The Seducer

Spring

And finally, and first of all, and at the centre of it all: the story of the hub, because there is a meaning to life, there are so many meanings to life that at least once on the journey from the cradle to the grave every human being may experience something that will move them to exclaim, quite spontaneously: ‘Yes, there has to be some meaning to life.’

In Jonas Wergeland’s case it happened like this: he was on the train, the electric line to Sognsvann — and here we are talking, mark you, about the unknown Jonas Wergeland, Jonas Wergeland the student of architecture — sitting in one of the most rickety coaches, on his way up to the University, where he was hoping to run into Axel in the canteen. Rain was falling outside the window: fine, almost invisible rain, the first of the year, gentle spring rain.

His thoughts were in disarray. He was stuck in a rut. He had been in a funny mood, almost melancholic, ever since the year before when, as he saw it, his life had been restored to him after his trip to Jebel Musa. He was still filled with a sort of convalescent lethargy, spent most of his time wandering about looking at things; he read a little, attended lectures and seminars at the High School, went on one or two field trips, worked on a couple of projects, did a lot of talking with Axel. Sometimes he would catch himself just hanging around waiting.

More people got on at Majorstuen. Jonas was gazing out of the window, at the rain, so fine that it was little more than a mist. He was conscious of someone sitting down directly opposite him. The coach rattled on up the track. He shifted his gaze, so that it fell on the floor, but he could feel it being drawn upwards by a force that defied gravity, until he found himself looking at two hands holding a book, an old book, and Jonas’s immediate thought, based on his experience in this area, was that it had to be an antiquarian book, possibly even a valuable book.

There was something about this sight which dispelled his melancholy, which quickened him, had a stimulating effect. He amused himself, as he often did, by studying the hands holding the book, the fingers as they turned a page, the position of the left index finger — there are two sorts of reader: those who hold the left index finger under the cover and those who leave it resting on the page — the finger of the person sitting across from him was lying on the page in such a way that it pointed straight at him. Jonas entertained himself by trying to guess, going by the hands alone, what the owner of the book looked like. He could tell straight away that they were a woman’s hands and that they spoke of great concentration on the part of the reader. On one of the fingers of her right hand, which rested on the page in what might almost have been described as a mudra position, the woman wore an unusual ring. It instinctively struck him as an aesthetic sight, those hands and the old book, there, in the coach of a train rattling northwards to Blindern; for some reason they, the hands and the book, struck him as being every bit as powerful, as beautiful, as momentous, as the long run of façades on the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires. It was as if he knew this was a sight that would shunt him onto a new track, breaking the course he was on just as a prism breaks the light, sending it off in another direction.

His attention was caught once again by the book, by how different it looked from the books that people usually read on the train, as indeed it was, although Jonas could not have known how different it was, that this book was entitled Studies of Syphilitic Disorders, that it had been published in 1875 and that the woman who was reading it was related to its author, Carl Wilhelm Boeck, and furthermore, that she, like him, had chosen medicine as her path in life.

Then he heard someone say ‘Jonas?’ at the very moment when he felt that old tingling sensation, prompted by those graceful hands, the fingers on the page of the book, starting to work its way from his tailbone all the way up his spine, stronger than ever before, quite inexplicably strong, so strong that his whole body was shaken by a tremor that ran from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

‘Jonas?’

Slowly he raised his eyes. He saw a sweater, self-coloured, underneath a black raincoat. He saw the collar of a blouse. He saw a chain round the neck. He saw her face. Face with a capital ‘F’. Golden. A face lit from within. A face he knew. That scar on the nose. The eyes. That look. As if the face were all eyes and nothing else. Even after twelve, thirteen years there was no mistaking it. Indeed, as he looked up and returned that look it struck him that for all those years, somewhere at the back of his mind, he had been thinking about that face, this person.

He was completely tongue-tied, could only sit there, speechless, as the coach swayed from side to side, blinked his eyes and could not for the life of him think where that glow on her face could be coming from on such a grey rainy day.

She fiddled with the chain round her neck, drew an old locket from inside her blouse. ‘Jonas,’ she said, Margrete said. ‘Don’t you recognize me? Gold in love?’

