Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The canvas on the easel depicted a group of horses and riders, with a large mirror in the background in which the riders were seen reflected, all executed in earth tones: ochre, umber, sienna, a tinge of Indian lake, but although the main impression was of brown, Jonas’s eye was immediately caught by a shimmering light underlying the sombre, muted hues, a golden sheen which seemed to speak of an invisible energy. ‘From the royal stables,’ the painter said kindly, somewhat surprised by Jonas’s absorption in the painting, going on to add: ‘The horse is the one animal most closely akin to man.’ When Jonas stepped right up close to the painting he noticed a number of unaccountably fine brushstrokes on the hindquarters of one of the horses, which, incredible as it may sound, offered him a glimpse into another dimension.

Jørgine needed only to look at Jonas. His face said it all. At the age of eight, Jonas Wergeland was an art connoisseur. He had no idea how this had come about, it just happened: he had a Geiger counter inside him that was triggered by fine works of art. He also picked out a landscape for his grandmother: ‘from Torvø’ they were later informed.

‘I’ll take them,’ Jørgine announced without further ado. She counted out 1200 kroner and laid the banknotes on the table next to some blue jars. Jonas had the idea that the painter thought this was too much, that he was almost embarrassed. ‘But you haven’t signed them,’ she said.

He signed the pictures. ‘Frantz W.,’ it said in ochre with a touch of white, this being long before the days when Widerberg opted for a palette of pure primary colours, simplified his name to Frans and became one of Norway’s most highly acclaimed and best-selling painters, his pictures becoming so ubiquitous in the form of prints, calendars and posters in thousands of homes that they were well on the way to becoming archetypes in themselves, every bit as much as the archetypes he endeavoured to portray.

Later in life Jonas would wonder whether he had possessed this gift for evaluating pictures from infancy. However that may be, it was when he was with his grandmother that he became aware of it, and there is no doubt that here we see the roots of what many regard as Norway’s greatest television talent of all time, namely, the ability to be able to tell right away when a picture is good, or could be good, or a scene, for that matter, in those instances where the pictures were to be shown on a screen. And, I might add, in years to come Jonas Wergeland would also make use of his remarkable inbuilt antenna when taking his exceedingly selective and very fruitful pick of Norway’s women.

But at the age of eight this tingling between his shoulder-blades was not something to which he gave much thought — in any case he had no idea what use he could make of it, in real life as it were. In time his grandmother’s interest in art also petered out, and she concentrated instead on perfecting her life as Winston Churchill, particularly in the years following the great man’s death as if, at long last and with some relief, she could be the only Churchill alive. But during the years when his grandmother’s art collecting was at its height, Jonas simply allowed her to take advantage of him, making no objection, obediently singling out a picture here and a picture there, perhaps because these gallery visits always wound up, as a reward, at the Studenten ice cream parlour. From that point of view, Jonas Wergeland was as easy to please as a sniffer dog when it is given a titbit for having sniffed out some concealed substance that it alone was capable of finding. When you come right down to it, and when you are only eight years old, there is nothing to beat that work of art known as a banana split, served in a bowl shaped like a half-moon, in that childhood paradise on the corner of Karl Johans gate, a place which even smelled as heaven must smell: of halved bananas, chopped almonds, strawberry jam and hot chocolate.

I could, with some justification, say that it was the connoisseur in Jonas Wergeland who first discovered Margrete Boeck since here too — although he had no notion why it should happen when he looked at a girl, and one with a sliver of glass stuck in her nostril at that — he was conscious of a quite indisputable tingle between his shoulder-blades. A few days later there could be no doubt about it: Jonas was in love, and this was the great love, that ‘once in a lifetime’ when the nerves are given an extra turn of the screw, and you are knocked almost senseless by emotion, wandering the face of the Earth like one great feeling encased in skin.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to touch that first real falling in love. Take the most glorified romantic experiences of adult life — and none of them bears the remotest resemblance to the incandescent quality, not to say supernatural dimensions, that are the mark of that first breathtaking love. And the thing I like most about this phenomenon is that, at this stage of their lives, boys, even the most ruthless careerists in the making, actually take time and exercise patience so that the innocent path from a girl’s fingertips to those indescribable square centimetres between her thighs can take, say, a whole year. This is due not only to a becoming shyness and lack of self-assurance, it owes as much to an awareness, stemming from a God-given natural instinct, of the unique and never-to-be-repeated nature of this experience, which leads them to do all they can to prolong the delight. Incredible as it may sound, even boys of this age realize that love is more than just a physical thing, that above all else it has to do with longing.

After the fatal — or felicitous, depending on how you look at it — bicycle crash of the spring, Jonas gradually became more and more infatuated with Margrete, the new girl who established herself in record time as the kingpin of her class, not least after they finished reading a tear-jerker of a story from their school reader, written by Dikken Zwilgmeyer, about a poor girl whom everybody teased and who finally died, whereupon Margrete thumped her desk with her fist and declared that nobody had any bloody right to go writing such a load of sentimental rubbish. And so, following the accepted procedure, a few weeks after the beginning of sixth grade, and following a summer break during which Jonas had done little else but lie flat on his back on Hvaler, just thinking and thinking and thinking about her — while the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ played on the transistor radio and not even a heated summer debate regarding topless bathing suits could take his mind off her — he dispatched a chum to speak to one of Margrete’s girlfriends, a middleman, not unlike the sort employed in matters of diplomacy, and let it be known that he was ‘nuts about her’, as the parlance of the day had it, as if it were generally recognized that love and madness are adjoining rooms with extremely porous walls. And then it was merely a matter of waiting, with his blood racing through his veins at twice its normal speed, until Margrete’s friend came back, after the obligatory and fairly protracted pause for thought to announce that, okay, Margrete wouldn’t mind going out with Jonas.

With that, Jonas Wergeland was swept off into the most intoxicating months of his life, days and weeks which would later come to seem like a unique blend of intensity, hyped-up emotions and, above all, magic because, from the day and hour that Margrete said yes, the whole world simply stretched out at his feet like a red carpet, or perhaps I should say a Persian carpet. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could go wrong.

So there they are, on an autumn day in Grorud, Jonas Wergeland and Margrete Boeck, strolling through a wood like golden amber on their way up to Lilloseter, where Jonas treats them both to, of all things, beef stew and root beer as if to mark the end of childhood. It is on the way down, when they are just about level with Aurevann Lake, its smooth waters mirroring the golden-yellow woods, that Margrete, with a deliberately casual swing of her arm, finds his hand for the first time and they hold hands, the concrete proof that a boy and a girl are actually going steady, and she continues to hold his hand, triumphantly, boldly, all the way past Steinbruvannet and down past the blocks of flats on Bergensveien, where they are observed by quite a few of their classmates, and the word is out once and for all: it’s official, they are going steady, they are a couple, they are sweethearts.