The Seducer

Broadcast

So do not forget the story that starts, or continues, at the moment when he realized just what a risk he was taking; that he should, of course, have done as the stupid safety regulations said, and turned back the minute they came out into the hollow in the hills and he saw his companion raising her eyes to the huge mountain straight ahead of them. They were heading south, towards the sun which only occasionally showed itself behind the clouds, in what would normally be described as heavy going: swirling snow and several degrees below freezing. The girl ahead of him on the track turned and grinned: ‘How’re you doing?’ He tried to smile back, feeling a cold sweat breaking out the length of his spine; he had been struck, after only the first few strides, by how deeply and sincerely he still hated this invention: skis, fibreglass now, and how terribly unfit he was; each time they stopped he had the urge to cough, his lungs seemed too small, and every inch of him pulsated with his heartbeat. They were making for a place she called Heddersvann: ‘a reasonable point to make for in such bad weather’, and let me just say right away that in writing the following I am treading with extreme care, because it deals with one of the few spheres in which Norwegians actually can boast greater expertise than any other nation: skiing.

At one point it seemed to him that she had altered course. They passed beneath a power-line and came to the foot of a steep slope. Just at that moment the clouds parted and the afternoon sun turned the landscape into the perfect picture of Easter in Norway as presented in tempting brochures aimed at foreign tourists. Directly above them towered a relatively high peak. The girl ahead of him made the sort of neat 180-degree turn that Jonas had never been able to do, neither as a child or now, before gliding up alongside him. ‘We’re going for the bloody top,’ she said, squinting over the top of her sunglasses.

‘That one?’ said Jonas, pointing to Store Stavsronuten.

‘No, that one,’ the girl said, pointing further up at a point diagonally behind Jonas, where Gaustatoppen itself lay hidden by cloud. She gazed resolutely, almost covetously, up what in Jonas’s eyes seemed a formidably steep mountainside.

‘But we haven’t told anybody,’ he said. ‘I mean, we said we were going to Heddersvann. And we don’t have time, it’s three o’clock now!’

‘What is it with you?’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re chicken? We’re going for the top, I said.’ She had definitely altered course, was already heading uphill, as the sky clouded over again.

‘Completely Gausta’, Jonas thought, this being their way as kids of saying somebody was crazy: a reference to Gaustad Hospital. He turned, needing to have a piss. The sight of the yellow patch on the snow made him feel like an animal, a dog. He set off after the girl, even though he knew it was madness, feeling the action beginning to tell on his upper arms and shoulders right away.

It was the week before Easter and the massive influx of people to the mountains. Jonas Wergeland had been hanging about for some days, almost totally alone, at the Kvitåvatn Mountain Lodge above Rjukan, having come to a breakthrough decision, an almost perverse decision: for the first time in his nigh-on twenty-four years he was going to give the Norwegian mountains a try. And even though, typically for him, he chose to avoid the Easter crowds, he did also cherish a faint hope of coming up with an explanation for this almost animal-like characteristic of the Norwegian race, this abrupt, almost panicky migration, this mass exodus to the mountains over the week of the Easter holidays.

There was also another, and more intriguing, motive for Jonas’s choice of Rjukan in particular, and it was not, as one might think, the splendid hydroelectric monuments of Vemork and Såheim — Jonas Wergeland was to remain shamefully ignorant of these almost baroque, or perhaps one should say fantastical, buildings until the day he met an African at Livingstone in Zambia many years later. No, it was curiosity about NRK’s main transmitters, set up on the tops of mountains all over Norway, that had brought him to the Gausta area — I consider this worth mentioning since it casts some doubt on whether Jonas Wergeland did indeed join NRK on an impulse as sudden and random as he himself has always claimed. The fact is that while at the College of Architecture he had come across Le Corbusier’s book, Vers une architecture, one of the few books which he had read as avidly as the Kama Sutra of his childhood, and what Le Corbusier had written about the link between the products of modern industrial design — cars, planes, passenger ships — and architecture, had led Jonas to think of television masts — surely these too could be transformed into an exciting architectonic impulse. He envisaged them almost as church spires in a new secular era or as the minarets of some sort of media religion. In other words, he had come to Rjukan to view the mast on the top of Gauta, the only problem being that, until now, it had not shown itself, due to the miserable weather — the clouds hung around the peak like a cap — and Jonas had not felt much like getting out on his skis.