And he started to cry. He looked at the floor and cried. Not for long but long enough to let it out, get whatever it was out of his system. He cried softly, making no motion, rather like the rain outside. And as he lifted his eyes to her, to her face, to her eyes, once more and smiled, making no effort to excuse himself, it dawned on him that he was in love again, or no, not again, that he was in love, he had been in love with her all along; what he had experienced with those other girls had been something else, only this was love. Jonas sat there looking at her, at her face, into her eyes, and it seemed to him that those twelve years in between had never happened, that she had gone off and left him only the day before.

So he did not alight at Blindern, nothing in the world could have induced him to get off at Blindern, there was a delicious heaviness in his limbs which made it impossible for him to budge an inch, and when she asked him laughingly where he was getting off, he said that he was never going to get off, he was going to stay on that rickety old train and watch her reading an old book for the rest of his life.

‘In that case,’ she said as they stopped at Ullevål stadium, ‘you’d better come with me.’ She took him firmly by the hand and led him off the train. They strolled down Sognsveien in the sort of spring rain that makes carrying an umbrella unthinkable, that makes one want to drink in the raindrops with every part of one’s being; rain that makes everything smell powerfully of the earth, smell of spring right to the marrow: the sort of rain which, in certain Norwegians, especially those with an aversion to snow, might elicit the same feelings as the life-giving rains falling at the end of a dry season in other parts of the world. And only then, when Margrete tucked her arm in his and laughed, looked up at the rain and laughed, did Jonas erupt into words and sentences as to what and where and who and why and when and how, all of which only served to make Margrete laugh even more while doing her best to provide him with answers that would satisfy his most immediate curiosity.

‘I’ve thought a lot about you, even though I’ve been living far away from you,’ she said as they were cutting across Damplassen. ‘As an old Tuareg once said to me: “Pitch your tents as far from one another and your hearts as close to one another as possible.”’

‘You’ve been among Tuaregs?’

‘Oh, there’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ she said.

They walked through Ullevål Garden City in the soft spring rain, turning up their faces to drops with a shade of warmth in them; it was like taking a shower. ‘D’you remember the liquorice coins we used to buy down at Tallaksen’s?’ Margrete said. Jonas laughed. ‘Yes, but do you remember the Opal chocolate?’ he said, and all at once they were caught up in a pyrotechnical burst of nostalgia, memories of sherbet dips and ice cream cones from the Snack Bar, of ‘Dr Mengele’, the school dentist, and My Fair Lady at the Colosseum, the mandolaikas they had made in woodwork class, water fights round the drinking fountain in the school playground, the time Wolfgang Michaelsen was hit in the eye by the cork from a champagne soda bottle and had to be taken to Casualty, and so on and so forth, both talking at once, laughing in the mild spring rain, soft rain that smelled of spring, that tasted of spring, and Margrete did not take her arm out of his until they reached the house, her parents’ house, and she unlocked the door. Her father, Gjermund Boeck, whom Jonas hated more than anyone else on this Earth for having taken Margrete away from Norway, was of course on the other side of the world, fulfilling his function as Norway’s ambassador, and came home only once a year, which meant that Margrete had the house to herself, a whole museum full of bronze temple lions and Chinese porcelain, not to mention a tiny jade turtle.

They sat in the kitchen, hair still wet, and talked, and they had plenty to talk about. Jonas talked about his travels, about astronomy, about architecture, about Axel, about Buddha, a lot about Buddha, while she, for her part, told him about all the different places she had lived in, about studying medicine at universities abroad and that she intended to specialize in skin diseases. They talked and talked, for hours they talked, occasionally drinking tea or eating freshly baked bread with goat’s cheese, and during the course of their conversation it struck Jonas that Margrete, the way she talked, reminded him of his parents, all that smalltalk which did, nonetheless, have a value, acquired a value, in that it formed a kind of web, of silk as it were, or built up into a weave, because he gradually began to perceive the difference, to see that this was her trademark, all the anecdotes she dispensed, pithy little tales that transformed the weave into a rug, a tapestry brimful of stories.

So Jonas stayed with her, stayed with her as if it were the most natural thing in the world; she did not have to say a word, she simply made up a bed in one of the guest rooms for him and once he had turned in for the night she came in and sat on the edge of his bed, and he told her, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had become completely bogged down, that he ought to be happy, but that he was stuck in a rut, was getting nowhere, and basically felt that life was a load of shit.

