The Seducer

Georgica

One should not judge Jonas Wergeland too harshly for wanting all of his relationships, and indeed life in general at that time, to be like one big opera, full of drama and pathos and grandiose exaggeration all rounded off by a violent death to the singing of a long aria. So wisely is life ordered, however, that by the time he and Margrete were living together this had long been forgotten; nothing could have been more remote from life with Margrete than drama and pathos.

So what did life with Margrete consist of? Of baking bread, for one thing. Apart from watching his small daughter when she was sleeping or playing, nothing filled Jonas with greater contentment — a heavy warm feeling of well-being tinged with a sense of something eternal — than to watch Margrete baking bread.

Like now.

It is evening, spring, and still light outside. On the windowsill is an egg cup with some coltsfoot which in some strange way shed a yellow glow over the whole kitchen as if all the light has to pass through this point before spreading out into the room. Margrete is standing at the kitchen bench, baking; Jonas sits in a chair at the rough-hewn kitchen table just watching, watching his wife baking, in a pair of faded jeans and a dark-blue woollen sweater, barefoot, as if baking were a holiday of sorts, a pleasure similar to that of walking barefoot in the sand. Margrete has no time for bought bread; there’s nothing worse, she says, tastes like sawdust. This makes Jonas laugh, but Margrete is serious: rotten bread makes for a rotten life, she says, so Jonas follows her with his eyes as she dabs at the water in the fireproof dish on the stove as if she had an in-built thermometer in her finger, then she crumbles the yeast into the liquid — never use dried yeast! she says — while Jonas sits there chuckling, closely following her every move, seeing how she prefers to blend the yeast liquid with a little wooden spoon, an ancient implement, wood is so gentle on the ingredients, she says, and metal gives the bread an aftertaste. Jonas sits in the kitchen watching his wife as she adds a pinch of salt, working on instinct, always this, working on instinct, a little sugar too, as it happens. Jonas drinks in the sight of Margrete standing there barefoot, in a baggy dark-blue sweater, sleeves rolled up, pounding dried herbs from her own garden to a powder in an old mortar, no herb is quite as wonderful as basil, she says, sprinkling it over the yeast mixture before pouring in coarse-ground wholemeal flour, then wheat germ, about so much, there it is again: ‘about so much’; he marvels at Margrete, seeing her sprinkling sunflower seeds into the bowl, one, no two, handfuls; adding linseeds that she has soaked in water beforehand so that they will swell and not steal moisture from the dough, oh, right, Jonas will try to remember that, sitting on a chair in a kitchen tinged yellow by a bunch of coltsfoot in a little egg cup, observing Margrete, observing, not least, her actions because, as Margrete is always saying: bread is culture, bread is the very keynote of a culture, she said, and never tired of telling him about other peoples, how they ground the grain, how they danced while the bread was baking. Jonas watches Margrete bustling about, barefoot, happy, watches as she demonstrates the most underrated aspect of the art of baking: the knack for dough. It was a mystery to him. No matter how carefully Jonas weighed and measured he never got it right or, at least, you got bread, but it was nowhere near as good as Margrete’s. Margrete simply had the knack, and so Jonas sits there watching, trying to wrench the secret from her, how she does it, as if she were an alchemist. In fact he not only watches her, he marvels at her, savours the sight of her sifting the flour, because you should always sift the flour, even if it says on the pack that it’s pre-sifted, to give the flour air, she always said; and Jonas likes the fact that she says the same thing every time, as if she does not think he will ever remember it because there is no way of proving it, it is just something she believes, has discovered for herself; Jonas likes to see the way she measures the flour out roughly, judging by eye as if it were a way of life, ‘roughly’, and how she dusts off the flour by clapping her hands over the sink as though applauding herself or the privilege of being able to bake one’s own bread.

Every individual has their own story, and Margrete is no exception. They had been on a motoring holiday in Norway — Margrete, Jonas and Kristin. Kristin was just a baby at the time. And apropos Kristin, I ought perhaps to point out that I have deliberately excluded her from this account. I merely wish to make it known that Jonas Wergeland does have a child. Not everyone knows that.

