The Seducer

A First Reader

Now where was I? Ah yes, I was about to tell you how Jonas Wergeland caught, or rather, was held spellbound, by the sight of his parents in the act. In actual fact, however, it all started some months earlier, on the day on which Nefertiti hinted to Jonas that the piece of furniture which he referred to simply as ‘the bookcase’ actually contained treasures beyond price in more ways than one.

Jonas and Nefertiti were stretched out on the floor, playing and listening to Duke Ellington, ‘Me and You’ and ‘So Far, So Good’ and ‘At a Dixie Roadside Diner’ and Jimmy Blanton’s swinging bass and, above all else, Ivie Anderson’s lazy croon; Jonas thought he might be a little bit in love with Ivie Anderson who, according to Nefertiti, had had to give up singing because she was asthmatic and who had also happened to play a mean game of poker. Jonas and Nefertiti were playing with those plastic cowboy and Indian figures that had just come on to the market, with revolvers which, wonder of wonders, could be pulled out of holsters, and bows and arrows that could be detached from the hands. Nefertiti was always an Indian, she particularly liked showing Jonas how the Indians had attacked General Custer at the battle of Little Big Horn, occasionally telling him something about Red Indian customs and rituals, about their sand paintings for instance. Jonas was just in the act of chasing a couple of Indians all the way into the bookcase when Nefertiti’s eyes suddenly widened and she took a book from the shelf. She blew the dust off it as if it were smoke from a revolver, opened it and nodded: ‘This is very valuable,’ she said. Jonas thought she was kidding. It was just an old book, nothing special about it. Nefertiti pulled out another one and said the same thing. This went on for some time.

At this point I ought perhaps to say something about Jonas’s family’s attitude to books. His parents did not read at all. Rakel had merely ploughed her way through the edition of the Arabian Nights given to her by Aunt Laura, and Daniel and Jonas read, or flicked through, nothing but comics. Their living room had been bare of bookshelves until the day when some boxes, quite a lot of them in fact, turned up from the western part of the country. Somebody in his mother’s family had died, some fairly distant and childless relative; some other, even more distant, relative had divided up the estate and by sheer chance — that much I can divulge — the boxes of books were sent to Åse Hansen. This came as a complete surprise to Jonas’s mother; nonetheless, she went out and bought some cheap bookcases and placed the books on them, mainly to brighten up the walls, a bit like wallpaper.

‘Wow! This one ought to be locked up in a safe.’ Nefertiti’s eye were just about popping out of her head. Jonas looked on, mystified, as she moved the books around, arranging those she had pulled off the shelves in order, a couple of dozen volumes ranged in a row, leather spines embossed with faded gilt lettering. ‘Jonas, these books are actually worth a fortune. Take good care of them.’ She eyed him gravely as if this were a matter of a last will and testament, something she was bequeathing to him. As, of course, it was, although Jonas did not know it then. Nefertiti kept her eyes fixed on him until she was sure that her words had sunk in. Then they went on with their game. And Jonas did remember, although it would be many years before he acted more systematically on this tip.

When they were finished playing, and the cowboys and Indians had all been thrown together higgledy-piggledy in a cardboard box, a kind of impartial mass grave, Nefertiti took another book from a shelf higher up. ‘You should take a look at this,’ she said. ‘It’s valuable, too, albeit it in another way.’

Jonas opened the book and sounded out a few sentences in what seemed to be a funny sort of Norwegian: ‘In the beginning, the Lord of Beings created men and women, and in the form of commandments in 100,000 chapters laid down rules for regulating their existence with regard to Dharma, Artha and Kama.’ Was this old Norwegian, Jonas wanted to know. Nefertiti explained that it was Danish. Jonas turned to the title page: ‘Ka-ma Sut-ra,’ he read. ‘It sounds a bit like a magic spell,’ Jonas said. Nefertiti nodded. And without batting those long lashes once she gave him a brief run-down of the book’s seven parts, recommending the second part in particular to Jonas as being not only diverting but also most informative. Jonas turned to the appropriate page, but when he saw that it was entitled ‘On Sexual Union’ he gave a start and made as if to put the book down. Nefertiti laughed at him and told him that it could be read in several ways; you could read it as a list of all the ways in which a man and a woman could have a nice time together, but you could also read it as transcriptions of all the many paths leading to the truth.

Over the next few days Jonas dipped into the book, and even though it was written in a rather dry vein, the sentences really set his imagination in ferment. ‘On Biting’ — what was that? ‘Leaf of a blue lotus’ — sounded a bit funny. ‘When the woman places one of her legs on her lover’s shoulder and stretches the other out and then places the latter on his shoulder and stretches out the other and continues to do so alternately, it is called the “splitting of the bamboo”.’ Mind-boggling. You might say that Vatsyayana, and not Thorbjørn Egner, was the author of Jonas’s first reader. If the truth be told, the Kama Sutra was one of the few books that Jonas read from cover to cover, something which was bound to leave its mark. For a start his teacher had to give him a telling-off for writing certain words in the Danish way — kvinder instead of kvinner for ‘women’, for example.

