Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

A lot of strange things have been said about Jonas Wergeland, but there is one thing that no one can take from him; even if he did not understand much of it, his early encounter with the Kama Sutra left him with a very different attitude to sex from most men. What he had grasped — and this was, in essence, the most important lesson — was that sex was a solemn undertaking, something important, something to be contemplated with the greatest respect. Added to which, it was an inexhaustible subject, encapsulated in a work consisting of ‘100,000 chapters’. The art of love was, in other words, all embracing. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was more to copulation than the vulgar simplicity of ‘pussy and prick/together stick’; copulation was also about ‘the art of making beds and spreading out cushions and covers for reclining’, ‘playing on musical glasses filled with water’, ‘quickness of hand or manual skill’ and, not least, the ‘solution of riddles, enigmas, covert speeches, verbal puzzles and enigmatic questions’. This last fitted with what Nefertiti had been getting at, and thanks to her Jonas would always associate sex with the search for truth. This being the case, it seemed only reasonable that the physical act of love should be difficult, calling, quite frankly, for a certain virtuosity. More than once, after the description of a sexual position, Jonas came upon the words: ‘This position is learnt by practice only.’ Jonas understood that in order to become a good lover you had to train; that when you came right down to it, it must be as hard as qualifying for the Olympic Games.

To Jonas, the Danish in which his edition of the Kama Sutra was written was like a very formal, slightly archaic Norwegian and for him, later in life, this was to remain the language of lovemaking. He always felt that there was something exalted and dignified about the act of love, with all those prepositive possessive pronouns and indefinite articles. Only weeks after those first reading sessions he noticed that in his head he had stopped using the standard word ‘twat’. When it came to sexual terminology Jonas Wergeland preferred the Sanskrit.

Now in passing it ought to be said that the attitude of small boys towards that endlessly fascinating part of a woman’s anatomy lying between her legs is nothing if not complex. One could, with some justification, bemoan the fact that men seem incapable of channelling the inventiveness and playful metaphorizing of their boyhoods into other areas later in life. Among Jonas’s chums, comparisons — or the attempt to establish a sort of Kretschmer’s typology of vaginas — were more often than not drawn from the dinner table or the animal kingdom as if the female genitals were a cross between a cold buffet and a zoo, or as if they could not make up their minds what was more thrilling: looking or tasting . If, for example, a girl was considered to be frigid — although, of course, it was always a case of pure guesswork, not to say wishful thinking — she would be said to have a ‘chicken twat’ as though all the boys had first-hand experience of what it felt like to stick their little peckers inside one of the ostensibly cold pale chickens in the window of Grorud Fish and Game. ‘Orange twat’ was the term given to the juicy ones or, more accurately, those girls who were imagined to be so; the treacherous types, the VD carriers, were ‘shark twats’; dry sticks were ‘juniper twats’; if they had their period they were ‘strawberry twats’, and the tight-arsed, impervious sort were ‘nut twats’. The ideal was what they called a ‘lamb twat’ since almost all of them had been across to Ammerud meadows and experienced the strange and delightful sensation of having a lamb suck their fingers — I shall resist the temptation to make any comment on this, but if anyone feels inclined to laugh at these attempts to encapsulate the secrets of the female body in words, might I remind you that even such a world-class writer as Mallarmé was not above such a line of thought, comparing as he did a vagina to ‘a pale-pink shell’ as if it were an ornament to be displayed on a shelf the way Jonas’s grandfather had done. In any event, it ought to be something of a challenge, I almost said in the name of women’s liberation, to come up with something new to say on this topic, something more original, something more akin to the description of the vulva given in the ancient scriptures — ‘like the print of a gazelle’s hoof in the desert sand’ — and, above all else, something more dignified. I might add that as a student Jonas himself made the following rather high-flown but nonetheless creditable attempt: ‘Her sex was as unexplored and impenetrable as a distant spiral galaxy.’

In other words, while the other boys were going on about ‘muffins’ and ‘beavers’, Jonas opted for the more formal ‘yoni’: or rather, not so much formal as detached. Jonas thought in terms of elephant yonis, mare yonis and gazelle yonis. To some extent, from boyhood onwards, these outlandish terms elevated the sexual act onto a metaphysical and, not least, epistemological plane, if I may be allowed to use such lofty words, while at the same time vouchsafing him a glimpse of other, alternative, ways of comprehending reality — something which I, for obvious reasons, set great store by. If, later in life, Jonas was nonetheless pressurized into coming up with another, less obscure metaphor, he would only have one word for a vulva, quite simply because that was how he saw them all: as a thinking cap. All of the women who guided Jonas inside themselves had some influence on his way of thinking and in order to illustrate how they did so, I will now tell you the story of his second encounter with Nina G.

As I said earlier, Jonas regarded his years at high school as an encounter with the hidden face of Norway. As luck would have it, for instance, he attended the nineteenth birthday party of one of his classmates, held not just anywhere, mind you, but in the Rococo Room of the Grand Hotel. In the early days at high school this classmate, who boasted four names rounded off by a ‘Jr.’, had seemed pretty ordinary — apart, that is, from a rather suspect green loden coat — but he had eventually given himself away with such remarks as ‘Can’t go into town with you, guys, I’ve got a flying lesson with Dad’ or ‘You’ll have to come home and meet these two Oriental girls we’ve got working in the house.’ It turned out that his parents were neighbours of Sir William up on Holmenkoll Heights, but they were not nouveaux riches like Sir William, they had inherited their fortune without having to lift a finger and they handled their status symbols in a casual often surprisingly devil-may-care manner.

For them, popping down to the Rococo Room was really just the urbane equivalent of a Saturday-night hop at the village hall, if not a less strenuous version of the only things that really interested them: sport and open-air pursuits. Incredible though it may seem, as much cachet was attached to a good slalom technique as to a seven-figure bank balance.

Here Jonas was brought face-to-face with Norway’s moneyed class, that one per mil of the Norwegian population who could contemplate hiring the Rococo Room at the Grand and inviting 200 people for a party at the drop of a hat in the middle of January, for example. And even though this was a formal dinner with everyone in evening dress, these people managed, by dint of a sort of innate nonchalance, to give what were for Jonas the most unreal surroundings, the appearance of an ordinary, everyday living-room. After dinner there was dancing to the music of a grand orchestra, strings and all. With something approaching disbelief Jonas, clad in a borrowed suit, watched young people of his own age, and especially the girls in their fabulous gowns, gliding around the floor as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in a room that sparkled with gilt, and with a tapestry on the back wall forming a museological backdrop to the orchestra — disbelief because these young people did not merely shuffle about, as Jonas was in the habit of doing, they glided, they floated across the floor in ballroom and Latin American dances, and they really could dance, adding nifty little variations of their own to the basic steps. Even so, they did not really seem to take it seriously, just as they did not take their wealth seriously, all but yawning as they danced, or with an affected fervour, giving Jonas an impression of something stylized, as if the whole set-up were a kind of opera, an enormous tableau. Jonas did not speak to anyone, he merely strolled about, nodding to this one or that; he really had nothing to talk to these people about, although they all seemed very nice. The plain fact was that they inhabited a totally different world. It was enough for Jonas simply to circulate and watch, to sit on red sofas and soak up the atmosphere — including, if the truth be told, a whiff of the odd joint — of a modern-day Norwegian ball, of a style that was totally vacuous. There was something about it all that was every bit as anachronistic, not to say comical, when compared to the world outside the windows, as all the rustic furniture with which these people filled their homes.