The Seducer

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The whole point of being human, as Gabriel told Jonas again and again, was to take over the direction of one’s own life. Why allow yourself to be defined by others. Be a king, for Christ’s sake! Did Jonas hear what he was saying? You had to pose your own questions, set your own terms! And at this point Gabriel invariably flung his arms wide, gesturing to the bulkheads surrounding them and reverently declared, his intonation perfect: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.’

Jonas Wergeland had never sailed — to sea, that is — on Gabriel’s boat, and yet his visits onboard the old lifeboat, securely tethered to its buoy not far from the shore, riding at its moorings as they say, represented a voyage of sorts around the world and, in terms of enlightenment, an endless continuation of the journey to inner Østfold. Just to sit below decks there in the saloon was enough, in a room the air of which was unlike that of any other, as if you could smell the scents of all the places at which that boat had docked or dropped anchor. ‘From Drøbak I circled the globe a dozen times,’ Jonas used to say.

The chief feature of that room was Gabriel Sand himself, in his ancient dark suit, complete with waistcoat, watch-chain and all, an outfit so totally out of date that it actually lent him a style all his own, a dash of a bygone nobility which went well, in a way, with his gift of the gab. Gabriel could talk and talk about everything and anything, all night long, non-stop, his flow of words punctuated only by the odd slice of tomato or a chunk of corned beef, or Jonas chucking another log into the stove; Gabriel could produce some object — a shell from the Society Islands, say, and spend hours telling the story of it. Jonas leaned back on his bench and listened, fascinated as much by Gabriel’s gold eye-tooth glinting in the gloom as he talked, like a sort of beacon in this ocean of yarns and assertions, predictions and curses, because in between his yarns Gabriel would suddenly start to rant and rave, usually in English, so that Jonas never knew whether he was quoting lines from some play or what; although he did learn the correct pronunciation of a host of rare and not always quite proper English words which would later earn Jonas much baffled admiration when he come out with them in English class. As a rule, though, Gabriel tended to do his grousing in Norwegian, and what the devil was he doing in this pettifogging little country anyway and why in hell’s name wasn’t he in Martinique or on the Charing Cross Road.

Gabriel Sand was going to have more reason for complaint, seeing that he was now onboard a boat which was about to set out, that evening, on a most dramatic and quite unintentional voyage, inasmuch as someone was very shortly going to cut its moorings and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Skipper Clement, the ferry which at that time used to set sail for Fred-erikshavn at 10 p.m., was just pulling out of Oslo harbour.

There was no end of curiosities onboard the Norge. On one bulkhead hung a barometer which always read ‘fair weather’ and next to the bookshelf, in the place of honour, hung a weathered playbill from the twenties advertising a performance at the Regent Theatre, King’s Cross with Gabriel’s name right up there alongside John Gielgud’s, no less. Sitting in state in the for’ard cabin, in a corner which Jonas could see from the saloon, was what Jonas had first taken to be a puppet theatre but which proved to be an old television, or at least the outer shell of one, with a skull sitting inside it, like a test card for death or some obscure sacred relic. ‘News, that’s the religion of today,’ Gabriel was fond of saying, ‘especially when it has to do with war or death.’ Gabriel sniffed at people who thought religion had died out, people who could not see that its significance was steadily increasing; that the age of crusades was only just beginning. And here he was: talking, mark you, about genuine religious conflicts and not the shite that went on in Northern Ireland, where religion was no more than a cover for something else. No, what he was talking about was the bizarre tension between Christians and Muslims that everybody seemed to think belonged to the Dark Ages, not realizing that Muhammad’s boys were only warming up and would soon be making their comeback, more terrible than ever before. ‘Here, Jonas, have another drop of whisky, won’t do you no harm, lad.’

Next to the gold tooth, what Jonas noticed were Gabriel’s eyes, they had such a heavy look about them, almost as if he were drugged. Not only that, but one of his eyes contrasted sharply with the other due to an ugly scar running along the underside of the eyebrow.

