The Seducer

The Kama Sutra in Norwegian

I have not forgotten what I set out to tell you, since all of this leads us up to, or back to, the body, an awareness of the body: Jonas Wergeland, the boy Jonas, standing by the chink in the door watching his naked parents rolling about on the rug, acting out that drama which certain psychologists, with as great a knack for exaggeration as the opera, have called ‘the primal scene’. And on one point at least the psychologists have been proved right; Jonas would never forget it.

For ages he stood there, watching his parents, not knowing that this sight in itself was astonishing enough: a couple making the moment last, taking their time to extract every ounce of pleasure from making love. Standing in the dark in the hallway, he felt the same spontaneous, awestruck admiration as he did when faced with one of Uncle Lauritz’s beautiful Caravelles, and as he watched he was struck by a two-way perception. On the one hand he saw how the familiar living room was altered by the act of love being performed on the rug; how the hessian wallpaper, the Negro lady on the wall — that piece of high kitsch — the new corner sofa, the bookshelf full of books that no one read, the cuckoo clock that was always an hour slow, how all of this tipped over into another dimension; were it not such a misleading word I would go so far as to say it was sanctified. Even something as dubious as the Negro lady on the wall acquired something of the air of an icon.

On the other hand, Jonas perceived this scene with his mother and father as a secularizing of sexuality, because simply by lying there naked on the rug, between the two chairs in which they usually sat and talked, totally absorbed in a long luscious screw — and transmitting, in the process, a highly graphic odour to Jonas’s nostrils — his parents brought all of the abstract and stiff and stylized prose Jonas had read in his Danish edition of the Kama Sutra, into everyday life, into his own living room, presenting it as a concrete, demystified possibility. Jonas watched his mother and father to some extent transplanting the teachings of the Kama Sutra into Norwegian soil.

Jonas tried to keep track of what was going on, concentrating not so much on their genitals as on the playful, constantly shifting positions of their bodies, and during the time he stood there, he was quite certain that he saw illustrated such hitherto mysterious phenomena as ‘the Coral and the Gemstone’, ‘the Bull’s Blow’ and ‘Sparrow Sport’, while his parents demonstrated, at least so he thought, such variations as the twining position, ‘the Crab’s position’ and ‘the congress of a Cow’. At one point he also saw his mother do something to his father which, going by the look of ecstasy on his father’s face, Jonas guessed must be the position known as ‘Tongs’, in which his mother sat on top of him and spun round tentatively like a wheel, something which did not fail to impress Jonas, since this was described as being the ‘absolute ultimate’, a position that could only be mastered by long practice, a sort of sexual ‘C’ element. All in all, this experience reinforced a feeling that Jonas had always entertained for his mother and father: respect.

There was one detail above all else which brought home to Jonas just what an uncommonly pleasurable experience he was witnessing. His mother was not wearing her usual wry smile. She lay with her eyes closed, her lips curling into a quite different smile, an ardent, deeply contented smile.

