The Seducer

Hell

What did Jonas Wergeland look for in a woman? Or, to put it another way, why did he get that tingling between his shoulder-blades on encountering a select few members of the opposite sex? Is there an explanation that goes beyond all the usual clichés concerning the randy male and basic instincts?

Thanks to my — how shall I put it? — unique position, I am able to cite an incident that offers one possible answer to this question. And again it concerns Jonas’s fateful cousin, Veronika Røed.

The year in which Jonas was born, Professor Ole Hallesby made a speech, broadcast on the radio, in which he sent the following, not exactly entertaining, thought into thousands of homes: ‘You know that if you dropped dead this instant you would go straight to Hell.’ This sparked off the much renowned ‘Hell debate’ as it was called — yet another one of those exchanges that exposes diverting sides of the Norwegian national character. I am not, however, going to succumb to the temptation to comment on this, merely to state that in due course Jonas Wergeland came to side with Hallesby; he knew there was a Hell.

Jonas always said that he was a cold-blooded creature. Even as a child he evinced an inveterate mistrust of winter and, more particularly, the Norwegian cultivation of this season; it was the cold, more than the snow, that got to him. No matter how many layers of clothes, or how thick the layers, his mother wrapped him in, even when tucked up nice and snug inside a sheepskin sleeping-bag with layer upon layer of blankets on top, he still seemed to shiver and shake. Later, Jonas would also belie the boast that all Norwegians are natural born skiers. He hated those strips of wood that the others had such a whale of a time sliding about on, not to mention all the sticky, messy business of waxing the things. All of the children at Solhaug, except Jonas, cheered when the first snowflakes began to fall; within seconds out came the skis and sledges, the skimmer-boards, the little toy ski-jumpers that you could bend at the waist and the plastic bobsleighs with lead weights in the runners. All winter long, Daniel and the other boys — and the girls for that matter — were hard at it building ingenious bottle slides; hanging onto the backs of cars (strictly illegal) rolling about in the snow and making whole hosts of snow-angels, while at the same time carrying on endless snowball fights with lethal clumps of ice as ammunition. And after all of this, they would come running in, looking like snowmen, gleefully rosy-cheeked, leaving puddles in the hallways and filling the flats with the stink of wet wool. Jonas viewed with aloof distaste all the pointless hassle of winding disgusting strips of insulating tape round ice-hockey sticks, not to mention dodging deadly pucks, all the time spent building staggeringly high ski-jump slopes, devising new waxing combinations to make jumping skis go faster, practising hazardous downhill turns, and all just to end up with broken legs and grazed faces. As they grew older Jonas looked on with growing disbelief as Daniel and his other chums wasted all of their free time on making long cross-country expeditions across Lillomarka just to obtain another stamp in their orienteering cards against some place name printed in red, green or black, thus winning themselves useless little yellow badges bearing a picture of a Birchleg, a legendary Viking skier; it wasn’t long before Daniel had an anorak covered in them, and he posed as proudly as another Oscar Mathisen for his father with the camera. Jonas rolled his eyes every time his brother barged breathlessly through the front door, drooling from the corner of his mouth and with a trail of blood-tinged snot running from his nose, yelling delightedly that he had set a new personal record out and back on the cross-country trail to Lilloseter.

For his own part, Jonas Wergeland did his best to confine his winter activities to the unavoidable trip to and from school, as far as possible he even avoided looking out of the window. The rest of the time he sat, or reclined, in a sort of hibernation, with his back against the radiator, reading comics and listening to Duke Ellington, first and foremost the so-called jungle numbers, full of weird sound effects, from the Cotton Club days: ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’ with Bubber Miley’s and Joe ‘Tricky Sam’ Nanton’s mournful, muted wah-wahs and wild, growling trumpets and trombones, ‘The Mooch’ with Sonny Greer’s gongs and pounding, galloping tom-toms; and ‘Haunted Nights’ with Teddy Bunns’s delicate wistful guitar solo — all in all, a sound so theatrical and exaggeratedly primitive that it provided the perfect accompaniment to the comics he read. Jonas was convinced that he and Duke Ellington shared the same loathing of wet woollen mittens and great, clodhopping, leather ski boots with ice-caked laces, that both he and Duke Ellington abhorred itchy long-johns and ludicrous string vests; all in all, there was something about the red-hot rhythms of ‘Jungle Nights in Harlem’ that told him Duke Ellington must detest everything that so much as smacked of ice and snow as deeply and fervently as he did — and this, although Jonas could not have known it, was true enough; Duke Ellington even hated fresh air, so much so that he never opened a window. But to return to Jonas, all winter long he sat with his back propped up against the radiator, longing for spring.

