The Seducer

The East is Red

He sat on a bench in a crowded park, looking out across a brown, muddy river teeming with every imaginable kind of boat, from little barges to rusty-hulled freighters; the occasional timeless junk glided past, and even the odd submarine, a red flag fluttering from its tower. Jonas gazed in fascination at the busy harbour, at this improbable spectrum of vessels, with the incessant hooting of the boats resounding in his ears, horns of varying pitches mingling with the bicycle bells on the street behind him, a sound like the tinkling of a thousand crystal shards; the deep, full notes and the crisp chiming, layer upon layer, forming a sound so complex, so inexhaustible and so totally apt for a country as unfathomable as China, land of the Ur-turtle.

Passers-by gaped at him in wonder, a few pointed openly. An elderly man, bareheaded and walking with a cane, stopped short and unabashedly eyed Jonas up and down. ‘Takk for i dag, ser deg i morgen,’ he said. ‘Bye for now. See you tomorrow.’ in Norwegian. When he saw the look on Jonas’s face he laughed and said: ‘You are from Norwegian? I could see it on you.’

‘How could you tell?’ Jonas asked.

The man pointed to Jonas’s shoes, but said: ‘Face. Ja, vi elsker. Bjørn Bjørnstjerne.’ This time he was quoting the Norwegian national anthem and misquoting the name of its author. The man sat down on the bench next to Jonas. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket, once blue now almost grey, that reminded Jonas of the jackets his grandfather had once worn, jackets that smelled of the seven seas and a hundred harbours. The man explained, in English of a sort, that at one time, many years before, he had worked in the bar of the seaman’s club. He waved an arm in the direction of the Huangpu’s murky waters, the bustle on the river, as if this were an attraction in itself. Just beyond them, two old men were playing mah-jong. ‘My father was a Christian,’ the man told him as if in confidence. His father had been a convicted criminal who had served time in prison. In Changsha, in Hunan province. On his release he had met a missionary from the Norwegian Missionary Society who had told him the story of Lars Skrefsrud, the Norwegian missionary who had also been to prison. This story had changed his father’s life, the man maintained.

They sat for a while in silence, gazing at the boats sailing so close together on the Huangpu that you could almost have crossed to the other side without getting your feet wet. ‘That was a long time ago,’ the man said. ‘The churches are closed now.’

Jonas nodded. He was more annoyed at the fact that the Jade Buddha Temple was closed, he would have liked to have seen it.

‘Do you know anything about Skrefsrud?’ said the man. Behind them the bicycle bells sounded like a sea of grasshoppers.

No, Jonas did not, apart from the name and some vague memory of an RI lesson about the Santal Mission. Wasn’t there something about the Norwegian Mission Society refusing to take him as a student?

‘He was a great orator,’ the man said.

‘Like Mao.’

‘Exactly. Like Mao.’ The man nodded eagerly. Did Jonas know that Skrefsrud had once spoken to 15,000 people in the capital city of Norway, out-of-doors — no loudspeakers, of course — and that he had spoken for two hours?

‘Why do you take such an interest in Skrefsrud?’

‘Because of my father. That strange coincidence. They were both locksmiths of a sort, too.’

‘So you are a Christian?’

‘No, but that does not stop me from respecting him.’

Jonas looked at the man and smiled, unsure whether he was referring to Skrefsrud or his father. People were funny. When he returned home from that trip, this was one of the things he remembered best, a little Chinese man talking about Lars Skrefsrud in a park on the banks of the Huangpu, thus tying up neatly with a story about red pins which Jonas had first heard as a small boy, from Nefertiti’s great-aunt, on a terrace on the banks of the Rakkestad river and leaving Jonas with a sense of connectedness in life and the world.

‘Are you a missionary?’ the man asked as he rose to leave. Jonas shook his head. He could have said: I’m travelling with a group of missionaries, only they don’t do their missionary work here, but in Norway. One might say that they had come to the ‘mother country’ for a refresher course.

