Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

There was nothing to beat Torggata Baths. With its copper, its marble and mahogany; with its elaborate tile-work, the exquisite patterns on floor and walls and, not least, its deckchairs, it was a real-life Utopia, open to all.

Then, in 1981, they closed the baths. From a purely personal point of view I am happy to say that I have no reason to become all het up about such a trivial matter, but I admit it is a mystery to me that more citizens of Oslo were not driven to protest against this move. A lot of people still bear a grudge against the yuppies, and Jonas hated them because they, or it would be truer to say, their spirit, reduced Torggata Baths to a collection of chic boutiques, chi-chi restaurants and snooty squash courts — and a scaled down Turkish bath that no one knew about. But the real crime, as I see it, is not what the yuppies did to the old interior but that the yuppie way of thinking, the fixation with money and indiscriminate profiteering, should have gained the upper hand in the city council, in the people’s own democratic decision-making processes. So it was in fact the people themselves, and not the yuppies, who showed just how short the distance is between two apparently opposite poles — a public baths and what it became: a limited partnership.

Jonas did not see any of this, but he saw how sad Buddha was. Jonas often took Buddha with him to Torggata, and he loved the place even more than Jonas. He did not think it was anywhere near so much fun to swim in the sterile new Nordtvedt Baths where the all-round experience offered by Torggata, a treat on many different planes, was supplanted by sheer function, pure keep-fit. Not that I have anything against that, but if you ask me, the closure of the old Torggata Baths represents the real divide between Oslo as a social democracy and Oslo as a town run according to the slick, one-dimensional principles of neo-capitalism. Until then, even the conservative parties had upheld the basic socialde-mocratic principles. I would go so far as to say that 1981 and the demise of Torggata Baths mark the end of a golden age for twentieth-century Norway inasmuch as social democracy was no longer an ideal and a set of values but a hollow system of government, little more than a vacuous accounting firm.

But I am supposed to be telling you about the first time Jonas met Gabriel Sand, and I am not so far off the track as one might think. You see, Gabriel invited Jonas into the most wonderful corner of all in the old Torggata baths: the changing rooms up on the galleries, little cubby-holes with walls of glazed tile and doors of fine reddish-brown mahogany that put Jonas in mind of the classy speedboats he saw down on Hvaler, belonging to shipowners or visitors from the island of Hankø, select summer haunt of Norway’s beau monde .

Jonas was feeling not a little bewitched by this man who had shown up out of the blue and saved his skin, and when Gabriel reached his own cubicle and motioned to Jonas to follow him — the man had not yet said one word — Jonas did not hesitate but stepped right inside the cramped changing room, where a pinstripe suit hung neatly from a hook, and sat down on the bench, after which Gabriel promptly closed the door by lowering that wooden bar, which some readers may remember, into place across it. Jonas was not at all afraid, though; there was something about this elderly man which inspired confidence, an air of authority — maybe it had something to do with the scar beneath one eyebrow, like a badge of honour, a sign of valour. On the bench between them stood a matte-green bottle and a small blue tin: ‘Foie gras’, Jonas read on the side of it. ‘Would you like some goose-liver pâté?’ It was the first time Gabriel had opened his mouth. ‘Some champagne?’ Jonas declined the offer, sat there in his swimming trunks looking round about him. There was something about Gabriel, his clothes, a gold pocket-watch, the food, a pack of Camel cigarettes, that made him feel as if he were in a little cabin, as if this man lived here, cramped, but cosy. ‘Have you ever noticed how mahogany has an air of the exotic about it?’ said Gabriel. ‘The very word “mahogany” makes you feel you could talk the language of Jamaica.’

‘What’s your name?’ Jonas asked.

‘That question is of little consequence to one who abhors all outward appearance but seeks the profound, the hidden, those things worth knowing.’ This answer seemed to echo around the cubicle, and Jonas thought it smacked of recitation. Gabriel smiled, and for the first time, in the dim light, Jonas caught the glint of his gold tooth.

‘My name is Gabriel,’ he said. ‘And I’m on the run from my wife.’ With that he launched into a long and occasionally frenzied tale that made Jonas laugh out loud more than once, about a dragon of a wife who forced him to seek sanctuary here, to enjoy forbidden fruit.

Then, having consumed the last of the pâté and the wine, he said, ‘So you guessed it, then.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Jonas.

‘That I’m a priest, albeit a retired one.’ Gabriel regarded him with what Jonas would have called ‘soft’ eyes and made a gesture that seemed, in the most amazing way, to extend the cubicle into a church and the food to a sacrament. Although Jonas did not realize it, he was witnessing acting at its best. It would be a long time before he discovered that Gabriel Sand was not a priest and neither did he have a wife. ‘Tell me. Have you tried diving from the five-metre here?’ Gabriel asked, changing the subject without any preamble.

Jonas told him about his fear of such an undertaking.

Gabriel opened the door: ‘Off you go and dive,’ he said, making it sound almost like a biblical commandment.

‘I can’t,’ said Jonas. ‘I really can’t.’

Quietly Gabriel explained that it was all psychological. Why couldn’t Jonas imagine that he was Samuel Lee, Olympic diving champion in 1948 and 1952? And again Gabriel broke into a fantastic account of how the Korean-American Sammy Lee, later to become a doctor and otologist, had taught himself to dive, all lies from beginning to end, but Jonas did not know that, he allowed himself be carried away, and who can blame him? That tale was the storytelling equivalent of a reverse dive with one and half somersaults and a triple twist.

‘I’m not Sammy Lee,’ said Jonas.

‘Oh, yes you are. What’s so unlikely in that? A lot more unlikely things have happened in this world than that you should, for three seconds, be Sammy Lee. Remember, your bodies are composed of exactly the same matter.’

Jonas walks up to the platform at one end of the hall, imagining that he is Dr Samuel Lee, two times Olympic champion in high diving. Samuel Lee at the age of fourteen. There is nothing to hinder him, the pool below is clear. Jonas covers the last few centimetres, curls his toes over the edge and imagines that he is Samuel Lee, senses the twists and somersaults and, not least, the joy of swooping , residing inside his body, in some chamber unknown to him. Jonas gazes down at the surface of the pool and imagines that he is Sammy Lee. He launches himself off in a perfect swallow dive; Sammy Lee could hardly have done it better. Not until he is in the pool, so overjoyed that he is gulping water, does Jonas become Jonas again.

‘Well done,’ said Gabriel moments later, when Jonas stood before him once more, like a soldier who has just carried out an order. ‘You’ve broken a barrier today. Dared to make a leap. We’re going to be good mates, that’s for sure.’ He took a long look at Jonas, nodded approvingly before saying, ‘By the way, I’ve got this lifeboat. I could do with a crewman to accompany me on a voyage 20,000 leagues under the sea.’