Which reminds me that I have not told you the story of why Jonas’s mother always had a wry little smile on her face as if she knew something that no one else knew. Again this has to do with speed-skating, with one of the most traumatic incidents in the whole of Norwegian skating history as a matter of fact. It occurred during the European championships at Bislett stadium in the fifties. Haakon Hansen, who happened to be a keen skating enthusiast, had arranged a babysitter for Rakel so that Åse, who had never attended a speed-skating tournament, could come with him. It was a Sunday in late January, the weather more like autumn than winter. Haakon Hansen was in his element, providing explanations and an enthusiastic commentary all the way through the 1500 metres, while Åse grew more and more bored, finding it hard to understand how her husband and all the other spectators could become so carried away, particularly seeing that the Norwegian skater Hjalmar, known to all Norway as Hjallis, or the ‘Happy King’ because of his lovely smile, dominated the whole proceedings so completely and was so devastatingly far ahead of the field overall that the final race, the 10,000 metres was anything but exciting. Åse Hansen, Jonas’s mother, was both cold and bored to death, standing beside her husband right next to the track, down by the southern curve, watching Hjallis skimming past, lap after lap, already pointedly looking for the Dutchman Wim van der Voort. To relieve the boredom slightly she nibbled at a bar of Freia milk chocolate which she had bought during the interval before the 10,000 metres, and it was during the seventeenth lap of this by now thoroughly unexciting 10,000-metre race, with the crowd, Haakon Hansen included, nonetheless cheering and yelling as if possessed, as she popped the last square of chocolate into her mouth, that the wind caught the silver paper and blew it out onto the track. Åse Hansen began to take an unexpected interest in this piece of silver paper of which no one else had taken any note and which lay, all but invisible, on the ice. Hjallis was coming down the changeover straight, when she noticed with growing excitement how a gust of wind caught the nigh-on invisible slip of silver paper and swept it low across the ice to land at the end of the inner curve just as Hjallis turned into it. Åse Hansen suddenly conceived an enormous interest in speed skating. She held her breath as Hjallis powered round the bend in the style for which he was so well known. Then it happened: a disaster, in Norwegian eyes, of earthquake proportions which made the front-page headlines in all the newspapers the next day; Hjallis, the national hero, fell. Hjallis’s right skate came down smack-dab on the silver paper, the blade met no resistance, his foot went flying backwards, and Hjallis lost his balance, fell headlong and went flying into a pole, damaging one skate in the process. The Happy King, not smiling now, got up and tried to go on, but it was no use, the skate was a write-off. He had to give up. The crowd, and not least Haakon Hansen, stared in disbelief, stunned, close to tears if the truth be told. Åse Hansen, too, was battling with her emotions, desperately trying not to laugh.

A photographer from the daily newspaper Dagbladet, Johan Brun, took the blame. At the selfsame moment that Hjallis’s skate came down onto the silver paper he had taken a picture, using two flashes, one of which happened to be fixed to a bar set close to the bend. Even Hjallis was sure that it must have been the flashes that had blinded him and caused him to lose his balance. As most Norwegians know, this has acquired the status of an official explanation. Only one person in Norway knows the real reason for Hjallis’s tumble, and she never told a soul, not even Jonas, although he would have set great store by this story, as an adult at any rate, proving as it does that we are usually only ever given one version of events, and hence only ever perceive one of many possible causes.

All ended well. Hjallis was allowed to skate the distance again and won his laurel wreath, and not only that: he also enhanced his mystical status by winning the 10,000 metres despite having to do seventeen laps more than anyone else. And since no harm had been done, Åse Hansen could go on laughing with a good conscience. She laughed at Hjallis being brought down by a bar of Freia milk chocolate, which thus bore out its advertising slogan: ‘None better, none close’. Åse Hansen laughed a lot over Hjallis and the silver paper in the months that followed, so much so that the laughter never really left her, it hung on in the form of a permanent crooked smile: a sign, as I say, that she knew something no one else knew.

As you will no doubt gather, speed-skating played an important part in the life of Jonas’s family, although I would say that this was pretty typical, considering the enormous interest in — nay, unbridled passion for — speed-skating in which the entire nation indulged during Jonas Wergeland’s formative years; an interest which, to be honest, I find difficult to explain, unless it has something to do with the alchemy generated between radio and speed-skating or with the huckster’s mentality that led people to sit there, noting down every lap time as though these figures formed part of some sort of national budget. Although it might also have had something to do with the Norwegian national character and its weakness for battling with the ice, that polar element: if, that is, it did not simply derive from a need to comfort themselves, to shine at something; to be the best, even if only an infinitesimal proportion of the human race could in any way relate to what is, in many ways, a bizarre sport.

