The Seducer

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

And so, as they were walking through the arcade behind the Cathedral, Axel Stranger asked whether any examples of the ‘music of the spheres’ had ever been written down.

‘Yes,’ one young man replied promptly, a young man who, for the sake of simplicity, I will call Thomas. ‘Beethoven’s string quartet, opus 131. The fourth movement especially. He leaves the earthly plane behind altogether there.’

‘You must be joking! Beethoven writes music as if his fingers were made of lead!’ came the swift response from a girl — Alva, to stick to Christian names. ‘Mozart, that’s who you should listen to. His string quarter in G-minor. You’ll never hear music more heavenly than that.”

‘Oh, come on, you don’t honestly believe that an utterly conventional little squirt like Mozart can be compared to a trailblazer like Beethoven.’ This remark from another girl, let us call her Trine — although I’m sure there are plenty of people, plenty of Norwegians, at any rate, who could make a guess at her surname.

‘That’s like comparing fireworks to a thunderstorm,’ said Axel, giving no indication of whose side he was on.

‘But you’re working from a totally false set of criteria,’ said Alva, wagging an admonitory finger at Trine, ‘why should it be any easier to compose clear, set melodies than impenetrable harmonies?’

Although no one had been leading the way, they were now walking down Skippergata, sending impassioned arguments for and against the two composers echoing around the tall old buildings and courtyards. The street was deserted, not surprisingly, since it was three o’clock in the morning. The Nomads were often wont to discuss music, and the Beethoven versus Mozart question cropped up so often that it might have been one of the key problems of existence.

But what did Jonas think? They had reached the corner of Tollbugata, which they automatically proceeded to walk up, and were just passing the old City tearooms, the lovely turn-of-the-century interior discernible through the windows, when Jonas saw fit to come out with one of the many quotations he carried in his head: ‘I believe our ideas about music are dependent on the extent, or rather: the limits, of our knowledge,’ he said. ‘Take a concept such as “confusion”, or the related term “order”. Now these are not, of course, properties in a material sense but merely things to which the mind that views or experiences them can relate. So one cannot rule out the possibility that someone, someday, might consider Mozart’s music to be confusing, ponderous and brooding, and Beethoven’s to be simple, clear and light.’

Both Alva and Trine sniggered, muttered something under their breath about ‘a load of waffle’ and ‘trust Jonas’, as they walked up the street past the solid walls of the lowering old Central Post Office.

Some people might laugh, and I will not deny that it does sound a bit over-the-top, almost to the point of parody: five young people strolling along an Oslo street in the middle of the night discussing Mozart and Beethoven as if the fate of the world depended on it. Nonetheless, I rather like this phase in Jonas Wergeland’s life, and I do not consider it in any way unreasonable that Jonas himself should have looked back on these years with a great deal of nostalgia.

They called themselves the Nomads. All five were students who had come to know one another at the University, despite being scattered around a wide variety of faculties. Their lowest common denominator was a pair of sturdy shoes with thick rubber soles, plus an inquiring mind far above the average.

At least one night a week they met up at a prearranged spot somewhere in Oslo and wandered this way and that. They had all discovered how productive it could be to carry on a discussion while roaming the city streets, at night at that, as if the combination of motion, night air and the backdrop of the nation’s capital steered their thoughts along exceptionally original lines.

Thus Oslo, however unlikely it may seem, became a city of ideas. For the rest of his days, Jonas Wergeland would associate house-fronts and shop windows, street names and tramlines with the things they discussed there. The square in front of Tostrupgården, for example, was not a spot which Jonas connected with summertime and pavement cafés; he remembered it for the time when Axel and Trine had come to a halt there, right next to the statue of Christian Krohg, and argued for over an hour about who was the more radical: Bakunin or Kropotkin. Slottsparken was fixed in Jonas’s memory as the setting for a heated debate, verging on a squabble, as to who was the more important writer, James Joyce or Franz Kafka, another recurring topic akin to that of Mozart versus Beethoven and just as impossible to resolve. Jonas would always remember Akershus Fort for a stirring nocturnal walk along its walls upon which Alva regaled them with a wonderful description of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist, and he never saw the facade of the Freemason’s Lodge on Wessels plass without thinking of Thomas’s passionate and appetizing presentation of the works of the ecclesiastical historian Mircea Eliades.

