Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

I make no secret of the fact that I consider this episode one possible source of certain fundamental traits in Jonas Wergeland’s character. After his initial doubts he had begun to look forward to seeing Oslo from the air, but the effect this had on him was very different from expected. It all came to a head, after they had been in the air for some time, when they flew over Grorud, and Uncle Lauritz proceeded to circle over Jonas’s hometown, with the best of intentions, of course, thinking, as he did, that the lad would get a kick out of it. ‘Look, there’s the block of flats where you live!’ he yelled over the drone of the engine, taking the aircraft gliding round in wide circles over a landscape that Jonas knew like the back of his hand. But instead of being thrilled by this sight, Jonas was actually scared, absolutely scared out of his wits, and I repeat: this was not the result of the G forces to which he was being subjected by the perpetual banking of the plane; Jonas Wergeland was terror-stricken purely and simply because the landscape below was unrecognizable. He stared at the ground in disbelief, refusing to credit that that , down there, was Grorud, Solhaug, Hagelundveien. They circled and circled, and Jonas looked down, even though he did not want to look down, but he was held, transfixed, he had to look down, down on that fearfully false, facile, flat image, on which only the broad straight lines of a childhood world full of nooks and crannies were chalked in — an image which bore no more resemblance to Grorud than a brick did to an ice cream factory. The voices coming over the radio all the time, the foreign language, heightened the sense of total unreality. One of the biggest shocks were the six blocks of flats, which looked so perversely farfetched, seeming to form the most unnerving pattern. And worst of all: he saw no people.

This glance out of the window left Jonas feeling sick to the marrow, he could feel something welling up inside him, something akin to an urgent protest. He threw up all over the place, the vomit gushing out, spraying over the back of the seat in front of him and over his trousers; he retched violently and threw up again, spewing his load, tears starting from his eyes. His uncle took one swift glance over his shoulder, straightened up the plane and headed back towards Fornebu airport. Back on the ground, he lifted Jonas out of the stinking cockpit, registering as he did so the state it was in, but he was not angry, merely looked at Jonas a little strangely and stroked his hair.

For his part, Jonas just stood there, studying the vomit that had stuck to his trouser legs, as a way of diverting his thoughts perhaps, or as if he were taking comfort in the little details, enjoying the sight of the tiny chunks of hot dog — they had stopped at Lysaker on the way out to the Flying Club to buy a hot dog wrapped in a potato pancake.

‘What happened?’ said Uncle Lauritz.

‘I don’t know,” said Jonas. ‘All of a sudden I just felt sick.’

The truth is that Jonas Wergeland had thrown up in horror, horror at seeing his beloved, chaotic, hilly, bustling Grorud, flattened out and brought down to a picture he could take in at a glance: a picture in which all the interesting details, tiny universes, were missing, as if what he were seeing were a formula, a diagram of an adventure. Gone were the rats at the rubbish dump, gone the words carved into the alder tree down by the stream, gone was old Frøken Schönfeldt on the bench with her handbag full of glacier mints. One could say that this was Jonas Wergeland’s first encounter with reductionism, and from that day forth he was to entertain an inveterate distrust of all forms of bird’s-eye view or synthesis, all systems or overall pictures: in other words, any totality that quelled refractory details and gave no thought to the individual. And later, the older he became, the more nauseated he would feel when confronted with theories or ideas that presented only one dimension of the multi-dimensional reality, as when faced with a teacher fervently championing the cause of dialectic materialism. Jonas detected the same flatness and appalling simplicity in such a theory, the same absence of real, live, enigmatic people, which he had been horror-struck to see from a light plane 3000 feet above the Grorud of his childhood.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together?

Jonas stretched out on the sofa with the remote control resting on his stomach, listening to Duke Ellington: ‘Solitude’, the 1940 band, Jimmy Blanton on bass, the flourish of Ben Webster’s saxophone, music that made him feel deeply nostalgic but which also helped him to relax, took his mind off his anxiety about the trip.

‘It’s not often I ask anything of you, Jonas.’ Margrete set aside her fountain pen, ran an eye over what she had written, several sheets of paper closely covered in pale-blue ink. Jonas realized that there was something different about her. ‘Couldn’t you stay at home? Just this once? Couldn’t they send someone else to that bloody World’s Fair?’

‘There’s no way, you know that. Not at such short notice. It was all arranged ages ago. Anyway, it’s my idea, it’s all down to me.’

‘What about Kristin?’ she said. ‘I’ve got that seminar next week-end, remember.’

‘I spoke to my mother, she can go down to Hvaler with her.’

‘But then I’ll be alone in the house when I get back. I don’t like to be alone. Why can’t you stay home?’

Outside the light was starting to fade. It was spring; it smelled of spring right to the heart of the room. On the hill leading down to the road the coltsfoot was already up, tiny yellow flames. ‘In my solitude,’ sang Ivie Anderson huskily, ‘you haunt me, with reveries of days gone by.’

‘I’m frightened,’ said Margrete.

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know, I’m just frightened. How did he die, anyway, your Uncle Lauritz?’

‘I’ve told you. He crashed in his light plane. He was flying too high. Or too low. Or too far. I don’t remember. I was too young at the time. He was an experienced pilot. Nobody could understand it.’

‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

He sat up. ‘Margrete, why are you frightened? Tell me.’

She sat for a long time gazing at the nib of her pen. Then: ‘It’s that last programme of yours.’

She was referring to a programme on non-European immigrants to Norway, in which Jonas had put a bunch of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans in the Central Police Station; sitting waiting and waiting in the hallway outside the Immigration Department, whiling away the time by telling each other stories, a sort of Decameron of tales that drew their subject matter from Oslo’s new ghettoes; or other stories, the most amazing stories, of how these people saw Norway and, more especially, the Norwegians. Jonas had received a lot of negative, and to some degree malicious, responses to this programme.

Margrete told him that she thought someone had tried to kidnap her or to hurt her. She had been standing outside the Board of Health offices on St Olav’s plass when she saw two men jump out of a car and come towards her, straight towards her, with a look on their faces as if to say that she was the very person they were looking for. The friend she was waiting for chose just that moment to appear, the men had stopped short, hesitated then turned and jumped back into the car.

‘Rubbish,’ he said.

‘What are you laughing at?’

‘You’re overestimating the power of television.’

‘But isn’t that what you’re always saying, how powerful it is?’

‘Yes, but not in that way. Margrete, take it easy. It’s that imagination of yours again. That’s what I’m always saying: you have far too vivid an imagination.’