After long consideration, I believe I have come up with an answer that is closer to the truth. Proper investigation reveals that Norway’s heyday ties in to some extent with the golden age of Det Norske Arbeiderparti — the Norwegian Labour Party — and likewise, the waning interest in skating more or less coincided with the decline of that same Labour Party. This also provides a key to the understanding of the baffling infatuation with speed-skating that manifested itself in Norway for so many years; nothing like it was ever experienced anywhere else, not even in the Netherlands: speed-skating is, quite simply, the religion of the Norwegian social democrats: the closest this sturdy ideology comes to mysticism. All of this quite unconsciously, of course. Just as Jonas was inexplicably attracted to the ball bearing he kept on top of his chest of drawers, so the Norwegian people were fascinated by the circle which the skating arena represented, as if it were a kind of hub in the wheel of society; as long as Norway was doing well in the skating, that gliding whirl around the ice, they knew the ball bearings of social democracy were running smoothly. This applied most of all to the 10,000 metres, in which two skaters sped round and round on the ice, one often half a lap behind the other. The Norwegian Labour Party, Det Norske Arbeiderparti, is best known by its abbreviation, DNA, and what the two skaters in the 10,000 metres are actually doing, as they skate lap after lap, is to create their own, continuous circles which, particularly when the crowd attempts to lift them with its roar, could be regarded as spirals, so that together the two skaters — even if they are not travelling in opposite directions — in fact form a double helix, the very structure of the DNA molecule: symbol of life itself. And what these people in all those thousands of Norwegian homes did, in noting down so conscientiously, one might almost say furtively, every single lap time, even in races that were of no real interest, was actually to cast a sort of spell to safeguard the good solid Norwegian way of life; it was a ritual, perhaps even a prayer, intended to prevent the idyllic existence which social democracy represented, that smile, from being taken from them. If anyone should doubt this, I would ask you to look at what happened to the DNA — Det Norske Arbeiderparti, that is — in Norway once so many Norwegians stopped keeping a note of speed-skating lap times.

I feel, therefore, that I can justify these little homilies on speed-skating, and there is a clear link, at any rate, between Jonas’s mother’s story, of Hjallis and his fall, and the central thread that runs through Jonas Wergeland’s own life: the endeavour to find the back door to well-known phenomena.

That was also how Jonas felt back then, standing in the hallway, the lone spectator to his parents’ lovemaking. At the sight of two ordinary people, an organist with Grorud Church and a fitter with Grorud Ironmongery, who also happened to be his father and mother, making love with all their hearts, voluptuously, passionately, on the rug, a mystery was brought down to earth. Before his very eyes, Jonas saw his parents translating into Norwegian exotic wonders that he had only read about in an Indian book; saw how they democratized, so to speak, something he had thought was unattainable, making it available to everyone. But at the same time he noticed how that mundane living room was pervaded by an exalted divine air so that for a moment his mother and father appeared to be weightless, floating, out of time, out of place, in space — as Gagarin had done the year before.

Although he could not put this perception into words, Jonas realized how fortunate he was to have stumbled, by sheer luck, upon another angle on the one subject they — the boys, that is — never tired of discussing: an angle that no one else had discovered. As he stood there in the dark, in the hallway, at the chink in the living-room door, things that till then had amounted to no more than speculative rumours or prurient, and somewhat macabre, fantasies suddenly tipped over into what could be described as eroticism: something that was at one and the same time transcendental and utterly banal. Jonas stood there watching, witnessing a warm, wonderful, life-affirming drama. He could see how good it was, how deeply they were enjoying it — and I ought perhaps to add that on that particular evening Åse and Haakon Hansen truly were filled with a kind of lustful joy. The Bay of Pigs crisis had just been resolved, and, like so many other people in the West, they felt that life had given them another chance. Jonas stood by the chink in the door, watching his parents making love, and he was neither ashamed nor afraid — he was proud. Because his mother and father were showing him, all unwittingly, that sexual intercourse must be one of the most marvellous things a human being can experience on this Earth.

From that day, or that evening, onwards, Jonas could not wait to grow up. He stood in the hallway where, next to the portrait of himself in forty-eight different poses, hung a framed photograph of him sitting on his grandfather’s lap; his grandfather peering at the camera as if he were looking for the story behind all stories. Standing at the chink in the doorway, Jonas was in no doubt: this, what he was looking at there, right in front of him, told without words, had to be the greatest story of them all.

And now here you are, in another living room, your own living room, and you are looking at another body, this one too on the floor, but not alive, you think, and that’s another story, just as great, you think, this too a hub, you think, and you stand there naked, you feel naked, and you feel chilled to the bone, as if the cold were creeping in on you from all sides, as if the whole room were slowly being turned into a snow cave, to a hell, you think.

