Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

And now here you are, in another living room, your own living room, and you are looking at another body, this one too on the floor, but not alive, you think, and that’s another story, just as great, you think, this too a hub, you think, and you stand there naked, you feel naked, and you feel chilled to the bone, as if the cold were creeping in on you from all sides, as if the whole room were slowly being turned into a snow cave, to a hell, you think.

You are so cold, and you think to yourself that if you can just think fast enough, think up enough chunks of your life and think them together at a quick enough tempo, then you would be warm again, everything would fit, become one, like the spokes on a wheel when the wheel is spinning fast, you think, and you look at the picture of Buddha, and you look at Margrete, on the floor, how lovely she is, even now, in death, why couldn’t you wait until I returned home before you baked that bread, you say, in a voice that is way too loud, almost a scream, and you look at her, a dead woman, on a polar-bear skin, and again your thoughts are distracted by this ridiculous bearskin, and you try to remember where it came from, but you give up, either that or you have the idea that it goes along with the cold in the room, and you are chilled to the bone, and you are thinking as fast as you can, and you see, try to take it all in, the whole scene, the coltsfoot in the egg cup, the hi-fi unit, silent once more, the body, the polar-bear skin, but it is too difficult, too unreal, so unreal that it becomes real, a ground-breaking opera, you think, a final scene worthy of a Don Giovanni, you think, so sink down onto your knees and sing, because there is no other possible response to this, you think, wrap yourself in the polar-bear skin and sing, as Kirsten Flagstad did on Greenland, sing, you think, fit to crack the ice.

You sit, or sink, down onto the piano stool, with your back to the sheet music; you lean your elbows on the keys and hear the harmonies this produces, disharmonious, or maybe they are harmonious, you think, if you could just get far enough away, to the top of Mount Sinai, for example; heard from the top of Mount Sinai these two clusters of notes would sound charming, you think, and as if to put this to the test, to prove it, you bring your elbows down once again, and again, and again, until it hurts and you get to your feet and catch sight of the murder weapon, as if only now, this second, do you realize how Margrete died, as if right up to this moment you had had the idea that she had been beaten to death by a polar bear, or strangled, or hit over the head with a blunt instrument, or stabbed with a knife at least, since any of these would be easier to understand than the murder weapon you are now looking at, so totally inconceivable, you think, so utterly and absolutely senseless, you think.

Although you could not say why, you walk through to the office, you just have to get away for a moment, as if a change of scene will alter everything, shake you out of this crazy vertigo, so you walk, naked, into the office that you share, shared, with Margrete, and there you stand and look round about you, with no clear idea of what you are looking at, until you recognize yet another television set, and a video recorder, two video recorders, piles and piles of cassettes, and along one wall you see a bookcase full of books, obscure books, you think, Margrete’s books, you think, books on medicine, a whole lot of books on skin diseases, on venereal diseases, you think, all sorts of information about venereal diseases, things beyond your ken, far beyond, miles and miles beyond the Kama Sutra , you think, but which were a part of everyday life for Margrete, things you never actually asked her about, or at least not enough about, and it occurs to you that if nothing else you did have one thing in common, you were both researchers, in different fields to be sure, you think, but researchers nonetheless, you think, and you look at the wall, as if to confirm this fact; you look at the huge map that hangs there, not depicting the Earth, other people might have a map of the world on their wall, but you, Jonas Wergeland, the Duke, tennis star, the conscience of Antarctis, you have a map of the planet Venus on the wall to remind you always to look for a new angle, a map that shows what we know so far of how Venus looks, a testimony to the scientific powers of mankind, you think, considering that the planet Venus is always hidden by a layer of cloud, like love, you think, except that radar soundings taken by space probes have made it possible to chart the surface of the planet, you think, and you walk over to it and read some of those names out loud: Atalanta Planitia you read, alongside a circular depression; Ishtar Terra you read, on the northern hemisphere, your eye moves on, you read, mutter names — Theia Mons, Rhea Mons, volcanoes, you think, repeating the names as if they constituted a mantra of sorts, as if you found a hypnotic comfort in this, in the thought that you too are a researcher, that that is what you really are, an expert in a field on which the large majority are totally in the dark, a scientist with a crystal prism in his head, you think.

And as if to reinforce this air of professionalism, you cross to the fax machine; you glance at the faxes that have come in, skim through them, and note that the last one was for Margrete, you can make nothing of what it says, and you do not recognize the name, of whoever sent it, a foreign name, you think, and you stand there with the fax in your hand, stand by the shelves lined with Margrete’s books, this universe of which you know so little, this, too, a planet covered by a permanent layer of cloud, you think, and suddenly it occurs to you how little you know about Margrete’s life, not only her working life, but her long childhood and years of study overseas, and you think about this, you spend a long time thinking about it, and you think about Margrete, dead, on a polar-bear skin, and you think that it could be one of the hundreds of people whom Margrete knows and you do not know, who, for reasons quite beyond your comprehension, has done this; after all, what do you know about all those years abroad, in places far from Norway, you think, all the cities in which she lived as the daughter of a Norwegian, and utterly objectionable, ambassador.

And so Jonas Wergeland found himself on one of the courts at the Njård Sports Centre, totally played out, gazing after a ball that had flown past him, way out of reach. On the other side of the net, Ambassador Boeck fished a new ball out of his pocket and smiled, he made no effort not to, he smiled what Jonas would without hesitation have called a diabolical smile. The ambassador served again, not all that hard, but straight and sure, and Jonas made a poor return, a rotten return, which his future father-in-law countered with a lethal forehand, Jonas would without hesitation have called it a diabolical forehand, a good old-fashioned drive landing a hair’s breadth from the sideline. Jonas did not have a hope, he was not even out of breath, since the ball never came into play; he muffed his serves, had no hope of beating the ambassador’s slow backhand, forgot to run in to the net, forgot absolutely everything.

After all the injustice that has been done to Jonas Wergeland — injustice that has led to his now languishing in uttermost darkness — I do not see it as my job to dwell on Jonas Wergeland’s bad side. Whole books have been written about Jonas Wergeland’s failings and defeats. This, in case anyone was wondering, is a book about Jonas Wergeland’s victories — about his rise, not his fall.

That said, I make no secret of the fact that Jonas Wergeland did have his negative side: that there were, for example, people whom, for various reasons, some more rational than others, he hated, and Gjermund Boeck, Margrete’s father was one of them.