Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Now Jonas’s curiosity was well and truly aroused. I should also say that Jonas was no more racially prejudiced than most Norwegians and besides, one of his heroes, Duke Ellington was a coloured American. But there was something about the lips of this man — an honest-to-goodness Bantu, if I may say so — that put him far closer to the epitome of the term ‘Negro’: they were big, absolutely enormous, like a caricature.

‘What are you doing in Norway?’ Jonas asked in English. ‘Are you a sportsman?’ The last summer Olympics were still fresh in Jonas’s mind with memories of Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’s black, gloved fists held high and Bob Beamons’s unbelievable long jumps.

The man shook his head. ‘Are you a jazz musician?’ Jonas asked, not without some hope.

‘I’m a refugee.’

‘Are you from Africa?’

The man laughed. ‘Africa is a big place,’ he said.

‘From Biafra?’ Thanks to the nightmarish pictures that had been in the news in recent years, this was one of the few African countries that Jonas could name.

‘An older struggle,’ the man replied.

At this point Jonas gave up, although even with his lack of interest in international conflicts, he might have come up with the answer had he given it a bit of thought. All he saw was a Negro, and to him a Negro meant an African, and to him Africa was Africa, not a collection of different countries. Africa was one big country inhabited by black Negroes who all looked alike.

The man explained politely that he came from South Africa but that, after having been imprisoned for some years, he had run away and lived for a while in Dar-Es-Salaam before he was given the chance to come to Norway. He had been offered a place at university here, he explained, a scholarship. He was studying medicine — yes, medicine, he repeated when he saw the expression on Jonas’s face, in a way that made Jonas realize that he must have to tell everyone twice. Now he was on his way to Bergen to visit friends — maybe the same people who had given him the sweater, which he was now wearing, Jonas thought, purely out of politeness.

It was this man, whose name was Isaac and who today — although Jonas does not know it — is a well-known figure in the United Nations, who, in the course of a long conversation, not without the odd neurotic note to it, had happened to mention the Comoro Islands to Jonas, one of his forefathers having hailed from there. This was just by the way, a word, a name tossed into a lengthy conversation covering subjects that were considerably more grim and disturbing, a conversation in which Jonas learned for the first time of incidents and atrocities which have since been described so often, to diminishing effect, that most people have become totally immune to them. But thanks to Jonas’s sense for detail and, even more so, to his utter ignorance of Les Comores — he actually thought this was a place on the African mainland — he had remembered the islands and subsequently picked up odd bits and pieces of information here and there until eventually he knew quite a bit about the country.

This was, however, a long-term result of the meeting with Isaac. Initially, what Jonas could not get out of his mind was the sight of this African, tricked out in a Norwegian sweater, sitting on a Norwegian train and gazing in disbelief, or rapture, out of the window at a Norwegian pine forest, murmuring that ‘even the woods are safe here’ as if he could hardly believe his eyes or his senses.

There is an old literary ploy that involves allowing one’s own country to be depicted by foreigners. For example by putting a Chinese in Berlin and having this Chinese describe life in Berlin so that everything is suddenly seen with a fresh eye often from such an alien perspective that familiar things appear quite laughable. And for Jonas Wergeland that one sentence, ‘Even the woods are safe here’, had just such an impact, one that deserved a whole book to itself. It was not only laughable; it was shocking.

Even before he alighted from the train in Bergen — in the sunshine, just to underline what an almost unnaturally idyllic place Norway was — where the Negro, Isaac that is, would stand for a long time simply peering round about him, out over the fjord, up at the mountains, in that gaudy sweater, with the fur hat pulled well down over his ears, Jonas knew that he would never be able to imagine what life was like in the continent from which his travelling companion came or understand one whit of his predicament: having to flee from country to country, never feeling safe, knowing that you could be shot or thrown into prison any time at all, for anything at all, and that once you were in prison the worst imaginable evil could befall you. Or you might escape being shot or thrown into prison only to starve to death instead. And if you chose to run off into the forest, into the jungle or bush, you were not a lot safer, what with bloodthirsty animals, snakes, venomous insects — in fact a natural world that was in itself murderous, a sort of impenetrability.

It suddenly dawned on Jonas Wergeland — and not only because the sun was shining on Bergen or because a certain area of that town happened to go by that name — that he was living in a paradise. It may sound absurd, to think that a young Norwegian should not have tumbled to this fact before now, but very few young Norwegians are aware of it at all, ever. Only then, at the thought of an African clad in a travesty of a Norwegian sweater and an incongruous fur hat, gazing at a pine forest — something which had never held any emotional associations for Jonas — while shaking his head and murmuring ‘Even the woods are safe here’, did Jonas Wergeland realize what an incredibly safe country Norway is, what a bewilderingly secure, quite incomprehensibly safe country he inhabited. All at once Jonas Wergeland saw that he lived in a land so inherently safe that anyone who had ever been in danger simply would not believe it. And, Jonas thought later, maybe that was the real reason why the Negro had pulled his fur hat, that enormous bear’s twat, closer about his head: not because it was cold but in order to keep his wits about him. In Norway you could, by accident of course, be run over by a truck, it’s true, but you could stroll into the densest forest or out into what Norwegians describe as their wildest wilds and feel sure that no harm would come to you. The most dangerous thing in a Norwegian forest was the adder, its bite about as lethal as a mosquito’s.

There were times, when out travelling, that Jonas neglected to say that he lived in Norway — which is to say in that place so totally devoid of real need and real insecurity. There were times abroad, if the situation were critical or catastrophic enough, when Jonas Wergeland had to resort to a lot of double-talk to save disclosing his nationality.

As far as that goes, Jonas Wergeland could have hoisted any flag at all over the schoolyard — as long as it came from a country that was not a part of the West.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way, do they fit together at all?

They had finished filming, and Jonas could tell right away that the shots from the area around Myggbukta would be good: the old, derelict sealing and weather station, huts lined inside with musk-ox hides, and of course the spectacular landscape round about; in fact just being confronted with that Arctic landscape in the comfort of your own living-room would be enough to take your breath away. The purpose of the shoot had been to afford a glimpse of a sealer’s life, and after a hectic week’s filming the NRK team had footage of just about everything: dog teams, with a camera fixed low down on the sled; hares, foxes, musk ox, seal, walrus — the only thing lacking was a polar bear. This sequence was to form part of a programme on the all but forgotten annexation of Eastern Greenland by Norway in the early thirties, a programme which caused a justifiable stir and gave rise to much, occasionally heated, debate in the press when it was shown on Norwegian television screens — understandably, seeing that the Norwegian people have every reason to want to forget this embarrassing episode, an example of a brand of polar imperialism to which Norway has never cared to admit. Not unexpectedly, it ended in bitter defeat for the Norwegians when the case was brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.