The Conqueror

Penalty Kick

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must concentrate once again on a thread which winds to the surface so often that it may well lie under everything. I am referring, in other words, to the story of the great shipwreck in Jonas Wergeland’s own life. And as in the war, here too a villain stood behind the torpedoing.

Although Jonas escaped miraculously unscathed from the crash on the E6, it left him walking about like a wounded man. He considered kicking up a fuss, making one hell of a scene, but decided in the end not to say anything to Margrete, not even in the way of veiled accusations regarding what had finally dawned on him, something so obvious that he ought to have tumbled to it long before. In any case, Margrete was not the crux of the problem. Somewhere in his mind Jonas had always harboured a fear, prompted by her inherent unreliability, or by something he could not put into words, that there would come a time when she would betray him. Even though he wished he did not love her half so much, there were times when he saw a witch in her, a supernatural side which was most evident in her constant insistence on freedom, a freedom which also included the right to behave unpredictably, or respond to motives he could not fathom. He had caught a glimpse of this way back in seventh grade, before she left Norway, in the ruthless way in which she had broken up with him. I never want to see her again, he had thought, with something close to relief.

The problem, as far as Jonas was concerned — the shock — was Axel.

He went around in a daze, went to work as usual — although he didn’t do anything there except sit and brood — but was always on the lookout for clues, signs that might give them away, lead him to a place where he would, as it were, catch them red-handed. It was here that the underside side of his creative genius was revealed: one and one made three — here, in his private life, as in his programmes. He rummaged through Margrete’s closet, disgusted with himself for doing so; rooted around in a wardrobe drawn from all over the world: colourful kangas for the beach, black Thai silk for evening; even Margrete’s soiled panties were turned inside out and examined for suspicious stains; he went through her diary, looking for coded appointments, hunted through her handbag for a letter, a note, some item that ought not to be there, if only a strand of hair. And incessantly, a wormball in his head: one and one makes three, had to make three. He found himself admiring them, the whole affair, how clever they were, this web of lies which they had spun and arranged so brilliantly, this triangle which they had constructed, as perfect and intricate and yet as jaw-droppingly simple as Pythagoras’s theorem about the square of the hypotenuse. What annoyed him most of all was his helplessness. He stood there shamefaced amid a heap of dirty washing with a metallic taste in his mouth, born of fear, or spite, a psychosomatic secretion from the organs of jealousy, and when he pulled off his shirt that night a sour, unfamiliar smell wafted up to him from his armpits, as if his body were trying to tell him that — if not physically, then mentally — he had been infected. He could understand, and even agree with, those who said that jealousy was a sickness, a chemical reaction in the brain; he didn’t give a toss, he knew he was sick, wanted to be that way, he nursed this state of green madness, viewing it, through the fog, with a certain curiosity even, as if he had just discovered new sides to himself, had sniffed out the darkest springs in the human heart. He peered, fascinated, into this hallucinatory chasm, astonished, almost impressed by the monster of hate which he saw taking shape, growing more and more terrible, day by day.

Until the evening in June when he stood outside the door of Axel’s apartment, unannounced and a lot more breathless than the several flights of stairs could warrant. He notes the Trio lock, rings the bell. Axel opens the door, opening also onto muted jazz and a faint whiff of garlic. Jonas had expected Margrete to be standing there, had been coiled and ready to spring, lithe as a wild beast, push the door wide open, squash the louse, before storming through every room, but he could tell straight away that she was not there. Axel let him in, looking surprised, pleased, expectant. And perhaps — in the suspicious eyes of Jonas Wergeland at least — a shade nonplussed.

‘Can you hear what that is?’ Axel asked once they were standing in the living room. ‘The Oscar Pettiford Trio, “Bohemia After Dark” — just like in the old days at Seilduksgata,’ he said, answering his own question, pleased by this coincidence: this music, and Jonas suddenly turning up on his doorstep. He is already on his way over to the drinks cabinet, across a pinewood floor strewn with little rugs, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, studiedly asymmetric. He could bake some potatoes, he joked, but he was all out of aquavit. Instead he returned with glasses and a rare malt whisky, a name Jonas had never heard before, a name that was hard to memorize, get one’s tongue round.

It was a bright summer evening, not a cloud in the sky, and yet standing in that room Jonas felt an ominous darkness stealing in. Three of the walls in the room were filled, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves; the fourth was dominated by windows and some paintings that looked like windows. Filmy white curtains fluttered gently over the deep window embrasures, casting shifting patterns over the rugs in a sort of double-exposure. In one corner stood the double bass. Jonas had a painful, recurring fantasy, in which Axel was making love to Margrete in the same way that he played the double bass, standing behind her, with his hands on her breasts, passionately intent on turning her into an unusual bass line under those probing fingers of his: Oscar Pettiford, ‘Bohemia After Dark’. Jonas had always wondered why Axel, such an attractive man, had never married. Now he knew. There was nothing Axel needed: he had Margrete. And any man who had Margrete had no cause to ask for more.

‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ Axel says, pouring some whisky. ‘Water? Ice?’

‘No, nothing,’ Jonas mumbled, knowing he ought to have asked for ice, take something to cool him down. There was a tinkle as Axel dropped ice cubes into his own glass. Jonas observed his friend’s clothes, the same old ‘uniform’: the tweed jacket draped over a chair, the white cotton shirt, baggy trousers and thick-soled shoes, as if he were still a boy who walked the streets at night, a nomad as in his student days — a person who had never grown up, a man who still lived in a world of fanciful chatter and airy-fairy dreams of being able to rock the Milky Way on its axis. Irresponsible bastard.

‘Sit down, please,’ Axel pointed to an armchair, a Stressless Royal identical to the one that Viktor used to sit in, staring at a blank television screen, there and yet not there.

Jonas put out a hand, as if to ward off such a fate, or as if realizing that for a very long time he had been as insensible and distant as Viktor.

‘Something struck me the other day when I was watching a repeat of your programme on Nansen,’ Axel said in his usual quick, intense fashion. ‘D’you remember the time after that mock exam when Viktor gave Napoleon what for, when we were sitting talking? I said there were no heroes any more, and you quoted something by Carlyle, from that rag of his which you’d probably never read, Heroes and Hero Worship or whatever it was called; something to the effect that history was simply the biographies of great men — I think maybe that was more or less what you were trying to say with your television series. Or am I wrong?’

‘Axel stop it, please,’ was all Jonas could say, he had a momentary urge to laugh, barely managed to stifle a hoarse and pathetic ‘Etiam tu, mi fili Brute.’

It was light outside, and yet it was growing dark, very dark. Jonas stood in the centre of the room, trying to make time stand still, looking at the shelves, all those book spines. Behind glass doors. As if they were treasures. Or as if this were some sort of hall of mirrors. A den of narcissism. When did Jonas first begin to have doubts about Axel? It must have been when he dropped out of university and started writing. Jonas could not understand it. Laughed at his friend, teased him, sneered at him even. What a waste. Axel, with his matchless gifts, his flair for combining biology and chemistry. Jonas had been baffled by his decision. His flight from DNA to fiction, from the genetic to the grammatical. ‘You, who would rather uncover a chain of cause and effect than be the King of Persia,’ Jonas had sneered. ‘Yes, that’s just why I did it,’ Axel said.

Jonas had never got more than halfway through any of Axel’s books; they did nothing for him. Axel himself claimed that his novels were inspired by DNA, that the search for a structure, a bass line in life played a part in his stories too. But Jonas could make nothing of them, was not even turned on by the rather pernicious, raw eroticism that pervaded some of the stories, this element which a number of critics found so intriguing and which they called ‘perversion as innovation’. In recent weeks Jonas had, however, nurtured a reluctant interest in — almost a fear of — this darker aspect; at home he had leafed with trembling fingers through some of Axel’s novels, hardly daring to read for fear of coming upon something he recognized. He remembered only too well what Axel had once said about writing: ‘Being a writer comes of being a liar,’ he said. ‘Books are the paths where deceit, lies and truth intersect. When two lies meet a truth is born, and when two truths meet, a lie is generated.’

Jonas is still standing in the centre of the room, rocking back and forth as though teetering on the brink of a precipice. The faint tang of malt whisky invades his nostrils, the music of the Oscar Pettiford Trio streaming from concealed loudspeakers coils itself around him. ‘Are you just going to stand there gawping all evening?’ Axel says. ‘Come on, sit down.’ Again the hand motioning towards the chair, as if he were offering Jonas a vacant throne.

Axel was wearing a pair of old, black-rimmed glasses, with tape wrapped round one arm. All of a sudden his friend, this former friend of his, seemed such a tragic figure to Jonas. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s just too fucking awful, it’s just too…’

He could not look Axel in the eye. He still had his gaze fixed on the bookshelves. He had always been suspicious of people who had a lot of books, who spent such a large part of their lives reading. From the very start he had disliked Margrete’s reading. She read whenever she had the chance, read with an avidity, an ardour that was written all over her face. And in all sorts of positions, often more or less on the spot where she came across the book: standing, sitting, lying down, as if the book immediately hypnotized her body into a state of immobility, total concentration. Sometimes, when she had hunted for and found a novel on the bottom shelf of the bookcase at home, Jonas would find her kneeling on the floor, bent over the book, her behind in the air, as if she were performing a devout act, praying. Or maybe it was an invitation, an expression of a secret longing to be taken from behind. Lately, with the jealous man’s amazing gift for visualizing, sticking certain images onto the mind’s eye so that they overshadow everything else, he had pictured Axel finding her like that, here, on one of those little rugs.

