The Seducer

Stave of Life

There were certain episodes in Jonas Wergeland’s life that he never quite got to the bottom of, that seemed to him to be shrouded in mist; there were even times when he wondered whether they had actually happened. As with the time when he was tramping up a hillside — not far from Ljomarberget, he discovered later — and she, Arnhild U., had stepped out of the haze right in front of him, accompanied by a grey elkhound. His first thought, despite her modern, forest-green clothing and, above all, the rifle she carried, was that she belonged to another age.

‘Idiot, you’ll scare away the elk,’ she had said, giving him a strangely penetrating look that did not, however, prevent a shiver of anticipation from running up his spine. There was something peasant-like about her, a brooding quality emphasized by the dark hair plaited into a wreath on top of her head. And yet her face was powerful, sensual, almost hungry-looking; her nostrils in particular made him feel as if she were sniffing him out, as if the smell of him would tell her more than she could see with her eyes.

‘Ever shot an elk?’ she asked, after taking a good long look at him. Jonas told her that the closest he had ever come to an elk had been the picture on a five øre piece, that such a thing as an elk-hunt was as remote from his experience as fishing for winter herring. ‘Well, you’d better stick with me then,’ she said, as if reciting from a fairytale, and proceeded to walk on. Jonas followed — not to find out what the hunt was like but to find out what she was like.

If he was not mistaken, and if he had not dreamt it, they headed up the hill towards Læshøe: towards what she called the ‘vigga’ — the belt between the forest and the bare mountain-top — through damp country glistening with the shades of autumn, colours to which the mist lent a subdued matte tone, reminiscent of tawny jade. As far as he could recall, the terrain had been hilly, with a few pine trees and a fair scattering of mountain birch, he had not really taken much notice; he had been too busy watching her, Arnhild U., striding on ahead of him with a dog on a leash and a rifle complete with telescopic sight over her shoulder. Each time they halted, he saw her nostrils twitching as if she were trying to compete with the dog to see who would catch wind of the elk first. She kept scanning from side to side, listening too; occasionally she stopped and hunkered down, studying a clump of greenery or running her fingers across the moss; now and again she looked at him with that same expression on her face and her nostrils flaring, as if he were another species of wildlife.

There was something unreal about the whole thing. They had just drawn level with some small patches of marsh when the dog suddenly tensed, lifted its nose into the air and dropped its tail half a turn. Arnhild U. planted a foot on the leash and slid her Browning rifle off her shoulder. She went down on one knee, cocked the gun, made Jonas get down too. Was this true? Did it happen? At any rate Jonas would swear later that he had been there in the marsh and seen a huge bull elk loom up right in front of them and that to begin with he had thought it must be a mirage, because he could not think what such a fabulous creature could be doing in a Norwegian forest; at that moment it had seemed not of this world at all, with its great, shovel-shaped antlers, the massive body on the long, spindly legs, like a ship in full sail. When it turned its head, presenting them with its curling muzzle and long goatee, the thought that flashed through Jonas’s mind was of a primeval world, of the Stone Age.

One thing was for certain, Jonas Wergeland had not come to Lom to hunt elk; he was there to see the stave church. In terms of cause and effect, the road from the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires to the stave church at Lom may have been a tortuous one, but no less understandable for all that. After entering the College of Architecture he had rapidly developed an interest in old Norwegian building styles. Indeed there were many who maintained that the stave church and the combination of staves and cog joints used in old cottages, lofts and storehouses — as found, for example, throughout the Otta valley — was Norway’s only significant contribution to architectural history.

And so, the day before, Jonas had wandered around the stave church at Lom, lost in wonder, running his fingers over the wood carvings on the chancel — an almost mesmerizing upward spiral of dragons — poring over the runic inscriptions, making sketches, lots of sketches, inhaling the scent of tar that pervaded the lofty, picturesque church interior, studying the old doorway, the ornamentation, counting the oldest pillars, inspecting the crossbeams and the St Andrew’s crosses, all the while trying to imagine how the original basilicum, now hidden away like a casket within the more recent church, must have looked, outside as well as in; although even here the dragons’ heads at the apexes of the gables lent the building an air of something dark and ancient, a vast scaly creature that at any moment might rise into the air and fly off across Lomseggen: a sight which, taken together with the smells and the touching had thrown him into a strange mood, one which had stayed with him right through the day, until he fell asleep in his hotel room and dreamed of cattle all night long. The next morning, despite the low cloud and the raw cold air, he had made his way on instinct, following some physical urge, up the hillside.

