The Seducer

Osiris

They were on the steamship jetty when it happened, one of those summer days filled with the sound of a thousand seagull cries, low tide and a dead calm, and a sea so smooth that the skerries could be seen mirrored in it. Colours were at their most intense in the afternoon light: the white of the houses, the red of the sheds along the quayside, the green of the lyme-grass; and the planks of the yawls gleamed like burnished gold. The air smelled of seaweed, of blue clay, of salt water. Jonas was six years old and had just learned to swim.

The high point of the day was the arrival of the Hvaler, a trusty old workhorse of a coaster which was in fact celebrating its centenary just around this time. Even as a grown man, Jonas could still recall every detail of that boat, right down to the smell down in the saloon, the judder of the engine and, not least, the noise it made, which could be heard half a mile away. The jetty, not the biggest of its kind, was packed with people, as it always was in those days when a coastal steamer was entertainment in itself. The majority were only there to check out what manner of funny-looking summer visitors would step ashore — their luggage was a dead giveaway — or which of the local residents had been over to Fredrikstad to buy new wallpaper. For a child, the mere fact of having a line thrown to you could make your day. Jonas, clad only in a pair of shorts, was there on the jetty with his cousin Veronika, who was already strikingly pretty, too pretty. They were standing roughly halfway along the jetty when Jonas suddenly became aware that the crowd seemed to be pushing them towards the edge, towards the boat which was now reversing out of the dock.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together?

Apropos the rationale for Jonas’s trip to Timbuktu, I apologize for oversimplifying. As always, there was at least one other, complex, reason. If anyone were to ask why Jonas Wergeland became a nomad, I could just as easily say he was searching for himself. And I mean that quite literally; he was searching for his arm or his hip, if, that is, he was not searching, purely and simply, for his head. This also explains why he was so delighted with the little leather pouch the Tuaregs gave him to hang around his neck, ornamented with a yellow and emerald-green motif representing the print of a sandal, to symbolize a man. Jonas felt as if he had found a foot, a limb that he had once lost.

You see: Jonas Wergeland was, in fact, carved up, dismembered, as a child.

It happened on that selfsame glorious summer’s day when the crowd, by dint of an incomprehensible conjunction of forces, a sort of parallelogram of forces, nudged him closer and closer to the very edge of the jetty until he was right up against one of the posts, and there he stood, staring down into the foaming water, at the seething whirlpools generated as the boat struggled to reverse out. In this part of the sound the current was exceptionally strong, and sometimes the crew had to make two or even three attempts, at full throttle, before they succeeded in bringing the boat round with the bow pointing towards Fredrikstad.

Jonas is gazing down into the boiling white waters, right out on the very edge of the jetty, almost mesmerized by the whirlpools, the way one can be mesmerized by the eyes of a snake — and then it happens: he is actually pushed in, down into those awful, frothing circles, not far from the stern of the boat and its fearsome propeller. Jonas’s first, spontaneous thought is that it is the mass that has pushed him in. So if anyone should wonder where Jonas Wergeland’s contempt for the masses springs from, the source of his oft-repeated assertion that the masses stunt the individual, now you know; it dates from that jetty on Hvaler where he quite literally became a victim of the power of the masses, the awe-inspiring energy which is always there, lying latent, in a crowd of people.

Jonas has only just learned to swim, he tries frantically to swim out of the way, but he can feel himself being dragged backwards, relentlessly, towards the propeller; he kicks and thrashes for all he is worth, but it does no good. There is a swishing, almost metallic sound in his ears, growing louder and louder, and already, on the brink of death, he feels the sharp pain of his feet being sliced off.

It was such a paradox, this whole incident, since up to that point in Jonas Wergeland’s life summer holidays on the island out in the mouth of the fjord had been associated with uninterrupted happiness. The stories of most people’s lives include a chapter entitled ‘In the Realms of Adventure’, and for Jonas this chapter was set — in two senses since it related both to being caught up in an adventure story and listening to adventure stories — in his father’s childhood home on Hvaler, one of the islands lying to the south of Fredrikstad, level with the Swedish border and overlooking the open sea. Here, in an old white house, in an atmosphere that would have to be described in a children’s song, not to sound banal, Jonas spent all his holidays as a boy. He experienced those summers with such an intensity that he knew, each morning when he awoke, that everything that happened that day would stay with him, that one day he would sit in an old folks’ home, looking back on, and shedding tears over, events that had gone straight to the heart of him with no detours: a beauty and a setting of such sunlit clarity that even a child who has never given any thought to such things instinctively understands that he is, as it were, establishing a bedrock within himself. And at the centre of this scene was his grandfather, exactly like a figure in some National Romantic painting, scratching the stomach of a grey tabby cat with the toe of his shoe.