You are so cold, and you think to yourself that if you can just think fast enough, think up enough chunks of your life and think them together at a quick enough tempo, then you would be warm again, everything would fit, become one, like the spokes on a wheel when the wheel is spinning fast, you think, and you look at the picture of Buddha, and you look at Margrete, on the floor, how lovely she is, even now, in death, why couldn’t you wait until I returned home before you baked that bread, you say, in a voice that is way too loud, almost a scream, and you look at her, a dead woman, on a polar-bear skin, and again your thoughts are distracted by this ridiculous bearskin, and you try to remember where it came from, but you give up, either that or you have the idea that it goes along with the cold in the room, and you are chilled to the bone, and you are thinking as fast as you can, and you see, try to take it all in, the whole scene, the coltsfoot in the egg cup, the hi-fi unit, silent once more, the body, the polar-bear skin, but it is too difficult, too unreal, so unreal that it becomes real, a ground-breaking opera, you think, a final scene worthy of a Don Giovanni, you think, so sink down onto your knees and sing, because there is no other possible response to this, you think, wrap yourself in the polar-bear skin and sing, as Kirsten Flagstad did on Greenland, sing, you think, fit to crack the ice.

You sit, or sink, down onto the piano stool, with your back to the sheet music; you lean your elbows on the keys and hear the harmonies this produces, disharmonious, or maybe they are harmonious, you think, if you could just get far enough away, to the top of Mount Sinai, for example; heard from the top of Mount Sinai these two clusters of notes would sound charming, you think, and as if to put this to the test, to prove it, you bring your elbows down once again, and again, and again, until it hurts and you get to your feet and catch sight of the murder weapon, as if only now, this second, do you realize how Margrete died, as if right up to this moment you had had the idea that she had been beaten to death by a polar bear, or strangled, or hit over the head with a blunt instrument, or stabbed with a knife at least, since any of these would be easier to understand than the murder weapon you are now looking at, so totally inconceivable, you think, so utterly and absolutely senseless, you think.

Although you could not say why, you walk through to the office, you just have to get away for a moment, as if a change of scene will alter everything, shake you out of this crazy vertigo, so you walk, naked, into the office that you share, shared, with Margrete, and there you stand and look round about you, with no clear idea of what you are looking at, until you recognize yet another television set, and a video recorder, two video recorders, piles and piles of cassettes, and along one wall you see a bookcase full of books, obscure books, you think, Margrete’s books, you think, books on medicine, a whole lot of books on skin diseases, on venereal diseases, you think, all sorts of information about venereal diseases, things beyond your ken, far beyond, miles and miles beyond the Kama Sutra, you think, but which were a part of everyday life for Margrete, things you never actually asked her about, or at least not enough about, and it occurs to you that if nothing else you did have one thing in common, you were both researchers, in different fields to be sure, you think, but researchers nonetheless, you think, and you look at the wall, as if to confirm this fact; you look at the huge map that hangs there, not depicting the Earth, other people might have a map of the world on their wall, but you, Jonas Wergeland, the Duke, tennis star, the conscience of Antarctis, you have a map of the planet Venus on the wall to remind you always to look for a new angle, a map that shows what we know so far of how Venus looks, a testimony to the scientific powers of mankind, you think, considering that the planet Venus is always hidden by a layer of cloud, like love, you think, except that radar soundings taken by space probes have made it possible to chart the surface of the planet, you think, and you walk over to it and read some of those names out loud: Atalanta Planitia you read, alongside a circular depression; Ishtar Terra you read, on the northern hemisphere, your eye moves on, you read, mutter names — Theia Mons, Rhea Mons, volcanoes, you think, repeating the names as if they constituted a mantra of sorts, as if you found a hypnotic comfort in this, in the thought that you too are a researcher, that that is what you really are, an expert in a field on which the large majority are totally in the dark, a scientist with a crystal prism in his head, you think.

And as if to reinforce this air of professionalism, you cross to the fax machine; you glance at the faxes that have come in, skim through them, and note that the last one was for Margrete, you can make nothing of what it says, and you do not recognize the name, of whoever sent it, a foreign name, you think, and you stand there with the fax in your hand, stand by the shelves lined with Margrete’s books, this universe of which you know so little, this, too, a planet covered by a permanent layer of cloud, you think, and suddenly it occurs to you how little you know about Margrete’s life, not only her working life, but her long childhood and years of study overseas, and you think about this, you spend a long time thinking about it, and you think about Margrete, dead, on a polar-bear skin, and you think that it could be one of the hundreds of people whom Margrete knows and you do not know, who, for reasons quite beyond your comprehension, has done this; after all, what do you know about all those years abroad, in places far from Norway, you think, all the cities in which she lived as the daughter of a Norwegian, and utterly objectionable, ambassador.