Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘Want to feel my yoni?’ yells one of the boldest girls, eliciting a barrage of delighted giggles from her sisters. Jonas squirmed his way through the lunch recess, walking an endless gauntlet of smirking faces. For a whole week, people would burst out laughing whenever he so much as showed his face.

Things did not look as if they could get any worse. But they could, and they did. Jonas learned what it felt like to be kicked when you are down: Margrete went away. She just disappeared. It was one thing to call it off, quite another to go away. All hope definitively gone, Jonas felt in acute need of a heart transplant.

What do you do when you are desperate?

You can take yourself off to Timbuktu, but you can also kill your mother’s seven lovers.

Is such a thing possible? Jonas’s mother with seven lovers? Was that why she went around with that crooked little smile on her face, looking as though she knew something no one else knew? Bear in mind that this was in the sixties, in Norway, Oslo, Solhaug: a few score families and everybody as good as knowing everybody else’s business; a community so transparent that the walls might have been made of glass, where each and every household knew about it the minute Mrs Bogerud received a letter from Hong Kong or the Myhres went to the length of acquiring something as unbelievably extravagant as a toaster. Bear in mind, too, that Jonas’s mother, Åse Hansen was a no-nonsense sort of a woman with both feet planted firmly on the ground and that she worked — although I’m not sure whether I mentioned it — for the most prosaic of companies, Grorud Ironmongers Ltd, a rock-solid concern manufacturing hardware in brass and steel under the ambitious leadership of the Bratz brothers, one of whom even held the post of Minister for Trade and Industry for a while — down by the station, and there she stood on an assembly line, coming into daily contact with such concrete items as door hinges, doorknobs and Tip Tight window fastenings. How did all this square with anything as unheard of as a whole bevy of lovers?

It was true. Jonas’s mother did have seven ardent lovers and all thanks to her brother, Uncle Lauritz. Jonas’s only recollection of his uncle was of a rather exotic character, a man in a dark-blue uniform with four gold stripes on his sleeves, a fragrant-smelling figure with sleek black hair, a monsoon, an eminently enigmatic wind which blew in across the temperate climate of their everyday life from time to time. Uncle Lauritz, jazz-lover, belonged to that legendary generation of pilots trained in Canada who served in World War II before going on to join the Norwegian national airline DNL, later to become part of SAS. Every now and again, when the occasion called for it, Uncle Lauritz had presented Jonas’s father with a bottle of aftershave lotion — different brands, all with names redolent of southern climes or heroic myths — the contents of which his father used only sparingly, possibly because he set such great store by them, or because aftershave was not his style. So they were left to sit on a shelf in the tall old-fashioned oak cabinet in the bathroom year after year, long after Uncle Lauritz had ceased to blow in over Grorud like some exotic wind: seven beautiful bottles, each displaying its own fine lines and containing its own golden and distinct perfumed liquid.

As a boy, one of Jonas’s favourite ploys when he went to the grocer’s with his mother was to sneak open the bottles of rum, vanilla and almond essence and sniff their delicious aromas as avidly as any hopeless slave to opium. Likewise, he often stood and admired the seven bottles in the bathroom cabinet, running his fingers over their elegant lines, picturing them to himself as elementary forms of some sort as he unscrewed the tops and inhaled their scents. I do not propose to launch into a long spiel concerning the evanescent nature of scent, nor to shake anyone’s belief in the objectivity of our sense of smell by citing the surprisingly varied preferences shown in different eras and by different peoples where perfumes are concerned, let me simply say that Jonas thought they smelled — oh, quite heavenly, so heavenly that the story of the three wise men and the word ‘myrrh’ automatically sprang to mind. The seven bottles of imported aftershave lotion were also costly by the standards of the day, amounting to little short of a treasure house in a bathroom belonging to perfectly ordinary, hard-working social democrats.

Only on special occasions, those times when he shaved again in the evening, did Jonas’s father splash a few drops on his cheeks, selecting one of the bottles on the shelf at random, and so it came about that his mother used to joke to the children that she had seven different lovers who came to her and whom she could only tell apart in the darkness by their scent. ‘Last night I had a visit from Alfredo from Capri,’ she might say at the breakfast table, smiling her crooked smile. Jonas always thought how wonderful it must be … to be seduced, night after night, by a different scent each time.

We all know how traumatic puberty can be. Personally, I rather like this contrivance on the part of Mother Nature and am frequently amused by what people are liable to say or do during this period, not least in terms of irrational rebellious acts. All too many individuals are too quick to shrug off the irreplaceable perspectives on life afforded by this hormonally charged time — the most ungrateful of them even go so far as to consider the phase as a necessary evil. In any event, Jonas Wergeland also committed his share of rebellious acts during puberty and one of the earliest of these, the one closest to my own heart, due to its shocking, almost primitive originality, happened to involve his mother’s seven lovers.

Without any warning, Margrete had vanished without trace, and eventually Jonas discovered the reason why: she had gone abroad. Her father the diplomat, Gjermund Boeck, had been assigned to a new post, on the other side of the world no less. This at least provided Jonas with a sorely needed scapegoat: Margrete’s father. Had it not been for him, blasted fiend that he was, Jonas would at least have been able to see Margrete. To say that Jonas hated Gjermund Boeck merely scrapes the surface of his volcano of emotions. As a last cruel cut, Jonas found out about Mr Boeck’s ‘kidnapping’ as he referred to it in his mind, just as the World Skiing Championships were getting under way in Oslo, a competition in which another Gjermund, namely Gjermund Eggen, was to become a new national hero, winning three gold medals and ensuring that for months afterwards, Jonas could not go anywhere without hearing or seeing that despised Christian name, even in an advertisement for root beer.

During this time, while Jonas was wandering about, not with a thorn in his flesh but with a thorn in his heart, his parents could have shown a little more consideration. Jonas had, as I have said, a wonderful father, and there never was a wiser mother than Åse Hansen; besides which, there was that crooked little smile of hers, adding to everything, joys as well as sorrows, the essential, ironic grain of salt. But faced with Jonas’s wretchedness, they were at a complete loss, which may explain their tactlessness and why, one evening as Jonas was standing in the bathroom doorway his father let fly a thoughtless remark from his chair in the living: ‘Take it easy, Jonas, you’ll soon forget her, I’m sure.’ Just at that moment his mother happened to come in from the kitchen. At sight of her son’s pale drawn face, she almost lost her temper and came out with a cliché which, by the very fact of it being a cliché, hurt Jonas that much more deeply: ‘Pull yourself together, boy! Nobody ever died of a broken heart!’

I admit that mothers are a mystery to me, not least their knack for making the most infamous remarks in delicate situations where really the only thing to do is to tread carefully and remember that silence is golden: a knack that might almost be likened to the sow’s tendency to eat her own young. Neither his mother nor his father really understood Jonas’s inner turmoil at all; they had, in other words, forgotten their own adolescence, the peaks and the abysses. They simply did not see that for a thirteen-year-old, losing someone whose hand you could hold, someone to press their lips against yours, was a disaster on a par with World War I; they did not realize that an entire inner landscape had been laid waste, suddenly and senselessly.