The Conqueror

The Silk Road

The final, the ultimate, proof was granted him with his conquest of Margrete Boeck. Although, conquest is absolutely the wrong word. And as he lowers the pistol, not knowing whether he has shot or not, he thinks of life with Margrete.

What was it like, life with Margrete?

For a long, long time, life with Margrete consisted simply of lying in a big bed, in a nest of duvets and pillows and sheets which reminded Jonas of the atmosphere in his Aunt Laura’s exotic flat in Tøyen, where her goldsmith’s bench smouldered in the far corner of the living room. He would lie in this big bed, having his body stroked by Margrete’s warm hands — when it wasn’t the other way round and he was trying to stroke her skin, cover it with caresses, a skin that was never the same twice, a body whose rises and hollows were always changing, changing with different times of day, different times of the year, of life. Whenever he lay like this, running his fingers and the palm of his hand over Margrete’s limbs, he thought of travels, of riches. One time when he was lying there, fondling her ankle, that exquisite spot, she asked him if he knew how many bones there were in the foot, and when he shook his head she answered herself: twenty-six. ‘That says something about how complex we are,’ she said. ‘And how vulnerable.’

If there was one thing Jonas learned, or ought to have learned, from his very first second with Margrete, it was that love is not blind, but seeing. That love gives you fresh eyes.

It never ceased to amaze Jonas how Margrete could make him forget old habits, and hence memories too, so that each time they made love it seemed to him — no matter how unlikely this may sound — like the first time, or rather, like something new. And, perhaps an even greater miracle: she taught him, a man, to set greater store by those long interludes when they explored each other’s skins than by the act itself. She helped him to see, or learn, that sometimes it can be better to touch a shoulder than a breast. And although Margrete could also wrap her arms around him, make love to him with a passion which almost frightened him, this gentle stroking of the skin was a pleasure above all others, a thrill which transmitted itself to the very smallest of cells. When Margrete laid her hand on his body and ran it over his skin from the sole of his foot to his crown, he understood what life was about: intensity, a heightened awareness of the moment, of his own breathing even, as if by placing her hands on his skin she put him into an unknown gear. It was a kind of education. ‘Be a vessel,’ she whispered to him again and again. ‘Be a vessel, not a sword; learn to take, Jonas.’

And did he? Is it at all possible to sum up a life such as Jonas Wergeland’s? Whatever the case, I hope that any assessment of this man will depend upon which story we place last, Professor. And might it not be — I ask you at least to consider the possibility — that there are other branches to this story, that what I am describing here forms the real starting point for Jonas Wergeland’s future life?

So let us end, or begin again, with the years when they were living together in the ambassador’s lavishly appointed apartment in Ullevål Garden City, in rooms painted in different colours, terracotta, ochre, cobalt: rooms as different from each other as the continents themselves, not least because, taken as a whole, they constituted a proper little museum of ethnography, filled as they were with objects from a goodly number of the earth’s more far-flung cultures — even in the garden, moss-covered statues sat half-concealed among the shrubbery, as if the ambassador had attempted to recreate a corner of some overgrown temple. The bedroom was all white, right down to the sheets and duvet covers — a white broken only by a gold statuette from Thailand. Particularly during those first weeks after they — a student of architecture and a medical student — met one another again and entered into a new relationship, the bed in this room was their domain. In his mind Jonas called it the Silk Road. It was Aunt Laura who had first told him about the miracle of silk — about the silk worms and the way the silk was turned into soft, smooth, shining fabrics — and about the Silk Road, the name given to the trade route, the historic link, between Asia and Europe. And once when he was sitting in his aunt’s flat in Tøyen, lolling back against soft cushions, surrounded by oriental rugs and the glimmer of gold and silver from her workbench, she had suddenly said: ‘The road that runs from a woman to a man, that too could be called a Silk Road.’