What Jonas Wergeland liked best about those strolls at night through the city were the sudden mental leaps, the jumps through time and space, the merging of totally unconnected subjects. There were times when their discussion sounded like an organ, with lots of voices, from the reediest flutes to the deep notes of the pedals, strong and weak, and Jonas thought it was beautiful, every bit as beautiful as the music of the spheres. Sometimes he had the feeling that he could set its stops, throw in a remark that would elicit exactly the right heated note, the voice level he had counted on producing. Or with one incisive statement such as ‘Maria Callas is the world’s greatest prima donna’, he could press an invisible ‘Tutti’ button that set them all talking at once, loudly and vociferously.

To Jonas Wergeland, these nocturnal ramblings through Oslo were very special occasions; he tried to remember everything that was said, to take it all in, with all his senses, and hence he also absorbed the scents and the sounds, brushes against walls, trees, the reflection in a window, as they walked and talked — as, for example, during the furious discussion, conducted on the way from Tøyen to Sofienborg, of Delacroix’s enigmatic painting Young Woman Attacked by a Tiger, which had been sparked off by a little reproduction that Trine had stuck into her notebook; or as when, without any transition, and yet possibly quite logically, they launched into a debate so fierce that one would have thought it was a matter of life or death on whether philosophy began with wonder or with desperation, a topic which kept them occupied all the way through Grünerløkka and far up Maridalsveien. Not that they were always so sure of themselves. Alva had had to search for words on the night, standing outside Ullevål Hospital, when she tried to explain to the others why she felt that ‘Todesfuge’ by Paul Celan was the finest poem ever written, but for the most part they had no doubts. There was the time, for instance, when Thomas, standing with his back to the station building at Majorstua, had expounded a long and pretty involved theory, punctuated by a lot of convulsive arm-waving, as to why the socialist experiment in Chile was bound to turn out as it did — this being a subject much on all their minds, as was the American statesman Henry Kissinger, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and who, according to Trine, at two in the morning on Bygdøy allé, was the most brilliant intelligent diplomat of the twentieth century with an unrivalled feel for the widespread consequences and patterns of international politics but who, according to Alva, same time, same place, was an amoral, paranoid and conniving sonofabitch of a tarantula hiding behind a hypocritical gloss of realpolitik. There were some mysteries they could not solve, like what Odin had whispered in Balder’s ear before the latter was laid on the funeral pyre, but there were other riddles to which they did find answers — for example that the ‘Rosebud’ of Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane could not possibly be anything other than William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for his mistress’s clitoris.

Now, to nip any criticism in the bud, while they might have been a bit on the airy-fairy side, the Nomads were not exponents of some brand of new romanticism, not at all. They knew very well that in many ways they were dilettantes, and that they had a hugely inflated idea of themselves and their own opinions. For all their enthusiasm and hyperbole they were not wanting in ironic objectivity. Alva might suddenly position herself in a gateway and declaim dramatically out of the darkness: ‘I seek the innermost core of the tree of life; what is it that holds the world together.’ They were all well aware that they often cited the wrong names, misunderstood theories and confused phenomena. The point was that that was okay. It was okay to come out with semi-digested, only partially understood ideas. It was okay to drop names they had only ever come across in footnotes. It was okay to refer to authors and tear their works to pieces or praise them to the skies, crudely and unsubtly, without ever having read them. It was okay to conduct a sort of intellectual Guinness Book of Records in which everything had to be the greatest or the least, the best or the worst, with no half-measures. There is a period in the life of every human being when that is how it is: impossible to believe that one can like both Mozart and Beethoven. It was as if every member of the Nomads knew that at some point in life it is necessary, absolutely essential, to be able to spout the most appallingly heretical, half-formed ideas without having to qualify anything. That it is important for one’s mental health. This phase of their lives, those nights roaming the city of Oslo, were not just one long and fruitful brainstorming session, they also constituted a kind of primal therapy, an opportunity to vent their frustrations, their aggression, their crazy notions. Above all else, it gave them a chance to play about with the most unlikely turtles, perhaps even discover one that was more viable than others.

There was only one spot that all of their various routes through the city took in, thereby living up to its name, ‘the Magnet’ in Akersgata: an establishment which, in its heyday, before the advent of the Nomads, had for many years been Oslo’s only all-night café. They had strict rules about who they let in, but thanks to Thomas, who worked a couple of evenings a week for a newspaper which had its offices in the same street, and to his amazing knack of making friends with the right people, they could flash the vital press cards that would open the Magnet’s doors to them in the middle of the night. And even though this bastion’s conscientious guardian, Fru Sommerstad, had a suspicion that something fishy was going on, she left them to drink their coffee in peace alongside the taxi drivers.

