Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

But to return to Mr Osen. Osen was a smart teacher: a bit wet behind the ears, maybe, but very, very smart. Our lesson deals with the subject of 1848, another great revolutionary year, and Osen has come up with a teaching ploy that, to his mind at least, is little short of brilliant. Although this class is bright enough, they are simply far too dependent on the textbook; what they lack, Osen feels, is understanding , by which, without realizing it, he actually means belief . But how to give these pupils, and not least these girls in white Aran sweaters, some insight into the mighty wheels that drive history forward?

Mr Osen begins not by sitting down at, but casually draping himself over , his lectern and asking, deadpan, whether anyone can cite the reasons for the revolution of 1848, whereupon the pupils, and in particular the girls in white Aran sweaters, several of whom are disturbingly sweet, reel off stock phrases from the textbooks on everything from population overspill and urbanization to a lack of democratic influence and unemployment, all of which is fair enough, thinks Olsen, but dear, oh dear, so generalized, so abstract, so devoid of any fundamental understanding — and, I might add: belief . So what does Osen do? Osen gets down, no, he doesn’t get down, he vaults down off the lectern, as pumped full of adrenalin as a gymnast completing his routine on the pommel horse, and proceeds to rummage in his briefcase. Then he sets up one of those little steam engines, the sort of toy which Jonas remembers from his childhood and which are usually found in the homes of children whose fathers are engineers or something of the sort, Wolfgang Michaelsen, of course, had one, and now here is Osen rigging up his little steam engine on the top of the lectern, as eagerly as any child, and indeed this was his own old plaything, so Osen is a dab hand at this, dropping small fuel tablets into the drawer underneath the gleaming boiler which he has filled with water and firing it up, a hectic flush in his cheeks, forgetting all about his PhD because this is a brilliant idea, thinks Osen, as he straightens up, something this class will never forget; the little steam engine chuffing along while he, Mr Osen, Dr Osen, delivers a lecture on the driving forces behind historical events and on 1848, pumping , so to speak, the information into those sponge-like brains, causing a totally fresh insight into history to permeate like steam through porous walls. It would have been an unmitigated triumph, had it not been for those two blasted know-it-alls sitting one behind the other in the row nearest the wall. Axel Stranger and Jonas Wergeland were sniggering, and if there is one thing a teacher hates it is pupils sniggering like that.

Axel and Jonas most certainly are sniggering. They had soon figured where all this was leading, as had the rest of the class come to that, so when Osen eventually reaches his conclusion that the steam engine was the main driving force behind the revolution of 1848; referring to the steam engine as ‘quite literally, one of the wheels upon which history ran’, it comes as an anticlimax, despite the fact that Osen, as he makes this pronouncement, gestures with a flourish, rather like a conjuror, at the steam engine, the wheels of which, thanks to a piston mechanism, are now whirring and running across the top of the desk, so perfect in every detail that it is all Osen can do not to blow the whistle.

Axel turns to Jonas with a look of exasperation. Jonas nods and raises his hand.

Now it ought to be said that Mr Osen was a tough nut. There were times when their teachers’ assertions were so utterly lacking in any well-reasoned foundation that they presented no sort of challenge whatsoever. As when their physics teacher had the effrontery to state that it would never be possible to prove whether quarks did or did not exist, or their chemistry teacher obdurately maintained that no one would ever succeed in mapping out the human genome. This testified to such an infinite disdain for the inherent potential of human beings, for good or ill, to be forever expanding their knowledge that Jonas and Axel could respond in only one way: by getting up and leaving the class, pleading a sudden — joint — attack of depression.

They occasionally had to resort to other tactics to save themselves from falling asleep, as when, instead of demanding exactly what was laid down in the syllabus, they insisted on more than the set syllabus, thus sending many a teacher just about round the bend. ‘Please sir, could you tell us a bit more about Gödel?’ asked Axel when the maths teacher was careless enough to let slip a remark about that scholar, perhaps simply wanting to impress them. And if the poor teacher did happen to know a little about the, if I may say so, extremely interesting and notable mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel; if he, for example, vaguely remembered something about Gödel’s proof, some recollection from his long distant days at university and possibly went so far as to resort to the blackboard, Axel would simply keep on at him, asking Sir please to elaborate on everything he said or wrote on the board, much as an analyst will latch on to the last few words a patient utters and ask him to tell him more about that, until the teacher was standing there stuttering and stammering and having to admit that this was beyond his grasp: a fact which, ironically enough, in this instance illustrates Gödel’s statement that fundamental questions are impossible to determine. To which Axel solemnly replies: ‘Yes but sir, this is important. I believe I speak for the whole class in asking you to provide us with more information on Gödel in our next maths period.’ The majority of teachers weighed their words very carefully when teaching 2MFb.

But these teachers were not to be pitied, nor were they robbed of any of their self-confidence. I would remind you that we are talking here of Oslo Cathedral School, Norway’s élite school par excellence , an institution which, in spite of everything, prided itself on the quality of its teaching staff. And no one need feel sorry for Mr Osen PhD, with his thesis on Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921 , when Jonas put up his hand to protest, and Jonas was protesting not only, like Axel, at Mr Osen’s cocksureness; he was also protesting because such a system, in which all of the pieces fall neatly into place — illustrated, what is more, by a wheel spinning in mid-air — was so monstrous that it made him feel physically sick.

‘This stuff about the steam engine is all very well, sir, but whatever happened, one might ask, to an element such as “the spirit”?’ It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, at the word ‘spirit’, Mr Osen recoils like a vampire confronted with a crucifix. ‘I would just like to remind you of what the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in that celebrated work Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien ,’ Jonas goes on, ‘in the first chapter of the third section, which deals with the Renaissance attitude to antiquity.’ As you can see, this was one of those occasions when Jonas Wergeland revealed the source of his quotation, and to listen to him anyone would have thought that he had just finished reading this relatively demanding work, in an early edition, printed in Gothic at that, just sailed through it, and not, as was in fact the case, simply memorized a piece from his little red notebook, one which was five lines longer than the part he had cited: ‘Here,’ says Jonas, ‘Burckhardt asserts that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but as much the spirit of the Italian people, which led to the spread of the Renaissance throughout the western world. Would you then, sir, rule out the possibility that the spirit of the French people, for example, had some bearing on the events of 1848?’