The Seducer

Rattus Norvegicus

Uncle William, or Sir William, as everyone in Jonas’s family called him on account of an incurable weakness for expensive blazers and flamboyant silk cravats, had been in Africa, a fact that he never failed to mention as if it were an alibi for some crime about which no one had inquired. During the eventful dinner party, much talked about within the family thereafter, when Jonas and his sister Rakel went to the length of poisoning Sir William, the latter seized his chance the minute they sat down at the table, having already consumed a couple of generous predinner highballs. ‘Did I ever tell you, our kid,’ he said, ‘about the time I met Haile Selassie?’

‘Our kid’ was none other than Haakon Hansen, Jonas’s father, who had just risen from the piano where he had been improvising a lovely little prelude to dinner aimed also at tempering Sir William’s dissatisfaction with their cheap whisky. He merely smiled back, not without a trace of concern: after all, here was his brother, together with his children, honouring them with one of his very rare visits. Now he was just waiting for his brother to start up his constant refrain: ‘I never could see why a dyed-in-the-wool heathen like you didn’t become a concert pianist, that way at least you’d have made a bit of money.’

But it never came. Sir William had more than enough to do, holding forth about Haile Selassie as if he were the world’s leading authority on Ethiopia, a personal friend of the emperor who had personally witnessed the skinny little monarch feeding the lions and leopards, not to mention the black panther, in the course of his regular morning constitutional. Not that Sir William did not have an excellent excuse for making this his topic for the evening, since the emperor had just died, a prisoner in his own palace. ‘D’you remember when we visited Addis Ababa, Veronika,’ he said, addressing his daughter, ‘and we saw St George’s Cathedral, where Haile Selassie was crowned?’

Veronika made some inconsequential, corroborative reply, but Sir William was not listening. Veronika, attractive, almost too attractive, and the same age as Jonas, had just started her studies at the institution which was to lay the foundations for her sensational career: the College of Journalism.

Uncle William went on pontificating about Haile Selassie — about his fantastic memory and his gratitude to loyal servants — realizing to his delight that he had come up with the perfect subject with which to dominate the dinner party, better in fact than the optional extras on his latest Mercedes, or his meetings with the prime minister, so he talked in glowing terms of Haile Selassie. Encouraged by the fact that no one was interrupting him, he launched into a long account of how the emperor had resisted Mussolini’s invasion of his country, growing more and more animated as he went on, like those mediocre actors who never land a leading role and so, in an effort to get even, elevate every social gathering to a stage upon which they blow their trumpet loud and long all evening, delivering endless monologues broken only by their own hoots of laughter.

The Brothers Grimm, who had not been to Africa, sat facing one another, wearing impeccable, almost identical suits and lending a strange symmetry to the table. Their names were Preben and Stephan, and Jonas recalled with a shudder his uncle incessantly cheering them on when they holidayed together on Hvaler as boys, whether they were diving, fishing or kicking a football about: Perfect, Preben! Splendid, Stephan! Rakel called them the Brothers Grimm because they were so ugly and because they had once ruined a fabulous doll’s house belonging to her. Rakel never forgave anyone for ruining a fairy-tale.

Now, however, the Brothers Grimm said hardly a word. In Sir William’s presence even these two inveterate egotists were relegated to walk-on parts. They had to content themselves with laughing or making little comments — when, that is, they were not blatantly inspecting the backs of the cutlery for hallmarks or sniggering eloquently at one another over the cheap crystal glasses. The Brothers Grimm were pushing thirty, but they were still just big kids, something which went some way to explaining why they were the first — and by that I mean at least a year ahead of everybody else — to have mobile telephones, pagers, laptop computers, Time Managers, fax machines, SUVs and the like. Fix & Fax Ltd., as Rakel said when speaking of their business dealings.

They were sitting in the dining room of the new villa. The large windows looked out onto Bergensveien, the town and a September day in the mid-seventies. Before dinner, Sir William and his three children had been shown around the house, which really was a very different story from the three-room flat in one of the low blocks of flats across the road. Only the picture in the bathroom, Theodor Kittelsen’s Soria Moria Castle remained the same. Sir William had run a curious eye over the place and a finger along the mantelpiece merely to ascertain with obvious disapproval Åse and Haakon Hansen’s relaxed approach to housework. For his own part, after his divorce he had employed someone to keep house for him. He banged a wall here and there or admired the pleasing blend of wood, tile and Persian rugs, these last a generous gift from Aunt Laura, who had most firmly declined the invitation to dinner. Even now, as he relentlessly continued his soliloquy on the emperor of Ethiopia, spouting assertions which no one was in a position to check, Sir William’s eye roved the room, taking in the full suite of dining-room furniture, all in pine, as if he could not believe what he was seeing: that his younger brother finally had his own house.