I am sure it will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that all of the Nomads, with the exception of Jonas, actually wanted to be something other than what they were studying to be. They wanted to write. Why this should have been was a mystery to Jonas. They wanted to be authors or playwrights, they wanted to write screenplays or poetry, and Thomas — how weird could you get? — wanted to be that most hair-raisingly bizarre of all animals, an essayist. He submitted long articles to the newspapers, on topics more quixotic than even Knut Hamsun’s young hero in Hunger could have dreamed up. All of which were — of course — roundly rejected by all and sundry.

Once inside the Magnet, they each took a seat at a separate table and proceeded to scribble like mad in their respective notebooks, the idea being that everyone should take them for reporters, fresh from doing some sensational nocturnal research and all set to make the scoop of their careers. They jotted down ideas that had come to them in between their discussions on the streets, thoughts generated by something one of the others had said, or by the graffiti on a statue, or quite simply churned out by brains that were running in top gear. And naturally, at that moment, sitting in the Magnet, scribbling down these thoughts as quickly as their pencils could shed their carbon particles, they honestly believed that what they were writing, at any rate after a wee bit of polishing, would cause the Milky Way to vibrate on its axis. They sat there with their fags between their lips, eyes narrowed, as if these notes they were making were of such brilliance that they were almost dazzled by them. Jonas knew that none of them would ever become novelists or writers of any description, but he never made fun of them, quite the opposite; he understood that these notebooks full of presumptuous, high-flying ideas would be worth their weight in gold at later and more disillusioned stages in their lives, that there would come a time when leafing through these little books would prove a more effective way of dulling their depression and world-weariness than all the medicines and pills in the world: to see, to have confirmed that they had once thought such thoughts, so grand, so outrageous, so extravagantly naïve and, above all: so insanely beautiful. Like turtles with gems affixed to their shells.

Jonas Wergeland made no notes. He already had a little book full of them, a golden sheaf of quotations. That was all he needed. That time, many years earlier, when Nefertiti and he were playing cowboys and Indians, and Nefertiti had ranged twenty-odd books side by side on the bookshelf and told him, gravely, that they were valuable, Jonas had automatically assumed that she was referring to their contents. When he was in eighth grade he had flicked through them and discovered that in each book there was one page with a corner turned down and a passage underlined. It was these passages which he had conscientiously jotted down in a little red notebook and in due course, after having them translated, had learned by heart. The quotation he had paraphrased during the Mozart versus Beethoven discussion he had found underlined at the end of — of all things — a totally unintelligible twenty-page article on ‘Diffusion’, complete with all sorts of formulae, written by none other than the physicist James Clerk Maxwell and reproduced in Volume II, a weighty tome in quarto format, of his collected scientific works; an unexpectedly crystal-clear passage which even Jonas could understand and employ — taking people by surprise, especially if he happened to divulge his source — in any number of situations.

Which reminds me that I have not said what Jonas Wergeland was studying, a piece of information which remained a well kept secret for a long time after he became famous; Jonas Wergeland was studying astronomy. Although that may not come as such a great surprise. Even as a boy, reading the following extract from the Kama Sutra, he had perceived the practical value of astronomy: ‘The lovers may also sit on the terrace of the palace or house, and enjoy the moonlight, and carry on an agreeable conversation. At this time, too, while the woman lies in his lap, with her face towards the moon, the citizen should show her the different planets, the morning star, the polar star, and the seven Rishis, or Great Bear.’ I mention this for the sake of any parents who might be under the misapprehension that reading the Kama Sutra would be bad for a child.

Jonas Wergeland himself claimed that he had been leafing through the university prospectus at random, as if the selection of a subject were something of a lottery, when under one course heading he had come upon the phrase ‘celestial mechanics’, and fell so completely for this term that he instantly plumped for the Institute of Theoretical Astro-Physics. Axel received a rather different version of the story: ‘I took all the subjects one by one and asked myself the following question: would I be happy to give this as my answer if I were sitting in a café and someone came up to me and asked what I was studying?’

The truth is almost as simple as that; Jonas Wergeland enrolled in the astrophysics course because he could not stand the thought of having to study any subject that was full of bombastic systems, and within the field of astronomy there were refreshingly vast areas about which absolutely nothing could be said for certain. Not only that, but the body of information was changing and expanding faster here than in any other subject. In other words, astrophysics was the perfect branch of learning for Jonas Wergeland, being a field in which any universal theory was doomed to look ridiculous — there were few turtles to be found in the study of astrophysics.

