The Seducer

The Jade Buddha

The few — I might almost say ‘the happy few’ — who managed to join one of the League of Friendship trips to China in the 1970s, in other words, those who could afford it and had made it through the ideological eye of a needle, can tell you that they were definitely no picnic. After a while, Jonas wearied of the heavy schedule and the thoroughly stage-managed visits to everything from the 7th of May Cadre School in Peking to the oil refinery in Nanking. And when it came to Shanghai, where they now found themselves, it went without saying that they had to make the pilgrimage to the little brick building containing the room in which the Chinese Communist Party was founded and go on the one-day excursion to an idealized People’s Commune; then there was the tour of a model hospital where they were treated to an acupuncture demonstration, as well as visits to some more solid establishments, such as the exemplary Steelworks no. 1. Wherever they went they were surrounded by wall newspapers and banners covered in huge characters which Jonas did not understand and which, despite their interpreter’s helpful translations, left him with a sense of remoteness, of an impenetrability that made a mockery of them, not least of the ‘concrete’ questions associated with their visits, usually asked by the girls with determined chins and steely gazes, questions to which Jonas felt there could be no answer, but which the Chinese seemed to find easy to deal with, producing great, long-winded answers to such questions, spouting verbose phrases that reminded Jonas of the time when he had had to recite the Shorter Catechism from memory, while their Norwegian guests nodded and made notes politely and were oh-so intent on learning, until eventually someone stood up and made a thank-you speech and presented a gift from Norway, after which they danced and sang Norwegian folksongs such as ‘Per Spelmann’ and ‘Hanen stend på Stabburshella’, the latter sung as a round at that, to give the Chinese a little taste of Norwegian culture. A punctilious and detailed report was of course written up later, and in the evening they did a recap. Little, very little, was left to chance.

On the whole, Jonas was surprised at how well he had got on with the M-L’s who made up the bulk of the party, characters at whom he could only shake his head before. Some of them would, like Jonas, eventually become key figures in Norwegian public affairs, individuals one saw on television and read about in the papers. Many a time Jonas had to smile when such a person showed up in some manifestly commercial context, as the representative of a typical capitalist concern, when he thought of how that same person had once sung ‘Per Spellman’ with such gusto at the Steelworks no.1 in Shanghai — although Jonas smiled not out of contempt, but out of respect for the unfathomability and broad diversity of mankind. All in all, he spent a lot of time talking to these people: as an astronomy student he detected many similarities between this sect and the planet Pluto — both were small and peripheral, but even so they provided some vital angles towards an understanding both of the universe and the people of Norway. One thing in particular which Jonas had confirmed was a quotation he had noted down in his ‘little red book’ and memorized, a quote by the American philosopher and psychologist William James, taken from an essay entitled ‘The Will to Believe’ from the book of the same name, which stated that moral questions are usually so urgent that they cannot be solved by waiting for sensible proof, and that when it comes to comparing values, we cannot turn to science for answers, we must consult our own hearts. Moral conviction is based, in other words, on the will to believe. And if there was one thing that these members of the AKP exhibited, more than any other ethical pressure group in Norwegian society, it was their rock-solid belief. As far as that went, they were all missionaries.

In whatever free time they had, when the others elected to put their feet up back at the hotel, worn out by their exacting schedule, Jonas seized the opportunity to go out into the streets, which he much preferred to Peking’s sterile avenues. And what did Jonas Wergeland do in the streets of Shanghai? Jonas Wergeland learned to cope with the masses. From the minute he set foot in China he had been surprised to note that he felt no fear when he walked the streets, surrounded by swarms of people. He had asked himself why this should be and came to the conclusion that it was because he stood out, even amid the hordes of black-haired Chinese in white, short-sleeved shirts. Not only was he almost a head taller than most of them, so that he seemed to skim about like a king on a shifting black and white chessboard, but he was constantly being gawped at, in fact almost everybody turned to look at him, and so here, in Shanghai, he had his first foretaste of his future as a television celebrity. Here, in one of the most densely populated thoroughfares in the world, Jonas was subjected to a form of therapy, he dived into the stream of humanity on the endless stretch of Nanking Street, the longest shopping street in China, with people walking twenty abreast along the pavements, and let it carry him along, as if in an interminable May Day procession; he found it hilarious, he crowed with laughter like a child learning to swim; he stood, out of breath, with his nose pressed against a shop window, studying how an abacus was used, before plunging back into the throng and being swept back down the street towards the Huangpu, like a fish in a shoal, moving as one with the others, and it was here, in Shanghai, that Jonas Wergeland finally lost his fear of crowds — or rather: his physical fear, the psychological dread of crowds was to stay with him all his life.

