The Conqueror

The Pursuit of Immortality

The natural thing would, therefore, be to proceed to the trip to Jerevan, but if we’re to follow the sequence I have in mind — that sequence that will, I hope, explain everything — then this is not the place for it. Nor for the story of the stamps, which another — dare I say? — less seasoned narrator might have presented at this point. Here, instead, we must turn to another island. This same thought had also occurred to Jonas Wergeland himself while he was in Samoa: that all the seashells around him reminded him of the large, burnished shells in the parlour of the house on Hvaler, souvenirs of his paternal grandfather’s seafaring days, shells which, when Jonas held one to each ear, brought him the sound of the sea in stereo.

Jonas was not always alone with his grandfather on the island at the mouth of the fjord. His cousin, Veronika Røed, was often there too, especially in the last summers before they both started school, the house being just as much the childhood home of her father, known as Sir William because of his way of dressing and his aristocratic leanings. There were the two of them, Jonas and Veronika, and their grandfather. Just them and a storybook island abounding with treasure and dragons, with hedgehogs and kittens and bowls of milk, with baking hot rocks and jetties where you could spend half the day fishing for a troll crab only, when you finally caught it, to let it go again.

They often went out in the rowboat. Jonas loved to watch his grandfather rowing, loved to hear the rasp of skin on wood, the creak of the rowlocks; Jonas would sit on the thwart, admiring his grandfather’s technique, noting how he flicked the blades of the oars and rested on each stroke, rowing with a rhythm that seemed to take no effort and made Jonas feel that they could go on rowing for ever. Actually, it was a funny thing about his grandfather’s rowing: he didn’t row forward, as was usual, he backed the oars, rowed backward so to speak, or rather, the reverse — he said it was easier that way.

Jonas’s grandfather had once built a model of a Colin Archer lifeboat, an exact replica with the red Maltese Cross ringed in blue on the bow and all, and sometimes they would gently set this in the water. When the wind filled the tiny sails it would sail so well that, seen against the right bit of the background, it could have been taken for a real boat. They would row alongside it, and Jonas played that they were gods, watching over it, that his grandfather was Poseidon and he and Veronika his attendants. Which was not so far from the truth, because to Jonas his grandfather really was a god.

It was also while pottering about on the boats that their grandfather taught the children to tie knots: first a half-hitch and a bowline, then more complicated rope techniques such as splicing. He even showed them how to tie a double Turk’s Head, the sort of boy-scout knot that Daniel tied in his Cubs neckerchief. Veronika slipped the knotted rope onto her finger and gave Jonas a funny look: ‘Now we’re engaged,’ she said. Jonas had nothing against that. They were the same age, and Veronika was prettier than anybody else he knew, even darker and sultrier than Little Eagle’s mother.

That summer Jonas was often to be found sitting against the sunbaked wall of the shed, looping bits of rope together. There was one particularly tricky knot which he never mastered: a clove hitch which, had he got it right, would have been almost as intricate in appearance as the drawings that Aunt Laura, the family’s artistic alibi, had shown him, with Arabic characters intertwining in such a way that it looked like a labyrinth. Far easier, and really just as lovely was the square knot. Jonas could not understand how two simple loops could produce something so strong. He never forgot how to do a square knot, not after his grandfather taught him how to tie it by telling him a story about two wrestlers and how the one wrestler won both times.

But then Omar Hansen told stories almost non-stop, more often than not in the blue kitchen, in that room as full of gleaming copper as an Oriental bazaar. And sometimes when his grandfather was telling a story Jonas was allowed to pound cardamom pods in a brass mortar: spice to be added to the dough for buns. There was nothing quite like it, those thrilling tales combined with the knowledge that they would soon be having freshly baked buns. On his arm, his grandfather had a tattoo of a dragon, done in Shanghai, so he said, and before starting a story he always rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘The dragon has to have air under its wings if the imagination is to soar freely,’ he said. And whether it was the dragon’s flight that helped him or not, Omar Hansen never ran out of stories, he could go on telling them for as long as he could row; he seemed to have lived all his life for only this: to sit one day in a blue kitchen with saucer-eyed grandchildren sitting opposite him. And as he span his yarns, each one more amazing than the one before, he peered at a point that seemed somehow beyond time and space, in such a way that fine wrinkles fanned out from his eyes to his temples, as if he were also, actually, endeavouring to twine these tales into one enormous clove hitch, into the story, the crucial knot, that lay behind all the others and bound them together.

