The Seducer

The Great Discoveries

Of all Jonas Wergeland’s more or less epic journeys, of all his, to varying extents, hazardous voyages of discovery, there was one which never palled, which stood as the most heroic, gruelling, groundbreaking and, not least, perilous, journey he had ever embarked upon: a journey to the interior of Østfold. This journey he made as a boy, together with Nefertiti of course and, at the moment when he set out, it ought to be said that they, or rather he, Jonas, considered this expedition to be just about as daring as sailing over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and consequently, after this, after they came back ‘to life’ as it were, he knew that anything was possible. From that point of view, Jonas could be said to have got the hackneyed theme of ‘young man sets out to see the world’ out of the way at the tender age of eight. Thanks to Aunt Laura, a lady given to chalk-white makeup, voluminous shawls and enigmatic hats, Jonas was familiar with such places as Isfahan and Bukhara, but in Jonas Wergeland’s life it was that journey to the interior of Østfold which blew his childhood universe apart.

But first let me say something about this childhood universe as it pertained to Jonas Wergeland. Philosophers and scientists are forever trying to come up with something smart to say about the nature of life — take, for example, all that artful talk about the world in a grain of sand. Not that I have any intention of depriving anyone of the illusion of being able to discover new ‘truths’, but if I might just point out that this is something which every child experiences, even if many of them do in time succeed, by the most amazing feat of erasure, in suppressing such insights. Every child inhabits all of history and all of geography in the most natural way possible. What those speculators in the meaning-of-life industry grope their way towards time and again are, in other words, merely scraps of a lost childhood.

Jonas Wergeland and his friend through thick and — even more so — thin, Nefertiti Falck, grew up in Grorud, on a community housing development with the fine-sounding name of Solhaug — Sunnyhills — six low blocks of flats sitting at the top of Hagelundveien. Here, in the north-east corner of Oslo, within a relatively small area, the whole history of Norway was exposed to view. Here lay the forest where people could live as hunters and gatherers; here, on the farms around Ammerud, one could see the shepherd and the sewer, the whole of peasant society in the flesh. And behind the blocks of flats ran Bergensveien, bearing witness to a burgeoning commercial trade, not to mention highwaymen a little further up around Røverkollen — Robbers’ Hill; Norway as an industrial nation could be studied at close quarters, both in the quarries alongside Trondheimsveien and in the textile factories along the banks of the River Alna. Grorud was one of the few places which provided an almost perfect illustration of the saying: ‘Town and land, hand in hand’. And during Jonas’s formative years, the new service industries also began to shoot sky-high, quite literally, in the shape of garish supermarkets and, not least, the Grorud shopping centre with its Babel tower block, all twelve storeys of it, with, most importantly — a real fairground attraction this — a lift. All history was there, in one small patch of ground. No one told them this, but they took it in, so to speak, with mother’s milk, through play.

And when it came to geography, Grorud was, like all other places in Norway, a result of the creative movement of the glaciers with its rivers and lakes, its fertile soil in valleys nestling between hills and steep mountainsides. The stark, almost vertical, granite face of Ravnkollen, rising up directly behind Solhaug, was a particularly dominant topographical feature, a sort of magnified version of the Berlin Wall which their mothers strictly forbade them to scale — in vain of course. Thanks to the childish imagination, the wide world, too, was to be found in nucleus in these few square kilometres: jungle, prairie, Sherwood Forest — you name it — it was all there, in miniature. In the world of childhood there is always a Timbuktu, some sort of outer limit and a Mount Everest, posing the ultimate challenge. Even the Victoria Falls were in principal anticipated at Grorud in the ‘waterfall’ down in the stream; for a child, a three-foot cascade is good enough.

On a day in mid-May, in the year in which Gagarin broke the space barrier in his own way, Jonas and Nefertiti embarked upon their great expedition to inner Østfold. It all began when Nefertiti’s father received a letter, the envelope plastered with foreign stamps and in fact addressed to an aunt whom everyone believed to be somewhere abroad. Nefertiti’s parents only had a rough idea of where she had previously lived and since the letter did not look all that important they laid it on one side, with the result that Nefertiti, who had a feeling that her aunt had returned home and that they would be able to locate her, decided to deliver the letter personally. But when Nefertiti mentioned the name of the place to Jonas he was all against the idea, since to him it sounded as alien and, not least, as daunting as any exotic name from the unreal frames of the comic strips. ‘There’s adventure to be found wherever you go,’ said Nefertiti, ‘and we can’t spend all our lives sitting on our backsides in Grorud, can we?’

