The Conqueror

In Seventh Heaven

So it is with pounding heart, Professor, that I now continue. For, as Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his mind went back to the moment when he had stepped through the door of the villa, only half an hour earlier, thinking that everything was going to be fine, even though he had just got back from the World’s Fair in Seville and was still recovering from a rough flight home. He was upset, certainly, furious in fact, but when he rang the bell and no one answered the door, he calmed down. Everything’s going to be fine, he told himself, I just need to get some sleep, have some time to myself. He felt relieved, unspeakably relieved, the way you do when you’ve got out of doing something you’ve been dreading for ages. He let himself in, flicked the switch for the outside light, but the bulb wasn’t working, he didn’t like that, never liked it when a switch was turned on and nothing happened, everything would be fine, he was alone, he would sit down in the living room, he would put his feet up, sift through his mail and listen to a CD of Bach fugues, he would ride it out, he would take a shower, stand under the hot water for a long, long time, he would be alright, he just needed a little time. He left his suitcase and his duty-free bag in the hall and wandered into the office he shared with Margrete, looked away sharply on seeing her textbooks on the shelf, a number of them on dealing with venereal diseases, far too many of them, didn’t want to think about that now, didn’t want to think about that, or about Margrete at all, instead lifted the bundle of letters lying on the desk and took a quick look through them, then on the way into the living room he stops at one, the only one which comes as a surprise, an envelope stamped ‘Oslo University’, from which he can tell that the sender is a woman, a well-known name in academic circles.

It would be untrue to say that Jonas Wergeland was totally unprepared for the bleakness of prison life. Once — one winter — he had spent hours listening to details from the Inferno, to the description, for example, of how Brutus, Cassius and Judas were chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Satan. Or how those who had accepted bribes wound up in a bath of seething pitch, a molten mass like the tar they used to boil up in the old shipyards, with little demons holding them down in the mire with the help of forks, like a cook would prod bits of meat bobbing to the surface of a stew. Jonas knew what happened to murderers too — though he had no idea, of course, what the future held in store: they were doomed to boil forever in a river of blood. Jonas had sat in a blue auditorium, in the front row, with his ears pinned back, while next to him Axel was busy taking notes — when, that is, he wasn’t leafing frantically through a book in order to score yet another exclamation mark in the already overcrowded margin. Round about them, solemn-faced souls were writing as if their lives depended on it. They were all students, attending a series of lectures on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

The mid-seventies was not exactly a time when students flocked, of their own free will, to lectures on Dante and the medieval worldview — not if it wasn’t on the syllabus, at any rate. The university was draped and hung, inside and out, with banners screaming out demands and declarations of support to all points of the compass. To some extent, the Norwegian version of the Cultural Revolution could, I’m sure, be characterized as a divine comedy, although as far as the students were concerned, modern-day Albania was a great deal closer to the ideal than Dante’s Italy. In Norway it was the imaginary Vømmøl Valley that set the standard for both paradise and poetry. So it goes without saying that it was Axel — Axel, who had for some time known that he would never be a biochemist and who had secretly sent his first clumsy, literary efforts to several publishers — who had sniffed out the Dante lectures in their students’ course list and managed to lure Jonas into making the leap, so to speak, from the revolutionary university routine to the Middle Ages — or was it, perhaps, the other way round? But the bait which Axel used to snare Jonas was not the content of the lectures, it was the lecturer — none other than Suzanne I., who is now known to everyone in Norway but who at that time, despite the fact that she had by then turned forty, had not yet found her calling and was recognized only within a very narrow circle. Axel had, however, heard of her through some literary friends and saw right away that she was one of those women who fulfilled all the strict criteria required to merit the distinguished epithet ‘sophisticated’ which he and Jonas had thrashed out while wandering aimlessly through the city late at night.

And from the word go, Jonas, who had really just come along for the fun of it, was hooked, in spite of the fact that he was the only person in that auditorium who had not read a word of Dante — he had never been any closer to a classical text than his big brother’s Illustrated Classics. He wasn’t entirely ignorant, though. As a little boy at Aunt Laura’s he had — speaking of picture books — found a volume containing Gustav Doré’s engravings for Dante’s Inferno, and these illustrations were still clear in his mind; indeed they enabled him, perhaps to a greater extent than the others, to follow Suzanne I.’s increasingly complex constructions and tempestuous zigzagging between the allegorical and the literal planes, which, by the way, showed him that hell, like the eroticism in Agnar Mykle’s books, was on the whole a matter of metaphor.

