Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Nefertiti’s imagination knew no bounds; where she was concerned even a cowpat could represent an entire universe, be translated into pearls of wisdom, pure gold. As I said, Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius was to choose Nefertiti as his best friend. He knew all along that it could not last, that she was clearly too good for this world.

To some extent Jonas felt that his nights on board the Norge , Gabriel’s boat, constituted a continuation of that first university, of those travels among linen bags and mothballs and all the old magazines, their subject matter as antiquated and absorbing as any Codex Sinaiticus . The loft had been replaced by the saloon in which Gabriel lit the paraffin lamp when the light filtering through the skylight began to fade and, instead of dried apricots, there were now corned beef and slices of tomato like little red wheels. Besides emitting a fine soft light, the paraffin lamp hanging from the ceiling also gave off a particular smell, and this odour mingled with the scent of the tar used for impregnating the hull, a scent which pervaded the boat; like incense, stimulating the memory, reminding Jonas of one of the best parts of his life: his grandfather — his father’s father, that is — and the stories he told.

In many ways, all of Gabriel’s yarn spinning came down to just one long story. No matter what he happened to be talking about it was liable to end up as the ‘Tale of the Chance of the Unlikely’. Gabriel could open a newspaper and in just about every column he would come upon grotesque examples of inanity and narrow-mindedness. ‘People just can’t see further than their own noses,’ he said. ‘Here’s some so-called expert stating categorically that unemployment is a thing of the past in Norway. I ask you! Chuck another log in that stove will you, Jonas. That sort of senile stupidity fair makes my blood run cold. How can people go around thinking that the world just stands still? Every bloody time somebody or other sets another world record, in speed-skating or athletics or whatever, we’re told that this one’ll never be broken. Where’s the historical perspective in that? And now heaven help me if they aren’t running down that poor sod of a composer again. I’ll bet you anything those same people will be writing articles praising him to the skies ten or fifteen years from now, the day he’s given the key to some grace-and-favour residence. It’s a bloody disgrace, so it is. Oy! Wake up, lad!’

What Gabriel did not know was that, under cover of darkness, someone had glided soundlessly up to the buoy and sliced through their mooring, setting the boat adrift. There were plenty of people who had no time for Gabriel and his ranting, especially not when he stood on the deck, and certainly not in the middle of the night, roaring his opinions to the four winds.

‘What’s wrong with the world?’ Gabriel asked, his gold tooth gleaming, while Jonas lay back, enthralled, drinking in this phantasmagorical display, worthy of another Don Quixote; to him these tirades were a thing of beauty in themselves, like exercises in inventiveness, stretching the mind. ‘People don’t believe in the improbable. That the most unlikely things can happen,’ said Gabriel, turning his rather heavy eyes on Jonas, the one rendered different by the scar under the brow seeming to gaze into another world. ‘For instance, if I were to say that a second-rate movie star might one day become president of the United States, people would kill themselves laughing. Damn right, they would. Even though it’s only a matter of time. The society they have over there, that’s the way things are going. We see the most unlikely things happening round about us all the time and yet somehow we manage to negate that such things could happen again. Pretty good, eh? Take the Berlin Wall, for instance, and all the people who think that that ’s always going to be there.’

I would ask you to bear in mind here that the sixties were just giving way to the seventies; bear in mind, too, that the Skipper Clement was on course for Frederikshavn and would very shortly have to pass through the very narrow channel into which Gabriel’s boat was now drifting, a stretch of water which, by the way, happened to be one of the most renowned in the history of Norway, for it is here on the seabed that the rusting hulk of the German battle-cruiser Blücher lies, testifying to the fact that something which no one would have thought possible did actually happen once, and in Norway at that.

But in the saloon, beneath a paraffin lamp, in the warmth from the wood stove, Gabriel was fulminating over this singular forgetfulness. Folk even forgot actual historical events. How could they? They neatly forgot, for instance, the disparities between ethnic groups living side by side in the same country. What was Jonas laughing at? By Christ, it was no laughing matter. How long, for example, did he think the Soviet Union was going to last, hm? Or what about some of these countries in the Balkans? They were only cobbled together willy-nilly anyway. ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ said Gabriel, ‘before the whole kit ’n caboodle blows sky-high. I’m telling you, Jonas: use your imagination.’

Sometimes Gabriel’s lectures took their outset in the boat itself, not least when he came to the subject of the Norwegian national character. Then he was liable to get up, duck inside one of the bunks and treat Jonas to a description of the inner skin of the hull, the pinewood lining and the outer shell overlaying this, the oak timbers; of the double frames and the ‘crooked knee-timbers’, launching off from this into expositions on everything from Viking ships and Norwegian prefabs to dragon-head patterns and the lumber trade with England. The first time Jonas came across the name of Colin Archer was in the middle of a discourse on the stave church at Lom.

Every programme in the Thinking Big series generated sacks of letters to the editors of newspapers all over Norway as if an entire nation had suddenly rediscovered the art of putting their thoughts into writing, and the longer the series ran, the bigger the pile of letters grew. Most of those who wrote in were, of course, positive, and indeed in some cases praised it to the skies, thanking Jonas Wergeland in superlatives for opening their eyes to these unique individuals and in the process giving them a renewed self-confidence and pride in being Norwegian. A few correspondents were, however, more critical, and the programme which provoked the greatest volume of disappointed and irate letters was that on Fridtjof Nansen. ‘It is quite outrageous,’ wrote one viewer, speaking of course ‘on behalf of many’, ‘that a television programme about Fritjof Nansen, our national hero, should not say one word about, nor show one picture of the Fram , Colin Archer’s masterpiece of a vessel, this Columbus egg which was the absolute prerequisite for Nansen’s greatest triumphs. To present a profile of Nansen’s life without including the Fram is like profiling Ole Bull without his violin.’

And precisely because so many Norwegians had such a fixed idea, an almost stylized, romanticized image of Nansen, Jonas Wergeland’s biggest problem had been how to use the prism inside his head to refract and break up the powerful light emitted by Nansen and thus arrive at the spectrum or the story which would reveal more clearly than anything else all the facets and the depths of his character, some less well-known aspect, preferably having nothing to do with crossing icy wastes on skis, or polar bears or cheering crowds on the quayside at Christiania. And Jonas found this story: that of a man who stood on a chill plain and wept in front of a group of mothers.