The Seducer

Tabriz

Aunt Laura’s flat looked like a bazaar. Where the walls were not covered in oriental rugs they were hung with objects made of copper and brass, and crawling around the floor was a leopard tortoise with little gems affixed to its shell. Jonas had the feeling that the tortoise was forever going round in circles and that time stood still at Aunt Laura’s.

When Jonas paid her a visit, his aunt would serve teas with names he never could remember and saw him settled among the pile of cushions on the sofa before she took her own seat at the far end of the room, in the corner that bristled with buffers and gas cylinders and draw-plates and plate rollers, not to mention a mysterious old safe. Jonas loved to sneak peeks at the bench at which his aunt sat and worked as she talked, as if the things she shaped out of gold and silver and the stories she told were all part of the same process.

Aunt Laura often spoke of her travels, and as time went on Jonas found that, once again, the sequence of cause and effect had become mixed up. His aunt did not go out travelling, as he had first thought, because of the rugs; it would be truer to say that the travelling was the cause; the rugs were merely an excuse. ‘My rugs have taken me all around the world,’ his aunt would say or: ‘These rugs form forty doors and every rug opens the door onto a journey.’ But Jonas saw no contradiction in this because when you came right down to it, as with the rugs, his aunt’s travels represented a search for stories — indeed, they made a grand story in themselves.

Aunt Laura’s secret beau idéal was Ibn Battuta, one of the greatest nomadic spirits of all time, born in Tangier at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Her eyes lit up when she mentioned Ibn Battuta’s name so that to begin with Jonas thought he must be an old and particularly fierce-burning flame. Tucked away like a treasure in an exquisitely carved chest, his aunt kept the French four-volume edition of Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah, and every now and again, usually when she was in a good mood, she would take out one of the volumes and leaf through it, stopping here and there, her blood-red lips curving into a smile, as if at some sudden recollection, before she laid the book back in the chest. Afterwards she would recite fragments from it to Jonas so that eventually he was able to reconstruct the whole story of Ibn Battuta’s overwhelming urge to travel, a passion he believed that God himself had instilled in him. Indeed, he had set himself the goal of visiting all of the world’s most renowned mosques, and because Ibn Battuta followed the rule never to take the same road twice, his travels led him to every part of the known world of the Middle Ages, from West Africa to China — Jonas particularly enjoyed hearing the different names for all the cities: al-Iskandariya for Alexandria, Misr for Cairo, Bait al-Muqaddas for Jerusalem. And wherever he went, through the secretary to whom he dictated the story of his travels, Ibn Battuta recounted little tales and anecdotes about people and places, from historical facts to where they grew the best melons and apricots, either that or he would quote homages made by poets to certain spots, or describe a rhinoceros for the benefit of his contemporaries. But first and last Ibn Battuta described all of the mosques, as, for example, when he devoted ten pages to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus with its three slender minarets, hailing it as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

Aunt Laura, too, had a particular penchant for mosques on account, as she put it, of their perfect balance between the masculine and the feminine, the minarets and the dome. She could sit for hours, telling Jonas how the small towns looked from a distance, the line of their rooftops against the sky, bows and lances, ‘or, if you like,’ she would say, ‘phalluses and breasts in perfect harmony as if in defiance of the suppressed sexuality of Muslim society.’

The truth of it is, however, that Jonas’s aunt went travelling to see minarets of quite another order, sacred objects of a much more down-to-earth sort. Not to beat about the bush: she travelled abroad to see all the penises in the world. And as time went on she made no secret of it either. If there was one thing Jonas liked about Aunt Laura it was that she said things straight out, quite unabashed, unlike other adults. And like Ibn Battuta she had also kept a record of her travels in the form of a bundle of highly unusual sketchbooks.

On one occasion, Aunt Laura drew the erect penis of a man lying on his back, viewed from the side, and showed Jonas how much it had in common with a mosque: the scrotum as the soft, rounded dome and the shaft itself as a proud minaret. So in fact it was here, in a flat in Tøyen, on the east side of Oslo, surrounded by Oriental rugs and precious metals, that Jonas first learned that he had a sacred object between his legs. And this might well explain — it’s just a thought, mind you — why a polar bear would one day back away from Jonas Wergeland’s genitals: out of respect for the divine.

