Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

I know it is banal and that I am repeating myself, but it is nonetheless necessary to restate the fact: you can take the most sublime act of love — and the list, as I am sure most people would admit, is extremely short — and compare it with the first time you felt the fingers of a person of the opposite sex curl round your own fingers and, not least, the thrill of those seconds, and we all know which one would come out the winner. I think I am safe in saying that many people would give a great deal to be able to relive that moment, the first time one holds hands with a childhood sweetheart, making contact not only with the palm of a small hand but with an ocean of strange warm feelings.

Jonas soon becomes aware that he is unbeatable. He plays what they call ‘pigeon rings’, more rightly known as ‘s’s and c’s’, the classic game being ‘ten plus ten’, so called because of the way the rings can be neatly linked together to form a ‘tenner’ bunch in which the finely-tuned shooter bunch stands out, sprawled across the tarmac like a streamlined sports car, but Jonas also plays ‘fifty-fifty’ with huge bunches that fly across the playground; he never misses, can hit anything, the trick being to sight along the left foot; corridors full of schoolchildren looking on, the first-graders in particular in open-mouthed awe of daredevils who would risk staking five rings on one game, one shot; gasping every time his chain slams with hair-raising precision into the other guy’s bunch from the most impossible distances; he wins tons of these multi-coloured plastic rings that were all the rage, collectors’ items back then, tosses them to the first-graders like small change to beggars, he can afford it, because he is unbeatable, he is a wizard, jumps the triple, hovering in mid-air as if Mercury himself had loaned him his winged shoes; becomes the first man to cover the distance between the two white marker lines in the playground in six strides, an amazing feat, and in rounders he comes this close to doing what no one in the whole history of the school has yet managed to do, the unattainable mythical dream, to break a window in the pavilion at the far end, striking the ball in a way that would have drawn an approving nod from Babe Ruth himself.

Meanwhile, he goes around holding hands with Margrete, it is enough just to hold hands, a joy that transcends all else, simply to hold hands, hold her unique hand, a lucky rabbit’s foot, during recess, or to walk hand-in-hand with her across Trondheimsveien to Tallaksen’s, where they alternate between buying such exotic delights as peanuts in their shells, two nuts in one shell, just like them, and Sweet Mint chewing gum, its wrapper printed with hearts, which they blow up into enormous pink balloons that will never burst, that are in danger of carrying them heavenwards. Even in a situation where the odds are stacked against him, Jonas manages to turn it to his advantage: a dinner at the home of Mr and Mrs Gjermund Boeck when Margrete’s mother appears dressed in what is, to Jonas’s mind, a hideous Mary Quant outfit, black and white with an ultra-short skirt, and otherwise blends into the background, thus making her father seem that much more predominant, red in the face and sporting a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. Having instantly sized Jonas up as a potentially subversive element within the family’s well-ordered dictatorship, he makes a point of delivering a long and, Jonas has to admit, impassioned speech on the necessity of bombing Vietnam — bloody Communist swine — back to the Stone Age and then some before — and this is where, by sheer coincidence, Jonas’s luck turns — putting on a record by Duke Ellington, thereby giving Jonas the opportunity to make a few tentative remarks on Jimmy Blanton’s all too early demise and deliver a brief panegyric on alto-sax player Johnny Hodges’s solo on ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing’, with the result that the urbane Gjermund Boeck settles back on the sofa, somewhat impressed, thinking damned if he isn’t starting to take to the boy.

This is followed by the slow progression of a drama wrapped in the great political dramas — both domestic and international — all of which are, of course, totally irrelevant as far as our young players are concerned: namely, the physical drama being played out between Jonas and Margrete. It is New Year’s Eve, under the relatively close supervision of a friend’s parents, and as the corks on the champagne-soda bottles pop, she embraces him; she, Margrete, opens wide her foreign-made beige cape like a gate and pulls him to her, hugs him tight against her lovely blue dress for several seconds, so tightly that he can feel her body, her curves, her bone-structure, that combination of hard and soft, against his own body and wishes that they could stand like this forever, wrapped inside a beige cape, on a New Year’s Eve, on a veranda, breast to breast, in a close embrace that would never be broken, until at last he lifts her into the air while, in a fit of pagan ecstasy, the people of Norway blow millions of kroner on painting the skies around them red and green and yellow.

But it had to end, because it was winter and, even though Jonas has never bowed to the national imperative as regards skiing, hates snow in fact, he goes skiing with Margrete, dons that most laughable article of clothing, knickerbockers — referred to in Norwegian, even more laughably, simply as knickers — and this he endures only because she is even more hopeless on skis than him, if that were possible — Bangkok not exactly being renowned for its skiing — and, what is more, because she looks so beautiful skiing, or trudging along, past Sørskogen, in an old grey anorak, with frost on her hair and eyebrows, to sit at Sinober, with glowing cheeks and fathomless blue eyes, drinking hot blackcurrant. Jonas not only endures it; by some miracle he actually manages, for the first time ever, to stay upright going down the lethal slopes to Movatn Lake, outdoing himself in swerving elegantly around those blasted dogs that are always liable to show up when you least expect it, in the middle of the track, on the worst bends, because all of a sudden he is a wizard, unbeatable, even on skis, a fact which they celebrate by hugging one another again, right out there in the forest, surrounded by snow and ice, as if wishing to check whether it really is true, or as good as the last time, or to see if they can make the snow on the trees melt just by standing underneath them for long enough, breast to breast, arms around one another, skis and poles entangled.

It was as if Jonas’s luck transmitted itself to the nation as a whole that winter. Take, for instance, the time when he and Margrete went to watch the speed-skating at Bislett, and Per Ivar — Per Ivar Moe, that is — won the world championship: Per Ivar of Oslo Skating Club, the man with the vaguely Mongolian features whom Jonas had even seen once, putting up a neon sign at Grorud shopping centre. They stand there, Margrete leaning back against Jonas’s chest, and watch Per Ivar skimming round in a dazzlingly white track top, a white knight, with people shouting ‘Moe, Moe, Moe’ and not, as one might think, ‘Mao, Mao, Mao’ like a people on the other side of the world, although here, too, in Norway, there is talk of a revolution, a skating revolution, stage-managed by a man called Stein Johnson, and I would like to make it clear that this was an extraordinary event, inasmuch as it was the first and only occasion on which Jonas Wergeland allowed himself to be swept away by a crowd and even go so far as to roar like a man possessed. It was during the ecstatic singing of ‘Victory is Ours’ that Margrete, without warning, took his head between her hands and kissed him, right there and then, in the middle of Bislett stadium, an arena that reeks of chauvinism and Norwegian triumphs: and not only Norwegian, come to that — in the summer of that year the Australian Ron Clarke would set a new world record there, in the 10,000 metres, during an international tournament, the first man to do it in under twenty-eight minutes, so Jonas could not help but feel, when that day came around, that it was owing to their presence there, their kiss, months earlier; that they had, as it were, blessed the stadium, left it sprinkled with magic dust or something of the sort. After all, it is not every Norwegian who can say he was kissed for the first time at Bislett stadium to the strains of ‘Victory is Ours’ during a tournament in which a Norwegian athlete won the day.