Another time he let himself drift, just to see where he would end up. He swam with the slightly thinner crowd down the wide street that runs along the riverbank, once the great and famous Bund, now Zhongshan Dong Erlu, past grandiose but grimy grey façades, built in the European style; he was swept on down the boulevard by the mass of people, passing under plane and camphor trees while three-wheeled cars kept up an infernal tooting, bicycle bells chiming all around them like a thousand crystal prisms. Jonas was carried all the way into the old city to be faced with chaos, albeit a chaos with some sort of order to it; he was carried through narrow overcrowded streets, between rickety, run-down stone houses with ramshackle wooden balconies, until suddenly he found himself at the Yu Yuan Gardens, the traditional Chinese gardens which would not become a sightseeing ‘must’ — even for Norwegian tourists — until some years later. Where he actually succeeded in ordering tea in the age-old teahouse and later, in a restaurant of sorts, sampled some steamed dumplings filled with meat before catching sight of a market in which he bought a dried seahorse, of all things, to celebrate his new life as a relaxed and exultant part of the sea of humanity.

In the evenings they would sit in the opulent restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel, with its pale-green walls, lacquer red pillars and gilding, enjoying the view of the river and the harbour, drinking Tsing-tao beer and recapping on the day’s activities, or rather: what they could learn from them, which was quite a lot — so much, in fact, that the majority of them tended to grow very sleepy and take themselves off to bed.

On one such evening, Jonas went out alone. He walked a little way down Nanking Street, strangely empty now, then turned to the right, into the area lying between the main street and the Suzhou river: a bewildering maze of narrow alleyways lined by low stone houses, their woodwork painted in shades of dark-red and brown, the odd sycamore tree, bamboo poles draped with clothes hung to dry. It was dark: warm. People sat outside, in the feeble light of electric lamps hung in the trees. Men in T-shirts were playing cards. Jonas passed a few little garages, the flames of welding torches, work going on round the clock. People gazed at him curiously, pointed unrestrainedly, all talking at once at the top of their voices. They smelt of muck mixed with hot oil, cooking smells.

After about half-an-hour Jonas realized that he was lost — although he was not in any way alarmed by this discovery. Everything looked the same: small low houses, lamps in the trees, heaps of rubbish, people sitting on low stools eating dumplings, old folk smoking. Jonas had not the foggiest notion of where he was, but he felt no fear; standing outside a bicycle repair shop, he calmly pulled out his mouth organ, put it to his lips and began to play Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’, not giving any thought to the fact that it should be that particular tune, or whether he hoped to achieve anything with it, although he was not at all surprised when an old man suddenly appeared before him, a man, what is more, who belied the myth of the inscrutable po-faced Chinaman, standing there with a bowl of noodles in his hand and a look of utter disbelief on his face, even Jonas could see that, disbelief and fear. He waved his chopsticks frantically, admonishingly, apparently trying to make Jonas stop playing, glancing round about him as he did so, before beckoning Jonas into a courtyard and from there into a little room with a picture of Chou En Lai on the wall and an empty birdcage hanging from the ceiling, where it was just the two of them — or at least, a young woman popped her head round a door then disappeared again. The man was wearing a round Mandarin cap, which Jonas instinctively took to be a sign of great courage.