Jonas had decided to keep a low profile and not make fun of his travelling companions. He knew, and was almost ashamed to admit, that he had his brother, the legendary Red Daniel, to thank for the fact that he had been able to make ‘the great leap’ from Norwegian to Chinese soil at all, places on such trips were in great demand. So without delving any deeper into the whys and wherefores, or the tedious preparations for the trip itself, I will simply take the liberty of saying that in the latter half of May 1974 Jonas Wergeland found himself in the Middle Kingdom, along with twenty-three others travelling under the auspices of the Norwegian-Chinese League of Friendship, and that they were there with the clearly stated aim of learning.

The most important lesson Jonas learned on this eventful trip — more important than his meeting with the living mummy Mao Tse Tung — was about his brother. Jonas had to go all the way to China to discover that he had got Daniel all wrong. For the greater part of his life Jonas had despised Daniel deeply and sincerely for his astonishing ability to combine overachievement with opportunistic radical views, his way of pairing success at school and on the sports field with all the ‘right’ forms of rebellion at any given time: the Rolling Stones, a final year at the Experimental High School, the odd joint, demonstrating against the hydroelectric power station at Mardøla — and the AKP. Essentially, the two had been waging a cold war ever since Buddha came into the family, Jonas could never forgive Daniel for being ashamed of Buddha. And yet, to Jonas’s surprise, Daniel had pulled a few strings and wangled him a place on the trip to China. And Jonas was grateful. For years, ever since Aunt Laura had told him about Ao, the Chinese Ur-turtle, the turtle that carries the world on its back, he had longed to see China.

I really ought to provide a brief summary of the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist movement, but I will have to refrain, for one thing because on this subject most Norwegians are liable to suffer from a fatal mental block — and the generation in question be heavily on the defensive — for at least another fifty years; so the detrimental effects will be felt for a while yet. Just as with the slow-acting poisons in certain mushrooms, the serious hallucinations do not kick in until much later.

I will simply say that Red Daniel was a member, and seemingly one of the more fanatical and dedicated ones, of the Norwegian Maoist party, more commonly referred to by the acronym AKP which, by dint of the staccato fashion in which the cadres were wont to pronounce it, tended to put one in mind of the rifle that the majority of young Norwegian men make the acquaintance of during their national service: the AG3. And in many ways that is what they were, a bunch of walking, talking automatic rifles; they could take bits from one another and put themselves together exactly as one would assemble a rifle. To cut a long story short: when it came to the so-called M-L movement, Jonas Wergeland inclined towards the virus theory. As far as Jonas could see, the fact that a whole gang of ostensibly normal young Norwegians seemed to feel that they had been saved by a political theory which was at one and the same time so touchingly naïve and so horrendously totalitarian could only be put down to the ideological side-effects of some form of virus that had so far escaped the notice of medical research.

That said, I would go so far as to say that the motives of many members of the party were far more irrational than was first thought; it was not simply a matter of sublimated religious fervour or a disguised lust for power, as some people, wise after the event, have maintained. During their three weeks in China, Jonas discovered his brother’s essential story: the story which provided the key to his enigmatic persona.

This story was a variation of another story with which Jonas was to some extent familiar but which he had never got to the bottom of. It concerned his brother’s piano playing. Like many children, while he was in the fourth grade Daniel had — much against his will — started taking piano lessons from a teacher who lived on Bergensveien, and despite having little or no talent for it — listening to him practise was downright painful — he struggled valiantly through ‘Gems from the Baroque’ and ‘Practice is Fun’ and ‘The Piano and I’ to the point where even Jonas, who was never surprised by his brother’s opportunism, could not imagine what induced him to carry on. Only when, after four hard years, Daniel had finally decided to throw in the towel, to stop taking piano lessons, did he confess to Jonas, one evening when they were lying in their bunk-beds, what it was that had kept him going back to that in many ways detested house up on Bergensveien week after week: to have the chance, once again, of feeling the piano teacher’s tits brush the back of his neck as she leaned over him impatiently to show him how the pieces he was murdering ought to be played. And even though Jonas had to grant that the young piano teacher was very attractive, he could hardly believe his ears, lying there in his bunk-bed: that anyone would put up with four years of torture for the occasional thrill of feeling a pair of tits against the back of their head!

