The seducer, p.23
The Seducer, page 23
‘Here’s the money,’ said Jonas’s grandmother, ‘and now I’ll take a little more port, if you don’t mind. Åse, stop looking so worried.’ Suddenly Jonas saw his grandmother as level-headed countrywoman, triumphant Churchill and wealthy patron of the arts all rolled into one; these three facets of her personality seemed to have synthesized into a greater whole, or perhaps only now were they seeing the real Jørgine Wergeland. ‘With this money you’ll be able to build that new house,’ she said. ‘Now that’s not so bad, is it?’
No, it was not so bad, and thus Jonas learned that the price of beauty, too, is constantly rising and that it can be converted into something concrete: a fine little brick-built house nestling under the reddish-brown granite face of Ravnkollen, for example. Jonas’s family always maintained that their house had been built by artists: by a bricklayer named Widerberg, a joiner named Rose and a plumber named Johannessen.
I might also add that Jonas’s grandmother most definitely did not need too feel bad about her ‘young businessman’. He had immediately recognized the value of Jørgine Wergeland’s unique collection of experimental works by young artists, the majority painted at a stage when they were in the process of breaking away from teachers and traditions and trying out new ways of painting. In other words, this man had a ‘nose’, and a nose for fine art at that. Before the seventies were out, Jens Johannessen, Frans Widerberg and Knut Rose – to name but three – would all, in their turn, score major successes as exhibitors at the Bergen Arts Festival and representing Norway at the Biennale in Venice. More to the point, however, is the fact that the ‘young businessman’ had detected something which escaped the attention of all but a few at that time: namely the first signs of what would later be referred to as the ‘yuppie decade’, which began to manifest itself towards the end of the seventies. Suddenly, works of art were fetching unprecedented sums of money – not only because they represented an investment and a speculative venture but also because they actually accorded the buyer a certain cachet. For instance, at the height of this wave, a picture by the not particularly inspiring, late nineteenth-century artist Erik Werenskiold was sold at auction for two and a half million kroner, and even a painter from our own century such as Kai Fjell could command prices of up to two million kroner for a picture. So even if, with a few exceptions, each of Jørgine Wergeland’s paintings on its own might not have been representative of such massive price increases, as a whole, as a collection, they constituted a very attractive proposition. Thus, when the time was right, her ‘young businessman’ was able, in his turn, to sell the collection to another ‘young businessman’ at a price three times greater than the exorbitant price he himself had paid.
If it is any consolation, I should just say that there is bound to come a day when the general public will enjoy these pictures, when this second, or a third, ‘young businessman’ is getting on in years and decides to do penance for his sins by building a magnificent art gallery as an annexe to the empire he has established almost solely by picking up the phone and saying ‘sell’ or ‘buy’.
What is more to the point, as far as our story is concerned, is that his grandmother’s transaction opened Jonas Wergeland’s eyes to the fact that this spine-tingling sensation of his could, as it were, be turned into hard cash. In which case he saw no reason why it should not someday be possible to trade in his own collection for something he truly dreamed of. You see, Jonas Wergeland did not collect paintings, he collected women.
And now you are standing in the Villa Wergeland, paid for, years ago, by your grandmother’s paintings, and you remember that you were on your way to the dining-room, and now you do actually walk through to the dining-room to check if the paintings are gone, if they have been stolen, and you do not need to switch on the light because you can see that the pictures are still there, they seem almost to shine in the dark, with a glow several layers thick, paintings you once singled out yourself, but what good does that do now, you think, what’s the use of a silver thread running down your spine now, you think, what the fuck use is art to anyone anyway, you think, and you trail back into the living room and you see the picture of Buddha and once again you are confronted with Margrete, dead, on the floor, and you have the urge to bend down and take her in your arms, hold her like a little child, tight against you, like a sculpture by Gustav Vigeland you think, man with a woman in his arms, you think, but you do not do so, you merely look and look, at her face, always that face you think, do you remember how I managed to ski all the way down the hills to Movatn, you ask out loud, all the way without falling once, for the first time, you say out loud, looking and looking at her, feeling your eyes fill with tears, the ache in your throat, a sword, you think, a sword at my throat you think, and now you are finally going to be chopped up and your limbs scattered around this room, as if across a vast, barren desert, you think.
