The Seducer

Imago Dei

So welcome, then, the warmth of the story that was played out at a time when the Beatles had already released their hit single ‘Love Me Do’ and their debut album, Please Please Me, although Jonas and Nefertiti knew nothing of all that — neither of them would ever share in the general adulation of these particular idols.

The Beetles, on the other hand, were a very different matter.

It all started with the two of them, Jonas and Nefertiti, walking down to the shops on Trondheimsveien to buy a fresh loaf and two fogged bottles of Mekka, the chocolate milk with such divine properties that was a firm favourite with both of them, before cutting across the stream down in the dip near Nybygga and onto the grouchy old farmer’s fields, a wide expanse of cultivated and fallow fields which was the scene of many an adventure — like the time when they, or Jonas at any rate, had watched wide-eyed as the stallion let out its huge member, a circus act in itself, and a sight which provided him, forever after, with an excellent frame of reference for the invective ‘you great horse’s dick’; or like the time down on the bank, when they dug up the city of Troy, all nine levels of it, together with Heinrich Schliemann, after Nefertiti, with a couple of sentences and a wave of her hand, had transformed a patch of perfectly ordinary Ammerud soil into the ruins on the mound at Hissarlik in the Dardanelles.

It was June, school had just closed for the summer. They crawled under the fence and into a green meadow dotted with white clover, buttercups and a fair number of fine examples of that breed of cattle known as Norwegian Red. Jonas and Nefertiti liked watching the cows, they both got a kick out of seeing them munching sideways, and Jonas particularly enjoyed contemplating them when they lay quietly chewing the cud, while Nefertiti would become immersed in thought-experiments on how wonderful it would be if they had four stomachs and had to chew their food twice, thus deriving twice the pleasure from it — always assuming, of course, that the food was good.

Before they reached the cattle, however, Nefertiti’s attention was caught by a cowpat, a not exactly fresh one, with a good thick crust on it; Jonas failed to see why she absolutely had to sit down right next to that. But Nefertiti slipped off her little rucksack and spread a tablecloth on the grass, the sort of red and white checked cloth that Jonas would not see again until he set foot inside Bényoucéf’s restaurant, La P’tite Cuisine. They settled themselves on this, Nefertiti broke the bread and Jonas tore the silver-foil tops off the Mekka bottles. They lay back, propped up on their elbows, eating and drinking and observing the cows further down the field; they took their time, as much time as the ruminating cattle, savouring every bite, every sip, as if making up for the fact that they could not enjoy the food more than once.

Afterwards, Nefertiti fetched a stick and split the cowpat in two. It was in this clump of dung that she found the beetle, and the moment she laid eyes on it she practically dropped to her knees and stayed there, utterly spellbound, with not so much as a blink of her long eyelashes.

Jonas had seen her like this on a couple of other occasions, so lost in contemplation that she seemed to be in a trance. One time she had sat up in the loft, watching a candle burn all the way down. And one autumn she had sat crouched over a mushroom that was pushing its way through the tarmac behind the garages, as if this were a miracle that she would not have missed for the world.

So it was now. Suddenly there was no talking to her, she pushed her cap back from her forehead and brought her face right down level with the cowpat. She shushed Jonas when he tried to say something, pointing to the beetle as if she had just made a sensational discovery, like another buried Troy. ‘Look,’ she murmured. ‘Weird,’ she murmured. ‘Really amazing.’ The beetle had red wing-cases, it looked like nothing so much as a tiny red VW beetle on legs. Jonas supposed that it must very, very rare, for Nefertiti to grow so worked-up about it. The insect rooted about in the muck, not in the least put out by the two curious onlookers, helping itself, all undaunted, to the feast spread before it. Eventually Jonas grew fed up with all this dung-guzzling and asked Nefertiti if they couldn’t go now. She did not answer, or at least merely murmured: ‘Incredible, quite incredible.’ Jonas rose and walked off.

He wandered around Nybygga for a while, chucked stones at some little kids who had been making a nuisance of themselves, walked up to the kiosk to buy an ice-lolly, the really good sort that had a little plastic figure inside it, mounted on a round platform, and all you had to do was to break off the stick and grind off the rough edge on the tarmac. He got a queen, a pale-blue one, but he already had that one; he trailed back up to Solhaug where he tinkered with his bike, straightening his favourite Monte Carlo cigarette pictures on the spokes and wondering what could have happened to Nefertiti.