One day, when old Arnt had been left to keep an eye on Jonas and Veronika, Omar Hansen came back home from Strömstad — which is to say, all the way from Sweden — with a new treat, a wondrous thing: a peach. These days, when tropical fruit is taken for granted in Norway, when you can buy anything from mangoes to kiwis just about anywhere, no one would give it a second thought, but in those days peaches were a rarity — Jonas had certainly never seen one, nor had Veronika; they had eaten canned peaches with whipped cream on one occasion, but this was something quite different, this was the real thing. Their grandfather laid the peach on a silver platter. ‘This peach is from Italy,’ he said. ‘But originally the peach comes all the way from China.’

It was one of the most beautiful things Jonas had ever seen: that groove in the flesh, the golden skin blushing pink on the one side. Their grandfather let them touch it, and Jonas held it tenderly, savouring the feel of the velvety surface; it reminded him of the fuzzy-felt pictures in Sunday School. From that day onwards he had no problem understanding how a complexion could be described as ‘peachy’. Grandfather said it had to sit a while longer, it wasn’t absolutely perfect yet. ‘We’ll share it tomorrow,’ he said and solemnly placed the peach back on its silver platter.

They sat round the oilcloth-covered table, gazing at the fruit, which seemed almost to hover above the silver platter, while Omar Hansen outdid himself with a story featuring Marco Polo as its central character and Jonas and Veronika as his armour-bearers — or perhaps it was the other way round — and this peach as one of the props; it had something to do with a city in China called Changlu and a bit about the pursuit of immortality, a thrilling adventure, almost as thrilling as the peach itself.

Late that night — a warm, almost tropical night — after they had gone to bed, Veronika padded upstairs to where Jonas lay in the old bed in a small room in the attic. It’s not easy to describe the relationship between two children, but there was something between Jonas and Veronika, something which caused their lips automatically to bump together when they played hide-and-seek in the dark in the barn, or when they came face to face in the tunnels formed by the dense tangle of juniper bushes on Tower Hill.

Outside of Jonas’s room, the wide loft extended like a wilderness beyond the bounds of civilization. Here, old clothes hung over battered trunks plastered with labels from exotic cities, and weather-beaten chests from Zanzibar full of faded copies of Allers Family Journal and The Illustrated Weekly. And in one corner, under some nets, stood the most mysterious thing of all: an old safe, heavy and forbidding. An unopened treasure.

At the other end of the loft, deep in shadow, loomed a harmonium — what in Norway used to be called a ‘hymn-bike’ — a memento of their grandmother who had, by all accounts, been a God-fearing woman whose heart had burned for the mission service. Actually it was on this instrument that Jonas’s father had begun his musical career, one that had since led him to the organ in Grorud Church. When it was light, Jonas had been known to slip into the shadows and play triads, his feet pumping away at the pedals for dear life. It surprised him to find what a lot of noise it made; he pulled out some knobs and observed how more keys than he had fingers for were then pressed down, as if an invisible spirit were sitting playing alongside him. His grandmother, Jonas thought. The choral songbook, which for a long time he had believed to be full of songs about the sea and fish, was still there, shrouded — appropriately enough — in gloom and open at her favourite hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

Jonas sits up in bed, can tell right away what Veronika has in mind. She cuddles up close to him, wearing a thin cotton nightdress with blue dolphins on it. ‘Why do we have to wait till tomorrow to eat the peach?’ she says, smelling like no one else: sweet, confusing. Jonas isn’t sure, he wavers: ‘But Granddad has to have a bit too, doesn’t he?’ he says. ‘He’s going to let us have it all anyway,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t you at least go and get it?’

