Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

To Jonas, even the interval took on a new dimension, becoming if possible an even more crucial part of the performance than in his schooldays, more like an entr’acte in which the audience unwittingly played the lead. Jonas stood at the bar, listening to the chatter, with people referring to the singers by their first names as if these were pivotal lines in the piece, and where even the merest snatch of conversation could cause him to see whole scenes, and even the music, in a new light, as when one elderly gentleman asked another elderly gentleman: ‘Did you notice the lovely lady who was playing the cello?’

In any case, it was directly after the interval that Nina G. had prompted him to turn and presented him with a gaze or a face that was more than enough to trigger that tingling between his shoulder-blades. For the remainder of the second Act Jonas was acutely aware of her presence, like an additional layer to the music, or as a sort of bonus, over and above the pleasure of seeing Donna Elvira manage to confuse Don Giovanni, her beloved, with his servant, merely because they had swapped clothes. Jonas could not remember when he had seen a better piece of entertainment. What a way of looking at identity! You put on other clothes and — hey, presto! — even a woman who has been this man’s mistress takes you for him! And throughout all the fun and games, which constituted, mark you, an uncannily accurate reflection of real life, out of the corner of his eye he could just make out the back of Nina G.’s head, although of course he did not know her name at that point. Not until the very end, in the scene in which the Statue, which is to say the dead Commendatore, complete with ashen-grey mask, appears at Don Giovanni’s table, and the latter grasps his hand and bemoans its deathly chill — only then did Nina G. turn towards him again. They exchanged a long, lingering glance. Then she smiled. Jonas felt her warmth hit him like the breath of a warm dry wind, a pleasant contrast to Don Giovanni’s cold end on the boards of the stage.

The director of this production had done away with the epilogue and its moralistic finger-wagging, and thus the opera finished right after the point when Don Giovanni, refusing point blank to repent of anything whatsoever, curled in on himself and, instead of having him engulfed in flame, a beam of light was shone only on his upper half, until he had sung his last words, after which he collapsed and the light went out. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of the absence of, any moral lecture, the audience went wild; they rose to their feet, shouted ‘bravo!’ and whistled in a manner more normally associated with sporting events as if this, with a handful of exceptions, exceedingly middle-class audience wholeheartedly approved of Don Giovanni’s impenitence, a rebel to the last: a response which, to Jonas’s mind, served as a fitting end to that exceptionally exuberant evening and the unusual view of things it had afforded him.

Jonas saw Nina G.’s back disappearing in the direction of the exit, but he took his time, considering whether to approach her in the cloakroom. When he emerged into the corridor and looked around for her, however, she was nowhere to be seen. I have already said that Jonas Wergeland never wooed or made any effort to win a girl. This, if only in his head, was the one exception and one which I ascribe to the whole mood of the evening — he was, after all, standing in Den Norske Opera. Jonas was all set to follow that girl, get down on one knee outside her window and sing a serenade. Strictly speaking, the mood he was in he could have done just about anything.

One should not judge Jonas Wergeland too harshly for wanting all of his relationships, and indeed life in general at that time, to be like one big opera, full of drama and pathos and grandiose exaggeration all rounded off by a violent death to the singing of a long aria. So wisely is life ordered, however, that by the time he and Margrete were living together this had long been forgotten; nothing could have been more remote from life with Margrete than drama and pathos.

So what did life with Margrete consist of? Of baking bread, for one thing. Apart from watching his small daughter when she was sleeping or playing, nothing filled Jonas with greater contentment — a heavy warm feeling of well-being tinged with a sense of something eternal — than to watch Margrete baking bread.

Like now.

It is evening, spring, and still light outside. On the windowsill is an egg cup with some coltsfoot which in some strange way shed a yellow glow over the whole kitchen as if all the light has to pass through this point before spreading out into the room. Margrete is standing at the kitchen bench, baking; Jonas sits in a chair at the rough-hewn kitchen table just watching, watching his wife baking, in a pair of faded jeans and a dark-blue woollen sweater, barefoot, as if baking were a holiday of sorts, a pleasure similar to that of walking barefoot in the sand. Margrete has no time for bought bread; there’s nothing worse, she says, tastes like sawdust. This makes Jonas laugh, but Margrete is serious: rotten bread makes for a rotten life, she says, so Jonas follows her with his eyes as she dabs at the water in the fireproof dish on the stove as if she had an in-built thermometer in her finger, then she crumbles the yeast into the liquid — never use dried yeast! she says — while Jonas sits there chuckling, closely following her every move, seeing how she prefers to blend the yeast liquid with a little wooden spoon, an ancient implement, wood is so gentle on the ingredients, she says, and metal gives the bread an aftertaste. Jonas sits in the kitchen watching his wife as she adds a pinch of salt, working on instinct, always this, working on instinct, a little sugar too, as it happens. Jonas drinks in the sight of Margrete standing there barefoot, in a baggy dark-blue sweater, sleeves rolled up, pounding dried herbs from her own garden to a powder in an old mortar, no herb is quite as wonderful as basil, she says, sprinkling it over the yeast mixture before pouring in coarse-ground wholemeal flour, then wheat germ, about so much, there it is again: ‘about so much’; he marvels at Margrete, seeing her sprinkling sunflower seeds into the bowl, one, no two, handfuls; adding linseeds that she has soaked in water beforehand so that they will swell and not steal moisture from the dough, oh, right, Jonas will try to remember that, sitting on a chair in a kitchen tinged yellow by a bunch of coltsfoot in a little egg cup, observing Margrete, observing, not least, her actions because, as Margrete is always saying: bread is culture, bread is the very keynote of a culture, she said, and never tired of telling him about other peoples, how they ground the grain, how they danced while the bread was baking. Jonas watches Margrete bustling about, barefoot, happy, watches as she demonstrates the most underrated aspect of the art of baking: the knack for dough. It was a mystery to him. No matter how carefully Jonas weighed and measured he never got it right or, at least, you got bread, but it was nowhere near as good as Margrete’s. Margrete simply had the knack, and so Jonas sits there watching, trying to wrench the secret from her, how she does it, as if she were an alchemist. In fact he not only watches her, he marvels at her, savours the sight of her sifting the flour, because you should always sift the flour, even if it says on the pack that it’s pre-sifted, to give the flour air, she always said; and Jonas likes the fact that she says the same thing every time, as if she does not think he will ever remember it because there is no way of proving it, it is just something she believes, has discovered for herself; Jonas likes to see the way she measures the flour out roughly, judging by eye as if it were a way of life, ‘roughly’, and how she dusts off the flour by clapping her hands over the sink as though applauding herself or the privilege of being able to bake one’s own bread.