Jonas sat fiddling with the tablecloth and gazing out of the window as his uncle launched into a long, involved story to do with Haile Selassie’s reforms and his building projects, in which he gave the impression that this diminutive monarch had more or less single-handedly raised Ethiopia out of the Stone Age and into the twentieth century, even though Sir William knew very well that the emperor was a despot of the first order who had clung to power any way he could and had vast sums of money salted away in foreign bank accounts, while his land lay fallow and his people ate sand. Suddenly, Jonas’s uncle turned to his hostess. ‘By the way, Åse, where’s your mother?’ he asked artlessly. ‘Still playing war games over in Oscars gate?’ The Brothers Grimm obviously got a great kick out of this question. Sir William was referring to Jonas’s grandmother who had, for long spells in her life, adopted the persona of Winston Churchill.

Jonas’s mother did not turn a hair, just sat there, smiling her little half-smile, as if now, as always, she knew something that no one else knew. In fact, she set some store by her brother-in-law’s lack of social nous, not least because his rude remarks usually provided fodder for weeks of amusing conversation with her husband.

Jonas felt much the same. There was something about his uncle’s creatively poisonous tongue which fascinated him, that ability to spend a whole evening going on and on about what a brilliant diplomat Haile Selassie was simply to prevent anyone else from getting a word in edgewise: a manifest demonstration of power quite in the spirit of the old emperor himself.

Rakel, on the other hand, had had enough of their uncle and had decided to shut him up more or less as an experiment, to see whether such a thing was even possible. She had hatched a plan to which Jonas was party, more out of principle than out of hate. Rakel believed it was time their uncle was given a taste of his own medicine: poison. So when she now appeared in the kitchen doorway wreathed in delicious smells, only these two, sister and brother, were aware that, all going well, this evening was liable to turn out rather differently than their uncle imagined.

The dishes were set on the table, thus forcing Sir William to stem his own stream of rhetoric: a mishmash of facts about Ethiopia, about all the intrigue which had sadly toppled the emperor from his throne the previous year, and snide remarks about Norwegian radicals who did not know the first thing about Africa, these aimed mainly at Jonas’s brother Daniel, one year his senior, ‘Red Daniel’ as he was known in those days. His brother, however, having been on the receiving end before, had been wise enough to make himself scarce that Sunday. Besides, he hated ‘such petty bourgeois affairs’.

Rakel had taken a lot of trouble over dinner, preparing filet de boeuf en croûte with a mushroom stuffing. Sir William smacked his lips at the very sight of the laden serving dish, and Rakel flashed Jonas a look of encouragement before she started slicing into the pastry, revealing what lay inside, the slices of beef interspersed with the mushrooms — this last being, obviously, the vital ingredient. Rakel passed round the bowl of salad, but had the dinner guests hand their plates to her to help them to the meat. That way she could make sure that her uncle was given the correct portion of mushrooms. If all went according to plan, in a little while he would have more to think about than sitting there like an emperor on his throne, dispensing spiteful remarks. Buddha was just about the only one to be exempt from his insinuations. He simply sat there, wearing his inscrutable smile and seeming to rise far above the verbal ructions round about him.

‘I remember how cheap fillet steak was in Nairobi,’ said Sir William after sampling the food. ‘Cost next to nothing — and quite out of this world. We’ll never have meat like that again.’

The reason for my dwelling at such length on Sir William is, of course, that this man happens to personify a crucial element in the story of Jonas Wergeland’s life. Sir William is not merely an uncle, Sir William is Norway, disguised in a blue blazer and gold cravat, a nouveau riche upstart. To Jonas, Sir William represented the very key to vital chapters in his nation’s most recent history. So when his uncle sat there, droning on and on about Emperor Haile Selassie, wearing an expression of superiority, authority and moral infallibility, in Jonas’s eyes it might just as well have been Norway sitting there talking.

Sir William had lived and worked in Kenya for three years and, speaking of this, I would like, if I may, to insert here a brief discourse on Norway. I am, as I am sure some of you will already have guessed, not Norwegian. I am an objective observer. I do not know what I would have to say to shake a Norwegian out of his fixed ideas about his nation’s history, but I might perhaps say that Norway and the sudden prosperity experienced by this country during the second half of the twentieth century could, in fact, be likened to the Netherlands — that, too, a small country bounded by the North Sea — and its almost unbelievable heyday during the seventeenth century. But unlike the Netherlands, Norway has been able to rake in the fruits of the rest of the world without — and this is the amazing thing — armed intervention, so that its people, almost unseen by the international community, have been able to sit back and revel in the riches which have poured into the country and which they themselves have, so to speak, merely processed, not altogether unlike a rat stowing away on a ship laden to the gunwales with food. Nor, I should perhaps point out in parenthesis, has Norway experienced any flourishing of the arts in conjunction with this material surfeit, as was the case in the Netherlands — and I suppose there is some justice in that. Little good does it do for an overexcited journalist once to have described Jonas Wergeland as the Rembrandt of his medium, on account of his innovative use of colour and wealth of detail.