People today have — if you will forgive me — such a narrow one-dimensional concept of the significance of the family, that I am not sure whether I should say anything at all about the part played in Jonas Wergeland’s life by his grandparents. Permit me, at any rate, to highlight one of the more general aspects in the form of a statement. The whole purpose of grandparents is to supply the fairy-tale element; they are the trainers of a child’s imagination. Not that they absolutely have to tell stories; in many cases it is enough for them to be there, like Jonas’s grandmother, because they are, in themselves, a story.

Jonas never knew his paternal grandmother, but his father’s father, Omar Hansen, lived long enough to fulfil his function in his grandson’s life. What Jonas remembered best about his grandfather was the fine creases at the corners of his eyes, radiating towards his temples when he screwed up his eyes, and he almost always had his eyes screwed up, as if he were constantly on the look-out for something that lay beyond what he saw around him all the time, something which Jonas fancied must be a sort of hidden story or a Story of Stories. In this, Jonas was not far off the mark, for Omar Hansen was a Platonist when it came to stories, believing as he did that every history, no matter how good, was only a pale shadow of a better story. Hence the reason that Jonas’s grandfather was perpetually brimming over with stories as if he were hoping that if he just went on telling them for long enough, or mixing up enough tales, some underlying story would eventually be revealed. In actual fact, I think Omar Hansen must have been the closest one can get in Norway to a rhapsody, a man with whole strings of stories committed to memory.

So for Jonas summer holidays consisted of a grandfather sitting in a blue kitchen with copper-hung walls and shelves lined with white jars inscribed with neat black lettering, telling a mishmash of tall tales and true ones while cleaning fish or cutting plugs of tobacco. ‘Just imagine, Jonas,’ he would say, ‘if you were living ten or twelve thousand years ago and were one of the first folk to come to Norway after the Ice Age. You’d have sailed right across here, so you would. You see, back then our island was under the sea, so you would have come ashore farther inland, up at Høgnipen, for example.’ Summer holidays were a grandfather in a rowboat, two big fists curled around the oars and fine creases around the eyes, a grandfather who taught Jonas how to haul in a net and lift the flatfish over the gunwale while at the same time pointing out the huge cairn on the crest of the island and saying something about his great-grandfather having dug up both the king and the bronze-age treasure that had lain underneath it: an exercise in inventiveness, both the quiet morning on the waters of the fjord and these stimulating stories.

Or they went for strolls, hand-in-hand, Jonas and his grandfather, through the dense belt of pine trees that stretched across the island, walking on a carpet of pine needles between tall golden trunks and beneath swaying treetops, while his grandfather talked of the old days, of the herring fishing, of men falling from the masts, of the village shop and Harry Hansen’s boatyard that was bewitched — and had Jonas ever heard the one about Lanky Arnold and the cherry tree? Or it might be the story of the customs men and the terrible blunder they made the time they tried to catch those smugglers from Sweden; or the missionary who used to preach at the village hall, only to be irresistibly tempted into the paths of sin and, thence, eternal damnation, by one of the island’s bonny lasses.

But always, first and last, there would be these two, Jonas and his grandfather, sitting on the smooth scoured rocks overlooking the open sea, where his grandfather had to bellow out his stories like another Demosthenes, to be heard above the roar of the breakers. What Jonas liked best of all was that his grandfather commenced all of his stories with the words: ‘Just imagine, Jonas, if you were …’ thus making Jonas himself the hero of every tale, no matter whether it was about maelstroms and sunken treasure, or mermaids, white whales and submerged reefs, or Tordenskjold’s victory at Dynekilen, not to mention lifeboats and great acts of heroism: just imagine if you were steering the pilot-boat, Jonas — can you picture it? — out there, heading for Koster to meet the Peter Wessel, or a spine-chilling tale of shipwrecks, see those banks over there, that’s right, there, where the surf is crashing something wicked, just imagine if you had gone off course one stormy night. The Store-Karl went down just there, you know. I was just a lad, saw the whole thing from Rokka, there was nothing anybody could do. And all the while his grandfather would be peering out to sea, with those fine creases around his eyes, as if he could make out another story, just over the horizon.