When Sigrid A. had walked into the fire-lit lounge the previous evening, tall and fair, with piercing blue eyes and a distinctive nose, Jonas had immediately been aware of that soft feather, which made its presence felt in his life only occasionally, being run up his spine by an invisible hand before coming to rest in the form of a prolonged tickling sensation between his shoulder-blades. But she — it must be said — had noticed him right away, too, and in a manner quite at odds with her normally shy nature she had, without a moment’s hesitation, walked straight over and sat down in the chair opposite him.

Sigrid A. was that pretty rare animal, a glaciologist. She had started out by studying medicine, it’s true, but had soon switched courses, recognizing the great outdoors to be her natural element. No doubt there are also some who know of her as a mountaineer; Sigrid A. was, in fact, to be the driving force behind countless daring exploits in one wilderness and another, in widely diverging parts of the world, as the leader of sponsored expeditions that generated banner headlines in the Norwegian press and led, in time, to her being called upon to fulfil other tasks, as a so-called PR ambassador for Norway, a somewhat obscure, but nonetheless lucrative diplomatic post. Sigrid A. not only felt a deep need always to be the first, but also to do things which allowed her to push her body to the limits of its capabilities as if this were a goal in itself; more than once she had been almost shocked by what her own flesh and blood could actually stand. During her conversation with Jonas in the lounge she did not, however, mention this at all. What she did say was that she liked going for long ski trips in the moonlight, and when Jonas confessed that skiing was rather a sore point with him, she saw her chance and invited him to go skiing with her the following day.

So there Jonas Wergeland was, against all the odds — and what was a great deal more foolhardy and irresponsible, without having told anyone — heading up the hill towards Gaustatoppen in dangerously bad weather, led by a woman who could cope with three times as much as he in terms of physical endurance.

The slope was so steep that he had to take it sideways on; the gap between them grew. She stopped, turned. ‘Come on!’ she called, a note of anger in her voice. Jonas pushed himself even harder, not so much because he wanted to show that he was a man, as because he felt like a dog, he had to obey. His arms ached, and in the grey light the snow seemed even whiter, dazzling. He was not happy, either, about this blend of hot and cold, with half of his body, the back side, soaked with sweat, while the snow and the wind threatened to turn his front to ice. She had stopped to wait for him. His nose was running; he felt thoroughly pissed off. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t go any further,’ he said, swallowing his pride. ‘You can do it!’ she said harshly, almost contemptuously. ‘Come on!’ She gave him a little rap on the backside with her pole.

Up on the ridge itself, the wind came at them from the northwest like a bat out of hell, crystals of ice dug in to their faces like crampons. Evening was drawing on. Jonas could not see the point in this: why they could not turn back, why they were out here defying the forces of nature when they could sitting in front of the fire back at Kvitåvatn Mountain Lodge drinking hot cocoa and playing Scrabble, or some other dumb game. It was as if she had to finish whatever she had set out to do; every inch of her radiated a determination unlike anything he had ever come across before.

Jonas plodded on, his chin lowered onto his chest. Everything was white — white, white — all the contours of the landscape had been obliterated by the swirling snow. He was growing bitterly cold, particularly around his groin. Amateur that he was, he had dressed as if for a quick run across Lillomarka. He floundered on, like a dog, he thought again and again, concentrating: right pole, left ski, he thought, left pole, right ski; he saw her turn, not to look at him — it was as if she instinctively knew he was there anyway — but at the invisible sun, with a look on her face that seemed to say she was aiming not for the top of Gausta but for something much higher, much greater. He felt afraid.