Jonas tiptoes down to the kitchen, stands for a moment on the linoleum floor gazing in awe at the fruit on its silver platter, hovering in the bright summer night. A planet called China. He feels the pull it exerts on him. As if they belong together, he and the peach. He is Marco Polo. He picks it up and climbs back up to the loft, places it on the sheet in front of Veronika. They look at it. Jonas thinks it is divinely beautiful.

From an early age Jonas was always on the lookout for objects that were more than they seemed, things that in some way illustrated something he could not put into words. At home he had taken the works out of an old alarm clock. They sat on top of the chest of drawers. A tiny, transparent factory. He liked to look at the gears inside the metal frame, how the cogs turned, how they meshed with one another, not to mention the balance wheel, which pulsated like a little heart. Most mysterious of all was the spring, the spiral that powered all the cogs by slowly expanding. A coiled steel sling. ‘The only thing that spoils it a bit,’ Jonas told Little Eagle, ‘is that the works have to be wound up, that they don’t run by themselves all the time.’

Daniel had a similar set of clock workings, but he, of course, just had to try to unscrew the frame, with the result that bits went flying in all directions, a bit like splinters from an exploding shell. Jonas had gazed respectfully at the spring lying on the floor, ostensibly harmless and insignificant, almost a yard in length. He saw what force, what driving force it possessed. The secret lay simply in coiling it up.

The peach had some of this same quality about it. A tension. As of something compressed and capable of expansion.

‘Take off your clothes,’ Veronika says. Jonas does as he is told, tells himself that the peach demands this, it is a crystal ball which will not reveal anything if he keeps on his pyjamas. Veronika promptly puts one warm hand around his balls. Jonas watches in amazement as his penis rises up, skinny and eager. She puts the other hand around the peach and shuts her eyes. Then she lifts the peach to his mouth. Jonas feels the soft, furred skin against his lips: down, velvet, silk, all at once. He is filled with a fierce hunger. He’s got to have a bite of this fruit. The juice runs down his chin as he sinks his teeth into the skin. It’s good, deliriously good. Veronika takes a bite before offering it to him again. They take bites turn and turn about, sharing it, with her hand cupped around his balls all the while.

Later in life, Jonas would say that nothing could hold a candle to those first bites of a peach. It was a delight, a treat, the like of which he would never experience again — not even when he dined at Bagatelle in Oslo, in those days the first and only restaurant in Norway to be awarded two stars in the Michelin guide. As the juice and the flesh glided over his tongue and down his throat Jonas felt a glow emanating from the very cortex of his brain, along with a taste in his mouth, which gave him an inkling of continents, spheres, of which he knew nothing.

Veronika looked adorable, sitting there in her flimsy nightie with its pattern of blue dolphins. Jonas beheld the soft lines of her body, her ankles, calves, the blonde hairs on her arms, brown summer skin covered in golden down. They snuggled up together, taking turns to eat, licking and sucking up every shred, every drop.

At last all that was left was the stone. It looked like a minuscule, worm-eaten brain. ‘Can I have it?’ he asked, not knowing whether it was because the stone looked nice, or because he wanted to make sure that the evidence of the theft lay in his hands, even though he knew they could never wangle their way out of this particular jam.

Veronika let go of his balls, lifted up her nightie. She wasn’t wearing any panties. She displayed her genitals. Jonas sat quite still and took in this sight, didn’t touch her, just sat and looked, studying those lines, the gentle swelling, the fleshy softness, the dark slit. She spread those fleshy lips and showed him the inside. It occurred to him that the clitoris — not that he knew that word for it, of course — was a sort of fruit kernel. That this too lay at the heart of something juicy, a fruit, something that could cause the cortex of the brain to glow. At the same time, for some reason he thought of the Turk’s Head knot, saw this thing before him as a knot, a circular knot. Veronika slid her finger a little way into her slit, or knot, then stuck it into Jonas’s mouth. ‘Now we’re spliced forever,’ she said. ‘Now nothing can part us.’

