Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘What’s that there?’ Axel asked, pointing to one dish. He was in great good spirits, a huge stack of books under his protective eye. ‘ Shahi korma rampuri , lamb cooked in a curry sauce,’ Jonas told him. ‘Right, give me some of that. Now folks, who wrote this? “Her body was moving in great surging billows under him. For one fearful moment they listened to each other’s gasping breathing and she whispered into his ear: ‘Yes.’ The darkness in front of his eyes was lit by myriads of tiny twinkling, singing stars. In cruel rapture mingled with pain and fear he let it happen.”’

‘Nabokov?’ suggested Thomas. ‘Miller,’ said Trine. ‘It has to be an Englishman,’ said Alva. ‘D.H. Lawrence.’ Axel grinned, shaking his head as the guesses rained down upon him, each one wilder than the one before.

‘Agnar Mykle,’ he said. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have removed it. Axel had only one Norwegian literary hero: Agnar Mykle. ‘It’s from a translation of Lasso rundt fru Luna . An outrageously bad one, I’m sad to say. Stupid bastards have cut at least ten sentences from that short extract alone. It’s a disgrace.’

Kashmir pullao , fried rice, and nan mahiwal, bread baked in a tandoori oven, were passed round along with bowls containing different relishes, wine bottles and jugs of water. They were sitting not far from the door and a model of the Taj Mahal faithful in every detail, lit from within. Over their table hung a large painting of Krishna dancing.

‘Here we are,’ said Thomas triumphantly, brandishing a copy of Theodor W. Adorno’s heavyweight contribution to the philosophy of modern music, unearthed in the deepest recesses of Grubbs Antikvariat in Nørregade. ‘Just you wait till I read what Theo W. has to say about the difference between Schönberg and Stravinsky,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come up with the definitive argument for proving that, compared to Beethoven, Mozart is a gnat.’ Upon which, predictably enough, another huge and vociferous argument broke out, causing people at the surrounding tables to prick up their ears, because even though all sorts of verbal hogwash might be served up at the table round which the Nomads sat over their mumtaz tikka and tandoori gobi , the odd pearl did also fall from their lips.

‘This is for you,’ Axel said rather solemnly, when the food had once more become the centre of attention, handing Jonas a fine, later edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos . ‘You can always see if you can find any sign of Pluto in there.’

Jonas, too, had dutifully purchased a book. About the South Pole. Oddly enough it was in Nansensgade that he had come upon Ernest Henry Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic . Jonas was perpetually on the hunt for arguments concerning the South Pole.

Jonas Wergeland had never run from his social responsibilities, even though he had soon discovered that any exercising of these would often have to be more symbolic than actual, as witness his more or less successful efforts to show solidarity with the remote island kingdom of Les Comores . Jonas knew that the choice of a political cause, which in turn was, of course, based on a choice of values that could never be proved, of turtles, if you like, was necessarily something of a lottery — a bit like the books one picked up in a second-hand bookshop. So let me simply state that, even before his more short-lived commitment to the Comorian cause, in fact, Jonas Wergeland’s eye had fallen on a geographical region and hence a political issue that was to concern him for the rest of his life — so much so that each year on April 10th he commemorated the birthday of the great humanist and natural rights theorist Hugo Grotius, the only person in Norway to do so.

Jonas Wergeland came down, in other words, in favour of the Antarctic — a somewhat opportunist choice, one might think, and not particularly original these days, when everyone from Greenpeace to conservative politicians is trying to cash in on this poor corner of the world, but I would just like to remind you that Jonas made his choice over twenty-five years ago. Of the few books he owned, nine out of ten had to do with the South Pole. Thus, Jonas Wergeland was one of the first people in Norway to recognize that this mysterious seventh continent was under threat, partly from the more or less covert lust for power of certain countries, and the front they provided for good old-fashioned imperialism, and partly by the ecological consequences of the modern technology that was now coming into use.

Jonas Wergeland was critical, not least, of his own country’s position in the Antarctic. He simply could not see why, just because some stubborn and vainglorious Norwegian had made it to the pole by dogsled and because other Norwegians had conducted a pretty ruthless whaling operation down there — the last thing anyone wanted to talk about now — Norway could lay claim to such an outrageously large slice of this colossal ice-cake, an area seven times greater than Norway itself.

As time went on, Jonas Wergeland developed a genuine fascination for the Antarctic, once part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, the way one always becomes interested in a subject if one only reflects on it for long enough, even if it has been chosen at random and even, indeed, if one has a dread of snow and ice. Jonas became more than simply fascinated — he eventually came to regard this paradoxically barren continent as a key, as an angle on the entire global situation at the end of the twentieth century. It was a laboratory not only for the forces of nature, but also for the forces of society, inasmuch as it represented a point of intersection, a mishmash of scientific, economic and political problems. The Antarctic was quite simply a gigantic and valuable prism of ice. Which is also why there was nothing Jonas feared more than that this fragile continent, its transparency, as it were, would be polluted by airports, waste and, worst of all, mine workings since, according to the experts, Antarctica was bursting with minerals. And despite the fact that the Antarctic Treaty painted an ostensible picture of sheer, harmonious idyll, with all its fine talk about peace and research, Jonas was keenly aware that this was nowhere near good enough. Because it was an indisputable fact — and this formed the very cornerstone of his commitment to the South Pole — that we in the West still inhabited a society where profit-oriented production was the governing corporate principle in the world of finance. That much socialism he had managed to absorb.

Although the term ‘environmental protection’ had not yet become all the rage, Jonas realized that this, the coldest, driest, highest continent on Earth, almost totally covered by an icecap measuring roughly 2000 metres thick, ought to be regarded much as a work of art, that it ought to be protected in the same way as the Taj Mahal. The Antarctic was the cleanest, most untouched place on Earth, ‘still a virgin in a global brothel’ as a future comrade-in-arms was to put it. The way Jonas saw it, it was obvious that the uninhabited South Pole — not counting the hundreds of millions of penguins, that is — should belong to all mankind and not merely to the seven countries with a claim to sovereignty, and hence he firmly believed — as a number of poorer countries would later suggest — that the Antarctic ought to be administered by the UN. Jonas was pretty certain that Trygve Lie would have supported such an idea.

So Jonas Wergeland not only celebrated Michelangelo Day in grand style; for many years, every April 10th — on ‘Grotius Day’ as he called it — you would find Jonas Wergeland on Karl Johans gate in Oslo, handing out fliers which he had personally paid to have printed, bearing such headings as ‘Give the Antarctic To The Penguins’, ‘Let Amundsen Rest In Peace’ and ‘Queen Maud’s Dubious Honour’. These relatively entertaining days on Karl Johan’s gate also taught Jonas something about how staggeringly little the average Norwegian knew about the South Pole, despite the fact that they were natives of a country that had placed an unbelievable seventh part of this vast region under Norwegian dominion, according it the status of a ‘dependency’.