One of the few things he could stand to do, however, was to build snow-houses — something which can of course be put down to the architectural leanings he was later to display. It did no harm either that snow-houses were easier fashioned when the snow was wet, which is to say when the temperature had crept up above zero. One construction in particular was to brand itself into, or more correctly become frozen solid in, Jonas’s memory. One March, during a mild spell, he and Nefertiti built an imposing palace on the slope running down to the stream, where the snow lay several metres deep. By using shovels to hollow out the inside and by rolling snowballs, they were able to build both up the way and down, creating several floors and criss-crossing passages. Nefertiti had sketched out the plan beforehand, and she and Jonas had made a trial model out of white Lego with Nefertiti explaining that this was a somewhat simplified version of the palace of King Minos on Crete. Jonas’s only happy memories of winter at Solhaug up to then were of him and Nefertiti sitting in spacious white rooms made of snow with a candle burning in the centre, eating dried apricots while Nefertiti told him about the catacombs in Rome, the cave paintings in grottoes in the South of France and about Elephanta in India, fabulous temples hacked out of the mountain.

One Sunday at the end of March, Sir William’s family had paid them a visit, and in a rash moment — he cursed himself later — Jonas had taken Veronika down to their masterpiece on the hillside. They crawled up and down passages which were sagging badly due to the thaw that had set in, only just managing to squeeze through the narrowest spots. In the largest room Jonas lit a stub of candle, and they sat there, silently, self-consciously, watching the light sparkling on the smooth walls. Below-zero temperatures over the past few nights had frozen the whole palace rock-hard.

Afterwards, they rolled snowballs in the wet snow outside, bowling them down the slope until they were gigantic, so big that tufts of grass came to light in their tracks, making Jonas want to roll up that whole carpet of snow and get a head-start on spring. He was actually well under way with this attempt to change the seasons when his father’s whistle sounded from a veranda somewhere out of sight, calling them in to dinner. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Jonas said to his cousin. ‘I’ll just get the candle.’ He crawled in through the little opening in the sagging snow palace.

I am sure the reader has long since guessed what Veronika did: with a strength that would have left anyone speechless, she rolled one of the enormous snowballs the last bit of the way down the slope so that it wedged tight across the entrance to the snow-cave. And off she went.

It is not easy to explain a person like Veronika, a girl who was already so pretty that she was actually too pretty. Some people might use the word ‘evil’, but that really does not cover it. On the whole I prefer to say as little as possible about Veronika Røed; I do not intend to comment on her motives in this instance or in any other instance on which she tried to harm Jonas. More than enough has already been written about Veronika Røed and her convoluted merits.

This is meant to be a book about Jonas Wergeland. This is meant to be a book written on Jonas Wergeland’s terms. At long last. He deserves it.

Back at the flat, where their dinner was already on the table, Veronika said that Jonas had run off and left her, she even managed to squeeze out a tear or two. And since Sir William had been smacking his lips demonstratively and impatiently for some time, Jonas’s mother said that he was probably on his way and that they should just go ahead and start dinner without him: cold roast pork and brown gravy as always at such family gatherings.

The minute Jonas discovered that the entrance was sealed off, he knew that it was Veronika’s doing. He tried to kick his way out, but it was no use, she had blocked the hole perfectly. Having run his hands along the solid ice walls more in discouragement than panic, Jonas crawled back to the big room, sat down resignedly in the centre and lit the candle stub, thinking to himself that he would be alright as long as the flame was burning. He sat gazing round about, sat in the centre of a circle, under a low dome. He was cold, even more so than usual, so cold that his whole body ached. It was worst around his groin, he could hardly feel a thing, his willy seemed to be turning into a little icicle. He cried for help, hearing how stifled his cry sounded, with no echo, like being under a quilt. The candle went out. He did not know whether this was because there was no air in the room or what. A faint, feeble light filtered through the roof. He knew he was going to die. He lay down, curled up foetus-like, lay there feeling one limb after another grow numb. He saw the glimmer of light beyond the walls gradually fading, like the glow of a Golden Fleece going out, conscious all the while of his mind being drained of images, going blank, totally white, like the room in which he lay.

