Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Christine A. pulled out an old book bound in parchment. ‘Feel this,’ she said. ‘ Arithmetica Universalis ,” Jonas read. Written by one Isaac Newton. An edition from 1732, if he read the Roman numerals aright. ‘Take a look inside,’ she said. Jonas leafed through the book, running his eye over words in Latin and rows of numbers with the odd set of brackets here and there; he could not help but find it beautiful. Christine A. produced another heavy volume bound in pale calfskin from a safe. Jonas opened it. ‘Ionnis Keppleri, Harmonices Mundi ,’ he read, fingering the thick rag paper. ‘Kepler’s Third Law,’ she said. ‘A first edition from 1619.’ He pored over the text, the profusion of beautiful illustrations, the geometric drawings; ran his fingers over the letters, the indentations in the paper. ‘This must be worth a fair bit,’ said Jonas. ‘A quarter of a million kroner,” said Christine A. ‘Still think it’s abstract?’

Jonas could hardly believe it. Here he was, in his own school, in a room he had never entered before, surrounded by books worth twenty-five to thirty million kroner: smouldering gold lettering on every side. Then, with consummate self-assurance, Christine A. wrapped her arms around him and kissed him long, until his body was red-hot and it struck him that this was not only a storehouse for books but also the storehouse of a power station producing an unknown form of energy.

‘Would you like me to show you something even more valuable?’ she asked and drew him up the stairs to the gallery where another, internal, stairway led up to the third floor and another store of books, through the wall from the music room where an indomitable singing teacher was endeavouring, yet again, to make dozy pupils sing ‘Stabat Mater’ in four-part harmony. The room lay in semi-darkness. Christine A. moved right up close to him, stood there with those translucent temples making him feel that the brain must be the body’s most erogenous zone, before resolutely pulling him down onto the floor among piles of old books and making love to him far into the next period — and, I might say, beyond that into the realms of mathematics. While his form was in a maths class, struggling with digital roots and potency, he was lying on the third floor, under a roof that sloped down to meet the windows, being tutored, in much more cogent fashion, in digital roots and potency. So it is no exaggeration to say that it was Christine A. who finally set mathematics into the right context for Jonas Wergeland, who showed him the relationship between mathematics and life.

The moment she lowered herself down onto him, Jonas could tell that she had what he would have called a mathematical yoni: for one thing, because she gave him a sense of being in close touch with an equation, full of unknowns, and — even more so — because she promptly began to execute geometric figures over his pelvis, using his penis as a sort of compass point, as if from that spot she were attempting to shift the Earth. After a while she turned to concentrating on figures of eight, the most incredibly delightful rotations that put Jonas in mind of a book he owned in which it said: ‘This position can only be mastered by dint of much practice.’ She sat astride him, executing these figures of eight with such virtuosity and for so long that Jonas caught a glimpse of himself from the outside; of himself there, in that room, among the dull gold of the book spines, an image which reminded him of the pictures on his grandfather’s biscuit boxes depicting a man holding a biscuit box bearing the same picture of a man holding a biscuit box and so on, further and further in. Not only that, she also seemed to be screwing him upwards towards some lofty lookout point from which, just before she stopped in order to take pleasure in her own orgasm, he had a fleeting impression of gazing upon infinity itself.

I ought perhaps to mention that Jonas Wergeland was one of only a handful to obtain an A in his final maths exam, something which no one would have bet on the year before. It was as if, after that period with Christine A. in a storehouse full of learned tomes, Jonas suddenly got the picture, saw the point in looking for known or unknown quantities. All at once everything seemed so clear, even Achilles and the tortoise, which was, of course, a variant of the problem of infinity. The whole of this ‘aha’ experience was something akin to a key that simply needed to be given an extra little turn for the lock to click open.

This incident provided Jonas with quite unmistakeable proof of his penis’s magic properties. For while he could always explain away other such occurrences — convince himself that he had a latent talent for drawing, for example, or athletics — in his heart of hearts he knew that if there was one thing he was not, it was a mathematician.

But to get back, or on — depending on how you look at it — to that traumatic evening at the ice rink when Margrete walked out of his life and Jonas was left lying shattered, in the fullest sense of that word, on the ice under floodlighting that somehow only served to enhance the sense of disaster (or to make the disaster seem that much worse). Lying there, flat on his back, Jonas felt the physical pain gradually ebb, partly thanks to the numbing chill seeping up from the ice and through his body and, not least, his crotch, making the skin of his scrotum shrivel and turn thick as a walnut shell; and his balls, those precious balls, drew themselves up into his pelvic regions as if going into permanent hibernation.

Only one thing to do now, he thought: head for Timbuktu.

On top of that, as if the weather, too, was conspiring against him, that winter proved to be a very hard one, with average temperatures lower than in any other winter on record. The ice lay dauntingly thick on Oslo Fjord, and heavy falls of snow transformed the Grorud landscape into a claustrophobic maze of tall frozen banks through which Jonas stumbled, kicking chunks of ice as hard as he could. For Jonas’s grief also had its aggressive side, which explains why he became King of the Castle — which is to say, of the enormous mound of snow in the playground — for the first and last time, knocking other kids off like some terrible Little John. In a way he was still unbeatable, but it was in the wrong way.

The situation was not improved by a letter he tried to write to Margrete — the very fact that he resorted to the written word shows just how desperate he was. He spent ages on it, searching for words, wanting to say something out of the ordinary. ‘Your yoni is like a hidden fruit,’ was one of the phrases which he penned, rather tentatively, although really quite pleased with the formulation, before rounding off a string of clumsy sentences with a cry for help, purely a strategic move, a quote from that detested duo Lennon and McCartney: he knew what a sucker she was for them.

And what happens? What thanks does he receive for this bold baring of his soul?

An unsuspecting Jonas steps out into the playground at the lunch recess and there, neatly ranged on the steps are just about all of the girls in Margrete’s class, killing themselves laughing and singing — no, not singing, bawling out: ‘ Help me if you can I’m feeling down ,’ and so on and so forth, and as if that weren’t enough, they proceed to trail after him in a body, screeching out the refrain over and over again, sending it echoing around the playground for everyone, including the teachers on playground duty and, indeed, the whole of Grorud, to hear.

Jonas refused to accept that there might be a connection, refused to believe that it was true, but it was: Margrete had read his letter out loud to her class, standing on a chair as if it were a huge joke: a letter in which he had left himself totally exposed, stripped bare, as it were. He walks around the playground with a troop of screeching girls on his tail, shooting sidelong glances at her, much as a wrongfully condemned man or a torture victim will eye his executioner and only then, seeing her standing alone on the steps, cruel and proud — she even meets his eye — does he see, bitterly disappointed and humiliated though he is, why he is so utterly infatuated with her. It is not something external, nothing like that at all. It is her inner radiance.