Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The high point of the day was the arrival of the Hvaler , a trusty old workhorse of a coaster which was in fact celebrating its centenary just around this time. Even as a grown man, Jonas could still recall every detail of that boat, right down to the smell down in the saloon, the judder of the engine and, not least, the noise it made, which could be heard half a mile away. The jetty, not the biggest of its kind, was packed with people, as it always was in those days when a coastal steamer was entertainment in itself. The majority were only there to check out what manner of funny-looking summer visitors would step ashore — their luggage was a dead giveaway — or which of the local residents had been over to Fredrikstad to buy new wallpaper. For a child, the mere fact of having a line thrown to you could make your day. Jonas, clad only in a pair of shorts, was there on the jetty with his cousin Veronika, who was already strikingly pretty, too pretty. They were standing roughly halfway along the jetty when Jonas suddenly became aware that the crowd seemed to be pushing them towards the edge, towards the boat which was now reversing out of the dock.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together?

Apropos the rationale for Jonas’s trip to Timbuktu, I apologize for oversimplifying. As always, there was at least one other, complex, reason. If anyone were to ask why Jonas Wergeland became a nomad, I could just as easily say he was searching for himself. And I mean that quite literally; he was searching for his arm or his hip, if, that is, he was not searching, purely and simply, for his head. This also explains why he was so delighted with the little leather pouch the Tuaregs gave him to hang around his neck, ornamented with a yellow and emerald-green motif representing the print of a sandal, to symbolize a man. Jonas felt as if he had found a foot, a limb that he had once lost.

You see: Jonas Wergeland was, in fact, carved up, dismembered, as a child.

It happened on that selfsame glorious summer’s day when the crowd, by dint of an incomprehensible conjunction of forces, a sort of parallelogram of forces, nudged him closer and closer to the very edge of the jetty until he was right up against one of the posts, and there he stood, staring down into the foaming water, at the seething whirlpools generated as the boat struggled to reverse out. In this part of the sound the current was exceptionally strong, and sometimes the crew had to make two or even three attempts, at full throttle, before they succeeded in bringing the boat round with the bow pointing towards Fredrikstad.

Jonas is gazing down into the boiling white waters, right out on the very edge of the jetty, almost mesmerized by the whirlpools, the way one can be mesmerized by the eyes of a snake — and then it happens: he is actually pushed in, down into those awful, frothing circles, not far from the stern of the boat and its fearsome propeller. Jonas’s first, spontaneous thought is that it is the mass that has pushed him in. So if anyone should wonder where Jonas Wergeland’s contempt for the masses springs from, the source of his oft-repeated assertion that the masses stunt the individual, now you know; it dates from that jetty on Hvaler where he quite literally became a victim of the power of the masses, the awe-inspiring energy which is always there, lying latent, in a crowd of people.

Jonas has only just learned to swim, he tries frantically to swim out of the way, but he can feel himself being dragged backwards, relentlessly, towards the propeller; he kicks and thrashes for all he is worth, but it does no good. There is a swishing, almost metallic sound in his ears, growing louder and louder, and already, on the brink of death, he feels the sharp pain of his feet being sliced off.

It was such a paradox, this whole incident, since up to that point in Jonas Wergeland’s life summer holidays on the island out in the mouth of the fjord had been associated with uninterrupted happiness. The stories of most people’s lives include a chapter entitled ‘In the Realms of Adventure’, and for Jonas this chapter was set — in two senses since it related both to being caught up in an adventure story and listening to adventure stories — in his father’s childhood home on Hvaler, one of the islands lying to the south of Fredrikstad, level with the Swedish border and overlooking the open sea. Here, in an old white house, in an atmosphere that would have to be described in a children’s song, not to sound banal, Jonas spent all his holidays as a boy. He experienced those summers with such an intensity that he knew , each morning when he awoke, that everything that happened that day would stay with him, that one day he would sit in an old folks’ home, looking back on, and shedding tears over, events that had gone straight to the heart of him with no detours: a beauty and a setting of such sunlit clarity that even a child who has never given any thought to such things instinctively understands that he is, as it were, establishing a bedrock within himself. And at the centre of this scene was his grandfather, exactly like a figure in some National Romantic painting, scratching the stomach of a grey tabby cat with the toe of his shoe.

People today have — if you will forgive me — such a narrow one-dimensional concept of the significance of the family, that I am not sure whether I should say anything at all about the part played in Jonas Wergeland’s life by his grandparents. Permit me, at any rate, to highlight one of the more general aspects in the form of a statement. The whole purpose of grandparents is to supply the fairy-tale element; they are the trainers of a child’s imagination. Not that they absolutely have to tell stories; in many cases it is enough for them to be there , like Jonas’s grandmother, because they are, in themselves, a story.

Jonas never knew his paternal grandmother, but his father’s father, Omar Hansen, lived long enough to fulfil his function in his grandson’s life. What Jonas remembered best about his grandfather was the fine creases at the corners of his eyes, radiating towards his temples when he screwed up his eyes, and he almost always had his eyes screwed up, as if he were constantly on the look-out for something that lay beyond what he saw around him all the time, something which Jonas fancied must be a sort of hidden story or a Story of Stories. In this, Jonas was not far off the mark, for Omar Hansen was a Platonist when it came to stories, believing as he did that every history, no matter how good, was only a pale shadow of a better story. Hence the reason that Jonas’s grandfather was perpetually brimming over with stories as if he were hoping that if he just went on telling them for long enough, or mixing up enough tales, some underlying story would eventually be revealed. In actual fact, I think Omar Hansen must have been the closest one can get in Norway to a rhapsody, a man with whole strings of stories committed to memory.

So for Jonas summer holidays consisted of a grandfather sitting in a blue kitchen with copper-hung walls and shelves lined with white jars inscribed with neat black lettering, telling a mishmash of tall tales and true ones while cleaning fish or cutting plugs of tobacco. ‘Just imagine, Jonas,’ he would say, ‘if you were living ten or twelve thousand years ago and were one of the first folk to come to Norway after the Ice Age. You’d have sailed right across here, so you would. You see, back then our island was under the sea, so you would have come ashore farther inland, up at Høgnipen, for example.’ Summer holidays were a grandfather in a rowboat, two big fists curled around the oars and fine creases around the eyes, a grandfather who taught Jonas how to haul in a net and lift the flatfish over the gunwale while at the same time pointing out the huge cairn on the crest of the island and saying something about his great-grandfather having dug up both the king and the bronze-age treasure that had lain underneath it: an exercise in inventiveness, both the quiet morning on the waters of the fjord and these stimulating stories.