The Seducer

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

Jonas Wergeland did not, in fact, have a fear of heights but a fear of outlooks or overviews. This was something he was also plagued with on his countless visits to Torggata Baths, where time and again he had sworn that he was going to dive from the five-metre platform only, just as often, to have to back down, feeling dizzy, almost nauseated. Which is to say it was not the height as such that petrified him, so that his feet refused to take those last few crucial centimetres towards the edge, but the image of the pool from above, that bird’s-eye view which turned the familiar surroundings into something alien and ghastly with all the detail of the hall erased and the people in the water suddenly being deprived of their facial features to become creatures of another sort, frogs executing meaningless movements.

During the summer they larked around in the lakes among the hills and forests just outside of town. But Nefertiti loved to swim in the winter, too, and so she had introduced Jonas to Torggata Baths. They used to take the yellow and green Grorud bus to the bridge at Møllergata and invariably popped round to the Central Fire Station to see whether the turntable ladder truck was out, or to Deichman’s Library if Nefertiti had books to return, before running on down to the baths. Nefertiti was like a seal in the water. Jonas would look on admiringly as she spun round like a wheel, dived straight to the bottom and cavorted about down there or when she did the most amazing somersaults from the springboard, breaking the surface perfectly, just like the lady on the Brynild liquorice pastilles pack.

Not to put too fine a point on it, as far as Jonas and Nefertiti were concerned, Torggata Baths was a holy place. The bus-stop in Grorud was just outside the grocer’s shop, so they always picked up a couple of bottles of Mekka, a brand of chocolate milk produced by the Norwegian United Dairies at that time, a brown bottle with a silver top, as if to illustrate the fact that they were setting out on a pilgrimage of sorts: that, like the Muslims, they considered the cleansing of the body a solemn affair. I know that to this day there are many people living along Trondheimsveien who remember those two children on the bus in the winter-time, sipping devoutly from their Mekka bottles and playing the odd Duke Ellington number on chromatic mouth organs, the most charming duets.

It was not only that the Torggata Baths had something of a religious air about them; throughout his life Jonas was to associate them with the concept of socialism owing to the sense of equality fostered by those chlorine-scented halls: the fact that no one could tell the difference between a Spartacus and a Caligula. Right from the time in the loft in the block of flats in Solhaug when Neferitit, wrapped in a sheet, had told him about the Romans and their thermae, those huge bathing establishments of which all that remains today are ruins that might have been tailor-made for open-air opera productions, Jonas had been fascinated by public baths. When you came right down to it there was something un-Norwegian about Torggata Baths. As Jonas was walking up the broad steps leading to the palatial entrance, the word that always came into his mind was ‘Europe’.

From another point of view, too, Torggata Baths was a memorable spot; it was here that Jonas met his mentor Gabriel Sand, during the winter when Jonas was in eighth grade to be precise.

As usual, Jonas had been hovering in the vicinity of the platform up in the gallery, desperately wanting to have a shot at diving off it, when a bunch of bigger lads came running up, almost as if they had sensed his fear, and made to chuck him off.

All of a sudden there he was, Gabriel Sand, a total stranger to Jonas, a most unlikely figure in a thick, black terrycloth robe with a white towel draped around his neck. He only had to look at the other boys for them to let go of Jonas and promptly beat a retreat, fearfully and apologetically, backing away, bowing and scraping, as if they had just been caught red-handed in the midst of some prank by their headmaster at school.

Jonas studies Gabriel long and hard before he thinks of something to say: ‘You know that priests are the servants of the imagination, that their power stems from their being able to make the masses believe the most incredible things?’

He waves a hand in the direction of Gabriel in his black robe topped off by the white towel and then towards the stairs down which the boys have disappeared, as though implying that he thinks Gabriel looks like a priest and that he must have worked a conjuring trick, some sleight of hand, like Mandrake the Magician, causing the riff-raff to vanish into thin air.

Even Gabriel could not know that Jonas was quoting here, or rather, had plucked a gem from the little red book in which he had begun to note down certain passages, in this instance some sentences from Charles Baudelaire’s Oeuvres posthumes et correspondances inédites, fortunately translated between the lines in Jonas’s edition. Nonetheless, Gabriel was impressed by a boy who could not have been any more than fourteen coming out with such a statement. I think I can safely say that Gabriel Sand would never have invited Jonas into his changing-room had it not been for that covert aphorism from Baudelaire.