They were driving along the side of a fjord somewhere in western Norway, surrounded by scenery that never ceased to amaze Jonas, a landscape that filled him with a constant urge to pinch himself to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming. They were on their way to catch a ferry and they had plenty of time, Margrete liked to have plenty of time, especially in this case, because it was the last ferry of the day. They had stopped at a so-called home bakery by the roadside in one of those little hamlets, all of which look alike. It was on the way to catch that last ferry of the day, half an hour later, that Margrete, who was driving, asked Jonas to give her a bit of bread because she was hungry. So Jonas took the loaf of bread, a perfectly ordinary loaf of bread, or so it seemed, in a white paper bag and broke a corner off the end. No sooner had Margrete taken a bite and swallowed it than she slammed on the brakes, did what amounted to an emergency stop, making Jonas think that she must have spotted a sheep that he had not noticed, but there was no sheep on the road; she then executed a rather hazardous U-turn, tyres screeching, and proceeded to drive back the way they had come. But they’d never catch the ferry now, Jonas protested, looking at his watch. Who cares? Margrete had retorted, she simply had to talk to the person, the genius, who had baked that bread. Which is how they came to drive back to that small hamlet on the banks of a fjord in western Norway, where Margrete actually succeeded in tracking down the baker and having a long and animated conversation with him about bread, not least about what constituted the real hallmark of good bread, a point on which they were so perfectly in agreement that they all but hugged one another: you felt it in your stomach the next day, in the form of a lovely warm feeling. Bread ought to leave you with a sense of physical well-being, and it should go on feeling good, not just the day after, but the day after that and the day after that again, in fact strictly speaking it ought to get better and better. So of course they had to sample several different varieties of bread, while Margrete swapped recipes with the baker, or not so much recipes as ideas about bread, about wood-burning stoves and storing in tiner, the old-style bentwood boxes, and naturally they had to stay the night in that little hamlet, nestling amid scenery that took your breath away, as the baker’s guests; everyone made a great fuss of them, and they had had such a lovely time because, as the baker was at pains to point out, there’s nothing quite like good bread for helping a conversation along. Then he had gone off to spend the night baking, so the next morning they were able to drive off to the ferry not only with memories stocked with a fresh batch of stories but also a backseat packed so full of bread that there was hardly any room for Kristin. That was the closest one came to drama in Margrete Boeck’s life.

Margrete loved bread. For once I am going to succumb to the exaggeration inherent in the word ‘loved’ because it would be incorrect to say that Margrete liked bread, she loved bread; her whole life represented a quest for the perfect loaf of bread. She was forever experimenting or trying out recipes she had picked up, and whenever she and Jonas travelled abroad, they spent half their time sampling different sorts of bread. While others went in search of the Holy Grail, Margrete went in search of the Perfect Bread. She was constant and insistent in her belief that good bread was the very essence of life itself; simply eating good bread was half the battle. Jonas laughed at this, but sometimes, when he could not sleep, he would get up and have a slice of Margrete’s bread with wild raspberry jam and a glass of milk. More often than not he was asleep before his head touched the pillow.

So perhaps this is where it all begins, or ends, with this story: Jonas sitting on a chair in the kitchen, watching Margrete bake bread: mixing the dough with a wooden spoon, putting her whole body into it, a furrow of concern between her brows as if she knows that this is the crucial stage, so she sifts in a little more flour, making the dough smooth, feeling when the consistency is just right. Jonas sees how she feels it with her whole body, sees the rapturous expression on her face; she really works at it — ‘opera’, as it happens, can also mean ‘work’ — she dances as she works the dough, endowing the whole process with an erotic touch, while the smell of yeast, faintly acidic, fills the room; and Margrete mutters to herself, or to the dough, gives it one last turn before sprinkling some flour over it and leaving it to rise.

It is evening, spring, still light outside. On the windowsill sits an egg cup full of coltsfoot, staining the whole room with yellow. Margrete looks at him and laughs, why doesn’t he treat her to one of those fabulously absurd quotations of his, she asks, and to please her he quotes something from Friedrich Schleiermacher, from Über die Religion, from the end of the second part, in which Schleiermacher asserts that ideas are paramount, the greatest and most essential element of human nature, and indeed that religion as such, the belief in God, is reliant on the direction such ideas take, at which Margrete laughs, she is the only person to actually laugh at his quotations, as if she could see right through him, his bluff with the twenty-odd quotations he had collected in his little red notebook, or regarded these ‘pearls of wisdom’, at best, as being self-evident. Nevertheless she comes over to him and strokes his cheek with a floury finger and gives him a hug, her dark-blue sweater is covered in spots of white and dusted with flour, like a dark sky full of nebulae — I am a universe, she was wont to say when he asked her why she sat quietly thinking, and she often sat quietly thinking, as if that were enough in itself, a colossal and precious deed, but now she is looking at the bowl on the worktop, because this is the most vital, the most exciting part of the whole process: the proving, whether the dough would rise, that was religion enough for Margrete, truly a test of the imagination, and she would jump with joy when it rose, there were few things she found more fascinating than the proving, those forces, organisms that saw to themselves once they had been set in motion, there was nothing you could do except stand humbly by and watch. There were times, odd occasions, when the dough did not rise, or when the bread somehow did not turn out well, although she could never figure out why. On such days, Margrete was all at sixes and sevens.

