Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

As Jonas made a valiant attack on the claws the ambassador began to press him, in a refined and only ever-so-slightly condescending manner, to voice his opinion on all manner of complex questions, not least the main foreign affairs issues of that autumn. Jonas felt as if he were attending some informal gathering in the Caribbean somewhere, or perhaps in Thailand — what with all the bronze and brass in the room — while Ambassador Boeck, despite the fact that he was sitting there sucking on legs and little claws and smacking his lips, was actually present in his professional capacity and keen to know exactly where they had one another — as if Jonas were the first secretary at the Bulgarian embassy, and they were circling one another, working their way towards a couple of serious questions. This combination of meticulous dissection or, in Jonas’s unpractised hands, what bordered on torture, of a shellfish and intense discussion was more than Jonas could handle. Either he lost his grip on the lobster or he lost the thread of the conversation. At one point the claw accidentally shot out of the cracker, almost knocking over the wine bottle, and moments later he crushed one of the smaller parts, as he sometimes did with a hazelnut, and had to pick bits of shell out of the meat, while Margrete sat there laughing more and more openly. The whole thing was one long and painful process of degradation in which Jonas committed just about every faux pas it is possible to make on such occasions — short of drinking from the finger bowl.

‘We really must have a game of tennis,’ said Margrete’s father as the dinner was drawing to a close, lighting a cigar and casting an eloquent glance at the mutilated carcase of Jonas’s lobster lying on his plate like a knight in armour pierced by lances.

‘Yes, let’s,’ Jonas said before he had had time to think, although he may not have known what he was agreeing to, engrossed as he was in studying the pattern on the ambassador’s shirt. But then: why not? All at once Jonas realized, with all his mind, as it says in the Catechism, that he had to beat this man at tennis, a sport he had never played, a sort of athletic parallel to the gastronomic finessing surrounding the lobster dissection. Despite Margrete’s father’s rather corpulent form and florid complexion, Jonas did not doubt for a second that he had spent half his life perfecting his ground stroke. And from that moment, Jonas had but one thought in mind: to put the ambassador in his place. To wipe that condescending smile off his face. Come what may. In retrospect, it occurred to Jonas that this might have been exactly what Gjermund Boeck had set out to do: to goad him into accepting such a stupid challenge, thus giving the ambassador the chance to humiliate him even further, to crack his last claw, as it were. Howsoever that may be, the point is that this incident forms the prelude to one of the key stories in Jonas Wergeland’s life, a story that tells of his pride, of how he hated to be humiliated, underestimated — even in a field in which he had no chance, no experience.

‘It’ll have to wait a while,’ said Jonas, his eye fixed on a tiny jade Buddha in the corner of the room, a transparent point that seemed to present an opening in an otherwise closed room.

‘Why don’t we say some time next autumn, then, when I’m home on holiday?’ the ambassador said, mopping his lips as if this arrangement were all the dessert he needed. ‘If you win, I’ll give you that polar-bear skin,’ he added and raised his wineglass.

So there was Jonas Wergeland, one year later, at the Njård Sports Centre. Dead beat. Gjermund Boeck had won the first set in record time. He glanced at his watch, as Jonas prepared to serve. Jonas could have sworn that yet again he detected that smile, the one which he would without hesitation have described as ‘diabolical’. Jonas was bone-weary. The net strung across the court made him feel trapped, like in a lobster pot. He tossed the ball into the air, his racket feeling like a useless implement, as if his arm had suddenly been transformed into a clumsy lobster claw.

And so Jonas felt some of the same weariness, the same leaden awareness, that he was facing an opponent who was too strong for him, on the day when he walked, or rather, slipped through, one of the side doors of Grorud Church.

There are moments in life that can work a change on a person, moments when the spirit makes a kind of a leap, and I confess that I have hunted high and low for the minutes which would define the point when Jonas Wergeland became the person he is, which is to say in the sense that he arrived at a new understanding of himself: the fact is that Jonas Wergeland was one person when he walked into that church and someone else — someone else entirely — when he came out. And during the interval he would commit, or at any rate be blamed for, an act that all Grorud would talk about for years, presenting it with a shudder as a horrific act of vandalism.

Jonas had a close, almost organic, affinity with Grorud Church, a building that was about as old as the century and visible from every corner of the valley. To Jonas it was the archetypal church, and he had made hundreds of sketches of it from all sides and from the memorial gardens in particular, with the broad steps in the foreground and the weeping birch to the right in front of the tower. The church was built out of red Grorud granite, and when they were little, Jonas and Nefertiti had often played in the hollows in the hillside where the blocks had been hacked out, not far from the People’s Palace and the cinema. Granite held a particular fascination for Nefertiti, and she was forever extolling its virtues: ‘You do know, of course, Jonas, that the Ten Commandments were written on tablets of granite.’ Always, when he sat in the church, Jonas had the idea that somehow he was sitting inside the mountain, the mountain of his childhood, that the church was merely a part of Ravnkollen’s granite massif, moved a little way out onto the plain by the hands of men. So he felt no surprise either, later in life, when he visited Egypt; he had already seen what man could do with blocks of stone. The pyramids were bigger, it’s true, but they did not come as a shock. And no one, neither the Lutherans nor the Marxists, needed to tell Jonas Wergeland that labour was sacred; he saw, he experienced, the wonder of it every time he sat in the church. That building was every bit as much of a monument to Grorud’s masons as it was to a higher power.

It was the middle of December and it was snowing, the first fall of the winter. The air was full, saturated you might say, with great white motes that fell with uncanny slowness, as if the flakes were all but defying gravity. Once inside the door, Jonas brushed himself off, noting as he did so, that his father was rehearsing his Christmas repertoire: preludes and variations on the Christmas carols. There was no one in the office, no one else in the church, only him and his father.

Slowly, Jonas made his way up the aisle, between the pews to the choir where he stopped to contemplate the huge fresco by Per Vigeland on the semi-circular wall behind the altar, The Great White Flock , a painting which did not elicit the slightest tingle between his shoulder-blades but which even so, owing to all the hours he had spent in the church as a child, had acquired the character of something familiar and comforting. He lay down on his back, his head pointing towards the altar rail. He was cold, but when he lay like this on the red carpet the organ music seemed to enfold him, coming at him from all sides, wrapping him in a soft, warm eiderdown. Sometimes he stretched out like this in the evenings, too, and in the darkness he could almost see stars appearing beneath the vaulted ceiling, or felt as if the walls and the roof simply disappeared, giving him the impression that he was lying outdoors in a warm sleeping-bag, gazing at the heavens. As a grown man, Jonas would always have a weakness for Pythagoras’s idea that the planets combine to create harmonies, not because this theory was correct — any more than all the others that have been propounded, then or now, regarding the universe — but because it appealed to his imagination and tallied with the sensation he had had as a child, lying on the floor of the church in the dark, alive to the way the organ music created the most amazing kaleidoscopic nebulae on the ceiling — unless it was the other way round, and the organ music was an echo of the star-studded sky.