Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

After this rather philosophical preamble the lesson switched to a more practical level, with a review of all the different parts, their names and their function, all of this while a pungent odour pervaded the room. ‘And this, boys,’ she said, towards the end of the demonstration, ‘is the clitoris. Clitoris means “shut away”, because its hidden behind this fold of skin. And the significance of this vital feature seems to be pretty well hidden as far as most men are concerned. But remember: with a woman, reverse logic applies: our secrets lie on the outside, not on the inside, as men believe. So I’m telling you now: stick to the outside.’

That was the day on which Jonas realized that the female is an outsider with a feel for the marginal. Later in life he would often speculate as to what the clitoris of life might be, and it was thanks largely to women like Rakel that he always sought the essence of things on the periphery and not in the centre.

Rakel also told her brothers that they should never charge at the clitoris like a bull at a gate, but that when the time was ripe they should proceed with the greatest caution and sensitivity and, above all, take their time. ‘You’ve heard of Aladdin’s Lamp? Well it’s the same with a woman, rub her the right way and afterwards she will do the most magical things to you.’ Due to its dispassionate and scientific nature, this session never came anywhere near what is known as incest. In all respects it represented an informative lecture on the female anatomy — a demythologizing, if you like — which gave Jonas and Daniel a good head start on other boys of their age and left them forever in their sister’s debt. Jonas and Daniel did not have a great deal in common, but their sister meant more to both of them than almost anyone else.

Jonas told no one about Rakel’s lesson, with one exception. The following day he and Nefertiti set off to try out a kite which they had built to Nefertiti’s design and which Jonas had bet they would never get off the ground. While they were unravelling the cord at the top of the hill, Jonas told her what had occurred. ‘Did she also tell you about Bartholin’s lymph glands?’ said Nefertiti, fluttering her long eyelashes.

‘What’re they?’

The kite flew into the air and hung silhouetted against the sky like a spirit out of a fairy tale. Nefertiti sent it into a dive towards the hilltop before deftly levelling it out and making it loop-the-loop a couple of times. She passed the cord to Jonas. ‘A sort of irrigation system,’ she said.

It took a lot to impress Nefertiti.

In the weeks that followed, when Jonas thought of Rakel presenting her genitals to them, as it were, it was the totally fragmentary, detached aspect of it which struck him; it took such a long time to digest all the talk about the woman’s pleasure and other such advanced concepts. He had been treated to a demonstration of an object which, even though to begin with he had no idea what it was for, seemed as fascinating and alluring and complex as Wolfgang Michaelsen’s little steam engine.

Rakel was, in many ways, the most intelligent and original member of the family. There were many things in life which Jonas found it hard to understand, but possibly the greatest mystery was how Rakel should have ended up the way she did. As a housewife. Married to a long-distance lorry driver — a great guy, but still. Or maybe it was only natural: that a woman who had spent so much of her life immersed in fairy tales, so intense, so full of energy; who had eyed the world so seductively for so many years, was bound to end up being totally ordinary, like a space probe that has burned out its booster rockets getting itself out of the Earth’s atmosphere and was now drifting quietly in orbit. Because it ought to be said: Rakel may have become invisible, blended in, so to speak, with the bedrock of Norway, but Jonas could not think of many people who were happier than she, and in Rakel’s case this was no empty platitude — no matter how much Jonas tried to explain it away, what Rakel had was genuine enviable happiness, utter contentment.

The whole point of being human, as Gabriel told Jonas again and again, was to take over the direction of one’s own life. Why allow yourself to be defined by others. Be a king, for Christ’s sake! Did Jonas hear what he was saying? You had to pose your own questions, set your own terms! And at this point Gabriel invariably flung his arms wide, gesturing to the bulkheads surrounding them and reverently declared, his intonation perfect: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.’

Jonas Wergeland had never sailed — to sea, that is — on Gabriel’s boat, and yet his visits onboard the old lifeboat, securely tethered to its buoy not far from the shore, riding at its moorings as they say, represented a voyage of sorts around the world and, in terms of enlightenment, an endless continuation of the journey to inner Østfold. Just to sit below decks there in the saloon was enough, in a room the air of which was unlike that of any other, as if you could smell the scents of all the places at which that boat had docked or dropped anchor. ‘From Drøbak I circled the globe a dozen times,’ Jonas used to say.

The chief feature of that room was Gabriel Sand himself, in his ancient dark suit, complete with waistcoat, watch-chain and all, an outfit so totally out of date that it actually lent him a style all his own, a dash of a bygone nobility which went well, in a way, with his gift of the gab. Gabriel could talk and talk about everything and anything, all night long, non-stop, his flow of words punctuated only by the odd slice of tomato or a chunk of corned beef, or Jonas chucking another log into the stove; Gabriel could produce some object — a shell from the Society Islands, say, and spend hours telling the story of it. Jonas leaned back on his bench and listened, fascinated as much by Gabriel’s gold eye-tooth glinting in the gloom as he talked, like a sort of beacon in this ocean of yarns and assertions, predictions and curses, because in between his yarns Gabriel would suddenly start to rant and rave, usually in English, so that Jonas never knew whether he was quoting lines from some play or what; although he did learn the correct pronunciation of a host of rare and not always quite proper English words which would later earn Jonas much baffled admiration when he come out with them in English class. As a rule, though, Gabriel tended to do his grousing in Norwegian, and what the devil was he doing in this pettifogging little country anyway and why in hell’s name wasn’t he in Martinique or on the Charing Cross Road.

Gabriel Sand was going to have more reason for complaint, seeing that he was now onboard a boat which was about to set out, that evening, on a most dramatic and quite unintentional voyage, inasmuch as someone was very shortly going to cut its moorings and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Skipper Clement , the ferry which at that time used to set sail for Fred-erikshavn at 10 p.m., was just pulling out of Oslo harbour.

There was no end of curiosities onboard the Norge . On one bulkhead hung a barometer which always read ‘fair weather’ and next to the bookshelf, in the place of honour, hung a weathered playbill from the twenties advertising a performance at the Regent Theatre, King’s Cross with Gabriel’s name right up there alongside John Gielgud’s, no less. Sitting in state in the for’ard cabin, in a corner which Jonas could see from the saloon, was what Jonas had first taken to be a puppet theatre but which proved to be an old television, or at least the outer shell of one, with a skull sitting inside it, like a test card for death or some obscure sacred relic. ‘News, that’s the religion of today,’ Gabriel was fond of saying, ‘especially when it has to do with war or death.’ Gabriel sniffed at people who thought religion had died out, people who could not see that its significance was steadily increasing; that the age of crusades was only just beginning. And here he was: talking, mark you, about genuine religious conflicts and not the shite that went on in Northern Ireland, where religion was no more than a cover for something else. No, what he was talking about was the bizarre tension between Christians and Muslims that everybody seemed to think belonged to the Dark Ages, not realizing that Muhammad’s boys were only warming up and would soon be making their comeback, more terrible than ever before. ‘Here, Jonas, have another drop of whisky, won’t do you no harm, lad.’