Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Next to the gold tooth, what Jonas noticed were Gabriel’s eyes, they had such a heavy look about them, almost as if he were drugged. Not only that, but one of his eyes contrasted sharply with the other due to an ugly scar running along the underside of the eyebrow.

In Gabriel’s opinion, the anti-metaphysical attitude of the Norwegian socialists was particularly risible. Their thinking seemed to stop at the bridge over Svindesund, at the border with Sweden, they simply could not conceive of the possibility that the yen for some divine element in everyday life might well up again, more strongly than at present, even in Norway. And what did Jonas think of these Marxists, setting the agenda with their extreme views these days? You’d think that’d be enough to make everybody realize that religion wasn’t dead. ‘These Norwegian Marxist-Leninists, they’re no better than any of those religious cults with their head-shrinkin’,’ said Gabriel. ‘The only difference bein’ that it’s their own heads they’re shrinkin’.’

As you can see, Gabriel Sand was a talker — ‘blabbermouth’ would be too flippant a word. When Gabriel talked it seemed always to be a necessity, like the shark which has to keep on swimming and swimming to save from sinking, because it has no air sacs. Not that Jonas had anything against Gabriel’s talking. He loved to sit there listening to him, occasionally helping himself to some more corned beef and tomatoes or pouring himself another drop of whisky, well watered down, while at the same time taking in the creak of the rigging, of the gaff, and the occasional gentle wallow as they were nudged by the wash from boats out in the channel. But first and foremost there was Gabriel and Gabriel’s talk of everything under the sun, all night long, because it was at night that they had their talks; at best, Jonas would manage a couple of hours sleep in one of the bunks before Gabriel rowed him back to the shore the next morning and Jonas headed back, dozy, and yet somehow elated, on the Nesodden ferry. And on the way in to Oslo harbour and the Town Hall; on the way to the Cathedral School and classes that all but lulled him to sleep — if, that is, Axel was not all geared up for some madcap turtle hunt — Jonas thought about the things Gabriel had talked about, such as the tenability of the doctrine of predestination or dinosaur skeletons in Colorado; or else the drift of the continents towards and away from one another, or the eclectic ideology of ancient Chinese philosophy.

What Jonas learned onboard Gabriel’s boat was not facts. When you came right down to it, Jonas learned just one thing: to feel wonder. But if, when sitting below decks in the saloon, Jonas felt himself to be down in the depths of the ocean, his very first university was situated on high, in a loft, in fact. And the person who really introduced him to the art of make-believe, that gift which was to set its stamp most clearly on his career and on which, like a turtle, his creativity rested was, of course, Nefertiti.

All of the two- and three-storey blocks of flats on the Solhaug estate had their own communal loft. This was in the days when, naïvely perhaps, people would happily store their belongings alongside those of their neighbours. The loft belonging to Jonas’s staircase was a real Aladdin’s Cave and a favourite hangout of Jonas and Nefertiti, not least because of an old gramophone which played seventy-eights and which really came into its own again after an overjoyed Nefertiti discovered the box of Duke Ellington records which Jonas’s mother had inherited from Uncle Lauritz and simply stowed away in the loft. Nefertiti was, of course, well acquainted with Duke Ellington and his intricate opus and as good as insisted that Jonas listen to and learn from these discs, which showed how even the simplest of melodies could be turned into a pyrotechnical display of tonal variations and rhythmic finesses. ‘It was Duke Ellington who taught me that the arrangement is all,’ as Jonas said in one interview. After playing through the whole pile several times, Jonas discovered that there were some numbers which swung more than others, swung to set you rocking from top to toe, and Nefertiti informed him that this was the 1940 band in which the man who made all the difference, from ‘Jack the Bear’ onwards, was bass player Jimmy Blanton, working away like a propeller under all the rest, driving the whole thing forward with a reckless and unprecedented energy.

One day Nefertiti came with a parcel for Jonas. Inside he found a red box which he opened, to lay eyes for the first time on his Hohner chromatic mouth organ, nestling in gleaming blue velvet, its plate beautifully engraved. Nefertiti could already play the mouth organ and, thanks to her enthusiasm and fantastic flair for teaching the right way to hold the instrument, how to play the individual notes, use the slide button and generally get the hang of the instrument, as well as the breathing technique and a pretty neat hand vibrato, it was not long before Jonas, too, could carry a decent tune, enabling them to perform several of Ellington’s catchy melodies together, the pièce de résistance in their repertoire being ‘Concerto for Cootie’, with the one instrument answering the other, just like the orchestra on the record. There was only one number which they never really mastered, the mind-blowing ‘Cotton Tail’ which called for the sort of technique not even Nefertiti could command. They tried and they tried, and it became a sort of goal in life for them, one day to get it right.

Thanks to Nefertiti, Jonas did not become a cellar sort of person, though he might have been so inclined. Instead, psychologically speaking, he became a loft person. That loft was a props cupboard in which every single object could be a springboard for the most breathtaking flights of fancy. It was in this loft, in a block of flats in Solhaug, Grorud that Jonas Wergeland learned to see the potential in the little details; realized that every object, even the very smallest, was full of possibilities around which the imagination could weave a tale. There was nothing to beat those imaginary journeys in the loft. All Nefertiti needed was a suitcase, some old clothes, an earthenware vase, a Christmas-tree stand, a spade — and hey presto! — they could be anywhere. The only things they ever took from the outside were provisions in the form of dried apricots, nomad food as was only right and proper, drawn from Nefertiti’s apparently endless supply at home. Other than that they had all they needed. Some sheets served for Tibet, starting point for a gruelling hunt for the Abominable Snowman; one solitary tarnished mirror became the great glittering palace of Versailles; a shattered pot was enough for the momentous discovery of ancient scrolls hidden in sealed clay jars at the back of deep grottoes; a small rug and a brass pot sparked off an intrepid visit to Mecca disguised as Muslims — all of this to the accompaniment of Duke Ellington’s magical orchestra, more particularly the 1940 band with Ben Webster and that wizard Jimmy Blanton: ‘Ko-Ko’, ‘Conga Brava’, ‘Sepia Panorama’, ‘The Flaming Sword’. The way Jonas saw it, it was no accident that Duke Ellington would later release records that spoke of journeys, albums such as Far East Suite and Latin American Suite . One particular day, when ‘Echoes of the Jungle’ was making the dust in the loft dance, Nefertiti unearthed a moth-eaten fox-fur stole, which provided the inspiration for a lengthy safari. Along the way she taught Jonas, among other things, that chimpanzees have a language all their own and that ‘ Nn ga kak ’ meant ‘I’m hungry’, a phrase which she had actually tried out on a visit to Copenhagen Zoo, whereupon the chimp had promptly handed her a banana. Again, up there in the loft, a pair of sandals had taken them to Ancient Rome, to warn Caesar, and I need hardly say that this was long before American film director Steven Spielberg showed all children that time-travelling of this sort can have the direst consequences. And in the evenings, in the autumn especially, all they had to do was open the trapdoor in the roof to observe the full moon through a pair of binoculars with shattered lenses, though this did not hinder their loft, now metamorphosed into a space ship, from making a nice soft landing, shortly afterwards, on the surface of the moon.