That said, there is no concealing the fact that for Jonas the most fascinating part of it all was Suzanne I. herself; she fascinated him as only very few women did, more specifically: those who could lift him up onto a higher level — to stick to the Dantean imagery. While Suzanne I. was talking about the hideous torments of hell and the striking correlation between crime and punishment, while she was explaining Dante’s overall plan and the conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and the teachings of the Church, Jonas, sitting in the front row, felt a button in his spine being pressed, felt his entire nervous system being put on red alert. While the rest were reading Dante, he was studying her, not least the austere face in which one eye seemed to look inward while the other gazed outward. There was something oddly anachronistic, not to say aristocratic, about her, partly also because of the way in which her hair was pinned up, like an elaborate snail’s shell, and her rather old-fashioned, though stylish, taste in clothes, which made her look like a wealthy, conservative, middle-class lady. It was winter, and exceptionally cold, with ice everywhere — a fitting climatic backdrop to the lectures, inspired by the nethermost circle of the Inferno — and usually, when she stepped out of the lift, always bang on time, so punctual that you could have set your watch by her, she was clad in an almost demonstratively voluminous fur, making no attempt to hide her vanity. Axel said she was reckoned to be something of an eccentric and that she had only recently come home to live in Norway after many years abroad, in Italy among other places — hence the reason that she was liable, every now and again, to recite a few stanzas in vibrant Italian, making Jonas feel that behind her mask she concealed many more passionate sides to her character.

The lectures were hard going, and student and after student dropped out — including, fortunately, those Pharisaic pains in the neck who found it necessary to argue about everything from improbabilities in the chronology of the work to impossibilities in the topography. Only a fraction of the students were still sticking with it by the time the colourful and relatively entertaining Inferno section had been completed and they moved on to the much greyer Purgatorio, in which Suzanne I.’s longwinded expositions and scholastic leanings came more into their own — and had a soporific effect on quite a few listeners. But Jonas — who was not all that impressed with the Inferno — he had, after all, spent several hours in a pitch-black grave — was growing more and more interested and looked forward — I was about to say: like a sinner — to Tuesdays, to Suzanne I.’s monologues about free will and the nature of the soul, not to mention her interpretations of Dante’s three dreams and Virgil’s discourses on love; he half-ran down the hill from the university — not to the Student Union at Chateau Neuf, where Axel and he occasionally attended one of the riotous gatherings in the amphitheatre-style auditorium and had no trouble imagining that they had been consigned to some wailing circle in the Inferno — but to the building next door, the old Divinity School, the top floor of which was home to the Institute for General Literary Studies, as if it had by some divine irony been set on a higher ledge on the Mountain of Purgatory than the theologians themselves.

By the time they got to the Paradise section, that pretty rarefied and by no means readily accessible ascension, fraught with transparent faces, indistinct souls and star-like spirits capable of choreographing their points of light into all manner of forms, only Jonas and three others were still sticking it out in the blue auditorium — even Axel the bookworm had opted out, muttering some sheepish excuse about a tough end-of-term exam. But Jonas sat there, still in the front row, and let himself be held transfixed, let the pressure build up inside him; he did not merely listen to what Suzanne I. was saying but paid as much attention to the way she said it, her gestures, the look on her face, especially when she was talking about light, about how Dante used light — as a kind of visual music — and even more so when she got onto the subject of Beatrice’s strange and problematic part in the whole thing, all while Suzanne I.’s amber necklace smouldered like embers at her throat. There was also something in what she said that tied in, in some strange way, with his own area of study, astrophysics, the exploration of the heavens, of the cosmos, those vast entities which were just about driving him round the bend with their staggering, nebulous dimensions, their billions upon billions of galaxies. You could say that in some ways Jonas found Dante’s text just as enlightening, even if it was six hundred years old. It seemed to him that Dante’s observations on the celestial spheres, based on Ptolemy’s theories, were at least as right or wrong as the theories about the universe with which he was confronted in his astrophysical studies. In six hundred years, today’s hypotheses would seem every bit as arbitrary as Dante’s, he thought. And I ought perhaps to mention here that it may have been Suzanne I., with her highlighting of the architectonic and symmetrical aspects of Dante’s work, who led Jonas Wergeland to cut short his astronomy studies and begin, instead, on a course which revolved around architecture.

Meanwhile, the days were growing longer and lighter, although the weather was still cold. At the last lecture, held appropriately enough just before Easter — which, of course, also plays a part in the Comedy — only Jonas and one other student turned up. Suzanne I. did not seem the least put out, although she had long been intrigued by Jonas Wergeland, a student who had sat steadfastly through all her lectures, without making a single note, it’s true, but apparently hanging on every word she said about the progress from darkness to light, as if it really mattered to him, gazing at her the whole time, gazing at her with something close to rapture, a look which could not fail to make an impression. Jonas, for his part, felt that during that last lecture she lifted him from one heaven to the next with her eyes alone, much as Beatrice’s radiant and loving eyes had done for Dante: felt also, again like Beatrice, that she looked much lovelier now than she had the first time he took his seat in the auditorium. So after this concluding lecture, in which she quite surpassed herself with her interpretation of the medieval view of woman as a possible channel to knowledge about the hereafter, not least in her discussion of the huge revelation in the last canto, the stream of effulgent images designed to help the mind reach out to a point beyond time and space — and after these expositions, which ought to have accorded any interested listener an insight into the whole of the Comedy, as the vault doors of national banks are occasionally opened to allow the man in the street a peek at the unforgettable splendour of the gold reserves, after all this she asks Jonas what he is going to do next.

