The Seducer

Smoke Without Fire

Not long after the party at Anne B’s, Jonas noticed that his manner, when discussing political issues, was different, smoother somehow, the words seemed to simply flow from his lips as if a totally new rhetorical organ had taken up residence inside him and was now demanding to be heard. For someone who had never been very good at putting his thoughts into words, suddenly he had a mind that worked like lightning — he could plan what he was going to say later in his argumentation even while he was actually making a point — and not only that, he found he had such a fantastic grasp of the actual sentence construction that he could easily depart from his main sentence and embroil himself in an intricate web of sub-clauses, only then — elegantly and without losing the thread for a second, with fresh cogency and weight, so it seemed — to complete his main sentence, like snapping shut a heavy lock. Jonas Wergeland overpowered others with such sentences, throwing out coils of words like a lasso with which he could not only catch and rope them in but also force them to the ground and bind them hand and foot.

I would like to stress that this discovery of other sides of himself did not, as some might think, have anything to do with sucking up a talent from another person, to allude, notwithstanding, to the requisite sexual element. It was much more as though Jonas Wergeland were quite naturally open to a continual metamorphosis, or rather: expansion. Jonas knew, especially after he met Gabriel Sand, that he was many people and the women he met merely helped him, by dint of a sort of hook-up, to give vent to these other sides of his character — including those he had not been aware of before. Often this new skill would create a need; at other times it turned out to be most opportune, as was the case with Jonas’s new command of language, which he had plenty of opportunity to display in the hours following his demonstration on behalf of the Comoro Islands.

When the students streamed out into the schoolyard after the first period, one of the fire department’s splendid turntable ladder trucks was just swinging in through the gates. It looked more dramatic than it was. There was no fire at the Cathedral School, although symbolically speaking one could perhaps say that the fire brigade had been called out by one of those ‘burning hearts’ of which the poet speaks; there was a fire on a flagpole at the Cathedral School. Jonas had also jammed the bolt on the skylight, and the rector, in a blend of desperation and rage, had called the Central Fire Station on Arne Garborgs plass and explained his problem; and since one has to assume that there were no other fires, real fires, raging elsewhere in the city and since it was not that far away, the duty officers agreed to do him this ‘favour’ and promptly dispatched a turntable ladder truck to the school to bring down the two flags, both the one on the pole jutting out over Ullevålsveien and the one on the cable above the schoolyard — ‘those pirate flags’ as the rector put it as if buccaneers had made an attempt to board his school.

It was a strange sight, and Jonas suddenly found himself wishing that Nefertiti could have seen it, not only because the demonstration had been very much in Nefertiti’s spirit but because it was the same turntable ladder truck that they had so often stopped to admire on their way to Torggata Baths. Jonas was downright proud to be the cause of such a singular to-do: the fire engine in the middle of the schoolyard and the ladder with a man in uniform at the top of it, sweating and straining to undo Jonas’s ingenious pulley contraption from the cable and so ‘lower’ the green flag of the Comoros, now fluttering over Norwegian soil for the first time.

By lunch-time that same day, long before the rector had completed his assiduous and vengeful hunt for the sinner, which would in due course require Jonas to draw on all of his newly won rhetorical skills, Jonas got into an almighty row with the school’s resident Young Socialists, who had long since figured out that Jonas Wergeland, that exasperating, swell-headed provocateur, had to be the man behind this weird demonstration, a demonstration which, even before they learned the motives behind it, they regarded as a deplorable act of heresy. And it was here, in a school shed, during the subsequent discussion, that Jonas Wergeland put the Cath’s Young Socialists so firmly in their place that for a long time afterwards students at the school, or at any rate those who heard about it and spread the rumours, found it hard to take the Young Socialists and their policies seriously.

