The Seducer

Ultima Thule

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way, do they fit together at all?

They had finished filming, and Jonas could tell right away that the shots from the area around Myggbukta would be good: the old, derelict sealing and weather station, huts lined inside with musk-ox hides, and of course the spectacular landscape round about; in fact just being confronted with that Arctic landscape in the comfort of your own living-room would be enough to take your breath away. The purpose of the shoot had been to afford a glimpse of a sealer’s life, and after a hectic week’s filming the NRK team had footage of just about everything: dog teams, with a camera fixed low down on the sled; hares, foxes, musk ox, seal, walrus — the only thing lacking was a polar bear. This sequence was to form part of a programme on the all but forgotten annexation of Eastern Greenland by Norway in the early thirties, a programme which caused a justifiable stir and gave rise to much, occasionally heated, debate in the press when it was shown on Norwegian television screens — understandably, seeing that the Norwegian people have every reason to want to forget this embarrassing episode, an example of a brand of polar imperialism to which Norway has never cared to admit. Not unexpectedly, it ended in bitter defeat for the Norwegians when the case was brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The film team were now in Scoresbysund, further down the coast, where they had been taking shots of the Danish base, the opposite pole in this dispute. And it was here, in this small hunting and fishing community with its little, red-painted wooden houses and racks draped with all manner of hides hung to dry, a sort of polar Timbuktu inhabited by Inuits, Danish troops and several hundred howling dogs straining at stout tethers, in a muddy street, that Jonas ran into Jørn Rasmussen, an elderly, one-time hunter now working for the Greenland Trade Department. And since this unexpected friendship was struck up, almost symbolically just as the ice on the fjord began to break up — the high point of the year — Jørn Rasmussen promptly suggested, nay, more or less demanded, that Jonas should come with him to one of the sealer’s huts up the fjord. And all credit to Jonas Wergeland, he never let such a chance pass him by. So the team left by helicopter for Mestersvig, to take a Twin Otter from there to Iceland, while Jonas stayed on for a few more days as a guest of the Dane.

Just twenty-four hours later, Jonas was sitting in a tiny sealer’s hut in the heart of the East Greenland national park, at the mouth of one of the narrow arms of the fjord. They had arrived there in a boat that looked like a shark, sailing between the ice floes with the sea birds whirling overhead. To begin with, the country around then had been wide and open, but then another landscape hove in sight; one which, to put it mildly, Jonas would never forget: white, black and blue. Ice, rock and sea. A landscape so monumental and at the same time so desolate and so elementary that it reminded Jonas — of all things — of a desert, not least because of the stark light. Again he had a feeling of having reached some outer limit, the very periphery of the humanly possible, or the beginning of something totally alien to him. The glaciers especially, plunging into the sea, the chill breath from a sheer wall of blue ice, made him shudder, even while he felt drawn to it, as if the blue cast itself held some vital secret.

Jonas Wergeland found himself in the heart of the wildest landscape he had ever seen. The simple wooden hut lay a hundred metres from the beach and was totally covered in tar-paper, both roof and walls. Behind the hut the mountain reared straight up 1,000 metres into the air, and beyond it jagged rugged peaks soared to 2,000 metres. Despite the primitive conditions, Jonas felt happy there from the word go. He was to spend two whole days and nights out here in the wilderness, in a borrowed sleeping-bag, together with Jørn Rasmussen, some kegs of aquavit and, not least, several kilos of freshly boiled seal-meat, large chunks of meat running with fat and juices, served steaming hot on dented tin plates — with no other accompaniment but salt and mustard.

On their first morning there, Rasmussen stepped outside and opened a box that had aroused Jonas’s curiosity early on. Out came, of all things, a portable battery-operated stereo system complete with two speakers, an anachronistic sight when set against the rude hut and the timeless terrain. This was a ritual, the Dane explained while he mounted the system on the wall of the hut: each year when the ice in the fjord broke up he came here. And what did he do? Jonas asked. Just a minute, Rasmussen said, pulling a tape out of his anorak pocket. The weather was beautiful, they had had fine weather for some time, a permanent ridge of high pressure and dazzlingly bright all day long.

