The Seducer

Strike the Christian Cross from your Flag

Always this: to find a different angle from anyone else. Like the time he took the stairs two at a time to come breathlessly to a halt outside the door of the corner room on the third floor and, quivering more with impatience than nerves, managed to pick the lock — he, Jonas Wergeland, the Duke, on the hunt for new angles.

He crosses to the window, shaped like the upper half of a circle. A half-moon. How apt. It is early in the morning, before first period, and Jonas is standing in the dusty flag-loft of Oslo Cathedral School with a length of fabric rolled up under his arm and his heart pounding in his chest. These are the days of student revolt and like so many others Jonas Wergeland means to hoist a flag — but not the usual flag.

The horizontal flag-pole was anchored inside the room itself, running through the wall just below the window; it put Jonas in mind of a jib-boom and made him feel as if he were standing in the bow of a lifeboat, all ready to do great deeds. But what he saw outside, or down below, was not the sea, but the cemetery.

Oslo Cathedral School was tucked away in one corner of the huge Rikshospital complex and Jonas actually felt more like a patient than a pupil: a patient who was constantly being given the wrong diagnosis. To be brutally frank, Jonas would have regarded his three years at this high school, all mentions of which were invariably punctuated by such epithets as ‘venerable’ or ‘steeped in tradition’ or ‘charming’, as seriously damaging to his mental health, had it not been for the fact that it lay just across the street from Our Saviour’s cemetery. For it was there that he had met Axel.

During the lunch-break on one of his first days at the Cathedral School, following an almost destructive impulse, Jonas had slipped through the wrought-iron gates of the cemetery. Despite the beautiful August weather, he was feeling thoroughly depressed and shuddered to think what the three years ahead of him held in store in terms of tedium and, worse, unsatisfied curiosity. Jonas cursed himself and the whim that had led him to this ‘august’ school in the heart of the city.

Gloomily he made his way between the rows of graves, and it was while he was walking along, kicking up the gravel, his eyes fixed on the ground, that he heard a familiar sound, a sound so familiar that at first he could not figure out what it was. He walked faster, straightened his shoulders, headed towards the sound, some faint notes played on an instrument he ought to know better than any other. The music was coming from someone hidden behind the leafy foliage surrounding one of the graves in the Grove of Honour. And there, sitting between two striking weeping beeches, on the grave of none other than Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, was Axel Stranger.

Anyone familiar with Our Saviour’s cemetery in Oslo will know that Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s grave is marked with a flat stone of red granite. The actual concept — a flag, yes, yet another flag — is really rather grotesque, but the monument itself makes a perfect place to sit; in summer the stone is lovely and warm and, as I mentioned, well screened by thick foliage. Axel had resorted to this spot to read. Oddly enough Jonas, who rarely opened a work of fiction, tended to choose friends who were readers. Nefertiti and Margrete were also readers. Lying on the granite next to Axel was Halldor Laxness’ Veveren fra Kashmir, a battered copy from Deichman’s Library.

On seeing Jonas, Axel finished the tune he was playing, the title of which had finally come to Jonas: ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ from Duke Ellington’s inexhaustible repertoire. Without a word, Jonas put out his hand, and the mouth organ was placed in his palm like a relay baton. It was exactly the same as his own, a Hohner Chromonica, well used, with a dent in the casing. Jonas raised it to his lips and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’, not altogether satisfied with his performance, it was a long time since he had played, but he got through it. His face deadpan, Axel took back the instrument and proceeded to play — without wiping it on his trouser-leg first, which Jonas promptly took as a vote of confidence — ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’ with such virtuosity and such feeling that it sent shivers up Jonas’s spine, forcing him to swallow several times. Never had anyone brought out the aching melancholy of that tune so well, no one in Ellington’s own orchestra come to that, not even Johnny Hodges. And as Axel played, Jonas felt something loosen its grip on him. Nefertiti. Or rather, he felt as if he were letting go of one hand and clasping another, a new hand. And it is as if Nefertiti herself was there beside him, giving this new friendship her blessing.

