The Seducer

The Turtles

Gabriel had been there to meet him, as usual, on the beach and rowed him out, with long, practised strokes to the boat. A stiff breeze was blowing from the south-east. Jonas had a suspicion that Gabriel had been at the bottle already since, instead of going below to the saloon, he immediately proceeded to climb the rigging like a strip of a lad: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ he bellowed across the water, his coat flapping about him. ‘You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’ Jonas sat down on one of the deck lockers, not taking his eyes off Gabriel, who was now standing on a ratline far above. ‘Once, in the China Sea, I shot a pirate right where you’re sitting,’ Gabriel yelled down at him. ‘By the way, did I ever show you the teeth marks left in the jib boom by that killer whale we ran into off the west coast of Canada?’

When he eventually came down, Gabriel decided to walk the manrope. Jonas rushed across to support him. ‘Are you going to come away with me next summer?’ Gabriel asked. He was always going on about it. ‘Let’s leave this bloody, stick-in-the-mud country behind,’ he said, just about falling overboard — though a nice cool dip might have done him good. Gabriel Sand belonged to that quite unique breed of hot-headed dreamers who are dead set on following the route taken by Ulysses around the Mediterranean or sailing to Vinland, via Greenland, in the wake of the Vikings, and it went without saying that he had a mind to solve the mystery of the Bermuda triangle. ‘At least come as far as the Galapagos Islands,’ he said. ‘I’ve always dreamed of being able to prove that Darwin made a fatal error out there. Let’s go back to that crossroads and find the other path, the one Darwin could have taken but didn’t. Two hundred years from now, m’lad, Darwin’ll be as out-of-date as those idiots who thought the Earth was flat!’

‘But what would take its place?’ Jonas felt obliged to ask.

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out, you great ninny!’ Gabriel’s gold tooth flashed. ‘Maybe we’re descended from sea horses. I’ve always had a soft spot for sea horses. In any case we could take a look at the turtles down there, big as VW Beetles they are.’

It was a real tonic to be onboard Gabriel’s boat. Jonas was in, or rather: yawning his way through, his second year at high school. At least once a week he took the ferry across to the Nesodden peninsula, going on from there by bus, then by rowboat to the Norge, as Gabriel had been presumptuous enough to name his boat because, in his eyes at least, it was indeed a royal barge. It was moored to a buoy far out in Vindfanger Bay, due north from Drøbak, on a level with Oscarsborg, and just the sight of it was enough to make Jonas relax, to breathe out: its graceful lines and splendid rigging, the intricate and yet eminently practical tracery of rope, block and tackle. The Norge was an old lifeboat, and Jonas felt that it had saved his life, too.

That Jonas Wergeland always maintained that Oslo Cathedral School where, then as now, you virtually had to fight for a place, was a highly overrated and uninspiring school, says more about Jonas Wergeland than it does about the school. The way Jonas saw it, in all of his time at high school there was only one bright spot: Axel Stranger, a kindred spirit who made it, psychologically at least, easier to yawn one’s way through classes. Strange as it may seem, Jonas did not learn a thing at high school and yet his marks were excellent, a fact which in everything except the science subjects could largely be attributed to a little red book, the fragmentary contents of which he had memorized inside and out. From this he could quote, in writing or verbally — and only rarely let it be known that he was, in fact, quoting — provocative opinions on just about everything: realism as viewed by the painter Eugène Delacroix, for instance; and thus, by paraphrasing briefly or at length or, if necessary, juggling quotations about to create the most unexpected and explosive combinations, he contrived to both impress and startle his teachers.

That was one way of getting through a class. The other was by going hunting for turtles. Jonas had taken the idea from an intriguing feature which crops up again and again in a number of ancient mythologies: the idea that the world rests on the back of a huge turtle. Hunting for turtles therefore involved seeking out the foundations upon which their teachers’ theories rested, the hub around which all their teaching revolved, for always, beneath the plainest, most solid facts, there lay a fiction, a turtle as big as a VW Beetle.

