Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

You walk back through to the living room, naked, and you remember who you are, it’s being naked that does it, you think, and all at once a name from the bundle of letters comes into your head, the letters you glanced at when you came home, and naked you walk across to the antique bureau where you left the letters and again you flick through them, and you find it, and you read the sender’s name, a woman’s name, you think, the name of a very famous woman, you think, and you remember those women whom you have loved and who have loved you, heartily, you think, deeply, you think, and who have given you of their abundance, and you turn towards Margrete with the letter in your hand, naked, and you realize that one of them, one of these women, might be behind Margrete’s death, one who refuses to let go of you, who still loves you, and you think of your golden balls, and it’s only to be expected, you think, that one day they would be your downfall.

Jonas Wergeland is nine years old. It is late at night and he wakes with a tightness around his balls.

I doubt if I need to remind anyone of the sexual frustrations of pre-pubertal boys and the ways they find of letting off steam. Some play rather artful games of ‘doctors and nurses’. Others can make do with reading the small ads in the newspaper, under the heading of ‘Health and Hygiene’, or uttering the name ‘Mount of Venus’ with all its connotations of scaled peaks and astronomical mysteries. Some run a tremulous felt tip along the side of the transformer station under cover of darkness, making up smutty rhymes ending in ‘pussy’, ‘Lucy’ and ‘juicy’, while others run a black market in condoms stolen from unwitting fathers. Some turn up in triumph at school with a stuffy sex manual discovered in an old dusty box in a far corner of the cellar, while others concoct myths about Mamma Banana, the girl who lives in the Swiss villa across from the flats, who was said to be so randy that every night, if no boys showed up, she had to stick an Ice Pole up ‘you know where’ to cool herself down, and we’re talking a fifty-øre Ice Pole at that. When Jonas Wergeland was a boy there were even some who plucked up the courage to club together for a pretty harmless girlie magazine, playing a nerve-racking game of poker to decide who would go into the shop, with sweaty palms and a tongue like lead, to buy it, so they could read it on the sly behind the garages and learn how even the most dauntingly pale and unimaginably ugly women — sporting light-green eye-shadow and weird hair-dos — could get you seriously worked up and leave you with friction burns on your foreskin.

While we are on this subject, it might be tempting to air a few home truths about psychologists, but since they are after all no greater charlatans than anyone else, I will confine myself to lamenting the fact that members of this profession have ruined many people’s chances of understanding what I am now about to tell you about Jonas Wergeland. I could, of course, be underestimating the average Norwegian, but I fear that not a few of them have gone along with the speculative and oft-repeated old bromide about sexual insecurity springing from some suppressed fear conceived in childhood. If this is true, then I would just like to say that on this score Jonas Wergeland was more fortunate than other children of his age — and that is a gross understatement. Not only did he have a sister who deemed it her almost sacred calling to enlighten her brothers when the first sweet itch made its puzzling presence felt in their groins — he also had parents who, one year later, were responsible for dispelling any last shreds of doubt planted by all the scaremongering that surrounded sex. Thanks to his parents, Jonas followed the development of his genitals with eager anticipation.

Jonas Wergeland experienced something that many another child before him has experienced, and this incident so crucial to his relaxed — some might say profligate — attitude to sex, occurred on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday evening. Until that day, Jonas had never given much thought to his mother’s and father’s private life, far less their nocturnal activities; as far as he was concerned, his parents were two regular individuals, much loved of course, but nonetheless just normal people living the usual sort of Norwegian life, their days made up of a combination of factors that could be counted on the fingers of both hands.

As I say, plenty of people have had the same experience; it was late, after 11.00 and all the children were asleep. Jonas woke up bursting for the toilet. He shinned down from his bunk-bed by dint of an impressive technique not unlike a fireman sliding down his pole or, according to Rakel, asleep in the next room, like Elvis in the scene where he sings ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in the film of the same name. The biggest hindrance was posed by Daniel’s collection of revolvers and rifles and accompanying belts, as well as cowboy hats and waistcoats adorned with gleaming sheriff’s stars, all slung around the bedpost, enough equipment to fit out a whole Western. Jonas tiptoed across the room, the walls of which were adorned with pennants, a dartboard, Jonas’s drawings and Daniel’s innumerable diplomas, not to mention the best of all — the cards from Uncle Lauritz: during his lifetime, Uncle Lauritz had sent them postcards from all the destinations flown to by SAS, with the result that eventually half of one wall was papered with brightly coloured cards from such cities as Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Cairo, to name one route of which Uncle Lauritz was especially fond — and these, both the scenes they depicted and the terse notes on the back, whetted the imagination and the wanderlust of Jonas in particular, as much as the copies of the National Geographic in the toilet did. Dotted here and there among the cards were also photographs of the planes with which Uncle Lauritz had conquered the world, the fourengine, propeller-driven DC-6B and DC-7C and, Jonas’s favourite, a plane which Uncle Lauritz unfortunately barely had the chance to try out: that quite indescribably elegant jet, the Caravelle, with lines that left a tingling sensation between the shoulder-blades.

Jonas trod softly across the room, almost without opening his eyes, as if reluctant to leave slumber behind, groped for the door-handle; aware, even with his eyes closed, of the object lying on the chest of drawers right next to the door, more because of the energy it gave off. Jonas had found a ball-bearing from the hub of a bicycle wheel and for reasons he did not quite understand it had become something sacred to him, a sort of portable altar, not because the ball-bearing looked so nice with its little circle of little steel balls, almost like a piece of jewellery, but because there was a mystique about it which in some unaccountable way exerted a strong attraction on him.

Jonas opened the door, softly still, moving more or less by feel; crept through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where he did the needful. It was when he was on his way back, in the hall, that he heard a vague murmur from the living room, the door of which was standing slightly ajar, so he stopped, because something was wrong, but what was it that was wrong? There was too little talking, almost no sound at all, and the words being murmured were too soft.

One of the things which Jonas Wergeland liked best about his parents and which he came to admire even more when he reached adulthood himself, indeed regarded as something of a mystery, was their supreme talent for quiet conversation, their unbelievable mastery of ‘the fine art of small talk’. This was Åse and Haakon’s fondest pursuit: to sit each in their chair in the living room and talk the evening away, which is to say: those evenings when both were at home, since Jonas’s father had his church duties, and his mother was active in any number of societies that Jonas never could make head nor tail of, although he could tell that his mother had a greater need for social contact than his father. But those evenings together truly were special occasions, something his father underlined by shaving again after dinner and splashing a few drops of foreign aftershave on his cheeks. On the wall of the living room hung a cuckoo clock, a source of much amusement to the children, until the day when Daniel, possibly in a premature act of rebellion against paternal authority, shot off both the cuckoo and the little man who played ‘O mein Papa’ with his catapult. Jonas’s mother was in the habit of setting this cuckoo clock an hour slow, something which Jonas was sure she did out of principle, so that she and his father could talk on for an extra hour every evening with a clear conscience.