‘Where do you do it?’ Jonas said, finally fixing his eyes on Axel, skewering him. ‘Here?’ He waves his arms in the direction of the chequerboard of rugs. It was the perfect place. Axel’s flat. A man living alone, working at home. ‘Or have you been going along on all these weekend trips she’s been taking over the past few years — to London, Paris, Amsterdam?’

He could have sworn there was fear in the look Axel sent him: ‘Sit down, Jonas. Let’s talk about this.’

This was the proverbial last straw, this partial admission, because it may be — let us be honest, Professor, and give Jonas Wergeland the benefit of the doubt — it may be that deep down he had hoped that Axel would deny the whole thing, obdurately, even if it was true, refute everything, and then end it with Margrete, pretend it had never happened, so that they could still be friends; or at the very least that he would go down on his knees and ask forgiveness, burst into tears, beg Jonas not to think too harshly of him, but now, after what he had already taken to be a confession, Jonas lost control completely, gave vent to two weeks of accumulated wrath, hailed accusations down on Axel’s head, peppered with all of the worst expletives he had been storing up, vitriol and gall, while Axel stood there quietly, taking it, knew that he had to stand quietly and take it, stood there wearing those old glasses with the taped arm, like one who was already wounded, a pathetic figure in Jonas’s eyes, a man who, in between Jonas’s volleys of abuse, still managed to break in to say that this, this whole performance, was unworthy of a man of Jonas’s intelligence, of such a brilliant doyen of the arts, couldn’t Jonas see that he was reducing himself to the oldest cliché of them all; and after Jonas, maddened still further by such an ill-timed reproof, ducked his head and knocked back all of his whisky in one gulp, to slake his parched throat as much as anything; and after Axel had nodded approvingly, as if he thought Jonas had at last come to his senses, and after Jonas had set his glass down neatly, almost gently, on the table, and after Axel had promptly lifted the bottle and refilled it, and after Jonas had straightened up and just stared at Axel, and after Oscar Pettiford’s music, the bass lines which had accompanied the whole carry-on, had come to an end, and after Axel had said something funny, and after Jonas had smiled, yes, laughed, and after Axel had walked over to Jonas, possibly meaning to get him finally to sit down, or to hug him, Jonas kicked Axel in the groin — in his mind, in the nuts — as hard as he could, with a power and precision comparable only to that of a kicker in American football, and his thoughts went to an incident in a basement in his childhood when he had experienced on his own person the full force of such an unspeakably painful mode of attack, learned that the sac containing his precious testicles was a button which, when subjected to remarkably little pressure, could put the whole body out of action: a trick which he had, therefore, memorized carefully, although he had never had need of it till now, the perfect opportunity, a swingeing boot to the balls, to the very solar plexus of sex, unexpected and hence supremely effective — and Jonas savours, truly savours, the moment when Axel, that unspeakable son of a bitch, first doubles up then sinks to the floor like an empty sack, a felled mast, with a long-drawn groan of pain.

Axel lay writhing on the floor. But Jonas couldn’t stop there, he was working in a red haze, he kicked him, heard something crunch, was suddenly reminded of the collision on the E6, the feeling that it was not just a matter of a crash, but of squeezing a pliant tin can; he kicked and kicked at Axel as he lay curled up on the floor in a sort of foetal position, moaning, kicked him as hard as he could, in the chest, in the back, the thighs, the head, till the glasses broke and the blood ran from Axel’s nose. And even as he showered Axel with the foulest curses he could think of, went totally, verbally, berserk, while kicking away at what, as far as he was concerned, was a miserable worm — once his friend, now a traitorous worm — he was filled with a strange sense of release which made him stop.

When he left, Axel was lying lifelessly amid a tangle of rugs, as if buried in a broken up jigsaw puzzle. Jonas considered smashing the double bass but managed to restrain himself. Don’t go too far, he told himself, well aware that he couldn’t possibly go any further than he already had. He staggered out of the flat, out into Oslo, wandered around aimlessly, found a restaurant where he gorged himself like a Roman emperor, out again, on to a bar; he felt like celebrating, got as sloshed as it is possible for a man to get, before he was all but thrown out, politely, but firmly, and as good luck would have it managed to flag down a taxi right outside, a taxi with an inexperienced woman driver. ‘Bergensveien,’ he said, hearing how he slurred the word. And then, muttering to himself: ‘Or to hell. I’ve just killed a man.’