The Seducer

Taj Mahal

And so coming to Copenhagen was like coming to another continent. It was not only the moral shock of being able to walk into any grocer’s shop and buy a bottle of white wine — it was more the gravity of the old buildings and palaces, all the verdigrised roofs and spires, a quite different sense of history than in Oslo, of nobility, if you like. Copenhagen was a capital worthy of a Duke.

At least a couple of times a year Jonas Wergeland and the other Nomads took themselves off to Copenhagen. Not to visit Tivoli, or the Zoo, not to buy hash in the Free State of Christiania or to watch porno movies or buy Danish salami. The purpose of these trips was two-fold: first they trawled the second-hand bookshops and then, in the evening, they repaired to number 38 Vesterbrogade.

When the Nomads stepped off the ferry in the morning, right next to Sankt Annæ Plads, they immediately set out on their wanderings from one watering-hole to the next, which is to say from one second-hand bookshop to the next; they combed all of those wonderful, chaotic, dust-laden treasure-houses with such fine-sounding addresses as Fiolstræde and Nørregade, Studiestræde and Nansensgade.

Jonas Wergeland was never a great book man, but he had nothing against second-hand bookshops. He like the lottery of it, the fact that you could stick your hand into any bookshelf at random and suddenly find yourself clutching some totally unexpected prize — let’s say a book by Carsten Niebuhr, astronomer and explorer: a well-thumbed copy of Beschreibung von Arabien.

And that was the whole point. For the Nomads, the idea was to track down books that were not to be had in Norway, different books — books which the Others did not read. What they wanted — for reasons which they themselves obstinately maintained lay in their genes — was to be different. Which is why, true to tradition, the Nomads had also chiselled out their own tablet of Commandments: 1. Thou shalt wander the streets. 2. Thou shalt eat as much exotic food as possible. 3. Thou shalt transcend thine own limits. 4. Thou shalt not discuss the death of God. 5. Thou shalt not cite the names of Marx, Nietzsche or Freud.

Thanks mainly to this last commandment they were always on the lookout for alternative thinkers, books which were not ‘in’ at that time. They read, for example, Richard Burton’s brilliant and wildly speculative ethnographic studies; they read Paul Valéry’s razor-sharp essays and Erwin Panofsky’s perceptive history of art. They read Georg Simmel rather than Marx, William James rather than Freud, and they read Paul Cézanne’s Correspondance rather than anything whatsoever of Nietzsche’s overrated, contradiction-ridden tirades.

So the lion’s share of the day was spent straining their eyes to read names and titles on jam-packed shelves and it did happen, of course, usually just before closing time, that one of them would fall for a fata morgana; that Axel’s eye would light exultantly on the spine of a much coveted volume which would promptly disappear — melt into thin air — as he reached out his hand. Then, at the appointed time, they would meet in Rådhusplads and march in a body, absolutely famished, to number 38 Vesterbrogade. I doubt if many Norwegians in the early seventies associated anything whatsoever with the first floor of number 38 Vesterbrogade — nor yet today, come to that — but for Jonas Wergeland and the Nomads, with their fondness for exotic food, this was a place of pilgrimage. Having once reached Copenhagen you didn’t go satisfying your hunger with Danish smørbrød or flæskesteg med kartofler — that’s roast pork with potatoes to you and me — nor yet by running a relay from one of the wealth of hot dog stalls to the next. Oh, no — you saved your appetite for number 38 Vesterbrogade.

Because at number 38 Vesterbrogade you found the Taj, one of the very first Indian restaurants in Scandinavia. In those days, of course, there was not a single Indian eating-house in Oslo. And as far as I am concerned, the fact that the first Indian restaurant did not open there until well into the eighties says more than any number of anthropological treatises about the Norwegian national character, about Norway’s astonishing isolation, about Norway’s lack of appeal to other nationalities — and, not least, the limited culinary curiosity of your average Norwegian.