It was only when they reached China that Jonas realized what an impressive feat this had been, and how much it said about his brother; about his staying power, his ulterior motives and, above all else, his nigh-on criminal sexual appetite. Because it was the same story over again, the piano lessons found their parallel in the AKP. Not to beat about the bush, the truth was that deep down, behind all his iron-clad ideological convictions, the latterly so legendary Red Daniel, Jonas Wergeland’s brother, had only one motive for being a member of the AKP: to pull the chicks. I know it sounds hard to believe, and even Jonas would have scoffed at the idea had he not witnessed first-hand, on that trip to China, his brother’s virtuoso technique for laying even the most hard-line, red-hot, female Marxist-Leninists: in other words, watched him putting into practice the reductionist lesson their sister had taught them when they were little: behind all the fine words, all ways lead to that spot between a woman’s thighs. In those three weeks, Red Daniel climbed into bed with no less than four of the eleven girls in their party, and believe me, that called for no small amount of ingenuity and subterfuge — in many ways living up to the AKP’s own methods — since at best they all had to sleep two to a room; and one of the girls was actually married to one of the guys in the group, who was sitting, in well-known, vulgar Maoist fashion, discussing why the people of Norway had to oppose the EEC even though China was in favour of the EEC, while his wife was writhing in the throes of a vulgar and most welcome orgasm in Daniel’s room, with only a thin wall between them.

While still on the train to Moscow, from where they were to travel on by plane with the Chinese airline CAAC, Jonas had been mildly surprised to see his brother coming on to one of the girls in the party, but then, he thought, that was fair enough, Daniel had as much right as anybody else to flirt about a bit and maybe even find himself a steady girlfriend. Jonas could not, of course, have known that his brother’s sole and very short-term goal was to screw this woman, a teacher with an extremely determined chin, up against the door of the train toilet, in time to the rumble of the wheels over the railway tracks, until she forgot all about Lenin’s teachings and instead underwent a re-education of sorts, starting all over again at the first letter of the alphabet. But in the endless, flat expanses of Peking, in between visits to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs, not to mention the Forbidden City with its yellow roofs and 9000 rooms, even harder going than the Louvre, Jonas noted that his brother had changed ladies, and indeed that on their five days in Peking, which also included the usual round of somewhat tedious visits to kindergartens and printing works and car factories, he changed ladies twice — the last one being a hardened feminist to boot, a dentist with a steely gaze. Jonas had to smile when he overheard his brother condemning, absolutely and utterly, all forms of pornography — Daniel, who as a teenager must surely have held the Norwegian record for the number of decilitres of semen expended during tension-relieving sessions in the bathroom over a paper harem judiciously selected from Solhaug’s biggest pile of soft-core porn magazines.

Some years after the trip to China, when Red Daniel, like just about everyone else, had had enough of the AKP and was busily engaged in blandly denying that any of it had ever happened — as if he and they truly had recovered from a virus infection that had also wiped their memories clean — while at the same time reverting to his old familiar ways: completing his education swiftly and efficiently and passing with flying colours, Jonas had quizzed him about this. Why on Earth had he done it? What was so special about those girls? At that, Daniel had to sit down, as if the memory were too much for him, and in the same tremulous voice that Jonas remembered from the evening, lying in their bunk-beds, when his brother had described the feeling of the piano teacher’s breasts against the back of his neck, he told him what the AKP women were like in bed. ‘Honestly, Jonas, there’s no one like them, they’re pure dynamite,’ he said, thereby betraying that he, like all the other AKP leaders, did not regret a thing. Red Daniel’s eyes shone when he spoke about what it was like to have sex with the AKP girls, who had made love with a wild abandon and a passion that left Daniel lost for words. Jonas’s brother had in fact discovered that the AKP stimulated the sex drive, exactly like an aphrodisiac: how, thanks to its very one-dimensionality and contrived view of reality, this entire milieu was actually as fraught with repressed sexuality and sublimated eroticism as any extremist religious sect. All you had to do was help yourself. ‘I’m telling you, Jonas: after an inane two-hour long discussion on why we had to oppose the formation of the republic of Bangladesh — to wit: because China said so — even though those poor people down there were crying out with one voice for independence; or after an intense and totally ludicrous meeting to debate the necessity of “armed rev’-lution, like y’know”, these women were like overripe fruit, one touch and they fell, exploded with pent-up desire. They wanted to be eaten, they wanted to let their juices pour down over you.’ Jonas laughed, but Daniel swore that he had never experienced anything like the sex he had had with those women, forced to embrace asceticism, their heads spinning from having to keep track of so many outrageously contradictory and mutually exclusive assertions. Like starving souls they clung to him as if he were an oasis in the desert. Daniel’s real stroke of genius was to remind these bewildered girls — because even behind those determined chins and steely gazes they were bewildered — that they had bodies, that they possessed a beauty and an allure far above and beyond the bounds of the grandest Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. Sex with Daniel represented a shortcut back to the real world, a brief glimpse of normal life, something which all of those woman eagerly clutched at, if only for one night.

