The Seducer

15·46·6

Jonas Wergeland is nine years old. It is late at night and he wakes with a tightness around his balls.

I doubt if I need to remind anyone of the sexual frustrations of pre-pubertal boys and the ways they find of letting off steam. Some play rather artful games of ‘doctors and nurses’. Others can make do with reading the small ads in the newspaper, under the heading of ‘Health and Hygiene’, or uttering the name ‘Mount of Venus’ with all its connotations of scaled peaks and astronomical mysteries. Some run a tremulous felt tip along the side of the transformer station under cover of darkness, making up smutty rhymes ending in ‘pussy’, ‘Lucy’ and ‘juicy’, while others run a black market in condoms stolen from unwitting fathers. Some turn up in triumph at school with a stuffy sex manual discovered in an old dusty box in a far corner of the cellar, while others concoct myths about Mamma Banana, the girl who lives in the Swiss villa across from the flats, who was said to be so randy that every night, if no boys showed up, she had to stick an Ice Pole up ‘you know where’ to cool herself down, and we’re talking a fifty-øre Ice Pole at that. When Jonas Wergeland was a boy there were even some who plucked up the courage to club together for a pretty harmless girlie magazine, playing a nerve-racking game of poker to decide who would go into the shop, with sweaty palms and a tongue like lead, to buy it, so they could read it on the sly behind the garages and learn how even the most dauntingly pale and unimaginably ugly women — sporting light-green eye-shadow and weird hair-dos — could get you seriously worked up and leave you with friction burns on your foreskin.

While we are on this subject, it might be tempting to air a few home truths about psychologists, but since they are after all no greater charlatans than anyone else, I will confine myself to lamenting the fact that members of this profession have ruined many people’s chances of understanding what I am now about to tell you about Jonas Wergeland. I could, of course, be underestimating the average Norwegian, but I fear that not a few of them have gone along with the speculative and oft-repeated old bromide about sexual insecurity springing from some suppressed fear conceived in childhood. If this is true, then I would just like to say that on this score Jonas Wergeland was more fortunate than other children of his age — and that is a gross understatement. Not only did he have a sister who deemed it her almost sacred calling to enlighten her brothers when the first sweet itch made its puzzling presence felt in their groins — he also had parents who, one year later, were responsible for dispelling any last shreds of doubt planted by all the scaremongering that surrounded sex. Thanks to his parents, Jonas followed the development of his genitals with eager anticipation.

Jonas Wergeland experienced something that many another child before him has experienced, and this incident so crucial to his relaxed — some might say profligate — attitude to sex, occurred on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday evening. Until that day, Jonas had never given much thought to his mother’s and father’s private life, far less their nocturnal activities; as far as he was concerned, his parents were two regular individuals, much loved of course, but nonetheless just normal people living the usual sort of Norwegian life, their days made up of a combination of factors that could be counted on the fingers of both hands.

As I say, plenty of people have had the same experience; it was late, after 11.00 and all the children were asleep. Jonas woke up bursting for the toilet. He shinned down from his bunk-bed by dint of an impressive technique not unlike a fireman sliding down his pole or, according to Rakel, asleep in the next room, like Elvis in the scene where he sings ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in the film of the same name. The biggest hindrance was posed by Daniel’s collection of revolvers and rifles and accompanying belts, as well as cowboy hats and waistcoats adorned with gleaming sheriff’s stars, all slung around the bedpost, enough equipment to fit out a whole Western. Jonas tiptoed across the room, the walls of which were adorned with pennants, a dartboard, Jonas’s drawings and Daniel’s innumerable diplomas, not to mention the best of all — the cards from Uncle Lauritz: during his lifetime, Uncle Lauritz had sent them postcards from all the destinations flown to by SAS, with the result that eventually half of one wall was papered with brightly coloured cards from such cities as Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Cairo, to name one route of which Uncle Lauritz was especially fond — and these, both the scenes they depicted and the terse notes on the back, whetted the imagination and the wanderlust of Jonas in particular, as much as the copies of the National Geographic in the toilet did. Dotted here and there among the cards were also photographs of the planes with which Uncle Lauritz had conquered the world, the fourengine, propeller-driven DC-6B and DC-7C and, Jonas’s favourite, a plane which Uncle Lauritz unfortunately barely had the chance to try out: that quite indescribably elegant jet, the Caravelle, with lines that left a tingling sensation between the shoulder-blades.

