Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Jonas unfurled his length of fabric, fixed it to the rope and hoisted it out onto the pole. It looked great, really … exotic. What would people on the street below think? That a new embassy had been established on Ullevålsveien?

The flag fluttered beautifully in the breeze. It was green, with a white half-moon and four small stars.

Jonas slung his rucksack over his shoulder, slipped back out of the flag-loft door and produced a little sliver of metal which he wedged into the lock — an old and effective trick. In any case, it was a good solid door, not to be broken down just like that.

There were still twenty minutes to go until first period and more, much more, to be done before then.

Jonas Wergeland did not, in fact, have a fear of heights but a fear of outlooks or overviews. This was something he was also plagued with on his countless visits to Torggata Baths, where time and again he had sworn that he was going to dive from the five-metre platform only, just as often, to have to back down, feeling dizzy, almost nauseated. Which is to say it was not the height as such that petrified him, so that his feet refused to take those last few crucial centimetres towards the edge, but the image of the pool from above, that bird’s-eye view which turned the familiar surroundings into something alien and ghastly with all the detail of the hall erased and the people in the water suddenly being deprived of their facial features to become creatures of another sort, frogs executing meaningless movements.

During the summer they larked around in the lakes among the hills and forests just outside of town. But Nefertiti loved to swim in the winter, too, and so she had introduced Jonas to Torggata Baths. They used to take the yellow and green Grorud bus to the bridge at Møllergata and invariably popped round to the Central Fire Station to see whether the turntable ladder truck was out, or to Deichman’s Library if Nefertiti had books to return, before running on down to the baths. Nefertiti was like a seal in the water. Jonas would look on admiringly as she spun round like a wheel, dived straight to the bottom and cavorted about down there or when she did the most amazing somersaults from the springboard, breaking the surface perfectly, just like the lady on the Brynild liquorice pastilles pack.

Not to put too fine a point on it, as far as Jonas and Nefertiti were concerned, Torggata Baths was a holy place. The bus-stop in Grorud was just outside the grocer’s shop, so they always picked up a couple of bottles of Mekka, a brand of chocolate milk produced by the Norwegian United Dairies at that time, a brown bottle with a silver top, as if to illustrate the fact that they were setting out on a pilgrimage of sorts: that, like the Muslims, they considered the cleansing of the body a solemn affair. I know that to this day there are many people living along Trondheimsveien who remember those two children on the bus in the winter-time, sipping devoutly from their Mekka bottles and playing the odd Duke Ellington number on chromatic mouth organs, the most charming duets.

It was not only that the Torggata Baths had something of a religious air about them; throughout his life Jonas was to associate them with the concept of socialism owing to the sense of equality fostered by those chlorine-scented halls: the fact that no one could tell the difference between a Spartacus and a Caligula. Right from the time in the loft in the block of flats in Solhaug when Neferitit, wrapped in a sheet, had told him about the Romans and their thermae , those huge bathing establishments of which all that remains today are ruins that might have been tailor-made for open-air opera productions, Jonas had been fascinated by public baths. When you came right down to it there was something un-Norwegian about Torggata Baths. As Jonas was walking up the broad steps leading to the palatial entrance, the word that always came into his mind was ‘Europe’.

From another point of view, too, Torggata Baths was a memorable spot; it was here that Jonas met his mentor Gabriel Sand, during the winter when Jonas was in eighth grade to be precise.

As usual, Jonas had been hovering in the vicinity of the platform up in the gallery, desperately wanting to have a shot at diving off it, when a bunch of bigger lads came running up, almost as if they had sensed his fear, and made to chuck him off.

All of a sudden there he was, Gabriel Sand, a total stranger to Jonas, a most unlikely figure in a thick, black terrycloth robe with a white towel draped around his neck. He only had to look at the other boys for them to let go of Jonas and promptly beat a retreat, fearfully and apologetically, backing away, bowing and scraping, as if they had just been caught red-handed in the midst of some prank by their headmaster at school.

Jonas studies Gabriel long and hard before he thinks of something to say: ‘You know that priests are the servants of the imagination, that their power stems from their being able to make the masses believe the most incredible things?’

He waves a hand in the direction of Gabriel in his black robe topped off by the white towel and then towards the stairs down which the boys have disappeared, as though implying that he thinks Gabriel looks like a priest and that he must have worked a conjuring trick, some sleight of hand, like Mandrake the Magician, causing the riff-raff to vanish into thin air.

Even Gabriel could not know that Jonas was quoting here, or rather, had plucked a gem from the little red book in which he had begun to note down certain passages, in this instance some sentences from Charles Baudelaire’s Oeuvres posthumes et correspondances inédites , fortunately translated between the lines in Jonas’s edition. Nonetheless, Gabriel was impressed by a boy who could not have been any more than fourteen coming out with such a statement. I think I can safely say that Gabriel Sand would never have invited Jonas into his changing-room had it not been for that covert aphorism from Baudelaire.

I can see how, for example, people might forget the lovely El Dorado cinema rotunda, sadly demolished in 1985, and how it looked, but that anyone, even older residents of Oslo, could succeed in actually erasing the old interior of Torggata Baths from their memories is quite beyond me. I am happy to say that Jonas Wergeland never forgot that establishment but cherished it as one of his fondest memories. Later, when confronted with some fine construction, such as the stations of the Moscow underground, those sunken palaces, he would mutter to himself: ‘By Jove, this could almost be Torggata Baths.’

As soon as he set foot in the vestibule, with its ticket office like a little glasshouse built into the wall, he was faced with an interior fit for a king. But it was not until he was older that Jonas explored the secrets of its nethermost regions which, besides a medicinal department featuring mud-baths and massage, housed a little-frequented Turkish bath; three vaulted chambers filled with hot air, like three little chapels ranged one after the other, and a small pool room with four stout pillars, one in each corner; black floor and white marble on the walls. This was a place where for next to nothing every Norwegian could transcend time and space and be ruler of the world for a day.

As a small boy, Jonas frequented the first and second floors — not only the bathhouse and the big pool, that vast colonnaded hall with the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling and daylight streaming in through the tall windows on either side through which, in the afternoons, the sunlight fell straight onto the green surface of the water — but also, what seemed to him at that time nothing short of a miracle: the sauna. Jonas Wergeland had never seen a sauna before he visited Torggata baths, and for him, with the chill that never seemed to leave his bones, it was a blessing — that was the very word that popped into his head — to be able to sit there, in a golden-yellow sauna, in the middle of winter, in Oslo, and sweat and get really warm ‘right to the soul’, as he said to himself. Afterwards he could take himself off to a cooling-down room which had showers and a nice little pool, and at the side of this pool — in front of the two marble massage benches in the alcove further back — there was, wonder of wonders, a copy of a small statue from Florence, no less: a boy holding a dolphin which spouted a jet of water into the pool. Finally one could retire to the rest room, settle back in a deckchair and flick through a newspaper, take a breather before getting dressed.