The Conqueror

Norwegian Baroque

I do not know where all this is leading, Professor, for when Jonas Wergeland was standing with his finger on the trigger, aiming at Margrete Boeck’s heart, his thoughts returned to the minutes just before when, after arriving home from Seville, he had sat on the sofa and told himself that everything was going to be fine; sat and read a letter, an inconsequential inquiry, while Bach’s organ music filled the room as in a church, seeming to soothe his frayed nerves and once again give him hope; until, that is, Margrete suddenly walked out of the bedroom, wearing a dressing-gown, his dressing-gown, and this really upset him, the fact that she was wearing his dressing-gown, as if she were saying that she was him, that she was his self; so he turned off the music — she had shattered the cocoon of music in which he had been endeavouring to wrap himself, the one that was meant to shield him from the wrath which was once more starting to stir inside him, terrible and unstoppable; and he turns beseechingly to the portrait of Buddha, as if to elicit from it another angle on his troubles, but it does no good, and he looks at the coltsfoot in an egg-cup on the coffee table, but it does no good, and she looks at him as if she is the one who is surprised and not the other way round, as if she were accusing him, and not the other way round, as if she were about to come out with a sarcastic ‘A-ha, so you thought you might pop home, did you?’, but she doesn’t; instead she tells him, very quietly — demonstratively so, he thinks — that Kirsten is spending the long weekend with her grandmother, on Hvaler, and that she, Margrete that is, had been lying reading but must have dropped off; all of this said with such bloody control, as if she can see that she is dealing with somebody who is close to cracking, a man struggling to curb his uncontrollable aggression. ‘Did you have a good trip?’ she asks. ‘Good to be home,’ he says, and feels himself falling into the dark abyss between these two trivial and completely inane remarks, but still he believes that he can do it, cool down, all he needs is a hot shower, a brandy, a big brandy, more Bach fugues, everything was going to be fine, and as a means of distracting himself he picks up his suitcase and carries it through to the bedroom, looking and looking all the time, looking, round about him, as if searching for something, some object, some clue, something that will give her away, give them away: this book on her bedside table, for example, which is probably not hers, probably his, and he looks round about, confused, as if he is also searching for something else, anything at all, something that will help him, anything at all, which could give him back his hope.

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas knew that he had been searching for something all his life. Everyone is searching for something. Life is a search. As children, they had rooted around in the rubbish tip at home, a landfill lying right behind Solhaug that was owned by a local entrepreneur and market gardener. Every time the trucks drove up and tipped all sorts of rubbish onto the edges of the tip, the kids had swarmed down the sloping sides like beggar children in Rio to hunt through it, because someone had once — no one remembered when — found a big box full of enormous film posters, a forgotten treasure hidden among discarded fixtures and fittings from an office building in town. So for years they had hunted diligently, combing every inch. But it probably didn’t matter so much whether they found anything — although there was always the chance of stumbling over an unexposed film or a brilliant tin of paint — what mattered most was the search.

That was how it had been that time out on Hvaler. At first he hadn’t wanted to go on the trip to Berby. It was more fun to play on the island and eat bread and syrup at old Arnt’s place, to sit there surrounded by the most fantastic model ships and listen to his yarns than to lie in the bow of the peter boat, peering down into the water all the way there. But when his grandfather asked him again on the morning when he was going over there, Jonas said yes. He knew something would happen. I’m going to find something, he thought. And thanks to a woman, Suzanne I. to be exact, he would one day understand what it was that he found: a story. His own story. Late in life, but not too late, Jonas realized that he was not only doomed to uncover the reasons for who he was — he could actually invent them, make up his own reasons.

On the sail across to Halden, Jonas was sunk in an expectant stupor, didn’t even look up when they slipped under the stunning Svinesund Bridge, hardly heard the stories his grandfather was telling him as he pointed up to the white bell tower at Fredriksten Fort or over at the granite quarries which they passed. Something’s going to happen, Jonas thought. His hopes were high; he was in stonemason country, just like in Grorud.