So let us sit in on a lesson with form 2MFb at Oslo Cathedral School. The class is in the middle of a history lesson and the teacher is Mr Osen, a newly-appointed member of the teaching staff, straight out of university, young and cocky, with a first-class degree and a brand spanking new PhD gained on the strength of a thesis entitled Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921. Girls in bulky white Aran sweaters had a particular tendency to fall like flies for Mr Osen, and, I might add, there were a whole lot of girls in bulky white Aran sweaters at Jonas’s school in those days. Rumours that during the same year in which he had defended his thesis, in the glorious year of 1968, Osen had been living in Paris did no harm either, since this made him what would later be termed a true-blue sixty-eighter, or ‘sixty-niner’ as Axel re-christened them due to their insistence on free love, their substantial contribution to the divorce statistics and, as Axel saw it, their preferred position when it came to sex and, later on, in their various positions in daily life in which they continued, as it were, to suck up to one another and lick one another’s arses.

But to return to Mr Osen. Osen was a smart teacher: a bit wet behind the ears, maybe, but very, very smart. Our lesson deals with the subject of 1848, another great revolutionary year, and Osen has come up with a teaching ploy that, to his mind at least, is little short of brilliant. Although this class is bright enough, they are simply far too dependent on the textbook; what they lack, Osen feels, is understanding, by which, without realizing it, he actually means belief. But how to give these pupils, and not least these girls in white Aran sweaters, some insight into the mighty wheels that drive history forward?

Mr Osen begins not by sitting down at, but casually draping himself over, his lectern and asking, deadpan, whether anyone can cite the reasons for the revolution of 1848, whereupon the pupils, and in particular the girls in white Aran sweaters, several of whom are disturbingly sweet, reel off stock phrases from the textbooks on everything from population overspill and urbanization to a lack of democratic influence and unemployment, all of which is fair enough, thinks Olsen, but dear, oh dear, so generalized, so abstract, so devoid of any fundamental understanding — and, I might add: belief. So what does Osen do? Osen gets down, no, he doesn’t get down, he vaults down off the lectern, as pumped full of adrenalin as a gymnast completing his routine on the pommel horse, and proceeds to rummage in his briefcase. Then he sets up one of those little steam engines, the sort of toy which Jonas remembers from his childhood and which are usually found in the homes of children whose fathers are engineers or something of the sort, Wolfgang Michaelsen, of course, had one, and now here is Osen rigging up his little steam engine on the top of the lectern, as eagerly as any child, and indeed this was his own old plaything, so Osen is a dab hand at this, dropping small fuel tablets into the drawer underneath the gleaming boiler which he has filled with water and firing it up, a hectic flush in his cheeks, forgetting all about his PhD because this is a brilliant idea, thinks Osen, as he straightens up, something this class will never forget; the little steam engine chuffing along while he, Mr Osen, Dr Osen, delivers a lecture on the driving forces behind historical events and on 1848, pumping, so to speak, the information into those sponge-like brains, causing a totally fresh insight into history to permeate like steam through porous walls. It would have been an unmitigated triumph, had it not been for those two blasted know-it-alls sitting one behind the other in the row nearest the wall. Axel Stranger and Jonas Wergeland were sniggering, and if there is one thing a teacher hates it is pupils sniggering like that.

Axel and Jonas most certainly are sniggering. They had soon figured where all this was leading, as had the rest of the class come to that, so when Osen eventually reaches his conclusion that the steam engine was the main driving force behind the revolution of 1848; referring to the steam engine as ‘quite literally, one of the wheels upon which history ran’, it comes as an anticlimax, despite the fact that Osen, as he makes this pronouncement, gestures with a flourish, rather like a conjuror, at the steam engine, the wheels of which, thanks to a piston mechanism, are now whirring and running across the top of the desk, so perfect in every detail that it is all Osen can do not to blow the whistle.

Axel turns to Jonas with a look of exasperation. Jonas nods and raises his hand.

Now it ought to be said that Mr Osen was a tough nut. There were times when their teachers’ assertions were so utterly lacking in any well-reasoned foundation that they presented no sort of challenge whatsoever. As when their physics teacher had the effrontery to state that it would never be possible to prove whether quarks did or did not exist, or their chemistry teacher obdurately maintained that no one would ever succeed in mapping out the human genome. This testified to such an infinite disdain for the inherent potential of human beings, for good or ill, to be forever expanding their knowledge that Jonas and Axel could respond in only one way: by getting up and leaving the class, pleading a sudden — joint — attack of depression.

