Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

As now, on a red carpet at the heart of the Grand Hotel. The instant his penis came into contact with her vagina and slipped inside, he was struck by a sense of a chemical change in his body; he was filled with energy, raised onto a higher plane, as if by a hydraulic system created by the friction between his penis and her vagina. From Aunt Laura’s sketches he knew that the phallus formed a straight line running out from the curved form of the scrotum, like a tangent from a circle, and this was also how he regarded something of the potential inherent in his penis; by dint of this he could break out of the set cycles of thought and shoot off at a tangent that would lead to something quite different. Exactly as here, because as they built towards a climax, slowly, because he was doing his utmost to spin it out, holding back, he noticed that his thoughts were starting to travel along different lines than usual until they eventually flowed out into an idea, a vision almost, as to what he should do for Owl, the debating society. He had been asked to talk about the opera, but now it was quite clear in his mind: he would rather play. He knew just what he would do; he would play arias from the opera but using different harmonies, jazz chords, old refrains with new tonal variations. While Nina G. sat astride him, making gentle, rhythmic love to him, giving him greater and greater pleasure, since she was now gripping the edge of the piano case and was thus able to raise and lower herself gently and vary the depth of penetration, he strove to hold onto this dream, spin it out, postpone the climax, so that he could also hear how good it would sound. And that concert at the Owl meeting a couple of weeks later did indeed prove to be a sensation, an event that was still being talked about at the school years later: how Jonas Wergeland, wearing a Persian-lamb hat of the sort worn by Theolonius Monk, jazzed up some well-known arias — opening with the stirring, seductive habanera from Carmen, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle ’, in a tempo and an arrangement that rendered it almost unrecognizable; following this up with Senta’s ballad from The Flying Dutchman, the wistful piece from Act II, ‘ Doch, dass der arme Mann noch Erlösung fände auf Erden ’, and adding most tellingly in the transition to ‘Ach, könntest du, bleicher Seeman , es finden’ some harmonies that sent chills up the audience’s spines. Last but not least he had played Don Giovanni’s and Zerlina’s duet, ‘ Là ci darme la mano ’, with a number of chords and springs from one key to another that made people gasp, partly because nobody could see how such a wealth of sound could be produced from one solitary piano. There were those who knew what they were talking about — and bear in mind that Jonas never made any effort to take this further — who believed Jonas Wergeland to be Norway’s greatest jazz talent since Jan Garbarek. It was not that Nina G. passed on this gift, by osmosis as it were or, to be more specific, by way of her moist vagina; nonetheless, it was thanks to her that he could suddenly see, or hear this potential within himself. Through Nina G. he discovered a different and unknown gear in music.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Jonas Wergeland was still lying on his back, his upper half under a grand piano in the Mirror Restaurant of the Grand Hotel, aware that Nina G. had started to tense into a tremulous, increasingly vehement rhythm, and was uttering sounds which made it quite clear to him that she was approaching a peak, or heading into something; and so eager was she, or so carried away, that just before she came, with a soft, muffled whimper like a glissando from the high to the low notes, she banged her head against the piano case, producing a sound, faint, but nonetheless audible, that swelled up among the dark mirrors and filled the room with a sort of fog of sound that Jonas was to hear again long afterwards — he would have sworn to it — built into one of her most famous pieces. And even though he did not want the pleasure to end, he too had to succumb to his orgasm, which he always dreaded slightly, or disliked because it interrupted a marvellous train of thought, snuffing it out. Jonas Wergeland could well understand why orgasm was known as ‘the little death’.

Speaking of death, that reminds me that I ought to tell you something known only to a handful of people.

At one point, Jonas Wergeland was told that he was going to die — the big death this time.

It happened while he was attending the College of Architecture, at a time, what is more, when he had just stumbled on an angle that really whetted his appetite for his studies on Louis Kahn and his stimulating ideas on the significance for a building of light and shade. Jonas had discovered something suspicious — one might almost say a shadow — in his body. He went to see a doctor. The doctor frowned and wasted no time in sending him for tests, X-rays; the pictures came back, the diagnosis was plain. I won’t mention the word, everyone knows how rapidly such things progress, especially in the form that had struck Jonas. Jonas Wergeland was going to die; it was that simple, that inconceivable. You will have to excuse me. This entire episode invites so much sentimentality and pathos that I will have to keep this as short as possible. The main thing, surprisingly enough when one considers the terrible emotional upheaval experienced by Jonas Wergeland when other people died, is that he took the news calmly, with dignity, just as people are capable of altering their pattern of behaviour when the situation demands it, in time of war for example. Or, more radically: it might have seemed as if Jonas suddenly felt that he belonged to an alien civilization: one which took a very different view of death.

However, what is more interesting — cynical as that word may sound in such a context — for anyone wishing to gain some insight into Jonas Wergeland’s life are the consequences which this news was to have. Jonas Wergeland was not the sort to just lie down and die. The doctor had given him a rough idea of how long he had, and Jonas was left wondering: What now? Meaning: How far can I get on whatever fuel I have left?

From time to time in newspaper profiles and interviews, one finds people coyly professing that even if they were told they were going to die soon, they would go on living their lives as normal. When, after saying the necessary farewells to the necessary people — not least after a long talk with Buddha — Jonas set out for the Sinai peninsula and Jebel Musa; he really was going on living as if nothing had happened, seeing that he had already had the trip half planned. There was no thought in Jonas’s mind of legends of elephants dragging themselves off to their secret graveyard, nor of choosing a particularly spectacular setting in which to draw his last breath. And one thing is for sure: there was no religious motive behind it.

Shortly afterwards, by virtue of his usual efficiency and a last bit of help from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations , Jonas touched down in Israel, and without so much as a glance at Jerusalem, without stopping to stick his own little slip of paper into the Wailing Wall, he took the quickest route, a military one, that is, by way of the Gulf of Aqaba, to the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. The skeletons of trucks and a tank left him in no doubt that he was now traversing borders that were taut as a bowstring. And yet nothing could have worried him less than the thought that a major war might break out, right under his nose so to speak.

As I say, there is no subtle way of telling this. And I admit that this is one point in the story when I am tempted to reveal who I am, since certain things would then be easier to understand. I apologize for the fact that, under the circumstances, I have to make such a demonstrative secret of my identity.