The Conqueror

The Vertebral Disc

Allow me, in this connection — and remember: the connections between the stories in a life are as important as the stories themselves — to tell you about a time when Jonas Wergeland felt real hurt or more correctly, about an incident which took place in the midst of that pain. It happened in the emotionally charged year of the EEC referendum, the year when Jonas Wergeland was due to sit his university Prelim — although the thought of sitting an exam seemed the farthest thing from his mind, not to say an absolute impossibility, at that time. He found himself at the northern end of Norway’s largest lake, in the ‘dayroom’ of a hospital, to be more exact, one of those rooms which, with their spartan, simulated cosiness seem more depressing and godforsaken than any other place on earth. As a small boy, whenever he saw a diagram of the human circulatory system Jonas would think to himself that the heart must be like a knot, and that was how it felt now. A knot tightening. Jonas Wergeland sat there, swollen-eyed, twisting a handkerchief round his fingers. Outside it was winter, and dark — as dark and impenetrable as life when it seems most pointless.

Jonas thought he was alone, but when he looked up, as if through water, there she was. She took him as much by surprise as a car you haven’t seen in your wing mirror, one that’s been in the blind spot but which suddenly appears, seemingly materializing out of thin air, when you turn your head. He felt like asking her to go away, had a truculent ‘Piss off!’ on the tip of his tongue, but bit it back. He shut his eyes. He sniffed. It sometimes occurred to Jonas that the reason he didn’t take up smoking was because he was afraid he would lose the ability to inhale women: to let their scent flow into his bloodstream and excite visions. He had caught a whiff of this scent before, in Viktor’s room.

She spoke to him: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘No,’ Jonas said — curbing his irritation: ‘No, thanks.’ He kept his eyes shut, as if the world would grow even darker if he opened them.

But she didn’t go away, she sat down on a chair next to him and placed her hand over his, thinking perhaps that he was a patient. She said nothing. Jonas inhaled her scent. Even with his eyes shut, even amid a maelstrom of black thoughts, he felt something seize hold of him, not of his hand but of his body, that something was drawing him to it, was intent on worming its way inside him: her, this unknown woman.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

He kept his eyes shut, his head bowed, thought first of leaving, but something made him stay, made him speak, say something, tearfully to begin with, but without it being embarrassing, about his best friend, about himself and Viktor, about the Three Wise Men, the bare bones only but enough for her — possibly — to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. She said not a word, simply sat with her hand on his. Jonas had the feeling that her hand led to light.

When she gets to her feet he looks up. The first thing he sees is a high forehead. Rationality, he thinks. Exactly what I need right now: rationality. A white coat hangs open over her indoor clothes. Her badge reveals that her name is Johanne A. She has just come off duty, is on her way out, home. She nods, gives him a searching look before walking off down the corridor. He follows her with his eyes, feels a faint pressure on his spine, a pressure that spreads throughout his body, like a tremor in the nervous system.

Jonas skived off school and stayed for some days in Lillehammer, in a town he would always hate. He met Johanne A. again. She was in her mid-twenties, a resident on the surgical ward — this was her first post. She told him what the neurologist had said about Viktor, about the depth of the coma and the swelling. Viktor was still on a respirator in intensive care. She explained the uncertainty of his condition, what treatment they were giving him, how things were likely to go from here. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But there’s nothing more we can do.’

Shortly before he was due to return home to Oslo, Jonas was sitting on a bench in the Swan Chemist’s Shop on Storgata, staring listlessly at a wall hung with portraits of generations of chemists. All chemists’ shops reminded Jonas of his maternal grandmother, because always, on trips into town with her, they would purchase a mysterious ointment at the chemist’s, the apothecary, on Stortorvet in Oslo — that one, too, with a swan on its façade: the symbol of immortality. And every time they stepped inside that shop his grandmother would throw up her hands in delight at the sight of the tiled floors, the pillars of creamy-coloured marble and a ceiling decorated with symbolic paintings; and while they were waiting she would tell Jonas about the fine old fittings of mahogany and American maple, with drawers of solid oak. ‘Like a temple to medicine,’ she would whisper. For this reason, Jonas always felt there was something rather antiquated — something holy, almost — about chemist’s shops, also now, here in Lillehammer. There was also something about the atmosphere of the place, the odour of creosote, of aniseed and essential oils, which reinforced this sense of a bygone, somehow alchemical, age. Even so, as he was washing down a headache tablet with a drink of water, he instantly recognized that other scent, it was as if he had been caught up in a whirlpool. He turned around. It was her. And there was something about Johanne A.’s figure, her dress and, above all, her high forehead that made her seem utterly anachronistic in those surroundings, like an astronaut in the middle ages. Nonetheless, he knew that there was a connection between her and the chemist’s shop. Or to put it another way: all of Jonas Wergeland’s women represented an encounter with the past.