Then, when they could not have been far from the top, the blast grew even fiercer or perhaps the weather simply was that much wilder up there. They trekked through a sea of whiplashes, everything was white, the earth, the sky, Jonas had slid into a sort of physical second gear; his engine was on automatic, right pole, left ski, left ski, right pole, thoughts churning around in his head willy-nilly. He looked down at the strange, windswept patterns in the driving snow and was struck by a feeling of being on an unknown planet or of suddenly having uncovered Norway’s innermost secret: that Norway was another planet. Jesus Christ, why couldn’t they turn back, she was out of her mind, this girl; he glanced back, that’s life for you, he thought, giving in to the banality, the macabre humour of the situation; you left a track on a cold and inhospitable planet, which promptly swept it away behind you.

The driving snow reached into every nook and cranny. Jonas had visions of precipices. Wasn’t there supposed to be a sharp drop on either side of the actual peak, the west side especially? Right ski, left ski, right ski, left ski, he could no longer feel his arms, his face was nothing but a cold, stiff mask, numb. Sigrid A. was looking round about, she seemed quite unperturbed, as if everything were going exactly according to plan or as if she were going on instinct, steering by some in-built compass; he was struck by her strong profile, a heroic profile, tailor-made for the heads of coins, he thought, and then once again he caught a glimpse of that look on her face, as if she relished this ordeal, this self-torment, this sub-human struggle. Suddenly she pulled up next to a high snowdrift. ‘We made it!’ she called down to him. ‘Congratulations, young man! The Tourist Board hut!’

Jonas refused to believe that they were saved, giggled with mild hysteria at the very idea. A snowdrift. A heap of snow. She motioned to him to follow her round to the eastern side of the bank of snow, and through the snow Jonas made out some rough stones. Had it not been for the corner of a window peeking out, he would have taken it for a cairn. But this was, in fact, the Gaustatoppen tourist hut, built of granite: huge blocks hacked out of the mountain itself, now totally buried in snow. ‘Now all we have to do is hoist the flag,’ she said, her face glowing as if she really loved such ordeals and was almost sorry to have reached the top.

After shovelling away another snowdrift piled up against the entrance, which was hung with a mocking sign offering ‘light snacks’, they found that the heavy blue, metal door was open. ‘Did you know about this?’ Jonas said.

She did not reply. Just flashed that happy smile.

Another surprise awaited them. Inside, the little room was warm, it actually felt warm after the icy wind. There was a switch; the light came on. ‘The extension’s new,’ she said. ‘It was added when the army were building up here. They laid heating cables under the cement floor, as you know.’

The door to the hut itself was locked. But Jonas was more than content, ran an eye gratefully round the wood-panelled room; there was a narrow oblong window high up in the eastern wall. Some blankets were piled on a bench along with some old sleeping bags. ‘People sometimes spend the night here,’ Sigrid A. said, unpacking her little rucksack, which proved to contain a little of this and a little of that. Soon they were sitting on the bench, each with a cup of tea and sharing a bar of chocolate and an orange. Thus, as a reward almost, for all that he had gone through, for the first time ever Jonas Wergeland was treated to the experience of a typical Norwegian Easter ritual.

As the light outside the window began to wane, Sigrid A. made up a bed on the warm floor with the blankets and sleeping bags. ‘Well, now we’ve just got to find some way of passing the time,’ she said, giving him a look that was as much an order as a request.

They got undressed. She swore at him when she saw how few clothes he had on, not even woollen underwear; but this anger turned to pity when she caught sight of his tiny penis, which had drawn as far into itself as it could, like a collapsed telescope. She tucked him up under the blankets, stroking it with her hand as she did so, warming it, putting her face down to it and blowing on it, taking it in her mouth, keeping it there for a long time, so long that she gradually made it rise and before too long she had climbed on top of him and guided it inside her, and Jonas felt a glorious, red-hot glow concentrating in one spot, felt his frozen body being thawed, as it were, by the warmth that flowed from this one spot. They lay still, that is to say, she crouched on top of him, bent over in such a way that her breasts just grazed his chest, two hot spots, a triangle of heat; and as she clenched him tightly with the muscles of her vagina, he had a marvellously tactile sensation of something tight, soft and miraculously warm, such a wonderfully delightful warmth flowing into his limbs, and it crossed his mind that this, the sum of this heat, must be what held the world together. And it was at that moment, if anyone should be in any doubt, that Jonas Wergeland truly understood what it was that he had always sought from these women: warmth. And as she slowly began to move, he could not help thinking how this sweet friction resembled two sticks being rubbed together to make fire; he vaguely remembered something about how, during their sacrificial rituals, the ancient Aryans had done just that, kindled a fire by grinding one stick in a hole made in another stick — symbolizing, of course, the lingam inside the yoni — and there was also something about this quite unbelievably delicious warmth of Sigrid A.’s vagina that made Jonas feel it was no ordinary warmth, the sort that could thaw ice, but a warmth that could actually kindle a fire, a creative flame within him, make it flare up inside him, enabling him to see things, experience something akin to visions or revelations, a warmth that would extend him, lighting up new chambers within him.

