Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Colonel Eriksen was a grey elkhound. He was actually called something boring, like Rocky or Rover, but Nefertiti had renamed him on the day when, by the most fantastic stroke of luck, he had almost bitten the balls of a vicious Rottweiler from further down Bergensveien that used to terrorize all the local kids, lunging menacingly on its chain and barking as fiendishly as the Fenris wolf. Colonel Eriksen, in case anyone is wondering, was the commander of Oscarsborg fortress out in Oslo fjord at the time of the sinking of the Blücher . Jonas and Nefertiti became particularly friendly with Colonel Eriksen and were occasionally allowed to take him for a walk or borrow him for expeditions up the river Alna.

It was one thing to lay low a monster of a dog, quite another to find Jonas Wergeland, a boy who hated snow and who was now, most improbably, shut up inside an airtight icebox. In addition to which, Colonel Eriksen was a very old dog; it was debatable whether he had any sense of smell left at all, but when Nefertiti let Colonel Eriksen sniff one of Jonas’s mittens — a trick she had picked up from a Lassie film on one of her many visits to Grorud cinema with Jonas — the old dog seemed to come to life and started straining at his leash as if he were a champion tracker dog and not an ancient hound long since ready for the happy hunting grounds. What a cliff-hanger; worthy of any B-movie at the Grorud flicks: Jonas, all but buried alive under the ice with time most definitely not on his side, and Colonel Eriksen, dashing with amazing purposefulness across the flagpole green, nose to the snow, dragging Nefertiti behind him as if he had caught the scent of the phantom elk itself. Not until Colonel Eriksen, growing more and more frantic with excitement, had led Nefertiti to the slope beyond the green did the truth dawn on her, even though she would never have believed that Jonas would dare to go inside the sagging cave.

After ascertaining that the snowball had frozen solid across the entrance, Nefertiti left Colonel Eriksen making a heroic, but vain, attempt to dig his way through the ice with his blunt, old claws and went for help. After some backbreaking and pretty frantic digging the rescue party managed to pull Jonas out, in the nick of time as they say, just as he was about to fall into a deep slumber induced by the delicious warmth that was spreading throughout his body: in other words, before the cold turned him to ice. From then on, Jonas always imagined Hell to be like that ice-cave, and though he did not know it, on this score his thoughts more or less coincided with those of a number of authorities, including the great Dante himself who, in The Divine Comedy, makes the surprising assertion that Hell does not consist of fire. The nethermost circle in his inferno is of ice.

Veronika’s reaction was that of most children. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she said and put on a display of such heartbroken and contrite sobbing that no one could be angry with her, least of all Sir William, who comforted his daughter in a manner that might have led one to suspect that he was sorry her plan had failed.

Jonas had been rescued, but the cold never lost its grip on him. ‘Below the waist I’m cold as ice,’ he would later say as a joke. So, to return to where we started: for the rest of his life he would be searching for warmth. And for Jonas Wergeland, there was nothing to match the warmth certain women transmitted to him when making love. So what he was looking for in a woman was, in fact, warmth: quite literally a fire at which to warm himself. Jonas Wergeland was chilled to the bone, and so he collected glowing coals, and like a member of some primeval civilization he never forgot that tending these coals and carrying them with one was the most important thing of all.

It was not unnatural that Jonas Wergeland should have run into Nina G. at Det Norske Opera. It happened right after the interval, while Don Giovanni, the Lord of Misrule, in the shape of a young Knut Skram, was kneeling under a balcony dressed in his servant’s clothes, playing, or pretending to play a mandolin, while singing cajolingly to Donna Elvira’s maid, begging her to come to the window: ‘ Deh vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro ’. It was just at that moment, as Don Juan was proving that he would do anything to win a woman, even assume another identity — in the midst of this serenade, so outrageously absurd and yet so infinitely beautiful — that Jonas Wergeland became aware that someone was looking at him, or not looking but staring, drinking him in with their eyes. He turned, to be met by the gaze of a girl sitting a few seats away from him, on the row in front. The gaze was that of Nina G. and her eyes were as round and full of desire as the o’s in ‘ O mio tesoro ’. Then she looked away, turning her eyes back to the stage, but even in the dark, that one glimpse was enough. Jonas could tell straight away, by the tremor running down his spine, that this girl evinced a rare capacity for bestowing warmth.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Like an organ in which the pipes sound from different corners even when the keys you are pressing are right next to one another?

Jonas had for many years been one of the youngest, not to say the youngest habitué of the Oslo jazz scene and, despite the fact that after 1965 jazz had gone into something of a slump, there were still a number of places one could frequent — which is to say that, apart from Friday nights at the newly-opened Beehive Club, Jonas basically had to sneak in to such places, aided and abetted by friends. One of the trickiest to gain entry to was the jazz club at the halls of residence in Sogn, although here, on the other hand, it was easy to blend into the crowd of students who sat there shaking their heads and slugging red wine, never knocking the ash off the cigarettes that dangled from the corners of their mouths. There has been a lot of talk about rock music and its detrimental effect on the hearing, but Jonas always felt that someone ought to have checked how all that shaking, and in many cases rotation of the head, had affected the 1968 generation, since he had the suspicion that so much drunken head-tossing in time, for example, to Arild Andersen’s driving bass lines must have led to a sort of collective whiplash effect. Jonas eventually left the scene, however, not so much because he had witnessed so much inordinate and alarming ‘digging’ but more because the music as such lost its outsider quality, perhaps precisely because in the end the very ‘freeness’ of the melodies and the rhythms had become so utterly predictable. And so he had gone in search of something else, and what he found was the opera . Let me put it this way: not all that many young people frequented Den Norske Opera in the years after 1968, and certainly not those of a rebellious bent.

The first operas he saw were Verdi’s Falstaff and Bizet’s Carmen , but it was Wagner and The Flying Dutchman that really showed him he was on the right track and not, as some might think, because of the story: a man condemned to sail on and on forever. No, it had more to do with the utterly unbelievable, tempestuous music that set the dresses of the ladies in the red plush auditorium fluttering from the very first notes of the overture and, not least, a sumptuous Aase Nordmo Løvberg in the role of Senta. The way I see it, Jonas Wergeland must have been one of her biggest fans at that time. He was forever popping up to the second floor of the Stortorvet Inn, vainly hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the booth just inside the door where the opera singers hung out, watched over by a waiter named Nyhus whom the singers — as one might expect, with their sense for all things Italian — had dubbed ‘Casanova’.