Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Or they went for strolls, hand-in-hand, Jonas and his grandfather, through the dense belt of pine trees that stretched across the island, walking on a carpet of pine needles between tall golden trunks and beneath swaying treetops, while his grandfather talked of the old days, of the herring fishing, of men falling from the masts, of the village shop and Harry Hansen’s boatyard that was bewitched — and had Jonas ever heard the one about Lanky Arnold and the cherry tree? Or it might be the story of the customs men and the terrible blunder they made the time they tried to catch those smugglers from Sweden; or the missionary who used to preach at the village hall, only to be irresistibly tempted into the paths of sin and, thence, eternal damnation, by one of the island’s bonny lasses.

But always, first and last, there would be these two, Jonas and his grandfather, sitting on the smooth scoured rocks overlooking the open sea, where his grandfather had to bellow out his stories like another Demosthenes, to be heard above the roar of the breakers. What Jonas liked best of all was that his grandfather commenced all of his stories with the words: ‘Just imagine, Jonas, if you were …’ thus making Jonas himself the hero of every tale, no matter whether it was about maelstroms and sunken treasure, or mermaids, white whales and submerged reefs, or Tordenskjold’s victory at Dynekilen, not to mention lifeboats and great acts of heroism: just imagine if you were steering the pilot-boat, Jonas — can you picture it? — out there, heading for Koster to meet the Peter Wessel , or a spine-chilling tale of shipwrecks, see those banks over there, that’s right, there, where the surf is crashing something wicked, just imagine if you had gone off course one stormy night. The Store-Karl went down just there, you know. I was just a lad, saw the whole thing from Rokka, there was nothing anybody could do. And all the while his grandfather would be peering out to sea, with those fine creases around his eyes, as if he could make out another story, just over the horizon.

Omar Hansen had been a sailor, and hence a lot of his material was drawn from the sea. The parlour was like a gallery filled with small pictures of ships, painted with a fine brush, and down in the outside privy hung a sheet of cardboard from an old calendar showing the sailing routes of the Wilhelmsen line, white lines on a dark-blue chart: a little like a star chart brought down to sea level. Jonas never tired of sitting there, frequently along with his grandfather, on the seat that offered the better view of the shore and the sea when you left the door open, with the wind tickling at your backside. Only later did it dawn on Jonas that that was why his father read the National Geographic in the toilet at home in the town: not because he had a yen to go travelling but as a means of recalling his childhood, the sensual delights of an outside privy: that view, the scenery, an open door and a shimmering sea — and, now and again, most wondrous of all, the sound of rain falling softly on the grass.

So, as I say, this unhinging accident — Jonas falling into the water between the jetty and a reversing boat — in no way fitted with the usual summer routine: a glimpse of hell in the midst of paradise.

Jonas is floundering helplessly in the water, aware that he is being drawn towards the propeller. Then, just as he feels an excruciating stab of pain and is quite sure that his feet have been chopped off, it hits him that it was Veronika, his cousin, who had given him the crucial nudge; he had noticed her standing close beside him as the crowd pushed them towards the edge, knew she was right behind him when he was standing up against the post, gazing spellbound at the eddies swirling around the reversing coaster. Would you believe it? Veronika had pushed him in; cool as you like, how mean can you be, he thinks, and now he is going to die, is already dead, because at that moment he is struck by an utterly convincing feeling that his head alone is left floating and thinking, in a sea of red, while the rest of his body has been chopped up into little pieces that are now drifting off in all directions; and in the midst of his mortal panic he has a vision of parts of his anatomy being washed ashore in the most widely divergent parts of the world: some ribs in Sydney, his heart in the Gulf of Aqaba, a hand off Buenos Aires, an ear on the east coast of Greenland because he is already dead, dismembered, so he believes, just as the metallic swooshing dies away. Someone has managed to signal to the people onboard to stop the engine; he hears a splash, feels someone getting an arm round him, feels himself being held up, being lifted, and he is back on the jetty where, to his surprise, he realizes that he is in one piece and that the smarting of the skin on his thighs stems from jellyfish stings. The first face he sees is Veronika’s, a sight which prompts him to blurt out a weak and incredulous ‘Jesus Christ, Veronika’. And only those who have read this far will guess that what Jonas is actually saying, even though he does not have the words with which to verbalize this perception, is: ‘So this is how you thank me for saving your life on the Zambezi?’

Jonas was in a state of shock, for a few minutes he also lost his memory and did not know who he was. And even after he gradually began to recover and could think clearly, he had a bewildered look about him, as if in some way he still was not sure who he was. His grandfather was more aware of this than anyone else and tried in his own way to undo the harm: day after day he sat on a rock overlooking the open sea and told Jonas who he was; in other words, he put Jonas back together. While the breakers rolled slowly in towards the rocks, Omar Hansen peered out to sea and told a never-ending stream of stories: just imagine, Jonas, if you were walking down by the docks in Sydney — Omar Hansen had been to Sydney himself and knew the city well — or, just imagine, Jonas, if you were a sailor going ashore in Buenos Aires, there’s a street there, by the way, called Avenida de Mayo, an adventure in itself … All in all, Jonas’s grandfather’s storytelling was more intense than usual; he really gave it everything he had, dragging up one gripping yarn after the other. Imagine, Jonas, listen to this, Jonas: important episodes, mainly involving the people of the island, distant relations, Uncle Melankton, a genius; his grandfather sat by the sea with the breakers crashing at their feet, fine creases around his eyes, and told stories to this small boy who suddenly seemed so scared, so pale, as if the water had washed away the tan he took on so easily in the summer. But pale or not, Jonas listened; and it was here, on a rock by the sea that Jonas Wergeland learned — by which I mean, he understood later — that the stories his grandfather told him might be more than a diversion or an amusement, a way of passing the time. That they represented something utterly fundamental, something on which his whole existence depended, that they built him up in the same way as food did.

Even though Omar Hansen did his utmost, to the point where he almost caught a glimpse of the Story behind the stories, and even though Jonas could see with his own eyes that he was all there, he never rid himself of the feeling that, psychologically speaking, he truly had been chopped into pieces, the way you see on those wall-charts showing cuts of beef, and that his dismembered limbs had been swept off by the currents and scattered across the world.

So when Jonas Wergeland travelled abroad to Timbuktu for example, he was really going in search of himself.

One limb which, fortunately for Jonas Wergeland, came to no harm either that time on Hvaler or later in life, was the one between his legs. Apparently there is a local museum, somewhere in France, where Napoleon’s testicles are preserved for posterity in a glass jar, and I seriously believe that plans ought to be made now for doing the same with Jonas Wergeland’s golden balls so that some day their secret may be disclosed, much as the brains of certain geniuses have been examined in order to see whether they are folded differently from the norm. I have already given some hint of what I am getting at here, so I might as well come right out with it: Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis.