The Seducer

Cleopatra’s Nose

And now, not to something before or after this, but above it all. I mentioned an old injury to Jonas Wergeland’s knee. One of life’s paradoxes is that things happen and yet we refuse to accept that they do just happen, by which I mean that we go around brooding over how and why this or that could happen, someone falling into a river, someone having to jump in, even years after the actual event when life has long since moved on, and on this score we would appear to have inexhaustible reserves of energy, so much so that generation after generation will sit down and brood, for example, over what might have happened had it not rained on the day before the battle of Waterloo. And it is every bit as pointless to go around wondering how Jonas Wergeland’s story would have turned out if only he had been paying more attention to where he was going or at any rate if he had not fallen head over heels for Margrete’s nose.

It was their wheels which brought them together. This was in fifth grade, a first encounter which was to give rise to quite a little local legend, there having been so many witnesses. It was springtime, with coltsfoot growing on all the banks and a strong whiff of bonfires in the air, a sign, if you like, that this was a season when things could easily be set aflame. Jonas came wheeling down from Bergensveien, from the housing estate of the new middle-class; Margrete was riding over from Teppabakken, Grorud’s answer to Holmenkoll — Heights, if one can refer to that area of fine old houses in such terms. As I say, there they were, riding along at a fair lick, coming from opposite directions and both set to turn in through the same, relatively narrow, school gate. It was bound to end in disaster.

It suddenly occurs to me, my theme here being that of collision, that it may have been a little thoughtless of me just to set this wheel of stories, all that has gone before, spinning without any sort of a preface or explanation. I ought to have introduced myself, I know, but I am very much afraid that this would only lead to misunderstanding. For some, this tale would thus be lent too much authority; it would lose all credibility in the eyes of others. My own popularity is, after all, plummeting, and — this much I can say — I am now so much persona non grata that a lot of people have declared me to be dead. I must, therefore, choose my words with care. I am who I am. More than that I cannot say.

I could of course have gone about this in some other way, but eager as I am to get my views across, I have no choice but to settle for a level — adopt a genre, style, call it what you will — which is totally alien to me and which cannot help but make the story as a whole seem somewhat unsatisfactory, not to say slapdash, something which is not helped by the fact that I happen to be putting this in writing, a medium so far removed from that over which Jonas Wergeland exercised such supreme command, and using the Roman alphabet to boot. Not only that, but I originally wrote it in Norwegian, a language spoken — in some cases better than others — by around four or five million people. Here I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for those linguistic errors and idiosyncrasies which were bound to crop up in the original and just as inevitably be carried over into this rendering, not to mention all of the — doubtless unwarranted — analytical passages. I would be the first to admit that I can in no way be said to have mastered all the stylistic levels of the Norwegian language. Nonetheless, I have — this, too, I confess — regarded the writing of this manuscript as a challenging experiment.

It is of course no coincidence that out of all the people in the world I should have chosen Jonas Wergeland, and apart from my obvious, aforementioned motive — that of wishing to say something to the Norwegian people and even to influence them in some way — I make no secret of the fact that I am curious: that, more than anything else, the driving force behind the writing of this story has been wonder. After all, how is it possible? How did all this come about? And how can so many scurrilous and untrue things be said about one man?

In other words, I want to see justice done. I do not come from Norway. I see things differently. I am capable of taking the broader view, of seeing Norway from above, with all the necessary detachment. And since Jonas Wergeland’s gift is that of being able to consider phenomena from a different angle it seems only fair that his life, too, should be presented from another and less biased slant than that taken by most people to date — not least by bringing to light certain events known to very few, such as the collision with Margrete.

But enough of that. I promise not to go on and on about my own motives. This is not meant to be about me, for one thing because I know how averse Norwegians are to self-conscious narratives and, for another, because the essential idea behind this project, if I dare use such a word, is my own deep secret.

In conclusion let me, for the sake of honesty, endeavour to forestall the irritation which is bound, in any event, to be felt: I do not intend to reveal my identity because I do not believe in such a concept as ‘identity’. I would therefore ask that this ‘I’, whom you will find breaking into the narrative now and again, be taken for what it is: the one telling the story. Of that there should be no doubt, not least when it comes to the host of anonymous and to some extent dubious stories about Jonas Wergeland doing the rounds; always, no matter how well concealed it may be, someone is telling the story.