Jonas slept soundly that night and wasn’t really feeling at all guilty when he came down to breakfast. Veronika and their grandfather were already sitting in the blue kitchen, staring as if in mutual sorrow at the empty silver platter. Jonas knew right away that his cousin had told their grandfather a tale in which all the blame rested with him, Jonas, alone — all alone; no matter what he said, he would not be believed. So he said nothing. They ate in silence, bread with cold mackerel from dinner the day before, and he was on the verge of telling a story, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He realized that the story was no good.

And afterwards? I don’t know what to say about what happened afterwards, Professor. It would be far too easy to psychoanalyse it. His grandfather was calm, he was perfectly calm when he went out into the forest with a knife: ‘Only one thing’ll do any good here — and that’s a good old-fashioned taste of the birch,’ as he said; he was calm when he took Jonas up to the attic and demonstrated the use of the birch twigs on the boy’s bare backside, rolled up his sleeves, giving Jonas the feeling that it was the tattooed dragon that was angry, that lashed and lashed at his behind; his grandfather brought down the birch again and again, beating steadily, with the same rhythm as when he rowed, as if he could keep it up for hours, but it was this very calmness that vouchsafed Jonas a glimpse of the towering rage, the almost berserker-like frenzy beneath the surface. There was something altogether a little too relentless, a little too self-righteous, a little too much solemn conviction in the blows his grandfather rained down on Jonas’s behind. For, no matter how he looked at it, Jonas could not see how the eating of this peach, however cheated his grandfather might feel, could justify a grown man with a lifetime of experience behind him putting a terrified little boy over his knee and thrashing him — on his bare behind, at that, and for a long time, for far too long — with a bundle of birch twigs, ceasing only just before the skin broke and the blood ran. It was a brutal, nigh-on wicked act, thought Jonas, young though he was. And it was during those seconds that it dawned on him that there was something wrong, possibly even seriously wrong, with his grandfather. That behind all those stories and yarns, behind the patient backward rowing, there lurked some dark secret, a tricky, inextricable knot. And this suspicion grew no less when his grandfather stood up and gave a sort of a sigh before walking over to the harmonium in the shadows and, with his back to Jonas, proceeded to play ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

Don’t put down your pen, Professor, I’m not finished. Because even when it hurt the most, Jonas knew that it was worth it. He would have done it again. For he had eaten the peach not just to find out how it tasted but also for another reason: to feed a craving that was more than physical hunger — just as the clock workings on the chest of drawers at home were more than just clock workings — and suddenly he knew that he was willing to endure a great deal in order to satisfy that craving. As he lay there, feeling the birch twigs strike his backside again and again, he sensed a mysterious power building up inside him, and when his grandfather allowed him to get up he felt a jolt run through his body, as if he had taken a huge leap forward, aged several years in one minute.

The next day, just for fun, he tried to tie that trickiest of knots, the labyrinthine clove hitch, and got it right first time, as if he had been doing it all his life, as if he suddenly had those twists and turns of the rope at his fingertips.

Jonas kept the peach stone. He made believe that it was a dragon’s brain. Dragons had tiny brains, he knew, but they could harbour a secret, like the safe in the corner of the loft. A pearl, maybe. One day, with Veronika standing over him, he crushed it with a hammer and found another kernel inside the stone, something like an almond. ‘Would you like to have it?’ he asked Veronika.

‘If you plant it in the ground, it’ll grow into a dragon,’ she said. ‘Come on, I know a place in the woods, just next to our rope ladder.’ And on the way there she stays him and, with what might almost have been tears in her eyes, says: ‘Did it hurt?’