The Conqueror

In Transylvania

To be a spectator. The trauma of traumas, the one thing he feared most of all: that he wished, at all costs, to avoid. Once more I shall tell the story of the radio theatre.

East of the flats lay a wooded hill, a triangle wedged between the cliff face, Bergensveien and Trondheimsveien about which, for many years Jonas and his chums had mixed feelings. Because through this lonely spot ran the short cut to the People’s Palace, better known as Grorud Cinema. The cinema was, in fact, a trade union concern, and so from an early age Jonas was brought up to regard films, illusions, as a natural part of working-class life. You hack out stone during the day and lose yourself in dreams in the evening. Every place has its Cinema Paradiso.

The room in which the films were shown was the same one in which Jonas had attended his first Christmas parties: a hall, in other words, reserved for boisterous festivities, and though Jonas would later be bowled over by the decor of such gems as the Klingenberg, the Sentrum and the Eldorado, in terms of atmosphere no cinema could match the stark surroundings of Grorud Cinema, with interlocking steel-framed chairs ranged in front of a grimy, battered screen upon which fantastic pictures could be discerned even before the picture had started. At Grorud Cinema children also got in to see adult films — far too often, in fact. Pretty much the only criterion for being allowed in was that you could reach up to the ticket window with your money, a window which was, as it happens, not unlike the ones at the Eastern Railway Station, so you felt you were asking for: ‘A ticket to Hollywood, please.’ Thanks to this very liberal regime, Jonas not only saw a heap of harmless films about Lassie and the sons of Lassie, but also a lot of hair-raising pictures which he definitely should not have seen, among them at least two Dracula movies in which a fearsome, bloodthirsty Christopher Lee was repeatedly seen standing silhouetted against the full moon, baring his needle-sharp fangs at some quaking woman. It was after the latest of these, Dracula Prince of Darkness, as a bunch of boys were walking back to Solhaug through the wood in a huddle, not unlike what the Romans called a ‘square formation’ — faint with terror, eyes flicking this way and that — that one lad with a rather macabre sense of humour came up with the idea that they were in the middle of Transylvania. To crown it all, the moon chose that moment to go behind a cloud, and it didn’t take too much imagination to hear the eerie flapping of bat wings and the howling of wolves echoing off the granite face of Ravnkollen, on top of which the outlines of Dracula’s black castle could clearly be discerned. From then on the wood was never referred to as anything but Transylvania. It was a mystery to Jonas how they could have whipped themselves up en masse into such a state of hysteria over something they knew to be so silly, but it just went from bad to worse. It got to the point where they were even pinching their mothers’ gold crucifixes and wearing them tucked inside their shirts when they had to walk home from the cinema in the evening. Even during the day the boys avoided crossing this spot. In Transylvania anything could happen.

At Solhaug there were not too many years between the different ‘generations’, which is to say the groups of children who played together. Jonas belonged to the second generation. The first batch of kids were all three or four years older, and their undisputed leader was Petter, or Sgt Petter as he was known after the new Beatles album came out and, by some enviable means, he managed to get hold of a silk military-style coat — from London’s Carnaby Street itself, no less — just like the ones the Beatles were wearing on the cover of said album. Not only that, but under his nose he sported some wisps of hair which he called a moustache.

None of the girls really stood out. Apart from Mamma Banana. Mamma Banana was what was known as ‘easy’. The sort of girl who, if she didn’t exist, every boy would have to invent. There were the wildest rumours going around about how insatiable she was and the things she found to console herself with on hot summer nights if there was no boy around. ‘Nothing can satisfy her,’ Guggen whispered to Jonas and rolled his eyes. ‘Not even a magnum bottle of beer.’ Mamma Banana just couldn’t get enough of it. Hence the name.

