Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

So there you sit, Jonas Wergeland; Norway’s answer to Dick Fosbury, turtle hunter, one of the few people to have played the biggest organ in the world, and you are listening to this fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach because you have to stop your body from falling apart and you gaze round about you, your mind a blank, and you cannot remember who you are, and you would not believe it if anyone, at this moment, were to come up to you and tell you that you were a big celebrity, you would deny it, no way, you would shout, you’re Jonas Hansen, an ordinary man from Grorud, except that you are not, because you are Jonas Wergeland, a top-notch actor, and you stand up, to be met by your own reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite, a gift from Aunt Laura, you think, an antique mirror in an exquisite frame, you think, with a glass that distorts the features, making you wonder who owns this face with the lost eyes, and this prompts you instantly and quite automatically to make a face, as you sometimes do when you catch yourself in the monitor in the studio, and the sight of this contorted expression on your own face lifts you out of the situation so that you are viewing it from the outside, as if from a new angle, you think, because even now, at this moment, you cannot help looking for new angles, because outside it is spring, late evening and mild, with an enchanting deep-blue sky, not to mention a pale-yellow band on the horizon, you think, and you can see that there are many sides to this situation, that it may even deal a cut to the eye that could put all of your life in a new light, you think, and you stand outside yourself, seeing yourself from a distance, as shocked, grief-stricken, bewildered to the point of breakdown, and seeing yourself from the outside like this, in the mirror, you see your grief laid bare and suddenly you see the funny side of the situation, in the midst of this tragedy you see yourself in absurd caricature, and you contort your features again, make another face and, as you do so, unconsciously you do something else, with your little finger, a sign of profound emotional upheaval, you think, a trick you picked up, something a great actor once did during a performance at the National Theatre, as a way of showing that his world was tumbling down about his ears. And this puts you in mind of Gabriel, and your thoughts stay with Gabriel as your eye returns to the body on the floor, and you think of Gabriel, and you think of the question that has been niggling at you: did he really believe such things?

Gabriel had been there to meet him, as usual, on the beach and rowed him out, with long, practised strokes to the boat. A stiff breeze was blowing from the south-east. Jonas had a suspicion that Gabriel had been at the bottle already since, instead of going below to the saloon, he immediately proceeded to climb the rigging like a strip of a lad: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ he bellowed across the water, his coat flapping about him. ‘You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’ Jonas sat down on one of the deck lockers, not taking his eyes off Gabriel, who was now standing on a ratline far above. ‘Once, in the China Sea, I shot a pirate right where you’re sitting,’ Gabriel yelled down at him. ‘By the way, did I ever show you the teeth marks left in the jib boom by that killer whale we ran into off the west coast of Canada?’

When he eventually came down, Gabriel decided to walk the manrope. Jonas rushed across to support him. ‘Are you going to come away with me next summer?’ Gabriel asked. He was always going on about it. ‘Let’s leave this bloody, stick-in-the-mud country behind,’ he said, just about falling overboard — though a nice cool dip might have done him good. Gabriel Sand belonged to that quite unique breed of hot-headed dreamers who are dead set on following the route taken by Ulysses around the Mediterranean or sailing to Vinland, via Greenland, in the wake of the Vikings, and it went without saying that he had a mind to solve the mystery of the Bermuda triangle. ‘At least come as far as the Galapagos Islands,’ he said. ‘I’ve always dreamed of being able to prove that Darwin made a fatal error out there. Let’s go back to that crossroads and find the other path, the one Darwin could have taken but didn’t. Two hundred years from now, m’lad, Darwin’ll be as out-of-date as those idiots who thought the Earth was flat!’

‘But what would take its place?’ Jonas felt obliged to ask.

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out, you great ninny!’ Gabriel’s gold tooth flashed. ‘Maybe we’re descended from sea horses. I’ve always had a soft spot for sea horses. In any case we could take a look at the turtles down there, big as VW Beetles they are.’

It was a real tonic to be onboard Gabriel’s boat. Jonas was in, or rather: yawning his way through, his second year at high school. At least once a week he took the ferry across to the Nesodden peninsula, going on from there by bus, then by rowboat to the Norge , as Gabriel had been presumptuous enough to name his boat because, in his eyes at least, it was indeed a royal barge. It was moored to a buoy far out in Vindfanger Bay, due north from Drøbak, on a level with Oscarsborg, and just the sight of it was enough to make Jonas relax, to breathe out: its graceful lines and splendid rigging, the intricate and yet eminently practical tracery of rope, block and tackle. The Norge was an old lifeboat, and Jonas felt that it had saved his life, too.

That Jonas Wergeland always maintained that Oslo Cathedral School where, then as now, you virtually had to fight for a place, was a highly overrated and uninspiring school, says more about Jonas Wergeland than it does about the school. The way Jonas saw it, in all of his time at high school there was only one bright spot: Axel Stranger, a kindred spirit who made it, psychologically at least, easier to yawn one’s way through classes. Strange as it may seem, Jonas did not learn a thing at high school and yet his marks were excellent, a fact which in everything except the science subjects could largely be attributed to a little red book, the fragmentary contents of which he had memorized inside and out. From this he could quote, in writing or verbally — and only rarely let it be known that he was, in fact, quoting — provocative opinions on just about everything: realism as viewed by the painter Eugène Delacroix, for instance; and thus, by paraphrasing briefly or at length or, if necessary, juggling quotations about to create the most unexpected and explosive combinations, he contrived to both impress and startle his teachers.

That was one way of getting through a class. The other was by going hunting for turtles. Jonas had taken the idea from an intriguing feature which crops up again and again in a number of ancient mythologies: the idea that the world rests on the back of a huge turtle. Hunting for turtles therefore involved seeking out the foundations upon which their teachers’ theories rested, the hub around which all their teaching revolved, for always, beneath the plainest, most solid facts, there lay a fiction, a turtle as big as a VW Beetle.

So let us sit in on a lesson with form 2MFb at Oslo Cathedral School. The class is in the middle of a history lesson and the teacher is Mr Osen, a newly-appointed member of the teaching staff, straight out of university, young and cocky, with a first-class degree and a brand spanking new PhD gained on the strength of a thesis entitled Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921 . Girls in bulky white Aran sweaters had a particular tendency to fall like flies for Mr Osen, and, I might add, there were a whole lot of girls in bulky white Aran sweaters at Jonas’s school in those days. Rumours that during the same year in which he had defended his thesis, in the glorious year of 1968, Osen had been living in Paris did no harm either, since this made him what would later be termed a true-blue sixty-eighter, or ‘sixty-niner’ as Axel re-christened them due to their insistence on free love, their substantial contribution to the divorce statistics and, as Axel saw it, their preferred position when it came to sex and, later on, in their various positions in daily life in which they continued, as it were, to suck up to one another and lick one another’s arses.