Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Precisely in order to reflect the varying, sometimes eccentric, notions of his heroes in all of his programmes, Jonas Wergeland ran a spot which he called ‘Three Off the Street’, in many ways a comic spot in which, apparently at random, he stopped three foreigners — played by the same three actors throughout the series — and tested their knowledge of the programme’s subject. In the Vigeland programme, the first person Jonas stopped, next to the Wheel of Life, was a ‘Japanese tourist’ hung about with all the paraphernalia of his photography fetish, who declared in broken Norwegian that Vigeland must have been a Buddhist, for one thing because he was so adamant in his assertion that life was a circle and for another because he had created the entire park in the form of a stupa. Had Jonas by any chance seen Borobudur?

Next came a ‘Dane’, a typical academic, who talked non-stop while trying in vain to find his way through the labyrinth in front of the fountain and fervently asserted that Vigeland was, first and foremost, a writer and that no one had written better about art than he. He then proceeded to read, or rather recite from memory, some caustic passages, truly amazing, from Vigeland’s letters: on the way in which dim-witted art critics misinterpreted the Icelandic-Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and on the quite unique power of Phidias’s sculptures for the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Had Jonas ever heard anything like it? Could anyone possibly put it better?

Finally, Jonas Wergeland approached an ‘Italian lady’, an excessively sensual character, who was standing on the bridge fondling the penis of one of the bronze statues, shiny from the touch of many fingers. After a volley of Italian adjectives she explained that what she really liked best of all about Vigeland were his utterly amazing, almost perverted, figures of fable, the majority of them no more than plastic sketches; she then went on to reel them off, from the woman leaning draped over the back of a panther with her head in its mouth to the rearing ox with two naked women tied by their hair to its horns, while shots of these figures were, needless to say, being flashed onto the screen.

Thus the programme of this, in the eyes of so many Norwegians, monumental artist concluded with an image of Vigeland as a minimalist, with those small, fabulous figures testifying to Vigeland’s true gift: his indomitable restless imagination.

Personally I find it a little odd — and odd is just the word for it — that Jonas Wergeland did not somehow or other manage to slip in the fact that, in Vigeland’s work, love consists mainly of pain, and that he did not include his own favourite sculpture; because I can tell you right here and now that his favourite, or rather his raw spot, among all of Vigeland’s works is the one entitled ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, which depicts a man on his knees, reaching out at full stretch for a woman who is slipping out of his arms. Jonas could never look at this sculpture without thinking of Margrete and the incident on a certain skating rink, an incident which also brought him close to what Vigeland attempted to portray in the relief entitled ‘Hell’: a representation of the suffering of man in all its phases.

The summer holidays came and went, they moved up into seventh grade, and still Jonas Wergeland went around hand in hand with Margrete Boeck, so aglow with something that went beyond mere happiness that even the teachers on playground duty had to smile and give their bunches of keys an extra rattle behind their backs. So Jonas’s sense of being a wizard, of being unbeatable, was every bit as strong, a fact which he proved, not least, by doubling every single record set on the pinball machine in Gro Snack Bar, again together with Margrete, one button each. Jonas wondered whether it was the attraction between him and her that produced the reversed magnetic field which was responsible for the fact that the gleaming ball-bearing simply would not drop through the hole at the bottom and looked set to go on dancing between the rubber bands of the targets for ever, while the machine pinged and flashed, and the digit counters whirled round so fast that the machine seemed on the point of breaking down or exploding. They celebrated their pinball wizardry by treating themselves to ice cream cones or small bottles of Coke with straws and putting more coins in the jukebox so they could listen to ‘Rock‘n’roll Music’ or ‘Eight Days a Week’ ringing out over the Formica-topped tables of the little snack bar on Trondheimsveien yet again, with that wonderful, slightly fuzzy sound that only a jukebox can make, while they laughed up their sleeves at the bigger lads showing off outside, revving up their Tempo motorbikes for the benefit of a bunch of girls with beehive hair-dos and about a pound of chewing gum all-told between their teeth.

The autumn sped past, as always, with election day and — to the extent that they took any note of it — an epoch-making victory for the Conservatives; with scrumping for apples, in which Jonas’s daring reached new heights when he actually managed to pinch two beautiful green apples from the garden of the ever-vigilant and not exactly mild-mannered ‘Hawkeye’ Larsen; and dark evenings with a nip in the air, ideal for long goodbyes, closely entwined with your back against the granite blocks of Grorud Church.

Jonas Wergeland and Margrete Boeck were the most loving couple in the Grorud Valley, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing to suggest that the sand was running out of the hourglass of their bliss or, perhaps I ought to say, the last ball-bearing would soon drop down the hole between the two bottom flippers. Then came the fateful day at the skating rink. Suddenly it was over, and in all probability it was the abrupt, almost explosive, way that it ended that led Jonas to pin the blame on the Oslo bomber.

For those who have forgotten, or did not experience it, I feel I ought to say something about this phantom or whatever one wants to call him, who terrorized the citizens of Oslo during the year in which Jonas and Margrete drifted about, almost weightless with love; an individual, soon known simply by the thriller-style name of ‘the bomber’, who shook Norway’s capital to its foundations from February right through the spring by setting cunning and lethal booby-traps in various parts of Oslo so that no one felt safe, not even in Grorud, and an entire populace went around in fear, keeping their eyes peeled for strings tied to gates, stretched across footpaths or between cars and lifting their feet good and high in dark alleyways. I believe that this period represents a milestone in the consciousness of many Oslo folk inasmuch as the bomber unwittingly induced in them a peculiarly existential state of mind in which each step they took was a leap in the dark that might bring them down on his deadly spider’s web. The one thing that we all know, deep down, was suddenly a concrete reality: one false step, and life would never be the same again.

But this possibility — the chance of getting a shower of shrapnel in your back at any minute — did not scare Jonas and Margrete; on the contrary, it only enhanced their happiness as if their romance were flourishing during wartime or under a state of emergency. And then, just as unexpectedly, Oslo was rid of wires and explosives. The police thought the man must be dead.

Winter set in brutally early — this alone should perhaps have served as a warning to Jonas, but at the end of November, with the temperature at an all-time low of minus sixteen degrees, he presented Margrete with a rolled-gold locket on which Aunt Laura had engraved an exquisitely lettered ‘Jonas’ as if this piece of jewellery could shield them from the cold or exert some sort of white magic that would make her his forever. One evening when they were propped up against the church wall, their arms wrapped tightly around one another to keep warm, he hung it around her neck like a medal and said: ‘Gold in love’.