Her real name was Laila, and she lived farther up Bergensveien in a tumbledown Swiss-style villa with coloured glass screening the veranda. If Jonas were honest with himself, she seemed more quiet than randy. But she was pretty; and they also had proof, of course, that those demure, downcast eyes were just a cover. One autumn, the smaller kids had been running around telling everybody that Karl’s Beetle was alive, that it rocked and rolled after dark. Jonas and his chums almost laughed their heads off at such daft notions. The Beetle in question was an ancient Volkswagen, an old banger really, which everybody called Charlie’s Chariot — an allusion to their name for what is also known, depending where one comes from, as the Plough, the Big Dipper or Charles’s Wain. It had been sitting outside Number Four for ages, covered by a tarpaulin. But the kids kept going on and on about it, so one night Jonas and a couple of the others stole down to the courtyard and hid behind some bushes. And it was true enough: Charlie’s Chariot had to be a creature of the night, because it did indeed come to life. It shook, rocked back and forth, like a giant tortoise, except that it never left the spot. Five minutes later they had their explanation. From under the tarpaulin crept Laffen and Mamma Banana. They must have managed to unlock the door and were using the car as a love-nest. But even this was not enough to convince Jonas — Laffen was an okay guy, he actually moved away soon after this, and no one knew what had really gone on under that tarpaulin. Jonas still found it hard to bridge the gap between the vulgar rumours about Mamma Banana and the happy face he had seen in the light of the street lamp when Laila clambered out of Charlie’s Chariot, as if she really had been on a trip around the stars.

This sight did, however, fire his erotic imaginings, much in the same way as the show on the flag green in the summertime, when the older girls armed themselves with plaid travelling rugs, Bambi record-players and piles of well-worn singles and Laila danced the twist along with the others, while Jonas and the younger lads lay on the slope a little way off, pretending to be playing on grass-blade whistles. And I tell you it was some sight: sixteen year-old Laila twisting her body this way and that in a sort of trance-like dance, with hips and a polka-dot bikini top that produced such inexplicable collisions in their thoughts that the boys had to fix their eyes on the pennant outstretched in the breeze for a second or so, before again daring to scan the green sward filled with girlish bodies wriggling out of the sheer, youthful joy of being alive.

Laila seemed to like Jonas; or at least she spoke to him. She had even been known to walk home from the shopping centre with him if they happened to bump into one another there — despite the fact that he was younger than her. Maybe it was because he didn’t tease her or shout rude remarks after her like the other boys. Some people said she wasn’t all there, but Jonas realized — even more so after Buddha came along — that there could be well be some other reason; that she had understood, seen, something which caused her somehow to shut herself off from the world a bit. And after Aunt Laura told him that the Arabian name for The 1001 Nights was Alf Layla wa-Layla, Jonas always thought of Laila as being a princess of sorts, an initiator of tales.

What sort of sound does a dragon make?

One evening — in the spring of the year when he was in his first year at junior high — Jonas had gone to Grorud Cinema and happened to sit down next to Laila. No Dracula film that night but a romantic affair with lots of kissing and a couple of nail-biting scenes which moved Laila to grip his hand — whether consciously or unconsciously he could not have said. Sgt Petter also betrayed his presence in the hall with demonstrative hoots of phoney laughter at unlikely moments. Outside, after the film, he drew Jonas aside and asked if he could talk Laila into walking home through the wood. Sgt Petter was with three other boys of his own age, a trio known to some as The Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘What for?’ Jonas asked.

‘Just for a laugh,’ said Sgt Petter. ‘We’re just going to give her a bit of a fright.’ More laughter. The other three laughed too.

Jonas wasn’t sure. He utterly despised Sgt Petter, but the older boy did possess certain talents Jonas wished that he too possessed: Sgt Petter had a creative streak. He could create things. All Grorud knew, for example, that he was the originator of the following joke, which at one point was being told all over Norway and beyond: ‘What did the Beatles say when they were caught in an avalanche? Watch out for those Rolling Stones!’ Sgt Petter was, in short, a trendsetter; he was, among other things, the first person back then to sport a pair of the fabulous new Romika football boots, which looked just like proper football boots and hence easily outclassed the more old-fashioned Vikings. All in all, Professor, I think that the difference between Romika and Viking football boots would prove a worthwhile peg on which to hang a local cultural analysis — the difference, as it were, between the elegant and the clodhopperish: a comparison elevated to a global scale by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss when he writes about the raw and the cooked. Boys who favoured the Romika boot tended to be fleet-footed forwards who quite often went on to play for top clubs like Frigg or Lyn, while the heavier and more robust Viking boots with their red laces were the preferred choice of backs who walloped or dunted the ball, characters like Frankenstein who usually wound up playing for deadly company teams. That Sgt Petter was the first person in Grorud with Romika boots basically says all there is to say about him.

‘Okay,’ Jonas said. He had defied Petter once, years before, and he was still smarting from that encounter. And yet: why did he do it? Because he knew what would happen. Or was that why: that he wanted to see whether what he knew would happen really would happen? As if he wanted to tempt fate. Press a strange, new button.

‘Great stuff,’ said Sgt Petter. ‘You’re a right tough nut, Jonas you’ve proved that before.’