And Jonas, who understood right away why he had sat through nine long lectures, and who had in fact also seen what she was getting at, that The Divine Comedy was actually a gigantic love poem, said that he was going take a walk into town. He knew what was coming. And it came: she suggested that they could walk down together. Jonas realized that he had made an impression, though of what sort he did not know; but we, Professor, acquainted as we are with the inexplicable frailties of the female of the species, know that simply by holding out through nine separate sessions, sitting up straight with his eyes aglow, by giving her his steadfast attention, he had won her in much the same way as a woman, no matter what she may say, is always bowled over by a man who gives her nine bouquets of red roses in quick succession.

It was the last really cold day of the year. She walked beside him wrapped in her black fur — mink, as far as he could tell. In the sunlight, however, it had a kind of golden sheen to it. Jonas caught her checking her reflection in a number of shop windows with undisguised self-absorption. He tried to bring up various topics of conversation as they walked down Bogstadsveien but was surprised to find that she appeared to be ignorant of most subjects: seemed, in fact, rather prickly, disagreeable. Only when he came out with one of his quotations did she show any interest. It was a thought lifted from Friedrich Nietzsche, taken from the only book by Nietzsche that Jonas had dipped into — or rather, from the only passage by Nietzsche which he had ever read: ‘Someone once said,’ said Jonas, ‘that anyone who fights with monsters must take care that he or she does not become a monster themselves.’ Suzanne I. looked at him in some amazement. ‘I was thinking of Dante and the Inferno,’ Jonas went on. ‘But what about the Paradiso? Would it also be the case that, when wrestling with angels, you would have to be careful not to become an angel?’ Suzanne I. had a wise answer to this. A very wise answer, Professor. And when they get to Homansbyen, where she lives, she invites him in for a cup of tea — typical: a cup of tea, what else?

Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

The decor of the attic flat was surprisingly impersonal, almost as if she were just passing through. The paintings on the walls were pretty pedestrian efforts, more like pseudo-art. A window was open. It was cold in the room. She made tea. They sat facing one another in two old-fashioned armchairs. Light poured strong and intense through a skylight. Jonas thought she was waiting for him to say something about her lectures, the last one in particular perhaps — or maybe he should tell her that he had been to Ravenna — but when he made to speak she raised her hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ she says, sounding weary, as if outside the auditorium she wanted to stay silent — and preferably alone. She holds both hands around her cup; her fingers are plainly ice-cold.

Jonas got up to look at a well-thumbed Bible lying on the table behind her chair. As he walked past her she suddenly put down her cup and drew him to her, drew him down to her, firmly, commandingly almost, and kissed him fiercely, and awkwardly, he thought to himself, yes: awkwardly, as if she had never kissed anyone before, or not in a very long time; it was the kiss of someone who has been starved, he thought. She pressed his head down to her breast, to the silky fabric of her blouse, panting heavily, tugging at the buttons herself, fingers shaking; she swore when a couple of buttons popped off and landed on the floor; she swore, he told himself again, surprised, as she pulled up her bra and ground his face against her skin with greedy determination, as if, after all those lectures, she had finally got to the heart of the matter, to what lay behind all that talk of sin and redemption. There was nothing banal about all of this though, what happened next is as difficult to describe as the abstract concept of paradise; Jonas himself had the impression that this was a unique and very special occasion, that she had possibly never done this before, had never wanted to do it before, had been too inhibited, maybe too proud, but now, at long last, had decided that the time had come, because she pushed him further down, impatiently, down to her crotch, as if it were an order, all shyness gone now; she swiftly undid her skirt, tore off her tights and panties and pressed his face against her vulva as if this was a gateway to salvation, inviting him to browse his way to her innermost secrets, and as she did so she grabbed the fur coat, which was hanging over the chair right behind her and spread it over herself and Jonas: it was still cold in the room.