As I am now: at the moment when, as I say, Jonas and Margrete came riding down the road from opposite directions, the one as cocksure and uncompromising as the other, with the result that two universes — one could go so far as to say that — collided right outside the school gate in an honest-to-goodness starburst. They collided because, as Jonas said, he assumed that any ordinary lamebrain of a girl would give way to a boy, while she, naturally, was grumbling about this ill-mannered twit who didn’t even know to let a lady go first: what one might call a severe difference of opinion. And it was not only their bikes that collided; they collided, boy and girl, on their bikes.

I must be allowed to say a little bit about bicycles, since they play no small part in Jonas Wergeland’s life and because bikes occupy a very special place in people’s memories — just think of the palpable thrill that runs through the body at the memory of the drag when a dynamo is flipped in against a tyre. And, even more than the bike itself, what one remembers are all the accessories and trimmings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for many people the status seeking that has since manifested itself in having as many letters and digits as possible after the name of a car had its beginnings right here. I could mention at random the different types of handlebars, not least the so-called ‘speedway’ handlebars which were all the rage for some time and which, if I remember correctly, were even banned, in keeping with the Norwegian fondness for every possible sort of safeguard, and which boasted such features as luminous handgrips with little nubs that pressed into the palm of your hand, and gears — source of such stories as, for example, how Frankenstein pedalled up the steep slope of Badedamsbakken in ‘third’, sitting down — and a speedometer, an item which in Jonas’s day was long a rarity, owned only by boys like Wolfgang Michaelsen, not to mention a lamp of the type that had two little yellow lights on either side of the big one, like fog-lights, and last but not least, the obligatory bell, which the really cool guys replaced with a beauty of a horn. Then you had the wide variety of different saddles, foremost among them the banana seat, motorbike-style, which suddenly became the in thing, and the accompanying cross-country tyres; and who could forget those mud-flaps emblazoned with an ‘N’, as if one were all set to cycle across Europe? Anything else? Oh yes, the tool kit on the carrier with its carefully stowed contents, anticipating the suitcase-packing problem in that everything had to be slotted into exactly the right place or the lid wouldn’t close. This fastened with a little padlock, available in various colours, and came complete with minute keys; which in turn brings me on to the advent of the combination lock, with a cat’s eye on the knob, and the hunt for the most baffling combination, which was engraved on a little copy of the lock itself and which, for some, represented their first encounter with the recursive element in life. Lastly, I ought to mention all the badges for sticking onto the mudguard, and the pennant, its rod vibrating so delightfully; and then, of course, the flags and foxtails that made you feel like the Shah of Persia as you rode around the blocks of flats. But one of the most interesting features in this connection was the trimming of the wheel-spokes, first with empty cigarette packs: Ascot, Speed, Jolly, Blue Master and, above all, Monte Carlo, the menthol Virginia cigarette that came in three varieties — yellow, red and black — adorned with little paintings which today seem quite exotic, like works of art from a bygone age, and later with triangles formed out of fuse-wire, which is to say copper wire of the sort insulated with different coloured plastic.

I take this opportunity to fire off — the word ‘fire’ being most apt here — a few remarks on the mystique attached to copper wire, inasmuch as Grorud was at this time experiencing something of a mini-revolution. It was as if Le Corbusier had suddenly been given free rein with the building of what were, by the standards of the day, the monumental concrete piles of the Grorud shopping centre and the new subway station, which in both cases entailed the blowing away of a lot of rock. A few parochial reactionaries were, as one might expect, sceptical about the new buildings, which rose up on the spot where the chapel and the Masonic Lodge and the corner shop had once stood, but Jonas and his chums welcomed this development with open arms; in the wake of the building boom the boys could go treasure-hunting, overcoming all sorts of inadequate barriers and — often illegally and on occasion at some risk — following the copper wire, like Ariadne’s thread, through a labyrinth of dynamited rubble and the fumes from explosive gases until they came to the coil at the end, with any luck lying close to a rubber mat. A few enigmatic exceptions, usually a future pillar of society like Daniel, Jonas’s brother, removed the plastic and sold the copper by the kilo to a scrap dealer, but for most of the boys the wire was a status symbol, a figment, which was of value only because they were all agreed on it — not unlike the Africans and their glass beads, the Polynesians and their shells — and which rose in value the rarer the colour of the plastic. Obviously I do not tell you all of this merely as a digression, but because I wish to underline the fact that the local community was undergoing drastic changes and, hence, to suggest that this might, unconsciously, have had an effect on Jonas such that he was, in other words, primed for a personal explosion, for a radical reconstruction of his inner being.

