The Seducer

Norwegian Wood

Then see this boy, a high-school student now, jogging along the corridor on the third floor of Oslo Cathedral School, past the main stairway, still no pupils, jogging on over to the metal ladder bolted to the left-hand wall, climbing the ladder, pushing open a hatch in the ceiling and coming up into the dark and dirty attic, where he locates and opens another hatch or rather a skylight this time, and clambers out onto the roof which, to his relief, is flat.

Jonas shoots a glance at the green, verdigrised onion dome across from him, surprised by how different everything looks from this angle, before cautiously wriggling over to a thick cable running from this roof to the roof of the old rectory. He opens his rucksack and pulls out another flag which, by dint of a nifty homemade pulley contraption, he manages to run out onto the cable, bringing the flag to a halt at the lowest point, where it hangs fluttering directly above the schoolyard.

There it hung, high in the sky, suspended in midair: the flag of a foreign country, green, with a white crescent moon and four stars. I have not yet said which flag it was. I dare say that very few people would be able to identify it anyway, and even fewer back then, since it had only been in use for a few years and was not officially adopted until the end of the seventies. Jonas regarded the length of bunting, feeling, in fact, rather solemn, the way he did when the Olympic medals were presented. He ventured a wary peek over the edge. More and more pupils were streaming through the gates into the schoolyard, and they all spotted it, stopped and pointed, baffled, as if the flag were some tropical bird, an impossibility. The rector, too, had come out, stood with his hands at his sides, peering up into the air. Jonas almost felt sorry for him. The rector was easily riled.

One aspect of Jonas Wergeland’s life that is rarely touched on concerns his attitude towards the great existential question: What to do? And here I am thinking, as the phrase suggests, along political lines: of the exceedingly banal, yet exceedingly complex question as to what, as an individual, one can do to make the world — neither more nor less than that — a better, a more just place. In due course Jonas would celebrate both Grotius Day and Michelangelo Day with great pomp and ceremony, but during his time at high school, as with so many others, this huge question could still fill him with an almost abstract lethargy, bordering on loathing. Then suddenly one day he shook off his almost normal and necessary apathy, looked this mind-boggling challenge straight in the eye and, from a wealth of options, chose as his cause the Comoro Islands, that tiny island kingdom in the Indian Ocean, north of Madagascar; more as a symbol of his willingness to lend a helping hand, naturally; as a sort of sop to his self-respect rather than out of any illusion that he could be of real help. And it has to be said to Jonas Wergeland’s credit that he chose a country and a cause that very few people cared about. I would go so far as to say that Jonas Wergeland was the only person in Norway around 1970 to speak up for the Comoro Islands, this being a time when, of all the conflicts big and small being waged throughout the world, the people of Norway concentrated — to all intents and purposes — all visible opposition on two things: the EEC and the war in Vietnam.

So it was the Comorian flag that Jonas had unfurled for the edification of his schoolfellows and anyone else who happened to be walking along Ullevålsveien that morning. In those days, as I am sure many readers will remember, the actual idea of hoisting a flag was nothing new, but the flag of the Comoro Islands was hoisted in only one school in Norway or in the whole of Europe, come to that: Oslo Cathedral School. So from that point of view — considering the school’s reputation as the Alma Mater of original thinkers — one might say that the rector had no real reason to be as upset or as enraged as he actually was.

I realize that some of you are growing impatient, but here’s the point: how did Jonas Wergeland learn about the Comoro Islands?

It all started on a train: on the Oslo-Bergen line to be precise. From the minute the train pulled out of the station Jonas had been gazing at the man sitting diagonally opposite him — and who could blame him? The man was a Negro. That’s right, a Negro in Norway. Now I use the word ‘Negro’ and not ‘black’ or ‘African’ simply because the word used in Norway at this time by everybody, even the socialists, was neger: literally ‘Negro’ or, I am afraid, ‘nigger’. There were not many Negroes to be found in Norway in the late sixties and this particular Negro was, what is more, clad in the most peculiar, not to say downright comical, outfit. The real eye-catcher was a brand-new, gaudily patterned sweater of the sort sold in the souvenir shops attached to the big hotels; and even though it was only the beginning of November and not especially cold, on his head he wore an enormous fur hat, the sort commonly referred to in Norway as a bjørnefitte — literally a ‘bear twat’ — with the ear flaps hanging down.