Jonas trod softly across the room, almost without opening his eyes, as if reluctant to leave slumber behind, groped for the door-handle; aware, even with his eyes closed, of the object lying on the chest of drawers right next to the door, more because of the energy it gave off. Jonas had found a ball-bearing from the hub of a bicycle wheel and for reasons he did not quite understand it had become something sacred to him, a sort of portable altar, not because the ball-bearing looked so nice with its little circle of little steel balls, almost like a piece of jewellery, but because there was a mystique about it which in some unaccountable way exerted a strong attraction on him.

Jonas opened the door, softly still, moving more or less by feel; crept through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where he did the needful. It was when he was on his way back, in the hall, that he heard a vague murmur from the living room, the door of which was standing slightly ajar, so he stopped, because something was wrong, but what was it that was wrong? There was too little talking, almost no sound at all, and the words being murmured were too soft.

One of the things which Jonas Wergeland liked best about his parents and which he came to admire even more when he reached adulthood himself, indeed regarded as something of a mystery, was their supreme talent for quiet conversation, their unbelievable mastery of ‘the fine art of small talk’. This was Åse and Haakon’s fondest pursuit: to sit each in their chair in the living room and talk the evening away, which is to say: those evenings when both were at home, since Jonas’s father had his church duties, and his mother was active in any number of societies that Jonas never could make head nor tail of, although he could tell that his mother had a greater need for social contact than his father. But those evenings together truly were special occasions, something his father underlined by shaving again after dinner and splashing a few drops of foreign aftershave on his cheeks. On the wall of the living room hung a cuckoo clock, a source of much amusement to the children, until the day when Daniel, possibly in a premature act of rebellion against paternal authority, shot off both the cuckoo and the little man who played ‘O mein Papa’ with his catapult. Jonas’s mother was in the habit of setting this cuckoo clock an hour slow, something which Jonas was sure she did out of principle, so that she and his father could talk on for an extra hour every evening with a clear conscience.

As Jonas grew older and was allowed to stay up longer, he used to sit between them, on the rug, building with Lego. He loved to sit there surrounded by the hum of their conversation, constructing buildings out of Lego bricks, endeavouring to exhaust all the possibilities for the sorts of houses you could build with the same number of bricks, as if he had already tumbled to the fact that you only had a limited number of basic forms to play with, and that life consisted of shuffling these about. In a way he felt that his mother and father were engaged in something similar, because they talked a lot about the same things, over and over again, but always in new patterns and variations, thus ensuring that the conversation was always interesting and exciting, and — the banal subject matter notwithstanding — rather like an everyday version of Plato’s dialogues. Only when he let Nefertiti help in with the building, did this theory collapse, because even with the same Lego bricks as he had, she could build houses he would never have dreamed possible, lifting them up to the lamp to show him how the secret of the construction derived from light and shade; houses which, if anyone should be wondering, helped sow the seeds of Jonas Wergeland’s ambition to become an architect.