It was late in the afternoon. He strolled down to the corner of the green behind Number Four, where the Midsummer’s Eve bonfire had already been built, bigger and richer in content than ever. Chairman Moen and his lady wife came out, carrying their hideous old sofa, and both greeted Jonas with such unwonted friendliness that anyone would have thought they had been caught red-handed, unmasked in the act of committing some unforgivable betrayal. Jonas stood out on the point, looking across the fields on the other side of the stream, at an area on which, within a few years, the farm would be anachronistically hemmed in by huge tower blocks full of children named Desiré and Elvis — as if to prove that it really was true; Elvis was not dead — and where at that moment Nefertiti still sat hunched over in the middle of a bright green field, surrounded by cud-chewing cows.

Jonas went up to help his mother take in the washing. It was her day off, she had been doing the washing downstairs in the communal laundry room, and Jonas found her in one of the large cubicles where the laundry was hung to dry and which, later in life, Jonas would always picture as being full of white sheets. All in all, this would remain one of his clearest memories of Solhaug and his childhood: standing in those drying cubicles surrounded by the scent of freshly washed sheets, that and the fact that in those days everybody had white sheets, like so many blank pages, so that you felt you were standing on board a fullrigger, bound for some wonderful new world.

He followed his mother up to the flat, played some Duke Ellington records, ‘Concerto for Cootie’ and ‘Me and You’, took out his mouth organ and tried, for the hundredth time, to play ‘Cotton Tail’, but he could not manage it, he never could, it was impossible.

The others arrived home. His father from the church, with his briefcase full of sheet music; Daniel from the pool at Badedammen, scarlet from head to toe, as if anticipating the years when he would be known as Red Daniel. He was appallingly sunburnt; Daniel never could do things by halves, always had to go to the extreme, had to achieve a better tan than anyone else in one day. Rakel returned from the Gro Snack Bar, a guy on a motorbike had dropped her off at the door. She had already developed a fondness for lads who rode big machines, had made the leap, as it were, from A Thousand and One Nights to 1,000 ccs and embarked upon the astonishing career in which she would end up as a happy housewife in the cab of a Mercedes-Benz trailer-truck, which, from her point of view, was as good as any palace.

After dinner, one of the week’s seven standard meals, which had been to some extent ruined by Daniel and his protests against reciting Kipling’s ‘If’ in the Midsummer’s Eve show, Jonas ran over to Number One to ask after Nefertiti. No, she hadn’t come home. Did Jonas have any idea where she was?

So back he went to the field, crawled under the fence and into the meadow with its lush green grass, where the cows lay or stood about in the warm afternoon light, looking like an advertisement for Freia milk chocolate or for Norway in general. It smelled of the Earth’s very own factory, of photosynthesis, of fermentation in bovine stomachs, of life, of summer, of holidays.

‘Isn’t it about time you were going home?’ he asked Nefertiti.

Nefertiti did not answer, she was still totally absorbed in the beetle, which appeared to be doing exactly the same as when Jonas had left it earlier in the day: slowly burrowing through muck, a task of Sisyphean dimensions, due to the fact that Nefertiti kept lifting away bits of dung with her stick, so as not to lose sight of it. She knelt on the red and white checked cloth as if it were a prayer mat, staring at the armour-plated beetle with such intensity that anyone would have thought she was trying to magnify each individual detail: the antennae, the grooves in the dorsal collar, the compound eyes, the teeth on its front legs, the stripes on the wing-cases. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said again and, without taking her eyes off the beetle, motioned to Jonas to come down beside her.

Jonas lay down, eyed the lovely red wing-cases, saw how they gleamed softly. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked.

‘Look at it,’ was all she said. ‘Just look at it and let your thoughts run. I’m telling you, Jonas: this is a precious sight. Worth more than rubies.’

As so often before and later, Jonas Wergeland did not know that that day was to form one of the foundation-stones of his life, a day which was later to determine the values he set for himself. I have already mentioned Jonas Wergeland’s commitment to the Antarctic, and the way he celebrated Grotius Day, but I actually began at the wrong end of the causal chain, since this, his interest in the Antarctic was, of course, based in its turn on a set of values. And even though I did say that the values — or turtles, if you will — that we decide upon tend necessarily to be a bit of a lottery, nonetheless they are not always governed by such random forces as one might think. For when Jonas Wergeland reached the age at which he first tried to make sense of the wealth of quite indisputably solid social values, when it became simply a matter of helping oneself, for example, to ‘liberty’ or ‘equality’ or ‘solidarity’ or ‘tolerance’, he did not, in fact, feel as if he had had to pick his key value — the one overriding value that would help him to set the others in order of precedence — out of a hat, blindly as it were, because he had quite instinctively opted for ‘imagination’, thus setting this value above all others.