And now there he was, on his knees — if that is, this happened to him at all — next to a woman with a rifle in her hands, staring at a bull elk roughly a hundred metres away from them which, due to the haze, the misty smoky atmosphere, acquired the semblance of a creature of fable, some sort of dragon, a dragon amid a landscape of matte, red-gold jade; the whole scene seemed so unreal. Not to Arnhild U., though. She dropped her hand, and the dog lay down without a murmur then, just as the elk turned side on to them, she released the safety catch. Jonas’s attention was momentarily caught and held by the two animals, the dog and the elk, so archetypically Norwegian, this odd confrontation between two emblems, two coins of the realm, silver and copper. At that moment the elk froze, still as a statue, with raised head and stiff legs; it must have become aware of them; it was so majestic, so Norwegian, resembling — of all things — a stave church, in the middle of the forest, a powerful piece of ornamentation, something so beautiful that Jonas was about to ask her to spare it when she fired. The elk collapsed as if heaving a sigh, as if it had been brought down by something huge and invisible, striking from right overhead, even before the ear-splitting bang. She looked at him exultantly as if she knew she had been too quick for him.

‘You like to kill,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All good hunters like to kill.’ There was something about her eyes, her cheeks, her nostrils as if the adrenalin had worked a change on her face, rendering it even more hungry-looking, lustful.

Jonas was never quite certain, but they must have walked up to the downed elk, with the dog running round about, sniffing, licking blood from the dead animal’s nostrils, before it lay down as if on guard. Arnhild U. slung off her rucksack. ‘So what are you doing in Lom?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on the elk, on the head with its glassy, wide-open eyes.

‘I’d been planning to take a look at some of the old farms, the storehouses mainly,’ he said. ‘But when I left the hotel after breakfast I changed my mind, I felt I just had to go for a walk.’

‘Well, I suppose you’d better come home with me,’ she said as casually as before, and even at that point, he thought later, he must have known how it would end: with stave and log while he staved his log into her.

Of what followed, if it really did happen, he had only a hazy recollection: how Arnhild U. pulled out a knife and did things to the dead bull elk that mystified him, things to do with the penis and testicles and rectum, and something with the throat and gullet, before she slit open the belly from breastbone to haunches and embarked on the actual disembowelling, such a very bloody and messy business that Jonas had to turn away; only after the stomach, the intestines and other entrails were spilled out upon the ground, with the steam rising from them, did he turn round again, in time to see how, after hacking away the diaphragm, she stuck her hand far inside the chest cavity and with a grunt pulled out the gullet and windpipe, lungs and heart, making his gorge rise. ‘The heart,’ she said, pointing to a lump in a whitish sac before cutting it loose, and seconds later she was sticking two fingers into a red slimy clump and holding it aloft in her bloody hands like a bowling ball, looking as if she had just reached into a safe and brought out a jewel casket. ‘Hold this,’ she said, tossing it into Jonas’s hands. He felt the way his own heart thudded to be holding this elk heart, still warm; how his fingers slipped into the cavities into which the veins had run, while a rank smell rose from the hefty, pear-shaped lump of flesh, the very seat of the elk’s life. Arnhild U. scooped blood out of the abdominal cavity with her cupped hands and when she was finished she smiled for the first time, stood there smiling with her black hair plaited in a wreath around her head and her arms covered in blood and gore to the elbows. The entrails smoked on the ground, almost like the remains of a campfire. The whole countryside reeked of something indefinable, something raw and primitive.

She took a roll of kitchen paper from her rucksack and cleaned her hands, walked up to him with the knife raised. He held the heart while she sliced off a little piece, popped it into her mouth. ‘Mmmmm,’ she said, closed her eyes, opened them again, looked at him, long and hard, he was still holding the elk heart up in front of him, with both hands, as if he were taking part in some sort of sacrificial rite.

As she was getting Jonas to slip the heart into a carrier bag, four burly men came walking up the hill. ‘Can you lot manage to haul this down to the tractor without me?’ she said, when the men reached them. ‘I have a guest,’ she said, as if that explained everything. They nodded wordlessly, looked at Jonas, looked at the elk; one of them had already gone off to cut down a birch bough. Arnhild U. packed the carrier bag containing the heart into her rucksack and started to walk down the hill, Jonas automatically following behind. The dog stayed behind with the men.

Although Jonas was sure that at least some of the events detailed above must have occurred, he never could figure out what actually happened next. He remembered them coming to the road where her car was parked, and that they drove towards Otta, that they turned off the road and drove up to a big old farm set around two courtyards and comprising a number of buildings built out of logs, blackish-brown timbers, including the farmhouse itself. They must have gone in there, he thought they had, into the kitchen, before she showed him the parlour, full of heavy, old furniture, log chairs and rose-painted cabinets, woven hangings and bookcases, a large desk, on which sat a picture of King Haakon; he believed he remembered that, because it had surprised him, a desk, he could not have known that freeholder’s daughter Arnhild U. would one day save the reputation of the farmers, at a time when most people felt that subsidies to Norwegian agriculture were becoming somewhat excessive. But that was still some years away; on that particular day Arnhild U. was alone on the farm, and she gave Jonas Wergeland, student of architecture, a guided tour, showed him the ancient storehouse, the stabbur where Jonas — although he had almost no memory of this — had gazed about him in awe, had said something about the corner-post, muttered something about the Middle Ages, about the Folk Museum, about Norwegian building materials: stone, wood and turf, that it was beautiful, powerful, he believed he had said, ran his hands over the thick solid crossbeams on the ground floor of the loft as if it were a living creature.