Your eye falls on the bowl on the side table, filled with fruit, like an oasis you think, looking at the oranges and remembering how Margrete would peel an orange, slowly, in awe almost, and how she would split it up into wedges, ‘boats’ she called them, eyeing each one lingeringly, holding it up to the light as if it were a work of wonder, you think, before putting it into her mouth, and you remember how she savoured, really savoured, every boat, you think, and the word ‘boat’ pulls you up short, makes you think of a boat reversing, and you hear a whooshing sound, like water seething around the stern of a reversing boat and you listen, intently, until it fades, dropping to no more than a faint hum, or radiation, and again you are struck by the distinct odour of electronic equipment in use and of some gently heated synthetic material, mingling with the smell of charred logs and ashes, and you walk round the corner to find a television set, switched on, but with the sound turned down, and at first you cannot think what a television is doing here, or what a television is, anyone would think you had never seen such a contrivance before, but it reminds you of something and you lift your eyes to the row of blue transparent jars on the shelf above it, as if these were every bit as important, because these are Margrete’s jars and there are seven of them, just like in the fairytales, you think, and you have a mind to knock them to the floor, in protest against something or other, but you do not, you merely look at them, at the delicate, transparent blue in the dim light and gradually it comes back to you, what it is, that machine sitting below the blue jars, what it is used for, pictures, you think, a screen you sit and look at, you think, and something slowly dawns on you, the way it does when you gradually begin to recognize someone who has said hello to you only once they eventually say their name, and the machine is switched on, you think, surprised, it must have been on all the time, you think, even as Margrete was dying, you think, as if this holds the key to it all, and you stand there looking, looking and looking, but you cannot make head nor tail of the images, neither what they represent or how they hang together.
So there you stand, Jonas Wergeland, brother to the polar bear, champion of the Perfume Islands, darling of the Norwegian people, in front of a television set, and you vaguely remember that you actually have cashed in on your collection of paintings, no, not paintings, you think, something else, you cannot remember what, only that you have exchanged it for something that has to do with this screen in front of you, these images, without sound, the chance to be behind these images, or to be these images, you think, and now you realize, as things become clearer, that it is the evening news flashing across the screen, and you recognize the newsreader, you are sure you have spoken to him sometime, you think, and there is something about these images, dramatic items from different countries that fills you with a desperate need to learn everything that has been happening in the world that day, and you think to yourself that if you can do that, you will also find the one detail which will explain everything, why you are standing here, looking at a dead body, you think, and from then on you will actually be enormously keen to know what went on in the world on that particular day, during those minutes when you wandered about in a daze or stood riveted in front of the evening news on TV, events at home and abroad, soundless, and there is something about these images, from society, as it were, from the world outside these windows, you think, which triggers a memory of who you are, one of the other people you are, because you are many people, you think, you are also a politician, you think, once you even climbed a flagpole for a cause, you think, and you were, no, you are still, deeply concerned with how you, an insignificant little individual, could step in and have some effect on the big decisions taken by a community in which almost no one shows their face and almost everyone is faceless, and you stand there, in a living room with a dead body lying next to you, and you gaze at a silent television screen showing a report of the more scandalous sort, some exposé or other, some outraged face speaking into a microphone held obligingly to his lips by a disembodied hand, and you remember that you too have made television programmes, a lot of programmes, you think, presenting Norwegian society from unusual angles, and you know that people were hit, hard, when they least expected it, struck by a ball that shot off at an angle, often more than one angle, like a billiard ball, you think, and you know you have shocked people, no more, aroused hate, you think, and you turn from the television screen to Margrete, dead on the floor, and you realize that any Norwegian citizen could be behind this, it could be anyone, even the Oslo bomber, you think, someone who’s sick in the head, or simply someone who hates being provoked, hates these all too revealing, all too unforeseen angles.
Strike the Christian Cross from your Flag
Always this: to find a different angle from anyone else. Like the time he took the stairs two at a time to come breathlessly to a halt outside the door of the corner room on the third floor and, quivering more with impatience than nerves, managed to pick the lock – he, Jonas Wergeland, the Duke, on the hunt for new angles.
He crosses to the window, shaped like the upper half of a circle. A half-moon. How apt. It is early in the morning, before first period, and Jonas is standing in the dusty flag-loft of Oslo Cathedral School with a length of fabric rolled up under his arm and his heart pounding in his chest. These are the days of student revolt and like so many others Jonas Wergeland means to hoist a flag – but not the usual flag.
The horizontal flag-pole was anchored inside the room itself, running through the wall just below the window; it put Jonas in mind of a jib-boom and made him feel as if he were standing in the bow of a lifeboat, all ready to do great deeds. But what he saw outside, or down below, was not the sea, but the cemetery.
Oslo Cathedral School was tucked away in one corner of the huge Rikshospital complex and Jonas actually felt more like a patient than a pupil: a patient who was constantly being given the wrong diagnosis. To be brutally frank, Jonas would have regarded his three years at this high school, all mentions of which were invariably punctuated by such epithets as ‘venerable’ or ‘steeped in tradition’ or ‘charming’, as seriously damaging to his mental health, had it not been for the fact that it lay just across the street from Our Saviour’s cemetery. For it was there that he had met Axel.
During the lunch-break on one of his first days at the Cathedral School, following an almost destructive impulse, Jonas had slipped through the wrought-iron gates of the cemetery. Despite the beautiful August weather, he was feeling thoroughly depressed and shuddered to think what the three years ahead of him held in store in terms of tedium and, worse, unsatisfied curiosity. Jonas cursed himself and the whim that had led him to this ‘august’ school in the heart of the city.
Gloomily he made his way between the rows of graves, and it was while he was walking along, kicking up the gravel, his eyes fixed on the ground, that he heard a familiar sound, a sound so familiar that at first he could not figure out what it was. He walked faster, straightened his shoulders, headed towards the sound, some faint notes played on an instrument he ought to know better than any other. The music was coming from someone hidden behind the leafy foliage surrounding one of the graves in the Grove of Honour. And there, sitting between two striking weeping beeches, on the grave of none other than Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, was Axel Stranger.
