Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

She said no more. He thought: that’s not what she’s frightened of. She’s frightened of something else. All that was meant just as a lead in. He pushed the thought away. She lit a lamp, started on another letter. There were times when Jonas wished he had inherited his parents’ ability to converse, to put the clock back an hour. Then it was the turn of ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’, not with the 1940 band this time but an agonizingly mournful version from Newport ’56. Even so, Jonas was aware of how the tune set every vertebra in his spine vibrating, while at the same time summoning up the picture of a ten-year-old girl, a girl with the longest eyelashes in the world, who was hit by a Scania-Vabis truck while playing this very tune. Jonas shut his eyes, allowing Johnny Hodges’s saxophone to bury him in sentimentality.

‘Why are you playing it again?’ Margrete said from the table.

He did not answer.

‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘Jonas, I’m frightened. Couldn’t you stay home, just this once?’

He opened his eyes, looked at her, closed his eyes again. He lay there with the remote control on his chest, ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’ came to an end; he knew she did not like it but he pressed a button, heard the electronic hiss before the tune hit in again.

Two days later he was on the plane to Seville. He was to regret making that trip for the rest of his life.

He sat on a bench in a crowded park, looking out across a brown, muddy river teeming with every imaginable kind of boat, from little barges to rusty-hulled freighters; the occasional timeless junk glided past, and even the odd submarine, a red flag fluttering from its tower. Jonas gazed in fascination at the busy harbour, at this improbable spectrum of vessels, with the incessant hooting of the boats resounding in his ears, horns of varying pitches mingling with the bicycle bells on the street behind him, a sound like the tinkling of a thousand crystal shards; the deep, full notes and the crisp chiming, layer upon layer, forming a sound so complex, so inexhaustible and so totally apt for a country as unfathomable as China, land of the Ur-turtle.

Passers-by gaped at him in wonder, a few pointed openly. An elderly man, bareheaded and walking with a cane, stopped short and unabashedly eyed Jonas up and down. ‘ Takk for i dag, ser deg i morgen ,’ he said. ‘Bye for now. See you tomorrow.’ in Norwegian. When he saw the look on Jonas’s face he laughed and said: ‘You are from Norwegian? I could see it on you.’

‘How could you tell?’ Jonas asked.

The man pointed to Jonas’s shoes, but said: ‘Face. Ja, vi elsker . Bjørn Bjørnstjerne.’ This time he was quoting the Norwegian national anthem and misquoting the name of its author. The man sat down on the bench next to Jonas. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket, once blue now almost grey, that reminded Jonas of the jackets his grandfather had once worn, jackets that smelled of the seven seas and a hundred harbours. The man explained, in English of a sort, that at one time, many years before, he had worked in the bar of the seaman’s club. He waved an arm in the direction of the Huangpu’s murky waters, the bustle on the river, as if this were an attraction in itself. Just beyond them, two old men were playing mah-jong. ‘My father was a Christian,’ the man told him as if in confidence. His father had been a convicted criminal who had served time in prison. In Changsha, in Hunan province. On his release he had met a missionary from the Norwegian Missionary Society who had told him the story of Lars Skrefsrud, the Norwegian missionary who had also been to prison. This story had changed his father’s life, the man maintained.

They sat for a while in silence, gazing at the boats sailing so close together on the Huangpu that you could almost have crossed to the other side without getting your feet wet. ‘That was a long time ago,’ the man said. ‘The churches are closed now.’

Jonas nodded. He was more annoyed at the fact that the Jade Buddha Temple was closed, he would have liked to have seen it.

‘Do you know anything about Skrefsrud?’ said the man. Behind them the bicycle bells sounded like a sea of grasshoppers.

No, Jonas did not, apart from the name and some vague memory of an RI lesson about the Santal Mission. Wasn’t there something about the Norwegian Mission Society refusing to take him as a student?

‘He was a great orator,’ the man said.

‘Like Mao.’

‘Exactly. Like Mao.’ The man nodded eagerly. Did Jonas know that Skrefsrud had once spoken to 15,000 people in the capital city of Norway, out-of-doors — no loudspeakers, of course — and that he had spoken for two hours?

‘Why do you take such an interest in Skrefsrud?’

‘Because of my father. That strange coincidence. They were both locksmiths of a sort, too.’

‘So you are a Christian?’

‘No, but that does not stop me from respecting him.’

Jonas looked at the man and smiled, unsure whether he was referring to Skrefsrud or his father. People were funny. When he returned home from that trip, this was one of the things he remembered best, a little Chinese man talking about Lars Skrefsrud in a park on the banks of the Huangpu, thus tying up neatly with a story about red pins which Jonas had first heard as a small boy, from Nefertiti’s great-aunt, on a terrace on the banks of the Rakkestad river and leaving Jonas with a sense of connectedness in life and the world.

‘Are you a missionary?’ the man asked as he rose to leave. Jonas shook his head. He could have said: I’m travelling with a group of missionaries, only they don’t do their missionary work here, but in Norway. One might say that they had come to the ‘mother country’ for a refresher course.

Jonas had decided to keep a low profile and not make fun of his travelling companions. He knew, and was almost ashamed to admit, that he had his brother, the legendary Red Daniel, to thank for the fact that he had been able to make ‘the great leap’ from Norwegian to Chinese soil at all, places on such trips were in great demand. So without delving any deeper into the whys and wherefores, or the tedious preparations for the trip itself, I will simply take the liberty of saying that in the latter half of May 1974 Jonas Wergeland found himself in the Middle Kingdom, along with twenty-three others travelling under the auspices of the Norwegian-Chinese League of Friendship, and that they were there with the clearly stated aim of learning.

The most important lesson Jonas learned on this eventful trip — more important than his meeting with the living mummy Mao Tse Tung — was about his brother. Jonas had to go all the way to China to discover that he had got Daniel all wrong. For the greater part of his life Jonas had despised Daniel deeply and sincerely for his astonishing ability to combine overachievement with opportunistic radical views, his way of pairing success at school and on the sports field with all the ‘right’ forms of rebellion at any given time: the Rolling Stones, a final year at the Experimental High School, the odd joint, demonstrating against the hydroelectric power station at Mardøla — and the AKP. Essentially, the two had been waging a cold war ever since Buddha came into the family, Jonas could never forgive Daniel for being ashamed of Buddha. And yet, to Jonas’s surprise, Daniel had pulled a few strings and wangled him a place on the trip to China. And Jonas was grateful. For years, ever since Aunt Laura had told him about Ao, the Chinese Ur-turtle, the turtle that carries the world on its back, he had longed to see China.

I really ought to provide a brief summary of the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist movement, but I will have to refrain, for one thing because on this subject most Norwegians are liable to suffer from a fatal mental block — and the generation in question be heavily on the defensive — for at least another fifty years; so the detrimental effects will be felt for a while yet. Just as with the slow-acting poisons in certain mushrooms, the serious hallucinations do not kick in until much later.