In Gabriel’s opinion, the anti-metaphysical attitude of the Norwegian socialists was particularly risible. Their thinking seemed to stop at the bridge over Svindesund, at the border with Sweden, they simply could not conceive of the possibility that the yen for some divine element in everyday life might well up again, more strongly than at present, even in Norway. And what did Jonas think of these Marxists, setting the agenda with their extreme views these days? You’d think that’d be enough to make everybody realize that religion wasn’t dead. ‘These Norwegian Marxist-Leninists, they’re no better than any of those religious cults with their head-shrinkin’,’ said Gabriel. ‘The only difference bein’ that it’s their own heads they’re shrinkin’.’

As you can see, Gabriel Sand was a talker — ‘blabbermouth’ would be too flippant a word. When Gabriel talked it seemed always to be a necessity, like the shark which has to keep on swimming and swimming to save from sinking, because it has no air sacs. Not that Jonas had anything against Gabriel’s talking. He loved to sit there listening to him, occasionally helping himself to some more corned beef and tomatoes or pouring himself another drop of whisky, well watered down, while at the same time taking in the creak of the rigging, of the gaff, and the occasional gentle wallow as they were nudged by the wash from boats out in the channel. But first and foremost there was Gabriel and Gabriel’s talk of everything under the sun, all night long, because it was at night that they had their talks; at best, Jonas would manage a couple of hours sleep in one of the bunks before Gabriel rowed him back to the shore the next morning and Jonas headed back, dozy, and yet somehow elated, on the Nesodden ferry. And on the way in to Oslo harbour and the Town Hall; on the way to the Cathedral School and classes that all but lulled him to sleep — if, that is, Axel was not all geared up for some madcap turtle hunt — Jonas thought about the things Gabriel had talked about, such as the tenability of the doctrine of predestination or dinosaur skeletons in Colorado; or else the drift of the continents towards and away from one another, or the eclectic ideology of ancient Chinese philosophy.

What Jonas learned onboard Gabriel’s boat was not facts. When you came right down to it, Jonas learned just one thing: to feel wonder. But if, when sitting below decks in the saloon, Jonas felt himself to be down in the depths of the ocean, his very first university was situated on high, in a loft, in fact. And the person who really introduced him to the art of make-believe, that gift which was to set its stamp most clearly on his career and on which, like a turtle, his creativity rested was, of course, Nefertiti.

All of the two- and three-storey blocks of flats on the Solhaug estate had their own communal loft. This was in the days when, naïvely perhaps, people would happily store their belongings alongside those of their neighbours. The loft belonging to Jonas’s staircase was a real Aladdin’s Cave and a favourite hangout of Jonas and Nefertiti, not least because of an old gramophone which played seventy-eights and which really came into its own again after an overjoyed Nefertiti discovered the box of Duke Ellington records which Jonas’s mother had inherited from Uncle Lauritz and simply stowed away in the loft. Nefertiti was, of course, well acquainted with Duke Ellington and his intricate opus and as good as insisted that Jonas listen to and learn from these discs, which showed how even the simplest of melodies could be turned into a pyrotechnical display of tonal variations and rhythmic finesses. ‘It was Duke Ellington who taught me that the arrangement is all,’ as Jonas said in one interview. After playing through the whole pile several times, Jonas discovered that there were some numbers which swung more than others, swung to set you rocking from top to toe, and Nefertiti informed him that this was the 1940 band in which the man who made all the difference, from ‘Jack the Bear’ onwards, was bass player Jimmy Blanton, working away like a propeller under all the rest, driving the whole thing forward with a reckless and unprecedented energy.

