The Seducer

The Golden Fleece

And so Jonas Wergeland was utterly shattered to feel that twinge in his shoulder, a razor-blade turning in the joint that not only ruined his serve but also meant that he had a hard job hitting his ground strokes, with the result that the ambassador won his service game to take the lead in the final decisive set. Jonas tried to keep his face a blank, not to betray this fresh handicap, but he was serving so wildly that it was all he could do just to hold his own serve. Thanks to Jonas’s poor play, the ambassador had recovered his aristocratic demeanour, and once more he loomed on the other side of the net, so sure of himself, and wearing that smile which Jonas would, without hesitation, have described as ‘diabolical’.

Jonas had to alter his strategy, think in terms of placing rather than power. He had to fall back on the hard-won skills carefully acquired during his six months of playing with other partners, after Margrete had refused ever to play with him again. ‘Come on, Jonas,’ he muttered under his breath, standing in the Njård Sports Centre, wreathed in the smell of his own sweat. ‘The most unlikely things are forever happening.’ The main thing now was to remember what Margrete had told him about her father’s weak points, not only about his backhand but also the fact that he was not quick on his feet.

The score was even, but things were going the ambassador’s way; he won his service games easily, while Jonas had to sweat and strain for every ball. Pain shot through his body every time he swung the racket, serving was an almost unbearable agony. Gjermund Boeck, realizing that Jonas was in trouble, showed no mercy, made the most of his offensive forehand, putting a spin on the easiest of shots, peppering Jonas’s side of the court. Jonas was suffering, every shot was torment; suddenly it occurred to him that the ambassador looked like a lobster, a horrible monster from another planet, his right arm and the racket forming a flailing, menacing pincer.

The sound of the ball, that incessant thunk thunk, was starting to get on his nerves, he was doing more and more running, slipped a couple of times, the whole hall reeked of sweat, he was dead beat, his eyes swam, his shoulder and upper arm were hurting something awful, he had to fight not to screw his face up, but he would not give in, he could not give in. As I say, this was the greatest challenge of his life, a stupid tennis match, but still and all the most important battle of his life, for the most ridiculous, cringe-making prize, a polar-bear skin, which was, nonetheless, a trophy he simply had to win, because this was Jonas Wergeland’s battle to make the utterly impossible, the highly unlikely, happen; this was the Grorud lad against the entire lobster-eating corps diplomatique; this was David against Goliath, east side against west; it truly was, as Jonas Wergeland put it — while under the influence, I grant you, and many years later — a battle to demonstrate Norway’s, or the average Norwegian’s, amazing adaptability and competitiveness. After all, if a lad from the east side who had never laid hands on a racket in his younger days could beat a keen cosmopolitan player, then surely Norway was capable of making the switch from heavy industry to computer technology.

Jonas fought on desperately, trying, through the sweat streaming down into his eyes and making them smart, through the pain in his arm which was nigh on torture, to think clearly, to think in terms of accuracy. Then all of a sudden he pulled off a couple of strokes that he seldom got right: a couple of drop-shots that the ambassador did not even try to run for, and a few not particularly hard, but wonderfully well-placed, ground shots that had the ambassador dashing from one side of the court to the other, red in the face and with his white shorts slipping farther and farther towards his knees: a beautiful sight which for a moment made Jonas forget his aching shoulder and even venture a lob which, amazingly, landed inside the line, and by adjusting his grip slightly he managed to give his serves a bit of a sidespin which more than once caught the ambassador completely on the hop. The pain in his arm was excruciating. Jonas could barely grip the racket, but even so, by some miracle, he succeeded in hitting a half-volley, at which Gjermund Boeck could only shake his head: ‘That’s not bloody well allowed!’ he gasped, hitching up his shorts and straightening the ludicrous, quasi-tropical, pseudo-colonial cap that was no longer bringing him luck. Jonas knew he was not playing by the book, the injury to his shoulder was forcing him to improvise, and by a combination of sheer luck — in line with modern Norwegian history — and a year of hard training, he succeeded in delivering a number of unorthodox, not to say acrobatic, shots: shots from weird angles, and a flick of the wrist reminiscent of tennis genius John McEnroe, who came to the fore and took everyone by storm just around that time. This match left Jonas convinced that one of his ancestors must have had an outstanding talent when it came to this particular combination of racket and ball, which he himself called a ‘tennis gene’ — if, that is, it was not something that Nina H., the hurdler, had unleashed but which had been lying dormant since the day when he cleared the 1.60 metres backwards to become area champion in the high jump.

The score was 5–5 in the final set, with Gjermund Boeck to serve. Jonas was in so much pain that he was hearing voices, heard his coach, Finn Søhol building up the tension, speaking in a low voice, not much above a whisper, the way he did when he was commentating at Wimbledon, speaking in hushed tones, especially at decisive moments in a match, as if he were afraid that the sound of his own voice, up in the commentator box, might put the players off. The ambassador fired off his first serve, a cracker of a shot, straight into the net, thank heavens, hitting it so hard that one of his strings snapped, and Jonas was allowed a breathing space while Boeck went to fetch his reserve racket.

Jonas was on his last legs, his eyes would barely focus, his arm felt as though it had dropped off. The ambassador served again, but the break seemed to have spoiled his concentration; not only was he serving badly he also hit two double-faults, with the result that Jonas won the game almost without having lifted his sore arm.

