Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

On one occasion, thanks to these agitprop activities, Jonas was even invited to visit the office of the polar advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there were rumours that Jonas’s expert knowledge and his warning that a minerals convention would not be ratified, nor prove in the long run to be a viable option, had carried some weight — and this I can corroborate. So Jonas Wergeland was in fact a pioneer and opinion-shaper as far as the South Pole was concerned and can in fact take no small share of the credit for the Antarctic, in due course, being accorded a new protocol on environmental protection — as long as it lasts, say I: because no one should be fooled into thinking that the Antarctic, cold though it may be, is not still a very hot, not to say piping hot, potato. All you have to do is mention the word ‘platinum’.

But such triumphs lay far in the future. For now, Jonas Wergeland was with the other Nomads in Copenhagen, in Vesterbrogade, in the Taj restaurant, tucking into dessert — Mango halves and kulfi-e-heer , ice cream. ‘What the hell’s that?’ Thomas asked Axel, sounding out the legend on the spine of a book picked up in an ordinary bookshop. ‘ De la … Grammatologie ? Jacques Derrida? Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘He’s going to be big,’ said Axel. ‘Derrida — sounds like a swearword to me,’ said Trine. Everybody laughed at Axel’s bad buy, thumped him on the back. Alva raised her glass to the statues of Parvati and Lakshmi further down the room.

They never slept on their nights in Copenhagen. After a lengthy dinner rounded off by handfuls of sugar-coated aniseed and betel-nuts they would meander down to Central Station to consign their books to left-luggage lockers. That done, they walked the streets: Copenhagen is a wonderful city for walking, especially at night. They wandered along the banks of Peblinge Sø discussing the virgin birth; they sauntered past the gardens of Rosenborg Palace totally engrossed in an exchange on the younger Malraux versus the older; as a bit of light relief on their way past The Marble Church, Jonas and Axel played Ellington’s smoky melancholy ‘Dusk’ on two mouth organs, before they wandered out to the Little Mermaid, a regular stop on their route, where they stood — all alone — and talked about wonder-boy Eddy Merckx, who had just won the Tour de France for the fifth time. On the way back, something akin to a fight broke out between Thomas and Alva over the importance of Norbert Elias, a heated discussion that lasted from Amalienborg to Kongens Nytorv. Not until they were seated over a glass of Gammel Dansk bitters and an early breakfast at Nyhavn, gathering their strength for a last bout of pearl diving in the antiquarian sea, were they reconciled if no closer to agreement.

It is easy to laugh at all this, I warrant you, but as I say, it’s an all too brief stage in life.

On the boat home they all fell asleep early, curled up in their Sleeperettes, all except Axel Stranger. He sat on the deck in the light summer night, reading Jacques Derrida, underlining like mad, toes curling with glee, blowing kisses to the gulls, already looking forward to regaling the others with the weird content of this book over a steaming hot dish of couscous at Bényoucéf’s.

And so you see, he just had to talk to somebody, he said, almost apologetically and almost bursting with eagerness, enthusiasm, agitation, as he caught up with Jonas on the steps leading down to the street. What did Jonas say? Please? Did he have a minute?

Jonas explained, by dint of a couple of well-rehearsed phrases, that he did not speak the language, that he simply happened — and here he hesitated as always — to be Norwegian, sorry, whereupon the stranger grabbed hold of his arm and resolutely stayed him, looking extremely agitated. Noruego? Noruego! The other man simply stood there repeating the name as if he had found the very password to the secrets of the universe and could not believe his luck.

‘But she is also Norwegian,’ the man said, switching to English.

‘Who?’

‘Liv Ullman.’

The stranger pronounced her name with reverence and an astonishingly accurate Norwegian ‘u’. Although he could not have said why — Liv Ullman meant nothing to him one way or the other — Jonas was glad the man had not taken him for Swedish.

‘We have to talk,’ the man said. ‘I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you. Your shoes.’ He was of an age with Jonas, dark, his eyebrows almost joining in the middle.

‘It’s late,’ Jonas said. It was getting on for ten o’clock.

‘Late? The day’s only just beginning,’ the man said. ‘Let’s walk.’

The stranger took Jonas by the arm and they set off down the street. Jonas had only the vaguest idea of where he was. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a small square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open, and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, a few pot-plants and a vase of flowers, barely discernible in the dim light as roses.

The man said his name was Eduardo, he asked what Jonas did for a living. Jonas said that he was studying astronomy, mainly in order to give some solid answer, he couldn’t really have said what he was doing right then. The man laughed. ‘And now you’ve switched to film stars?’ he said. ‘You must be very proud of her.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Liv Ullman.’

That name again. Had Jonas seen her as Nora? Eduardo wanted to know. Or as Rebecca West? What was she doing these days? In his excitement Eduardo stumbled over the English words.

Jonas had to admit that he did not know that much about her. Eduardo was flabbergasted, stopped dead, gesticulated frantically, lost for words.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m on my way to the Avenida de Mayo,’ Jonas said. ‘I need to see it one last time before I leave.’

Eduardo shrugged this off. ‘There’s no hurry, surely. This is more important.’ He seemed almost angry, his brows drew together into one long black line, he towed Jonas along in his wake, started talking about the cinema, animatedly, about Liv Ullman, how great she was, that there was no one to touch Ullman in close-up, the greatest since Garbo. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a small square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, some pot-plants and an old mirror, black and mysterious in the dim light.

‘And her lips,’ said Eduardo. ‘Have you seen her lips?’ He stopped, took Jonas by the shoulders, almost shaking him. ‘Even Sophia Loren doesn’t have lips like that. By God, Liv Ullman puts a whole world of emotion into her lips alone.’

Jonas had been in a funny mood all day. It still got to him every time, the way his uncertainty grew in big cities, not only as to what he should do with his life but as to who he was. When he walked along the broad avenues or through the busy streets with the hum of a foreign language in his ears, he felt as if his very identity were being brought into question or was disintegrating. He was everyone and no one. Among the crowds on the calle Florida it struck him that he could pass himself off as anyone at all: an idea that he both liked and disliked. In any case there was something about this city, more than any other city, possibly because of its air of being a copy of all other cities, or a copy of a copy, a sort of concrete denial of the possibility of original thought, that imbued him with a strong sense of loneliness or emptiness. It was this that had prompted him, an hour or so before he bumped into Eduardo, to grab a taxi, wanting to get a little further away from the most frequented parts of town. They were somewhere near the top of the calle Sarmiento — although Jonas did not know that: to him, every quarter looked like all the rest — when, out of the corner of his eye, the way you can spot a car coming from another direction even when you are looking straight ahead, he suddenly caught sight of something familiar and asked the driver to stop. Acting on impulse, as they say. He paid the fare and watched the car drive off. It was a while before it dawned on him what it was that had made him stop. On a wall behind which, as it turned out, hid the Cinemateca Hebraica, hung a portrait of Liv Ullman. Jonas had actually been pulled up short, in the middle of a strange city, by the face of the Norwegian actress, as if he had caught sight of someone he knew, a casual acquaintance or distant relative.