All at once the air was filled with the sound of opera music. Mighty music. And the strange thing, thought Jonas, was that this music — majestic, in many ways wild — suited, nay, echoed the landscape. And suddenly the country round about them seemed like a stage-set, the whole of this vast landscape had about it something of the unreality and beauty of a stage, artificially lit and with scenery built on illusions. They sat with their backs against the wall of the hut, each on his battered chair and listened to opera. They were well wrapped up, and the sun was heating up nicely. Not far from them, about a kilometre away, there was a glacier, with an icefall of at least twenty metres, plummeting straight down into the sea. Behind it lay a couple of nunataks, like two gigantic black horns on the glacier’s smooth, snow-white brow. They sat listening to opera music and saw how the ice glittered, every shade of white and blue. Jonas had been seized by his old dread of ice, of being crushed by ice, the minute he caught sight of Eastern Greenland from the plane, but the fear had gradually faded and now he could rest his eyes on the wall of ice without the thought of hell once crossing his mind. Rasmussen looked at Jonas, nodded, smiled, raised a cup of black coffee chased with a dash of something stronger. Jonas recognized the music. It was Wagner — ‘what else?’ he thought. It was Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, and it was Kirsten Flagstad singing her celebrated Liebestod, Kirsten Flagstad’s voice that was being hurled across the landscape at the all-embracing ice-cap and at the icefall rearing straight out of the fjord directly in front of them, where they sat with their backs against the tar-paper of the hut wall, with woollen plaids over their legs and warming cups of coffee in their hands. ‘I knew you’d like it,’ said Rasmussen. ‘That’s why I invited you.’

And then it happened: the glacier right in front of them calved. A colossal, an unbelievably huge chunk simply broke off and slid into the sea, sending spray shooting high into the air. It all happened with such ineffable slowness that they had time to take it in, to comprehend and memorize the shock, and only after the sight had, as it were, been absorbed, did the sound reach their ears, like a clap of thunder increasing in volume behind Kirsten Flagstad’s voice and Wagner’s music, a tremendous roar and an echo that reverberated off the mountainsides. Jonas had the distinct impression, no, he was positive that it was Kirsten Flagstad’s voice — and not the sun or the surging of the sea — that had sliced off this massive chunk of ice; that Kirsten Flagstad’s voice had sent a shiver running through it, causing the glacier to calve out of sheer delight.

Only later, when the music had been turned off and they were sitting there with their backs to the wall of the hut, surrounded by a silence so palpable that it was in itself an experience, did Jonas ask Rasmussen why exactly he had played Tristan and Isolde. It was clear to Jonas that this was the role that had been assigned to him, that he was supposed to ask, just at this moment, and then had to listen, and he was not meant to say anything, because Rasmussen simply needed to tell this story at regular intervals, about once a year, and preferably around the time when the glaciers were calving, so he could say that it was love that split the ice apart and because this was the most uplifting time of the year and, hence, the best time for anyone wishing to contemplate their sad fate, shed a tear or two and pour an extra drop of aquavit into their coffee. This was how Jonas Wergeland heard his story, while they sat side by side, leaning back against the wall of the hut, with their eyes on the enormous iceberg slowly drifting down the fjord like another Flying Dutchman; a story so heartbreaking and in many ways so unlikely that I reserve the right to remain silent — some stories are even sadder than the myth of Tristan and Isolde. In any event, Rasmussen’s story ended with a self-imposed hermit-like existence, ‘in a climate as cold as the chill that struck at my heart,’ as he put it, where not even the most death-defying Valkyrie riding across the ice with nine semi-wild huskies harnessed to the sled could make him forget.

‘I heard Kirsten Flagstad at the Metropolitan in ’52,’ he said. ‘I’ve never wept as much.’

‘You mean you heard her sing just after?’ Jonas asked, his eyes fixed on the iceberg as it floated off over the smooth waters of the fjord, chiselled as a sculpture, marble on mirror.

‘A week later. I had two tickets, but I had to go alone.’

‘And then you came here?’

‘Then I came here.’

Jonas Wergeland would later cherish the theory, in his heart of hearts, that it must have been Kirsten Flagstad’s voice, possibly certain overtones in it, that had drawn the polar bear to it, seeing that it happened that very same evening, when he had to make a visit to the toilet, and when the chances of running into a bear at that time of year, in that region, were microscopic. Rasmussen had not even told him to remember the Mauser, normally as obvious an accessory as a toilet roll.