Once the booster rockets of the Prelims had been jettisoned, Jonas found himself in the rarefied realms of astronomy, i.e. the foundation course. He even spent time, a little at least, leafing through books in the reading room on the top floor of the physics building as well as attending lectures in the auditorium at the institute, a building with decorative celestial globes in the corridors and a functionalist vestibule worth a whole course of study in itself. For a long time he almost enjoyed being a student, took part in field trips to the solar observatory at Harestua and was drawn into discussions with other astrophysics majors, or the lecturers, who had their rooms in the former apartments, since converted, of old Professor Rosseland, who watched over them from Alf Rolfsen’s portrait in the seminar room, the old drawing-room. It was not until Jonas made a start on ‘Galactic and extra-galactic astronomy’, which involved, among other things, the mind-boggling subject of cosmology, that he began to have cold feet. There was something about these colossal forces, vast distances and inconceivable time-scales, billions of miles and years; and, not least, the eerie notion of a universe constantly expanding towards a state of total darkness, that scared him, that almost caused the scales to tip the other way; the theories became so vague, so top-heavy and woolly that it was all rather too much of a good thing — Jonas caught himself longing for a turtle. In fact he had already made up his mind to quit the course when one day, at the foot of the stairs, he passed a poster depicting the ‘outer planet’. He had walked past it countless times before without stopping, but this time his eye immediately homed in on Pluto, and there was something about the tiny planet on the very edge of the solar system — some sense of kinship with this outsider — that captured Jonas’s interest anew. He immediately enrolled in another course, one in which he could make a specific study of Pluto. From then on Pluto became Jonas Wergeland’s pet project, or turtle; after one term he knew just about all there was to know about the planet, more in fact than the professor who taught them, and here I am not merely thinking of such things as how many days it takes to revolve, how wide the angle of its orbital plane or how elongated its ellipse — I am thinking of the acquisition of information so advanced that Jonas Wergeland was in a position to speculate, in a highly scientific manner, on Pluto’s probable size and mass and its possible origins, a feat which was all the more impressive when one considers that this was even before the discovery of Pluto’s moon. I am not exaggerating when I say that for some years, Jonas Wergeland was Norway’s leading expert on the planet Pluto.

One can, of course, ask oneself what use — I almost said earthly use — so much knowledge of such a minor detail, a distant planet, can be put to in real life. Jonas Wergeland’s had not yet come this far in his scrupling when he left the Magnet all-night café with the other Nomads and set out on another stroll through the deserted streets of Oslo, picking up the threads of their previous discussion as they went along, or raising some fresh and inflammable topic, some issue on which they would most certainly disagree strongly. But it could also be, as that night, that they came walking up Ullevålsveien, past Jonas’s and Axel’s old haven, Our Saviour’s cemetery — at that time of night a shadowy, mysterious landscape beyond the railings — and were startled by a dog that barked at them from behind the gates, although no one could figure out what the animal was doing there.

They were still walking along the side of the graveyard when Axel said: ‘Shit, what’s it called again, that dog that guards the entrance to Hades, the Greek kingdom of the dead?’

‘Anubis,’ said Trine like a shot.

‘No, no, no,’ Thomas protested. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s … Garm.’

‘That’s Norse mythology, you twit.’ Axel was furious with himself for not being able to remember the name.

‘What about the two-headed Orthrus?’ Alva suggested.

‘Take it easy, guys, the name’s Cerberus,’ said Jonas.

The others nodded, now they remembered. They looked at Jonas. Jonas had a habit of surprising them.

‘By the way, does anyone know why it’s called Hades?’ said Alva.

‘Comes from the Greek “aides”, the unseen,’ said Jonas. ‘The God Hades had a helmet which made him invisible.’

Alva laughed and thumped him on the back. ‘Trust you to know such a totally useless piece of information.’

How did Jonas Wergeland know this? Because he was Norway’s leading expert on the planet Pluto, that’s how. Because Pluto is only another name for Hades, god of the underworld, and the planet Pluto derived its name in part from the fact that it was so difficult to detect, it was almost invisible, like Hades. This gave Jonas a desire to know more about the Hades of mythology, and that, in turn, is how he stumbled upon the dog Cerberus. From the stars to Hell — but still only a short hop.

‘You can say what you like about the uses of astronomy,’ Jonas said, as the Nomads reached Sankt Hanshaugen in a body at four in the morning, ‘but it’s one way of learning your Greek mythology.’