Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

So there they lay, he on top and she underneath him — a prophetic touch this — with the whole school standing round them, half-curious, half-gloating, all but cheering, in fact. They were curious because no one had ever laid eyes on this girl before, which was hardly surprising since her last school had been some distance away, in Bangkok to be precise, where she had attended the International School, and this was her first day at Grorud School. And they were gloating because Jonas Wergeland had fallen flat on his face and was at long last going to get his comeuppance for defying the ban on cycling to school. No one knew, of course, that Margrete hadn’t passed her cycling proficiency test either and was, therefore, Jonas’s partner in crime. Her full name was Margrete Boeck, a surname Jonas at first pronounced as ‘book’ until she informed him that it ought to be pronounced ‘boak’. The more spiteful referred to her, possibly because of their head-on collision, as ‘buck’.

Once Jonas had gathered his wits, he noticed that his mirror was also smashed, a brand-new mirror with a transparent red rim, and that made him really mad. But then he caught sight of Margrete’s nose and he was done for. Embedded in Margrete’s nose, just alongside one of her nostrils, was a tiny sliver of mirror and, I might as well tell you right now, this left a scar on her nose, a scar which would always remind both of them of this incident, of what can happen when no one is prepared to give way. But right at that minute the sliver of mirror was still embedded there, and Jonas could not take his eyes off it. It looked so much like those tiny jewels which people in India wear in their noses, and this added an entirely new dimension to the girl lying underneath him, something foreign, something goddess-like.

Margrete was the first and she would be the last.

She shook him off and pulled herself to her feet, put a hand to her nose and winced as she removed the sliver of glass, causing the blood to well up, and when she saw the blood on her fingers she subjected him to a torrent of verbal abuse that he would not forget in a hurry:

‘You nearly killed me, you dirty goddamn red-faced son of a bitch, you stinking crazy big-cheeked stupid rat, you google-eyed cowardly bloody bastard son of a bitch — idiot!’

Shocked as he was, Jonas could not but admire her perfect English pronunciation, having wrestled with English for nigh on a year and still being more interested in the pretty English mistress’s provocative way of dressing, not least her skin-tight sweaters which came, in a way, to symbolize the expanding, forward-looking possibilities presented by the English language, something that was also being brought home to him now, when he was being given a proper dressing down by a strange girl and did not understand one word of it. The worst of it was that he could not get up, because of his knee, which must have taken a knock with the result that, as this stream of invective poured over him, he stayed where he was in front of her, on one knee, as if he were proposing.

I ought perhaps to add, for anyone who has not yet guessed it, that this is the woman who is lying dead — those with no respect for the gravity of the situation might say ‘knocked down’ — on the floor at Jonas Wergeland’s feet at this moment, which is to say the moment which I have chosen to form the hub of this spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, something which I can do because I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality. Anyone wishing to understand Jonas Wergeland’s life will first have to dispense with the belief that the passage of time says anything about cause and effect.

Someone took care of Margrete and walked her up to the main school building, while others tried to pick up her bike. It turned out, however, that the front wheels of the two bikes had inexplicably become locked together, rather like those rings that conjurors’ use in their acts. And while people pulled and tugged at the bikes, Jonas saw how the rear wheel began to turn, slowly, round and round, both in motion and standing still, all decked out with an intricate pattern of copper wire and cigarette packs, the eye drawn in particular to the Monte Carlo pack, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of cigarette packs, a woman’s head on the outer rim of the roulette wheel.

Someone has put some coltsfoot in a jar on the living-room table and you stand in the doorway and stare and stare. Coltsfoot. Of all things. A dead woman and coltsfoot, you think, and in your mind’s eye you see that nightmare image, or hear it, feel it, a wheel, you think, the wheel just turning round and round, and getting nowhere, you think, a wheel simply spinning in mid-air, just a circle, an endless repetition; so who, you ask, as you have asked so many times before, who then, you ask, is turning the wheel; what, you ask, what lies at the hub of the wheel, because it was wheels that brought you together and she bled that first time too, blood first and last, you think, and coltsfoot, so he was right, that old writer, when he said that all the paths of love are strewn with flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

You stand there, a bundle of fan mail in your hand, you stand in the doorway and stare and you have this terrible feeling of nausea, as if you had eaten fly-agaric, as if you were about to throw up an entire life, turn yourself inside out, you think, and you look at the body, and you see that this sight, this landscape in the guise of a human figure, forces you to address a question regarding the way things hang together, one from which you have always shied away, the broad brushstrokes, you think, simplification and you only just manage to stop yourself from throwing up, and you gaze out of the big windows overlooking Bergensveien and Ammerud Meadows and the town and you think that you must remember what the weather is like, that this is important, because it’s a lovely day, you think, and it’s spring, you remember, and already quite mild, you think, and you would like to have known exactly what the temperature was, as if this would explain everything, change everything, and in the gloom you can see that the sky over the city is deep-blue and perfectly clear and you stand for a long time considering this light, the band of yellow at the very bottom, the light late in the evening, the light between winter and summer, a light found nowhere else in the world, you think, a light so indescribably beautiful it hurts, you think, and I would be the last to reproach you for not picking up the phone right there and then, but instead summoning every ounce of intuitive energy to prevent your own body from going to pieces, from falling to the floor like a flat expanse of invisible molecules, nor would I blame you, as others no doubt would, for the fact that you put down the bundle of letters and walk or somehow get yourself over to the shelf in the living room on which the hi-fi looms.

Mechanically you press the buttons that bring the black boxes to life, you savour the vibrant thud from the loudspeakers, like a heartbeat, you think, and you flick through the row of CDs, more or less at random and pull out a CD, and you lift it out of its holder, you study the disc, seeing how it shines, like a miniature sun you think, or no, it strikes you that it looks like a wheel, shot with rainbows, you think and you lay it in the tray in the CD player and pick up the remote control, select the track you want and fall into a more abstract reflection on the feel of the tiny rubber button on the remote control, its perfect pressure on the thumb, and you try to isolate this pleasure and you think also of something else, something vague, a cordless connection, but it eludes you and you hear, or listen intently to, the electronic whisper for the tenth of a second it takes the CD player to aim the laser beam at the correct spot, a bit like a memory at work, you think, as now, you think, faced with a dead body, you think, and you hear the music pouring out, Johann Sebastian Bach, you think, as if surprised by the organ music which fills the room, a fugue, you think, and you sit down in the armchair and shut your eyes, and your throat feels as if someone were squeezing it gently while subjecting your eyes to a dose of teargas and you have to swallow and you have to wipe your eyes, more than once, and you listen to the music, not because it is the antithesis of the thing on the floor, a dead wife, but because you are trying to identify that inexplicable something which links the notes together, if it is not the swell of the organ, you think, the very breath of life behind the music, you think, feeling in acute need of oxygen, as if you had just surfaced after almost being drowned in a whirlpool.