One evening, when Aunt Laura had finished soldering the join on a cylinder of silver that she had bent into a circle, with the faint smell of gas still lingering in the room, she told Jonas about Ibn Battuta’s description of the Ali ibn Abi Talib mosque in the town of Al-Basra, which had seven minarets, one of which trembled when the name of Ali ibn Abi Talib was spoken out loud. Ibn Battuta had tried this for himself and seen how the minaret shook. Aunt Laura turned her white face to look at Jonas as if weighing up whether he was mature enough to hear the truth. Then she said, ‘In the same way you can make a cock tremble by whispering certain words.’ And Jonas realized that, like Ibn Battuta, she must have put this to the test.

In connection with his visit to Mecca, his aunt went on, Ibn Battuta had described the Black Stone and how kissing this ‘affords a pleasure that is especially good for the mouth’. Ibn Battuta regarded the stone as God’s hand on Earth, which meant that kissing it was actually synonymous with touching the hand of God. Again Jonas’s aunt scrutinized him from under inky eyelids, to see whether he could cope with what came next: namely, that she had found the same to be true of penises, that they were like antennae of a sort, tuned in to the celestial. ‘Some kiss the Black Stone in the Kaaba, others kiss stones in kaabas of another sort,’ she said.

To be absolutely frank, so passionately obsessed was Aunt Laura with the male organ that rugs were not all she collected on her long and arduous journeys; she collected penises too. That is to say, she drew them. Jonas’s aunt had sketchbooks full of penises, all shapes and sizes. If, prior to this, Jonas had imagined that a cock was just a cock, much as a layman cannot tell the difference between Oriental rugs, then his misconceptions on this score were put straight with a vengeance at Aunt Laura’s. ‘Just as with the goldsmith’s craft, it all comes down to the tools,’ she said.

It was at such times that his aunt would pour more tea and bring in a brass salver of fruit on which a banana might be lying, graphically arranged between two plums, before she sat down next to Jonas on the sofa and showed him her sketchbooks, or travel journals as she called them, from every corner of the globe; turning their pages with fingers adorned with rings the like of which Jonas had never seen: spirals and little facets that gleamed and flashed among the drawings of all the penises she had come across in different societies. Later in life, Jonas would wonder whether his aunt might have had some deeper purpose with all of this. While in olden days there were people, phrenologists, who believed that they could tell something about a person’s temperament by measuring the skull, Aunt Laura’s study of the penis’s countless physiognomic aspects may have sprung from a theory that this said everything about what these men were like as people: how intelligent they were, for example.

However that may be, as his aunt leafed through her journals, with her bracelets jingling, Jonas beheld penises of every length and thickness, pointed and stubby, and in their various states: limp, erect and ejaculating. There were also sketches of individual details, as if each part of the organ were deserving of a study in itself: the pubic hair, for example. When it came to the foreskin, Jonas was particularly intrigued by certain peoples who, according to his aunt, arranged the skin in folds like a sort of drapery — in direct contrast, in other words, to all those men who were circumcised. In one sketch of the glans his aunt had depicted it as a helmet, in others as the wing cases of a beetle and as a scarab. Or it might be the scrotum, covered in a labyrinthine pattern of wrinkles, which made it look like a piece of coral or a brain. On some pages his aunt had executed detailed studies of the furrow that divides the scrotum in two; on others she had captured the head of the penis from in front, like a Cyclops. Jonas also came across some sketches of ejaculating penises which resembled nothing so much as rough drawings for fountains.

But the majority of the sketches depicted what in good Anglo-Saxon is called a ‘hard-on’, as if this posed the truly creative challenge. Aunt Laura was especially interested in the comparisons which a hard-on invited. Some resembled horses’ heads, the neck and the head, or the whole of a horse’s forebody, others were like dolphins and snakes. ‘I ran into this one in Brazil,’ said Aunt Laura, pointing to one which, owing to the pronounced ruff around the glans, had the look of a Triceratops dinosaur about it. Jonas saw other penises reminiscent of asparagus, tulips, various sorts of mushroom and a sprouting onion. Or shaped like large loaves. Or bones, clubs and flagpoles. There were even some flutes and bejewelled sceptres. Some were streamlined as rockets. In other cases his aunt had given her imagination free rein and drawn penises as telescopes, lighthouses, antlers, curling trunks or as the top of a champagne bottle, complete with cork. Some of the drawings had been coloured, with the result that in one instance the penis looked like a large, glossy purple aubergine, in another a pillar of ivory etched with fine blue lines and one last as an old tree trunk, gnarled and twisted.