But what did imagination mean to Jonas Wergeland? Imagination was the first link in the ethical chain. To Jonas it seemed patently obvious that a weak imagination made for a weak individual. After all, it was no use choosing ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ if one did not have the imaginative power to find ways and areas in which to put these values to use — and to balance one against another in those cases where they happened to clash. It was no good defending life, the weak, the individual, truth — whatever you wanted to call it — against the powers that be at any given time, if one had no fantasy. The fight for a stronger imagination was, therefore, the most important of all.

As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, protest was not about writing indignant pieces for the newspapers on all sorts of injustices. To him, it was about standing on Karl Johans gate and provoking people into using their imaginations. Which is why Jonas Wergeland inaugurated Michelangelo Day; every year on March 6, Michelangelo’s birthday, he walked up and down Karl Johans gate, handing out leaflets he had paid for out of his own pocket with such headlines as ‘Paint a Sistine Chapel’ or ‘When Did You Last Poke Fun At A Pope?’ or ‘Take A Day Off To Study The Veins In A Block Of Marble’. Jonas knew that everyone went around with great stores of knowledge and information in their heads; what he was endeavouring to do with these leaflets was to encourage them to use these creatively, shuffle the cards, form this abundant store of experiences into new chains of causality. Even if one only succeeded in getting people to alter the way in which they fantasized about things, it was bound to have important consequences. Even Marx knew that.

So even though Jonas Wergeland was well aware that the Earth abounded in causes that were crying out for a champion, and swarming with weak souls in need of a spokesman — all you had to do was take your pick — I hope you can see how Michelangelo Day and Grotius Day go hand in hand, just as aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand, and why Jonas should have thrown himself into the debate surrounding Antarctica, of all things. Because Antarctica is, of course, the continent of the imagination. This, the last wilderness on Earth is totally dependent on our imaginative powers. This vast ice-covered region is actually nothing but one gigantic blank page, rich in possibilities.

And it was on that warm June day in the grouchy, old farmer’s fields, surrounded by cud-chewing cows, daisies and timothy, that the idea of imagination as a value was sown in Jonas Wergeland’s mind, as he lay next to Nefertiti on a red and white checked cloth with his nose stuck almost right inside a cowpat.

They lay for a long time in silence. Jonas felt as if they were spying on the beetle’s banquet, as if they were intent on uncovering a great secret, that it was all a matter of being patient, as indefatigable as the beetle, crawling and burrowing and guzzling its heart out in a world of muck. The beetle’s upper side looked a little like a mask, a face.

‘Aphodius fimetarius,’ said Nefertiti. ‘A dung beetle. Belongs to the scarab family. You know, like “the sacred scarabé”, which was an object of religious worship in Egypt. Sometimes a figure in the shape of this beetle was laid over the hearts of the dead. The beetle is a symbol of eternal life.’

‘Is it rare?’ Jonas said, pointing to the red, softly gleaming wing-cases.

‘No, it’s very common,’ said Nefertiti and then she told him something about the dung beetle, that specialist in shit: that they were generally very fussy when it came to the consistency of the dung, or rather, its moisture content; some went for fresh dung, others liked the older stuff. And they all had their preferences, according to a sensible distribution of all the squalor in the world, for the excrement of different animals and different grades of dung. ‘But our friend fimetarius here can cope with the very driest cowpats, it’s about the only one that can. Just think, Jonas: it’s like a nomad in a desert of shit!’ Nefertiti was truly fascinated by these dung beetles, she knelt there, reverently, patiently explaining to Jonas how these creatures passed through every stage of their life cycle buried in muck. And what a digestive system! They could eat all night and all day, non-stop. They were refuse collectors, cleaning the Earth. Nefertiti looked at him from under the longest eyelashes in the world: ‘Isn’t that absolutely amazing, Jonas? Living off muck! Surviving in a world of shit! That’s what I call fantastic. Doesn’t it make you think big thoughts? Make you imagine the most inconceivable things?’

They straightened up. Nefertiti sat there looking at him for a long time, with eyes that were bluer than the sky on the longest, lightest day of the year then suddenly, although Jonas could see no reason for this, she pulled out her crystal and handed it to him. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘Remember that the imagination is also a path to knowledge and that includes knowledge that can be reached by any other paths.’

Then she hugged him, held him tight, before gazing into his eyes again. For a long time. Only later did Jonas reflect that that was the only time Nefertiti had ever hugged him. They sat for a while among the cattle, with her holding his hand while they watched the beetle digging its way down into the dung and disappearing, and when they rose to their feet, Jonas felt as though he had not only learned something about life in a cowpat, he had also been shown all of life in a nutshell.