‘But even out of shit some good can come,’ she said. ‘Remember the dung beetles.’ And she went on to tell him a short fairytale, an Egyptian fairy tale, about a scarabé, a tumblebug, and its efforts to bury a ball of dung: a little story so full of wisdom and carrying such a powerful echo of a girlish voice from his childhood that Jonas lay awake for ages, stunned, after Margrete had tucked him up under the eiderdown and left the room.

Over the next few weeks this was the thing he found most fascinating: her ability now and again, at the perfect point in a conversation, to come up with a story of ten or twenty sentences, a story so compact that it could be written on the palm of a hand but which in some way summed up or added another dimension to something that she, or he, had said; or gave rise to surprising unseen associations which left him sitting or lying and thinking for hours afterwards. These little stories were usually based not on things that she herself had experienced, but on things she had read, because he knew that she was a reader, that she had read a multitude of novels and poetry collections and plays and that it was the stuff of these that she recounted, her imagination endowing them with a new twist; he knew, too, that her stories sprang from things, details, in those books which few others noticed, because Margrete had a totally different eye for things, she viewed the world from a different — one might almost say more wondering — angle than other people.

He discovered what it entailed, this gift of hers, as they sat in the kitchen in Ullevål Hageby talking and drinking tea and eating home-baked bread with goat’s cheese and jam, while he was learning, for the first time — or rather, for the second time. — what it meant to be in love, really in love, because he felt like a work of art, like something unique. That was Margrete’s gift: to make others, whoever she happened to be talking to, feel that they were of consequence, were important: as with him now, because he was aware of how, suddenly, in responding to the things she said, he was articulating ideas that had not even occurred to him until the very moment when he heard himself voicing them. And they talked about things that he had never discussed with, for example, the Nomads; it was another form of conversation altogether, a more tranquil form, a deeper form, and he also discovered what her gift, this ability to bring out the best in others, derived from: her imagination, her talent for invention, her talent, by dint of ten or twenty sentences, for turning everything upside down, making you see the world in a totally different light.

And then it happened, what Jonas Wergeland had hoped for and yet had not dared hope for. After a long talk in the kitchen, three weeks after they had met one another again, she walked over to him, took him by the hand and pulled him to his feet. She looked at him, looked into his eyes and hugged him, hugged him for an eternity, cuddled up to him, cuddled up tight to him as if she could not get close enough, pressed herself against him, soft and hard at one and the same time, but mostly hard, so passionately that Jonas could not help but be reminded of the words of the Kama Sutra: ‘When a man and a woman are very much in love with each other, and, not thinking of any pain or hurt, embrace each other as if they were entering into each other’s bodies … then it is called an embrace like a mixture of milk and water.’

Then, when at long last she let go of him, she regarded him with a veiled but purposeful look in her eyes, before taking his hand and leading him through to the bedroom, to a large double bed, and there she undressed first him and then herself, before they lay down, naked, beside one another on the bed, and she began to stroke him, and she went on stroking him until he felt the entire expanse of his skin waking up, as if from a sleep, a numbness, as if he had only just been cured of a fatal illness; and he felt a desire to stroke her, too, so he stroked her, noticing, as he did so, how her skin seemed to glow, or to emit a sheen, as from a Golden Fleece, golden as the locket she wore round her neck, gold in love, and when he curled up against her, trying to completely overlap her, like two spoons fitting together, he was met not only by warmth but also by a quite extraordinary radiation, as if he were in the middle of a force-field, together with the conviction that, at the end of the day, this was all that mattered, this stillness, this peace, this vast stretch of her skin against his vast stretch of skin, that this was the true epicentre of sexual pleasure, what it all came down to, something so free of any friction, two people lying close together, still but at the same time in motion, a hub, the point around which the whole wheel of existence spun.

Then they made love, and for the first time Jonas lay on top of a woman, in the commonest of all positions, the missionary position; it just turned out that way, for one thing because she liked it best that way, enjoyed him better in that position, and he was surprised at how different it was, how close he got, how much nearer he came, how much deeper, and how he had become carried away in a totally different way, and even though it was he who had taken the lead he soon lost control, a very strange, and totally new experience for him, with the result that he barely had time to register her orgasm, which was not of the epileptic sort but quiet and powerful, with her seeming to retreat into herself, before he was overtaken by an acute, two-fold sensation both of falling and of floating upwards, so that his mind switched off, went into neutral, and for several seconds he was far away.