Jonas, knowing as he did that attack is the best form of defence, began by asking what they knew about the Comoro Islands, these characters who spoke with such absolute certainty about the sorry state of the world, of imperialism and the class struggle in general — and, he added triumphantly, the necessity of a good education, not least for the cadres, among whose number these Cath Socialists counted themselves. This immediately gave rise to a lot of shifty looks in the Young Socialist ranks because of course they did not know the first thing about the Comoro Islands. Then, before they could gather themselves together, Jonas smartly fired off a round of questions, first of a geographical nature — what were the names of the four main islands, what was the capital called and what did they associate with the name ‘Kartala’ and suchlike — before switching to questions which he answered himself as he went along, regarding the current economic situation and social conditions in the Comoros. What did they export? What did they import? What was the average life expectancy? And by dint of these questions and answers he succeeded, quite cunningly, in presenting a picture of the tremendous poverty on the islands and the horrendous political decisions that had led the kingdom to the point where everything centred on vanilla pods, cloves and ylang-ylang essence for the perfume industry, leaving the people in abject poverty with no agriculture to feed them, which, and here he played his trump card, brought him to the question of who — who! — was to blame for this appalling misrule or, to put it another way, which country had been the colonial power, and indeed still looked upon the Comoros as its own overseas territory? And he stared hard at these faces, surprisingly many of which sported glasses with black frames, wreathed in greasy hair, with FNL badges stuck directly under their chins as if it were some sort of fashion, or a uniform, but none of which could supply the answer: France. That’s right dammit: France, the most cynical of all countries when it came to its activities outside its own borders, making the English look like out-and-out humanists by comparison when it came to foreign policy and the building of infrastructures in their colonies. It really was incredible, that these guys, these Young Socialists, didn’t know about France and the Comoro Islands, seeing as how, when you came right down to it, France was also at the bottom of that unscrupulous conflict in Vietnam, which the Young Socialists were supposed to be such experts on, going on about it as if they had personally spent at least a year fighting in the jungle.

There stood Jonas Wergeland — in the schoolyard of Oslo Cathedral School, in that shed in which the students could shelter in foul weather — generating, aptly enough, a veritable storm of arguments and critical questions and harangues that made those poor, and in their own eyes, radical and politically conscious Young Socialists cower as if seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. And Jonas had not yet come to his pièce de résistance, namely, to ask, to no avail, of course, whether they could outline the political situation in the Comoro Islands. And you can take it from me, gaining any sort of overview of the political situation in the Comoros at that time was no easy task. But Jonas really let them have it, he inundated those ignorant, so-called activists with facts about the traditional Comorian parties, the UDC, the RDCP and the UMMA, also known as the ‘greens’, the ‘whites and the ‘white-oranges’, and thereafter on MOLINACO, PEC, PASCO and ASEC, all of whom were in opposition, more or less socialist and illegal, as well as the conservative MPM. Jonas rained these acronyms, a whole alphabet of them, down on their heads, only rarely giving the full French designations of the abbreviations, letting these Young Socialists see just what it was like to hear someone talking political double Dutch. But the worst, or the best, of it was that at this point Jonas Wergeland truly did have mastery of this bewildering mishmash of different political constellations and standpoints as to whether they should forge even stronger ties with France, or fight for full independence — a mishmash that would have formed a fantastic breeding ground for support groups from all manner of factions — and, I might add: a lot of entertainment — if only more Norwegians had taken an interest in the Comoro Islands. And believe me: it took some doing for a Norwegian to differentiate between Mouzaoir Abdallah and Ahmed Abdallah, or tell the difference between Saïd Mohamed Cheikh, Prince Saïd Ibrahim and Prince Saïd Mohamed Jaffar.

But it did not stop there: Jonas Wergeland also succeeded, thanks to his newly acquired command of the rhetorical devices — by which I mean not necessarily the classic form but a pawky Norwegian, social-democratic variant — in delivering all of this in the form of outrageously convoluted arguments involving sentence constructions verging on a complexity comparable only to that of the larger molecules in organic chemistry — while at the same time hammering home rebukes and stressing points with such expressions as ‘it must be resoundingly clear’ and ‘quite the reverse’ — bringing the whole thing to a conclusion with a question shaped as a calculated complaint, while in a vacant corner of his mind he sent his grateful thanks to Anne B., whom he had spied over by the stairs leading to the girls’ gym, as to why in the world every radical in Norway had to fight for the same cause. Why did they all have to flock like sheep around the Vietnam banner? Surely there were other countries deserving of our solidarity and our attention, countries that were struggling to rid themselves of the yoke of colonialism? How could people who called themselves revolutionaries and who were supposedly fighting for the Third World not know shit about the Comoro Islands? It was a fucking revolutionary disgrace! Jonas flung out an arm, taking in all those FNL badges not to mention Mao badges and all sorts of other badges: some of these guys had chests like kids in the school band with a lot of jamborees under their belts or old Soviet soldiers celebrating a national holiday. In that shelter in the schoolyard of Oslo Cathedral School, Jonas closed his fiery speech on the Comoro Islands with an indirect denunciation of his schoolfellows’ apathy, their superficiality, their blinkered outlook — which of course led one to suspect that it was not Vietnam, say, that mattered to them; they were not interested in the world, they were interested only in power, in manipulating. Vietnam was simply an excuse to flaunt themselves and their ironclad egos; the actual object of their hate was neither here not there. So in closing let me just add, for the record, that Jonas’s thundering denunciation was in no wise prompted by a reckless urge to heap abuse on the superficial commitment and political narcissism of Norwegian youth. At that moment Jonas Wergeland was the Comoro Islands champion in Norway, right then it was important to him, more important than anything else, that the students at the Cath should be told about this island kingdom in the Indian Ocean.

