The Seducer

What Price Beauty

The bathroom in the new villa was of course quite a different story. It had a red fired-brick floor complete with under-floor heating, gleaming white tiles on the walls with a chequered border in ultramarine designed by Aunt Laura and copied, according to her, from the dome of a mosque in Samarkand. Everything was bigger — the bath, the washbasin, the whole room in fact — which meant that there was also space for a shower cabinet and this, together with the ferns, quite a little rain-forest of them, lent the bathroom an air of sheer luxury, an impression which Jonas crowned by installing a bidet when he took over the house. There were times, sitting on the toilet, when Jonas fell to contemplating the astonishingly rapid rate of social change in twentieth-century Norway: the leap from his grandfather’s naturally aromatic outside privy on Hvaler, by way of the tiny bathroom in the block of flats at Solhaug, to this sumptuous, one might almost say international, chamber in the new house with its generous expanse of mirror and fittings worthy of any number of design awards — the equivalent of making the leap from Stone Age to Atomic Age within a couple of generations. It should be said, however, that they did retain the shelf of National Geographics, the only difference being that the old scent-spattered copies had been replaced by newer issues. Theodor Kittelesen’s picture of Soria Moria Castle also hung in its place on the wall, clearly visible from the toilet seat. Which reminds me that I never did finish the story of Jonas and his grandmother and their activities within the Norwegian fine-art market: a story which has both a moral and a happy ending.

Åse and Haakon Hansen had been on the look-out for some time for a bigger house, although they still had ample room where they were even after Buddha came along, Rakel having left home around the same time. But they had fallen prey to that dream common to all Norwegians: the dream of a house of one’s own, as if the fact of no longer having to live through the wall from anyone else represented the last lap on the road to happiness, a legacy of sorts from the days when every Norwegian inhabited his own valley with high hills between him and his nearest neighbours. Which is why, when a plot of land on the other side of Bergensveien came their way, only a stone’s throw from the block of flats in which they lived, they jumped at the chance and hence — typically — were only just starting to realize their dream of having their own house as Jonas and Daniel, too, were about to leave the nest.

Jonas’s parents hired an architect to draw up plans for a simple house, a house they could afford, but even this proved to be beyond their means. The building, which extended upwards and outwards and would later be dubbed ‘Villa Wergeland’, looked like remaining as out of reach as Soria Moria Castle, to stick with Kittelsen for the moment, the building costs proving to be far greater than anyone had expected — double in fact. Unlike the men behind a number of subsequent, much publicized Norwegian building projects, however, Åse and Haakon Hansen discovered this at an early stage. They obtained a number of estimates from an obliging builder, at no obligation, and very quickly figured out that such an outlay was more than they could afford.

One Sunday when the whole family was, for once, having dinner together in the flat at Solhaug — cold roast pork as usual on such occasions — Jonas’s father explained the situation to the children, with a lot of fiddling and fidgeting, and announced that sadly they would have to shelve their plans for a house of their own. At that very moment, while all of them were feeling pretty glum and even Åse’s crooked smile had been wiped off, the doorbell rang and there stood Jonas’s grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, who had long since read the signs in telephone conversations with her daughter.

It had been a while since any of them had seen her. Jørgine had gone through a lengthy spell of being Winston Churchill — a magnificent Winston Churchill, I might add — but the word was that in recent years she had gone back to being herself, which is to say an ordinary, one-time farmer’s wife from Gardermoen sitting reminiscing in the kitchen in Oscars gate or down by the pond in Slottsparken, chatting away quite normally to other old folk.

‘Dearie me, you’re a right cheery-looking lot!’ Jonas’s grandmother wasted no time. She asked them to sit themselves down in the sofa nook, she asked for a glass of port, she asked them all to relax.

Then she laid a cheque on the table, made out to Jonas’s mother, Åse Hansen.

‘There you go, and good luck to you.’ She raised the glass of port, winked at them all, even Buddha, who was gazing in wonder at the three deep creases in her forehead.

Jonas’s mother was completely nonplussed. ‘That’s an awful lot of money,’ was all she said.

‘True, but then what would I do with it?’ said his grandmother.

‘But how did you come by it, mother? You haven’t been doing anything illegal, have you?’

