Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

At one point during the party, while he was standing listening to a brief lecture, quite brilliant, on the extent to which a democratic system could ever gain control of the economic market forces, Jonas was struck by a sense of being in solitary confinement, or a sort of prison camp, like the one at Grini during the war, where all the leaders of the future sat biding their time while madmen played havoc with the country.

On the return of Anne B.’s parents — they, too, Labour supporters, Jonas learned — they had a drink with the young people, a drink which Mr B. mixed in a cocktail shaker, and again stayed for half an hour of polite conversation before retiring to the first floor. Immediately afterwards, as her guests were starting to leave, Anne B. asked Jonas if he would not stay behind, in fact she told him straight out that she would like him to spend the night there — in her bed. She did not beat about the bush; her gaze did not waver. Jonas muttered something about her parents, but she said it was okay with her parents. It was okay with her parents? Jonas repeated incredulously. ‘And I’m on the Pill, of course,’ said Anne B. ‘Mum advised me to start taking it last year.’ As I say, Jonas was here faced with a side of Norwegian society he had not known existed: second and third generation Labour supporters, fathers who mixed their drinks in a shaker and mothers who could coolly tell their seventeen-year-old daughters that they ought to consider using contraception.

So Jonas stayed. And when he climbed into her bed, naked, she boldly proceeded to stroke his body while she went on talking, remarking on the party guests, or commenting on what he had said about doing great things in a country of small men, saying that it was well said, that that was what she liked about him, that he could come out with such statements, even though she didn’t agree, the Scandinavian society had to be regarded as a social experiment, nowhere near finished. Anne B. carried on talking in this vein, one might almost say arguing, while she caressed him, stroking his skin, as if they were two sides of the same coin, caresses both, and Jonas had nothing against this, it did not get in the way of anything at all, just made it that much more erotic. She had, he noticed, a huge yoni; one by one his fingers slid inside it as he fondled her, an elephant yoni, large and wet like an open mouth, but he had no difficulty in filling her when she sat astride him, a position she choose both to illustrate her freedom of will, her deliberate decision on that particular night to choose him, and because she wanted to set the pace, starting out slowly and lingeringly, as if she could not quite believe that she had actually found a cock that could fill her completely; but then she was not to know that Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis, a penis that could become thicker or thinner, shorter or longer as required, like a zoom lens; she was not to know that Jonas Wergeland could fill any vagina exactly as that vagina longed to be filled, perfectly, to give a pleasure second to none, so to begin with she moved slowly, tentatively, still talking all the while, pursuing her line of argument, which involved a number of objections to Jonas’s quote from John Stuart Mill and which amounted, on the whole, to a discourse on finding the right balance , she said, accentuating the word ‘balance’ first one way, then another, while she rocked back and forth on top of him, soon starting to ride him faster and faster, bearing down harder, and he felt something happening to his body, felt it opening up, becoming receptive to something or other, something that was starting to take shape inside his head, new ideas, filling him with energy, even as she was talking to him and making love to him, both at once, and he loved it, he loved her voice, that slightly husky voice, as if she were forever talking, never gave her voice a rest, he loved the stream of words, the long sentences in which sub-clauses wove in and out of sub-clauses, while she never once lost the main thread of the sentence; he felt his own thoughts starting to turn in the same insistent way, the same way as she was making love to him, short, sharp thrusts alternating with longer, more rhythmic strokes, breathtakingly wonderful and stimulating, for her too, and as she approached a climax she could no longer keep her sentences in order, a fact which manifested itself first of all in her statements, in the way that her sub-clauses no longer hung together; and thereafter became more and more marked by sudden leaps and unfinished sentences, running out into disconnected preambles and such rhetorical expressions as ‘it is resoundingly clear’ and ‘quite the reverse’ until at last she was reduced to firing off single words and, in the long pauses between, her pelvis worked more and more frenetically until she stiffened with something that reached him only as a little gasp escaping her lips, a barely audible exclamation mark, after which he drove inside her as if giving her a standing ovation, as much for her long, oratorical performance as for the exceptionally fast, almost relentless, pace at which she had made love to him. And I hardly need add that it was this same strong-willed woman who — after changing her surname and taking her degree in socio-economics, it’s true — is now the leader of her party; a woman who, I warrant you, will leave behind her not a pigeon dropping, but an enduring memorial, a towering monument in Norwegian politics.

Not long after the party at Anne B’s, Jonas noticed that his manner, when discussing political issues, was different, smoother somehow, the words seemed to simply flow from his lips as if a totally new rhetorical organ had taken up residence inside him and was now demanding to be heard. For someone who had never been very good at putting his thoughts into words, suddenly he had a mind that worked like lightning — he could plan what he was going to say later in his argumentation even while he was actually making a point — and not only that, he found he had such a fantastic grasp of the actual sentence construction that he could easily depart from his main sentence and embroil himself in an intricate web of sub-clauses, only then — elegantly and without losing the thread for a second, with fresh cogency and weight, so it seemed — to complete his main sentence, like snapping shut a heavy lock. Jonas Wergeland overpowered others with such sentences, throwing out coils of words like a lasso with which he could not only catch and rope them in but also force them to the ground and bind them hand and foot.

I would like to stress that this discovery of other sides of himself did not, as some might think, have anything to do with sucking up a talent from another person, to allude, notwithstanding, to the requisite sexual element. It was much more as though Jonas Wergeland were quite naturally open to a continual metamorphosis, or rather: expansion. Jonas knew, especially after he met Gabriel Sand, that he was many people and the women he met merely helped him, by dint of a sort of hook-up, to give vent to these other sides of his character — including those he had not been aware of before. Often this new skill would create a need; at other times it turned out to be most opportune, as was the case with Jonas’s new command of language, which he had plenty of opportunity to display in the hours following his demonstration on behalf of the Comoro Islands.

When the students streamed out into the schoolyard after the first period, one of the fire department’s splendid turntable ladder trucks was just swinging in through the gates. It looked more dramatic than it was. There was no fire at the Cathedral School, although symbolically speaking one could perhaps say that the fire brigade had been called out by one of those ‘burning hearts’ of which the poet speaks; there was a fire on a flagpole at the Cathedral School. Jonas had also jammed the bolt on the skylight, and the rector, in a blend of desperation and rage, had called the Central Fire Station on Arne Garborgs plass and explained his problem; and since one has to assume that there were no other fires, real fires, raging elsewhere in the city and since it was not that far away, the duty officers agreed to do him this ‘favour’ and promptly dispatched a turntable ladder truck to the school to bring down the two flags, both the one on the pole jutting out over Ullevålsveien and the one on the cable above the schoolyard — ‘those pirate flags’ as the rector put it as if buccaneers had made an attempt to board his school.