‘Christ Almighty,’ said Axel. He slipped the mouth organ into his jacket pocket, ran a hand through his tousled locks and squinted up at the sun. ‘What a shower.’

Jonas knew what he was referring to. Their class. Not because they were so all-fired clever. Nor because so many of them were the children of pillars of society who before too long would themselves constitute a disproportionately large slice of Norway’s highly visible élite. It was because they were such bloody conformists. Even their radicalism was conformist; their very rebelliousness followed the fashion, usually of an earlier era, so they could ponce about in their fathers’ berets and their grandfathers’ black waistcoats, reading Sartre, like Jonas’s cousin Veronika — who, it went without saying, was also a pupil at the school. It reeked to high heaven of opportunist opposition.

‘And those teachers.’ Axel made a face.

‘Aye hope you awll rrree-alayze what sawrrrt of school you arrre attending.’ Jonas did a perfect imitation of the headmaster.

‘I knew it the minute I saw you,’ said Axel. ‘I could tell by your shoes. You were a wanderer. You were the only one.’

Jonas had also noticed Axel. It’s always the way. You home in on one another almost as soon as you walk through the school gates: like ants, it’s all down to chemistry, even in a crowd of several hundred. It might be a look, a laugh — in Jonas and Axel’s case it was their shoes. Both wore a particular type of sturdy, thick-soled black brogue, well polished. And they were dressed almost identically in white cotton shirts, buttoned to the neck, dark tweed jackets and baggy trousers of a good quality; in other words, what I would call timeless clothes — clothes that never reflect the current fashion, no matter how much or how often that may change.

‘Where did you learn to play like that?’ Axel asked.

‘From a girl.’

‘And Duke Ellington?’

‘The same.’

‘Looks like we’ve both been lucky,’ Axel said. ‘To run into originals in a world full of imitators.’ Otherwise, Axel’s most distinctive feature was his hair, a thick black mop that at times looked so wild that it could have been mistaken for the Rasta dreadlocks of a later date.

They made many a visit to Our Saviour’s cemetery during their three years at the Cathedral School. While other pupils headed for the town centre at lunchtime, going all the way down to the Studenten ice cream parlour, wolfed down stacks of mille-feuilles in the neighbourhood teashops, sneaked into the Rikshospital canteen or wandered along to Ringstrøm’s second-hand bookshop to rummage through the boxes set out on the street, Jonas and Axel took refuge among the stone monuments on the other side of Ullevålsveien, where the graves of famous Norwegian men and women provided them with a place to relax between two spells of dreary school work. ‘During lunch-breaks at the Cath, I mixed with a lot of interesting people,’ Jonas would later say. In the classroom they went hunting for turtles; at lunchtime they sat or lay stretched out in the Grove of Honour and played the mouth organ, their eyes resting on the top of a lovely copper beech or a majestic horse chestnut. Jonas taught Axel the arrangements for two mouth organs that Nefertiti had taught him, first and foremost their pièce de résistance: ‘Concerto for Cootie’. They really made that number swing, so magnificently that on occasion they ended up being chased by the caretaker. ‘Don’t you have any respect for the dead?’ he would holler, waving his fist at them. ‘Vandals!’

Jonas and Axel would have been more inclined to say that they were ‘honouring the dead’.

They had their favourite graves. The grassy slope alongside Edvard Munch’s memorial plaque was just right for ‘Morning Glory’, Olaf Bull’s beautiful grave with its tall undressed stones lent a unique resonance to ‘Never No Lament’, perfect for two mouth organs, while they did honour to composer Johan Svendsen’s lofty obelisk, fittingly enough, with ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing’.

