Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

From the day and hour that Jonas and Margrete met one another again in the late seventies and entered into a new and long-lasting relationship, the ambassador had done his best to humiliate Jonas; whenever, that is, the ambassador was home on leave from his posting which at that time happened to be on the other side of the Atlantic. It was not so much that he disliked Jonas and did not want him for a son-in-law as that, for him, bringing people down was a pleasure in itself; he looked upon it as a kind of sport. So when Jonas crossed the threshold of the solid red-brick house among the apple trees in Ullevål Garden City, Gjermund Boeck carried on as if they had never met before, as if all that time at Grorud, the year when Jonas had visited, or rather sneaked in and out of their house, a time when, if nothing else, they had listened to Duke Ellington together, had never happened. There were no sour or baleful looks, only a sort of smiling condescension, an offhand ‘Good evening, m’lad’, consistently followed by the wrong name.

One evening when Margrete’s mother was visiting relatives in Kongsberg, her father invited Jonas to dinner. It was late autumn, and Ambassador Boeck received Jonas in the living room before a roaring fire. Luckily, Margrete was also there; Jonas only just managed to bite back a comment on the ambassador’s rather surprising Hawaiian shirt, one of many from his wardrobe, which conspired with his sun-burned face to make Jonas think of diplomacy as being like surfing on a restless sea; the bigger the waves the more fun it was. As I said, the Boeck’s house lay in Ullevål Garden City, a housing development to the north of Oslo city centre, built in the English style and originally designed to house blue- and white-collar workers, in line with the fine ‘home ownership’ concept. Right from the outset, however, the middle-classes had naturally claimed it for their own and it had long since become one of the city’s most desirable residential areas and yet another instance of the fate of social democracy in Norway: a utopia which, in the end, only the well-to-do could afford. In any case, this was where Ambassador Boeck and his lady wife resided, with his collection of souvenirs from all over the world. In the living room, the East tended to predominate: quite a little museum of artefacts large and small, in porcelain, brass, bronze, jade and, on the floor — Jonas could hardly believe his eyes — a polar-bear skin: a gift, the ambassador said, poking the rows of teeth in the bear’s maw with the toes of his shoe. Despite the fact that Gjermund Boeck was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and swirling the ice cubes in his whisky glass as if they were at some sort of beach party, the bearskin rug and the blazing fire left Jonas with a sense of something raw and primitive, of having dropped in on a caveman.

Dinner proved to be a combination of these two impressions: tropical feast and stone age. Gjermund Boeck served them lobster. Whole lobster, mark you, and big ones at that. ‘Lobster au naturel ,’ he said in a tone of voice that fell midway between triumph and malicious glee, as he set the dish in front of Jonas. For practical purposes and out of kindness to their guests, most people split and clean lobster before serving it, but Gjermund Boeck did have his ulterior motives, and hence each place setting was furnished with a big sharp knife and a chopping board, like a little accompanying operating table in teak, on which Jonas proceeded to place a lobster which, its red hue notwithstanding, seemed almost alive, menacing even. It may have been mainly because he did not know what to do next, but it reminded Jonas of the sort of creature he only ever encountered in nightmares. For the first time he realized how ugly, how truly hideous, a lobster is, and in the one corner of his mind in which he was trying to see the bright side of the situation, he considered this detail to be a valuable discovery. For all you know, he thought to himself, the lobster might hold the key to the secrets of the Earth.

I suppose I ought to explain that, in spite of all his island holidays on Hvaler, Jonas had never eaten lobster, partly because of the ban against catching lobster during the summer months and because he had never developed a taste for shellfish — the one thing about the lobster that fascinated him was its ability to move about in an unorthodox fashion, something that came back to him now, when he would not have minded being able to scuttle backwards out the door. ‘I do hope you won’t mind making do with a ’74 Chablis,’ said Ambassador Boeck, filling Jonas’s glass.

The table — Margrete’s handiwork — was a delight to behold. The lobsters with their bright red shells would eventually find their way onto blue plates, recalling their natural element, and the yellow of the tablecloth echoed that of the mayonnaise. All this, together with the lemon wedges, a simple green salad and bottle of white wine, meant that the table literally glowed with primary colours. Jonas tried to keep his eye on the ambassador as he split his own lobster, but that gentleman succeeded quite brilliantly in concealing his dexterity with the big sharp knife, much like a conjuror keeping the audience’s attention fixed elsewhere. Jonas made a stab at the lobster, but it slid about on the board as if it had suddenly woken up and was all set to attack, and he could have sworn that the ambassador was smiling, even though he made a pretence of being intent on lifting the meat out of the shell with the aid of a lobster fork. When Jonas did finally manage to dig the knife through the lobster’s astonishingly intractable armour plating, the juice squirted everywhere, including smack in his eye. Margrete, who did not even try to hide her smile, leaned over to him and turned the creature onto its belly before sticking the sharp knife into the head just below the eyes and splitting the lobster neatly in two, after which she removed the sand sac and intestines and placed the two halves on his plate.

‘Cheers,’ said Gjermund Boeck, nodding affably, in commiseration almost, like a player winning the first trick. They raised their glasses, and while Jonas did his utmost to make as little mess as possible on his plate, Margrete’s father promptly set to work on the claws with the lobster cracker, while at the same time regaling them with anecdotes from the other side of the Atlantic and acerbic comments on the deplorable state of affairs in Norway. Jonas noted the position of his fingers as he squeezed the lemon wedge over the lobster meat, and the way the colour of the shellfish toned in with the ambassador’s striking complexion. Jonas was far from happy, it wasn’t even as if the food tasted good; he fiddled with his cutlery, had no idea when he was supposed to use the lobster fork and when to switch to an ordinary knife and fork. ‘Here, have some toast,’ said Margrete, in an attempt to give him something else to think about. ‘More mayonnaise? Salad?’

‘Give the lad some more wine, help him get a move on,’ said the ambassador, handing Jonas the lobster cracker with what could have been described as a diplomatic smile. Jonas tried to play it cool, while vainly shooting sidelong glances at Margrete, in hopes of help from that quarter, but she just kept her eyes on her plate, and Jonas realized, to his amazement, that she was desperately trying not to laugh, as if this were a practical joke in which she had had just as much of a hand as her father, some sort of ritual, a test to which they subjected every suitor who came to the house. Above the table hung a lamp more reminiscent of a billiard-hall, as though the table were the setting for a contest of some description. Jonas was far from happy, fed up to the back teeth with lobster meat — what little he had managed to swallow.

‘When you come to think about it, it really is a wonder that lobster is so good,’ said the ambassador. ‘After all, it is the scavenger of the sea par excellence .’ That ‘ par excellence ’ sounded around the room like a little fanfare. ‘Did you know that lobster are attracted by the smell of rotten fish?’