Jonas was leading 6–5; he was serving for the match. His shoulder was throbbing like hell, he clenched his teeth so hard he could taste the amalgam, he simply had to do this, it was his one big chance; and through all the pain he was conscious of a strange sense of pleasure. He served, not particularly hard, the ball came into play, they hit some long balls from the baseline; every shot was like a knife slicing into his arm. Jonas both relished it and felt like crying, suddenly understanding what masochism was all about, slamming the shots hard enough to bring the humiliating taste of lobster flesh rising up into his throat to mingle with that of blood and amalgam, long balls from the baseline, until he knew he would never manage to hit the next ball. Then, out of blue, while trying to clinch the game with a coolly calculated diagonal on the backhand, the ambassador quite inexplicably hit the ball out of court. ‘Damn and blast it to hell!’ yelled Gjermund Boeck, the ambassador, causing heads to turn in the far corners of the hall. Jonas served again, a rotten, uncontrolled serve, fully expecting a lethal return; he could already see the sneer on the ambassador’s florid face, but yet again the latter hit the ball out, all but smashing his racket on the floor in the process. The ambassador tightened up on his next two returns, played superbly, and the score stood at 30–30 when Jonas finally succeeded in serving another ace to gain match point.

He was close to passing out, was seeing two of the ambassador, the pain in his shoulder had spread throughout his body, his whole system riddled with broken glass. Racked by the most excruciating pain, he managed to toss the ball into the air and hit it, wildly, feebly, but the ambassador returned it warily as if he did not quite trust himself. Jonas hit a backhand cross, Gjermund Boeck responded with a sound, slicing, but slow, backhand. Jonas knew he was going to have to tie this match up before he keeled over with the pain; he hit a nice, long forehand, ran into the net, knew this was it, the moment when he would either win or lose everything, his faith in himself, a different life, a Golden Fleece, the belief that the most unlikely things happened every day, and through the pain he saw, to his teeth-gnashing despair, that Gjermund Boeck was well-placed, saw that look on his face that said he had everything under control, he had hit this murderous drive, his real show-piece shot, a hundred times before, in Bangkok, London, Nairobi, and he was now about to sweep Jonas off the court with this sure-fire shot, bring the score to deuce and then turn the match ruthlessly in his own favour. He hit the ball, ramming it perfectly, putting the whole of his corpulent figure behind the shot, a horrific, unbeatable passing shot which Jonas could only gaze after, sick to the marrow, but as he gazed after the ball, feeling sick to the marrow, he saw it land outside the line; it could not be, but it was out, and the ambassador, too, was gazing at it, although he could not really believe it, that the ball was out, and that Jonas Wergeland had won the match.

Gjermund Boeck was a good loser, however, and that very evening, at home in Ullevål Garden City — Margrete was also present — among the porcelain vases and dancing bronze gods, he made much of Jonas, not least of his willpower and heroic achievement, what with his injured shoulder and all. Jonas had the feeling that only now had the ambassador, again wearing one of his eye-catching Hawaiian shirts and standing with his back to a roaring fire, accepted him as a prospective son-in-law. ‘Here’s to the hero of the day,’ said Gjermund Boeck. ‘Cheers, Jonas! Damn me if you don’t serve harder than Roscoe Tanner!’ And the ambassador kept his promise; he actually did present Jonas with the huge polar-bear skin.

Despite his success, Jonas did not play much tennis after that match, and not because of his injured shoulder either: that soon healed. This might seem a mite odd, since Jonas himself believed tennis to be the greatest of all his talents. ‘I could have won Wimbledon if only I’d discovered this gift earlier,’ he would say in all seriousness. And yet after that day he rarely lifted a tennis racket. However strange it may sound, to Jonas Wergeland tennis — for reasons that were both irrational and, to some extent, anachronistic — represented a disavowal of the world of his childhood. ‘It’s a question of class,’ he maintained, despite being, in general, almost fanatically anti-ideological. I merely present this as yet another incongruous, but intriguing, aspect of Jonas Wergeland’s life; one which stands, not least, as a distinct contradiction to his decision to become the Duke, an individual who stood out, most decidedly, from the crowd.

There was, however, one thing that Jonas did not know, although he ought to have suspected something of the sort, since great individual victories are almost always won due to the unseen help of others: Margrete had tampered with her father’s racket. She knew from experience that her father was forever breaking strings and that he usually had a couple of back-up rackets on hand. So the day before the match, unbeknownst to her father, of course, she had had his two reserve rackets restrung. She had asked for them to be strung a little looser to ensure that, at least for a couple of games, her father’s control would be a little off, and he would not hit the ball quite as he expected to do. Jonas Wergeland would probably never have won that match, if the ambassador had not, as luck would have it, had to switch rackets at a crucial moment in the final set. Jonas never found out about this bit of ‘help’, and Margrete kept it to herself for the rest of her life, even when she had to listen, not without a touch of exasperation, to Jonas bragging about his great feat, as he was constantly doing — he persisted in regarding it as the greatest victory of his whole life — usually when some guest asked where in the world they had come by the most peculiar decorative touch on their living-room floor.

Something else which Jonas did not know, something not even Margrethe knew, was that the ambassador had long been looking for some way to rid himself of that hideous polar-bear skin.