The seducer, p.22
The Seducer, page 22
Jonas refused to accept that there might be a connection, refused to believe that it was true, but it was: Margrete had read his letter out loud to her class, standing on a chair as if it were a huge joke: a letter in which he had left himself totally exposed, stripped bare, as it were. He walks around the playground with a troop of screeching girls on his tail, shooting sidelong glances at her, much as a wrongfully condemned man or a torture victim will eye his executioner and only then, seeing her standing alone on the steps, cruel and proud – she even meets his eye – does he see, bitterly disappointed and humiliated though he is, why he is so utterly infatuated with her. It is not something external, nothing like that at all. It is her inner radiance.
‘Want to feel my yoni?’ yells one of the boldest girls, eliciting a barrage of delighted giggles from her sisters. Jonas squirmed his way through the lunch recess, walking an endless gauntlet of smirking faces. For a whole week, people would burst out laughing whenever he so much as showed his face.
Things did not look as if they could get any worse. But they could, and they did. Jonas learned what it felt like to be kicked when you are down: Margrete went away. She just disappeared. It was one thing to call it off, quite another to go away. All hope definitively gone, Jonas felt in acute need of a heart transplant.
What do you do when you are desperate?
You can take yourself off to Timbuktu, but you can also kill your mother’s seven lovers.
Is such a thing possible? Jonas’s mother with seven lovers? Was that why she went around with that crooked little smile on her face, looking as though she knew something no one else knew? Bear in mind that this was in the sixties, in Norway, Oslo, Solhaug: a few score families and everybody as good as knowing everybody else’s business; a community so transparent that the walls might have been made of glass, where each and every household knew about it the minute Mrs Bogerud received a letter from Hong Kong or the Myhres went to the length of acquiring something as unbelievably extravagant as a toaster. Bear in mind, too, that Jonas’s mother, Åse Hansen was a no-nonsense sort of a woman with both feet planted firmly on the ground and that she worked – although I’m not sure whether I mentioned it – for the most prosaic of companies, Grorud Ironmongers Ltd, a rock-solid concern manufacturing hardware in brass and steel under the ambitious leadership of the Bratz brothers, one of whom even held the post of Minister for Trade and Industry for a while – down by the station, and there she stood on an assembly line, coming into daily contact with such concrete items as door hinges, doorknobs and Tip Tight window fastenings. How did all this square with anything as unheard of as a whole bevy of lovers?
It was true. Jonas’s mother did have seven ardent lovers and all thanks to her brother, Uncle Lauritz. Jonas’s only recollection of his uncle was of a rather exotic character, a man in a dark-blue uniform with four gold stripes on his sleeves, a fragrant-smelling figure with sleek black hair, a monsoon, an eminently enigmatic wind which blew in across the temperate climate of their everyday life from time to time. Uncle Lauritz, jazz-lover, belonged to that legendary generation of pilots trained in Canada who served in World War II before going on to join the Norwegian national airline DNL, later to become part of SAS. Every now and again, when the occasion called for it, Uncle Lauritz had presented Jonas’s father with a bottle of aftershave lotion – different brands, all with names redolent of southern climes or heroic myths – the contents of which his father used only sparingly, possibly because he set such great store by them, or because aftershave was not his style. So they were left to sit on a shelf in the tall old-fashioned oak cabinet in the bathroom year after year, long after Uncle Lauritz had ceased to blow in over Grorud like some exotic wind: seven beautiful bottles, each displaying its own fine lines and containing its own golden and distinct perfumed liquid.