There were not too many Norwegian students who could be tested in a Norwegian literature class on the serpentine influence of Sigurd Hoel and then go out, slip a red stocking cap over the head of said gentleman atop his gravestone and play that lovely Ellington number ‘The Girl In My Dreams Tries To Look Like You’, finding in this a welcome safety-valve, a way of letting off steam. Axel in particular, having the handicap of being a reader, was forever getting into arguments with their Norwegian teacher, not least because this Norwegian teacher was an advocate of a turtle with an especially tough shell, a commonly held theory known as ‘realism’, with the accent on mimesis, imitation and so-called reliable sources — reliable in relation to what? Axel would ask — which their Norwegian teacher would put into practice by claiming, cool as you like, without dropping his gaze for a second, without blushing, without stammering, that the novel The Fire by Tarjei Vesaas, coming between the two highly acclaimed works The Birds and The Ice Palace, was no good. The best one could hope for, according to Axel, was that he had merely gleaned this opinion from orthodox contemporary book reviews. At worst, he had actually read Brannen himself and meant what he said. Either that or the Norwegian teacher would drive Axel to despair by claiming that the experiments carried out by Johan Borgen later in his career had little to offer compared to his earlier, far more traditional work: a viewpoint so monstrous that Axel could not even laugh it off. One day, incensed by an argument he had had with this teacher on the subject of what a damnably overrated writer Henrik Ibsen was and why in hell such a senile old fool should be allowed to take up so many of their vital Norwegian classes, Axel stormed out in a rage and peed on Ibsen’s tombstone, the obelisk in the Grove of Honour: a traditionalist’s phallus, according to Axel, a stinking corpse in the hold. There are many ways of making a protest. Axel replaced the catchword of the day — ‘Peace!’ — with his own alternative: ‘Piss!’ For those of you who might feel offended by this, I would, if I may, like to say a few words in Axel’s defence. His reaction was prompted by a great love of literature, so great — not to say excessive — that he could often be moved to tears by the things he read, a trait which Jonas never understood. To be honest, he never really could comprehend those members of the human race who were readers.

As I say, there are many ways of making a protest: there was Jonas Wergeland, in the flag-loft of Oslo Cathedral School, all set to hoist a flag. He opened the middle of the three panels in the arched window and considered the white pole sticking surprisingly far out into midair, as much as five metres maybe, and the rope toggle which, as ill luck would have it, must have been tugged loose by wind and weather and had slid a good way down the pole. He was going to have to shin out onto it, not far, but the very thought was enough to leave him paralysed.

Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

He has to do it. He has made up his mind. He is Jonas Wergeland, the Duke, on the hunt for fresh angles. He forces himself not to look down at Ullevålsveien as he crawls carefully, very carefully out of the window and stretches out, even more carefully if that is possible, along the pole. Like a bowsprit, he thinks, even as he feels it give under him; it is a wooden pole, the mere thought that it might be rotten brings him out in a sweat and, worse, moves him to look down, inducing an attack of vertigo; half of him wants to let go, the other half is hanging on for dear life. A woman glances up at him in astonishment but does not stop. She must think that Jonas is some sort of chameleon, or that a high-school student clinging to a flagpole sticking straight out into the air thirty feet above the ground is a perfectly normal sight in these rebellious times. Jonas looks down on the cemetery, fantasizing as to what they will write on his tombstone, but he makes it, grabs hold of the line, undoes it one-handed and crawls backwards to safety.

Jonas unfurled his length of fabric, fixed it to the rope and hoisted it out onto the pole. It looked great, really … exotic. What would people on the street below think? That a new embassy had been established on Ullevålsveien?

The flag fluttered beautifully in the breeze. It was green, with a white half-moon and four small stars.

Jonas slung his rucksack over his shoulder, slipped back out of the flag-loft door and produced a little sliver of metal which he wedged into the lock — an old and effective trick. In any case, it was a good solid door, not to be broken down just like that.

There were still twenty minutes to go until first period and more, much more, to be done before then.