And only now, years later, as they lay there in a white room, blessed by a golden idol, lay stretched out alongside one another in a big bed, like two continents, like west and east, did he see what she meant — for with them too, it was as much a matter of exchanging gifts, just as cultures swap inventions, ideas, historical knowledge. This was what Margrete meant when she whispered to him: ‘Be a vessel, learn to take.’ And he took. For many weeks he lay beside her in bed and took from her the equivalent of fine porcelain, peaches, rich fabrics and strange spices, while he gazed at her eyebrows, which looked as though they had been brushed with black ink by a Japanese master of calligraphy. And in the same way he tried as best he could to give, to shower her with the equivalent, from his world, of grapes, walnuts, metals and fragile glass. Because what they were doing as they lay there side by side, with their fingers wandering like caravans over the landscapes of their bodies, was telling stories; for hour upon hour they took it in turns, as all lovers do, to tell each other stories from their lives. A good many of Jonas’s were about Buddha, about how clever he was at imitating people on the television, not to mention his repertoire of ABBA songs, and there was a lot about Daniel: the account, for example, of the bizarre incident which had converted him to Christianity; and Margrete told him about her parents, about her mother’s unhappy life, or about the time when she, Margrete, supported herself for a whole year in Paris by doing street theatre: stood on an upturned rubbish bin outside Saint Germain des Prés, dressed as Buster Keaton and doing a doleful but hilarious imitation of him which elicited both roars of laughter and money from passers-by; or about the walking tour she made, not in the mountains of Norway, but of China, not from hut to hut, but from temple to temple. She told him, not least, about all that she had read, all the books, and when Jonas asked her why she read so much she replied: ‘Because I’m lonely, and reading helps me learn to live with my loneliness.’

On one such evening, when Margrete had just finished a long story about the International School in Bangkok, Jonas leaned back, his body heavy with contentment: ‘Do you think that one day’s happiness could save a whole life?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Margrete. And a moment later: ‘Just as a second’s hate can destroy it.’

He didn’t understand what she meant, that she may have been trying to forestall something, make him see that any fruitful transaction can be ruined the minute one of the parties starts to feel dissatisfied and decides they would prefer to be in charge, become a conqueror, have the upper hand.

One evening, one bright evening when the scent of spring was drifting through the open bedroom window, after he had told her about the strange fish and the oyster he hadn’t opened, she got out of bed and disappeared for a couple of minutes. When she returned she held out a clenched fist to him. ‘Open it,’ she said. ‘Pretend it’s an oyster.’

Jonas prised open her fingers, one by one, really had to work at it, because she truly seemed to be trying to make her fist as hard to open as an oyster shell. In the palm of her hand lay a pearl, a small, slightly irregular, natural pearl. She had found it in Japan when she was a little girl. ‘Here take it, it’s yours,’ she said. Jonas looked at it, noted the way in which the light was both absorbed and reflected by it, sat gazing at it for ages, with his throat constricting and his lips tightening. ‘It may not be perfect, but it is a real pearl,’ she said.

Jonas looked and looked. The pearl seemed to be made of white silk. But to Jonas, the incredible thing was not the pearl itself but the thought of the steady, painstaking process by which the oyster converts the foreign body — strokes it, if you like — into a pearl.

‘It takes a long time,’ Margrete said, as if reading his mind. ‘It takes a long time to become a person.’

The next day, back at his bedsit, Jonas unearthed his old lacquer casket, the casket which he had once found in a safe and which had been carted along with him every time he moved, like a portable altar. It contained just two things: a silver brooch and a puck. Two sacred relics. When he placed the pearl between them, luminous and clear, but at the same time impenetrable, it became a multiplication sign between two unknown quantities, an ‘x’ and a ‘y’, but somehow this tiny white sphere brought about a massive increase in their combined import. He shifted the pearl around, tried every possible combination. When he placed it after the brooch and the puck it made him think of a full stop, a sign that his search was at an end; and when he set the pearl on top of the puck he observed how the white dot seemed to fertilize all the black, turning it into a totally different object. Jonas felt as though an entire past, a string of stories, had suddenly acquired a new and brighter character.