A lot of strange things have been said about Jonas Wergeland, but there is one thing that no one can take from him; even if he did not understand much of it, his early encounter with the Kama Sutra left him with a very different attitude to sex from most men. What he had grasped — and this was, in essence, the most important lesson — was that sex was a solemn undertaking, something important, something to be contemplated with the greatest respect. Added to which, it was an inexhaustible subject, encapsulated in a work consisting of ‘100,000 chapters’. The art of love was, in other words, all embracing. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was more to copulation than the vulgar simplicity of ‘pussy and prick/together stick’; copulation was also about ‘the art of making beds and spreading out cushions and covers for reclining’, ‘playing on musical glasses filled with water’, ‘quickness of hand or manual skill’ and, not least, the ‘solution of riddles, enigmas, covert speeches, verbal puzzles and enigmatic questions’. This last fitted with what Nefertiti had been getting at, and thanks to her Jonas would always associate sex with the search for truth. This being the case, it seemed only reasonable that the physical act of love should be difficult, calling, quite frankly, for a certain virtuosity. More than once, after the description of a sexual position, Jonas came upon the words: ‘This position is learnt by practice only.’ Jonas understood that in order to become a good lover you had to train; that when you came right down to it, it must be as hard as qualifying for the Olympic Games.

To Jonas, the Danish in which his edition of the Kama Sutra was written was like a very formal, slightly archaic Norwegian and for him, later in life, this was to remain the language of lovemaking. He always felt that there was something exalted and dignified about the act of love, with all those prepositive possessive pronouns and indefinite articles. Only weeks after those first reading sessions he noticed that in his head he had stopped using the standard word ‘twat’. When it came to sexual terminology Jonas Wergeland preferred the Sanskrit.

Now in passing it ought to be said that the attitude of small boys towards that endlessly fascinating part of a woman’s anatomy lying between her legs is nothing if not complex. One could, with some justification, bemoan the fact that men seem incapable of channelling the inventiveness and playful metaphorizing of their boyhoods into other areas later in life. Among Jonas’s chums, comparisons — or the attempt to establish a sort of Kretschmer’s typology of vaginas — were more often than not drawn from the dinner table or the animal kingdom as if the female genitals were a cross between a cold buffet and a zoo, or as if they could not make up their minds what was more thrilling: looking or tasting. If, for example, a girl was considered to be frigid — although, of course, it was always a case of pure guesswork, not to say wishful thinking — she would be said to have a ‘chicken twat’ as though all the boys had first-hand experience of what it felt like to stick their little peckers inside one of the ostensibly cold pale chickens in the window of Grorud Fish and Game. ‘Orange twat’ was the term given to the juicy ones or, more accurately, those girls who were imagined to be so; the treacherous types, the VD carriers, were ‘shark twats’; dry sticks were ‘juniper twats’; if they had their period they were ‘strawberry twats’, and the tight-arsed, impervious sort were ‘nut twats’. The ideal was what they called a ‘lamb twat’ since almost all of them had been across to Ammerud meadows and experienced the strange and delightful sensation of having a lamb suck their fingers — I shall resist the temptation to make any comment on this, but if anyone feels inclined to laugh at these attempts to encapsulate the secrets of the female body in words, might I remind you that even such a world-class writer as Mallarmé was not above such a line of thought, comparing as he did a vagina to ‘a pale-pink shell’ as if it were an ornament to be displayed on a shelf the way Jonas’s grandfather had done. In any event, it ought to be something of a challenge, I almost said in the name of women’s liberation, to come up with something new to say on this topic, something more original, something more akin to the description of the vulva given in the ancient scriptures — ‘like the print of a gazelle’s hoof in the desert sand’ — and, above all else, something more dignified. I might add that as a student Jonas himself made the following rather high-flown but nonetheless creditable attempt: ‘Her sex was as unexplored and impenetrable as a distant spiral galaxy.’

In other words, while the other boys were going on about ‘muffins’ and ‘beavers’, Jonas opted for the more formal ‘yoni’: or rather, not so much formal as detached. Jonas thought in terms of elephant yonis, mare yonis and gazelle yonis. To some extent, from boyhood onwards, these outlandish terms elevated the sexual act onto a metaphysical and, not least, epistemological plane, if I may be allowed to use such lofty words, while at the same time vouchsafing him a glimpse of other, alternative, ways of comprehending reality — something which I, for obvious reasons, set great store by. If, later in life, Jonas was nonetheless pressurized into coming up with another, less obscure metaphor, he would only have one word for a vulva, quite simply because that was how he saw them all: as a thinking cap. All of the women who guided Jonas inside themselves had some influence on his way of thinking and in order to illustrate how they did so, I will now tell you the story of his second encounter with Nina G.