The Seducer

Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

And so Jonas Wergeland now stood there with the ball in his left hand, totally devoid of any peaceful intentions, bounced it a couple of times, fixed his eye on a point in the court on the other side of the net, bounced the ball once more before throwing it into the air, mind focussed, and hit it as hard as he could and then some, as if he were hurling a javelin and not a felt covered ball at Gjermund Boeck’s cocky, smirking features. He hit it beautifully, with his body at full stretch, ensuring that the ball landed exactly where it was supposed to in the ambassador’s service court, with enough power behind it that even though Gjermund Boeck did manage to get to the ball, it slammed into the net as the screech of a sliding rubber sole mingled with the hiss of a less than diplomatic curse.

Jonas’s future father-in-law had won the first set 6–1. That one game had been an obvious consolation prize, a fact that rankled all the more with Jonas. And, what was worse, he had forgotten to put everything he had into that one detail.

Jonas served again, tossing the ball into the air with such a practised air that anyone with any knowledge of tennis would have taken him for a seasoned player, him, Jonas Wergeland, Grorud lad and anti-snob, who had never touched a tennis racket as a boy. Again his serve was powerful, well-placed, he was conscious of the delightful sensation that ran through him every time he hit the ball just right, faultlessly, the glorious sound, the rush it gave; he repeated his success twice more to win his service game outright. The ambassador, for once not wearing one of his garish Hawaiian shirts but the traditional whites, which conspired with his old-fashioned flat cap to lend him a rather tropical colonial air, clapped his racket with the flat of his hand cheerily, but Jonas could tell that he was nonplussed, so nonplussed that his serve became a little less sure, and Jonas managed to make a number of good returns, even against the ambassador’s backhand, which he knew to be slow, with an under-spin that allowed him ample time to run in to the net and enjoy the luxury of a volley. Boeck won the game, but he really had to work for it and, what is more: he was shaken, he saw now that humiliating Jonas was not going be as easy as he had thought — not easy at all.

Jonas served again, even harder this time and, by his own lights, nigh-on flawlessly, and won this game, too, outright, with three aces and a ball that his prospective father-in-law could do no more than tap with his racket, a return so bad that a neatly placed forehand from Jonas nearly sent the ambassador — bearing a passing facial resemblance to Trygve Lie — flying headlong onto the court as he strained vainly, and comically, to reach Jonas’s ball. Gjermund Boeck was no longer clapping.

So what had happened? How could an amateur — a complete novice, basically — hold his own against a seasoned tennis player, albeit an elderly man, corpulent and fairly slow, but still an experienced and, above all, wily player who would normally have had no problem in wiping the floor with such a greenhorn, as he had done in the first set, without having to stretch to more than a gloating grin? Tennis is not one of my favourite sports, but I believe that this episode affords an insight into an important aspect of Jonas Wergeland’s nature: not only his almost uncanny strength of will but also, and just as importantly, his keen eye for the crucial angle of attack, the one detail that makes all things possible, including the crushing of a smug and rather nasty ambassador.

Immediately after the fateful lobster dinner the previous autumn, two things had happened. Jonas had moved in with Margrete, who was living in her parents’ flat in Ullevål Garden City while they were abroad, and he had started to take tennis lessons with her on an indoor court; or rather, first she had packed him off to Johan Hannes’s shop on Parkveien, where he had bought a wooden Donnay ‘Borg pro’ racket, one which had come warmly recommended by Hannes — not surprisingly, seeing that he happened to be the local agent for the Belgian firm. Margrete played a decent, if not a great, game of tennis, thanks to a cosmopolitan upbringing within diplomatic circles where playing tennis was an inherent part of the whole way of life, every bit as essential as being able to handle a telex machine or a cocktail glass, or knowing on which occasions one was supposed to fly a flag on the car. Although she had not played for ages, she still had her sure serve and her solid ground stroke, they seemed to be ingrained in her, like her swimming stroke. But Margrete was a hopeless teacher. She laughed at Jonas, she roared with laughter at Jonas’s ineptitude and ungainly antics on the tennis court; if anything, he was even more ham-fisted with a racket than he was with a lobster fork. After only a couple of sessions on the indoor court, during which Jonas had hardly managed to land a single ball inside the lines of the court, she told him — good-humouredly, but in no uncertain terms — that he was hopeless. He was a great guy, but he had no gift for tennis. ‘Why don’t you call off this stupid duel with Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m begging you, please.’

