Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

As Jonas grew older and was allowed to stay up longer, he used to sit between them, on the rug, building with Lego. He loved to sit there surrounded by the hum of their conversation, constructing buildings out of Lego bricks, endeavouring to exhaust all the possibilities for the sorts of houses you could build with the same number of bricks, as if he had already tumbled to the fact that you only had a limited number of basic forms to play with, and that life consisted of shuffling these about. In a way he felt that his mother and father were engaged in something similar, because they talked a lot about the same things, over and over again, but always in new patterns and variations, thus ensuring that the conversation was always interesting and exciting, and — the banal subject matter notwithstanding — rather like an everyday version of Plato’s dialogues. Only when he let Nefertiti help in with the building, did this theory collapse, because even with the same Lego bricks as he had, she could build houses he would never have dreamed possible, lifting them up to the lamp to show him how the secret of the construction derived from light and shade; houses which, if anyone should be wondering, helped sow the seeds of Jonas Wergeland’s ambition to become an architect.

But as a rule Jonas lay alone on the rug between his parents, listening with half an ear to the hum of their voices, their laughter, which seemed to act as a spur to his invention; his mother talking about her work at the Grorud Ironmongery, and his father about things he had seen and heard in Grorud Church, and for Jonas there was something about this very contrast between the church on the hill next to the school and the factory in the valley alongside the railway line that made his parents the perfect conversationalists, giving them an ocean of topics on which to draw. He revelled in it, lying there between them, listening to the way they talked, also about those things on which they disagreed, little arguments, although the tone never varied; the way they jumped from one topic to another, without needing to use a newspaper as a springboard, talking about people they knew and events in the surrounding community, anything and everything, but still much in the same vein, a mesh of this and that, building into a web — and, by some sort of alchemy, into something precious. Jonas noticed that his father’s fluttering hands steadied when he was talking to his mother, just as they did at the organ as if here, too, in these conversations in which they could come up with endless variations on a theme, he was practising a kind of Kunst der Fuge . The week before had, as it happens, been a little out of the ordinary, with a more serious note creeping into the hum of voices, and Jonas, lying on the rug between his parents, striving to build a house he had never built before, had repeatedly picked up such words as ‘Cuba’ and ‘rockets’.

Now Jonas stood in the hall listening, eyes open, stood there gazing at the picture hanging above the black bakelite telephone of himself as a one-year-old in forty-eight different poses. Something was wrong, there was too little talk going on, too low, in the living room. He was just about to go in and investigate but stopped short as he moved into a position, or perhaps I should say adopted an angle, from which the chink in the door afforded him a view of another corner of the room, and there he stayed, looking and looking. Jonas saw the textured wallpaper, he saw the cuckoo clock that always ran slow, he saw the Negro lady on the wall, with the gold rings in her ears and around her neck — later to become a collector’s item — and he saw the two curving chairs with their distinctly functionalist design, noticed them above all else, because they were empty; his parents were not sitting in their respective chairs, talking about this and that, weaving something precious together, they were lying naked on the rug — bare-naked as children would say — and not only that but in a funny position. Jonas stood in the shadows and watched, not with fear, but with tremulous wonder; he had a feeling that here, too, they were weaving something, something beautiful, precious. He realized that what his parents were doing was something that made you blissfully happy, and if he had not induced this from anything else, then he could tell from the look on his father’s face: his father had the same look on his face as he had when Knut Johannesen skated the 10,000 metres at the Olympics in Squaw Valley, a race I mentioned in passing at an earlier — which is to say chronologically later — point. Jonas never forgot that moment or that look. He and Daniel had walked into the room, each clutching a paper cornet of liquorice pipes, all set to listen to Children’s Hour , the absolute high point of the week, primarily on account of the serial. But it was not the Children’s Hour signature tune that issued from the radio. Instead of ‘And now it’s time for Children’s Hour ’ they heard the almost hysterical voice of sports commentator Oddvar Foss, telling the Norwegian people about this fantastic race on the other side of the Atlantic, a race which Jonas found nowhere near as fascinating as observing the look on his father’s face — and let me just add that Haakon Hansen was a true skating aficionado, a real fan, like so many others at that time. Jonas Wergeland belonged, in other words, to the last generation of Norwegian children to grow up with their fathers’ ardent, nigh-on pathological, passion for skating. So Jonas stood there, observing his father’s face as Johannesen skated circuit after circuit on the other side of the world, and he could see that his father was over the moon, that he could not really believe this was happening, that Johannesen was about to do the distance in under sixteen minutes, a feat regarded as bounding on the impossible. Jonas stood there spellbound, watching as his father’s face was further transformed, passing into an expression that spoke of utter, almost divine, rapture, to culminate in what Jonas was later to define as the ‘Face of Bliss’ — not so surprisingly, perhaps, seeing that Johannesen, when he crossed the finishing line, had beaten the record set by Hjallis in 1951, a record that the pundits had claimed could never be broken, by an incredible forty-six seconds. And it was this very expression, the Face of Bliss, that Jonas’s father was wearing now as he made to love to Jonas’s mother, in a sort of Olympic event, you might say: making circuit after circuit.

Jonas stood in the hall, at the living-room door, and watched and watched, feeling rather solemn, filled with awe. There was something about these smooth, effortless actions, the semblance of perfection and, not least, the juncture of his parents’ pelvises that gave Jonas the idea that this, too, had to do with a ball-bearing, a hub, something sitting at the centre, around which everything else miraculously revolved.

I am sure a lot of people will find it hard to identify with this leitmotiv in Jonas Wergeland’s attitude to sex: the idea that lovemaking was something which lifted him up into another sphere — please note, I did not say a higher sphere. Going by what I have related so far regarding Jonas Wergeland’s liaisons with women and, even more so, by the speculations that certain sections of the media have seen fit to print, a great many would probably maintain that he was a Casanova of the first water. I know that I am faced here with a nigh-on impossible task — after all we are talking both of sexuality and of shaking the hard and fast views of the average Norwegian — but since I have set out to present an alternative picture of a life which most people feel they already know inside out, I see it as my plain duty to state that Jonas Wergeland was a highly moral, an admirably moral person — at any rate where sex was concerned. I would even go so far as to say that very few men in Jonas Wergeland’s position would have been able to lead as upright a life as he did, especially when one thinks of what I have, perhaps rather casually, referred to as his ‘magic penis’ and the demonstrable gains he derived from the sexual act.