So Jørgine told them the story of ‘the young businessman’ who had rung her doorbell one day and asked to see her pictures. Jonas had all but forgotten the paintings that he had helped to collect. As recently as his first year in high school he had called in on his grandmother a couple of times after classes; he particularly remembered one visit to the Art Centre, occasioned by a biennale of works by young Nordic painters which had caused quite a stir, when he had persuaded his grandmother to buy a couple of early works by painters as diverse as Bjørn Carlsen and Odd Nerdrum, before celebrating a job well done not, as previously, with a visit to the Studenten ice cream parlour but with dinner — meatballs and stewed cabbage — at Restaurant Krølle, where his grandmother, clearly very much at home, impressed on Jonas the importance of only buying pictures by artists who were endeavouring to break new ground. ‘Like Knut Rose,’ she said, thinking of the boldly coloured paintings by him which she had acquired in the late sixties, prompted, needless to say, by that unerring tingling between Jonas’s shoulder-blades.

This ‘young businessman’, as Jørgine called him, wandered from room to room of the big flat in Oscars gate in a daze, hardly crediting what he was seeing; over the years Jonas’s grandmother had hung the walls with an impressive collection of works by young Norwegian artists, together with a few pictures from the fifties by Jakob Weidemann and Inger Sitter and a couple of Munch lithographs. When he had regained his breath he made Jørgine an offer on the spot for the whole collection. A very generous offer. More than it was worth. A lot more, by Jørgine’s reckoning. He insisted. She asked him to let her think it over. The following day she took him up on his offer, sold the whole lot, apart from four pictures which she later gave to Jonas, as a special thank-you to him.

‘Here’s the money,’ said Jonas’s grandmother, ‘and now I’ll take a little more port, if you don’t mind. Åse, stop looking so worried.’ Suddenly Jonas saw his grandmother as level-headed countrywoman, triumphant Churchill and wealthy patron of the arts all rolled into one; these three facets of her personality seemed to have synthesized into a greater whole, or perhaps only now were they seeing the real Jørgine Wergeland. ‘With this money you’ll be able to build that new house,’ she said. ‘Now that’s not so bad, is it?’

No, it was not so bad, and thus Jonas learned that the price of beauty, too, is constantly rising and that it can be converted into something concrete: a fine little brick-built house nestling under the reddish-brown granite face of Ravnkollen, for example. Jonas’s family always maintained that their house had been built by artists: by a bricklayer named Widerberg, a joiner named Rose and a plumber named Johannessen.

I might also add that Jonas’s grandmother most definitely did not need too feel bad about her ‘young businessman’. He had immediately recognized the value of Jørgine Wergeland’s unique collection of experimental works by young artists, the majority painted at a stage when they were in the process of breaking away from teachers and traditions and trying out new ways of painting. In other words, this man had a ‘nose’, and a nose for fine art at that. Before the seventies were out, Jens Johannessen, Frans Widerberg and Knut Rose — to name but three — would all, in their turn, score major successes as exhibitors at the Bergen Arts Festival and representing Norway at the Biennale in Venice. More to the point, however, is the fact that the ‘young businessman’ had detected something which escaped the attention of all but a few at that time: namely the first signs of what would later be referred to as the ‘yuppie decade’, which began to manifest itself towards the end of the seventies. Suddenly, works of art were fetching unprecedented sums of money — not only because they represented an investment and a speculative venture but also because they actually accorded the buyer a certain cachet. For instance, at the height of this wave, a picture by the not particularly inspiring, late nineteenth-century artist Erik Werenskiold was sold at auction for two and a half million kroner, and even a painter from our own century such as Kai Fjell could command prices of up to two million kroner for a picture. So even if, with a few exceptions, each of Jørgine Wergeland’s paintings on its own might not have been representative of such massive price increases, as a whole, as a collection, they constituted a very attractive proposition. Thus, when the time was right, her ‘young businessman’ was able, in his turn, to sell the collection to another ‘young businessman’ at a price three times greater than the exorbitant price he himself had paid.

If it is any consolation, I should just say that there is bound to come a day when the general public will enjoy these pictures, when this second, or a third, ‘young businessman’ is getting on in years and decides to do penance for his sins by building a magnificent art gallery as an annexe to the empire he has established almost solely by picking up the phone and saying ‘sell’ or ‘buy’.

What is more to the point, as far as our story is concerned, is that his grandmother’s transaction opened Jonas Wergeland’s eyes to the fact that this spine-tingling sensation of his could, as it were, be turned into hard cash. In which case he saw no reason why it should not someday be possible to trade in his own collection for something he truly dreamed of. You see, Jonas Wergeland did not collect paintings, he collected women.