Omar Hansen had been a sailor, and hence a lot of his material was drawn from the sea. The parlour was like a gallery filled with small pictures of ships, painted with a fine brush, and down in the outside privy hung a sheet of cardboard from an old calendar showing the sailing routes of the Wilhelmsen line, white lines on a dark-blue chart: a little like a star chart brought down to sea level. Jonas never tired of sitting there, frequently along with his grandfather, on the seat that offered the better view of the shore and the sea when you left the door open, with the wind tickling at your backside. Only later did it dawn on Jonas that that was why his father read the National Geographic in the toilet at home in the town: not because he had a yen to go travelling but as a means of recalling his childhood, the sensual delights of an outside privy: that view, the scenery, an open door and a shimmering sea — and, now and again, most wondrous of all, the sound of rain falling softly on the grass.

So, as I say, this unhinging accident — Jonas falling into the water between the jetty and a reversing boat — in no way fitted with the usual summer routine: a glimpse of hell in the midst of paradise.

Jonas is floundering helplessly in the water, aware that he is being drawn towards the propeller. Then, just as he feels an excruciating stab of pain and is quite sure that his feet have been chopped off, it hits him that it was Veronika, his cousin, who had given him the crucial nudge; he had noticed her standing close beside him as the crowd pushed them towards the edge, knew she was right behind him when he was standing up against the post, gazing spellbound at the eddies swirling around the reversing coaster. Would you believe it? Veronika had pushed him in; cool as you like, how mean can you be, he thinks, and now he is going to die, is already dead, because at that moment he is struck by an utterly convincing feeling that his head alone is left floating and thinking, in a sea of red, while the rest of his body has been chopped up into little pieces that are now drifting off in all directions; and in the midst of his mortal panic he has a vision of parts of his anatomy being washed ashore in the most widely divergent parts of the world: some ribs in Sydney, his heart in the Gulf of Aqaba, a hand off Buenos Aires, an ear on the east coast of Greenland because he is already dead, dismembered, so he believes, just as the metallic swooshing dies away. Someone has managed to signal to the people onboard to stop the engine; he hears a splash, feels someone getting an arm round him, feels himself being held up, being lifted, and he is back on the jetty where, to his surprise, he realizes that he is in one piece and that the smarting of the skin on his thighs stems from jellyfish stings. The first face he sees is Veronika’s, a sight which prompts him to blurt out a weak and incredulous ‘Jesus Christ, Veronika’. And only those who have read this far will guess that what Jonas is actually saying, even though he does not have the words with which to verbalize this perception, is: ‘So this is how you thank me for saving your life on the Zambezi?’

Jonas was in a state of shock, for a few minutes he also lost his memory and did not know who he was. And even after he gradually began to recover and could think clearly, he had a bewildered look about him, as if in some way he still was not sure who he was. His grandfather was more aware of this than anyone else and tried in his own way to undo the harm: day after day he sat on a rock overlooking the open sea and told Jonas who he was; in other words, he put Jonas back together. While the breakers rolled slowly in towards the rocks, Omar Hansen peered out to sea and told a never-ending stream of stories: just imagine, Jonas, if you were walking down by the docks in Sydney — Omar Hansen had been to Sydney himself and knew the city well — or, just imagine, Jonas, if you were a sailor going ashore in Buenos Aires, there’s a street there, by the way, called Avenida de Mayo, an adventure in itself … All in all, Jonas’s grandfather’s storytelling was more intense than usual; he really gave it everything he had, dragging up one gripping yarn after the other. Imagine, Jonas, listen to this, Jonas: important episodes, mainly involving the people of the island, distant relations, Uncle Melankton, a genius; his grandfather sat by the sea with the breakers crashing at their feet, fine creases around his eyes, and told stories to this small boy who suddenly seemed so scared, so pale, as if the water had washed away the tan he took on so easily in the summer. But pale or not, Jonas listened; and it was here, on a rock by the sea that Jonas Wergeland learned — by which I mean, he understood later — that the stories his grandfather told him might be more than a diversion or an amusement, a way of passing the time. That they represented something utterly fundamental, something on which his whole existence depended, that they built him up in the same way as food did.

Even though Omar Hansen did his utmost, to the point where he almost caught a glimpse of the Story behind the stories, and even though Jonas could see with his own eyes that he was all there, he never rid himself of the feeling that, psychologically speaking, he truly had been chopped into pieces, the way you see on those wall-charts showing cuts of beef, and that his dismembered limbs had been swept off by the currents and scattered across the world.

So when Jonas Wergeland travelled abroad to Timbuktu for example, he was really going in search of himself.