His hopes rose even further when they reached the head of Idde Fjord, and the face of the landscape somehow changed, acquired a somehow magical cast, possibly because of the light. A storm was brewing, black clouds towered up around them. Jonas felt as if they had entered a secret valley, a sort of hidden paradise, because only here was the sun shining. Many people think that Norway stops at Svinesund and Halden, but to the east and south of Idde Fjord there is an enclave — an appendix, you might say — jutting right into Sweden. It would be only natural for him to find something completely out of the ordinary here, in such an out-of-the-way part of Norway, Jonas thought. At the very top of the fjord the water was so shallow that they had to follow the marker posts to the mouth of the River Berby, then sail some way up a channel in the river before tying up at a little jetty attached to the sawmill. His grandfather had to deliver an old sewing machine to a relative who worked at Berby sawmill, and once that was done he asked Jonas if he wanted to come with him up to the manor house, to pick up a lilac bush at the nursery there.

‘Is it okay if I just stay here and have a look around?’ Jonas asked.

‘Alright,’ his grandfather said. ‘But promise me you’ll be careful.’

As Omar Hansen fell into step with somebody further up the road, Jonas turned back to the broad, quietly flowing river. He followed it upstream, under a bridge and up to the first, shallow rapids and stood there staring into the dark waters. He could see the bottom, stones which looked golden in the strong sunlight. Here, he thought, it has to be here. It was like walking with a dowsing stick in your hands, and suddenly it dips. The weather had turned bad, black clouds all around; only the spot on which he stood was bathed in a glorious light. If I dive in here, I’ll find treasure, he thought. He knew.

The day before, the afternoon had been close and thundery too. When it thundered, Jonas sat on a pouf in the house’s open-sided porch. Thunder and lighting held a magnetic attraction for him, that meteorological drama; he thought about radio plays, how on earth to create that sound? It would be even more of a challenge because of the stereo effect: the thunder rolling like a landslide from skyline to skyline, followed by ear-splitting bangs. Jonas particularly liked those wonderful moments before the storm broke, the silence and the tension in the air. The pressure. Blue-grey clouds building up menacingly one behind the other. The colours of the landscape pulsating, as if they were under attack from some hidden darkness. Then came the rain, and the lightning. He sat on his pouf — sheltered from the showers but outside all the same — and counted the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder. He was never scared, not even when the crash came almost immediately after the lightning and it sounded as if someone was ripping up a sheet right next to his ear, while at the same time hammering on the bottom of a zinc tub. Jonas thought it might even be a vague dream of his: to be struck by lightning — and survive, of course. He had the idea that this must surely leave you charged up for the rest of your life; you’d be able to stick a light bulb in your mouth and make it light up, the way they did in the comics. He sat on the soft pouf on the stone step and gazed almost yearningly at the lightning flashes. Two dragons playing with a pearl, that — so his grandfather had told him — was what people in China believed caused thunder and lightning and rain in general. Jonas had never swallowed the story about Thor and his hammer. ‘The lightning is the glittering beams from an enormous pearl, tossed across the sky by dragons playing among the clouds,’ he had once told wide-eyed classmates at Grorud School.

Afterwards, when the rainbow hung over the neighbouring island and the landscape was looking all fresh and new, as if it had just been run through a gigantic, electric washing machine, Jonas usually went fishing. The day before, too, he had taken out his rod and gone down to the boathouse, walked barefoot along the path through a meadow that smelled like a spice market after the thunderstorm. He had taken the little rowboat: Jonas was good at rowing, he could row for hours without tiring, flicked the oars like an old seadog; he rowed all the way out to Flaket and beyond, through the farthermost inlet at Svanetangen point, to sit bobbing on the waves on the outer side of the island, with the sea — the ocean, he thought to himself — stretching out before him.

