The Seducer

Bukhara

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 leopardtortoise 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.

One day, Jonas was allowed to look on while his aunt cast a little head out of gold, and what intrigued him more than anything else — more than the complicated gravity casting technique — was the way she transformed four old wedding rings into molten gold in the crucible with the aid of a gas-gun, before pouring it into the mould. There was something about that molten gold that he would never forget, a colour and a sheen which he occasionally thought he detected in certain uncommonly good pictures. This was one of Jonas’s favourite occupations: to watch his aunt working, often wearing a leather apron like a blacksmith, in that corner of the room which had the look of a proper little industrial plant. Jonas found it hard to believe that you needed so many tools to make something so small.

Having cleaned and polished the gold head his aunt asked Jonas to fetch the tortoise, which was crawling about the floor. She studied it long and hard, from all angles, before he was allowed to set it back on the floor. And for anyone who has not yet guessed as much, it was, of course, Aunt Laura who first told Jonas the old Chinese tale about the world resting on the back of an ancient creature, Ao, a huge turtle; a tale which Jonas later recounted to Axel and which inspired their hunt for their teachers’ underlying and often shaky propositions.

In many ways, his visits to Aunt Laura’s flat were akin to crawling inside the organ, although in the one instance Jonas had to lie on a hard wooden plank, while in the other he sank back onto soft silk cushions. In June 1964, the same year, strangely enough, when the James Bond film From Russia With Love went on general release in Norway, Nikita Khrushchev paid a visit to that country and while he was there Werna Gerhardsen, wife of the Norwegian prime minister, invited the first lady of the Soviet Union to pay a call on one of her neighbours in the Tøyen tenement where she lived, so that Madame Khrushchev could meet ‘a typical Norwegian family’ and see how they lived — the whole thing duly covered by the national press, naturally. Jonas often thought, laughing to himself, what a sensation it would have caused if the two first ladies and the whole entourage of reporters had rung the wrong doorbell and called instead on Aunt Laura, who happened to live in the same building as Prime Minister Gerhardsen. To some extent, however, he decided on reflection, it would not have been so bad, because in many ways Aunt Laura’s flat provided a different and necessary angle on Norwegian society. And there were times, when he was lying on his back on the sofa in Tøyen with a bowl of pistachio nuts on his chest, that Jonas saw it all so clearly: It was Einar Gerdharsen’s flat, right over his head, that was unreal and these things round about him, including Aunt Laura with a lump of gold on the anvil, that was the true Norway.

The flat’s unique character also owed something to the absence of a television. ‘What do I want with a television when I have forty screens in my living room, and every one of them presenting a wonderful story?’ Aunt Laura would say, pointing to the rugs on the walls around her. Jonas knew what she meant; he liked lying on the sofa, taking in one rug after another. If you tired of one — its colours, its patterns — you only had to let your eye move on. Although he did not know it, in this Jonas was anticipating the possibility that would be open to television viewers of the future, to switch from one channel to another using a remote control.

Aunt Laura was totally absorbed in her work at the bench at the far end of the room, and Jonas had gone over to pour her some more tea — as usual he had no idea what sort of tea it was, but it smelled good. His aunt was correcting the lineaments of the little gold heart ever so carefully with a graver. It was a fine sight, his aunt with her black-lined eyes and blood-red mouth bent over gold and silver, hand moving purposefully and surely. As a small boy Jonas had been allowed to sit alongside her and play with tongs and a piece of silver plate and was thus able to experience for himself the solemn, almost sensual feeling of bending the silver. He could sympathize with his aunt’s love and respect for these malleable metals, their durability: silver and, even more so, gold, metal of the gods, metal of the sun.

Jonas left the teapot with his aunt and went back to the sofa, where he sank down into the pile of cushions with one of his aunt’s sketchbooks, her ‘travel journals’ in his hands. He opened it at random and was promptly confronted with something that made him start: drawings of penises covered in rings, or with little swellings like warts. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, curious and a little afraid, holding up the book. Aunt Laura barely glanced up from under her black-lined eyelids then quietly went on working, quite unperturbed, on the gold head, while she explained to Jonas that in many societies, even in the West, men pierced holes in their members for rings and little metal rods. ‘If, for example, you have a pin stuck through the head of the penis, it’s known as ampallang,’ his aunt said matter-of-factly. ‘And if you have a ring, preferably of gold and set with small precious stones, through the skin at the side of the scrotum, that’s called hafada.’ As for the lumpy penises, those swellings he saw there, those were pearls, surgically inserted under the skin. Her aunt looked up at him. What was he making faces for? Why couldn’t men wear pins and pearls on their penises? They stuck them in their ties, didn’t they?

Jonas was not only making faces, he could virtually feel his own testicles smarting. Nonetheless, for the first time he perceived a connection between his aunt’s collection of penises and their aspects, those sketchbooks, and her jewellery, because it was clear that in some way all of those different organs, both with and without rings, inspired her.

‘You know the penis is a piece of jewellery,’ Aunt Laura said. ‘These men have simply taken that to its logical conclusion. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the cock is a work of art.’

As I say, Aunt Laura was not one for mincing her words.

Through all his comings and goings in the flat in Tøyen, Jonas gradually came to see that not only the rugs and the travelling but also these penises amounted to one and the same thing. As with the rugs and the travelling, when you came right down to it, this collection of penises also testified to the search for a good tale. The idea that the penis truly did contain a story, possibly concerning the secret of sexuality, had often occurred to Jonas when his aunt sat next to him on the sofa and showed him, with a pencil held between fingers adorned with spirals of gold, how this simple form harboured no end of possibilities.