I ought of course to tell you how things went, in the years that followed, with this fervent commitment to the Comoros. In the autumn of 1976, Jonas received a letter from none other than President Ali Soilih, who had toppled the new state’s first president, Ahmed Abdallah, from power the previous January. And in this odd letter Ali Soilih, the utopian dreamer who initiated a most peculiar Maoist-cum-Socialist experiment on the islands, thanked Jonas Wergeland for his efforts on behalf of the Comoro Islands’ cause in Scandinavia and maintained that his fight up there in the north had been an inspiration to those fighting for full independence, which, as far as at least three out of the four islands were concerned, had been achieved in 1975. This letter meant such a lot to Jonas Wergeland that he had it framed, like a diploma, and showed it off whenever anyone accused him of lacking political awareness. How Ali Soilih found out that Jonas Wergeland had hoisted the Comorian flag in a school in far-off Norway was a mystery to Jonas and everyone else, and even though there is a very simple explanation I am not going to disclose it here and risk ruining the best part of this tale.

Because from there on, it is the usual story: of a commitment that gradually peters out. In Jonas Wergeland’s defence it should be said that he tried, he tried very hard to follow future developments in the Comoro Islands. Jonas did his best, somewhat resignedly, to keep track of the new parties and alliances that sprang up after his raising of the flag: the PUIC, FNU, UDZIMA, FNUK-UNIKOM and FD, to name but a few of the permutations of initials that Jonas found increasingly abstract. He valiantly endeavoured to keep abreast and still more valiantly to understand what was going on down there on those islands in the Indian Ocean: the power struggles and political proclamations. Not least, he tried to understand the employment and the presence of foreign mercenaries, primarily French, in various coups d’états. It almost became something of a hobby, rather like stamp collecting; Jonas Wergeland collected piece after piece of an African reality, the only thing being that the more pieces he accumulated the less he understood any of it. The Comoro Islands actually afforded an angle onto the whole African dilemma, lying as they did off the continent, like a lens through which the mainland could be viewed. The whole gamut of depressing factors was to be found there: a mixed-bag of ethnic groups, a ruinous colonial past, overpopulation, extreme poverty, food shortages, high infant mortality rate, low life expectancy, illiteracy, one-sided exports, political intrigue, governmental chaos, coups, abortive utopian socialism, mercenaries, the Muslim syndrome: a disheartening sum which in the end Jonas found impossible to add up. Or perhaps it was simply that he could not figure it out, not even after the mathematical breakthrough that brought him insight into equations involving several unknowns, the problem of infinity. Sometime in the mid-eighties — and, quite honestly, who can blame him? — Jonas Wergeland gave up, mind reeling, battered and bruised by incomprehensible facts. He threw in the towel. The Comoro Islands and Africa won on a technical knockout.

But as far as his debate with the Young Socialists as a high-school student, in the schoolyard, in that shed was concerned — that Jonas won. And it is important, as it was for Jonas Wergeland, to feel at least at one point in your life that you have an overview and that, perhaps precisely because of that overview, you manage to light on a cause that has not been taken up by everyone else. So even though, in the long run, the Comoro Islands affair ended in defeat, for Jonas Wergeland it represented unequivocal proof — as witness the letter from Ali Soilih — that it does actually pay to step in and do something to change the world. In those terms, Jonas Wergeland’s fight for the Comoro Islands was a glorious victory and, if I may say so, an example worth emulating.