I would like, in other words, to defend a point of view which holds luck to be the key factor in the history of Norway in the twentieth century; and when I say luck, I do not just mean the fluke by which, by being in the right place, at the right time, a nation quite unexpectedly finds itself enjoying a golden age. I am also thinking of the sort of good fortune which makes it possible to commit a crime and not be punished for it: crime without punishment, to twist the words of one of Russia’s greatest writers. And I have asked myself — please do take this as being well-meant, as a working hypothesis — whether it might not be this self-same good fortune, or the suppression of such, that has turned the Norwegian people so clearly into a nation of spoiled children, to the point where they have utterly lost sight of one of the most important facets of human nature: a sense for the tragic.

Sir William — who had studied civil engineering at the Norwegian Technical College, as it then was, in Trondheim — was the embodiment of this same combination of luck and criminal tendencies, of what one might call the ‘lucky sod’ syndrome. In the mid-sixties he had signed up as a so-called expert with the newly established and extremely lucrative undertaking that went by the name, not to say alias, of Norwegian Development Aid. So Sir William belonged, in fact, to the first generation of Norwegians to leave the country as perfectly ordinary Norwegian citizens and to come back rolling in money — not so much helping others as helping themselves, as Rakel put it — so much so that they could go right out and buy a better car or build a bigger house, the latter also necessary in order to have room for all those enormous zebra hides and rugs, all the chests and weapons, lion-claw necklaces and stuffed baby crocodiles, drums and stone figurines, the whole of Africa reduced to bric-à-brac, as if their stay there had been one long safari, several years of tourism, with the Norwegian state footing the bill. It was his time as an aid worker in Kenya that did for Sir William, although he had evinced incipient signs of snobbery early on: as, for example, when he exchanged his original surname for that of Rød, a place near Hvaler, and as if that weren’t enough had added an extra letter, giving Røed. But it was in Africa that he really had the chance to be on top in both material and social terms, where he could savour to the full the pleasure of belonging to a social elite with people bowing and scraping to you both in your own home and at the office. So by the time Sir William returned home, ironically enough from a commission entrusted to him by the Norwegian state, all of his socialist upbringing with its ideals of equality and distribution of goods had been about as thoroughly undermined as it could possibly be.

And yet the most amazing thing, and the reason why Jonas always kept a very close eye on Sir William in case he should inadvertently let slip some clue to the mystery, was that this long sojourn in a poverty-stricken African country had not instilled in him a greater sense of humility and gratitude. Instead, Sir William could sit there and talk as if he were the world’s greatest expert on Africa, when, that is, he was not pouring scorn on Norway as if intent in some way upon renouncing his country’s excellent infrastructure and relatively well-developed democracy in favour of a misgoverned dictatorship on the verge of collapse simply because it accorded such paradisiacal privileges to people of his (i.e. Sir William’s) calibre. Sir William did not return home, as did the individuals in Jonas Wergeland’s television series Thinking Big, intellectually enriched; he came home laden with prejudices, even more narrow-minded than before — and, not only that, but espousing a baffling brand of morality which amounted, basically, to straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. He could, for instance, never understand — indeed it was quite beyond his powers of comprehension — how his brother, Jonas’s father, could have chosen a profession in which the chances of making any real money were so slim.

And it was for this reason that he reluctantly concluded his peroration on Emperor Haile Selassie with a sort of prophetic pronouncement to the effect that tomorrow’s Ethiopia was going to go down the toilet and only then deigned to congratulate his brother on his new villa: ‘Splendid house, our kid, splendid,’ he said, glancing around. And even though Sir William earned five times as much as Jonas’s father and lived in a mansion, he could not quite conceal yet another character trait which he had honed to perfection while mixing with the other foreigners in Kenya: envy. ‘But where the hell did you get the money for it,’ he asked. ‘Did you rob a bank? Or have people suddenly started paying you for creating an atmosphere in their church?’

‘Winston Churchill helped us,’ said Jonas.

‘No, it was art,’ Haakon Hansen said, his fingers fluttering fretfully along the edge of the table as if longing for the piano keys. ‘I know you’ll find this hard to believe, William, but we came by the money through art.’

‘It’s not exactly what you’d call a prime location, is it?’ one of the Brothers Grimm chipped in.

‘The fact that it’s Grorud knocks half a million off the price,’ added the other.

Jonas’s mother just sat and smiled, shaking her head ever so slightly, as if she were shocked but was nonetheless having an uncommonly good time and would not have missed this for the world.

The mention of art prompted Veronika to turn the conversation to an exhibition which was currently the subject of fierce debate in the newspapers: a move which led Sir William, after screwing up his face at the red wine, to make a show of his interest in the arts by proclaiming how appallingly bad the artist in question, a woman, was, while his tirade only served to betray the fact that he had not even seen the exhibition.

As their uncle took a forkful of the poisonous mushrooms and popped them into his mouth, causing Rakel to look down at her plate, a sly smile on her face, he asked, apropos this artist, if it were not the case that Jonas knew her and if it were not in fact the case that he had even gone out with her. ‘That would be just like you,’ he remarked, turning to Jonas. ‘You never did have any ambition.’