‘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.