As a boy, one of Jonas’s favourite ploys when he went to the grocer’s with his mother was to sneak open the bottles of rum, vanilla and almond essence and sniff their delicious aromas as avidly as any hopeless slave to opium. Likewise, he often stood and admired the seven bottles in the bathroom cabinet, running his fingers over their elegant lines, picturing them to himself as elementary forms of some sort as he unscrewed the tops and inhaled their scents. I do not propose to launch into a long spiel concerning the evanescent nature of scent, nor to shake anyone’s belief in the objectivity of our sense of smell by citing the surprisingly varied preferences shown in different eras and by different peoples where perfumes are concerned, let me simply say that Jonas thought they smelled – oh, quite heavenly, so heavenly that the story of the three wise men and the word ‘myrrh’ automatically sprang to mind. The seven bottles of imported aftershave lotion were also costly by the standards of the day, amounting to little short of a treasure house in a bathroom belonging to perfectly ordinary, hard-working social democrats.
Only on special occasions, those times when he shaved again in the evening, did Jonas’s father splash a few drops on his cheeks, selecting one of the bottles on the shelf at random, and so it came about that his mother used to joke to the children that she had seven different lovers who came to her and whom she could only tell apart in the darkness by their scent. ‘Last night I had a visit from Alfredo from Capri,’ she might say at the breakfast table, smiling her crooked smile. Jonas always thought how wonderful it must be … to be seduced, night after night, by a different scent each time.
We all know how traumatic puberty can be. Personally, I rather like this contrivance on the part of Mother Nature and am frequently amused by what people are liable to say or do during this period, not least in terms of irrational rebellious acts. All too many individuals are too quick to shrug off the irreplaceable perspectives on life afforded by this hormonally charged time – the most ungrateful of them even go so far as to consider the phase as a necessary evil. In any event, Jonas Wergeland also committed his share of rebellious acts during puberty and one of the earliest of these, the one closest to my own heart, due to its shocking, almost primitive originality, happened to involve his mother’s seven lovers.
Without any warning, Margrete had vanished without trace, and eventually Jonas discovered the reason why: she had gone abroad. Her father the diplomat, Gjermund Boeck, had been assigned to a new post, on the other side of the world no less. This at least provided Jonas with a sorely needed scapegoat: Margrete’s father. Had it not been for him, blasted fiend that he was, Jonas would at least have been able to see Margrete. To say that Jonas hated Gjermund Boeck merely scrapes the surface of his volcano of emotions. As a last cruel cut, Jonas found out about Mr Boeck’s ‘kidnapping’ as he referred to it in his mind, just as the World Skiing Championships were getting under way in Oslo, a competition in which another Gjermund, namely Gjermund Eggen, was to become a new national hero, winning three gold medals and ensuring that for months afterwards, Jonas could not go anywhere without hearing or seeing that despised Christian name, even in an advertisement for root beer.
During this time, while Jonas was wandering about, not with a thorn in his flesh but with a thorn in his heart, his parents could have shown a little more consideration. Jonas had, as I have said, a wonderful father, and there never was a wiser mother than Åse Hansen; besides which, there was that crooked little smile of hers, adding to everything, joys as well as sorrows, the essential, ironic grain of salt. But faced with Jonas’s wretchedness, they were at a complete loss, which may explain their tactlessness and why, one evening as Jonas was standing in the bathroom doorway his father let fly a thoughtless remark from his chair in the living: ‘Take it easy, Jonas, you’ll soon forget her, I’m sure.’ Just at that moment his mother happened to come in from the kitchen. At sight of her son’s pale drawn face, she almost lost her temper and came out with a cliché which, by the very fact of it being a cliché, hurt Jonas that much more deeply: ‘Pull yourself together, boy! Nobody ever died of a broken heart!’
I admit that mothers are a mystery to me, not least their knack for making the most infamous remarks in delicate situations where really the only thing to do is to tread carefully and remember that silence is golden: a knack that might almost be likened to the sow’s tendency to eat her own young. Neither his mother nor his father really understood Jonas’s inner turmoil at all; they had, in other words, forgotten their own adolescence, the peaks and the abysses. They simply did not see that for a thirteen-year-old, losing someone whose hand you could hold, someone to press their lips against yours, was a disaster on a par with World War I; they did not realize that an entire inner landscape had been laid waste, suddenly and senselessly.
So what do you do when you are desperate? Or, to put it another way, how heavy is love?