Johanne A. invited him back to her place for coffee. She lived above the hospital, not far from the open-air museum at Maihaugen. They strolled up the hill. It was cold; it was growing dark. She was wearing a big hat, the sort of hat that made heads turn. In the hall Jonas noticed a shelf holding several other eye-catching pieces of headgear.

The flat was furnished in an unusual style: ‘avant-garde’ was the word that sprang to Jonas’s mind. The furniture in the sitting room looked more like works of art, architectonic concepts sculpted into chairs and storage units. The lighting too was highly original: little flying saucers hovering over glass-topped tables. Products from Bang & Olufsen — a television set and an expensive, metallic stereo system — seemed to belong to a universe unlike any Jonas had ever seen. Jars, vases, ashtrays — even the salt and pepper shakers on the shelf between the kitchen and the sitting room — appeared to have been designed for the atomic age. Jonas felt as if he had stepped into a laboratory, a room which proclaimed that here, within these walls, some sort of experiment was being carried out. ‘The world is progressing,’ was all she said when she noticed the way his eyes ran round the room in astonishment, occasionally glancing out of the window, at the old buildings on the hill, the vestiges of tarred-brown, medieval Norway only a stone’s throw away.

She poured coffee for him from a transparent jug in which the grounds were pressed down to the bottom by a shining strainer. He pointed to an old microscope over by the window. ‘I’ve had that since I was a child,’ she said. ‘Pasteur was my great hero. These days, of course, viruses are the thing — electron microscopes.’ For a long time, while at university, she had considered a future as a research scientist but had abandoned this idea, was happy where she was now, expected to end up in general practice. As she was talking, Jonas studied the pictures hanging on the walls: reproductions of Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson and The Raising of Lazarus and a fine selection of Leonardo’s studies of different parts of the body, all rendered strange and different by gleaming steel frames and by being interspersed with a number of stringently abstract pictures by Malevich. In one spot hung an artistic representation of the human head’s development through various palaeontological stages, as if her pictures also aimed to underline her statement about the world progressing.

She broke off in the middle of a sentence: ‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ she said. ‘You seem so ordinary and yet at the same time so different. There’s a look in your eyes. Not at first, there wasn’t, but now.’