But as a rule Jonas lay alone on the rug between his parents, listening with half an ear to the hum of their voices, their laughter, which seemed to act as a spur to his invention; his mother talking about her work at the Grorud Ironmongery, and his father about things he had seen and heard in Grorud Church, and for Jonas there was something about this very contrast between the church on the hill next to the school and the factory in the valley alongside the railway line that made his parents the perfect conversationalists, giving them an ocean of topics on which to draw. He revelled in it, lying there between them, listening to the way they talked, also about those things on which they disagreed, little arguments, although the tone never varied; the way they jumped from one topic to another, without needing to use a newspaper as a springboard, talking about people they knew and events in the surrounding community, anything and everything, but still much in the same vein, a mesh of this and that, building into a web — and, by some sort of alchemy, into something precious. Jonas noticed that his father’s fluttering hands steadied when he was talking to his mother, just as they did at the organ as if here, too, in these conversations in which they could come up with endless variations on a theme, he was practising a kind of Kunst der Fuge. The week before had, as it happens, been a little out of the ordinary, with a more serious note creeping into the hum of voices, and Jonas, lying on the rug between his parents, striving to build a house he had never built before, had repeatedly picked up such words as ‘Cuba’ and ‘rockets’.

Now Jonas stood in the hall listening, eyes open, stood there gazing at the picture hanging above the black bakelite telephone of himself as a one-year-old in forty-eight different poses. Something was wrong, there was too little talk going on, too low, in the living room. He was just about to go in and investigate but stopped short as he moved into a position, or perhaps I should say adopted an angle, from which the chink in the door afforded him a view of another corner of the room, and there he stayed, looking and looking. Jonas saw the textured wallpaper, he saw the cuckoo clock that always ran slow, he saw the Negro lady on the wall, with the gold rings in her ears and around her neck — later to become a collector’s item — and he saw the two curving chairs with their distinctly functionalist design, noticed them above all else, because they were empty; his parents were not sitting in their respective chairs, talking about this and that, weaving something precious together, they were lying naked on the rug — bare-naked as children would say — and not only that but in a funny position. Jonas stood in the shadows and watched, not with fear, but with tremulous wonder; he had a feeling that here, too, they were weaving something, something beautiful, precious. He realized that what his parents were doing was something that made you blissfully happy, and if he had not induced this from anything else, then he could tell from the look on his father’s face: his father had the same look on his face as he had when Knut Johannesen skated the 10,000 metres at the Olympics in Squaw Valley, a race I mentioned in passing at an earlier — which is to say chronologically later — point. Jonas never forgot that moment or that look. He and Daniel had walked into the room, each clutching a paper cornet of liquorice pipes, all set to listen to Children’s Hour, the absolute high point of the week, primarily on account of the serial. But it was not the Children’s Hour signature tune that issued from the radio. Instead of ‘And now it’s time for Children’s Hour’ they heard the almost hysterical voice of sports commentator Oddvar Foss, telling the Norwegian people about this fantastic race on the other side of the Atlantic, a race which Jonas found nowhere near as fascinating as observing the look on his father’s face — and let me just add that Haakon Hansen was a true skating aficionado, a real fan, like so many others at that time. Jonas Wergeland belonged, in other words, to the last generation of Norwegian children to grow up with their fathers’ ardent, nigh-on pathological, passion for skating. So Jonas stood there, observing his father’s face as Johannesen skated circuit after circuit on the other side of the world, and he could see that his father was over the moon, that he could not really believe this was happening, that Johannesen was about to do the distance in under sixteen minutes, a feat regarded as bounding on the impossible. Jonas stood there spellbound, watching as his father’s face was further transformed, passing into an expression that spoke of utter, almost divine, rapture, to culminate in what Jonas was later to define as the ‘Face of Bliss’ — not so surprisingly, perhaps, seeing that Johannesen, when he crossed the finishing line, had beaten the record set by Hjallis in 1951, a record that the pundits had claimed could never be broken, by an incredible forty-six seconds. And it was this very expression, the Face of Bliss, that Jonas’s father was wearing now as he made to love to Jonas’s mother, in a sort of Olympic event, you might say: making circuit after circuit.

Jonas stood in the hall, at the living-room door, and watched and watched, feeling rather solemn, filled with awe. There was something about these smooth, effortless actions, the semblance of perfection and, not least, the juncture of his parents’ pelvises that gave Jonas the idea that this, too, had to do with a ball-bearing, a hub, something sitting at the centre, around which everything else miraculously revolved.