They occasionally had to resort to other tactics to save themselves from falling asleep, as when, instead of demanding exactly what was laid down in the syllabus, they insisted on more than the set syllabus, thus sending many a teacher just about round the bend. ‘Please sir, could you tell us a bit more about Gödel?’ asked Axel when the maths teacher was careless enough to let slip a remark about that scholar, perhaps simply wanting to impress them. And if the poor teacher did happen to know a little about the, if I may say so, extremely interesting and notable mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel; if he, for example, vaguely remembered something about Gödel’s proof, some recollection from his long distant days at university and possibly went so far as to resort to the blackboard, Axel would simply keep on at him, asking Sir please to elaborate on everything he said or wrote on the board, much as an analyst will latch on to the last few words a patient utters and ask him to tell him more about that, until the teacher was standing there stuttering and stammering and having to admit that this was beyond his grasp: a fact which, ironically enough, in this instance illustrates Gödel’s statement that fundamental questions are impossible to determine. To which Axel solemnly replies: ‘Yes but sir, this is important. I believe I speak for the whole class in asking you to provide us with more information on Gödel in our next maths period.’ The majority of teachers weighed their words very carefully when teaching 2MFb.

But these teachers were not to be pitied, nor were they robbed of any of their self-confidence. I would remind you that we are talking here of Oslo Cathedral School, Norway’s élite school par excellence, an institution which, in spite of everything, prided itself on the quality of its teaching staff. And no one need feel sorry for Mr Osen PhD, with his thesis on Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921, when Jonas put up his hand to protest, and Jonas was protesting not only, like Axel, at Mr Osen’s cocksureness; he was also protesting because such a system, in which all of the pieces fall neatly into place — illustrated, what is more, by a wheel spinning in mid-air — was so monstrous that it made him feel physically sick.

‘This stuff about the steam engine is all very well, sir, but whatever happened, one might ask, to an element such as “the spirit”?’ It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, at the word ‘spirit’, Mr Osen recoils like a vampire confronted with a crucifix. ‘I would just like to remind you of what the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in that celebrated work Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,’ Jonas goes on, ‘in the first chapter of the third section, which deals with the Renaissance attitude to antiquity.’ As you can see, this was one of those occasions when Jonas Wergeland revealed the source of his quotation, and to listen to him anyone would have thought that he had just finished reading this relatively demanding work, in an early edition, printed in Gothic at that, just sailed through it, and not, as was in fact the case, simply memorized a piece from his little red notebook, one which was five lines longer than the part he had cited: ‘Here,’ says Jonas, ‘Burckhardt asserts that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but as much the spirit of the Italian people, which led to the spread of the Renaissance throughout the western world. Would you then, sir, rule out the possibility that the spirit of the French people, for example, had some bearing on the events of 1848?’

As I say, Osen was a tough nut, and so Osen simply ignores the question or rather, he is so nettled by the mere mention of Jacob Burckhardt’s name that he snorts, a snort which is, to be sure, drowned out by the chuffing of the steam engine.

Then it is time for Axel to take over: ‘But sir, what about the minds of the people? What about the theories that had been making themselves felt in Europe for fifty to sixty years?’ he says or all but shouts. ‘Theories propounded by, for example, Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau? Do they count for nothing, sir? Or do you perhaps believe that Diderot, too, came about as a consequence of the French Revolution? Or,’ and here Axel points to the toy on the top of the desk, ‘of the steam engine?’

Then the thing that Osen fears most happens: the class bursts out laughing, even the girls in the white Aran sweaters laugh. And at this moment Osen thinks back with longing — and this makes it possible to forgive him — to when he was a boy, to the Christmas when he was given this toy, so long before all the years at university, all the toiling away at Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921; Osen thinks of how, that first Christmas Day, he put the steam engine through its paces for his chums and they had stared, all agog, at this marvel which, for a short time, put Osen — the boy Osen, that is — in the for him unwonted position of being the centre of attention: a marvel which was not a steam engine — they had not the faintest idea what this thing might be used for, that it was a model of something which actually existed — but a miraculous object, a sort of perpetuum mobile, and what mattered was the gleam of the paintwork, the tooting of the whistle, the smoke issuing from the funnel. It was pure magic, a pure enigma, much like history.

