Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

For a long time after that, Jonas was convinced that life was an adventure, one that would go on forever, behind one adventure another one would always be lurking, but could that be true here, too, he thought, as a girl with the longest eyelashes in the world and a head as fragile as terracotta, flew through the air, already dead, and hit the tarmac at his feet with a horrid soft thud, while the last note from the mouth organ hung over the landscape, hung on and on, seeming to take up residence in the granite face of Ravnkollen, and Jonas stood there, unable to tear his eyes away from Nefertiti’s bike, lying in the ditch with the front wheel spinning round and round.

The unknown driver was climbing out of his cab, and people were running down the road from Solhaug. But before anyone could reach them, before he himself collapsed in a fit of anguished weeping, on the longest, lightest day of the year Jonas walked over to the girl lying lifeless, seemingly without a scratch, on the tarmac before him, only a few drops of blood trickling from her ear to betray that something fatal had occurred. Jonas bent down, wanting to remember her face, to stick it up in the place of honour in his memory, and as he did so he saw a tiny beetle crawl out of the pocket of her white blouse, across her heart; a beetle with red wings, he thought to himself, making one last effort before total and utter collapse, before the beetle flew off.

‘Do you have to go?’ she asked.

‘Of course I have to go,’ he said.

‘Why do you play that tune over and over again?’ she said.

He did not answer.

‘Why can’t you stay home?’ she said.

He did not answer.

‘Jonas, why do you keep playing that song?’

He lifted the seventy-eight off the turntable, regarded it: a black hole. Normally she never asked him about Duke Ellington, as if she knew this was a sacrosanct, nigh-on taboo, subject; that a whole host of feelings lay buried there, feelings associated with a life long before she came along. Instead he put on a CD, although he missed the crackling, missed the less than perfect sound quality, a breath of long ago. For him, Duke Ellington would always be the 1940 orchestra, in the loft at Solhaug, with Nefertiti.

‘You’ve never said that much about him,’ Margrete said.

‘Who?’

‘Your uncle.’ Margrete pointed to the pile of seventy-eights.

‘He was a big Duke Ellington fan,’ said Jonas, not knowing, the way one never does know, that this would be one of the most crucial conversations of his life.

Margrete indicated with a gesture that that much she had figured out for herself.

‘He was at the Newport festival in 1956, when Ellington made his comeback,’ Jonas said, as if this said all there was to say about Uncle Lauritz and what an exceptional person he had been. Jonas was standing in the centre of the room in the new wing of the villa, with its walls of Grorud granite, like a fortress; standing with his feet nestling cosily in a polar-bear skin and looking out of the window, down onto Bergensveien, at the junction with the road to Solhaug, while the weird strains of ‘Caravan’ meandered softly out of the loudspeakers, filling him with a wave of sentiment for which he sometimes felt the need, more pleasure than pain.

Margrete said nothing. She seemed to be out of sorts. She had been out of sorts for weeks. She did not say much to him either, never came out with so much as a single one of the little anecdotes of which she was usually brimful. She spent her time writing, writing letters to women friends all over the world: Jakarta, Santiago de Chile. She was a great letter writer; she enjoyed writing. Jonas never wrote anything or not letters anyway. Margrete wrote to someone at least once a week, long letters written with an old fountain pen, took pleasure in it, took pains over it, writing in a neat copperplate, wet, pale-blue characters, as if the actual process was as important as what she wrote. He envied her this dedication, the delight she took in covering page after page with a litany of inconsequential chitchat.

‘Do you have to go now?’ she asked again. ‘I mean, you do have this phobia about planes.’

‘I do not have a phobia about planes.’

‘Well you certainly don’t like flying.’

He turned away from the window and looked at her. She was writing, her eyes on the sheet of paper, she looked like a schoolgirl hunched over her first ‘a’s. ‘Mood Indigo’, with Lawrence Brown’s trombone, came brushing out of the hi-fi, painting him indigo inside. There were things that had happened to him that he had never spoken of, not even to Margrete; stories he wished to keep to himself — perhaps because he doubted whether anyone else would understand them. One of these concerned Uncle Lauritz and the day he had taken Jonas to the Oslo Flying Club, right next to Fornebu airport. He was six years old, they had been strolling about, looking at the light planes when his uncle came to a halt, as if quite by chance, in front of a Piper Cub, a small white plane with a red trim. Jonas did not know that it was his uncle’s own plane. ‘Want to go for a spin?’ Uncle Lauritz had said, smiling. If not exactly scared, Jonas had certainly been a little nervous: as I am sure anyone who has seen a two-seater Piper Cub from the late fifties would understand. It looked as though it would topple over if a grown-up so much as leaned against it. With its anything but reassuring skeleton of steel tubing covered with sailcloth and a paltry sixty horsepower engine in the nose, it looked like an only slightly larger version of the frail model planes that the big boys played with on the playing field at home, the ones they started by flicking the propeller with their fingers and steered in the air with the aid of two strings, standing in the middle of the field making the plane circle round and round above their head. Although things often went amazingly well to begin with, more often than not these flights ended with an almighty crash, either because the petrol had run out or because the boy pilot had lost control of the elevators on the other end of the strings.

The last thing Uncle Lauritz was expecting was for Jonas to say no, so he had already commenced the ritual known as the ‘walk around’, checking such things as the air in the tyres and whether the cables were securely attached to the rudders. So Jonas did his best to look enthusiastic, partly because he knew that he would then be one up on his chums. After all, it was a far cry from the endless yells of ‘Give us a ride!’ every time a plane flew over their heads, to actually getting to ride in one.

Soon afterwards, Jonas was in the cockpit, sitting in the seat behind his uncle, well strapped in with seat belt and shoulder harness. They had taxied out to their holding position, where Uncle Lauritz had run through the pre-flight checks: engine, instruments, talking on the radio throughout, carrying on a dialogue which Jonas understandably could not make head nor tail of since it was conducted in English, with words such as ‘ground’ and ‘tower’ and ‘clear to taxi’ cropping up again and again along with a lot of ‘LIMA BRAVO CHARLIE’s, although all of this only served to make Jonas feel safer, giving, as it did, the impression that they were in continual contact with some higher power. Not until they taxied out onto the runway did Jonas start to have misgivings. Or rather, to begin with everything was just great. Jonas actually enjoyed the swooping sensation, and he was not the slightest bit afraid when the little plane dipped or his uncle banked into a turn, making his tummy tickle. Besides, for the first few minutes he was too busy watching the instrument panel, particularly a funny-looking instrument that his uncle simply called ‘turn and slip’, with a black ball that indicated the angle at which they were flying. So the flight went without a hitch until the moment when Jonas looked out of the plexiglass window or rather, looked down . But it was not their height off the ground — somewhere around 3000 feet — that six-year-old Jonas Wergeland found frightening, it was the view itself or the perspective .