Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Fortunately, this time it was not a tennis machine on the other side of the net but Gjermund Boeck, the ambassador, and that gentleman was both startlingly red in the face and thrown quite off-balance by his prospective son-in-law, who was unexpectedly serving with uncanny accuracy and managing to return a good few of his own serves, transformed as if by magic so it seemed, into a future champion. As luck would have it, it was the ambassador himself who had chosen the Njård Sports Centre, which, with its wooden floor, gave Jonas an added advantage, since play moved even faster on such a surface.

Jonas tossed the ball into the air, noticed fleetingly how it hovered, started to rotate, transformed into Pluto, the most outlying and most obscure of all the planets in the solar system, offering an angle on the entire universe, before it dropped, and he turned it into a comet, a dazzling ace that left Margrete’s father gazing open-mouthed after it, and won a long hard second set 7–5 for Jonas. At that very moment he realized there was something up with his shoulder.

The ambassador, clearly exhausted, but determined, fiendishly determined, prepared to serve in the final, decisive set.

And so in the same year in which statesman Trygve Lie died, Jonas Wergeland lay stretched out on the red carpet beneath the vaulted ceiling of Grorud Church, looking as though he had strained every muscle in his body in his attempt to reach an unbeatable smash from the opponent we call Life. No one seeing him lying there on the floor, as if dead, could have guessed that not long afterwards he would be the cause of the most appalling and to some extent sensational rumours as to how the church had been vandalized.

Outside the snow was falling, a constant sifting of light flakes that settled in a white film over everything, transforming the entire landscape — not inappropriately, really, with Christmas just around the corner. Jonas lay on his back in the choir, listening to this organ music with the weird timbres, music in keeping, not with the crystals of snow, but with the walls of the church, the different minerals in the granite, something far more mysterious and deep, light and weighty at one and the same time: long-drawn-out chords, with notes vibrant as little whirlpools, slowly changing and forcing him into a state of meditation, forcing him to look inside himself.

Light streamed in through the stained-glass windows, sending a shaft of light slanting through dim dust onto the pews right next to Jonas. He lay there, listening to the organ music, struck by how little he knew about his father. Where had he produced this from, his father, this music with the totally different logic, beyond major and minor: slow shifts striking out in all directions like a variety of possibilities all existing side by side. Jonas was to wonder about that day in the church for the rest of his life, and later he did ask his father what he had been playing. ‘Messiaen,’ his father replied, only Jonas thought he had said ‘Messiah’, which in fact seemed pretty apt: it was music worthy of a saviour. His father had played a piece from Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur , the birth of the Lord, first the part entitled ‘ Le Verbe ’, with the descending scale played on the pedals, and then the meditative piece to which he was now listening, motionless, on his back in the choir of the church: ‘ Desseins éternels ’, measured, introspective music with a most unusual setting, repetitions that were, nonetheless, all different, leaving him with an impression of ideas being weighed up, music that spun him into a cocoon, encased him, protected him. He twisted his head back and looked at the fresco, The Great White Flock , the crowd, felt that horror again, felt as though he were becoming invisible.

For this was, of course, the point, the final conclusion: with his grandfather gone, no one was telling him, and if no one was telling him, he was no longer a unique individual, and if he was no longer a unique individual, then he was just another face in the crowd, and if he was just another face in the crowd, then he was on the point of disappearing, becoming, quite literally, lost; and it was only now, with the death of his grandfather, that Jonas Wergeland realized what it was that he dreaded more than anything else: the thought of being invisible.

When do we become who we are?

Wrong question: When do we see who we are? Or what we are?

The threat of invisibility was to dog Jonas Wergeland all his life. A visit to Gardermoen many years later proved to be a particularly upsetting experience. After a memorable trip to Gudbrandsdalen, while he was studying at the College of Architecture, Jonas had suddenly been seized by a pressing need to find out more about his own roots and not least the countryside in which his mother had grown up, but which he had never seen, his grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland having left the area during the war — that grandmother who was now so old and frail that she made the V-sign if she so much as managed to get out of bed.

He drove into Gardermoen and parked the car next to the post office, walked across the road to the Shell station and was directed to an old man who lived nearby and who, as luck would have it, was able to point out the spot where his grandparents’ smallholding, his mother’s childhood home, had stood. Jonas sauntered pensively along Gardermoveien, past the Community Centre and the playing fields and then all at once there he was staring at his roots on the other side of the fence.

And what did he see?

Tarmac. An airstrip.

Where once there had been a smallholding, there was now a military and civil airport, an international zone so to speak. How had this come about?

In 1942, about forty properties had been bought up by the Germans, who were planning to extend the airport, or rather, build an airport, since in those days the airport was little more than an airstrip cutting across a field. Jonas’s grandmother had told him how a German wearing jodhpurs with a leather patch on the backside had come to the house and simply announced that they had a fortnight to get out, by order of the Wehrmacht. Most of the properties were family dwellings, but a handful, like Jørgine and Oscar Wergeland’s, also included as much as ten to fifteen acres of land: smallholdings supporting a few horses, cattle, some pigs and chickens, stables and byres. His maternal grandfather had also been a cobbler, with his own workshop on the premises, as well as doing the occasional stint with the local artillery regiment, the AR 2. The purchase was passed by the local council and his grandparents were paid the going rate — which was still a tidy sum of money at that time, although Oscar Wergeland never had any joy from it since, according to Jørgine he was so mad that he burst a blood vessel and died. He could not bear the thought of the Germans taking their smallholding away from them. After that, Jørgine moved to Oslo and bought the flat in Oscars gate.

Jonas Wergeland stood by the fence, not all that far from where the school had once stood and stared at the runway, first surfaced by the Germans with concrete, which in turn had later been covered by tarmac — a bad idea, as it turned out, so bad that it had all had to be redone. Jonas had always known about this, but even so he could not quite believe it even when he saw it with his own eyes. One day a smallholding, the next razed to the ground and covered by concrete as if to seal up the past. And right then and there, standing by that fence at Gardermoen, it dawned on him that here lay the explanation for the feeling he sometimes had of being totally lacking in any roots, a feeling which the next moment would manifest itself in a niggling restlessness. There, at Gardermoen, at the end of a long runway, Jonas Wergeland understood for the first time why, right from the start, he had been condemned to the life of a nomad. His roots in the earth were gone — not even at his grandfather’s house on Hvaler was there a patch of cultivated land: that was a house coloured by ships and travel. Jonas’s only knowledge of the land had come from his mini-introduction in the school garden. Jonas Wergeland stood by a fence at Gardermoen, next to a strip of asphalt below which lay his grandparents’ smallholding, watching a plane come rolling towards him, lift its belly to him and take off; he just didn’t understand it, how it could happen so fast, from earth to air in one, two, three generations, from something concrete to something abstract, and possibly it was here — it’s merely a suggestion — as the ear-splitting roar of the jet engines spread across the countryside, that Jonas Wergeland realized he was going to have to take this to its logical conclusion and start with the most abstract and ethereal thing of all: television.