The way he recalled it later, they then stepped into the cow byre, which had been modernized, and there was something about the smell of the place, not that it was in any way bad, but there was something so strong, so primordial about it, something to do with muck and beasts and fermentation gases that had an almost stupefying effect. She had taken his hand, he was certain about that, while they were still walking along the feed-floor between the stalls containing the cows, or rather, those that were inside, the ones that had recently calved, recumbent creatures, large heads to either side, chewing the cud, she even came out with the odd name as they progressed, that is just what they did: progressed, as if passing between the rows of pews in a church. As far as he could remember the walls were white, and yet to him the room had seemed dim and full of big brown eyes that followed them, placid animals, a room that thrummed harmoniously. It must have been somewhere around there, probably right at the very back, by the door into the feed-room, because he thought he remembered there being calves, both new-born calves, each in their own little box, and calves in bigger pens, and hay, too, the calves were given hay, she said, at least he thought she had said that, just before she pressed herself against him with a desire so fierce that he could feel her heart pounding through her clothes, feel her whole body trembling, after which she blinded him, almost smothered him with kisses and started to tear impatiently at his belt and then, with surprising strength, a powerful longing, she almost lifted him off the floor and threw him down in a tiny, empty box, into the hay, or at any rate onto something soft, something yielding and comfortable, and I am here to tell you that this is, in all essentials, true. I can also reveal that she had tried all along to resist, even though she had been filled with desire from the moment she laid eyes on him up on the hillside, because she was a virtuous woman, with strong moral principles, particularly regarding sex before marriage, but there in the byre, possibly because it smelled so strongly of living things, she had allowed her emotions to gain the upper hand, or as she was later to say: ‘I knew it was madness, but I was so blessedly spellbound. It burned the very cockles of my heart.’ Those were exactly, and typically, the words Arnhild U. used.

Jonas, for his part, was never absolutely certain whether it could have been true, that he really did lie there on his back, right next to the calves, seeing her suddenly standing over him, naked from the waist down, how she flushed red, or how her whole face seemed to swell with lust as she tore off his trousers and sat astride him, at the same time guiding his hands up under her homespun jacket and sweater and flannel shirt, cupping them over her breasts and shutting her eyes; and no sooner was that done than, with a long deep breath, she opened herself to him, and he slid inside her, in to something so warm and wet and vital that it immediately put him in mind of a big warm heart. And later, he had the definite impression that not even he, not even Jonas Wergeland, for all the singular experiences he had been through, had ever been made love to with such ecstasy, with such a fierce intensity, with such power, such carnal — yes, that was just the word for it — lust as when Arnhild U. made love to him: Arnhild U., who threw back her head and rode him as if she had been waiting for this half her life, who rode so hard that the hair around her head began to fall loose, made love to him deeply, passionately, slowly; thinking back on it later he would always feel that it had been like making love to the earth itself, and yet all the time he had the idea that she was not making love to him, but to something greater, thoughts she herself had, or that she was making love to something quite different, a creature of fable, and there was also something about the animals close by, the sound of hooves stamping on the floor, a lowing sound, possibly from a cow about to calve and, above all else, the smell, the smell of cattle and silos, of hay and muck, pure muck, permeating everything and making him feel like a beetle, a beetle in a dung heap, living life to the full. But just one look at her face was enough to dispel this thought, because her face glowed as if she were praying, as if she were right in the middle of a prayer, and as she rode him, more and more intensely, moving up and down, both deep and high at the same time, her face slowly took on a look of utter ecstasy, and the wreath of hair, or what was left of the wreath of hair, seemed almost like a halo around her head. This sight absorbed his attention for so long that his own thoughts did not overcome him until near the end, in the form of a strong awareness of, not to say a longing for, roots: to belong somewhere, because it had been brought home to him that it was from this that he, too, stemmed, from houses built out of stone and wood and turf, other places, other times, farmers, fishermen and hunters, yes, hunters too, and it was on the way home, after his visit to Lom, that Jonas Wergeland was struck by the impulse to stop off at Gardermoen in order to find out finally where his mother’s childhood home had stood.

He lay in the byre, all of his senses on the alert, picking up the sight of dust dancing in a band of light, the smells and sounds of ruminant creatures and, above all else, her ecstatic face, as if the sacred and the profane had been brought together in one room; and just before he came, as he felt the seed seeming to surge up from a deeper source than usual, in the midst of his thoughts regarding his own epic, or lack of his own epic, she jumped off, as if her subconscious were taking its own precautions, or perhaps feminine intuition had told her that this was her most fertile time of the month, with the result that his semen spurted over the small of her back, leaving an exclamation mark there, before she smeared it in with her hand and lifted her fingers greedily to her nose, holding them under her quivering nostrils.

Jonas Wergeland’s first clear memory was of the moment when he unlocked the door of his car outside the Fossheim Hotel. But as he bowled down the road towards Otta, even when he could clearly see her farm, or what he thought was her farm, a collection of wood, stone and turf that almost merged with the landscape, he was not sure what had occurred earlier or whether anything at all had happened, whether the whole thing belonged to another life, to another time entirely.