Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Then she hugged him, held him tight, before gazing into his eyes again. For a long time. Only later did Jonas reflect that that was the only time Nefertiti had ever hugged him. They sat for a while among the cattle, with her holding his hand while they watched the beetle digging its way down into the dung and disappearing, and when they rose to their feet, Jonas felt as though he had not only learned something about life in a cowpat, he had also been shown all of life in a nutshell.

And finally, and first of all, and at the centre of it all: the story of the hub, because there is a meaning to life, there are so many meanings to life that at least once on the journey from the cradle to the grave every human being may experience something that will move them to exclaim, quite spontaneously: ‘Yes, there has to be some meaning to life.’

In Jonas Wergeland’s case it happened like this: he was on the train, the electric line to Sognsvann — and here we are talking, mark you, about the unknown Jonas Wergeland, Jonas Wergeland the student of architecture — sitting in one of the most rickety coaches, on his way up to the University, where he was hoping to run into Axel in the canteen. Rain was falling outside the window: fine, almost invisible rain, the first of the year, gentle spring rain.

His thoughts were in disarray. He was stuck in a rut. He had been in a funny mood, almost melancholic, ever since the year before when, as he saw it, his life had been restored to him after his trip to Jebel Musa. He was still filled with a sort of convalescent lethargy, spent most of his time wandering about looking at things; he read a little, attended lectures and seminars at the High School, went on one or two field trips, worked on a couple of projects, did a lot of talking with Axel. Sometimes he would catch himself just hanging around waiting .

More people got on at Majorstuen. Jonas was gazing out of the window, at the rain, so fine that it was little more than a mist. He was conscious of someone sitting down directly opposite him. The coach rattled on up the track. He shifted his gaze, so that it fell on the floor, but he could feel it being drawn upwards by a force that defied gravity, until he found himself looking at two hands holding a book, an old book, and Jonas’s immediate thought, based on his experience in this area, was that it had to be an antiquarian book, possibly even a valuable book.

There was something about this sight which dispelled his melancholy, which quickened him, had a stimulating effect. He amused himself, as he often did, by studying the hands holding the book, the fingers as they turned a page, the position of the left index finger — there are two sorts of reader: those who hold the left index finger under the cover and those who leave it resting on the page — the finger of the person sitting across from him was lying on the page in such a way that it pointed straight at him. Jonas entertained himself by trying to guess, going by the hands alone, what the owner of the book looked like. He could tell straight away that they were a woman’s hands and that they spoke of great concentration on the part of the reader. On one of the fingers of her right hand, which rested on the page in what might almost have been described as a mudra position, the woman wore an unusual ring. It instinctively struck him as an aesthetic sight, those hands and the old book, there, in the coach of a train rattling northwards to Blindern; for some reason they, the hands and the book, struck him as being every bit as powerful, as beautiful, as momentous, as the long run of façades on the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires. It was as if he knew this was a sight that would shunt him onto a new track, breaking the course he was on just as a prism breaks the light, sending it off in another direction.

His attention was caught once again by the book, by how different it looked from the books that people usually read on the train, as indeed it was, although Jonas could not have known how different it was, that this book was entitled Studies of Syphilitic Disorders , that it had been published in 1875 and that the woman who was reading it was related to its author, Carl Wilhelm Boeck, and furthermore, that she, like him, had chosen medicine as her path in life.

Then he heard someone say ‘Jonas?’ at the very moment when he felt that old tingling sensation, prompted by those graceful hands, the fingers on the page of the book, starting to work its way from his tailbone all the way up his spine, stronger than ever before, quite inexplicably strong, so strong that his whole body was shaken by a tremor that ran from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

‘Jonas?’

Slowly he raised his eyes. He saw a sweater, self-coloured, underneath a black raincoat. He saw the collar of a blouse. He saw a chain round the neck. He saw her face. Face with a capital ‘F’. Golden. A face lit from within. A face he knew. That scar on the nose. The eyes. That look. As if the face were all eyes and nothing else. Even after twelve, thirteen years there was no mistaking it. Indeed, as he looked up and returned that look it struck him that for all those years, somewhere at the back of his mind, he had been thinking about that face, this person.

He was completely tongue-tied, could only sit there, speechless, as the coach swayed from side to side, blinked his eyes and could not for the life of him think where that glow on her face could be coming from on such a grey rainy day.

She fiddled with the chain round her neck, drew an old locket from inside her blouse. ‘Jonas,’ she said, Margrete said. ‘Don’t you recognize me? Gold in love?’

And he started to cry. He looked at the floor and cried. Not for long but long enough to let it out, get whatever it was out of his system. He cried softly, making no motion, rather like the rain outside. And as he lifted his eyes to her, to her face, to her eyes, once more and smiled, making no effort to excuse himself, it dawned on him that he was in love again, or no, not again, that he was in love, he had been in love with her all along; what he had experienced with those other girls had been something else, only this was love. Jonas sat there looking at her, at her face, into her eyes, and it seemed to him that those twelve years in between had never happened, that she had gone off and left him only the day before.

So he did not alight at Blindern, nothing in the world could have induced him to get off at Blindern, there was a delicious heaviness in his limbs which made it impossible for him to budge an inch, and when she asked him laughingly where he was getting off, he said that he was never going to get off, he was going to stay on that rickety old train and watch her reading an old book for the rest of his life.

‘In that case,’ she said as they stopped at Ullevål stadium, ‘you’d better come with me.’ She took him firmly by the hand and led him off the train. They strolled down Sognsveien in the sort of spring rain that makes carrying an umbrella unthinkable, that makes one want to drink in the raindrops with every part of one’s being; rain that makes everything smell powerfully of the earth, smell of spring right to the marrow: the sort of rain which, in certain Norwegians, especially those with an aversion to snow, might elicit the same feelings as the life-giving rains falling at the end of a dry season in other parts of the world. And only then, when Margrete tucked her arm in his and laughed, looked up at the rain and laughed, did Jonas erupt into words and sentences as to what and where and who and why and when and how, all of which only served to make Margrete laugh even more while doing her best to provide him with answers that would satisfy his most immediate curiosity.