Jonas stands in the bathroom doorway, contemplating the tall, narrow ton-weight of the oak cabinet rearing up between the washbasin and the toilet, the only piece of furniture his mother had brought with her from her childhood home in Gardermoen; and there, more importantly, are the seven bottles of precious aftershave lotion, ranged along the uppermost shelf. Jonas grips the sides of the doorway, his parents’ words ringing in his ears; he feels grief and fury melding, endowing him with a strength of untold dimensions, so great that he makes up his mind to throw that bloody great junk heap of a cabinet out of the bathroom window, a little peephole no more than thirty centimetres square. After all, if man has the muscle power to jump over a building, surely it must also be possible to lift a tall massive cabinet about as heavy as a piano and chuck it out of a window that is too small. After all, the most unlikely things are forever happening. With that, he strides resolutely across to the cabinet, gets his arms round it and actually manages to lift this colossal chunk of oak off the floor, as if he were pulling the Norwegian national tree itself up by the roots and not only that; with a savage roar he also succeeds in throwing, or somehow ramming, the cabinet into the tiny square window high up in the wall: a wonderful cathartic moment as he feels the agonizing implosion transformed into an explosion, the result being that the cabinet crashes into the wall with an infernal bang, shattering the shelf of National Geographics before smashing to the floor, where every article of glass shatters into a million pieces, and Jonas goes on seething for a few seconds more over everything and anything, not least the fact that he did not manage to hurl that cabinet through the little peephole hard enough to send bricks flying in all directions.
Inasmuch as the bathroom in many ways was the flat’s holy of holies, a chamber of dreams both for his mother and his father, Jonas had the great satisfaction of feeling that with this gesture of protest he had killed two birds with one stone. Years of National Geographics lay scattered across the floor, littered with broken glass and spattered with a good few decilitres of scent. Jonas, on the other hand, was safe; the crisis had passed: his destructive energy had, as it were, been burnt off.
How heavy is love? At least 150 kilos I would say. For some days afterwards, Jonas was painfully aware that he had strained himself badly. But better to have aching kidneys than an aching heart. And in any case: it is not every day one has the satisfaction of killing seven lovers with one lethal blow.
What Price Beauty
The bathroom in the new villa was of course quite a different story. It had a red fired-brick floor complete with under-floor heating, gleaming white tiles on the walls with a chequered border in ultramarine designed by Aunt Laura and copied, according to her, from the dome of a mosque in Samarkand. Everything was bigger – the bath, the washbasin, the whole room in fact – which meant that there was also space for a shower cabinet and this, together with the ferns, quite a little rain-forest of them, lent the bathroom an air of sheer luxury, an impression which Jonas crowned by installing a bidet when he took over the house. There were times, sitting on the toilet, when Jonas fell to contemplating the astonishingly rapid rate of social change in twentieth-century Norway: the leap from his grandfather’s naturally aromatic outside privy on Hvaler, by way of the tiny bathroom in the block of flats at Solhaug, to this sumptuous, one might almost say international, chamber in the new house with its generous expanse of mirror and fittings worthy of any number of design awards – the equivalent of making the leap from Stone Age to Atomic Age within a couple of generations. It should be said, however, that they did retain the shelf of National Geographics, the only difference being that the old scent-spattered copies had been replaced by newer issues. Theodor Kittelesen’s picture of Soria Moria Castle also hung in its place on the wall, clearly visible from the toilet seat. Which reminds me that I never did finish the story of Jonas and his grandmother and their activities within the Norwegian fine-art market: a story which has both a moral and a happy ending.
Åse and Haakon Hansen had been on the look-out for some time for a bigger house, although they still had ample room where they were even after Buddha came along, Rakel having left home around the same time. But they had fallen prey to that dream common to all Norwegians: the dream of a house of one’s own, as if the fact of no longer having to live through the wall from anyone else represented the last lap on the road to happiness, a legacy of sorts from the days when every Norwegian inhabited his own valley with high hills between him and his nearest neighbours. Which is why, when a plot of land on the other side of Bergensveien came their way, only a stone’s throw from the block of flats in which they lived, they jumped at the chance and hence – typically – were only just starting to realize their dream of having their own house as Jonas and Daniel, too, were about to leave the nest.
