Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

At one point it seemed to him that she had altered course. They passed beneath a power-line and came to the foot of a steep slope. Just at that moment the clouds parted and the afternoon sun turned the landscape into the perfect picture of Easter in Norway as presented in tempting brochures aimed at foreign tourists. Directly above them towered a relatively high peak. The girl ahead of him made the sort of neat 180-degree turn that Jonas had never been able to do, neither as a child or now, before gliding up alongside him. ‘We’re going for the bloody top,’ she said, squinting over the top of her sunglasses.

‘That one?’ said Jonas, pointing to Store Stavsronuten.

‘No, that one,’ the girl said, pointing further up at a point diagonally behind Jonas, where Gaustatoppen itself lay hidden by cloud. She gazed resolutely, almost covetously, up what in Jonas’s eyes seemed a formidably steep mountainside.

‘But we haven’t told anybody,’ he said. ‘I mean, we said we were going to Heddersvann. And we don’t have time, it’s three o’clock now!’

‘What is it with you?’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re chicken? We’re going for the top, I said.’ She had definitely altered course, was already heading uphill, as the sky clouded over again.

‘Completely Gausta’, Jonas thought, this being their way as kids of saying somebody was crazy: a reference to Gaustad Hospital. He turned, needing to have a piss. The sight of the yellow patch on the snow made him feel like an animal, a dog. He set off after the girl, even though he knew it was madness, feeling the action beginning to tell on his upper arms and shoulders right away.

It was the week before Easter and the massive influx of people to the mountains. Jonas Wergeland had been hanging about for some days, almost totally alone, at the Kvitåvatn Mountain Lodge above Rjukan, having come to a breakthrough decision, an almost perverse decision: for the first time in his nigh-on twenty-four years he was going to give the Norwegian mountains a try. And even though, typically for him, he chose to avoid the Easter crowds, he did also cherish a faint hope of coming up with an explanation for this almost animal-like characteristic of the Norwegian race, this abrupt, almost panicky migration, this mass exodus to the mountains over the week of the Easter holidays.

There was also another, and more intriguing, motive for Jonas’s choice of Rjukan in particular, and it was not, as one might think, the splendid hydroelectric monuments of Vemork and Såheim — Jonas Wergeland was to remain shamefully ignorant of these almost baroque, or perhaps one should say fantastical, buildings until the day he met an African at Livingstone in Zambia many years later. No, it was curiosity about NRK’s main transmitters, set up on the tops of mountains all over Norway, that had brought him to the Gausta area — I consider this worth mentioning since it casts some doubt on whether Jonas Wergeland did indeed join NRK on an impulse as sudden and random as he himself has always claimed. The fact is that while at the College of Architecture he had come across Le Corbusier’s book, Vers une architecture , one of the few books which he had read as avidly as the Kama Sutra of his childhood, and what Le Corbusier had written about the link between the products of modern industrial design — cars, planes, passenger ships — and architecture, had led Jonas to think of television masts — surely these too could be transformed into an exciting architectonic impulse. He envisaged them almost as church spires in a new secular era or as the minarets of some sort of media religion. In other words, he had come to Rjukan to view the mast on the top of Gauta, the only problem being that, until now, it had not shown itself, due to the miserable weather — the clouds hung around the peak like a cap — and Jonas had not felt much like getting out on his skis.

When Sigrid A. had walked into the fire-lit lounge the previous evening, tall and fair, with piercing blue eyes and a distinctive nose, Jonas had immediately been aware of that soft feather, which made its presence felt in his life only occasionally, being run up his spine by an invisible hand before coming to rest in the form of a prolonged tickling sensation between his shoulder-blades. But she — it must be said — had noticed him right away, too, and in a manner quite at odds with her normally shy nature she had, without a moment’s hesitation, walked straight over and sat down in the chair opposite him.

Sigrid A. was that pretty rare animal, a glaciologist. She had started out by studying medicine, it’s true, but had soon switched courses, recognizing the great outdoors to be her natural element. No doubt there are also some who know of her as a mountaineer; Sigrid A. was, in fact, to be the driving force behind countless daring exploits in one wilderness and another, in widely diverging parts of the world, as the leader of sponsored expeditions that generated banner headlines in the Norwegian press and led, in time, to her being called upon to fulfil other tasks, as a so-called PR ambassador for Norway, a somewhat obscure, but nonetheless lucrative diplomatic post. Sigrid A. not only felt a deep need always to be the first, but also to do things which allowed her to push her body to the limits of its capabilities as if this were a goal in itself; more than once she had been almost shocked by what her own flesh and blood could actually stand. During her conversation with Jonas in the lounge she did not, however, mention this at all. What she did say was that she liked going for long ski trips in the moonlight, and when Jonas confessed that skiing was rather a sore point with him, she saw her chance and invited him to go skiing with her the following day.

So there Jonas Wergeland was, against all the odds — and what was a great deal more foolhardy and irresponsible, without having told anyone — heading up the hill towards Gaustatoppen in dangerously bad weather, led by a woman who could cope with three times as much as he in terms of physical endurance.

The slope was so steep that he had to take it sideways on; the gap between them grew. She stopped, turned. ‘Come on!’ she called, a note of anger in her voice. Jonas pushed himself even harder, not so much because he wanted to show that he was a man, as because he felt like a dog, he had to obey. His arms ached, and in the grey light the snow seemed even whiter, dazzling. He was not happy, either, about this blend of hot and cold, with half of his body, the back side, soaked with sweat, while the snow and the wind threatened to turn his front to ice. She had stopped to wait for him. His nose was running; he felt thoroughly pissed off. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t go any further,’ he said, swallowing his pride. ‘You can do it!’ she said harshly, almost contemptuously. ‘Come on!’ She gave him a little rap on the backside with her pole.

Up on the ridge itself, the wind came at them from the northwest like a bat out of hell, crystals of ice dug in to their faces like crampons. Evening was drawing on. Jonas could not see the point in this: why they could not turn back, why they were out here defying the forces of nature when they could sitting in front of the fire back at Kvitåvatn Mountain Lodge drinking hot cocoa and playing Scrabble, or some other dumb game. It was as if she had to finish whatever she had set out to do; every inch of her radiated a determination unlike anything he had ever come across before.

Jonas plodded on, his chin lowered onto his chest. Everything was white — white, white — all the contours of the landscape had been obliterated by the swirling snow. He was growing bitterly cold, particularly around his groin. Amateur that he was, he had dressed as if for a quick run across Lillomarka. He floundered on, like a dog , he thought again and again, concentrating: right pole, left ski, he thought, left pole, right ski; he saw her turn, not to look at him — it was as if she instinctively knew he was there anyway — but at the invisible sun, with a look on her face that seemed to say she was aiming not for the top of Gausta but for something much higher, much greater. He felt afraid.