For this reason the Taj, and not forgetting the proprietors, Saba and Promila, was actually the main objective of their visit — more than the bookshops, although naturally they could not restrain themselves, but fell to scrutinizing one another’s literary booty the minute they had plonked themselves down at the table. And there, in that L-shaped room lit by oil lamps, with its walls of exquisitely carved walnut, they consumed various dishes ordered from a lavish menu glued onto sheets of copper, while they leafed through books with faded spines and covers flecked with mildew, notes scribbled in their margins by avid readers and forgotten bookmarks of the strangest descriptions — and you can take it from me, the atmosphere in the Taj on the evenings when the Nomads ate there, surpassed even that of the Restaurant Krølle in Oslo in its intellectual heyday. The hot spicy food seemed to set fire to their conversation, or perhaps it was the books lying higgledy-piggledy among the plates and bowls and glasses that created an uncommonly propitious mood, thereby taking their discussions to quite unwonted and explosive heights, to moments of almost ecstatic joy and an instinctive understanding of even the most hair-raisingly complex issues.

As I say, Jonas was not all that interested in books — or not their content, at any rate, he preferred the actual hunt — but he loved sitting in that restaurant, with sitar music playing in the background, popping paper-thin morsels of crisp poppadom into his mouth, while Ganesh, the great scribe, rendered in brass, gazed down on him from the wall. It was as if, at long last, he found himself in that India to which he had first been introduced in his boyhood copy of the Kama Sutra.

The others, however, alternated between uttering blissful sighs and reading aloud from the day’s antiquarian finds. Alva, who had dreams of becoming a playwright, had stumbled upon the memoirs of the Danish actress Johanne Luise Heiberg, A Life Relived in Memory; and look at this, she said, helping herself to some more paneer chat masaladar, an exotic vegetable cocktail, believe it or not she had actually obtained a book containing Denis Diderot’s marvellous polemic on acting: Paradoxe sur le Comédien. ‘To feel or not to feel, that is the question,’ she declaimed, holding the book theatrically at arm’s length. And what about Trine? Trine sat wreathed in smiles, both because she was halfway through a bowl of mulligatawny, that celebrated soup, and because she had finally managed to track down the manuscript, in book form, of the film that Carl Theodor Dreyer never managed to make: Jesus of Nazareth.

‘What’s that there?’ Axel asked, pointing to one dish. He was in great good spirits, a huge stack of books under his protective eye. ‘Shahi korma rampuri, lamb cooked in a curry sauce,’ Jonas told him. ‘Right, give me some of that. Now folks, who wrote this? “Her body was moving in great surging billows under him. For one fearful moment they listened to each other’s gasping breathing and she whispered into his ear: ‘Yes.’ The darkness in front of his eyes was lit by myriads of tiny twinkling, singing stars. In cruel rapture mingled with pain and fear he let it happen.”’

‘Nabokov?’ suggested Thomas. ‘Miller,’ said Trine. ‘It has to be an Englishman,’ said Alva. ‘D.H. Lawrence.’ Axel grinned, shaking his head as the guesses rained down upon him, each one wilder than the one before.

‘Agnar Mykle,’ he said. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have removed it. Axel had only one Norwegian literary hero: Agnar Mykle. ‘It’s from a translation of Lasso rundt fru Luna. An outrageously bad one, I’m sad to say. Stupid bastards have cut at least ten sentences from that short extract alone. It’s a disgrace.’

Kashmir pullao, fried rice, and nan mahiwal, bread baked in a tandoori oven, were passed round along with bowls containing different relishes, wine bottles and jugs of water. They were sitting not far from the door and a model of the Taj Mahal faithful in every detail, lit from within. Over their table hung a large painting of Krishna dancing.

‘Here we are,’ said Thomas triumphantly, brandishing a copy of Theodor W. Adorno’s heavyweight contribution to the philosophy of modern music, unearthed in the deepest recesses of Grubbs Antikvariat in Nørregade. ‘Just you wait till I read what Theo W. has to say about the difference between Schönberg and Stravinsky,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come up with the definitive argument for proving that, compared to Beethoven, Mozart is a gnat.’ Upon which, predictably enough, another huge and vociferous argument broke out, causing people at the surrounding tables to prick up their ears, because even though all sorts of verbal hogwash might be served up at the table round which the Nomads sat over their mumtaz tikka and tandoori gobi, the odd pearl did also fall from their lips.

