Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The film team were now in Scoresbysund, further down the coast, where they had been taking shots of the Danish base, the opposite pole in this dispute. And it was here, in this small hunting and fishing community with its little, red-painted wooden houses and racks draped with all manner of hides hung to dry, a sort of polar Timbuktu inhabited by Inuits, Danish troops and several hundred howling dogs straining at stout tethers, in a muddy street, that Jonas ran into Jørn Rasmussen, an elderly, one-time hunter now working for the Greenland Trade Department. And since this unexpected friendship was struck up, almost symbolically just as the ice on the fjord began to break up — the high point of the year — Jørn Rasmussen promptly suggested, nay, more or less demanded, that Jonas should come with him to one of the sealer’s huts up the fjord. And all credit to Jonas Wergeland, he never let such a chance pass him by. So the team left by helicopter for Mestersvig, to take a Twin Otter from there to Iceland, while Jonas stayed on for a few more days as a guest of the Dane.

Just twenty-four hours later, Jonas was sitting in a tiny sealer’s hut in the heart of the East Greenland national park, at the mouth of one of the narrow arms of the fjord. They had arrived there in a boat that looked like a shark, sailing between the ice floes with the sea birds whirling overhead. To begin with, the country around then had been wide and open, but then another landscape hove in sight; one which, to put it mildly, Jonas would never forget: white, black and blue. Ice, rock and sea. A landscape so monumental and at the same time so desolate and so elementary that it reminded Jonas — of all things — of a desert, not least because of the stark light. Again he had a feeling of having reached some outer limit, the very periphery of the humanly possible, or the beginning of something totally alien to him. The glaciers especially, plunging into the sea, the chill breath from a sheer wall of blue ice, made him shudder, even while he felt drawn to it, as if the blue cast itself held some vital secret.

Jonas Wergeland found himself in the heart of the wildest landscape he had ever seen. The simple wooden hut lay a hundred metres from the beach and was totally covered in tar-paper, both roof and walls. Behind the hut the mountain reared straight up 1,000 metres into the air, and beyond it jagged rugged peaks soared to 2,000 metres. Despite the primitive conditions, Jonas felt happy there from the word go. He was to spend two whole days and nights out here in the wilderness, in a borrowed sleeping-bag, together with Jørn Rasmussen, some kegs of aquavit and, not least, several kilos of freshly boiled seal-meat, large chunks of meat running with fat and juices, served steaming hot on dented tin plates — with no other accompaniment but salt and mustard.

On their first morning there, Rasmussen stepped outside and opened a box that had aroused Jonas’s curiosity early on. Out came, of all things, a portable battery-operated stereo system complete with two speakers, an anachronistic sight when set against the rude hut and the timeless terrain. This was a ritual, the Dane explained while he mounted the system on the wall of the hut: each year when the ice in the fjord broke up he came here. And what did he do? Jonas asked. Just a minute, Rasmussen said, pulling a tape out of his anorak pocket. The weather was beautiful, they had had fine weather for some time, a permanent ridge of high pressure and dazzlingly bright all day long.

All at once the air was filled with the sound of opera music. Mighty music. And the strange thing, thought Jonas, was that this music — majestic, in many ways wild — suited, nay, echoed the landscape. And suddenly the country round about them seemed like a stage-set, the whole of this vast landscape had about it something of the unreality and beauty of a stage, artificially lit and with scenery built on illusions. They sat with their backs against the wall of the hut, each on his battered chair and listened to opera. They were well wrapped up, and the sun was heating up nicely. Not far from them, about a kilometre away, there was a glacier, with an icefall of at least twenty metres, plummeting straight down into the sea. Behind it lay a couple of nunataks, like two gigantic black horns on the glacier’s smooth, snow-white brow. They sat listening to opera music and saw how the ice glittered, every shade of white and blue. Jonas had been seized by his old dread of ice, of being crushed by ice, the minute he caught sight of Eastern Greenland from the plane, but the fear had gradually faded and now he could rest his eyes on the wall of ice without the thought of hell once crossing his mind. Rasmussen looked at Jonas, nodded, smiled, raised a cup of black coffee chased with a dash of something stronger. Jonas recognized the music. It was Wagner — ‘what else?’ he thought. It was Wagner, Tristan and Isolde , and it was Kirsten Flagstad singing her celebrated Liebestod , Kirsten Flagstad’s voice that was being hurled across the landscape at the all-embracing ice-cap and at the icefall rearing straight out of the fjord directly in front of them, where they sat with their backs against the tar-paper of the hut wall, with woollen plaids over their legs and warming cups of coffee in their hands. ‘I knew you’d like it,’ said Rasmussen. ‘That’s why I invited you.’

And then it happened: the glacier right in front of them calved. A colossal, an unbelievably huge chunk simply broke off and slid into the sea, sending spray shooting high into the air. It all happened with such ineffable slowness that they had time to take it in, to comprehend and memorize the shock, and only after the sight had, as it were, been absorbed, did the sound reach their ears, like a clap of thunder increasing in volume behind Kirsten Flagstad’s voice and Wagner’s music, a tremendous roar and an echo that reverberated off the mountainsides. Jonas had the distinct impression, no, he was positive that it was Kirsten Flagstad’s voice — and not the sun or the surging of the sea — that had sliced off this massive chunk of ice; that Kirsten Flagstad’s voice had sent a shiver running through it, causing the glacier to calve out of sheer delight.

Only later, when the music had been turned off and they were sitting there with their backs to the wall of the hut, surrounded by a silence so palpable that it was in itself an experience, did Jonas ask Rasmussen why exactly he had played Tristan and Isolde . It was clear to Jonas that this was the role that had been assigned to him, that he was supposed to ask, just at this moment, and then had to listen, and he was not meant to say anything, because Rasmussen simply needed to tell this story at regular intervals, about once a year, and preferably around the time when the glaciers were calving, so he could say that it was love that split the ice apart and because this was the most uplifting time of the year and, hence, the best time for anyone wishing to contemplate their sad fate, shed a tear or two and pour an extra drop of aquavit into their coffee. This was how Jonas Wergeland heard his story, while they sat side by side, leaning back against the wall of the hut, with their eyes on the enormous iceberg slowly drifting down the fjord like another Flying Dutchman ; a story so heartbreaking and in many ways so unlikely that I reserve the right to remain silent — some stories are even sadder than the myth of Tristan and Isolde. In any event, Rasmussen’s story ended with a self-imposed hermit-like existence, ‘in a climate as cold as the chill that struck at my heart,’ as he put it, where not even the most death-defying Valkyrie riding across the ice with nine semi-wild huskies harnessed to the sled could make him forget.

‘I heard Kirsten Flagstad at the Metropolitan in ’52,’ he said. ‘I’ve never wept as much.’