Jonas’s parents hired an architect to draw up plans for a simple house, a house they could afford, but even this proved to be beyond their means. The building, which extended upwards and outwards and would later be dubbed ‘Villa Wergeland’, looked like remaining as out of reach as Soria Moria Castle, to stick with Kittelsen for the moment, the building costs proving to be far greater than anyone had expected – double in fact. Unlike the men behind a number of subsequent, much publicized Norwegian building projects, however, Åse and Haakon Hansen discovered this at an early stage. They obtained a number of estimates from an obliging builder, at no obligation, and very quickly figured out that such an outlay was more than they could afford.
One Sunday when the whole family was, for once, having dinner together in the flat at Solhaug – cold roast pork as usual on such occasions – Jonas’s father explained the situation to the children, with a lot of fiddling and fidgeting, and announced that sadly they would have to shelve their plans for a house of their own. At that very moment, while all of them were feeling pretty glum and even Åse’s crooked smile had been wiped off, the doorbell rang and there stood Jonas’s grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland, who had long since read the signs in telephone conversations with her daughter.
It had been a while since any of them had seen her. Jørgine had gone through a lengthy spell of being Winston Churchill – a magnificent Winston Churchill, I might add – but the word was that in recent years she had gone back to being herself, which is to say an ordinary, one-time farmer’s wife from Gardermoen sitting reminiscing in the kitchen in Oscars gate or down by the pond in Slottsparken, chatting away quite normally to other old folk.
‘Dearie me, you’re a right cheery-looking lot!’ Jonas’s grandmother wasted no time. She asked them to sit themselves down in the sofa nook, she asked for a glass of port, she asked them all to relax.
Then she laid a cheque on the table, made out to Jonas’s mother, Åse Hansen.
‘There you go, and good luck to you.’ She raised the glass of port, winked at them all, even Buddha, who was gazing in wonder at the three deep creases in her forehead.
Jonas’s mother was completely nonplussed. ‘That’s an awful lot of money,’ was all she said.
‘True, but then what would I do with it?’ said his grandmother.
‘But how did you come by it, mother? You haven’t been doing anything illegal, have you?’
So Jørgine told them the story of ‘the young businessman’ who had rung her doorbell one day and asked to see her pictures. Jonas had all but forgotten the paintings that he had helped to collect. As recently as his first year in high school he had called in on his grandmother a couple of times after classes; he particularly remembered one visit to the Art Centre, occasioned by a biennale of works by young Nordic painters which had caused quite a stir, when he had persuaded his grandmother to buy a couple of early works by painters as diverse as Bjørn Carlsen and Odd Nerdrum, before celebrating a job well done not, as previously, with a visit to the Studenten ice cream parlour but with dinner – meatballs and stewed cabbage – at Restaurant Krølle, where his grandmother, clearly very much at home, impressed on Jonas the importance of only buying pictures by artists who were endeavouring to break new ground. ‘Like Knut Rose,’ she said, thinking of the boldly coloured paintings by him which she had acquired in the late sixties, prompted, needless to say, by that unerring tingling between Jonas’s shoulder-blades.
This ‘young businessman’, as Jørgine called him, wandered from room to room of the big flat in Oscars gate in a daze, hardly crediting what he was seeing; over the years Jonas’s grandmother had hung the walls with an impressive collection of works by young Norwegian artists, together with a few pictures from the fifties by Jakob Weidemann and Inger Sitter and a couple of Munch lithographs. When he had regained his breath he made Jørgine an offer on the spot for the whole collection. A very generous offer. More than it was worth. A lot more, by Jørgine’s reckoning. He insisted. She asked him to let her think it over. The following day she took him up on his offer, sold the whole lot, apart from four pictures which she later gave to Jonas, as a special thank-you to him.