Jonas liked these single-minded studies, the emphasis on a solitary detail: the attempt to reflect the nature of sexuality from such a strange, such a bizarre angle. But there is no getting away from the fact that he also became much more aware of the organ between his own legs, at the very time when, to stick to Aunt Laura’s analogy, he was in the process of changing from a planteater into a beast of prey.

Those sketches which Jonas found most fascinating bore no resemblance to anything; they were utterly original figments of the imagination. Just as with the rugs, Jonas saw that you could depict reality any way you liked. Occasionally these sketches formed a series of metamorphoses, progressing from a recognizable penis to a piece of jewellery.

Did Jonas want some more tea? His aunt filled his cup before getting up and going over to her workbench at the far end of the room where she began to tidy away her soldering iron, files and emery paper, the grinding paste and buffs. It was high time men started to take their member seriously, learned to control it, his aunt said as she hung tongs and scissors in their places among the multitude of tools, a whole ironmongery on the wall. Had Jonas heard of those women who can smoke a cigarette with their vagina and pick up coins with their labia? Why shouldn’t boys be able to do something equally accomplished? Aunt Laura then proceeded to tell Jonas about men she had met who, by controlling their muscles, could make their penises point in different directions. And take them from erect state and back to limp, quick as you like, by sheer willpower. She had met men who could beat a drum with their penises, without using their hands. ‘Just imagine what such a man could do to you!’ she said, and her bracelets were given an extra jingle, although Jonas found it hard to picture this. On Bali she had come upon a group who could masturbate and hit a coin five metres away with their semen, just the way Jonas’s grandfather could hit the spittoon from a good way off, she added. And then there were the Tibetans who were able to hold onto their semen. All Norwegians could learn something from that, said Aunt Laura as she switched off the light, giving the room over once more to the dim light that Jonas loved so well.

For a long time silence reigned. Jonas ran his eye along the walls, from rug to rug, and he had the idea that the patterns were moving, alive. ‘Tell me more of the story about Princess Li Lai,’ he asked.

‘In Xanadu,’ said Aunt Laura after first pouring herself another cup of tea, ‘Princess Li Lai received another suitor in her cool palace, in the innermost room in which she had shut herself away for many years, for she had yet to find one who could make love to her as she desired, one who would make love to her until she saw a turtle with the image of a face on its shell. The one who had come to woo her on this occasion was the celebrated jade-carver Taw Maw and he did not waste any time, but carried her to the bed and immediately proceeded to make love to her. Taw Maw concentrated solely on her clitoris, as if it were a rare stone which he had resolved to shape into an ornament. The princess felt his stiff member begin to rub against her clitoris, felt as if he were gently drilling and sawing, rubbing and rubbing. And as he made love to her, more and more urgently and passionately, Princess Li Lai felt this rubbing filling her with a warm glow as if she had stepped out into the sunshine and were walking through a landscape that Taw Maw the jade carver was slowly filing in her path, with vaguely transparent trees and fold upon fold of mountains that seemed to go on forever, and as she came to a river it suddenly overflowed its banks and swept her away, and she floated off as if caught up in a tidal wave, floated and floated in a warm stream that flowed faster and faster, more and more powerfully, until the princess was thrown onto the bank and she noticed a bridge nearby. This she walked across and it brought her to a plateau at the foot of a mountain, and while Taw Maw the jade carver made love to her ever more vigorously with his hard member, boring and filing, rubbing and rubbing, making fine movements born of long experience, she felt her legs carrying her towards the mountain, faster and faster, until she was raised up, climbed and climbed, drifted upwards and when she reached the top of the mountain she felt a stab of pain and she realized that a dragon had lifted her in its claws, and this discovery filled her with such a raging fury that she flew at the creature, punching, kicking, biting, yelling, quite beside herself, until she managed to claw a hole in its skin, and it blew apart with an explosion, a bang that caused her to open her eyes. And there she saw the face of the jade carver Taw Maw which, just for an instant, bore the features of a dragon. And she thanked him but asked him to leave, because she had not yet seen a turtle with a shell that resembled a face, and she was sure that there must be a better way to be made love to.’

Jonas lay back among the soft cushions, gazing at one of the rugs on the wall, trying to remember what the different figures represented. For a long time he lay there, feeling a little mesmerized, partly by the glow of all the metals round about him. He shut his eyes, heard the jingling as his aunt moved about the room.

‘Tell me what you found in Samarkand,’ he said at last, just before he left. He always had to try.

‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she said. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’