It took some time for Jonas to grasp that the old man had been moved, truly moved, to hear him play that tune on the mouth organ, so moved that he gripped both of Jonas’s arms, as if in greeting, and in English of a sort told Jonas, falteringly, that he had once played in a jazz band at the Peace Café, the hotel where Jonas was now staying, but that jazz music, like all other decadent pursuits, had long since been forbidden. The old Chinese man in the Mandarin cap pointed at the mouth organ which Jonas was still holding in his hand and said ‘Forbidden, forbidden’ and attempted to explain how they, the jazz musicians, could not even practise together because of informers. The old man began to dismantle a huge pile of chests and suitcases, in order to get at the chest on the very bottom, from which he produced a little case. This he opened, to reveal a lovely old saxophone nestling in blue velvet. ‘Johnny Hodges,’ Jonas said, pointing to the saxophone. The other man beamed, he nodded eagerly, before his face became impassive once more. ‘Ellington is dead,’ he said, looking Jonas in the eye. ‘No, no, Ellington isn’t dead. Don’t you worry,’ Jonas said, as if wanting to comfort this Chinese man who had been robbed of the possibility to pursue his own interests. But it was true; Duke Ellington was dead. Unknown to Jonas, he had died a couple of days earlier. So it was not until later that he had time to wonder how an elderly Chinese down a back street in Shanghai could have heard about it; might it have been a stanza from the funeral service — at which the sound of an alto-sax played by Johnny Hodges himself had drifted up into the vaulted ceiling of the Cathedral of St John the Divine — that had somehow been relayed all the long way from New York to Shanghai?

The old man walked Jonas back up to Nanking Street. ‘The Duke,’ he said, as if addressing Jonas, and made a little salute, a bow, the kind of thing seen in films, before taking himself off.

Which brings me to another incident which had actually slipped my mind. I mention it simply because the photograph of this incident, to which Jonas Wergeland himself never ascribed any importance, led many Norwegians to believe, and still does to this day, that in his past Jonas Wergeland had been something of a revolutionary: a reputation which in some Norwegian circles, even the more conservative, carries a certain prestige, as if it were a badge of wartime heroism, granted only to the bravest of the brave in idyllic Norway.

Before leaving for home they had one last day in Peking, on which they were scheduled to visit the History Museum and the Museum of the Revolution. The bus which had brought them there from the Peking Hotel parked at the back of the Great Hall of the People, home of the National People’s Congress, which meant that they only had to turn the corner to find the vast, the almost unbelievably enormous, expanse of Tiananmen Square spread at their feet, swarming with people and with the Monument to the People’s Heroes between them and the Gate of Heavenly Peace, fronting the Forbidden City. Instead of walking straight across the square to the History Museum, they walked along the massive façade of the Great Hall, to take a look at the main entrance.

A car had pulled up at the foot of the steps and as they were standing there, in the middle of the stone stairway leading up to the huge yellow building with the red flags fluttering on its roof, a group of Chinese came out of the door to the Great Hall and proceeded to walk slowly towards them. As they were passing Jonas and the others, the huddle of Chinese stopped and opened up, like a lift door, to disclose a figure at its centre, supported between two others. The Norwegians’ guide was beckoned over to the group, and Jonas saw an elderly man in a grey Mao suit turning to their guide and asking him something. Having received a reply — which is to say, after one after another of his companions had whispered the reply into the ancient’s ear — a smile lit up his old face and he made towards them, supported by two younger men, and at that moment Jonas recognized the old man in the Mao suit, because the old man in the Mao suit was none other than Mao himself; the word was that Mao was ill and rarely went out, and yet there was the man himself, Mao Tse Tung, coming towards them; not at all well, anybody could see that, but large as life. Mao Tse Tung had been attending the People’s Congress before setting out for Southern China, where he would stay for the remainder of the year, consigning Peking to his wife, Jiang Qing, and her fateful conspiracies. Mao Tse Tung headed straight for Jonas Wergeland, even though there were twenty other Norwegians in his party; Mao Tse Tung walked up to Jonas Wergeland and no other and offered him his hand; Mao Tse Tung’s lips moved, although Jonas could not catch a single sound, but another Chinese came to their aid and interpreted. ‘You are from Norway?’ he said, which is to say: Mao said. ‘I have met several other young people from Norway,’ Mao said through the interpreter. He stood there clasping Jonas’s hand, and it occurred to Jonas that he had finally managed to see a jade Buddha after all, a face, yellowish-green and deeply transparent. If, that is, it was not a rotten, hundred-year-old egg: the sort of thing the Chinese considered a delicacy. Mao, for his part, had automatically assumed Jonas to be the leader of his party. Mao Tse Tung had run an eye over those twenty people and, despite the Parkinson’s disease which made it almost impossible for him to coordinate anything at all, not even his speech, the great helmsman — or seducer — had promptly come to the conclusion that Jonas Wergeland was, so to speak, the great revolutionary among them and probably a person of considerable influence and power back home in Norway.

