Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘You mean you heard her sing just after?’ Jonas asked, his eyes fixed on the iceberg as it floated off over the smooth waters of the fjord, chiselled as a sculpture, marble on mirror.

‘A week later. I had two tickets, but I had to go alone.’

‘And then you came here?’

‘Then I came here.’

Jonas Wergeland would later cherish the theory, in his heart of hearts, that it must have been Kirsten Flagstad’s voice, possibly certain overtones in it, that had drawn the polar bear to it, seeing that it happened that very same evening, when he had to make a visit to the toilet, and when the chances of running into a bear at that time of year, in that region, were microscopic. Rasmussen had not even told him to remember the Mauser, normally as obvious an accessory as a toilet roll.

It was a typical outdoor privy, apart from the fact that the door was missing. As far as Jonas was concerned that was all to the good, he could sit and look out at the shore and the fjord just as he had done as a boy at his grandfather’s place on Hvaler. It was bright as day outside, totally calm, and the landscape suffused with colours the like of which he had never seen before: supernatural hues. Out on the fjord drifted icebergs, miniature palaces. He could not help but think of Kittelsen’s picture in the bathroom at home; ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Just a few seconds later, as he was getting up from the toilet, he heard a shuffling sound and before he had time to think that it might be a fox, a broad — a gigantic — head appeared in the doorway, filling it completely. It was a polar bear. Jonas could not believe that a polar bear could move so quietly.

I think I can say — and I have given this a lot of thought — that Jonas Wergeland was faced here with the most dangerous opponent of his life. Jonas Wergeland stood with his trousers round his ankles, nose to nose with a polar bear. Tuaregs are one thing; a massive animal, half a ton of it, with eyeteeth befitting the biggest carnivore on dry land, is something else again. Jonas had heard — they heard a lot of stories during the shoot — that the polar bear was totally unpredictable at close quarters, that nine times out of ten it would attack; it has to be a long way off if you are to have any chance of scaring it away. But this polar bear was close, really close. Jonas tried, of all things, to look it straight in the eye. The polar bear tilted its head slightly, unsure. Suddenly it snapped its teeth together, five or six quick, dry snaps. If there were one time in Jonas Wergeland’s life when you could employ the phrase ‘and his blood froze’, this would be it. But at the same time he was thinking, because his mind was running the whole time, in wild leaps and little circles, how quickly things could happen; you sit on the toilet, you take a crap, you look out over the shore and the fjord, for once you take time to enjoy being alive — and then you’re dead.

The polar bear stretched its neck all the way through the door, and this Jonas saw, as with the glacier calving, in ultra slow motion; or as when he used the remote control to flick through sequences in video films, studying certain scenes frame by frame and always being amazed by how many shots there were; now not only did he see a polar bear’s head coming at him, he saw the black nose, the expressionless, coal-black eyes, saw the ears — like a teddy bear’s, the thought flashed through his mind — saw every hair in the fur around its snout but also, or at one and the same time, he saw the landscape behind it: the shore, the fjord, the blocks and floes of ice — and again, like marble over a mirrored surface, infinitely beautiful — the mountains, the colours, those unbelievable pastel hues, and not only that, but also the wooden planks around the door, how weather-beaten they were, how big the cracks were, the hole where a knot had fallen out, a hole that drew the eye, giving him the urge — as the last thing he did — to put his eye to that aperture, to see what slice of life this would afford him, but instead what Jonas saw was the black snout and that mouth closing in on his crotch, because that was exactly what the polar bear was aiming at, and a second later Jonas actually felt its snout nudge his penis. For one fleeting moment, for the first and only time in his life, Jonas experienced that phenomenon which the late, great Sigmund Freud expended so much of his energy and imagination on explaining: the fear of castration.

The polar bear blew down its nose, a snort that struck Jonas as sounding so loud in the silence that the word ‘inny-dick’ which they had used to shout at one another in fun as kids, suddenly became a reality. On the point of passing out, Jonas nonetheless managed to register that the polar bear had pulled back, turned round and was galloping off towards the beach. Jonas could hardly believe what his eyes were telling him: that the polar bear was running away. He thought this must be something he was seeing through a knothole on the other side of death’s door, the outcome of some sort of parallel occurrence: an alternative course of events that never actually took place. Jonas stood with his trousers round his ankles and watched the polar bear bounding down to the beach, turning its head to look at him every now and again before it jumped into the water and swam off. Jonas followed it with his eyes until he could no longer see it between the icebergs, marble gliding over a mirrored surface.

Only then did he dare to look down at his benumbed body as if he could not believe that his member was still intact. For years Jonas would wonder what could have scared the bear away, and he thought to begin with that it must have had something to do with his penis’s magic quality, a distinct odour. Later he came to the conclusion that the polar bear had spared him quite simply because it saw that they were brothers; they were both nomads.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? What determines the course of a life?

Two months after Jonas returned safe and sound to Norway, Margrete discovered to her surprise that she was pregnant, even though she had been using contraception. Jonas felt sure that the polar bear must have scared extra life into his sperm cells, enabling them to defy all resistance.

Aunt Laura’s flat looked like a bazaar. Where the walls were not covered in oriental rugs they were hung with objects made of copper and brass, and crawling around the floor was a leopard tortoise with little gems affixed to its shell. Jonas had the feeling that the tortoise was forever going round in circles and that time stood still at Aunt Laura’s.

When Jonas paid her a visit, his aunt would serve teas with names he never could remember and saw him settled among the pile of cushions on the sofa before she took her own seat at the far end of the room, in the corner that bristled with buffers and gas cylinders and draw-plates and plate rollers, not to mention a mysterious old safe. Jonas loved to sneak peeks at the bench at which his aunt sat and worked as she talked, as if the things she shaped out of gold and silver and the stories she told were all part of the same process.

Aunt Laura often spoke of her travels, and as time went on Jonas found that, once again, the sequence of cause and effect had become mixed up. His aunt did not go out travelling, as he had first thought, because of the rugs; it would be truer to say that the travelling was the cause; the rugs were merely an excuse. ‘My rugs have taken me all around the world,’ his aunt would say or: ‘These rugs form forty doors and every rug opens the door onto a journey.’ But Jonas saw no contradiction in this because when you came right down to it, as with the rugs, his aunt’s travels represented a search for stories — indeed, they made a grand story in themselves.