Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

So the programme on Fridtjof Nansen also had to do with cold and ice — not least in human terms, with a global spirit that was sick unto death, as Nansen said in the speech he made on being presented with the Nobel Prize — a fact which Jonas Wergeland intimated most strikingly by concluding the programme with a close-up of Nansen’s eyes, showing the tears frozen to the skin.

There they were, on board the old lifeboat, renamed the Norge , where Gabriel Sand was now talking about acting, ‘the least understood of all the creative arts’. He demonstrated, for example, after fixing his eyes on the deck for thirty seconds, how he could turn on the tears and when Jonas looked impressed he said: ‘It’s you who sees the weeping and the emotion; all I do is squeeze out a couple of tears.’

As if to underline this illusion, or the air of magic, he lit a cigarette and was soon wreathed in coils of smoke which took on an unwonted movement and dimension in the light of the paraffin lamp. ‘So what do you plan to do after high school?’ he asked.

‘Study architecture,’ said Jonas, not really knowing why, although he had an idea that the urge to do so dated back to walks around Oslo as a boy, when there were certain buildings which he never tired of seeing: the Town Hall in all its massive symmetry and the Art Centre with its so-called ‘golden mean’, but more than anything else, due to the fact that his father often took him down to the harbour to look at the boats, there was Lars Backer’s exquisite Restaurant Skansen, a revelation in terms of functionalist form which for some reason the people of Oslo allowed the powers that be to raze to the ground — as I say: the most unlikely things are forever happening.

‘Rubbish!’ said Gabriel. ‘Be an actor! Build castles in the air, not on the ground. Create illusions inside people’s heads. They’ll outlast structures that’ll be pulled down before you know it anyway.’

The cigarette smoke enveloped him like a swirling veil; it might have been a stage-effect, the only thing lacking was for him to go through to the for’ard cabin and fetch the skull ensconced in the shell of the television. Gabriel smoked Camels as if to betoken his nomadic existence, and Jonas recalled how he and Nefertiti had sometimes bought liquorice cigarettes that came in the most gorgeous packet with a copy of the Camel logo on the front. The camel picture also happened to rank above all others when it came to the cigarette packs they fixed to the spokes of their bike wheels, possibly because it was so rare and hence lent a lot of prestige, as well as being squashy, which meant that they had to glue it onto a piece of cardboard. Seeing Gabriel with his pack of Camels, Jonas had a feeling of being back there, a feeling that everything went in a circle, round and round, like a wheel of fortune.

‘What makes you think I should be an actor?’ Jonas asked, lifting his mug of whisky.

‘To be who you are. Why not follow it through?’

‘I can’t quite see myself on a stage playing some part.’ The very idea made Jonas laugh.

‘Don’t say that, lad.’ Gabriel was vehement now, brandishing his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. ‘Every one of us invents and plays as many different parts in our daily lives as we need in order to be taken seriously. Just look at yourself. I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that each person should be stuck with just one persona.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘What I’m saying is that every human being has many sides to their character,’ said Gabriel. ‘See, any one of us could go off our heads at any time, it just so happens that, for some reason, we don’t.’ Gabriel squinted at Jonas with his two mismatched eyes. ‘I’ll never forget my dear friend Niels Bohr,’ he went on as if something vital had just occurred to him. ‘A man of vision who gave one of the most momentous speeches of the twentieth century, at a physicists’ congress in Como, in ’27 that must have been, in which he introduced the world to the theory of complementarity , working from the basic principle that light appears to exist both in particle and in wave form. So don’t you ever forget, Jonas, that there’s more than one side to a human being; just like light, we contain the potential for both particles and waves. At the very least. Imagine the possibilities! All you have to do is take your pick. So: be an actor!’

Out in the galley, some pickle jars chinked together as a couple of waves — one might almost think Gabriel had ordered them up specially — caused the boat to roll a little more than usual, but neither of them turned a hair. In an act of sheer genius Fridtjof Nansen had once let his boat drift with the ice. Now it was Gabriel’s boat that was drifting, although this was far from being part of some grand plan but an act of sabotage. The boat drifted on, without the two on board, snug and warm down below in the saloon, noticing a thing. They had no idea that they would soon be right out in the middle of the shipping lane and even less idea that the Skipper Clement , more like a small town than a ferry, was heading straight for them.

Gabriel was no longer in the theatre, but he could look back on what had been a remarkable career. After leaving school he had followed his English mother when she moved back to London, where he soon found himself caught up in the theatrical scene, and it was here, among other things, that he formed a firm friendship with the actor John Gielgud, who was the same age as himself. More than once Gabriel had described Gielgud’s inimitable interpretation of Hamlet — not the much-vaunted production at the New Theatre in 1934 but the one staged in 1930 at the Old Vic, the best Hamlet ever, according to Gabriel, making Jonas laugh with his imitation of Gielgud’s way of speaking, in which ‘Words, words, words,’ came out as ‘Wirds, wirds, wirds.’

Every person has their own quintessential story, one which says more about who they are than any other. Gabriel Sand’s was a classic story, albeit with the odd twist or two; in the early twenties John Gielgud had persuaded him to take part in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to be staged at a little theatre near King’s Cross — the competition for parts was fierce, but even so, after only one audition, Gabriel was signed up.

Just for the fun of it, and to show Jonas that he could still remember it, Gabriel did the first half of the balcony scene for him, taking both Romeo’s and Juliet’s parts; he played it any number of different ways, to show what a wealth of techniques an actor has at his disposal: everything from diction and tempo to pauses and posing. For Jonas, it was a bit like when his father played the organ and showed him how he could make a tune sound different by switching to a different register. One version Gabriel did as a parody so outrageous that it put Jonas in mind of Norwegian actors, those few he had seen.

Gabriel stood on the deck with a bookshelf at his back and a paraffin lamp as his only spotlight and truly became another person, or rather a whole host of other people, and even in his antiquated suit and without a single prop he was Juliet, to the life, and then, in the warm light that glinted softly off his gold tooth and the watch-chain draped across his stomach, he suddenly played the balcony scene in a way which left Jonas convinced that Romeo and Juliet wanted to die and, thereafter, by dint of only a few minor alterations, forced Jonas to change his mind completely and believe that it was all down to the hand of fate. More than just about anything else, what he admired was Gabriel’s beautiful English; it was perfect, spoken like a true native. Jonas never witnessed better theatre than in the saloon of an old lifeboat, on a stage that reeked of tar and whisky, birch logs and Camel cigarettes.