Here, after taking a cross-bearing, he let out his line, a good solid construction of his own devising: a combination of weighted line and gig; not spoon bait, but hooks baited with mussels, a sinker, thick nylon, sound knots. Jonas always dreamed of the Big One, had heard that there were supposed to be Greenland shark out here — in his mind’s eye he saw the little shark from the book on fishing, shuddered. It would be something to show off, though, and take photographs of, the way they did in tropical waters. He had fantasies of one day sitting with his children on his lap: ‘And here’s a picture of me standing next to the biggest shark ever caught off the coast of Norway.’

The truth is that Jonas seldom got a bite. But he liked fishing anyway, liked raking up the mussels, liked drifting in the rowboat, listening to the water lapping at its sides. Sometimes he simply tied the line to a tholepin and left the swell to keep the gig dancing while he opened more mussels, he liked that too, found it exciting to open them with his stumpy-bladed knife, erotic even — the sight of the soft, aromatic innards, at any rate. ‘Did you know there’s a sort of pearl that’s found in mussels?’ his grandfather had once said.

He has just decided to turn for home when he feels the boat beginning to drift out to sea, even though there is a light onshore breeze and no current to speak of. He has been sitting no more than twenty yards from the headland, directly off a break in the rocks, a small pebble beach. The water isn’t all that deep here, either, nine or ten fathoms maybe. But his line is sitting at an angle that fits with the direction in which he is drifting. Jonas feels the nylon cord. Taut as Einar Tambarskjelve’s bowstring, he thinks, and straight away he knows: it’s a fish — the Big One itself. ‘A whale!’ he thinks at first, overjoyed, then terror-stricken. He puts out his oars and rows for shore but doesn’t budge an inch: in fact, he is actually drawn further out. He doesn’t know what’s going on, is growing frightened, pulls for all he is worth, churning up the water but goes on drifting slowly but surely away from the shore, out onto the open sea, out into the deep.

He could, of course, have cut the line, but that would have been too bad. He rowed and rowed with all his might and finally succeeded in keeping the boat still. The line was running straight down. Jonas thought the fish must have got away from him, he rowed almost all the way to shore before pulling in his oars and putting a finger to the line. There was still something there. He managed to haul the fish in a bit, then put another half-hitch around the tholepin, repeated this process several times, until he glimpsed a shape down in the depths, a huge shape, something that gave him a jolt before the line again shot away from the boat and the — creature — that was on his hook broke the surface. Jonas all but fell over the side. He saw humps. Actual humps! About ten yards away he could see several humps sticking up out of the water. The first thing he thought of was an anaconda. Then he decided it must be a sea serpent. Time and again his grandfather had told him the story of the Hvaler sea serpent, told it so vividly that Jonas had huddled up against him in fright. ‘The beast has been sighted off both Torbjørnskjær and Akerøya and later on out between Tisler and Heia,’ he said. ‘Even a dean of the church, the soul of reliability, once wrote about the sea serpent, and wait till you hear this, Jonas, it was forty feet long and as big round the middle as a potbellied stove.’ Jonas stared at the spot in the waves where the incredible creature had appeared. Whatever it was, it was too big. And this close to land? It could have been sunning itself, Jonas thought. It had been a chilly start to the summer, cold in the water.

After a fierce tussle — Jonas could not have said whether it went on for minutes or hours — he managed to reach the beach, where he tied up the boat, grabbed the line and hopped ashore. Thanks to a combination of luck and skill Jonas succeeded — despite its weight — in dragging the monster up onto the shingle. It writhed and squirmed so ferociously that it wriggled right off the hook. Before the fish, or the serpent, could get to the water, though, it worried its way down among some large stones and got stuck, lay there helplessly.

Jonas regarded this fearsome creature from a safe distance. It had to be at least six feet long and weigh a good sixty or seventy pounds. The jaws were the scariest part. For ages Jonas stood there, spellbound, staring at those teeth.