It was a typical outdoor privy, apart from the fact that the door was missing. As far as Jonas was concerned that was all to the good, he could sit and look out at the shore and the fjord just as he had done as a boy at his grandfather’s place on Hvaler. It was bright as day outside, totally calm, and the landscape suffused with colours the like of which he had never seen before: supernatural hues. Out on the fjord drifted icebergs, miniature palaces. He could not help but think of Kittelsen’s picture in the bathroom at home; ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Just a few seconds later, as he was getting up from the toilet, he heard a shuffling sound and before he had time to think that it might be a fox, a broad — a gigantic — head appeared in the doorway, filling it completely. It was a polar bear. Jonas could not believe that a polar bear could move so quietly.

I think I can say — and I have given this a lot of thought — that Jonas Wergeland was faced here with the most dangerous opponent of his life. Jonas Wergeland stood with his trousers round his ankles, nose to nose with a polar bear. Tuaregs are one thing; a massive animal, half a ton of it, with eyeteeth befitting the biggest carnivore on dry land, is something else again. Jonas had heard — they heard a lot of stories during the shoot — that the polar bear was totally unpredictable at close quarters, that nine times out of ten it would attack; it has to be a long way off if you are to have any chance of scaring it away. But this polar bear was close, really close. Jonas tried, of all things, to look it straight in the eye. The polar bear tilted its head slightly, unsure. Suddenly it snapped its teeth together, five or six quick, dry snaps. If there were one time in Jonas Wergeland’s life when you could employ the phrase ‘and his blood froze’, this would be it. But at the same time he was thinking, because his mind was running the whole time, in wild leaps and little circles, how quickly things could happen; you sit on the toilet, you take a crap, you look out over the shore and the fjord, for once you take time to enjoy being alive — and then you’re dead.

The polar bear stretched its neck all the way through the door, and this Jonas saw, as with the glacier calving, in ultra slow motion; or as when he used the remote control to flick through sequences in video films, studying certain scenes frame by frame and always being amazed by how many shots there were; now not only did he see a polar bear’s head coming at him, he saw the black nose, the expressionless, coal-black eyes, saw the ears — like a teddy bear’s, the thought flashed through his mind — saw every hair in the fur around its snout but also, or at one and the same time, he saw the landscape behind it: the shore, the fjord, the blocks and floes of ice — and again, like marble over a mirrored surface, infinitely beautiful — the mountains, the colours, those unbelievable pastel hues, and not only that, but also the wooden planks around the door, how weather-beaten they were, how big the cracks were, the hole where a knot had fallen out, a hole that drew the eye, giving him the urge — as the last thing he did — to put his eye to that aperture, to see what slice of life this would afford him, but instead what Jonas saw was the black snout and that mouth closing in on his crotch, because that was exactly what the polar bear was aiming at, and a second later Jonas actually felt its snout nudge his penis. For one fleeting moment, for the first and only time in his life, Jonas experienced that phenomenon which the late, great Sigmund Freud expended so much of his energy and imagination on explaining: the fear of castration.

The polar bear blew down its nose, a snort that struck Jonas as sounding so loud in the silence that the word ‘inny-dick’ which they had used to shout at one another in fun as kids, suddenly became a reality. On the point of passing out, Jonas nonetheless managed to register that the polar bear had pulled back, turned round and was galloping off towards the beach. Jonas could hardly believe what his eyes were telling him: that the polar bear was running away. He thought this must be something he was seeing through a knothole on the other side of death’s door, the outcome of some sort of parallel occurrence: an alternative course of events that never actually took place. Jonas stood with his trousers round his ankles and watched the polar bear bounding down to the beach, turning its head to look at him every now and again before it jumped into the water and swam off. Jonas followed it with his eyes until he could no longer see it between the icebergs, marble gliding over a mirrored surface.

Only then did he dare to look down at his benumbed body as if he could not believe that his member was still intact. For years Jonas would wonder what could have scared the bear away, and he thought to begin with that it must have had something to do with his penis’s magic quality, a distinct odour. Later he came to the conclusion that the polar bear had spared him quite simply because it saw that they were brothers; they were both nomads.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? What determines the course of a life?

Two months after Jonas returned safe and sound to Norway, Margrete discovered to her surprise that she was pregnant, even though she had been using contraception. Jonas felt sure that the polar bear must have scared extra life into his sperm cells, enabling them to defy all resistance.