Among the group of Chinese there was a photographer. He took a picture of Jonas shaking hands with Mao Tse Tung, a picture which found its way, in a roundabout fashion, into a couple of newspapers, accompanied by the caption: ‘Chairman Mao meets the leader of a group of Norwegian cadres during their visit to Peking.’ This picture, which had been heavily retouched, showed an ebullient Mao and a somewhat doubtful-looking Jonas as if the honour were all on Mao’s side. Which was true enough, since Jonas Wergeland had only one thought in mind during that handshake: here I am, shaking the hand of a man who has made people too terrified to play Duke Ellington.

What Jonas remembered best of all was the moment when he glanced towards the square itself, where those people closest to them, hundreds, possibly thousands of them, had turned to stare at them: at Jonas and Mao. Suddenly their facial features had vanished, leaving them looking like nothing but a host of rounded forms, like pebbles on a beach by the sea, or like a rolling sea itself — The Great White Flock — and the ancient face bobbing up and down before him, the old head almost incapable of holding itself upright, assumed an eerie resemblance to the head of a turtle. And in a flash of perception, Jonas saw that he was here confronted with the greatest turtle of the twentieth century, made of jade at that, an almost transparent substance possessed of a quality which dictates that it must be shrouded in gloom for its secret to be revealed.

And now here you are, back from yet another trip, and you know that you are going to regret that trip for the rest of your life, and you look at Margrete, and you try to take it in, and you ask yourself why you were not at home, you try to remember where you have actually been and you realize, to your horror, that all this time, in some padded corner of your brain, you have been working on ideas for your programme on the World’s Fair, on the Expo in Seville; you realize, with something bordering on despair, standing there in a room containing a dead wife, how this shielded part of your brain has been thrown into a whirl of creativity, and it comes as something of a shock to you to realize that the scene with which you are confronted here, and the desperation you feel inside, have galvanized your imagination, and already, much against your will, you find yourself envisaging various possibilities for original angles in the footage you have brought back with you; you look at the picture of Buddha, you realize that it looks like Mao Tse Tung, and all at once you remember who you are, and it dawns on you why you cannot get the thought of television out of your mind, even here, even now, because you are the seducer, the seducer of the people, you think, like Mao, you think, on one occasion you even seduced the great seducer himself, the chairman of the world’s biggest housing cooperative, you think; you turn and look out of the window, half expecting to see a gigantic Midsummer’s Eve bonfire, the size of a world in flames, you think, but all you can see are the outlines of the low blocks of flats on the other side of Bergensveien, and as you look at them you have a sense of being lifted up, as if you were in a small plane, a Piper Cub, you think, of looking down on everything from a great height, your own villa included, like an itty-bitty angle on a granite Norwegian rock-face, you think, so ludicrously simplified and false, you think, noticing as you do so that in your absence someone has been using the old record-player, the one that takes seventy-eights, and you see a record on the turntable, see the title, ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’, you drop to your knees, feeling sick to the marrow; if only you knew how much I wish I could be there, how I wish I could put my hand on your brow, to make it easier for you to throw up, and it is all I can do not to reveal the motive behind this task I have set myself, to keep my deep secret, but I hope that you at least, you, Jonas Wergeland, conqueror of the television masts, saviour of the suicidal, founder of Michelangelo Day, will understand, and understand also how much, how overwhelmingly much, this chronicle has meant to me, too.