And it is on this same day, on his return to Ullevål Garden City, that it happens, as he is lying quietly, on a perfectly ordinary evening, it happens quite undramatically, the thing which on several occasions he thought he was on the track of, but which he now knows he was never on the track of, because it is now that it happens, while Margrete is stroking him, endlessly, reading his body intently and single-mindedly, the way she would read a book, running her hands all over him, caressing every single inch of his skin with her fingertips; it is at this moment that he experiences something so all-pervading that it would not be unreasonable to associate it with what, in his diary, Søren Kierkegaard described as an upheaval ‘which suddenly pressed upon me a new and infallible Interpretation of all Phenomena…’

And that night, on his way to the bathroom, naked, he passed the large mirror in the dim hallway and gave a start. He did not recognize himself. He met his reflection in the dark surface of the mirror and saw that his face had changed. And not only that: his face, the whole of his naked body shone with a kind of inner light. He knew what it was. An afterglow. A product of her love. It was something her hands had stroked into being in him. Because even when they made love he was more conscious of her hands than her vagina: the feeling when they had sex was that of being stroked, caressed, rather than a physical sensation of sliding in and out. He stared at his reflection, at his body, which seemed almost luminous, surrounded by a halo. Jonas stood in the dark hallway studying his own face in the mirror, smiled to himself, she had made him glow; and although he could not know that what he was actually witnessing here was the dawning of his career as a charismatic television personality, he did feel that the pressure, or the sum of all the instances of pressure, had at long last turned the carbon within him into diamond, that he was finally ready, and had the ability, to do something extraordinary.

Up to this point in my life, he thought, I’ve always been a hairsbreadth away from being a loser. Now I’m sure. I’m going to be a winner.

For a whole week Jonas puzzled over what he could give her in return, or no: not in return, in reply — something precious, beyond compare. He could not stop thinking about it, even when they were lying in the white room, running their hands over each other’s skin. Then one morning she was lying there telling him about a secret place she had had as a child, down by the seashore among a cluster of solid, little pine trees, where she could lie surrounded by a confusion of scents, with the sound of the waves in her ears, looking at the way in which the pine-branches formed a fretwork screen against the sky — and as she was telling him this, it came to him what she should have, and that evening he went to fetch it and gave it to her, like Marco Polo presenting a gift to Kublai Khan: the latest dragon head he had carved, a copy of the Academic’s fine head, his best attempt so far.

‘What is it?’ she asked with a smile that said she liked it.

‘It’s the start of a ship,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any further.’

‘Where do you mean to go on this ship?’

‘To a new land,’ he said. ‘Somewhere no one else has ever been.’

For a long time she lay saying nothing, stroked his back, working her way slowly upwards, over every vertebra, sending waves of well-being right through him.

‘Do you know what I like best about you?’ she said.

He didn’t know what to say.

‘Your weakness,’ she said. ‘You’re so weak that you could seduce a whole nation.’

Jonas both understood and did not understand what she meant. He was lying with his back to her, just about falling asleep. All of a sudden she wrote something on the tablet of his back with her finger, a swift, intricate flourish that induced a quite unique thrill of pleasure, a ripple that ran from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. ‘What was that?’

‘The Chinese character for dragon,’ she said.

So the days passed. They lay closely entwined in bed, stroking each other and telling stories. And while they lay there, while she was talking, Jonas was considering her skin, and all at once he knew what it reminded him of — it reminded him of the layers of lacquer on his grandfather’s old casket; he had the same sense of peering into something unfathomable, incomprehensible and yet infinitely beautiful; and as she went on talking, telling him about her life abroad, about university, about books, a realization gradually welled up inside him: Margrete was the golden fleece for which he had always been searching, she was what stood at the end of the longing that had taken vague form that time in the granite quarry. Everything else would only be stopping-off places on the way to this goal, even eventual celebrity, even international celebrity.

‘I want to have a baby,’ Margrete said one day.

‘Why?’

‘So there’ll be someone to be the saving of you when I’m gone.’

‘Were you thinking of going somewhere?’

‘That’s up to you.’

This, these weeks, these years, were the fullest in Jonas Wergeland’s life. He lay there clinging to that body, stroking that skin again and again, in circles, in spirals, happy because he realized that through her he had found a way which also led to possibilities so fundamentally different from any that had gone before; but still there was this hollow dread, a fear that it would not last, as if, for all their happiness, he could not help thinking that even Silk Roads can become overgrown.

Nevertheless, Jonas Wergeland gave up the chance of a completely different life, a different destiny when, on one of those quiet evenings, he placed both hands gently on her skin and said: ‘I’ve always thought that I would kill you if you left me. But now I know I would never do that. From this moment on my life begins anew.’