Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The score was 5–5 in the final set, with Gjermund Boeck to serve. Jonas was in so much pain that he was hearing voices, heard his coach, Finn Søhol building up the tension, speaking in a low voice, not much above a whisper, the way he did when he was commentating at Wimbledon, speaking in hushed tones, especially at decisive moments in a match, as if he were afraid that the sound of his own voice, up in the commentator box, might put the players off. The ambassador fired off his first serve, a cracker of a shot, straight into the net, thank heavens, hitting it so hard that one of his strings snapped, and Jonas was allowed a breathing space while Boeck went to fetch his reserve racket.

Jonas was on his last legs, his eyes would barely focus, his arm felt as though it had dropped off. The ambassador served again, but the break seemed to have spoiled his concentration; not only was he serving badly he also hit two double-faults, with the result that Jonas won the game almost without having lifted his sore arm.

Jonas was leading 6–5; he was serving for the match. His shoulder was throbbing like hell, he clenched his teeth so hard he could taste the amalgam, he simply had to do this, it was his one big chance; and through all the pain he was conscious of a strange sense of pleasure. He served, not particularly hard, the ball came into play, they hit some long balls from the baseline; every shot was like a knife slicing into his arm. Jonas both relished it and felt like crying, suddenly understanding what masochism was all about, slamming the shots hard enough to bring the humiliating taste of lobster flesh rising up into his throat to mingle with that of blood and amalgam, long balls from the baseline, until he knew he would never manage to hit the next ball. Then, out of blue, while trying to clinch the game with a coolly calculated diagonal on the backhand, the ambassador quite inexplicably hit the ball out of court. ‘Damn and blast it to hell!’ yelled Gjermund Boeck, the ambassador, causing heads to turn in the far corners of the hall. Jonas served again, a rotten, uncontrolled serve, fully expecting a lethal return; he could already see the sneer on the ambassador’s florid face, but yet again the latter hit the ball out, all but smashing his racket on the floor in the process. The ambassador tightened up on his next two returns, played superbly, and the score stood at 30–30 when Jonas finally succeeded in serving another ace to gain match point.

He was close to passing out, was seeing two of the ambassador, the pain in his shoulder had spread throughout his body, his whole system riddled with broken glass. Racked by the most excruciating pain, he managed to toss the ball into the air and hit it, wildly, feebly, but the ambassador returned it warily as if he did not quite trust himself. Jonas hit a backhand cross, Gjermund Boeck responded with a sound, slicing, but slow, backhand. Jonas knew he was going to have to tie this match up before he keeled over with the pain; he hit a nice, long forehand, ran into the net, knew this was it, the moment when he would either win or lose everything, his faith in himself, a different life, a Golden Fleece, the belief that the most unlikely things happened every day, and through the pain he saw, to his teeth-gnashing despair, that Gjermund Boeck was well-placed, saw that look on his face that said he had everything under control, he had hit this murderous drive, his real show-piece shot, a hundred times before, in Bangkok, London, Nairobi, and he was now about to sweep Jonas off the court with this sure-fire shot, bring the score to deuce and then turn the match ruthlessly in his own favour. He hit the ball, ramming it perfectly, putting the whole of his corpulent figure behind the shot, a horrific, unbeatable passing shot which Jonas could only gaze after, sick to the marrow, but as he gazed after the ball, feeling sick to the marrow, he saw it land outside the line; it could not be, but it was out, and the ambassador, too, was gazing at it, although he could not really believe it, that the ball was out, and that Jonas Wergeland had won the match.

Gjermund Boeck was a good loser, however, and that very evening, at home in Ullevål Garden City — Margrete was also present — among the porcelain vases and dancing bronze gods, he made much of Jonas, not least of his willpower and heroic achievement, what with his injured shoulder and all. Jonas had the feeling that only now had the ambassador, again wearing one of his eye-catching Hawaiian shirts and standing with his back to a roaring fire, accepted him as a prospective son-in-law. ‘Here’s to the hero of the day,’ said Gjermund Boeck. ‘Cheers, Jonas! Damn me if you don’t serve harder than Roscoe Tanner!’ And the ambassador kept his promise; he actually did present Jonas with the huge polar-bear skin.

Despite his success, Jonas did not play much tennis after that match, and not because of his injured shoulder either: that soon healed. This might seem a mite odd, since Jonas himself believed tennis to be the greatest of all his talents. ‘I could have won Wimbledon if only I’d discovered this gift earlier,’ he would say in all seriousness. And yet after that day he rarely lifted a tennis racket. However strange it may sound, to Jonas Wergeland tennis — for reasons that were both irrational and, to some extent, anachronistic — represented a disavowal of the world of his childhood. ‘It’s a question of class,’ he maintained, despite being, in general, almost fanatically anti-ideological. I merely present this as yet another incongruous, but intriguing, aspect of Jonas Wergeland’s life; one which stands, not least, as a distinct contradiction to his decision to become the Duke, an individual who stood out, most decidedly, from the crowd.

There was, however, one thing that Jonas did not know, although he ought to have suspected something of the sort, since great individual victories are almost always won due to the unseen help of others: Margrete had tampered with her father’s racket. She knew from experience that her father was forever breaking strings and that he usually had a couple of back-up rackets on hand. So the day before the match, unbeknownst to her father, of course, she had had his two reserve rackets restrung. She had asked for them to be strung a little looser to ensure that, at least for a couple of games, her father’s control would be a little off, and he would not hit the ball quite as he expected to do. Jonas Wergeland would probably never have won that match, if the ambassador had not, as luck would have it, had to switch rackets at a crucial moment in the final set. Jonas never found out about this bit of ‘help’, and Margrete kept it to herself for the rest of her life, even when she had to listen, not without a touch of exasperation, to Jonas bragging about his great feat, as he was constantly doing — he persisted in regarding it as the greatest victory of his whole life — usually when some guest asked where in the world they had come by the most peculiar decorative touch on their living-room floor.

Something else which Jonas did not know, something not even Margrethe knew, was that the ambassador had long been looking for some way to rid himself of that hideous polar-bear skin.

And so Jonas Wergeland was stretched out on the soft red carpet in the choir of Grorud Church, listening to his father playing the organ, while the light streamed in through the stained-glass windows high up in the walls and spread over the empty pews like a golden fleece, so it seemed to Jonas that the flurry of snow outside had been transformed into music and colour. He listened intently, wonderingly, to the unusual sounds emanating from the organ pipes, the strange shifts in tone, as if he knew they would set something in motion; he was just waiting for the signal, a faint whistle sounding amidst all the other notes. He was conscious of a slight ache in his body, in the shoulders especially, but it was a good feeling. A lot of people may well be strangers to the idea that a future victory — winning a gruelling tennis match against all the odds, for instance — can make itself felt in the present. I ask only that the possibility be considered.