Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Then, when they could not have been far from the top, the blast grew even fiercer or perhaps the weather simply was that much wilder up there. They trekked through a sea of whiplashes, everything was white, the earth, the sky, Jonas had slid into a sort of physical second gear; his engine was on automatic, right pole, left ski, left ski, right pole, thoughts churning around in his head willy-nilly. He looked down at the strange, windswept patterns in the driving snow and was struck by a feeling of being on an unknown planet or of suddenly having uncovered Norway’s innermost secret: that Norway was another planet. Jesus Christ, why couldn’t they turn back, she was out of her mind, this girl; he glanced back, that’s life for you, he thought, giving in to the banality, the macabre humour of the situation; you left a track on a cold and inhospitable planet, which promptly swept it away behind you.

The driving snow reached into every nook and cranny. Jonas had visions of precipices. Wasn’t there supposed to be a sharp drop on either side of the actual peak, the west side especially? Right ski, left ski, right ski, left ski, he could no longer feel his arms, his face was nothing but a cold, stiff mask, numb. Sigrid A. was looking round about, she seemed quite unperturbed, as if everything were going exactly according to plan or as if she were going on instinct, steering by some in-built compass; he was struck by her strong profile, a heroic profile, tailor-made for the heads of coins, he thought, and then once again he caught a glimpse of that look on her face, as if she relished this ordeal, this self-torment, this sub-human struggle. Suddenly she pulled up next to a high snowdrift. ‘We made it!’ she called down to him. ‘Congratulations, young man! The Tourist Board hut!’

Jonas refused to believe that they were saved, giggled with mild hysteria at the very idea. A snowdrift. A heap of snow. She motioned to him to follow her round to the eastern side of the bank of snow, and through the snow Jonas made out some rough stones. Had it not been for the corner of a window peeking out, he would have taken it for a cairn. But this was, in fact, the Gaustatoppen tourist hut, built of granite: huge blocks hacked out of the mountain itself, now totally buried in snow. ‘Now all we have to do is hoist the flag,’ she said, her face glowing as if she really loved such ordeals and was almost sorry to have reached the top.

After shovelling away another snowdrift piled up against the entrance, which was hung with a mocking sign offering ‘light snacks’, they found that the heavy blue, metal door was open. ‘Did you know about this?’ Jonas said.

She did not reply. Just flashed that happy smile.

Another surprise awaited them. Inside, the little room was warm, it actually felt warm after the icy wind. There was a switch; the light came on. ‘The extension’s new,’ she said. ‘It was added when the army were building up here. They laid heating cables under the cement floor, as you know.’

The door to the hut itself was locked. But Jonas was more than content, ran an eye gratefully round the wood-panelled room; there was a narrow oblong window high up in the eastern wall. Some blankets were piled on a bench along with some old sleeping bags. ‘People sometimes spend the night here,’ Sigrid A. said, unpacking her little rucksack, which proved to contain a little of this and a little of that. Soon they were sitting on the bench, each with a cup of tea and sharing a bar of chocolate and an orange. Thus, as a reward almost, for all that he had gone through, for the first time ever Jonas Wergeland was treated to the experience of a typical Norwegian Easter ritual.

As the light outside the window began to wane, Sigrid A. made up a bed on the warm floor with the blankets and sleeping bags. ‘Well, now we’ve just got to find some way of passing the time,’ she said, giving him a look that was as much an order as a request.

They got undressed. She swore at him when she saw how few clothes he had on, not even woollen underwear; but this anger turned to pity when she caught sight of his tiny penis, which had drawn as far into itself as it could, like a collapsed telescope. She tucked him up under the blankets, stroking it with her hand as she did so, warming it, putting her face down to it and blowing on it, taking it in her mouth, keeping it there for a long time, so long that she gradually made it rise and before too long she had climbed on top of him and guided it inside her, and Jonas felt a glorious, red-hot glow concentrating in one spot, felt his frozen body being thawed, as it were, by the warmth that flowed from this one spot. They lay still, that is to say, she crouched on top of him, bent over in such a way that her breasts just grazed his chest, two hot spots, a triangle of heat; and as she clenched him tightly with the muscles of her vagina, he had a marvellously tactile sensation of something tight, soft and miraculously warm, such a wonderfully delightful warmth flowing into his limbs, and it crossed his mind that this, the sum of this heat, must be what held the world together. And it was at that moment, if anyone should be in any doubt, that Jonas Wergeland truly understood what it was that he had always sought from these women: warmth. And as she slowly began to move, he could not help thinking how this sweet friction resembled two sticks being rubbed together to make fire; he vaguely remembered something about how, during their sacrificial rituals, the ancient Aryans had done just that, kindled a fire by grinding one stick in a hole made in another stick — symbolizing, of course, the lingam inside the yoni — and there was also something about this quite unbelievably delicious warmth of Sigrid A.’s vagina that made Jonas feel it was no ordinary warmth, the sort that could thaw ice, but a warmth that could actually kindle a fire, a creative flame within him, make it flare up inside him, enabling him to see things, experience something akin to visions or revelations, a warmth that would extend him, lighting up new chambers within him.

She began by making love to him long and lingeringly, with a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were planning great exploits, or as if he were a great exploit, a wide-open space in himself. Outside, darkness had fallen, the wind howled around the walls of the hut, crystals of ice spattered against the window; he lay there, warm from head to toe, while she made love to him with greater and greater intensity, her whole body eventually working furiously as she rode him, purposefully, tirelessly, as if this too were a wilderness that she had to conquer, a peak she had to climb. She made love to him all night long, so many times that Jonas could not believe that they — or at any rate he — could go on, but she would make him rise up again, whipping him on as relentlessly as when she dragged him to the top of the mountain, making love to him so fiercely and so divinely that his whole body seemed to glow. And it was during this exhausting coupling with Sigrid A. that Jonas not only learned how much his body could stand, that he could hold out for far longer than he had imagined and that the volume of semen in his glands had not run out, even though he was crying out that it had; during the course of that pleasurable and demanding night a new determination was also born in Jonas Wergeland, making him realize that it was time he put his experiences into some sort of order, set himself some big goal, select, as it were, a peak. And, what with the fiery glow in his body, the great, bright light of creativity in his head and the thought of the transmitter standing at the top of Gausta, right outside the window, he had the feeling that their lovemaking was being broadcast, that the image of their coupling was being beamed into all those thousands of homes.