One day Nefertiti came with a parcel for Jonas. Inside he found a red box which he opened, to lay eyes for the first time on his Hohner chromatic mouth organ, nestling in gleaming blue velvet, its plate beautifully engraved. Nefertiti could already play the mouth organ and, thanks to her enthusiasm and fantastic flair for teaching the right way to hold the instrument, how to play the individual notes, use the slide button and generally get the hang of the instrument, as well as the breathing technique and a pretty neat hand vibrato, it was not long before Jonas, too, could carry a decent tune, enabling them to perform several of Ellington’s catchy melodies together, the pièce de résistance in their repertoire being ‘Concerto for Cootie’, with the one instrument answering the other, just like the orchestra on the record. There was only one number which they never really mastered, the mind-blowing ‘Cotton Tail’ which called for the sort of technique not even Nefertiti could command. They tried and they tried, and it became a sort of goal in life for them, one day to get it right.

Thanks to Nefertiti, Jonas did not become a cellar sort of person, though he might have been so inclined. Instead, psychologically speaking, he became a loft person. That loft was a props cupboard in which every single object could be a springboard for the most breathtaking flights of fancy. It was in this loft, in a block of flats in Solhaug, Grorud that Jonas Wergeland learned to see the potential in the little details; realized that every object, even the very smallest, was full of possibilities around which the imagination could weave a tale. There was nothing to beat those imaginary journeys in the loft. All Nefertiti needed was a suitcase, some old clothes, an earthenware vase, a Christmas-tree stand, a spade — and hey presto! — they could be anywhere. The only things they ever took from the outside were provisions in the form of dried apricots, nomad food as was only right and proper, drawn from Nefertiti’s apparently endless supply at home. Other than that they had all they needed. Some sheets served for Tibet, starting point for a gruelling hunt for the Abominable Snowman; one solitary tarnished mirror became the great glittering palace of Versailles; a shattered pot was enough for the momentous discovery of ancient scrolls hidden in sealed clay jars at the back of deep grottoes; a small rug and a brass pot sparked off an intrepid visit to Mecca disguised as Muslims — all of this to the accompaniment of Duke Ellington’s magical orchestra, more particularly the 1940 band with Ben Webster and that wizard Jimmy Blanton: ‘Ko-Ko’, ‘Conga Brava’, ‘Sepia Panorama’, ‘The Flaming Sword’. The way Jonas saw it, it was no accident that Duke Ellington would later release records that spoke of journeys, albums such as Far East Suite and Latin American Suite. One particular day, when ‘Echoes of the Jungle’ was making the dust in the loft dance, Nefertiti unearthed a moth-eaten fox-fur stole, which provided the inspiration for a lengthy safari. Along the way she taught Jonas, among other things, that chimpanzees have a language all their own and that ‘Nn ga kak’ meant ‘I’m hungry’, a phrase which she had actually tried out on a visit to Copenhagen Zoo, whereupon the chimp had promptly handed her a banana. Again, up there in the loft, a pair of sandals had taken them to Ancient Rome, to warn Caesar, and I need hardly say that this was long before American film director Steven Spielberg showed all children that time-travelling of this sort can have the direst consequences. And in the evenings, in the autumn especially, all they had to do was open the trapdoor in the roof to observe the full moon through a pair of binoculars with shattered lenses, though this did not hinder their loft, now metamorphosed into a space ship, from making a nice soft landing, shortly afterwards, on the surface of the moon.

Nefertiti’s imagination knew no bounds; where she was concerned even a cowpat could represent an entire universe, be translated into pearls of wisdom, pure gold. As I said, Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius was to choose Nefertiti as his best friend. He knew all along that it could not last, that she was clearly too good for this world.

To some extent Jonas felt that his nights on board the Norge, Gabriel’s boat, constituted a continuation of that first university, of those travels among linen bags and mothballs and all the old magazines, their subject matter as antiquated and absorbing as any Codex Sinaiticus. The loft had been replaced by the saloon in which Gabriel lit the paraffin lamp when the light filtering through the skylight began to fade and, instead of dried apricots, there were now corned beef and slices of tomato like little red wheels. Besides emitting a fine soft light, the paraffin lamp hanging from the ceiling also gave off a particular smell, and this odour mingled with the scent of the tar used for impregnating the hull, a scent which pervaded the boat; like incense, stimulating the memory, reminding Jonas of one of the best parts of his life: his grandfather — his father’s father, that is — and the stories he told.