‘It might have something to do with my back,’ he said. And because she was a doctor, he did not consider it unreasonable to tell her about an episode from his childhood, from the time when he would not eat. His parents had come up with all sorts of ploys to distract him during mealtimes, to get Jonas — inadvertently almost — to swallow a few morsels of food. On one occasion on Hvaler they had given him a box of buttons to play with while they shovelled food into him as best they could. Among all these different and interesting buttons one in particular caught Jonas’s eye. His grandfather said that he had bought it in China and that it came from a dragon. ‘Imagine that, you little starveling: genuine dragon horn!’ The Chinaman in the shop had told him that farmers sometimes came across dragon skeletons in desolate spots and sold the bones and horns. The apothecaries ground the bones into powder and craftsmen made things from the horns, including buttons. Jonas clearly enjoyed this story, because he promptly popped the button into his mouth — and swallowed it, to everyone’s dismay. Jonas vaguely remembered his mother forcing him to sit on the potty, then examining his stools as keenly as a customs officer looking for bags of heroin, or as if he was the Emperor of China and his shit was sacred — but found no button. His parents were worried sick. They took him to the hospital and had him X-rayed. Nothing showed up on the X-ray plates either. No button had come out, and no button could be detected inside him, not by the X-rays at any rate. It wouldn’t necessarily do any harm, the doctor reassured them, though secretly he guessed that the button had come out the other end long ago. ‘The body can cope with a lot more than we think,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard stories of surgeons leaving this or that inside patients after an operation, folk have survived worse things than a button.’ Jonas, for one, felt reassured. As the years passed and he read about all the odd things that were inserted into people’s bodies, from heart valves to silicone, he came to the conclusion that the body could accept one measly button, even a horn one. When he grew older, he would dream that it had slotted itself into his spine like a disc, that he was, in other words, equipped with an extra vertebra — had suffered more or less the opposite of a slipped disc. He recalled how proud he had been on attending one of his first school medicals: ‘You’ve got a remarkably straight back, boy!’ the doctor had said. Several times, during bouts of depression, Jonas was to take comfort in this — in his belief that, in spite of everything, the button made him special. His grandfather had told him about a tribe in Brazil: when they reached a certain age the young boys of the tribe had wooden plugs put in their ears to enable them to pick up the dreams of the tribe. ‘Sometimes I think of the button as a pill,’ he told Johanne A. ‘A pill that didn’t take effect for a long time.’ What he did not tell her, Professor, was that the effect of the pill was to exert a pressure on his spine, a pressure which sometimes altered his perception completely and gave him a glimpse of a world rich in possibilities.

‘I knew there was something,’ she says, and without more ado she proceeds to switch off the lights, as if this anecdote has inspired her to undertake some unorthodox operation that needs to be conducted in the dark. She puts out all the lights, apart from one lamp in a corner, a sphere encircled by a metal ring, like another Saturn suspended over a table bearing little pyramids of coloured glass. Normally, Jonas was frightened by dark rooms but not now, not with her beside him, not with that scent infiltrating his nostrils, filling him with a mounting sense of exhilaration. She sat on the white sofa, faint reflections from her eyes in the shadows. Two geometric earrings hung like satellites on either side of her face. She reached out her hands to him, he went to her, kissed her, felt a lock turn smoothly, as if they each possessed half of the key to something important which they could only open together, like you saw in films, where two keys were required in order to open a safety deposit box or fire a rocket.

She drew him into an adjoining bedroom, got undressed without a word, made him do the same. Her legs were smooth-shaven, she must have trimmed her pubic hair too, it looked a little too perfect in shape, or artificial, like something out of a retouched, chocolate-box picture. In the dim light the two halves of her buttocks looked to be made of crystal, twin globes that harboured secrets, future prospects, intimations that Jonas was about to make love to a being superior to himself, a visitor from a planet where evolution had reached a more advanced stage, where they did not play the old brutish game involving lots of primitive pawing and pumping in and out.

She did not invite any foreplay, pulled him down onto the bed, resolutely and yet controlled, almost cool, he thought to himself, and as he slipped inside her, he felt, as he always felt at those first, tentative thrusts, a friction that puts him in mind of a dynamo, a dynamo running against a bicycle wheel, activating a lamp, flooding everything with light; and he drifts around in this light, savouring not just the physical euphoria, but also the thoughts that promptly begin to come pouring into his head, thoughts of a most unusual nature, as if the extra disc in his spine — whether imaginary or real — also contains a secret programme, impulses which only a woman can trigger.

Johanne A. was also in a state of extreme well-being, indeed she would later say that — although she had no idea why — this time with Jonas caused her to change her mind, revived her wish to become a research scientist after all, with the result that — as well as doing some remarkable work for Doctors for Peace and carrying out some pretty risky assignments for the Red Cross in war-torn regions — she wound up as an international expert on tropical diseases, a conqueror within medicine, within a field in which the study of microbes was central, the investigation of the influence of these minute organisms on people’s lives, something which was about as hard to fathom as love, or the desire she was feeling now, a desire which, without any warning, almost made her take leave of her senses, to lie writhing under a man, hardly more than a boy, to whom she had only spoken for a few hours.