The first thing a dazed Jonas Wergeland saw after the collision, once he began to grasp what had happened, was his bicycle wheel with its elaborate trimming — perhaps because he knew that his whole life would be spent wrestling with the mystique of the wheel, with the circle, with the hub — and not only that but one of the lengths of copper wire wrapped round the spokes had come undone and was now pointing straight at Margrete, thus directing attention to a charge of dynamite greater than anything Jonas could have known.

So there they lay, he on top and she underneath him — a prophetic touch this — with the whole school standing round them, half-curious, half-gloating, all but cheering, in fact. They were curious because no one had ever laid eyes on this girl before, which was hardly surprising since her last school had been some distance away, in Bangkok to be precise, where she had attended the International School, and this was her first day at Grorud School. And they were gloating because Jonas Wergeland had fallen flat on his face and was at long last going to get his comeuppance for defying the ban on cycling to school. No one knew, of course, that Margrete hadn’t passed her cycling proficiency test either and was, therefore, Jonas’s partner in crime. Her full name was Margrete Boeck, a surname Jonas at first pronounced as ‘book’ until she informed him that it ought to be pronounced ‘boak’. The more spiteful referred to her, possibly because of their head-on collision, as ‘buck’.

Once Jonas had gathered his wits, he noticed that his mirror was also smashed, a brand-new mirror with a transparent red rim, and that made him really mad. But then he caught sight of Margrete’s nose and he was done for. Embedded in Margrete’s nose, just alongside one of her nostrils, was a tiny sliver of mirror and, I might as well tell you right now, this left a scar on her nose, a scar which would always remind both of them of this incident, of what can happen when no one is prepared to give way. But right at that minute the sliver of mirror was still embedded there, and Jonas could not take his eyes off it. It looked so much like those tiny jewels which people in India wear in their noses, and this added an entirely new dimension to the girl lying underneath him, something foreign, something goddess-like.

Margrete was the first and she would be the last.

She shook him off and pulled herself to her feet, put a hand to her nose and winced as she removed the sliver of glass, causing the blood to well up, and when she saw the blood on her fingers she subjected him to a torrent of verbal abuse that he would not forget in a hurry:

‘You nearly killed me, you dirty goddamn red-faced son of a bitch, you stinking crazy big-cheeked stupid rat, you google-eyed cowardly bloody bastard son of a bitch — idiot!’

Shocked as he was, Jonas could not but admire her perfect English pronunciation, having wrestled with English for nigh on a year and still being more interested in the pretty English mistress’s provocative way of dressing, not least her skin-tight sweaters which came, in a way, to symbolize the expanding, forward-looking possibilities presented by the English language, something that was also being brought home to him now, when he was being given a proper dressing down by a strange girl and did not understand one word of it. The worst of it was that he could not get up, because of his knee, which must have taken a knock with the result that, as this stream of invective poured over him, he stayed where he was in front of her, on one knee, as if he were proposing.

I ought perhaps to add, for anyone who has not yet guessed it, that this is the woman who is lying dead — those with no respect for the gravity of the situation might say ‘knocked down’ — on the floor at Jonas Wergeland’s feet at this moment, which is to say the moment which I have chosen to form the hub of this spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, something which I can do because I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality. Anyone wishing to understand Jonas Wergeland’s life will first have to dispense with the belief that the passage of time says anything about cause and effect.

Someone took care of Margrete and walked her up to the main school building, while others tried to pick up her bike. It turned out, however, that the front wheels of the two bikes had inexplicably become locked together, rather like those rings that conjurors’ use in their acts. And while people pulled and tugged at the bikes, Jonas saw how the rear wheel began to turn, slowly, round and round, both in motion and standing still, all decked out with an intricate pattern of copper wire and cigarette packs, the eye drawn in particular to the Monte Carlo pack, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of cigarette packs, a woman’s head on the outer rim of the roulette wheel.

Someone has put some coltsfoot in a jar on the living-room table and you stand in the doorway and stare and stare. Coltsfoot. Of all things. A dead woman and coltsfoot, you think, and in your mind’s eye you see that nightmare image, or hear it, feel it, a wheel, you think, the wheel just turning round and round, and getting nowhere, you think, a wheel simply spinning in mid-air, just a circle, an endless repetition; so who, you ask, as you have asked so many times before, who then, you ask, is turning the wheel; what, you ask, what lies at the hub of the wheel, because it was wheels that brought you together and she bled that first time too, blood first and last, you think, and coltsfoot, so he was right, that old writer, when he said that all the paths of love are strewn with flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