Jonas could not take his eyes off this man, who had spent the whole time staring curiously or wonderingly, one might almost say ‘goggle-eyed’, out of the carriage window, the sort of window that cannot possibly be opened, never mind the fact that there was a sign warning passengers not to lean out of it. But Jonas was sure that if the window had been open, the Negro would have been leaning out of it; it seemed as if he just could not get enough of the sights he was seeing through the window, he had hardly so much as glanced around the compartment, not even when the refreshments trolley came past, with its bitter coffee and rubbery cheese slices which, by the way, I believe should be sampled by anyone who wishes to learn something about Norwegians, about their high cost of living and their astonishing eating habits: food that defies all comparison — this railway fare, at any rate — unless it be with the character-building meals consumed in ancient Sparta.

The train was halfway between Hønefoss and Nesbyen, and the man was still staring out of the window, looking possibly even more dumbfounded than before, well-nigh enraptured — staring out at the pine forest. Jonas had never seen anyone gaze in such wonder at a pine forest. It was as though the man found it impossible to take in the mass of pine trunks, and Jonas even began to feel a little bit proud of the Norwegian forests, of the fact that pine and fir trees could fill a Negro with such awe. Jonas fancied that the man must be sitting there lost in thoughts of Viking ships and stave churches and the like as the train chugged on through the pine trees. Eventually, the Negro began to shake his head, slowly, again and again, before finally murmuring something that Jonas had to strain to catch: ‘Even the woods are safe here.’ The Negro went on shaking his head, smiling incredulously at the wall of trees and softly repeated: ‘Yeah, even the woods are safe here.’

Now Jonas’s curiosity was well and truly aroused. I should also say that Jonas was no more racially prejudiced than most Norwegians and besides, one of his heroes, Duke Ellington was a coloured American. But there was something about the lips of this man — an honest-to-goodness Bantu, if I may say so — that put him far closer to the epitome of the term ‘Negro’: they were big, absolutely enormous, like a caricature.

‘What are you doing in Norway?’ Jonas asked in English. ‘Are you a sportsman?’ The last summer Olympics were still fresh in Jonas’s mind with memories of Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’s black, gloved fists held high and Bob Beamons’s unbelievable long jumps.

The man shook his head. ‘Are you a jazz musician?’ Jonas asked, not without some hope.

‘I’m a refugee.’

‘Are you from Africa?’

The man laughed. ‘Africa is a big place,’ he said.

‘From Biafra?’ Thanks to the nightmarish pictures that had been in the news in recent years, this was one of the few African countries that Jonas could name.

‘An older struggle,’ the man replied.

At this point Jonas gave up, although even with his lack of interest in international conflicts, he might have come up with the answer had he given it a bit of thought. All he saw was a Negro, and to him a Negro meant an African, and to him Africa was Africa, not a collection of different countries. Africa was one big country inhabited by black Negroes who all looked alike.

The man explained politely that he came from South Africa but that, after having been imprisoned for some years, he had run away and lived for a while in Dar-Es-Salaam before he was given the chance to come to Norway. He had been offered a place at university here, he explained, a scholarship. He was studying medicine — yes, medicine, he repeated when he saw the expression on Jonas’s face, in a way that made Jonas realize that he must have to tell everyone twice. Now he was on his way to Bergen to visit friends — maybe the same people who had given him the sweater, which he was now wearing, Jonas thought, purely out of politeness.

