Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The celebrations had been well under way before noon, with a parade in which the younger children, many of them wheeled in their prams, were dressed up in costumes painstakingly sewn by their mothers, who had worked and planned for this day as zealously as the residents of Rio preparing for their grand carnival, and continued in the afternoon with, it has to be said, a splendid show, stage-managed by a domestic-science mistress who also acted as Master of Ceremonies for the proceedings, clad, appropriately enough, in her white cookery-class overall, as if the entire show were a good and nutritious dish which she had composed and was now serving up to the proud parents sitting on the grass in the natural amphitheatre outside of Number One, watching and listening to the estate children singing through a blaring PA system, reading poetry, doing conjuring tricks, playing the trumpet and performing the most incomprehensible sketches, which everybody laughed at anyway, because they knew that the kids were endeavouring to make up for all the devilment they had got up to during the rest of the year. The children were always worried that it might rain, but I am here to tell you: it never rained at Solhaug on Midsummer’s Eve when Jonas was a boy. So the parents could lounge on the grass, keeping half an ear on the concert while they soaked up the sun, with a few of the fathers whispering to one another that they’d be blowed if little Susan hadn’t shot up during the spring, going about in high heels and a summer frock that really didn’t leave an awful lot to the imagination, by Christ it didn’t.

After the show there was a little break in the festivities, during which the kids went off to inspect the bonfire on the big green behind Blocks Three and Four, bigger than ever, always bigger than ever, on the point down by the stream where they were in the habit of hiding when they fastened a length of thread to Jens Ovesen’s window. The trick was to rub the thread with rosin, creating the most excruciating, irritating noise. Ovesen, known as Jesse Owens because he was so brown in the summertime and because he was the fastest man in Grourd and hence represented the biggest challenge of a prankster’s career, had in his time been a legendary right-back with one of the top Oslo teams, even made it onto the national team, and was famed for being the first back to go into the attack. To be chased by Ovesen was one of the most terrifying and gleeful high points of boyish pranking, and Ovesen himself did not seem to mind it either, as could be seen by the way he vaulted over the rail of the balcony, like any competitive sportsman. Whenever he caught one of them he would slap them on the back and say: ‘You’re too slow, lad!’ and let the culprit go, a humiliation greater than being dealt the expected clip round the ear.

But it was Midsummer’s Eve, the weather was warm, perfect, and as the day wore on into evening, the grown-ups drifted out, the Mums looking so nice they were almost unrecognizable and the Dads smelling of Wella hair-cream and an extra dab of Floid aftershave, all except Haakon Hansen, who had splashed out with a few drops of an Italian brand and was hoping that Fru Jakobsen, at least, would notice.

Now, let me tell you about this particular Midsummer’s Eve. Oh, I know I am starting to wax all lyrical, but I cannot help but become carried away, because this is so beautiful, this is the absolute highlight of Norwegian history: it was party time at Solhaug, a community get-together on the green behind Block Four, a green that the caretaker kept as immaculate as a golf course, with little saplings planted on the slope leading down to the stream, supported, in true textbook fashion by canes: a job carried out ‘ på dugnad ’, a phrase that is the very watchword of the Norwegian social democrats: as a communal effort, that is, with everyone pitching in to help. Jonas would always remember, not least at more isolated, egocentric points in his life, those evenings when people were out with their shovels, gripping little trees with their roots packed in bags and the chairman of the residents association rolled up in his Trabant — that’s right, a Trabant! — with a crate of Solo orangeade on the back seat, and everyone had this — how can I put it? — look of pioneering zeal on their faces. And now there they were, setting the table — one long table — again with everyone doing their bit, spirits are high, they are on the verge of the breakthrough to utopia; all that is lacking is for the streets to be paved with gold. It is the longest, lightest day of the year, and although this may be going a bit far, the Solhaug of that time was, to the people who lived there at any rate, what Ancient Greece had been in its day: a high point in the history of civilization and democracy.

Much as I would prefer not to, I feel duty bound to say that, at some point, historians will come along who will take a cool objective look at this era and doubtless interpret it quite differently. It should also be said that a great many people, regardless of the age in which they live, recall the years when they were setting up house and starting a family as a rich and meaningful time — not to mention their childhood years — but even I, able as I am to view the whole thing impartially and objectively, cannot help but be captivated by the golden glow that surrounds this period in the history of Norway’s little land.

But where was Nefertiti?

As people began to gravitate towards the green, Jonas went looking for her. Not that he was actually concerned, although it did suddenly cross his mind that she had been acting strangely earlier in the day. At one point she had stood with her forehead pressed against the flagpole from which the white and blue Solhaug pennon dangled limply, and right after that she had sat for a while, as if in a trance, on their favourite ledge in the little cliff at Egiltomta, having managed to play ‘Cotton Tail’, that impossible Ellington number, all the way through on the mouth organ for the first time. And, strangest of all: why, a couple of days earlier, had she pulled out her little crystal prism and given it to him, just like that — that prism which was her most treasured possession? ‘Here, take this,’ she had said, ‘and learn how to use it.’

Jonas had the feeling that maybe he ought to have been keeping an eye on her, but it was the longest, lightest day of the year, and it was party time, so Jonas wandered about, doing his best to take it all in, aware that he had to remember this, conscious of the feathery frisson running up his spine that told him he was looking at a great work of art, a picture of Soria Moria Castle, so he could only hunt for Nefertiti with half an eye, because there was Fru Agdestein wearing red nail-polish and carrying a huge tray of smørbrød , prepared according to the book, which in those days meant, for example, such toppings as boiled egg and rollmop herring or liver pâté with pickled gherkins, the extravagance of two ingredients on the same slice of bread almost unheard-of, but it was a party; and there went Herr Madsen, carrying a crate of beer, Madsen who had just bought a new car, a Citroën, with a chassis that could be raised or lowered by pulling a lever, a trick that had had to be demonstrated to the entire estate not once, but twice; what a wonder, a quantum leap beyond the general boring run of cars that lined the kerbsides round the blocks of flats, rather like ordering snails in garlic butter when everyone else was having meat patties with onions. Jonas nipped in and out among the busy grown-ups, eyeing Fru Jakobsen with a shudder. Today she had surpassed herself, Solhaug’s exotic flower, picked and brought back by Herr Jakobsen from his time at a technical college in Rome, a sensation, going about bare-legged almost all winter long; she could tick them off in a way that made their jaws drop, introduced an entirely new body language and temperament and was, of course, the object of many a man’s latent erotic desires.