Axel had long since spotted the turtle in Mr Osen’s lesson — and it was one of the truly big turtles of the day: dialectic materialism. And since Axel Stranger was extremely interested in causal relationships, a mania which would also come to determine his choice of profession, he now rises to his feet, as if to mark the solemnity of the moment, and says: ‘History requires goodstories, sir. What you have not grasped is that dialectic materialism is a really rottenstory.’ And at that he delivers a lengthy and pretty impassioned diatribe against dialectic materialism in which he succeeds quite brilliantly in mastering such dogmatic and deadly concepts as ‘the forces of productivity’ and ‘means of production’ and ‘basis’ and ‘superstructure’ in such a way that he not only takes up the fight but actually goes into the attack on Osen’s home ground, where the goal is defended by Karl Marx and his foreword to A Critique of Political Economy. That Axel thus dismisses dialectic materialism’s answer to the not exactly trifling question as to what factors have contributed most to the transformation of human society, could be put down neither to his being an uncritical idealist or a wish on his part to return to the primary school’s subjective, storybook style of teaching, but to a demand for fewer bombastic theories and a more nuanced approach — in other words, have the steam engine, by all means, but not just that. ‘You might at least put a well-thumbed volume from Diderot’s encyclopaedia alongside that bloody steam engine, eh sir?’

And it is here that Mr Osen makes his fatal blunder: he tries to accommodate Axel’s views and as a result, particularly after a swift and elegant parry from Axel, he loses himself in a hopeless rigmarole of vulgar Marxist jargon: living proof, if you like, that no Norwegian is ever capable of absorbing more than the most simplified version of any theory from the outside world, just as turtles from along the coast of Mexico are doomed to die on those occasions when they stray into the Gulf Stream and end up in Norwegian waters.

Axel, on the other hand, is in his element. It would have been fair enough if Olsen had simply trotted out Engels’ fine-honed version of dialectic materialism, even though that, too, is now so utterly banal, since anyone with an ounce of sense has long since recognized the relationship between technology, ownership structures and civilization. But what Osen is advocating with his little steam engine really is going too far, a ludicrous brand of determinism. ‘So you see, sir, what I cannot accept about this theory of yours,’ says Axel, ‘is, first of all, that it denies the significance to history of conscious human acts, which is, in itself, quite absurd; and secondly it states that human beings act solely from motives which spring from material concerns, something which, quite honestly, sir, goes against everything experience tells us.’

So ends this history class with 2MFb at Oslo Cathedral School, and it ends with a teacher packing away his boyhood steam engine and a pupil, right to the last, following one pointed remark with another until, as the school bell rings he strategically gets in the final word, as he concludes by saying that the interesting thing about Watt’s steam engine was not what it gave rise to but what had given rise to it. In other words, whether it had been an angel or a devil that had given Watt and the others the idea.

So much for high school. But right now it was recess for Jonas. He was on board a little gem of a lifeboat, a slice of Norwegian history if you like.

It was now quite dark. Out in the channel they could see the lights on the odd boat. Gabriel came over to the locker on which Jonas was sitting and put an arm round him. Was Jonas hungry? How would he like to taste a speciality from London’s West End?

They crossed to the hatch and climbed down the ladder. Gabriel was one of the few people with an old boat of this kind who had not installed an engine. Instead he talked about the wind: of the wind as cause and effect, of caprice and unpredictability. And of humility. ‘The wind is always there,’ he said. ‘But it’s only when you start to sail that you really become aware of it.’

Jonas settled himself in the saloon and lit the paraffin lamp, while Gabriel went into the galley to make his West End speciality. Jonas liked being in the saloon, he felt happier in that saloon than almost anywhere else, he liked the smell, liked the light and above all else he liked the stories which inhabited that room. On one of the bulkheads hung a bookshelf constructed in such a way that the books, all of them plays, would not fall out when the seas ran high.

The food was served up, the same as always, corned beef and tomatoes. And whisky. In ship’s mugs.

To those who know Gabriel Sand it will come as no surprise when I say that not everyone was so enamoured of his boat as Jonas Wergeland. In fact, that very evening certain characters of a more vindictive nature were making their way down to the bay and a waiting rowboat, sharp knives in pockets.

On board the Norge Gabriel raised his mug: ‘Did I ever tell you about my time on the Marquesas Islands, when I swam in the most wonderful lagoon I’ve ever come across on this Earth? It lay between the legs of the princess Aroari.’