Only after he had come back to his senses did it occur to him that he had not thought of anything at all, nor had he had any sense of being expanded, as on earlier occasions; and while he was lying there, wondering about this, still curled up close to Margrete with the scent of her skin in his nostrils, he realized that he had become a totally different person, and this he knew, quite simply because he could tell that this was love and because love is not only an expansive, but also a transformative, force.

He turned onto his side and lay there looking at her, her face, the aura that surrounded her, and he told himself again that this was the hub: lying here, propped up on one elbow, gazing into a face with closed eyelids, that shimmer on the skin, conscious all the while of his body, every single cell, radiating peace and contentment. And as he looked at the jade turtle which she had placed on the bedside table and which seemed transparent, seemed to hover, in the half-dark, he knew that he would stay with her, that he had to stay with her, that this was enough, that there was nothing else worth striving for, he had to stay there, with her, with that living wisdom, that inexhaustible fantasy, that life-giving imagination, this had to be his goal in life, just to be there, within that force-field, talking to her, watching her bake, listening to her stories, curling up beside her, curling up close, to be next to that skin, never to let that golden sheen out of his sight. To learn to tell stories.

She opened her eyes. ‘What are you thinking?’ she said.

‘That I’m going to be one of the quiet ones in this country. That I’m going to be an architect, and build little houses that are nice to live in.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That I don’t need to fumble in the dark any more. That I’m going to stay here and love you.’

‘It won’t be easy.’

‘I’m a great seducer,’ he said.

She smiled in the dim light. Her eyes, her face, shone. Glowed. She reached out a hand and described circles on his brow with the tip of her finger, slowly, and then, before letting her hand fall back onto the pillow, a straight line shooting out like a tangent.

In the end, however, there is no way round it, and you are bound to land here, here in this room, and you come to a stop, utterly exhausted, as if after a great battle, you think, and with a victim, you think, an innocent victim, and you crouch down next to Margrete, and you think and you think, and you look at Margrete and think long and hard, look at her again, dead on a polar-bear skin, shot by a Luger, you think, killed by people who are terrified of anything that is different, you think, not just of a story that is different, but of people, you think, and you look at the picture of Buddha, that beautiful picture of Buddha, and you look at the telephone, and at that you have to stop, even though it all comes flooding in, the memories, you think, the stories, even though more and more spokes keep being added to the wheel, and now you realize, now you know, you have known it ever since you were very young, that life can only be comprehended as a collection of stories.

You crouch there, looking at Margrete, you look at her face, and you look at that golden sheen, as from a Golden Fleece even now, you think, and you remember her ability to sleep, because, she said, sleep has a cleansing effect, everyone who sleeps cleanses the universe, she said, and you would often watch her when she was sleeping, and maybe she is sleeping now, you think, that’s how it looks, anyway, as if she were doing something sacred, you think, and again you are overcome with grief, because you are thinking not only about those wicked individuals, the people behind the Luger, you are also thinking about yourself, and you blame yourself, you are ridden with guilt, because you were not there, and you think that you deserve to die, too, and you think, you think long and hard, and you look at Margrete, and you think of soft spring rain all those years ago, and you think that it must, nonetheless, be possible to go on living, that there is hope, because where there is no longer any hope there are no stories to be told either, you think.

So you stand up, and for a fleeting moment you are seized by doubt, and you think that everything might tie up in a totally different way, that you have got it all wrong, and you start towards the telephone, and you walk the hard road to the telephone, like Hindus walking over red-hot coals, you think, and as you are walking the hard road to the telephone, ridden with guilt, I just want to say, once and for all, that I believe you, I want you to know that: I believe you. And know, Jonas Wergeland, that the one who is writing this does so in the hope that your fellow countrymen will understand but also, and perhaps more so, in order that you, when you eventually read this, will understand. And what it is that I want you to understand, only you know.

So walk those last few metres, the hard road to the telephone, thinking as you do so that it must be possible to go on living, because you are alive to the alchemy of storytelling, that even shit can be turned into gold, that even tragedy can be transformed into stories one can live on, live off, and you walk over to the telephone, you reach the telephone, you lift the receiver, and you look at the two circles of the receiver, you key in a number, like a tangent, a way out, you think, and you are afraid, you know that what is now about to happen could change everything that has happened, and you know that from now on all of this could be rearranged to form quite a different story, and you know that anything can happen from the moment you start to speak, to tell your story.