Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Yes, Margrete was gone. Later, Jonas felt sure that it was all the fault of the circle. The repetition. That this repetition was a kind of death. As if by letting himself be manipulated into whirling round and round like that he had unscrewed something

Margrete is gone, and while Jonas is standing by the gate, trying to regain his breath, Margrete’s chum comes over — like an angel of death, he thinks to himself, even before she gets to him — picking her way because of her skate guards: ‘Margrete’s breaking it off,’ she says.

Jonas stands there, watching the steam from his own breath. Then he says, the way one does, amazingly, manage to say at such moments: ‘What do I care?’ For years he was to wonder how he could have come up with such an inane choice of words. ‘What do I care?’

What do you do when you are desperate?

Jonas’s mind is a complete blank. All he can do is to skate gracefully backwards, concentrate solely on skating gracefully backwards, perhaps unconsciously wishing to turn back the clock. But so intent is he on displaying the utmost grace in the art of skating backwards that he does not see the chunk of ice on the surface of the rink, just as Per Ivar Moe did not see the sliver of soap some weeks later in Deventer: a booby trap of ice which causes him to come crashing down, as badly as it is possible to crash on skates. Charlie Chaplin could not have done it better: first the frantic skittering, faster and faster, in a futile attempt to regain his balance, and then the finale, the dreadful fall, where you just manage to adopt a perfectly horizontal position in midair before coming down on the rock-hard ice, and every single part of the back side of your body seems to take a battering as your head and heels both hit the ice at once.

And finally: the explosion. The back of Jonas’s head slams into the ice so hard that a myriad shards of light, a whole universe of starbursts, come racing towards him and through him, a bit like the effect used in a film to give the illusion of travelling faster than the speed of light. When he emerges on the other side he is convinced that his spine has been shattered and that the silver thread — although what bloody good is a silver thread to him now, anyway? — has been severed.

For a long time Jonas just lies there, as if he were dead, he is dead, his eyes closed, while the chill from the ice spreads throughout his body, a not unpleasant sensation. He only wishes that he could put himself into deep-freeze and that someone would wake him up when the world has become less crazy and bewildering.

For a long time Jonas lies there, chilled to the marrow, listening to the mawkish strains of ‘Yesterday’ pouring out of the loudspeakers right above his head with the result that he would come to hate that song, felt like crying every time heard it. And, as most of you will no doubt appreciate, he had to endure listening to that song many a time over the years. To cut a long story short: Jonas Wergeland was never a great Beatles fan.

Margrete was gone. Margrete was the first and the last. And it was on account of Margrete that Jonas Wergeland killed his mother’s seven lovers.

What do you do when you are desperate?

Jonas Wergeland blamed the American cartoonist Carl Barks for his trip to Timbuktu. As a child there were few things Jonas loved more than the final frames of Barks’s inimitable stories, in which Donald Duck, alone or, for instance, with his friend Gyro Gearloose the inventor — usually drawn in silhouette — would be seen hightailing it to Timbuktu, or quite simply find themselves in Timbuktu after the most hair-raising scandals and disasters have become a fact. The whole point is to get as far away as possible, to someplace where no one knows you.

There are times when we all yearn to be far, far away and in the autumn of 1972, Jonas Wergeland yearned to be far, far away. This was due not so much to Carl Barks as the need to get away from the circus surrounding the EEC referendum, which, to Jonas’s mind, not only dulled the wits but also turned the heads of the Norwegian people for several months; suddenly the derogatory term ‘parish-pump politics’ seemed to cover the reality of the situation perfectly. The country was bursting at the seams with loudspeakers and public meetings; there were stands on every street corner, demonstrations at every turn, leaflets through letterboxes, posters on every telegraph pole, bad political ditties on the radio and hysterical debates on television. Ideologies became muddled up, and no one noticed; in the same breath candidates could profess both radical politics and conservative values or vice-versa. As far as Jonas was concerned there was nothing to choose between the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ camps for stupidity, so when he made his escape, it was not from yes or no but from dogmatism, or perhaps he was acting on an intuition that, despite all the shouting, the issues which these people were debating were of little consequence, as would later be confirmed. While the full battery of spotlights and microphones was trained on the tackling and hard play that surrounded any standpoint taken on the EEC, the crucial decisions, the ones which would really determine Norway’s immediate future, were made in the shadows and on the quiet, under the direction of people like Sir William. The foundations of Norway the oil nation were being laid without anyone asking the Norwegian people.

It is easy for me, who can indulge in the luxury of being a disinterested party, to say that Norway in the late summer of 1972 was an admirable example of a democracy in full flower. For Jonas Wergeland, however, this was a time when an entire country was stage-managed like a media event and, what was worse, one that wasn’t even entertaining. Where others saw a debate, Jonas saw only a welter of emotions camouflaged as rational argument, where they would have done better to dish out clubs instead of pamphlets. In actual fact, the thought of travelling to Timbuktu had never entered Jonas’s head before, but once it was there it had become almost a compulsion. And thanks to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species he could simply pack his bag and go.

I suppose I ought to mention in parenthesis here that travelling to Timbuktu nowadays is, of course, no big deal: not like it was for the first Europeans who actually paid with their lives, either on the way there or merely because they were unfortunate enough to reach there, travellers who suffered the most appalling hardships and only survived the desert by slitting open their veins and drinking their own blood, eating lizards and chewing on their leather belts. A trip to Timbuktu today, on the other hand, is not that arduous or dramatic and requires little more in terms of organization than taking the underground from Oslo’s Central Station to the suburb of Stovner, the main difference being the need for a visa and a couple of vaccinations. So I do not intend to waste any space on the journey as such but simply let Jonas Wergeland follow David Attenborough’s example and pop up on the scene.

When Jonas Wergeland arrived in Timbuktu, in Mali, a country where people die earlier and earn less than just about anywhere else on Earth, he was, unlike the first Europeans to reach the place, not disappointed. Those explorers had been expecting to find a pulsating city awash with gold and ostrich feathers and leopard skins, with rulers who surrounded themselves with seductive dancers and jesters whose voices emanated from their armpits. Instead, what they found was a tiny huddle of mud huts, about as rich and exciting as the remains of a sand castle once the tide has come in; a town which had nothing left of its legendary past but its name.