So there he was, on the train, and it was strange how well Jonas was to remember that trip, the sharpness of every detail, especially from the point where the track branched, after Ski station, and headed off into the complete unknown: up to then the only place he had ever taken the train to was Frederikstad. He always remembered that expedition into inner Østfold more clearly than, let’s say, his trip to Shanghai: the moment, for example, when they crossed the River Glomma, having left behind them stations with such outlandish names as Kråkstad, Tomter and Spydeberg, and Nefertiti brought out a mouth organ. But Nefertiti did not play ‘Oh, My Darling Clementine’ or any other such tired old evergreen. No, she played ‘Morning Glory’ by Duke Ellington, no less, and she played that intricate melody beautifully on a gold, chromatic mouth organ, while they rolled along tracks flanked on both sides by black fields on which the first shoots were just starting to show; either that or spring-green meadows dotted with yellow flowers, and one with a whole herd of horses galloping across it and a gleaming white church in the background, like something Edward Hopper might have painted. She played so well, so divinely, that Jonas was able to take her cap round and collect a whole six kroner in jingling coins before they passed Mysen.

Now at this point I really ought to say something about Nefertiti, although nothing can really do her justice. She was the same age as Jonas, but unlike him, the mere sight of an ant could prompt her to point out that the ants had already evolved into at least ten thousand different species while at the same time asking Jonas why the life of human beings should be governed to such an extent by sight and sound whereas ants went wholly by taste and smell, a chemical form of communication; or she might ask what Jonas thought of a world that revolved around the woman, the female. Nefertiti had an unusually shaped head which she always concealed under a cloth cap; it was so uncommonly long at the back that Jonas sometimes wondered whether she might be from another planet. Her clothes and her appearance were pretty ordinary apart from the fact that she always wore her hair in plaits, had pearl studs in her ears and boasted the longest eyelashes in the world. These aside, Nefertiti’s most distinctive feature was her inexhaustible imagination, which ensured that no matter what she thought of or made, it was always different. She could make paper airplanes shaped like the Concorde of the future that glided endlessly through the air; she knocked together carts that made the kids from Leirhaug, the development down the road, scratch their heads and made rafts the like of which Huckleberry Finn would never have dreamed possible.

Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius, albeit unbeknownst to himself, was to choose a girl as his best friend. It was Nefertiti who taught him that women are, first and foremost, teachers, then mistresses — and above all that when you come right down to it, the female is a very different and, more to the point, a much more fascinating creature than the male.

They alighted at Rakkestad, sniffed the scent of a sawmill on the other side of the railway track before walking up to the crossroads, where they stood with their backs to the Co-op, the sort of shop where you could buy anything, absolutely anything, from paintbrushes to three sorts of syrup, but which has, of course, since been pulled down, every last brick of it — in true Roman fashion, one might say — to be replaced, as in so many other places, by a standardized box of a petrol station.

So here we have Jonas and Nefertiti standing between the Central Hotel and The Corner, gazing down Storgata like two cowboys coming to a lawless town and wondering whether they dare take the chance of riding through it. Which was perhaps not all that surprising, since Rakkestad, like so many small villages the world over, does give the impression of being the sort of place one instinctively suspects to be populated by an assortment of weirdoes — people who lie in their sickbeds keeping a precise tally of their whooping-cough fits and severity of same — and the sort of half-witted, hillbilly characters who are just itching to blow you away, sitting at their windows with loaded shotguns, dribbling tobacco juice and leering and muttering under their breath all the while. In those days, before you came to Grandgården and on the same side, there was a kiosk known simply as ‘Langeland’ and right outside this Jonas and Nefertiti ran into three pretty hefty boys of their own age. One of them was bouncing a football, a rather battered lace-up football, while another, who was missing his front teeth, was fiddling with a formidable-looking catapult. Despite a warning nudge in the arm from Jonas, Nefertiti boldly asked them the way to Haugli General Store. The boys laughed. Did they know her aunt? ‘Sh’isnæ hame,’ laughed the boys, thereby erecting a language barrier that felt no less great than the one experienced by Jonas at a later date, when he heard the Bedouins talking among themselves at the foot of Jebel Musa. A sly grin spread across the face of the boy with the catapult, as he picked up a rather sharp-looking stone from the pavement and fitted it into the leather sling.

Jonas, who had had his doubts about the trip from the very start, had plagued Nefertiti to at least let him bring his new gun, which could take several strips of caps at once, thus making a bigger bang, but Nefertiti had laughed at him: ‘Why don’t you take some glass beads and copper wire and be done with it?’ she said. ‘Or the Bible?’