But Jonas knew nothing of this on that visit to China, nor would he have had anything against Red Daniel’s excesses, had it not been for one thing: also on the trip was a real working-class girl, a very quiet and, to Jonas’s mind, artless AKP girl who worked in a factory in Fredrikstad, without anyone having asked her to do so: a girl, in other words, with her working-class credentials in order, unlike Daniel, who had to hide behind a mother at Grorud Ironmongery. This girl, whom Jonas called ‘the Princess’, had a steady boyfriend back home in Fredrikstad, he too a true-blue worker, and during the trip Jonas learned that she had applied — applied! — to become pregnant but had had her application rejected by her comrades in the AKP. It was fine by Jonas if Daniel seduced teachers and dentists, those girls with the determined chins and steely gazes for whom, assuming that they did not shoot themselves, this merely represented a brief hiatus in their careers, after which they would be able to sport the AKP like a flower in their buttonholes, but he took a very dim view of his brother also entangling an innocent, trusting girl like the Princess in his net.

Which is exactly what happened in Shanghai, on the day that they visited the No. 1 Department Store in Nanking Street — now Nanjing Donglu — where almost all of them had bought shoulder-bags emblazoned with red Chinese characters saying ‘Serve the people’, a motto which Daniel had long since supplanted with ‘Love the people’. They were sitting talking and drinking green tea at the Peace Hotel where they were staying: once the famous Cathay Hotel, all mahogany furniture, velvet curtains and phoney opulence. The Princess was wearing a Chinese peasant shirt in silk which she had had made in Shanghai and was looking fabulous, to use a favourite adjective from the AKP vocabulary. She was laughing, she was happy, she was on the biggest adventure of her life and, to his despair, Jonas saw that she was besotted with Daniel.

That night, after some skilful diversionary tactics and a bit of a reshuffling as far as rooms were concerned, his brother’s brief besieging of the Princess was brought to a successful conclusion. But as he was leaving her room, about to make his way to the floor below, he bumped into a Chinese man who just about jumped out of his skin at sight of Daniel. The Chinese led him down the stairs, looking so aghast that Daniel saw nothing for it but to go with him, all the way down to the Art Deco lobby, where the Chinese man’s horror swiftly transmitted itself to the people at reception, who summoned a doctor and the police, not to mention the national guide who had been asleep and who had his work cut out trying to sort the whole thing out. Daniel had not the foggiest notion what was going on, but it turned out that his face was covered in blood: that he was in fact a pretty grisly sight to behold. The hotel staff, understandably, had assumed that he had sustained some serious injury. Whereas the truth of it was that the Princess had had her period, but had either been too shy or so hot for him that she had not wanted to mention it, and in the delectable darkness of their conjoining, when she had laid herself open like a ripe, juicy fruit, Daniel — hell-bent on the implementation of his sister’s lesson — had not noticed anything either.

So you see, Daniel had not always been known as Red Daniel, but after that episode the nickname stuck. Later, Jonas Wergeland was to look upon this as being the M-L’s only redeeming feature, and their only possible way of making up for their monstrous zealotry: they could tell all the great stories from those days, such as the story of Red Daniel, a modern folktale which, in all its grisly humour, shows that the AKP not only had the blood of the workers on their hands, but also on their heads.