It was at this point, after Jonas had spent several evenings at the flat in Ullevål Garden City, surrounded by brass Indian gods and jade Chinese dragons, sitting gazing into the fire, with something obviously weighing on his mind, that Margrete put down a book on Istanbul and persuaded him to tell her what was bothering him. And when he told her how he had gambled away his kingdom, just like that, with one throw of the dice, she suggested, with typical assertiveness that she should go down to Stavanger and speak to Sir William: she, who did not know his uncle, who was not one of the family. ‘Maybe I can fix it somehow.’ She had looked at him for a long time. He had looked at her for a long time. He heard what she was saying. He knew what she was saying. Or at least he thought he knew what she was saying.
A couple of days after this she went off, and twenty-four hours later she returned. ‘It went fine,’ she said the minute she walked into the kitchen where he was sitting over a late breakfast. And then, on her way to the bedroom: ‘The debt’s cancelled.’
‘How did you manage it?’ he asked.
‘I talked to him,’ she said.
He asked no more questions.
It could be, as I say, that not long after this brief confrontation, which left him in a state of quivering uncertainty, Jonas Wergeland walked out of the house, because on that afternoon, the very day, that is, on which the Ayatollah Khomeini landed in Iran, a former friend of Jonas Wergeland appears to have met him in the basement of Grøndahl’s in Øvre Slottsgate, where he had been busily intent on trying out a number of pianos — the friend remembered how a couple of radically beautiful fragments of ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ had sounded pensively on everything from a Bechstein to a Schimmel. Jonas had said he was going to take up music again, that from now one he was going to devote himself solely to this, to ‘harmonies like shining constellations’, and thereafter, still according to this other person, he asked, or supposedly asked, a sales assistant whether it would be possible to pay in instalments and to have a piano delivered to his bedsit in Hegdehaugsveien.
But as far as I can tell, this has to be a pack of lies, Professor, at any rate if it is true that instead, on that afternoon, Jonas followed Margrete into the bedroom where they made love, briefly, but with extraordinary passion, and where afterwards Jonas lay on the bed thinking about how she had been aflame with desire when he came to her, as if she wished to hide something or ease some hurt. And the more he thought — not least about her capacity for acting impulsively and improperly, like the time when she was dared into stripping for some mutual friends, almost taking his breath away with her shameless behaviour, and afterwards simply shrugged it off, said it was no big deal — the more he thought about that and about other things, the more he found himself picturing what must have happened in Stavanger, somewhere in Sir William’s lonely labyrinth of a mansion. He was also painfully aware of what a temptation it must have been for his uncle, a man without a wife, a man of temperamental longings and no scruples, and then there she is — Margrete, that dazzling creature, right in front of him, in his own barren home, a woman who politely asks a favour of him, with a look in her eye that says she is willing to do anything in return. Jonas lay there, tossing and turning, thinking, conscious that he did not know Margrete, only knew that there was so much he did not know, she was full of secrets; he could not lie still, shook her, woke her up, began to probe, to ask what had really happened down there in Stavanger, ‘Are you telling me that he actually waived the debt, just like that?’
‘Why are you so worried?’
‘Because…’ He chopped the air helplessly with one hand, listening as he did so to her voice, as if it were complex chord, on the very edge of dissonance.
‘No more questions,’ Margrete said, getting up.
Jonas was suddenly seized by a pain in his stomach, his back, his shoulders. He stood up, grabbed hold of her arms and swung her round, slapped her face hard with the flat of his hand. The crack resounded around the room. ‘Say it, I want to hear it,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Did you?’ He looked, he glared at her. ‘You really did it?’
‘What if I did?’ Margrete said defiantly, running her fingers over her cheek. ‘You certainly wanted me to. I could see it in your face.’
He hit her again, so hard that she fell back onto the bed. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he did it anyway. She could have stood up, walked out, but she lay where she was.
‘I want to know what happened,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything.’
‘I remember once…’
He hit her again, hated how she always told stories instead of answering.
I do not know if it is true — I have to express my doubts — because there are, there’s no hiding it, people who this selfsame afternoon, which is to say while Jonas was, as I have explained, standing in that bedroom, hitting Margrete again and again in his desperation and trying to worm out of her something he really did not want to hear — there are those who believe that, at exactly the same time, they met Jonas Wergeland on the Sognsvann line with all his skiing gear, on his way up to Nordmarka, and who maintain that he remarked, a mite flippantly, that one might just as well ski off the track a way and plonk oneself down in the snow. ‘Then you have to decide what to believe in,’ he said, or supposedly said. ‘The cold or the light?’
I ought perhaps to allow for the possibility that this really did happen, I mean that Jonas Wergeland actually was in several places at once, although — and I hate having to admit my own limitations — I only know about the one strand: the goings-on in the bedroom in Ullevål Garden City, where he went on torturing Margrete.
‘What was he like?’
‘You know him better than I do,’ Margrete said.
‘Was he good?’
‘For God’s sake, Jonas, what do you want me to say? No matter what answer I give you, it’ll be the wrong one. You’ll only see what you want to see anyway. The debt’s cancelled. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Did you?’ he repeated.
Margrete waited a long time before answering, lay gazing at the golden idol against the end wall. ‘Whatever I did, I did it for you,’ she said.
‘I’ll kill you,’ he said and struck her again, only just managing to overcome the urge to clench his fist. He was seething inside, and yet somehow distanced from it all, so he could see that he still had those dollar signs in his eyes, not a sign of avarice, but of blindness: a serpent in each eye. He struck and struck again, feeling that he was punishing himself, that this was a form of suicide, but he could not stop himself; it was like the sexual encounters of youth when the ecstasy of the moment outweighs any possible consequences that could last a lifetime. She could have put up a fight, but she did not. She lay there and allowed herself to be beaten, lay there and allowed Jonas Wergeland’s suspicions to grow and grow, curling herself up into a ball, tighter and tighter, as if practising for a future situation, or kept hoping that this would be the last time he would hit her, that this had to be done, to ensure that it never happened again; which is why, she was already willing to forgive him, even while the blows were raining down on her.
It may well be that the path from one point to another; from — say — a kitchen table in Ullevål Garden City to an office in Marienlyst, has to be understood as being the sum of all the possible paths one could take from that table to that office; if, that is, it is not the case that of all the likely routes only one becomes a reality, for one fact which a great many people can corroborate — indeed it is pretty much common knowledge — is that, no matter what happened on the day in question and wherever else he might have been, not long afterwards, during a quite unseasonal shower of rain, and after having had lunch with Margrete at the university, a lunch which was rounded off with a Napoleon cake, Jonas Wergeland presented himself at the Marienlyst office of NRK’s head of programming, to ask whether they were looking for new announcers, and thereafter — according to later rumours — not only did he come out with a story which made the normally rather reserved TV director burst out laughing, but to the latter’s question he replied that he was fed up studying architecture, fed up with the whole bloody business and felt like starting on something totally different, like television, for instance.