So I do not blame you for once again crawling over to Margrete on your hands and knees, as if to inspect a shot elk, with a vague notion that you ought to cut out the heart, in order to examine it, chamber by chamber, you think, because there, you think, might lie the answer, you think, to the mystery of love, you think, and you lean over her, lift one of her eyelids, as if to check whether the image of her murderer might have been imprinted on her pupil, and you think of those television cameramen who have filmed their own killers, sequences which are then screened on the evening news, but you find no images fixed on Margrete’s pupils, only the black reflection of your own face, like a camera obscura, you think, but then you’ve always known, known that it could just as easily be you lying there, on the polar-bear skin, shot, because it is your fault, you think, it is your seductive arts that lie at the start of this causal chain, you think, and your eye goes to the row of videocassettes on the bookshelf, like book spines you think, with no antiquarian value whatsoever, you think, not worth a shit, you think, or worth no more than a bullet through the heart, like that programme of yours that NRK screened just before you left for Seville, the one that had frightened Margrete, you think, the one that had enraged other people, you think, and you gaze at the Luger lying on the floor underneath the coffee table, an unmistakeable message, you think, from people who hate your seductive arts, and more specifically that programme, the one you called ‘Tales from the Ghetto’, in which the new citizens of Norway, Africans, Asians, Latin-Americans, told stories about their adopted country; in which you wanted to make the viewers see, or rather, seduce them into seeing, you think, that immigrants enrich a nation, and in which you made the point, through the pictures, that a society that has no contact with the outside world is bound to stagnate culturally, and in which you held up these new countrymen as being a marvellously creative minority, lending an entirely new, and sorely needed, dimension to Norwegian life, and it was good television you think, it was stunning television, you think, and it had given rise to a gratifying new sympathy for these Norwegians with different facial features, but it had also prompted a wave of indignant protest, you think, and it had taken the lid off a pernicious fear of anything foreign, a ghastly intolerance of anything that was different, something for which not even you were prepared, and you received threats, vicious threats, you think, so you ought to have known better, you ought to have stayed home, looked after Margrete, you think, because she too had felt threatened, but you didn’t take it seriously, and now, at last, you realize that it must have been racists, coming to your house while you were away, to take revenge, you think, intent on protecting the Norwegian way of life, you think, pure, antiseptic Norway, you think, probably neo-Nazis, you think, the Luger pointed to that, it was clear proof, a calling card, you think, left behind on purpose, you think, and it looks old, must be from the war, a relic, something one associates with Germany, with the Nazis, you think, and that fits, suddenly it all fits; it had to happen some day, you think, because you are the star, you are the wizard of television, you are the man who makes the people of Norway sit up and take notice, who can draw a response from people, you think, and to be honest you’ve always been waiting for something like this to happen, always knew that one day it was bound to turn nasty, that one day the idyll was bound to be shattered, that one day a monster of a Scania-Vabis would come crashing brutally, relentlessly through the fragile walls of your villa, shattering bricks and blocks of granite and sending them flying chaotically in all directions. And now here you are, as if in a bomb crater, you think, on your knees before an innocent victim, you think, and you know you have to make that call, you know you cannot put it off any longer, you look at the telephone, and you know what a God-awful to-do there will be, and you know the sort of headlines it will give rise to, and you know the press will have a field day, and you know that from now on nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same again, and you know that you have come to a juncture as critical as that long hard battle you once had to fight in a TV studio at Marienlyst — so I say to you, now, at this desperate chaotic moment, because it could be the saving of you.