Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘I’ve thought a lot about you, even though I’ve been living far away from you,’ she said as they were cutting across Damplassen. ‘As an old Tuareg once said to me: “Pitch your tents as far from one another and your hearts as close to one another as possible.”’

‘You’ve been among Tuaregs?’

‘Oh, there’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ she said.

They walked through Ullevål Garden City in the soft spring rain, turning up their faces to drops with a shade of warmth in them; it was like taking a shower. ‘D’you remember the liquorice coins we used to buy down at Tallaksen’s?’ Margrete said. Jonas laughed. ‘Yes, but do you remember the Opal chocolate?’ he said, and all at once they were caught up in a pyrotechnical burst of nostalgia, memories of sherbet dips and ice cream cones from the Snack Bar, of ‘Dr Mengele’, the school dentist, and My Fair Lady at the Colosseum, the mandolaikas they had made in woodwork class, water fights round the drinking fountain in the school playground, the time Wolfgang Michaelsen was hit in the eye by the cork from a champagne soda bottle and had to be taken to Casualty, and so on and so forth, both talking at once, laughing in the mild spring rain, soft rain that smelled of spring, that tasted of spring, and Margrete did not take her arm out of his until they reached the house, her parents’ house, and she unlocked the door. Her father, Gjermund Boeck, whom Jonas hated more than anyone else on this Earth for having taken Margrete away from Norway, was of course on the other side of the world, fulfilling his function as Norway’s ambassador, and came home only once a year, which meant that Margrete had the house to herself, a whole museum full of bronze temple lions and Chinese porcelain, not to mention a tiny jade turtle.

They sat in the kitchen, hair still wet, and talked, and they had plenty to talk about. Jonas talked about his travels, about astronomy, about architecture, about Axel, about Buddha, a lot about Buddha, while she, for her part, told him about all the different places she had lived in, about studying medicine at universities abroad and that she intended to specialize in skin diseases. They talked and talked, for hours they talked, occasionally drinking tea or eating freshly baked bread with goat’s cheese, and during the course of their conversation it struck Jonas that Margrete, the way she talked, reminded him of his parents, all that smalltalk which did, nonetheless, have a value, acquired a value, in that it formed a kind of web, of silk as it were, or built up into a weave, because he gradually began to perceive the difference, to see that this was her trademark, all the anecdotes she dispensed, pithy little tales that transformed the weave into a rug, a tapestry brimful of stories.

So Jonas stayed with her, stayed with her as if it were the most natural thing in the world; she did not have to say a word, she simply made up a bed in one of the guest rooms for him and once he had turned in for the night she came in and sat on the edge of his bed, and he told her, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had become completely bogged down, that he ought to be happy, but that he was stuck in a rut, was getting nowhere, and basically felt that life was a load of shit.

‘But even out of shit some good can come,’ she said. ‘Remember the dung beetles.’ And she went on to tell him a short fairytale, an Egyptian fairy tale, about a scarabé, a tumblebug, and its efforts to bury a ball of dung: a little story so full of wisdom and carrying such a powerful echo of a girlish voice from his childhood that Jonas lay awake for ages, stunned, after Margrete had tucked him up under the eiderdown and left the room.

Over the next few weeks this was the thing he found most fascinating: her ability now and again, at the perfect point in a conversation, to come up with a story of ten or twenty sentences, a story so compact that it could be written on the palm of a hand but which in some way summed up or added another dimension to something that she, or he, had said; or gave rise to surprising unseen associations which left him sitting or lying and thinking for hours afterwards. These little stories were usually based not on things that she herself had experienced, but on things she had read , because he knew that she was a reader, that she had read a multitude of novels and poetry collections and plays and that it was the stuff of these that she recounted, her imagination endowing them with a new twist; he knew, too, that her stories sprang from things, details, in those books which few others noticed, because Margrete had a totally different eye for things, she viewed the world from a different — one might almost say more wondering — angle than other people.

He discovered what it entailed, this gift of hers, as they sat in the kitchen in Ullevål Hageby talking and drinking tea and eating home-baked bread with goat’s cheese and jam, while he was learning, for the first time — or rather, for the second time. — what it meant to be in love, really in love, because he felt like a work of art, like something unique. That was Margrete’s gift: to make others, whoever she happened to be talking to, feel that they were of consequence, were important: as with him now, because he was aware of how, suddenly, in responding to the things she said, he was articulating ideas that had not even occurred to him until the very moment when he heard himself voicing them. And they talked about things that he had never discussed with, for example, the Nomads; it was another form of conversation altogether, a more tranquil form, a deeper form, and he also discovered what her gift, this ability to bring out the best in others, derived from: her imagination, her talent for invention, her talent, by dint of ten or twenty sentences, for turning everything upside down, making you see the world in a totally different light.

And then it happened, what Jonas Wergeland had hoped for and yet had not dared hope for. After a long talk in the kitchen, three weeks after they had met one another again, she walked over to him, took him by the hand and pulled him to his feet. She looked at him, looked into his eyes and hugged him, hugged him for an eternity, cuddled up to him, cuddled up tight to him as if she could not get close enough, pressed herself against him, soft and hard at one and the same time, but mostly hard, so passionately that Jonas could not help but be reminded of the words of the Kama Sutra : ‘When a man and a woman are very much in love with each other, and, not thinking of any pain or hurt, embrace each other as if they were entering into each other’s bodies … then it is called an embrace like a mixture of milk and water.’

Then, when at long last she let go of him, she regarded him with a veiled but purposeful look in her eyes, before taking his hand and leading him through to the bedroom, to a large double bed, and there she undressed first him and then herself, before they lay down, naked, beside one another on the bed, and she began to stroke him, and she went on stroking him until he felt the entire expanse of his skin waking up, as if from a sleep, a numbness, as if he had only just been cured of a fatal illness; and he felt a desire to stroke her, too, so he stroked her, noticing, as he did so, how her skin seemed to glow, or to emit a sheen, as from a Golden Fleece, golden as the locket she wore round her neck, gold in love, and when he curled up against her, trying to completely overlap her, like two spoons fitting together, he was met not only by warmth but also by a quite extraordinary radiation, as if he were in the middle of a force-field, together with the conviction that, at the end of the day, this was all that mattered, this stillness, this peace, this vast stretch of her skin against his vast stretch of skin, that this was the true epicentre of sexual pleasure, what it all came down to, something so free of any friction, two people lying close together, still but at the same time in motion, a hub, the point around which the whole wheel of existence spun.