I can see how, for example, people might forget the lovely El Dorado cinema rotunda, sadly demolished in 1985, and how it looked, but that anyone, even older residents of Oslo, could succeed in actually erasing the old interior of Torggata Baths from their memories is quite beyond me. I am happy to say that Jonas Wergeland never forgot that establishment but cherished it as one of his fondest memories. Later, when confronted with some fine construction, such as the stations of the Moscow underground, those sunken palaces, he would mutter to himself: ‘By Jove, this could almost be Torggata Baths.’

As soon as he set foot in the vestibule, with its ticket office like a little glasshouse built into the wall, he was faced with an interior fit for a king. But it was not until he was older that Jonas explored the secrets of its nethermost regions which, besides a medicinal department featuring mud-baths and massage, housed a little-frequented Turkish bath; three vaulted chambers filled with hot air, like three little chapels ranged one after the other, and a small pool room with four stout pillars, one in each corner; black floor and white marble on the walls. This was a place where for next to nothing every Norwegian could transcend time and space and be ruler of the world for a day.

As a small boy, Jonas frequented the first and second floors — not only the bathhouse and the big pool, that vast colonnaded hall with the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling and daylight streaming in through the tall windows on either side through which, in the afternoons, the sunlight fell straight onto the green surface of the water — but also, what seemed to him at that time nothing short of a miracle: the sauna. Jonas Wergeland had never seen a sauna before he visited Torggata baths, and for him, with the chill that never seemed to leave his bones, it was a blessing — that was the very word that popped into his head — to be able to sit there, in a golden-yellow sauna, in the middle of winter, in Oslo, and sweat and get really warm ‘right to the soul’, as he said to himself. Afterwards he could take himself off to a cooling-down room which had showers and a nice little pool, and at the side of this pool — in front of the two marble massage benches in the alcove further back — there was, wonder of wonders, a copy of a small statue from Florence, no less: a boy holding a dolphin which spouted a jet of water into the pool. Finally one could retire to the rest room, settle back in a deckchair and flick through a newspaper, take a breather before getting dressed.

There was nothing to beat Torggata Baths. With its copper, its marble and mahogany; with its elaborate tile-work, the exquisite patterns on floor and walls and, not least, its deckchairs, it was a real-life Utopia, open to all.

Then, in 1981, they closed the baths. From a purely personal point of view I am happy to say that I have no reason to become all het up about such a trivial matter, but I admit it is a mystery to me that more citizens of Oslo were not driven to protest against this move. A lot of people still bear a grudge against the yuppies, and Jonas hated them because they, or it would be truer to say, their spirit, reduced Torggata Baths to a collection of chic boutiques, chi-chi restaurants and snooty squash courts — and a scaled down Turkish bath that no one knew about. But the real crime, as I see it, is not what the yuppies did to the old interior but that the yuppie way of thinking, the fixation with money and indiscriminate profiteering, should have gained the upper hand in the city council, in the people’s own democratic decision-making processes. So it was in fact the people themselves, and not the yuppies, who showed just how short the distance is between two apparently opposite poles — a public baths and what it became: a limited partnership.

Jonas did not see any of this, but he saw how sad Buddha was. Jonas often took Buddha with him to Torggata, and he loved the place even more than Jonas. He did not think it was anywhere near so much fun to swim in the sterile new Nordtvedt Baths where the all-round experience offered by Torggata, a treat on many different planes, was supplanted by sheer function, pure keep-fit. Not that I have anything against that, but if you ask me, the closure of the old Torggata Baths represents the real divide between Oslo as a social democracy and Oslo as a town run according to the slick, one-dimensional principles of neo-capitalism. Until then, even the conservative parties had upheld the basic socialde-mocratic principles. I would go so far as to say that 1981 and the demise of Torggata Baths mark the end of a golden age for twentieth-century Norway inasmuch as social democracy was no longer an ideal and a set of values but a hollow system of government, little more than a vacuous accounting firm.

But I am supposed to be telling you about the first time Jonas met Gabriel Sand, and I am not so far off the track as one might think. You see, Gabriel invited Jonas into the most wonderful corner of all in the old Torggata baths: the changing rooms up on the galleries, little cubby-holes with walls of glazed tile and doors of fine reddish-brown mahogany that put Jonas in mind of the classy speedboats he saw down on Hvaler, belonging to shipowners or visitors from the island of Hankø, select summer haunt of Norway’s beau monde.

