The Seducer

Everything Flows

Once more he was thrown into the vortex, as they picked up speed and were drawn relentlessly onwards into the next stretch of rapids to suddenly find themselves caught up in an inferno of white water and whirlpools as if they were riding a tidal wave or had been swept away by an avalanche, and it was all happening too fast, Jonas felt, far too fast, he had no time to latch onto the details and already had that feeling of nausea, that ghastly nausea that always hit him when he had flown too high, when everything was reduced to the grotesque. Jonas Wergeland sat, soaked to the skin, in a frail rubber dinghy with more or less sheer walls of rock flying past on either side: concentrating, amid all the thoughts whirling around in his head, solely on keeping a tight grip on the rope running around the rim, while flattening himself against the bottom like a terrified bird in the nest. Everybody has to die sometime, he thought to himself, and now it’s my turn.

Jonas cursed himself for being there, crouched on his knees as if in prayer, hanging on for dear life on this ride with death, at the bottom of a narrow gorge with only a thin layer of rubber between him and the rapids’ seething embrace, when he could have been lounging on the hotel terrace, sipping a highball and contemplating the weird assortment of hotel guests from every corner of the globe, maybe picking out an Ellington number on the piano, drawing applause from lethargic Swedish aid workers in desperate need of a bit of R and R. Or he could have done something sensible and, above all, perfectly safe, and taken a walk up to the dusty, neglected museum to gen up on the geology and history of the region, in a room right next door to Livingstone’s letters and measuring instruments and his partially mauled coat.

But instead, on an October morning in the mid-eighties, he had dutifully presented himself at the pool along with the others, to be briefed by a sun-bronzed smart-arse who took full advantage of the rather tense atmosphere, dishing out flippant bits of advice and telling macabre jokes, about the fearsome ‘stoppers’, for instance: a sort of vertical wave, usually occurring at the bottom of a stretch of rapids, which could drag a man under and keep him down there for ages. So it was with some misgivings that Jonas had filed along behind the others later on, as they clambered down the steep path to the bottom of the gorge through which the Zambezi continued its seething progress after the falls, zigzagging through deep and uncannily narrow canyons. The light was dazzling, the air as full of powerful odours as a chemist’s shop and humming with insect life. Halfway down the native bearers made tea for them and even sang a few songs, seeing to it that the party acquired a little local colour into the bargain.

Down by the river itself, at the point where they were to board the rafts, Jonas stood for a moment listening to the roar of the falls farther up, millions of litres per second thundering downwards into an inferno of a chasm, a phenomenon so daunting and yet so fascinating that he could see why some of the natives imbued it with divine significance, believing this to be the wellspring of the world. And indeed they were surrounded by a strange almost unreal landscape which left one with the very distinct impression that man had no business here, that this was a paradise for plants and animals and the little lizards in particular.

After yet another nerve-racking pep talk, delivered in the calmer part of the basin, they slipped slowly into the mainstream. ‘No way back!’ some wit called out as the raft picked up speed, heading down the river, which closed in relentlessly as they approached the first stretch of rapids, and right then and there Jonas knew, as one often does in the seconds after making a fatal decision, that he should not have done this, that this trip was bound to end in disaster.

There were six rafts going down together, seven people in each one, including the man at the oars who, in theory, was supposed to be an experienced oarsman. Jonas looked at their man, a not particularly muscular-looking African wearing a sly grin, and felt far from reassured. Not only that, but the rubber raft seemed somewhat the worse for wear; and the grubby yellow lifejackets they were wearing did not exactly inspire much confidence either. Jonas had a suspicion that the whole lot dated from the Second World War and had been bought on the cheap. And here I would just like to add that the sort of modern innovations which are to be found nowadays up north, in the sheltered and strictly regulated confines of Scandinavia, helmets and wetsuits and the like, were of course quite unthinkable in these parts, and indeed would have been considered utterly ridiculous.