See this boy, huddled inside a cave of ice which, when viewed from above, together with the passage to the outside, looks not unlike the womb and the birth canal. And I ask you: is this the Jonas Wergeland whom so many people feel they know; on whom a whole host of people have aired their views with such certainty? Know, at any rate, that this picture, these crystals of ice, are a prism, a magnifying glass, as good an instrument as any other through which to examine Jonas Wergeland’s life.

And then? What happens next? Well, as always, our hero is saved by his best friend. When Jonas’s mother began to suspect that something was wrong her first instinct was to go to Nefertiti. The latter pulled her cloth cap well down over her ears, immediately understanding the gravity of the situation. Jonas was not the sort to spend ages playing outside in wintertime. They instigated a search, called the neighbours, looked in the cellars, combed the area up around Eigiltomta, calling his name, hunted as far down as the shops on Trondheimsveien. By this time his mother was really worried, she was convinced that someone had abducted him, a six-year-old without an ounce of sense. Everybody joined in the hunt, even Veronika. Veronika, that astonishing child, searching with every semblance of zeal and earnestness. It was growing dark. Even Nefertiti, who was never afraid, was worried now, so desperate that she ran up to the gamekeeper’s lodge on the other side of Bergensveien to borrow Colonel Eriksen.

Colonel Eriksen was a grey elkhound. He was actually called something boring, like Rocky or Rover, but Nefertiti had renamed him on the day when, by the most fantastic stroke of luck, he had almost bitten the balls of a vicious Rottweiler from further down Bergensveien that used to terrorize all the local kids, lunging menacingly on its chain and barking as fiendishly as the Fenris wolf. Colonel Eriksen, in case anyone is wondering, was the commander of Oscarsborg fortress out in Oslo fjord at the time of the sinking of the Blücher. Jonas and Nefertiti became particularly friendly with Colonel Eriksen and were occasionally allowed to take him for a walk or borrow him for expeditions up the river Alna.

It was one thing to lay low a monster of a dog, quite another to find Jonas Wergeland, a boy who hated snow and who was now, most improbably, shut up inside an airtight icebox. In addition to which, Colonel Eriksen was a very old dog; it was debatable whether he had any sense of smell left at all, but when Nefertiti let Colonel Eriksen sniff one of Jonas’s mittens — a trick she had picked up from a Lassie film on one of her many visits to Grorud cinema with Jonas — the old dog seemed to come to life and started straining at his leash as if he were a champion tracker dog and not an ancient hound long since ready for the happy hunting grounds. What a cliff-hanger; worthy of any B-movie at the Grorud flicks: Jonas, all but buried alive under the ice with time most definitely not on his side, and Colonel Eriksen, dashing with amazing purposefulness across the flagpole green, nose to the snow, dragging Nefertiti behind him as if he had caught the scent of the phantom elk itself. Not until Colonel Eriksen, growing more and more frantic with excitement, had led Nefertiti to the slope beyond the green did the truth dawn on her, even though she would never have believed that Jonas would dare to go inside the sagging cave.

After ascertaining that the snowball had frozen solid across the entrance, Nefertiti left Colonel Eriksen making a heroic, but vain, attempt to dig his way through the ice with his blunt, old claws and went for help. After some backbreaking and pretty frantic digging the rescue party managed to pull Jonas out, in the nick of time as they say, just as he was about to fall into a deep slumber induced by the delicious warmth that was spreading throughout his body: in other words, before the cold turned him to ice. From then on, Jonas always imagined Hell to be like that ice-cave, and though he did not know it, on this score his thoughts more or less coincided with those of a number of authorities, including the great Dante himself who, in The Divine Comedy, makes the surprising assertion that Hell does not consist of fire. The nethermost circle in his inferno is of ice.

Veronika’s reaction was that of most children. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she said and put on a display of such heartbroken and contrite sobbing that no one could be angry with her, least of all Sir William, who comforted his daughter in a manner that might have led one to suspect that he was sorry her plan had failed.

Jonas had been rescued, but the cold never lost its grip on him. ‘Below the waist I’m cold as ice,’ he would later say as a joke. So, to return to where we started: for the rest of his life he would be searching for warmth. And for Jonas Wergeland, there was nothing to match the warmth certain women transmitted to him when making love. So what he was looking for in a woman was, in fact, warmth: quite literally a fire at which to warm himself. Jonas Wergeland was chilled to the bone, and so he collected glowing coals, and like a member of some primeval civilization he never forgot that tending these coals and carrying them with one was the most important thing of all.