Jonas was feeling not a little bewitched by this man who had shown up out of the blue and saved his skin, and when Gabriel reached his own cubicle and motioned to Jonas to follow him — the man had not yet said one word — Jonas did not hesitate but stepped right inside the cramped changing room, where a pinstripe suit hung neatly from a hook, and sat down on the bench, after which Gabriel promptly closed the door by lowering that wooden bar, which some readers may remember, into place across it. Jonas was not at all afraid, though; there was something about this elderly man which inspired confidence, an air of authority — maybe it had something to do with the scar beneath one eyebrow, like a badge of honour, a sign of valour. On the bench between them stood a matte-green bottle and a small blue tin: ‘Foie gras’, Jonas read on the side of it. ‘Would you like some goose-liver pâté?’ It was the first time Gabriel had opened his mouth. ‘Some champagne?’ Jonas declined the offer, sat there in his swimming trunks looking round about him. There was something about Gabriel, his clothes, a gold pocket-watch, the food, a pack of Camel cigarettes, that made him feel as if he were in a little cabin, as if this man lived here, cramped, but cosy. ‘Have you ever noticed how mahogany has an air of the exotic about it?’ said Gabriel. ‘The very word “mahogany” makes you feel you could talk the language of Jamaica.’

‘What’s your name?’ Jonas asked.

‘That question is of little consequence to one who abhors all outward appearance but seeks the profound, the hidden, those things worth knowing.’ This answer seemed to echo around the cubicle, and Jonas thought it smacked of recitation. Gabriel smiled, and for the first time, in the dim light, Jonas caught the glint of his gold tooth.

‘My name is Gabriel,’ he said. ‘And I’m on the run from my wife.’ With that he launched into a long and occasionally frenzied tale that made Jonas laugh out loud more than once, about a dragon of a wife who forced him to seek sanctuary here, to enjoy forbidden fruit.

Then, having consumed the last of the pâté and the wine, he said, ‘So you guessed it, then.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Jonas.

‘That I’m a priest, albeit a retired one.’ Gabriel regarded him with what Jonas would have called ‘soft’ eyes and made a gesture that seemed, in the most amazing way, to extend the cubicle into a church and the food to a sacrament. Although Jonas did not realize it, he was witnessing acting at its best. It would be a long time before he discovered that Gabriel Sand was not a priest and neither did he have a wife. ‘Tell me. Have you tried diving from the five-metre here?’ Gabriel asked, changing the subject without any preamble.

Jonas told him about his fear of such an undertaking.

Gabriel opened the door: ‘Off you go and dive,’ he said, making it sound almost like a biblical commandment.

‘I can’t,’ said Jonas. ‘I really can’t.’

Quietly Gabriel explained that it was all psychological. Why couldn’t Jonas imagine that he was Samuel Lee, Olympic diving champion in 1948 and 1952? And again Gabriel broke into a fantastic account of how the Korean-American Sammy Lee, later to become a doctor and otologist, had taught himself to dive, all lies from beginning to end, but Jonas did not know that, he allowed himself be carried away, and who can blame him? That tale was the storytelling equivalent of a reverse dive with one and half somersaults and a triple twist.

‘I’m not Sammy Lee,’ said Jonas.

‘Oh, yes you are. What’s so unlikely in that? A lot more unlikely things have happened in this world than that you should, for three seconds, be Sammy Lee. Remember, your bodies are composed of exactly the same matter.’

Jonas walks up to the platform at one end of the hall, imagining that he is Dr Samuel Lee, two times Olympic champion in high diving. Samuel Lee at the age of fourteen. There is nothing to hinder him, the pool below is clear. Jonas covers the last few centimetres, curls his toes over the edge and imagines that he is Samuel Lee, senses the twists and somersaults and, not least, the joy of swooping, residing inside his body, in some chamber unknown to him. Jonas gazes down at the surface of the pool and imagines that he is Sammy Lee. He launches himself off in a perfect swallow dive; Sammy Lee could hardly have done it better. Not until he is in the pool, so overjoyed that he is gulping water, does Jonas become Jonas again.

‘Well done,’ said Gabriel moments later, when Jonas stood before him once more, like a soldier who has just carried out an order. ‘You’ve broken a barrier today. Dared to make a leap. We’re going to be good mates, that’s for sure.’ He took a long look at Jonas, nodded approvingly before saying, ‘By the way, I’ve got this lifeboat. I could do with a crewman to accompany me on a voyage 20,000 leagues under the sea.’