Jonas was sitting right at the back, along with a female journalist and a photographer with his camera in a waterproof bag. On a scale of one to six these rapids were classed as a five, and thus they attracted enthusiasts from all over the world eager to try all their hearts could take of white-water rafting and daredevil games with the elements. Jonas held on tight, seeing a wave rising up dangerously high in the air ahead of them; he even took time to wonder for a moment how this could be possible, how could a killer wave shoot right up in the air like that, like a geyser, or appear to be heading straight for them, in the middle of a deep river, but his musings were cut short when the oarsman — who, thought Jonas, must be off his head — steered straight at the wave while the three at the front threw themselves forward into the column of water, then the raft was gliding up and over as if going over a big bump, while they whooped ecstatically, thereby revealing the whole object of the tour: to have fun, to flirt with danger, to switch off from some dull office job in Amsterdam or Singapore or Cape Town. According to their instructions, the three at the back, where Jonas huddled, were supposed to keep the raft level, but Jonas had no thought for anything but to hang on tight, gripping the rope running round the rim as if it were an umbilical cord of sorts, the only thing tying him to life; then, almost instinctively, he hurled a primal scream at the precipitous cliff faces, a howl that was totally drowned out by the deafening racket, or fury, of the river waters.

Jonas knew there was no way this could ever turn out well. He had to ask himself whether this whole stupid exercise, casting himself out into the fiercest rapids in the world, might not simply be the manifestation of a covert death wish, or a means of escape, that he in fact had no desire to get under way with the venture which was to alter his whole career: that he could not face the thought of all those heated discussions, not to say arguments and hard-nosed deliberations over everything from budgets to people that would have to be gone through before he could have any hope of realizing the mammoth project he had in mind. On one quieter stretch, where the terrain also opened out, seeming to allow him a breathing space, oxygen for his brain, he thought not without some qualms of all the months of planning that lay ahead of him were he to pull it off: the colossal amount of groundwork, not forgetting all the jealousy, the backbiting and intrigue he would have to put up with. So perhaps this expedition was a final test, he thought, as everything closed in and the raft was once more caught up in foaming white waters that raced between sheer rock-faces, sweeping them along the bottom of a deep gorge, because if he made it through this, survived this ride between what looked like an endless run of rocky islets ready at any minute to close up and mash him to a pulp, as in some ancient Greek epic — except that nothing would have time to close up here, with everything moving at such a crazy speed — then he might even have some chance of overcoming the Norwegian rock-face, that massive hurdle denoted by lack of imagination and pettiness and an unwillingness to think big, all of which were so much the hallmark of the management team responsible for evaluating the project to which he was now, down here, about to put the finishing touches. That may also have been why he seemed to be constantly on the lookout for something on the dark cliffs speeding past, without really knowing what: an answer, a sign.

In any case he soon lost track of what his motive might have been, since it was all he could do just to hold on tight, just to be scared, so terrified that he became more and more convinced that this white speck, these white specks of boiling water, this endless roiling would be the death of him, that at some point his good fortune was bound to desert him, that good fortune which had saved his bacon in countless tricky situations in the most bizarre parts of the world: looking down the throat of a polar bear in Greenland; on a ledge ten storeys above the ground in Manhattan; in the Sahara, lying on his back in the sand with a sword at his throat. Jonas Wergeland recognized that characteristic feeling of nausea which never failed, a sure sign that things were about to go wrong, badly wrong; that this was where his luck ran out; he was going to die here, in a sort of existential toilet: one pull on the chain and you were flushed away in a swirl of water. No good spouting paraphrases here on Darwin’s revolutionary view of a term of a hundred of million years or any of the other argumentations which he had collected in a little red book and which had smoothed his path up the ladder of success. Here, between these cliffs, at this pace, all words were laid to earth, or rather, were washed away by the water. So Jonas was scared to death, assailed by regret, but it was too late, he knew that someone was going to be tossed out into those lethal rapids, and he had a nasty sickening feeling that that someone would be him. I know I have to go sometime, he thought, but why does it have to be in such an utterly ridiculous hair-raising fashion?

I know it is hard to believe that Jonas Wergeland, so famed for his consummate sang-froid and prodigious self-assurance, for his courage in fact, could have been so afraid or had such morbid thoughts, but without in any way meaning to boast, let me make it clear once and for all, that my acquaintanceship with this man Jonas Wergeland is of a sort that I cannot expect anyone to understand, nor do I see any reason to elaborate upon it, but it does enable me briefly to recap on the following facts: Jonas Wergeland is sitting in a sixteen-foot rubber raft, racing down the rapids on the Zambezi river, knowing that someone, and most probably he himself, is going to fall in, and he is so terrified that not only is he shitting his pants and jumping out of his skin and so on and so forth — he is so appallingly frightened that, for some of the time at least, he is not really there; his mind deserts him, is out there floating on another plane, with the result that he actually succeeds, albeit involuntarily, in doing what one sometimes tries to do, although with no success, at the dentist’s, namely to think of something else entirely as the drill bores in towards the nerve in a tooth.