In many ways, all of Gabriel’s yarn spinning came down to just one long story. No matter what he happened to be talking about it was liable to end up as the ‘Tale of the Chance of the Unlikely’. Gabriel could open a newspaper and in just about every column he would come upon grotesque examples of inanity and narrow-mindedness. ‘People just can’t see further than their own noses,’ he said. ‘Here’s some so-called expert stating categorically that unemployment is a thing of the past in Norway. I ask you! Chuck another log in that stove will you, Jonas. That sort of senile stupidity fair makes my blood run cold. How can people go around thinking that the world just stands still? Every bloody time somebody or other sets another world record, in speed-skating or athletics or whatever, we’re told that this one’ll never be broken. Where’s the historical perspective in that? And now heaven help me if they aren’t running down that poor sod of a composer again. I’ll bet you anything those same people will be writing articles praising him to the skies ten or fifteen years from now, the day he’s given the key to some grace-and-favour residence. It’s a bloody disgrace, so it is. Oy! Wake up, lad!’

What Gabriel did not know was that, under cover of darkness, someone had glided soundlessly up to the buoy and sliced through their mooring, setting the boat adrift. There were plenty of people who had no time for Gabriel and his ranting, especially not when he stood on the deck, and certainly not in the middle of the night, roaring his opinions to the four winds.

‘What’s wrong with the world?’ Gabriel asked, his gold tooth gleaming, while Jonas lay back, enthralled, drinking in this phantasmagorical display, worthy of another Don Quixote; to him these tirades were a thing of beauty in themselves, like exercises in inventiveness, stretching the mind. ‘People don’t believe in the improbable. That the most unlikely things can happen,’ said Gabriel, turning his rather heavy eyes on Jonas, the one rendered different by the scar under the brow seeming to gaze into another world. ‘For instance, if I were to say that a second-rate movie star might one day become president of the United States, people would kill themselves laughing. Damn right, they would. Even though it’s only a matter of time. The society they have over there, that’s the way things are going. We see the most unlikely things happening round about us all the time and yet somehow we manage to negate that such things could happen again. Pretty good, eh? Take the Berlin Wall, for instance, and all the people who think that that’s always going to be there.’

I would ask you to bear in mind here that the sixties were just giving way to the seventies; bear in mind, too, that the Skipper Clement was on course for Frederikshavn and would very shortly have to pass through the very narrow channel into which Gabriel’s boat was now drifting, a stretch of water which, by the way, happened to be one of the most renowned in the history of Norway, for it is here on the seabed that the rusting hulk of the German battle-cruiser Blücher lies, testifying to the fact that something which no one would have thought possible did actually happen once, and in Norway at that.

But in the saloon, beneath a paraffin lamp, in the warmth from the wood stove, Gabriel was fulminating over this singular forgetfulness. Folk even forgot actual historical events. How could they? They neatly forgot, for instance, the disparities between ethnic groups living side by side in the same country. What was Jonas laughing at? By Christ, it was no laughing matter. How long, for example, did he think the Soviet Union was going to last, hm? Or what about some of these countries in the Balkans? They were only cobbled together willy-nilly anyway. ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ said Gabriel, ‘before the whole kit ’n caboodle blows sky-high. I’m telling you, Jonas: use your imagination.’

Sometimes Gabriel’s lectures took their outset in the boat itself, not least when he came to the subject of the Norwegian national character. Then he was liable to get up, duck inside one of the bunks and treat Jonas to a description of the inner skin of the hull, the pinewood lining and the outer shell overlaying this, the oak timbers; of the double frames and the ‘crooked knee-timbers’, launching off from this into expositions on everything from Viking ships and Norwegian prefabs to dragon-head patterns and the lumber trade with England. The first time Jonas came across the name of Colin Archer was in the middle of a discourse on the stave church at Lom.