Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

I will simply say that Red Daniel was a member, and seemingly one of the more fanatical and dedicated ones, of the Norwegian Maoist party, more commonly referred to by the acronym AKP which, by dint of the staccato fashion in which the cadres were wont to pronounce it, tended to put one in mind of the rifle that the majority of young Norwegian men make the acquaintance of during their national service: the AG3. And in many ways that is what they were, a bunch of walking, talking automatic rifles; they could take bits from one another and put themselves together exactly as one would assemble a rifle. To cut a long story short: when it came to the so-called M-L movement, Jonas Wergeland inclined towards the virus theory. As far as Jonas could see, the fact that a whole gang of ostensibly normal young Norwegians seemed to feel that they had been saved by a political theory which was at one and the same time so touchingly naïve and so horrendously totalitarian could only be put down to the ideological side-effects of some form of virus that had so far escaped the notice of medical research.

That said, I would go so far as to say that the motives of many members of the party were far more irrational than was first thought; it was not simply a matter of sublimated religious fervour or a disguised lust for power, as some people, wise after the event, have maintained. During their three weeks in China, Jonas discovered his brother’s essential story: the story which provided the key to his enigmatic persona.

This story was a variation of another story with which Jonas was to some extent familiar but which he had never got to the bottom of. It concerned his brother’s piano playing. Like many children, while he was in the fourth grade Daniel had — much against his will — started taking piano lessons from a teacher who lived on Bergensveien, and despite having little or no talent for it — listening to him practise was downright painful — he struggled valiantly through ‘Gems from the Baroque’ and ‘Practice is Fun’ and ‘The Piano and I’ to the point where even Jonas, who was never surprised by his brother’s opportunism, could not imagine what induced him to carry on. Only when, after four hard years, Daniel had finally decided to throw in the towel, to stop taking piano lessons, did he confess to Jonas, one evening when they were lying in their bunk-beds, what it was that had kept him going back to that in many ways detested house up on Bergensveien week after week: to have the chance, once again, of feeling the piano teacher’s tits brush the back of his neck as she leaned over him impatiently to show him how the pieces he was murdering ought to be played. And even though Jonas had to grant that the young piano teacher was very attractive, he could hardly believe his ears, lying there in his bunk-bed: that anyone would put up with four years of torture for the occasional thrill of feeling a pair of tits against the back of their head!

It was only when they reached China that Jonas realized what an impressive feat this had been, and how much it said about his brother; about his staying power, his ulterior motives and, above all else, his nigh-on criminal sexual appetite. Because it was the same story over again, the piano lessons found their parallel in the AKP. Not to beat about the bush, the truth was that deep down, behind all his iron-clad ideological convictions, the latterly so legendary Red Daniel, Jonas Wergeland’s brother, had only one motive for being a member of the AKP: to pull the chicks. I know it sounds hard to believe, and even Jonas would have scoffed at the idea had he not witnessed first-hand, on that trip to China, his brother’s virtuoso technique for laying even the most hard-line, red-hot, female Marxist-Leninists: in other words, watched him putting into practice the reductionist lesson their sister had taught them when they were little: behind all the fine words, all ways lead to that spot between a woman’s thighs. In those three weeks, Red Daniel climbed into bed with no less than four of the eleven girls in their party, and believe me, that called for no small amount of ingenuity and subterfuge — in many ways living up to the AKP’s own methods — since at best they all had to sleep two to a room; and one of the girls was actually married to one of the guys in the group, who was sitting, in well-known, vulgar Maoist fashion, discussing why the people of Norway had to oppose the EEC even though China was in favour of the EEC, while his wife was writhing in the throes of a vulgar and most welcome orgasm in Daniel’s room, with only a thin wall between them.

While still on the train to Moscow, from where they were to travel on by plane with the Chinese airline CAAC, Jonas had been mildly surprised to see his brother coming on to one of the girls in the party, but then, he thought, that was fair enough, Daniel had as much right as anybody else to flirt about a bit and maybe even find himself a steady girlfriend. Jonas could not, of course, have known that his brother’s sole and very short-term goal was to screw this woman, a teacher with an extremely determined chin, up against the door of the train toilet, in time to the rumble of the wheels over the railway tracks, until she forgot all about Lenin’s teachings and instead underwent a re-education of sorts, starting all over again at the first letter of the alphabet. But in the endless, flat expanses of Peking, in between visits to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs, not to mention the Forbidden City with its yellow roofs and 9000 rooms, even harder going than the Louvre, Jonas noted that his brother had changed ladies, and indeed that on their five days in Peking, which also included the usual round of somewhat tedious visits to kindergartens and printing works and car factories, he changed ladies twice — the last one being a hardened feminist to boot, a dentist with a steely gaze. Jonas had to smile when he overheard his brother condemning, absolutely and utterly, all forms of pornography — Daniel , who as a teenager must surely have held the Norwegian record for the number of decilitres of semen expended during tension-relieving sessions in the bathroom over a paper harem judiciously selected from Solhaug’s biggest pile of soft-core porn magazines.

Some years after the trip to China, when Red Daniel, like just about everyone else, had had enough of the AKP and was busily engaged in blandly denying that any of it had ever happened — as if he and they truly had recovered from a virus infection that had also wiped their memories clean — while at the same time reverting to his old familiar ways: completing his education swiftly and efficiently and passing with flying colours, Jonas had quizzed him about this. Why on Earth had he done it? What was so special about those girls? At that, Daniel had to sit down, as if the memory were too much for him, and in the same tremulous voice that Jonas remembered from the evening, lying in their bunk-beds, when his brother had described the feeling of the piano teacher’s breasts against the back of his neck, he told him what the AKP women were like in bed. ‘Honestly, Jonas, there’s no one like them, they’re pure dynamite,’ he said, thereby betraying that he, like all the other AKP leaders, did not regret a thing. Red Daniel’s eyes shone when he spoke about what it was like to have sex with the AKP girls, who had made love with a wild abandon and a passion that left Daniel lost for words. Jonas’s brother had in fact discovered that the AKP stimulated the sex drive, exactly like an aphrodisiac: how, thanks to its very one-dimensionality and contrived view of reality, this entire milieu was actually as fraught with repressed sexuality and sublimated eroticism as any extremist religious sect. All you had to do was help yourself. ‘I’m telling you, Jonas: after an inane two-hour long discussion on why we had to oppose the formation of the republic of Bangladesh — to wit: because China said so — even though those poor people down there were crying out with one voice for independence; or after an intense and totally ludicrous meeting to debate the necessity of “armed rev’-lution, like y’know”, these women were like overripe fruit, one touch and they fell, exploded with pent-up desire. They wanted to be eaten, they wanted to let their juices pour down over you.’ Jonas laughed, but Daniel swore that he had never experienced anything like the sex he had had with those women, forced to embrace asceticism, their heads spinning from having to keep track of so many outrageously contradictory and mutually exclusive assertions. Like starving souls they clung to him as if he were an oasis in the desert. Daniel’s real stroke of genius was to remind these bewildered girls — because even behind those determined chins and steely gazes they were bewildered — that they had bodies, that they possessed a beauty and an allure far above and beyond the bounds of the grandest Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. Sex with Daniel represented a shortcut back to the real world, a brief glimpse of normal life, something which all of those woman eagerly clutched at, if only for one night.