It was this man, whose name was Isaac and who today — although Jonas does not know it — is a well-known figure in the United Nations, who, in the course of a long conversation, not without the odd neurotic note to it, had happened to mention the Comoro Islands to Jonas, one of his forefathers having hailed from there. This was just by the way, a word, a name tossed into a lengthy conversation covering subjects that were considerably more grim and disturbing, a conversation in which Jonas learned for the first time of incidents and atrocities which have since been described so often, to diminishing effect, that most people have become totally immune to them. But thanks to Jonas’s sense for detail and, even more so, to his utter ignorance of Les Comores — he actually thought this was a place on the African mainland — he had remembered the islands and subsequently picked up odd bits and pieces of information here and there until eventually he knew quite a bit about the country.

This was, however, a long-term result of the meeting with Isaac. Initially, what Jonas could not get out of his mind was the sight of this African, tricked out in a Norwegian sweater, sitting on a Norwegian train and gazing in disbelief, or rapture, out of the window at a Norwegian pine forest, murmuring that ‘even the woods are safe here’ as if he could hardly believe his eyes or his senses.

There is an old literary ploy that involves allowing one’s own country to be depicted by foreigners. For example by putting a Chinese in Berlin and having this Chinese describe life in Berlin so that everything is suddenly seen with a fresh eye often from such an alien perspective that familiar things appear quite laughable. And for Jonas Wergeland that one sentence, ‘Even the woods are safe here’, had just such an impact, one that deserved a whole book to itself. It was not only laughable; it was shocking.

Even before he alighted from the train in Bergen — in the sunshine, just to underline what an almost unnaturally idyllic place Norway was — where the Negro, Isaac that is, would stand for a long time simply peering round about him, out over the fjord, up at the mountains, in that gaudy sweater, with the fur hat pulled well down over his ears, Jonas knew that he would never be able to imagine what life was like in the continent from which his travelling companion came or understand one whit of his predicament: having to flee from country to country, never feeling safe, knowing that you could be shot or thrown into prison any time at all, for anything at all, and that once you were in prison the worst imaginable evil could befall you. Or you might escape being shot or thrown into prison only to starve to death instead. And if you chose to run off into the forest, into the jungle or bush, you were not a lot safer, what with bloodthirsty animals, snakes, venomous insects — in fact a natural world that was in itself murderous, a sort of impenetrability.

It suddenly dawned on Jonas Wergeland — and not only because the sun was shining on Bergen or because a certain area of that town happened to go by that name — that he was living in a paradise. It may sound absurd, to think that a young Norwegian should not have tumbled to this fact before now, but very few young Norwegians are aware of it at all, ever. Only then, at the thought of an African clad in a travesty of a Norwegian sweater and an incongruous fur hat, gazing at a pine forest — something which had never held any emotional associations for Jonas — while shaking his head and murmuring ‘Even the woods are safe here’, did Jonas Wergeland realize what an incredibly safe country Norway is, what a bewilderingly secure, quite incomprehensibly safe country he inhabited. All at once Jonas Wergeland saw that he lived in a land so inherently safe that anyone who had ever been in danger simply would not believe it. And, Jonas thought later, maybe that was the real reason why the Negro had pulled his fur hat, that enormous bear’s twat, closer about his head: not because it was cold but in order to keep his wits about him. In Norway you could, by accident of course, be run over by a truck, it’s true, but you could stroll into the densest forest or out into what Norwegians describe as their wildest wilds and feel sure that no harm would come to you. The most dangerous thing in a Norwegian forest was the adder, its bite about as lethal as a mosquito’s.

There were times, when out travelling, that Jonas neglected to say that he lived in Norway — which is to say in that place so totally devoid of real need and real insecurity. There were times abroad, if the situation were critical or catastrophic enough, when Jonas Wergeland had to resort to a lot of double-talk to save disclosing his nationality.

As far as that goes, Jonas Wergeland could have hoisted any flag at all over the schoolyard — as long as it came from a country that was not a part of the West.