Jonas knew nothing of this, so preoccupied was he with the vigorous way in which she had gradually begun to move, with her vagina, which gripped him so tenderly, with the light, with the thoughts drifting into his mind, with words that passed into new words, images, a whole network of sudden similarities between widely differing entities. For if there was one thing Jonas had learned back in the days when Daniel used to lie in the top bunk and read aloud from Agnar Mykle’s works, it was that sex is all to do with metaphors, with executing unexpected pirouettes in the imagination: to be able, one moment, to say that her small breasts ‘had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass’ and the next to gasp out the words: ‘her breasts were like explosives under her jersey’. Jonas grasped very early on that sex had something to do with broadening the mind, of giving it span, that sex was not an end in itself, but a means by which to achieve something else, perhaps quite simply a means to creativity, a conviction which was now confirmed for him, here, as he lay on his back on the bed and she sank down onto him again and again, so warm and powerful that he could almost feel the springs in the mattress, even as something similar was happening to his thoughts, as she, or they together, transformed them into spirals, springs, with the ability to hop, free themselves from a chain that ran from A to B to C, and that was why he lay there, as she exerted a greater and greater pull on him, engulfing him even while seemingly trying to restrain herself, and felt how he built a bridge of metaphors, as from A to X to K, a bridge which suddenly led him to espy a similarity between his own erect penis and a lever, the sort of tool that enabled one to move objects heavier than oneself; and perhaps that was why, at that same moment, Jonas felt himself, or her, Johanne A., shrugging off something heavy, exposing some object that lay buried, braiding various fragments into larger chunks, and eventually a story, something about being in a forest, not in a modern flat, but in a primeval forest, much as this white apartment might conceal a mahogany chemist’s shop, because lovemaking was alchemy, a commingling of irreconcilable elements, a fact which she proved by entwining herself around him with greater and greater ardour, surprising ardour, perhaps, uncontrolled even; by casting herself over him with an intensity that generated light and linked him to a story he both remembered and did not remember, thus he could recall that milk cartons had also been around ten years before, but not whether they had been printed with a red four-leaf clover design or not, and yet he knew, as he lay there savouring the light, drifting in it, that together they could set it rolling — the story that was hidden and yet right there: in the blind spot, you might say. And while Jonas was concentrating on remembering, or seeing; on letting his movements spark off associations, as they were weaving their limbs together into a writhing knot, he heard Johanne A., involuntarily, and possibly unwittingly, begin to snort, to utter sounds, hoarse grunts which, in a parenthesis in his train of thought, afforded room for surprise that a girl like her, the owner of this ultra-modern apartment, a woman who obviously believed wholeheartedly in man’s potential for evolving into an even more intelligent being, that this woman could lie there like that, grunting wildly underneath him, as if her white coat came complete with a witch-doctor’s mask. Howsoever that might be, this only made him even more aroused; he was conscious of how his thoughts struggled to get a grip on some sense of a whole, wove themselves together, how the friction slid over into a feeling of lightness, as if she were lifting him up and at the same time urging him to move with greater intensity, until she could hold back no longer, though she bit her lip until it bled — she came with a long drawn-out howl, a downright bestial scream which ended with her letting her arms flop to the floor, like someone fainting away, and whether this was what it took, or whether Jonas was just about there anyway, at that very second, thankfully and with his mind in giddy freefall, he discerned the thread connecting the whirl of thoughts which she, or the two of them together, had generated inside his head.

He was still inside her. ‘Didn’t you come?’ she asked on recovering consciousness, so to speak. Her voice was tinged with guilt. She was still out of breath, and one corner of her mouth was red with blood. ‘Did you get satisfaction?’ she asked, as if it were important to her.

He lay there smiling: he too, out of breath, smiling for the first time in days. ‘Yes, I got satisfaction,’ he said at last. And it was true, although this word did not cover the phenomenon of orgasm in the normal sense. It’s true that he was also interested in gaining satisfaction, but not the sort that could be measured in millilitres of semen produced. For Jonas Wergeland — and I hope to return to this — the act of love was not necessarily about ejaculation but about enlightenment, about being lit up, about seeing.