Sometimes they talked while the dough was rising, Margrete liked to talk about his work at NRK, kid him about it, ask him about people, intrigues at Broadcasting House, scandals, although she seldom watched television. She, on the other hand, said next to nothing about her own job as a consulting physician with the Oslo Health Board — not because her work was confidential but because she preferred to switch off from it when she came home. Or because there were other things she would rather talk about. Often she would tell Jonas little stories — the most marvellous flights of fancy — which he suspected had been plucked from books, that being Margrete’s favourite pastime: reading. Which is to say, she did not read, she laid herself open to the writing. Other times, Margrete might take a bath while the dough was rising, she had an Archimedean affinity for bathtubs. If there was one thing that Jonas admired, and envied, in his wife it was her sense for what are known as ‘the little things in life’. Margrete possessed a unique awareness of, and took a singular delight in, the things with which she surrounded herself: everything from an arrangement of flowers in a vase on the table in the living room to the toilet paper in the bathroom. ‘You only have to look at something for long enough for it to become interesting,’ she would say. And she had an even more exceptional gift for turning the daily round into a work of art; an expression such as ‘the tedium of everyday life’ was totally alien to her. To Margrete, every occurrence, even those that were repeated again and again, was a small miracle, a ceremony out of which she squeezed every drop of goodness. The way Jonas saw it, Margrete did for day-to-day life what Einstein had done for mass; she discovered, or disclosed, its energy. Those things which to others were blind routine, were for Margrete a whole succession of sensations: waking up, stretching, sniffing bodily odours, getting washed. Cutting her nails was a ritual in itself, a sort of minor engineering project. Getting dressed was like a ballet, not of pleasure but of concentration, as if her mind was constantly on the job, giving it great thought. After breakfast she would tune in to, take delight in, the workings of her bowels. Margrete could even turn a trip into town on the subway into an eye-opening experience. She particularly enjoyed the gardens on the aboveground stretch between Risløkka and Økern, the way they changed with the seasons.

But more often than not they went through to the bedroom and made love. There was nothing quite like making love while the dough rose. Margrete pulled off jeans and a floury sweater and made love to him in a way she only did when she was baking bread, with firm hands and a tense expectancy, taking a long time over it — as long as it takes for a batch of dough to rise.

Afterwards, Margrete would go back to the kitchen and remove the tea towel from the bowl, proudly, as if unveiling a monument, because the dough had risen, and Jonas would sit back down on his chair and watch how she kneaded the dough, passionately almost, as if she were still making love, or touched by their lovemaking, before dividing it into portions, placing each one in an old baking tin brushed with olive oil to give the bread a nice crust. Jonas would sit and watch her, say something to her, usually something banal, something hopelessly, ineptly banal, that almost always expressed how much he loved her and which always caused her to send him a long, lingering look, to walk over to him, barefoot, pensively, while the loaves rested again. Then she would brush them with egg and put them in the oven. And he would not get up but would go on sitting there while the scent of Margrete’s bread filled the kitchen and it grew dark outside, slowly, as it does when Norway is at its best.

Jonas especially liked to watch Margrete taking the finished loaves out of the baking tins and tapping them as if she were listening for just the right note. He took even greater enjoyment in seeing how happy, how truly happy she was when the bread was acceptable, although as far as she was concerned it could never be absolutely perfect. Occasionally he sat on, gazing at the loaves ranged on their rack, the sheen of the crust, how they almost seemed to glow, and he could not rid himself of the thought that this might be the Golden Fleece for which he had always been searching, that it might be that simple, that close at hand. In any case, the bread was precious to Margrete. She gave away loaves as Christmas presents, wrapped in tea towels and tied up with ribbon.

It is evening, spring, soon it will be dark outside. Kristin is asleep in her room. Jonas is already looking forward to breakfast, to Margrete’s bread. To Jonas, this is happy married life: looking forward to breakfast. Jonas experienced many great and exciting things in his life, and yet given the choice, there was nothing to match breakfast with Margrete, her bread with wild raspberry jam and a glass of milk.