And now you are standing in the Villa Wergeland, paid for, years ago, by your grandmother’s paintings, and you remember that you were on your way to the dining-room, and now you do actually walk through to the dining-room to check if the paintings are gone, if they have been stolen, and you do not need to switch on the light because you can see that the pictures are still there, they seem almost to shine in the dark, with a glow several layers thick, paintings you once singled out yourself, but what good does that do now, you think, what’s the use of a silver thread running down your spine now, you think, what the fuck use is art to anyone anyway, you think, and you trail back into the living room and you see the picture of Buddha and once again you are confronted with Margrete, dead, on the floor, and you have the urge to bend down and take her in your arms, hold her like a little child, tight against you, like a sculpture by Gustav Vigeland you think, man with a woman in his arms, you think, but you do not do so, you merely look and look, at her face, always that face you think, do you remember how I managed to ski all the way down the hills to Movatn, you ask out loud, all the way without falling once, for the first time, you say out loud, looking and looking at her, feeling your eyes fill with tears, the ache in your throat, a sword, you think, a sword at my throat you think, and now you are finally going to be chopped up and your limbs scattered around this room, as if across a vast, barren desert, you think.

Your eye falls on the bowl on the side table, filled with fruit, like an oasis you think, looking at the oranges and remembering how Margrete would peel an orange, slowly, in awe almost, and how she would split it up into wedges, ‘boats’ she called them, eyeing each one lingeringly, holding it up to the light as if it were a work of wonder, you think, before putting it into her mouth, and you remember how she savoured, really savoured, every boat, you think, and the word ‘boat’ pulls you up short, makes you think of a boat reversing, and you hear a whooshing sound, like water seething around the stern of a reversing boat and you listen, intently, until it fades, dropping to no more than a faint hum, or radiation, and again you are struck by the distinct odour of electronic equipment in use and of some gently heated synthetic material, mingling with the smell of charred logs and ashes, and you walk round the corner to find a television set, switched on, but with the sound turned down, and at first you cannot think what a television is doing here, or what a television is, anyone would think you had never seen such a contrivance before, but it reminds you of something and you lift your eyes to the row of blue transparent jars on the shelf above it, as if these were every bit as important, because these are Margrete’s jars and there are seven of them, just like in the fairytales, you think, and you have a mind to knock them to the floor, in protest against something or other, but you do not, you merely look at them, at the delicate, transparent blue in the dim light and gradually it comes back to you, what it is, that machine sitting below the blue jars, what it is used for, pictures, you think, a screen you sit and look at, you think, and something slowly dawns on you, the way it does when you gradually begin to recognize someone who has said hello to you only once they eventually say their name, and the machine is switched on, you think, surprised, it must have been on all the time, you think, even as Margrete was dying, you think, as if this holds the key to it all, and you stand there looking, looking and looking, but you cannot make head nor tail of the images, neither what they represent or how they hang together.

So there you stand, Jonas Wergeland, brother to the polar bear, champion of the Perfume Islands, darling of the Norwegian people, in front of a television set, and you vaguely remember that you actually have cashed in on your collection of paintings, no, not paintings, you think, something else, you cannot remember what, only that you have exchanged it for something that has to do with this screen in front of you, these images, without sound, the chance to be behind these images, or to be these images, you think, and now you realize, as things become clearer, that it is the evening news flashing across the screen, and you recognize the newsreader, you are sure you have spoken to him sometime, you think, and there is something about these images, dramatic items from different countries that fills you with a desperate need to learn everything that has been happening in the world that day, and you think to yourself that if you can do that, you will also find the one detail which will explain everything, why you are standing here, looking at a dead body, you think, and from then on you will actually be enormously keen to know what went on in the world on that particular day, during those minutes when you wandered about in a daze or stood riveted in front of the evening news on TV, events at home and abroad, soundless, and there is something about these images, from society, as it were, from the world outside these windows, you think, which triggers a memory of who you are, one of the other people you are, because you are many people, you think, you are also a politician, you think, once you even climbed a flagpole for a cause, you think, and you were, no, you are still, deeply concerned with how you, an insignificant little individual, could step in and have some effect on the big decisions taken by a community in which almost no one shows their face and almost everyone is faceless, and you stand there, in a living room with a dead body lying next to you, and you gaze at a silent television screen showing a report of the more scandalous sort, some exposé or other, some outraged face speaking into a microphone held obligingly to his lips by a disembodied hand, and you remember that you too have made television programmes, a lot of programmes, you think, presenting Norwegian society from unusual angles, and you know that people were hit, hard, when they least expected it, struck by a ball that shot off at an angle, often more than one angle, like a billiard ball, you think, and you know you have shocked people, no more, aroused hate, you think, and you turn from the television screen to Margrete, dead on the floor, and you realize that any Norwegian citizen could be behind this, it could be anyone, even the Oslo bomber, you think, someone who’s sick in the head, or simply someone who hates being provoked, hates these all too revealing, all too unforeseen angles.