Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Jonas was not only making faces, he could virtually feel his own testicles smarting. Nonetheless, for the first time he perceived a connection between his aunt’s collection of penises and their aspects, those sketchbooks, and her jewellery, because it was clear that in some way all of those different organs, both with and without rings, inspired her.

‘You know the penis is a piece of jewellery,’ Aunt Laura said. ‘These men have simply taken that to its logical conclusion. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the cock is a work of art.’

As I say, Aunt Laura was not one for mincing her words.

Through all his comings and goings in the flat in Tøyen, Jonas gradually came to see that not only the rugs and the travelling but also these penises amounted to one and the same thing. As with the rugs and the travelling, when you came right down to it, this collection of penises also testified to the search for a good tale. The idea that the penis truly did contain a story, possibly concerning the secret of sexuality, had often occurred to Jonas when his aunt sat next to him on the sofa and showed him, with a pencil held between fingers adorned with spirals of gold, how this simple form harboured no end of possibilities.

His aunt switched off the lamp at the back of the room. She was finished working, and Jonas was allowed to see the result. On the bench was a silver cylinder, rounded at one end, sitting on a base of oxidized copper, or rather: you had to slide the base over the cylinder. No one needed to tell Jonas that he was looking at a lingam and a yoni. ‘But take a closer look,’ his aunt said. ‘See what you can do with the cylinder.’ And this was the surprise, because when Jonas lifted off the top, he found what looked like a large diamond, though it was in fact a chunk of crystal, cut into an oval, and faceted. Jonas tilted it and saw how beautifully the dim light was refracted by the glass as if through a prism. ‘Give it a shake,’ Aunt Laura said, her blood-red lips smiling eagerly. When Jonas shook the crystal, out slid four little feet and a head of gold, in much the same way as one of those Transformer toys that would appear in the shops a few decades later, and suddenly Jonas realized what it was: a turtle. He laughed. ‘Great stuff, Auntie!’

‘This is my turtle,’ said Aunt Laura, kissing him on the cheek. ‘The turtle that lies at the bottom of everything.’

Jonas stood there admiring his aunt’s work, popping the cylinder through the copper base, noting how neatly they slotted together, taking the top off the silver cylinder, shaking the crystal. Amazing. A silver penis. Ejaculating a turtle with a golden head. And only then — with that silver cylinder and crystal turtle in his hand — did Jonas understand what a lovely, nay, nigh-on perfect story this was. As if all of his aunt’s rugs and travels had been shaped, reworked into a piece of jewellery.

Later, Jonas lay back down on the sofa, in the pile of soft cushions, with a cup of sweet-scented tea on the table next to him. His aunt moved about the room, tidying up, bracelets jingling; she put the sketchbooks back in the chest alongside the precious four-volume edition of Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah . The room lay in shadow, the rugs on the walls became windows onto fabulous landscapes and when Jonas turned his head he could see the lingam on the workbench in the corner drawing all the light around it and storing it in the silver.

‘Tell me more about Princess Li-Lai,’ Jonas asked.

And at such times the word ‘no’ never passed Aunt Laura’s lips. ‘In Xanadu,’ she said, ‘Princess Li Lai received another suitor in her cool palace, in the innermost room in which she had shut herself away for many years because she had not yet found one who could make love to her until she saw a turtle with a shell that looked like a face. The one who had come to woo her on this occasion was the celebrated rug-maker, Kara Bagh, and he did not waste any time either but carried her to the bed where he immediately proceeded to make love to her. Kara Bagh concentrated solely on her insides as if she contained a multitude of threads which he was resolved to knot into a rug. The princess thought she could feel his member growing hard and soft by turns and how he alternated between long strokes and short, close-knit twists and turns deep inside her as if he were knotting something that was attached to the very tip of his penis. And as he made love to her, ever more strangely, with the most surprising movements, in the oddest patterns, Princess Li Lai felt these touches filling her with a warm glow as if she had stepped out into the sunshine and were walking through a landscape that Kara Bagh the rug-maker slowly created in her path, knot by knot, with vegetation in glowing colours and high mountains in wild formations stretching away behind and beyond one another, seeming to go on forever, and as she came to a river it suddenly overflowed its banks and swept her away, and she floated off, as if caught up in a tidal wave, a delicious pressure against her body, floated and floated in a warm stream that flowed faster and faster, harder and harder, until she was thrown onto the bank, and there she caught sight of a bridge nearby. She crossed this and it brought her to a plateau at the foot of a mountain, and while Kara Bagh the rug-maker made love to her ever more vigorously with his alternately hard and soft member, with long and short strokes, with knots and loose threads, the princess felt her legs carrying her towards the mountain, more and more swiftly, until she was lifted up, rose higher and higher, drifted, and when she reached the top of the mountain Kara Bagh made love to her in patterns so rare and with actions so studied that she lost her balance and toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell and fell and fell through the air, as if being set free, heavy, replete, until she came once again to a stretch of water, went on sinking, sank and sank, a glorious, all-embracing feeling, an endless sinking, until suddenly she had a sense of climbing, even while she went on sinking, climbed and sank, sank and climbed as if she were being expanded in all directions, liberated from without and from within, achieving consummate insight, immaculate stillness, a rainbow of light and then she broke the surface again, shot through with warmth and discovered that she was being carried by a large turtle, lying on her stomach on its back, and Princess Li Lai saw, on the instant, that the shell looked like a face, the selfsame face that she gazed down on when she opened her eyes, the face of Kara Bagh the rug-maker for, unknown to her, he had changed position, so that she now lay on top of him. And she thanked him and asked him to stay because she was sure that this must be the best way to be made love to. “What did you do to me?” Princess Li Lai asked. And great was her astonishment when Kara Bagh told her that he had not been inside her at all. For, as he said later: “No man can reach the innermost depths of a woman with his member.”’

Often, perhaps too often, in novels, one reads of young men being seduced by their voluptuous aunts; an aunt, for example, with a pale face, a lot of kohl around her eyes and blood-red lipstick. Jonas Wergeland was not, however, seduced by his aunt’s body but by her stories. Many things in Jonas Wergeland’s life would have been different had he not spent so much time surrounded by rugs and copper in Aunt Laura’s flat.

‘Tell me about Samarkand,’ he said at last, as always, just before he left.

‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she said. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’

Allow me to introduce Nora Næss, resident of the town of Bryne in the Jæren area of south-west Norway, a teacher, married to a man who works out in the North Sea, two children, own house. A perfectly ordinary, middle-aged Norwegian woman, exactly like Nanna Norheim in Bærum or Nina Narum in Tromsø. On the evening on which NRK TV showed the first programme in Jonas Wergeland’s series Thinking Big , Nora Næss had not really been intending to watch television; she pressed the button more or less out of habit, without checking to see what was on, because she was in the dinette, ironing tablecloths and could just as well have something to look up at now and again, something to break the monotony of the job. And then suddenly there was this amazing programme. First she glanced up more often than usual, possibly for a little longer, then she started watching more and more and ironing less and less until eventually, without taking her eyes off the screen, she pulled the plug of the iron out of the socket, sat down on the sofa and watched television as if she had never watched television before. Or, as she confided to her friend, and the odd thing is that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum both confided almost the same thing to their friends: ‘To be honest, I felt as though I was being made love to. I mean it. And as the programme was coming to a close I could feel myself swelling up with pleasure.’