But Jonas had to beat Gjermund Boeck, and in this lies the very crux of the story: to swear to do something which you do not know the first thing about, in which you are possibly not even all that interested; which, quite frankly, you think is just plain daft — to do it because of an innate, pigheaded determination, and perhaps even a longing, at least once in your life, to win a battle against all, absolutely all, the odds. So, in the final analysis, Jonas was not competing against the ambassador — even though he deeply and sincerely disliked his future father-in-law. What he was fighting was his own doubt, his doubt as to whether he really could do the impossible, make the improbable a reality. It could have been anything at all. In Jonas Wergeland’s case it happened to be tennis. He knew that if he could succeed in beating the ambassador at tennis, then there was nothing he could not do. Hence this silly little duel, this typically macho set-up, with its even more absurd trophy, a trophy of which Jonas felt almost ashamed, but which at the same time he coveted with all his heart: a polar-bear skin, a momentous milestone in Jonas Wergeland’s career. Walking off the court with or without that skin would quite simply represent the difference between two different lives.

Jonas managed to persuade Margrete to persevere, they even played over Christmas and on through the latter half of the winter, a couple of evenings a week at least, until Jonas had almost reached the level that most amateurs stick at for life, a slightly imprecise style, all home-made serves and countless technical errors, that nonetheless suffices to keep the ball in play so long as one’s opponent is no better a player. He had also been bitten, against all the prior warnings he had received, by the tennis bug, by the idea of batting a felt-covered rubber ball back and forth across a net. A court divided into six sections, yet an infinitude of possibilities. For one of his projects at the College of Architecture, Jonas had designed a house to a plan inspired by the divisions of a tennis court. But Margrete beat him every time, and she was growing more and more fed up with it.

Then, one particularly bad evening when Jonas had sent every ball he hit with his forehand slamming into the net, his eye was caught by two men in their forties, playing in the next court; real geniuses with a tennis ball, to Jonas’s mind at least, hitting the ball with such nonchalance, elegance and, above all, an ease unlike anything Jonas had ever seen; commenting all the while, wryly and with an astonishing breadth of vocabulary, on their own blunders. Even if Jonas was uncommonly ignorant as regards great Norwegian exploits in this particular sport, he ought at least to have recognized one of the players, or rather, his voice — because this was Finn Søhol, the man who had for decades been the top tennis player in Norway and was now a tennis commentator for NRK. For the benefit of those readers who are particularly interested, I can tell you that the other player was Gunnar Sjøwall, several times Norwegian champion and Søhol’s doubles partner of many years standing. As a pair, these two succeeded, among other things, in getting as far as the third round of the gentlemen’s doubles at Wimbledon in the mid-fifties — quite an impressive feat.

It may have been his very ignorance that gave Jonas the brass neck to approach Finn Søhol later, in the changing room, and ask him whether he would consider giving him some lessons, or at least see whether he could help him to improve his game.

‘Why?’ Søhol asked.

‘My girlfriend’s dad’s a fiend from hell,’ Jonas said. ‘I’ve just got to beat him. It’s a matter of life or death.’

Søhol laughed but accepted this as a valid reason. He could tell at a glance, possibly thanks to the intuition developed through all his years of playing tennis, that there was something special about the young architecture student standing before him, sweating and vehement, a Donnay ‘Borg pro’ racket resting on his shoulder like a rifle. Which is how Jonas came to find himself, one week later, on the island of Bygdøy, inside the whitewashed, green-roofed building that was home to the Bygdøy Tennis Club.

Finn Søhol, Jonas’s voluntary unpaid trainer, had already worked out a strategy; he had given the matter some thought, had even become quite intrigued by the problem. ‘The only way you can beat a more experienced player is by learning to serve,’ he said. ‘Serve well, I mean.’ Søhol demonstrated what he meant by a good serve. Jonas did not even have the chance to lift his racket, just heard the whoosh of the ball. His first thought was to walk out right there and then; the whole situation was too ridiculous, too extreme. But once he had had time to think about it he found that he liked the idea, and the more he thought about it the more he liked it. That everything could hang on such a detail. That you could win a match even if you had not mastered the whole gamut of strokes, even if neither your footwork or physical form were up to scratch. It reminded him a little of his own attempt to gain some understanding of the entire universe solely by studying the planet Pluto.