She began by making love to him long and lingeringly, with a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were planning great exploits, or as if he were a great exploit, a wide-open space in himself. Outside, darkness had fallen, the wind howled around the walls of the hut, crystals of ice spattered against the window; he lay there, warm from head to toe, while she made love to him with greater and greater intensity, her whole body eventually working furiously as she rode him, purposefully, tirelessly, as if this too were a wilderness that she had to conquer, a peak she had to climb. She made love to him all night long, so many times that Jonas could not believe that they — or at any rate he — could go on, but she would make him rise up again, whipping him on as relentlessly as when she dragged him to the top of the mountain, making love to him so fiercely and so divinely that his whole body seemed to glow. And it was during this exhausting coupling with Sigrid A. that Jonas not only learned how much his body could stand, that he could hold out for far longer than he had imagined and that the volume of semen in his glands had not run out, even though he was crying out that it had; during the course of that pleasurable and demanding night a new determination was also born in Jonas Wergeland, making him realize that it was time he put his experiences into some sort of order, set himself some big goal, select, as it were, a peak. And, what with the fiery glow in his body, the great, bright light of creativity in his head and the thought of the transmitter standing at the top of Gausta, right outside the window, he had the feeling that their lovemaking was being broadcast, that the image of their coupling was being beamed into all those thousands of homes.

The next morning they stepped out into the most beautiful weather. Everything, the whole, wide world, was shimmering blue and white — sparkling white — and charged with a breathtaking silence. The television mast a hundred metres above their heads glinted like one of Carl Nesjar’s year-round fountains, a sculpture of ice. Jonas was sure that Le Corbusier would have appreciated this sight, that Le Corbusier, like Jonas, would have been filled with awe at the thought of such a heroic project: a wild, elongated and sparsely populated country linked together by a telecommunications network. An epic undertaking, Jonas thought. And beautiful, Jonas thought, as beautiful as nature itself.

It was said that you could see a seventh part of Southern Norway from the top, and it certainly seemed so. As Jonas spun round and round on his own axis, like a little kid, wide-eyed and speechless, he discovered — and this he automatically put down to the events of the previous night — that suddenly this landscape meant a great deal to him, he actually felt a kind of love for these vast open spaces, these mountains. And the snow, even the snow. He bent down and scooped it up, having to screw up his eyes against the light, and as he crouched there, hunkered down on Gaustatoppen, clutching a handful of snow, it dawned on him why so many people migrated to the mountains at Easter time: on account of the light, the dazzling light. And from that day forth, Jonas Wergeland was always to regard this as being his countrymen’s finest trait: their longing for light which, not unreasonably, manifested itself at Easter time, during a religious festival; and in days to come this insight was to form the basis for his optimistic estimation of television’s potential, inasmuch as television was a form of light, dazzling light.

The trip down was something of an anticlimax. Even though he took the slopes diagonally, crisscrossing his way down, it went so fast that his eyes were tearing behind his sunglasses; his leg muscles ached and he fell God knows how many times, slithering and bouncing. Sigrid A. was way ahead of him, executing elegant practised Telemark swings as though she were taking part in a display and only lacked the felt hat, the homespun breeches and the traditional sweater. When he finally caught up with her at the foot of Longefonn she was standing talking to the rescue team that had been about to institute a search for them.