‘This is for you,’ Axel said rather solemnly, when the food had once more become the centre of attention, handing Jonas a fine, later edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos. ‘You can always see if you can find any sign of Pluto in there.’

Jonas, too, had dutifully purchased a book. About the South Pole. Oddly enough it was in Nansensgade that he had come upon Ernest Henry Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic. Jonas was perpetually on the hunt for arguments concerning the South Pole.

Jonas Wergeland had never run from his social responsibilities, even though he had soon discovered that any exercising of these would often have to be more symbolic than actual, as witness his more or less successful efforts to show solidarity with the remote island kingdom of Les Comores. Jonas knew that the choice of a political cause, which in turn was, of course, based on a choice of values that could never be proved, of turtles, if you like, was necessarily something of a lottery — a bit like the books one picked up in a second-hand bookshop. So let me simply state that, even before his more short-lived commitment to the Comorian cause, in fact, Jonas Wergeland’s eye had fallen on a geographical region and hence a political issue that was to concern him for the rest of his life — so much so that each year on April 10th he commemorated the birthday of the great humanist and natural rights theorist Hugo Grotius, the only person in Norway to do so.

Jonas Wergeland came down, in other words, in favour of the Antarctic — a somewhat opportunist choice, one might think, and not particularly original these days, when everyone from Greenpeace to conservative politicians is trying to cash in on this poor corner of the world, but I would just like to remind you that Jonas made his choice over twenty-five years ago. Of the few books he owned, nine out of ten had to do with the South Pole. Thus, Jonas Wergeland was one of the first people in Norway to recognize that this mysterious seventh continent was under threat, partly from the more or less covert lust for power of certain countries, and the front they provided for good old-fashioned imperialism, and partly by the ecological consequences of the modern technology that was now coming into use.

Jonas Wergeland was critical, not least, of his own country’s position in the Antarctic. He simply could not see why, just because some stubborn and vainglorious Norwegian had made it to the pole by dogsled and because other Norwegians had conducted a pretty ruthless whaling operation down there — the last thing anyone wanted to talk about now — Norway could lay claim to such an outrageously large slice of this colossal ice-cake, an area seven times greater than Norway itself.

As time went on, Jonas Wergeland developed a genuine fascination for the Antarctic, once part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, the way one always becomes interested in a subject if one only reflects on it for long enough, even if it has been chosen at random and even, indeed, if one has a dread of snow and ice. Jonas became more than simply fascinated — he eventually came to regard this paradoxically barren continent as a key, as an angle on the entire global situation at the end of the twentieth century. It was a laboratory not only for the forces of nature, but also for the forces of society, inasmuch as it represented a point of intersection, a mishmash of scientific, economic and political problems. The Antarctic was quite simply a gigantic and valuable prism of ice. Which is also why there was nothing Jonas feared more than that this fragile continent, its transparency, as it were, would be polluted by airports, waste and, worst of all, mine workings since, according to the experts, Antarctica was bursting with minerals. And despite the fact that the Antarctic Treaty painted an ostensible picture of sheer, harmonious idyll, with all its fine talk about peace and research, Jonas was keenly aware that this was nowhere near good enough. Because it was an indisputable fact — and this formed the very cornerstone of his commitment to the South Pole — that we in the West still inhabited a society where profit-oriented production was the governing corporate principle in the world of finance. That much socialism he had managed to absorb.

Although the term ‘environmental protection’ had not yet become all the rage, Jonas realized that this, the coldest, driest, highest continent on Earth, almost totally covered by an icecap measuring roughly 2000 metres thick, ought to be regarded much as a work of art, that it ought to be protected in the same way as the Taj Mahal. The Antarctic was the cleanest, most untouched place on Earth, ‘still a virgin in a global brothel’ as a future comrade-in-arms was to put it. The way Jonas saw it, it was obvious that the uninhabited South Pole — not counting the hundreds of millions of penguins, that is — should belong to all mankind and not merely to the seven countries with a claim to sovereignty, and hence he firmly believed — as a number of poorer countries would later suggest — that the Antarctic ought to be administered by the UN. Jonas was pretty certain that Trygve Lie would have supported such an idea.