Søhol devoted the rest of the evening at Bygdøy Tennis Club to the art of tossing the ball into the air correctly. Jonas threw the ball in to the air again and again, without hitting it once; just stood there, throwing the ball up, pretty high, with a straight left arm, in such a way that, if he threw it correctly, it would land on a handkerchief that Søhol had spread on the court a little way in front of his body and a shade to the right of his left foot. Having done this repeatedly for what felt like an eternity to Jonas, he was allowed, for another eternity, to swing his racket back and up at the same time as he threw the ball — a vital action, almost like something out of a ballet, in which the arms fly apart, and rhythm and timing are all — but still without hitting the ball, without serving.

Jonas Wergeland left Bygdøy Tennis Club feeling convinced that he had just learned his most important lesson in tennis, without having played a single stroke. He liked it, inside he was jumping for joy, he realized that he had found his angle, for the first time he realized that he had a microscopic chance of actually beating such a superior opponent as Gjermund Boeck, an out-and-out fiend as well as being an ambassador and his future father-in-law.

Jonas took up the challenge with renewed energy. At the flat in Ullevål Garden City he practised the moves that Søhol had taught him, drawn from the javelin throwers’ training programme, exercises to build up the muscles that would give him a better throwing action. Jonas threw himself into this with an enthusiasm that almost surprised himself and left Margrete shaking her head; lay on the living-room floor, surrounded by his future in-laws’ bronze gods and earthenware vases from the Far East, doing a variety of sit-ups to strengthen both the vertical and diagonal abdominal muscles, working slowly but steadily to begin with; lay on his back with his arms stretched out behind his head and lifted weights; did what were known as pullovers, an exercise perfected by Terje Pedersen, a Norwegian who had for some time held the world record in the javelin and whom Jonas Wergeland was now imitating in order to build up that part of the chest muscle which pulled the arm forward — one muscle he had real need of when serving — and in the midst of all these monomaniacal exertions, his eye kept going to the polar-bear skin on the floor, as if it were some huge, enticing diploma. Once the snow had melted, Jonas Wergeland could be found in the garden, standing lost in concentration among the apple trees, throwing a ball into the air and getting it to land on a handkerchief spread on the ground. To a chance observer, it must have looked as if he were performing some arcane ritual, some sort of religious observance, possibly of Far Eastern origin.

He made five more visits to Bygdøy Tennis Club and Finn Søhol. Serving and serving, again and again, the art of repetition. Again Søhol spread the handkerchief on the floor, in the service court this time, like a bull’s-eye at which Jonas was to aim, one which was gradually moved. ‘If you’re to force his backhand, you’ll have to serve first towards the centre and then out to the line!’ Søhol was far from satisfied but thought Jonas was improving. ‘To hell with the second serve, hit it as hard as you can every time, either you’ll win the point or it’ll be a double fault, all or nothing.’ During the last two sessions they also practised forehand returns so that Jonas, if he were lucky, would be able to return some of the ambassador’s serves. ‘You might be able to break his rhythm and win a few points on his serve, too,’ said Søhol.

Finally, Søhol set up a tennis machine on the opposing baseline to give Jonas the chance to really try out his forehand. It was a momentous experience: being bombarded by an incessant stream of yellow balls as in some ancient myth in which warriors sprang up from the ground as fast as the hero could hack them down. ‘Swing your racket well back,’ yelled Søhol, ‘now follow through. That’s the way. Well done.’

Fortunately, this time it was not a tennis machine on the other side of the net but Gjermund Boeck, the ambassador, and that gentleman was both startlingly red in the face and thrown quite off-balance by his prospective son-in-law, who was unexpectedly serving with uncanny accuracy and managing to return a good few of his own serves, transformed as if by magic so it seemed, into a future champion. As luck would have it, it was the ambassador himself who had chosen the Njård Sports Centre, which, with its wooden floor, gave Jonas an added advantage, since play moved even faster on such a surface.

Jonas tossed the ball into the air, noticed fleetingly how it hovered, started to rotate, transformed into Pluto, the most outlying and most obscure of all the planets in the solar system, offering an angle on the entire universe, before it dropped, and he turned it into a comet, a dazzling ace that left Margrete’s father gazing open-mouthed after it, and won a long hard second set 7–5 for Jonas. At that very moment he realized there was something up with his shoulder.

The ambassador, clearly exhausted, but determined, fiendishly determined, prepared to serve in the final, decisive set.