You stand there, a bundle of fan mail in your hand, you stand in the doorway and stare and you have this terrible feeling of nausea, as if you had eaten fly-agaric, as if you were about to throw up an entire life, turn yourself inside out, you think, and you look at the body, and you see that this sight, this landscape in the guise of a human figure, forces you to address a question regarding the way things hang together, one from which you have always shied away, the broad brushstrokes, you think, simplification and you only just manage to stop yourself from throwing up, and you gaze out of the big windows overlooking Bergensveien and Ammerud Meadows and the town and you think that you must remember what the weather is like, that this is important, because it’s a lovely day, you think, and it’s spring, you remember, and already quite mild, you think, and you would like to have known exactly what the temperature was, as if this would explain everything, change everything, and in the gloom you can see that the sky over the city is deep-blue and perfectly clear and you stand for a long time considering this light, the band of yellow at the very bottom, the light late in the evening, the light between winter and summer, a light found nowhere else in the world, you think, a light so indescribably beautiful it hurts, you think, and I would be the last to reproach you for not picking up the phone right there and then, but instead summoning every ounce of intuitive energy to prevent your own body from going to pieces, from falling to the floor like a flat expanse of invisible molecules, nor would I blame you, as others no doubt would, for the fact that you put down the bundle of letters and walk or somehow get yourself over to the shelf in the living room on which the hi-fi looms.

Mechanically you press the buttons that bring the black boxes to life, you savour the vibrant thud from the loudspeakers, like a heartbeat, you think, and you flick through the row of CDs, more or less at random and pull out a CD, and you lift it out of its holder, you study the disc, seeing how it shines, like a miniature sun you think, or no, it strikes you that it looks like a wheel, shot with rainbows, you think and you lay it in the tray in the CD player and pick up the remote control, select the track you want and fall into a more abstract reflection on the feel of the tiny rubber button on the remote control, its perfect pressure on the thumb, and you try to isolate this pleasure and you think also of something else, something vague, a cordless connection, but it eludes you and you hear, or listen intently to, the electronic whisper for the tenth of a second it takes the CD player to aim the laser beam at the correct spot, a bit like a memory at work, you think, as now, you think, faced with a dead body, you think, and you hear the music pouring out, Johann Sebastian Bach, you think, as if surprised by the organ music which fills the room, a fugue, you think, and you sit down in the armchair and shut your eyes, and your throat feels as if someone were squeezing it gently while subjecting your eyes to a dose of teargas and you have to swallow and you have to wipe your eyes, more than once, and you listen to the music, not because it is the antithesis of the thing on the floor, a dead wife, but because you are trying to identify that inexplicable something which links the notes together, if it is not the swell of the organ, you think, the very breath of life behind the music, you think, feeling in acute need of oxygen, as if you had just surfaced after almost being drowned in a whirlpool.

So there you sit, Jonas Wergeland; Norway’s answer to Dick Fosbury, turtle hunter, one of the few people to have played the biggest organ in the world, and you are listening to this fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach because you have to stop your body from falling apart and you gaze round about you, your mind a blank, and you cannot remember who you are, and you would not believe it if anyone, at this moment, were to come up to you and tell you that you were a big celebrity, you would deny it, no way, you would shout, you’re Jonas Hansen, an ordinary man from Grorud, except that you are not, because you are Jonas Wergeland, a top-notch actor, and you stand up, to be met by your own reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite, a gift from Aunt Laura, you think, an antique mirror in an exquisite frame, you think, with a glass that distorts the features, making you wonder who owns this face with the lost eyes, and this prompts you instantly and quite automatically to make a face, as you sometimes do when you catch yourself in the monitor in the studio, and the sight of this contorted expression on your own face lifts you out of the situation so that you are viewing it from the outside, as if from a new angle, you think, because even now, at this moment, you cannot help looking for new angles, because outside it is spring, late evening and mild, with an enchanting deep-blue sky, not to mention a pale-yellow band on the horizon, you think, and you can see that there are many sides to this situation, that it may even deal a cut to the eye that could put all of your life in a new light, you think, and you stand outside yourself, seeing yourself from a distance, as shocked, grief-stricken, bewildered to the point of breakdown, and seeing yourself from the outside like this, in the mirror, you see your grief laid bare and suddenly you see the funny side of the situation, in the midst of this tragedy you see yourself in absurd caricature, and you contort your features again, make another face and, as you do so, unconsciously you do something else, with your little finger, a sign of profound emotional upheaval, you think, a trick you picked up, something a great actor once did during a performance at the National Theatre, as a way of showing that his world was tumbling down about his ears. And this puts you in mind of Gabriel, and your thoughts stay with Gabriel as your eye returns to the body on the floor, and you think of Gabriel, and you think of the question that has been niggling at you: did he really believe such things?