He began to kiss her, fired by a potpourri of scents, not unlike a blend of perfume and ammonia, or — the thought flashed through his mind — heaven and hell; and he instinctively knew, perhaps because of the way she held his head, that Suzanne I. had never been kissed like this before. He remembered Daniel, how Daniel had given a lecture, an actual lecture, on the art of what in scientific parlance is referred to as ‘cunnilingus’. That too had been in an attic, on Hvaler, in his grandfather’s house, one rainy summer’s day when they were sitting reading — it might even have been the Illustrated Classics. Daniel had pointed to the safe where they had once found the lacquer casket containing a canvas bag which they had thought might hold pearls but which had in fact concealed a pistol, a Luger. Daniel had walked over to the safe, and as he was struggling yet again to open it, turning the dial in the centre as gingerly as if he were attempting to locate ‘Lux’ on the radio’s chaotic medium wave, he described to an inexperienced Jonas the challenges which that place between a girl’s legs held in store for him. Because, according to Daniel, there was a certain similarity between the manipulation of such a combination lock and the licking of a girl’s pussy. Every woman had her own code; no two were exactly the same. ‘There’s nothing more complex than a woman’s privates,’ he said. ‘And yet you can give any girl, even the hardest nut, an orgasm just by using your tongue — if you’ve had enough practise, that is.’ It was like a robber being faced with a safe and saying to himself ‘Aha, a Diebolt from the thirties’ or ‘Great, a Chubb from England’, instantly calling to mind all the technical subtleties and special features of the make in question and how to open it — that, said Daniel was exactly what it was like for him when he ran a tentative finger over a girl’s delights; he knew right away exactly what was needed, how many licks in one direction, how many in another, the requisite number of light or penetrating flicks of the tongue, when to take a break, when to up the tempo. That evening, out in the yard, Daniel had pointed to the cat, which was lapping milk from a bowl: ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s how to do it.’

And now Jonas was lying between a woman’s legs, and not just any woman, but Suzanne I. who, only a few years later, would publish her first major critical work, the fruits of learning accumulated and allowed to ripen over years of silence, as if she had suddenly found release, as if the pieces had suddenly fallen into place for her, enabling her to publish several books one after the other in rapid succession, most of them in English. Thus Suzanne I. in fact became the first ever Norwegian critic of true international standing: a scholar who won worldwide acclaim for her original approach to her subject matter and a distinctive style bordering on fiction.

Lying there, Jonas saw how the light coming through the skylight fell, like a spotlight, on the area between her legs, in such a way that her clitoris seemed almost to glow, like the chunks of amber around her neck. And he accepted the challenge with pleasure, accepted the privilege and set to his task with a resolve and, not least, patience, that Daniel would have applauded; it also seemed as if she was now expecting him to make up for the fact that he not spoken, asked a question, used his tongue at all, during her lectures; and he loved the feeling of being able to drive her wild with nothing but these simple oral exercises, causing her to shed the role of prim and proper middle-class lady — so much so that she began to mutter what sounded like gibberish, obscenities and taboo words mixed with phrases from other languages; she’s speaking in tongues, he thought groggily, either that or these were utterly elementary words and sounds, the whistling of air through her teeth and visceral grunts that issued from her as she tore at the fur with her fingers, pulling it further and further down over him, so that for a moment he felt as if he was making love to a black beast. I admit it is tempting to draw comparisons with Dante: the idea of making a circular descent into a dark hole, to finally wind up in paradise, but images were, nonetheless, beginning to take shape in Jonas’s head, like a vision almost, if I may be allowed to pursue this same thread. As he lay there in a kind of stupor, weird thoughts came into his mind, words which, by means of metaphorical leaps, or — why not — an erotic discus throw, transported him to that other attic, to the house on Hvaler, even as those thighs turned into sinuous creatures and his tongue into a line plunging into a vast deep, an ocean containing things of which he knew nothing, objects that gleamed dully in the darkness, and when she came, when at long last she reached a climax, and Jonas had placed his hands on her breasts, thinking perhaps that there was a connection between her nipples and her clitoris, or that her whole body was a complex locking mechanism, like the ones in the ancient pyramids, where you had to press several spots at the same time in order to make the heavy stone doors pivot on their axis — when the culmination came, when her body began to signal that she was about to come, Jonas felt more words and images inside his own head coiling themselves together to form something bigger, turning into a story, a story that he understood even more clearly perhaps because — the darkness between her legs notwithstanding — his head was closer to a light source than normal; and as she, after an assiduous oral onslaught on Jonas’s part, spread her legs even further apart, tipped up her pelvis and stiffened — soundlessly, but as if it took tremendous effort — a corresponding convulsion, or mental release, occurred inside him and left him, for the first few moments thereafter lying, damp-faced and as lifeless as she. He did not come to his senses until he heard her whisper: ‘Go — please go.’ She regarded him with eyes so heavy that she might have been drugged. And with a flash of resentment, he would think later. ‘Get out,’ she said. On his way out, as he was closing the outer door, with the scent of vaginal juices still in his nostrils, Jonas heard her swear, a couple of times, swear loudly and clearly, almost infernally.