What was he to do? How was he going to get it home? He could just see the pictures in Fredrikstad Blad. The sensation of the summer. He picked up a heavy stone, meaning to throw it at the beast.

Then something happened. What it was Jonas would never say. But he put the stone down, jumped into the rowboat to fetch an oar, and using this as a lever he managed, a bit at a time, to nudge, or help, the creature down to the water’s edge and out among the clumps of seaweed, where it revived and disappeared with a splash.

Jonas knew no one would believe him, so he never told a soul. Except me, Professor. Likewise I am the only one, apart from Margrete, to have heard what happened up at the top of Idde Fjord.

Because, as I say, the next day, with a sense of crossing a boundary, Jonas had padded — like a Red Indian, so he thought — up the bank of the River Berby, in this somehow alien Norwegian landscape, until something made him stop, a feeling that here, right here, he would find something precious. It was oppressively hot. He stood on the riverbank and watched dark clouds swelling up on all sides, saw the sun breaking through here and there, the apocalyptic radiance you see depicted on altarpieces, with the sun’s rays falling like lighthouse beams on the earth. He stepped into the river, just next to the first stretch of rapids, waded out a bit before taking a header into a deep pool. Jonas was a good diver, and he was diving now, looking for unusual stones. Instead he spied something else, he didn’t know what they were, but they looked like shells. He had had no idea that shells could be found in freshwater, too. He picked one up at random and carried it ashore.

Jonas sat on the bank examining his find. Almost four inches wide. And heavy. Like a piece of slate. He sat by a dark, gently flowing river and knew, with solemn conviction, that this thing could decide his fate.

He met up with his grandfather as the latter was coming down the road with the lilac bush, and once they were back in the rowboat and heading for home, Jonas took out the shell and showed it to his grandfather. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Omar Hansen only needed to take one glance at it. ‘A freshwater pearl oyster,’ he said.

Jonas almost dropped it into the water he was so taken aback. Really? His grandfather nodded. Jonas studied the shell. Never in all his wildest dreams had he imagined that it was possible to find something like this in Norway. A pearl oyster. Something so — he searched for the word — un-Norwegian. And he, Jonas, had found one. His whole conception of what Norway had to offer in the way of new frontiers instantly changed. It was as though Norway had expanded with a jolt round about him, as he sat there in the peter boat, sailing down Idde Fjord. And who knows, perhaps it was here, in a secret corner of Norway, that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his career, a career that was rooted in the belief that the impossible was possible. Because, as I am sure most people will understand, no one who has found a pearl oyster in Norway can ever have any doubts about this country.

Jonas sat with both hands round the oyster, as if he were holding a thing of great potency. Alive. A heart. He pulled out a pocket knife, so excited he could hardly breathe. He had no problem seeing how this situation could branch out into two totally different lives. Depending on what was inside.

As if he read Jonas’s mind, his grandfather said: ‘There’s maybe one pearl for every hundred shells. And maybe a perfect pearl in every hundred pearls.’

Jonas gazed at the gnarled oyster. But if it was one of those shells… It was one of those shells. He just knew it, could already picture the fabulous dull-sheened sphere embedded in the soft flesh, was already wondering what he should do with it, whether he should have it made into a pearl earring to give to somebody he loved, or what. This was not just a question of a pearl. It was a button. Something that could trigger unimaginable processes.

He sat with the oyster in one hand, the knife in the other. Then, all of a sudden, he stretched his fist out over the rail, uncurled his fingers and let the oyster slip into the water. It floated for a moment before it sank.

His grandfather eyed him. Said nothing. Not until they were level with Halden did he point to the shore: ‘Look, Jonas, over there’s the quarry that supplied the granite block for the Monolith in Vigeland Park.’

Jonas nodded. Proudly. As proudly as if they were towing the stone for the Monolith behind them. Or the stone for something much bigger than the Monolith.