Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

But this is for real, or at least more so, and Jonas Wergeland prepares for the decisive jump, for his one big chance to become area champion. He eyes the bar, one metre and sixty centimetres above the ground; it’s high, he’s never jumped that high, but he knows what Gabriel Sand, the old actor, will come to say to him, note my choice of words, will come to say to him, because they have not yet met, but they will meet and those things which will happen are already inherent in him, carried within him even now, so he knows that Gabriel Sand is going to tell him about the wave potential of human beings, about all the things we are but which we do not exploit because they seem so hard to fathom. Jonas knows that anything is possible, even the most unlikely things, when human beings have the muscle power to leap over a house, a fact which has been proved scientifically, in other words: the potential is there.

Jonas Wergeland also had something else going for him; that spring he had met Nina H., one of the greatest track-and-field athletes in the whole of the Grorud valley, in the whole of Norway, for that matter. They had been confirmed together in Grorud Church and had come to know one another well, very well, during confirmation classes in which the vicar placed particular emphasis on the seventh commandment and all the ins and outs of sexual morality, though this of course merely added a bit of spice to what were, otherwise, pretty deadly classes and, paradoxically, titillated those young confirmation candidates more than was good for them. To begin with, before they ever spoke to one another, Jonas had noticed how Nina H. glanced in his direction more than once, especially when the vicar referred, in his dry, roundabout fashion, to the untold perils and temptations of puberty, and Jonas felt that shiver which ran slowly from the base of his spine all the way up to the back of his neck, leaving an inexplicable tingling sensation between his shoulder-blades.

Like Nina H., Jonas was a member of the athletics side of Grorud Sports Club, which moved its training activities in the spring from the gym to the sports ground across the road, and it was here, one rainy training night when only a handful had shown up, that Jonas and Nina H. found themselves the only two left in the clubhouse. Nina showed such promise and was considered so trustworthy that she had her own key to the changing rooms. Jonas had showered and was sitting naked on one of the wooden benches, digging sand out of his spikes when Nina H. walked into the boys’ changing room, wrapped only in a towel. She said not a word, maybe smiled a little smile, before going down on her knees in front of him and stroking his thighs while she gazed into his eyes. ‘Just relax,’ she said. Then she gently cupped her hand around his ‘lingam’, as Jonas would have put it, seeming almost to weigh his penis in her palm, apparently rather surprised both by its consistency and its lightness, when in fact she was enraptured, studying the lines of his penis, its shape and proportions, following the course of every vein, taking in every irregularity in such a way that Jonas understood what his Aunt Laura was getting at with her pithy assertion: a good cock is worth its weight in gold. Nina H. looked as though she had found a treasure map, the sort they used to etch into walrus tusks in olden days.

Seeing the way she stuck out her tongue just a little before putting her lips to the head of his penis, Jonas could not help thinking of their confirmation, the sight of her at the altar rail in exactly the same position, on her knees, her eyes half-closed, how lovely she had looked. She wasn’t religious, he was pretty sure about that, and yet she had an air of expectancy about her, as if she knew that this was a solemn moment, that it was right, no matter what, that it had to do with life, rites of passage, a leap marked by something symbolic; now her hands were round his hips, in a room pungent with sweat, and her lips and tongue were doing things he had never imagined possible, things for which even his sister’s anatomy lessons had in no way prepared him, and he felt his body swelling as her tongue fluttered around the ridge of his glans, how his muscles suddenly bore witness to resources of energy unknown to him, and when he came, when the semen spurted out in great warm jets over her lips, and she even opened her mouth to swallow some of it, as if it really were a blessing or at any rate a fortifying drink of some sort, he could not stop himself from thinking of how she had opened her mouth in just that way, with her tongue protruding slightly, to receive the wafer from between the vicar’s fingers; and even when his conscience instinctively started sending out blasphemy signals and quashing this comparison, he realized that this, what she was now doing to him, what she was now giving him, ought also to be seen as a sacrament, and I — even I — would be the last to object to that.

Their game did not stop there, however; they switched places as if intent on taking their confirmation classes a stage further or, better, taking up a matter they had not previously touched upon. Now it was Jonas’s turn to kneel in worship, he ran his fingers over Nina H.’s long, muscular legs, remembering that that was the first thing he had noticed about her, her thighs, showing under skin-tight jeans, because she was a runner; Jonas had even stood watching in admiration sometimes when she was practising tempo runs on the curves, contemplating her marvellous stride, the look on her face which intimated that it might not be the idea of competing which drew women to take part in athletics but the mystical element; at any rate it was an aesthetic delight to see those long legs propelling her body forward so swiftly, the very lift of the knee, the springiness, the flexing of the tendons, while at the same time he felt there was something erotic about the sight, an idea which is not so far out when you think that the Chinese, for example, when they wish to declare their love, say ‘I have seen a woman’s foot.’ Nina H. had long been a member of the distinguished 1,00 °Club, and her room at home was bedecked with silver, so I assume that most Norwegians, at least, will know exactly whose legs Jonas Wergeland was now crouched between, legs which it would later be said ought to be insured with Lloyds, and will recall her triumphs in the 100 metres hurdles, not least the race she ran and the gold medal she won at the European Championships in the mid-seventies, the most beautiful race ever run on European soil, as one ecstatic journalist described it. And now here he was, Jonas Wergeland, on his knees in a changing room redolent of countless boys and their united efforts and dreams of gold, his face pressed between those legs which would at a later date be regarded as nigh on public property and his tongue buried deep in certain far more private and unknown parts of her anatomy. The fissure between the labia majora and minora has been compared, not without some justification — at any rate if one thinks of the opening up of new possibilities — to the physicists’ fission of the atom, and Jonas truly did have a sense of something explosive inside him, an urge, an appetite, which had been totally missing from his sister’s pragmatic demonstration and which gave him the chance to try out a skill which also vouchsafed a glimpse into the heart of creation, deep-red secrets. Rakel had at least explained to them that not all women’s genitals were the same shape or size — far from it — and as far as Jonas could tell, Nina H. had, according to his own terminology, a splendid example of a gazelle yoni, as seemed only natural, considering her particular discipline; a tight vagina which clamped itself around his finger like a suckling mouth, a soft vice, as if her vagina, too, had benefited from all the training to which she had subjected her body. This was Jonas’s main impression, kneeling there between Nina H.’s perfect legs, surrounded by a scent reminiscent of damp sawdust, that this thing, this place which his tongue was exploring was, first and foremost, a muscle; or rather, not a muscle, but a source of potential energy which, if he tapped into it, would boost his own body’s performance, like a pole when you made a jump. And as if to assure himself of a share in this flood of vitality, he flicked his tongue still harder, until Nina H. raised her arms, grasped the hooks above her head, pulled herself up and hung, almost suspended in mid-air, while she came and came and came again, her athletic body writhing as if she were doing a split jump, with a smile on her face and her eyes closed, so that Jonas looking up, saw her for the first time, with her arms raised above her head and that smile of relief, as he was to see her time and again on television in later years, when she broke through the tape, almost always coming first.