Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

For his own part, Jonas Wergeland did his best to confine his winter activities to the unavoidable trip to and from school, as far as possible he even avoided looking out of the window. The rest of the time he sat, or reclined, in a sort of hibernation, with his back against the radiator, reading comics and listening to Duke Ellington, first and foremost the so-called jungle numbers, full of weird sound effects, from the Cotton Club days: ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’ with Bubber Miley’s and Joe ‘Tricky Sam’ Nanton’s mournful, muted wah-wahs and wild, growling trumpets and trombones, ‘The Mooch’ with Sonny Greer’s gongs and pounding, galloping tom-toms; and ‘Haunted Nights’ with Teddy Bunns’s delicate wistful guitar solo — all in all, a sound so theatrical and exaggeratedly primitive that it provided the perfect accompaniment to the comics he read. Jonas was convinced that he and Duke Ellington shared the same loathing of wet woollen mittens and great, clodhopping, leather ski boots with ice-caked laces, that both he and Duke Ellington abhorred itchy long-johns and ludicrous string vests; all in all, there was something about the red-hot rhythms of ‘Jungle Nights in Harlem’ that told him Duke Ellington must detest everything that so much as smacked of ice and snow as deeply and fervently as he did — and this, although Jonas could not have known it, was true enough; Duke Ellington even hated fresh air, so much so that he never opened a window. But to return to Jonas, all winter long he sat with his back propped up against the radiator, longing for spring.

One of the few things he could stand to do, however, was to build snow-houses — something which can of course be put down to the architectural leanings he was later to display. It did no harm either that snow-houses were easier fashioned when the snow was wet, which is to say when the temperature had crept up above zero. One construction in particular was to brand itself into, or more correctly become frozen solid in, Jonas’s memory. One March, during a mild spell, he and Nefertiti built an imposing palace on the slope running down to the stream, where the snow lay several metres deep. By using shovels to hollow out the inside and by rolling snowballs, they were able to build both up the way and down, creating several floors and criss-crossing passages. Nefertiti had sketched out the plan beforehand, and she and Jonas had made a trial model out of white Lego with Nefertiti explaining that this was a somewhat simplified version of the palace of King Minos on Crete. Jonas’s only happy memories of winter at Solhaug up to then were of him and Nefertiti sitting in spacious white rooms made of snow with a candle burning in the centre, eating dried apricots while Nefertiti told him about the catacombs in Rome, the cave paintings in grottoes in the South of France and about Elephanta in India, fabulous temples hacked out of the mountain.

One Sunday at the end of March, Sir William’s family had paid them a visit, and in a rash moment — he cursed himself later — Jonas had taken Veronika down to their masterpiece on the hillside. They crawled up and down passages which were sagging badly due to the thaw that had set in, only just managing to squeeze through the narrowest spots. In the largest room Jonas lit a stub of candle, and they sat there, silently, self-consciously, watching the light sparkling on the smooth walls. Below-zero temperatures over the past few nights had frozen the whole palace rock-hard.

Afterwards, they rolled snowballs in the wet snow outside, bowling them down the slope until they were gigantic, so big that tufts of grass came to light in their tracks, making Jonas want to roll up that whole carpet of snow and get a head-start on spring. He was actually well under way with this attempt to change the seasons when his father’s whistle sounded from a veranda somewhere out of sight, calling them in to dinner. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Jonas said to his cousin. ‘I’ll just get the candle.’ He crawled in through the little opening in the sagging snow palace.

I am sure the reader has long since guessed what Veronika did: with a strength that would have left anyone speechless, she rolled one of the enormous snowballs the last bit of the way down the slope so that it wedged tight across the entrance to the snow-cave. And off she went.

It is not easy to explain a person like Veronika, a girl who was already so pretty that she was actually too pretty. Some people might use the word ‘evil’, but that really does not cover it. On the whole I prefer to say as little as possible about Veronika Røed; I do not intend to comment on her motives in this instance or in any other instance on which she tried to harm Jonas. More than enough has already been written about Veronika Røed and her convoluted merits.

This is meant to be a book about Jonas Wergeland. This is meant to be a book written on Jonas Wergeland’s terms. At long last. He deserves it.

Back at the flat, where their dinner was already on the table, Veronika said that Jonas had run off and left her, she even managed to squeeze out a tear or two. And since Sir William had been smacking his lips demonstratively and impatiently for some time, Jonas’s mother said that he was probably on his way and that they should just go ahead and start dinner without him: cold roast pork and brown gravy as always at such family gatherings.

The minute Jonas discovered that the entrance was sealed off, he knew that it was Veronika’s doing. He tried to kick his way out, but it was no use, she had blocked the hole perfectly. Having run his hands along the solid ice walls more in discouragement than panic, Jonas crawled back to the big room, sat down resignedly in the centre and lit the candle stub, thinking to himself that he would be alright as long as the flame was burning. He sat gazing round about, sat in the centre of a circle, under a low dome. He was cold, even more so than usual, so cold that his whole body ached. It was worst around his groin, he could hardly feel a thing, his willy seemed to be turning into a little icicle. He cried for help, hearing how stifled his cry sounded, with no echo, like being under a quilt. The candle went out. He did not know whether this was because there was no air in the room or what. A faint, feeble light filtered through the roof. He knew he was going to die. He lay down, curled up foetus-like, lay there feeling one limb after another grow numb. He saw the glimmer of light beyond the walls gradually fading, like the glow of a Golden Fleece going out, conscious all the while of his mind being drained of images, going blank, totally white, like the room in which he lay.

See this boy, huddled inside a cave of ice which, when viewed from above, together with the passage to the outside, looks not unlike the womb and the birth canal. And I ask you: is this the Jonas Wergeland whom so many people feel they know; on whom a whole host of people have aired their views with such certainty? Know, at any rate, that this picture, these crystals of ice, are a prism, a magnifying glass, as good an instrument as any other through which to examine Jonas Wergeland’s life.

And then? What happens next? Well, as always, our hero is saved by his best friend. When Jonas’s mother began to suspect that something was wrong her first instinct was to go to Nefertiti. The latter pulled her cloth cap well down over her ears, immediately understanding the gravity of the situation. Jonas was not the sort to spend ages playing outside in wintertime. They instigated a search, called the neighbours, looked in the cellars, combed the area up around Eigiltomta, calling his name, hunted as far down as the shops on Trondheimsveien. By this time his mother was really worried, she was convinced that someone had abducted him, a six-year-old without an ounce of sense. Everybody joined in the hunt, even Veronika. Veronika, that astonishing child, searching with every semblance of zeal and earnestness. It was growing dark. Even Nefertiti, who was never afraid, was worried now, so desperate that she ran up to the gamekeeper’s lodge on the other side of Bergensveien to borrow Colonel Eriksen.