So Jonas Wergeland not only celebrated Michelangelo Day in grand style; for many years, every April 10th — on ‘Grotius Day’ as he called it — you would find Jonas Wergeland on Karl Johans gate in Oslo, handing out fliers which he had personally paid to have printed, bearing such headings as ‘Give the Antarctic To The Penguins’, ‘Let Amundsen Rest In Peace’ and ‘Queen Maud’s Dubious Honour’. These relatively entertaining days on Karl Johan’s gate also taught Jonas something about how staggeringly little the average Norwegian knew about the South Pole, despite the fact that they were natives of a country that had placed an unbelievable seventh part of this vast region under Norwegian dominion, according it the status of a ‘dependency’.

On one occasion, thanks to these agitprop activities, Jonas was even invited to visit the office of the polar advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and there were rumours that Jonas’s expert knowledge and his warning that a minerals convention would not be ratified, nor prove in the long run to be a viable option, had carried some weight — and this I can corroborate. So Jonas Wergeland was in fact a pioneer and opinion-shaper as far as the South Pole was concerned and can in fact take no small share of the credit for the Antarctic, in due course, being accorded a new protocol on environmental protection — as long as it lasts, say I: because no one should be fooled into thinking that the Antarctic, cold though it may be, is not still a very hot, not to say piping hot, potato. All you have to do is mention the word ‘platinum’.

But such triumphs lay far in the future. For now, Jonas Wergeland was with the other Nomads in Copenhagen, in Vesterbrogade, in the Taj restaurant, tucking into dessert — Mango halves and kulfi-e-heer, ice cream. ‘What the hell’s that?’ Thomas asked Axel, sounding out the legend on the spine of a book picked up in an ordinary bookshop. ‘De la … Grammatologie? Jacques Derrida? Never heard of him,’ he said. ‘He’s going to be big,’ said Axel. ‘Derrida — sounds like a swearword to me,’ said Trine. Everybody laughed at Axel’s bad buy, thumped him on the back. Alva raised her glass to the statues of Parvati and Lakshmi further down the room.

They never slept on their nights in Copenhagen. After a lengthy dinner rounded off by handfuls of sugar-coated aniseed and betel-nuts they would meander down to Central Station to consign their books to left-luggage lockers. That done, they walked the streets: Copenhagen is a wonderful city for walking, especially at night. They wandered along the banks of Peblinge Sø discussing the virgin birth; they sauntered past the gardens of Rosenborg Palace totally engrossed in an exchange on the younger Malraux versus the older; as a bit of light relief on their way past The Marble Church, Jonas and Axel played Ellington’s smoky melancholy ‘Dusk’ on two mouth organs, before they wandered out to the Little Mermaid, a regular stop on their route, where they stood — all alone — and talked about wonder-boy Eddy Merckx, who had just won the Tour de France for the fifth time. On the way back, something akin to a fight broke out between Thomas and Alva over the importance of Norbert Elias, a heated discussion that lasted from Amalienborg to Kongens Nytorv. Not until they were seated over a glass of Gammel Dansk bitters and an early breakfast at Nyhavn, gathering their strength for a last bout of pearl diving in the antiquarian sea, were they reconciled if no closer to agreement.

It is easy to laugh at all this, I warrant you, but as I say, it’s an all too brief stage in life.

On the boat home they all fell asleep early, curled up in their Sleeperettes, all except Axel Stranger. He sat on the deck in the light summer night, reading Jacques Derrida, underlining like mad, toes curling with glee, blowing kisses to the gulls, already looking forward to regaling the others with the weird content of this book over a steaming hot dish of couscous at Bényoucéf’s.