Laila was glad to have someone to walk through the wood with — they’d get home faster that way, she said. Jonas felt his testicles constrict as they entered the path between the trees. It was dark, but Laila did not appear to be at all frightened, in fact she seemed very cheerful, was more chatty than usual, wanted to know what Jonas thought about some of the scenes in the film as they were walking past sheds with a graveyard air about them, blocks of stone just waiting to be turned into gravestones.

When she took his hand, halfway through Transylvania, he had second thoughts and was about to turn back. Too late. Just level with the quarry’s gaping amphitheatre they ran into the wolf pack, Sgt Petter and the other three crashing out of the bushes, not with a ‘Boo!’ but with dangerously set faces. They grabbed Laila by the arms. ‘You keep watch here,’ they ordered Jonas. ‘Give a howl if anyone comes.’

They disappeared, dragging Laila between them. Jonas knew no one would come. He heard Laila say something, the boys laughing. ‘Take it easy, we know you want to.’ Sgt Petter’s voice. Then that laugh. An innocent laugh and yet steely. Out of place. Beyond creepy.

Jonas heard what it sounded like. Dragon laughter. The sound they had created in their radio play.

He stood there, in the middle of Transylvania, a prince of darkness, staring at the ground, heard Laila moaning. She liked it. Well, why not? With his own eyes he had seen her slipping out of Charlie’s Chariot with her hair all mussed up. Alf Layla wa-Layla.

He stands there, in the middle of Transylvania, in the amphitheatre of the quarry as it were, staring at the ground, hears fabric being ripped, a stifled cry of ecstasy, or was it a muffled scream, a scream for… He can’t help it, has to look up, spies them in among the trees, sees them clearly even in the dark, sees how three hold her down while the fourth lies on top of her. He looks up just as two of them swap places. And seeing it with his own eyes it is impossible to misinterpret those sounds: it is not moaning, it is sobbing, a human being wailing in pain.

He knows what he ought to do now. Hold up a cross. Be a Saint George. Anything. But he is paralysed. Stands in the middle of Transylvania, in the amphitheatre, and just watches. A spectator.

And at the same time, appalled, he realizes that what he is feeling, what he thinks is horror, is not horror. It is a breathless awareness, a tremendous opening up, a receptivity, to impressions. The scene before him, everything around him, seems to become a lever, dislodging a rock inside him, uncovering a dark hole, a treasure, a ball of snakes, he doesn’t know. He stands there and feels himself almost being torn apart with despair, even while wishing that this moment would last. For everything, even the smell of damp granite, permeates him and he is transformed into one enormous overview, an explosion of ideas, a kind of chord which sums up everything, which is both grating and divine, as is the rhythm — ‘That I’ll have to try out on the piano,’ was the thought that flashed through his mind — a beat, a whole lot of beats at once, thudding, pounding, right through him, a wild, primitive, compelling pulse.

The four boys staggered out. Sgt Petter had an ugly scratch on his cheek, he was bleeding. ‘Great stuff, Dickie. I knew you were a tough nut.’ He gave Jonas a quick thump on the back before they all ran off toward Solhaug. On their own: innocent lads. Together: a mob. The mystery of the mass. Four swans forming a dragon.

Jonas followed the sounds of weeping. Laila was sitting on the ground, her trousers still round her ankles, her sweater rucked up above her waist. There were scratches under one breast, blood on the back of her hand. Jonas noticed some pine needles on her white thigh, wanted to brush them off, but didn’t. ‘Laila?’ he said.

No answer. Nothing but heartrending sobs.

‘Was it horrible?’ he asks.

She looked at him. Despite the darkness he saw it. Despite the tears. A hate he had only seen once before. In Ørn’s eyes that time when they fought and Jonas held him down.

She got up, clearly in pain. Crying soundlessly. He tried to help her, but she turned away, it took her a while to straighten her clothes, then she started making her way back through the trees, so unsteady on her feet that she had to stop every so often and prop herself up against a tree trunk. He heard her throw up. He followed slowly after her. Only once did she turn round, and though she didn’t say anything, from the look in her eyes he knew what she was thinking. The most horrible thing about it, those eyes said, was him.

Jonas stayed right behind her the rest of the way home, benumbed by conflicting emotions. Guilt turned his legs to lead. A rhythm galloped around in his head. He could not rid himself of it. Then: Dickie, he thought. Why did Sgt Petter call me Dickie?

He knew it. It was bound to happen. He had known it all along.