about it. Jonas walked about, reading posters but not taking in anything of what he was reading, surveyed the view without seeing what he was surveying, looked into the restaurant and the souvenir shop without really being there, without buying anything. His feet were on solid ground, but he felt as if he were balancing on a knife’s edge. A narrow promontory that could split his life in two.

It happened on the way down. He was alone in the gondola with an elderly man who stood with one hand tucked inside his jacket, like another Napoleon. Few tourists visited the country in those days, even fewer at that time of year. The wind had risen a little, but the weather was fine; the sea sparkled brilliantly in the south, as a reminder, almost, of how rich in diamonds the country was. The man immediately struck up a conversation, he was from Cape Town himself, brightened up when Jonas mentioned Norway, showed him his stick: ‘See what that is?’ he said eagerly, nodding at the handle. And then, triumphantly: ‘Whalebone.’

It might have been because of his grandfather, but Jonas could almost foresee what happened next. The man pointed down at Table Bay and the harbour and began to tell him about all the Norwegian whale fishermen who had passed through the city. ‘Some of the harpooners lived here all year round, you know.’ The man knew something of the whaler’s life, he had delivered food to the ships when they were bunkering. ‘Canned fruit was popular,’ he said. ‘Peaches especially.’ Within a couple of minutes he had told a great deal about Norwegians and Cape Town. ‘And it’s no secret,’ he chuckled, ‘that a fair number of babies with Norwegian blood in their veins have been born here.’

They were a third of the way down. Jonas observed that the wind had freshened; the gondola was rocking noticeably. He felt afraid, and yet was conscious of how concentrated everything was, even what the man was saying. A life crumpled up into a few seconds. Usually Jonas preferred to maintain a discreet silence on the subject of Norway and whales. The images from South Georgia were still fresh in his mind: the ghost towns at Husvik and Grytviken, the rusty storage tanks, half-sunken whaling ships, a deserted flensing plan forming a slanting dance floor for the penguins. The whale population around South Georgia is still as little as ten per cent of what it once was. In some seasons nigh-on 8,000 whales could be caught in those waters. A total massacre.

‘Great city,’ the man said, peering out. ‘Shame about all the blacks, ruin everything so they do. Fucking and fighting’s all they know. Animals. Bloody animals.’ The man’s knuckles whitened around the handle of his stick.

Jonas did not feel like getting into a discussion with this character, he merely shook his head, unconsciously almost, and went on gazing at the view.

This only goaded the other man: ‘And please don’t talk to me about racism. I happen to be one of those people who rate the whale very highly among God’s creatures. I think it really is as intelligent as we are. But I’d never dream of criticizing you lot for hunting it. So you can’t bloody well blame us for doing to the kaffirs — inferior beings that they are — what you’ve done to the whale. In fact, we ought to take a leaf out of you Norwegians’ book. Do a really radical cull.’

Just as Jonas was about to protest at this comparison, out of common decency, if nothing else, the gondola stopped. A twang. Like a pizzicato note from a violin string. Something was wrong.

He tried not to look down and instead gazed out at the water, a carpet of diamonds; he had never seen an ocean sparkle like that, so bright, so dazzling. But the man was not to be sidetracked; he was visibly incensed. ‘Don’t you come here acting all holier-than-thou,’ he said. ‘We’re the same, you and I. Your lot got rich on whaling. We got rich through the blacks. You should be downright proud of Svend Foyn. Inventing the grenade harpoon puts him in the same league as Hiram Stevens Maxim, the man behind the machine-gun.’

They hung quietly between heaven and earth. Jonas was waiting for the jerk, a twang, as from Einar Tambarskjelve’s bowstring, and then the fall, one fleeting second and it would all be over. To win a new land: death. ‘But you’re forgetting one thing,’ he said stubbornly, or as a way of escaping his fear. ‘We don’t really hunt whales any more.’

‘Well, there’ll never be an end to apartheid, that’s for sure,’ came the other man’s curt, bitter reply. ‘Never. We’re going to keep the blacks down for ever.’

At best, if this was a valid comparison, then perhaps one day the prosperous white areas around Sea Point would lie as deserted as the rusty ruins in South Georgia, Jonas thought. He could not know that things were happening behind the scenes in South Africa, that great changes were afoot, that just after New Year speeches would be made in the South African parliament, in this same city below him, which no one could have predicted and which would make a whole world believe that one truly could round a cape by the name of Good Hope.

Jonas could not resist it; he had to look out, down at the steep scree beneath them. His life hung, quite literally, by a thread, a cable.

His whole life depended on cables. He had known it for a long time.

There came a jolt. In his heart too. An echo inside him. The gondola started to move. Minutes later they were down. He stepped out, but his legs would not carry him; he dropped down onto a bench. The elderly man got into a waiting car, raised his stick to him before he drove off. Jonas couldn’t have said whether this was meant as a threat or a salute. But one thing he understood: we know nothing about what our dreams mean. And we know nothing, thank heavens, about what the future holds. We can never know what will happen the next second, the next day, the next year.

On the way to Greenmarket Square, moments after they had barely missed running into a man who dashed across the road, the taxi driver told Jonas that he had had the same dream three nights running: a whale swam in from Robben Island — the driver pointed across the glittering waters to the north-west — and coughed up a man on the beach at Sea Point, a black man wearing a royal crown. Now what did Jonas make of that?