His aunt switched off the lamp at the back of the room. She was finished working, and Jonas was allowed to see the result. On the bench was a silver cylinder, rounded at one end, sitting on a base of oxidized copper, or rather: you had to slide the base over the cylinder. No one needed to tell Jonas that he was looking at a lingam and a yoni. ‘But take a closer look,’ his aunt said. ‘See what you can do with the cylinder.’ And this was the surprise, because when Jonas lifted off the top, he found what looked like a large diamond, though it was in fact a chunk of crystal, cut into an oval, and faceted. Jonas tilted it and saw how beautifully the dim light was refracted by the glass as if through a prism. ‘Give it a shake,’ Aunt Laura said, her blood-red lips smiling eagerly. When Jonas shook the crystal, out slid four little feet and a head of gold, in much the same way as one of those Transformer toys that would appear in the shops a few decades later, and suddenly Jonas realized what it was: a turtle. He laughed. ‘Great stuff, Auntie!’

‘This is my turtle,’ said Aunt Laura, kissing him on the cheek. ‘The turtle that lies at the bottom of everything.’

Jonas stood there admiring his aunt’s work, popping the cylinder through the copper base, noting how neatly they slotted together, taking the top off the silver cylinder, shaking the crystal. Amazing. A silver penis. Ejaculating a turtle with a golden head. And only then — with that silver cylinder and crystal turtle in his hand — did Jonas understand what a lovely, nay, nigh-on perfect story this was. As if all of his aunt’s rugs and travels had been shaped, reworked into a piece of jewellery.

Later, Jonas lay back down on the sofa, in the pile of soft cushions, with a cup of sweet-scented tea on the table next to him. His aunt moved about the room, tidying up, bracelets jingling; she put the sketchbooks back in the chest alongside the precious four-volume edition of Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah. The room lay in shadow, the rugs on the walls became windows onto fabulous landscapes and when Jonas turned his head he could see the lingam on the workbench in the corner drawing all the light around it and storing it in the silver.

‘Tell me more about Princess Li-Lai,’ Jonas asked.

And at such times the word ‘no’ never passed Aunt Laura’s lips. ‘In Xanadu,’ she said, ‘Princess Li Lai received another suitor in her cool palace, in the innermost room in which she had shut herself away for many years because she had not yet found one who could make love to her until she saw a turtle with a shell that looked like a face. The one who had come to woo her on this occasion was the celebrated rug-maker, Kara Bagh, and he did not waste any time either but carried her to the bed where he immediately proceeded to make love to her. Kara Bagh concentrated solely on her insides as if she contained a multitude of threads which he was resolved to knot into a rug. The princess thought she could feel his member growing hard and soft by turns and how he alternated between long strokes and short, close-knit twists and turns deep inside her as if he were knotting something that was attached to the very tip of his penis. And as he made love to her, ever more strangely, with the most surprising movements, in the oddest patterns, Princess Li Lai felt these touches filling her with a warm glow as if she had stepped out into the sunshine and were walking through a landscape that Kara Bagh the rug-maker slowly created in her path, knot by knot, with vegetation in glowing colours and high mountains in wild formations stretching away behind and beyond one another, seeming 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, a delicious pressure against her body, floated and floated in a warm stream that flowed faster and faster, harder and harder, until she was thrown onto the bank, and there she caught sight of a bridge nearby. She crossed this and it brought her to a plateau at the foot of a mountain, and while Kara Bagh the rug-maker made love to her ever more vigorously with his alternately hard and soft member, with long and short strokes, with knots and loose threads, the princess felt her legs carrying her towards the mountain, more and more swiftly, until she was lifted up, rose higher and higher, drifted, and when she reached the top of the mountain Kara Bagh made love to her in patterns so rare and with actions so studied that she lost her balance and toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell and fell and fell through the air, as if being set free, heavy, replete, until she came once again to a stretch of water, went on sinking, sank and sank, a glorious, all-embracing feeling, an endless sinking, until suddenly she had a sense of climbing, even while she went on sinking, climbed and sank, sank and climbed as if she were being expanded in all directions, liberated from without and from within, achieving consummate insight, immaculate stillness, a rainbow of light and then she broke the surface again, shot through with warmth and discovered that she was being carried by a large turtle, lying on her stomach on its back, and Princess Li Lai saw, on the instant, that the shell looked like a face, the selfsame face that she gazed down on when she opened her eyes, the face of Kara Bagh the rug-maker for, unknown to her, he had changed position, so that she now lay on top of him. And she thanked him and asked him to stay because she was sure that this must be the best way to be made love to. “What did you do to me?” Princess Li Lai asked. And great was her astonishment when Kara Bagh told her that he had not been inside her at all. For, as he said later: “No man can reach the innermost depths of a woman with his member.”’

Often, perhaps too often, in novels, one reads of young men being seduced by their voluptuous aunts; an aunt, for example, with a pale face, a lot of kohl around her eyes and blood-red lipstick. Jonas Wergeland was not, however, seduced by his aunt’s body but by her stories. Many things in Jonas Wergeland’s life would have been different had he not spent so much time surrounded by rugs and copper in Aunt Laura’s flat.

‘Tell me about Samarkand,’ he said at last, as always, just before he left.

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