The boy with no front teeth had raised the catapult into what could only be called a menacing position when Nefertiti did something unexpected: she pulled out a yo-yo which Jonas had never seen before. She shot the yo-yo out into the air in such a way that it knocked the catapult out of the boy’s hand, caught it on the rebound, much like catching a boomerang, and then, before they had time to collect themselves, she proceeded to do the most amazing tricks with that yo-yo, leaving the boys standing there open-mouthed like kids at a circus — and, may I add, this performance of Nefertiti’s really was quite unique, this being long before the days of Coca-Cola yo-yos, when almost every self-respecting kid could do ‘Around the World’, ‘Rock the Baby’ and ‘Walkin’ the Dog’.

As soon as she was done, Nefertiti invited the boys into the kiosk and stood them a small cola each and a pack of a new brand of chewing gum that came with a transfer inside the wrapper. Then she put a coin in the jukebox and played ‘Apache’ by the Shadows as if wishing to show, through the natives’ own music as it were, that she came in peace. Thus, yet another well-known scene was enacted: that in which travellers in a foreign land find themselves surrounded by hostile individuals and someone, usually a professor, saves the situation by suddenly breaking into the tribe’s own language. Because Nefertiti actually did start to talk like them. Jonas could not believe his ears as he stood there watching her waving her arms about and hearing her use words and expressions such as ‘bags ‘n’ bags’ and ‘right guid’ as well as even more obscure phrases such as ‘ah dinnae think sae’ and ‘disnae maitter a doaken’, while the Shadows provided a dramatic backdrop of sound.

‘Haugli General Store’s a bit further down Storgata,’ said Nefertiti when she came over to him afterwards.

The last stage of the journey went without a hitch, the boys even accompanied them a bit of the way, they were on their way down to Mjørud Grove in any case. Before they said goodbye, Nefertiti juggled the football about a bit, rounding off by bringing it to rest at the base of her neck, while the boys muttered something about ‘Jinker’ Jensen, star of Brann FC. And I would say that it was here, at this point, on Storgata in Rakkestad, while the boys were saying something to Nefertiti about ‘awfie nice’ and ‘nae bother attaw’, that Jonas Wergeland lost his fear of the unknown and acquired the fundamental belief that most people are to be trusted. And also, almost as important, he realized that Norway was an infinitely mysterious land, a land full of white patches.

This last, this sensation of having entered unknown territory, was only reinforced by his meeting with Nefertiti’s great-aunt, who was overjoyed to receive the letter and invited them into her little cottage on the banks of the River Rakkestad, also an ideal spot for punting or fishing for bream, perch and pike. And it was here, on a terrace in Rakkestad, surrounded by birdsong and the humming of insects, while they drank squash and ate fresh-baked raisin buns which Nefertiti had had the foresight to purchase in Dahl’s pastry shop, that her aunt produced a stereoscope, a marvellous instrument new to Jonas, and showed them pictures from all over the world, pictures in black and white which were a wonder of depth and inviting landscapes. Jonas Wergeland would never forget that afternoon when he sat on the terrace in inner Østfold and, instead of seeing the embankment on the other side of the River Rakkestad, saw the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt and Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro.

‘From Rakkestad I could see the whole world,’ Jonas Wergeland was later to say.

Nefertiti’s aunt had been a missionary, most recently in Madagascar, and when they were finished looking at the pictures she told them not only about Tananrive but also about the even more distant country of China, where she herself had been, and the mighty rivers that run through it. She did not say much about the missionary work as such because she knew that children do not really see the point in that, but she took them into the house and showed them a map hanging on the living-room wall. Of all that Jonas saw and experienced that day, this map was the one thing which branded itself most indelibly on his memory; it was a map of the world, with lines running from Norway to all of those parts of the globe where Norwegian missionary organizations were active, their stations indicated by red pins, and in truth there were no small number of lines radiating from Norway and ending in a red pin. To Jonas, those lines seemed to extend to nigh on every country in the world, and he stood for ages just gaping at this evidence of the area encompassed by Norwegian missionaries, the host of rays and red pins, as if Norway were the centre of a red sun enlightening the whole world. Now and again a train rumbled past on the embankment outside, on the other side of the River Rakkestad, as if to show that here, too, they were linked to every part of the world.

At Rakkestad, Jonas learned that there was a Norway outside of Norway, and thus he could be said to have broken the space barrier twice that day — not only did he break free of the world of his childhood, he also broke free of Norway. And standing there in that living room gazing at the map of the world covered in all those red pins, he struggled to grasp an idea which obviously, at the age he then was, he did not manage to formulate clearly in his mind, but which he would spend much of his life endeavouring to confirm: that every country contains the whole world. And that the whole world contains something of Norway.