Anyone familiar with Our Saviour’s cemetery in Oslo will know that Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s grave is marked with a flat stone of red granite. The actual concept – a flag, yes, yet another flag – is really rather grotesque, but the monument itself makes a perfect place to sit; in summer the stone is lovely and warm and, as I mentioned, well screened by thick foliage. Axel had resorted to this spot to read. Oddly enough Jonas, who rarely opened a work of fiction, tended to choose friends who were readers. Nefertiti and Margrete were also readers. Lying on the granite next to Axel was Halldor Laxness’ Veveren fra Kashmir, a battered copy from Deichman’s Library.
On seeing Jonas, Axel finished the tune he was playing, the title of which had finally come to Jonas: ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ from Duke Ellington’s inexhaustible repertoire. Without a word, Jonas put out his hand, and the mouth organ was placed in his palm like a relay baton. It was exactly the same as his own, a Hohner Chromonica, well used, with a dent in the casing. Jonas raised it to his lips and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’, not altogether satisfied with his performance, it was a long time since he had played, but he got through it. His face deadpan, Axel took back the instrument and proceeded to play – without wiping it on his trouser-leg first, which Jonas promptly took as a vote of confidence – ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’ with such virtuosity and such feeling that it sent shivers up Jonas’s spine, forcing him to swallow several times. Never had anyone brought out the aching melancholy of that tune so well, no one in Ellington’s own orchestra come to that, not even Johnny Hodges. And as Axel played, Jonas felt something loosen its grip on him. Nefertiti. Or rather, he felt as if he were letting go of one hand and clasping another, a new hand. And it is as if Nefertiti herself was there beside him, giving this new friendship her blessing.
‘Christ Almighty,’ said Axel. He slipped the mouth organ into his jacket pocket, ran a hand through his tousled locks and squinted up at the sun. ‘What a shower.’
Jonas knew what he was referring to. Their class. Not because they were so all-fired clever. Nor because so many of them were the children of pillars of society who before too long would themselves constitute a disproportionately large slice of Norway’s highly visible élite. It was because they were such bloody conformists. Even their radicalism was conformist; their very rebelliousness followed the fashion, usually of an earlier era, so they could ponce about in their fathers’ berets and their grandfathers’ black waistcoats, reading Sartre, like Jonas’s cousin Veronika – who, it went without saying, was also a pupil at the school. It reeked to high heaven of opportunist opposition.
‘And those teachers.’ Axel made a face.
‘Aye hope you awll rrree-alayze what sawrrrt of school you arrre attending.’ Jonas did a perfect imitation of the headmaster.
‘I knew it the minute I saw you,’ said Axel. ‘I could tell by your shoes. You were a wanderer. You were the only one.’
Jonas had also noticed Axel. It’s always the way. You home in on one another almost as soon as you walk through the school gates: like ants, it’s all down to chemistry, even in a crowd of several hundred. It might be a look, a laugh – in Jonas and Axel’s case it was their shoes. Both wore a particular type of sturdy, thick-soled black brogue, well polished. And they were dressed almost identically in white cotton shirts, buttoned to the neck, dark tweed jackets and baggy trousers of a good quality; in other words, what I would call timeless clothes – clothes that never reflect the current fashion, no matter how much or how often that may change.
‘Where did you learn to play like that?’ Axel asked.
‘From a girl.’
‘And Duke Ellington?’
‘The same.’
‘Looks like we’ve both been lucky,’ Axel said. ‘To run into originals in a world full of imitators.’ Otherwise, Axel’s most distinctive feature was his hair, a thick black mop that at times looked so wild that it could have been mistaken for the Rasta dreadlocks of a later date.
They made many a visit to Our Saviour’s cemetery during their three years at the Cathedral School. While other pupils headed for the town centre at lunchtime, going all the way down to the Studenten ice cream parlour, wolfed down stacks of mille-feuilles in the neighbourhood teashops, sneaked into the Rikshospital canteen or wandered along to Ringstrøm’s second-hand bookshop to rummage through the boxes set out on the street, Jonas and Axel took refuge among the stone monuments on the other side of Ullevålsveien, where the graves of famous Norwegian men and women provided them with a place to relax between two spells of dreary school work. ‘During lunch-breaks at the Cath, I mixed with a lot of interesting people,’ Jonas would later say. In the classroom they went hunting for turtles; at lunchtime they sat or lay stretched out in the Grove of Honour and played the mouth organ, their eyes resting on the top of a lovely copper beech or a majestic horse chestnut. Jonas taught Axel the arrangements for two mouth organs that Nefertiti had taught him, first and foremost their pièce de résistance: ‘Concerto for Cootie’. They really made that number swing, so magnificently that on occasion they ended up being chased by the caretaker. ‘Don’t you have any respect for the dead?’ he would holler, waving his fist at them. ‘Vandals!’
Jonas and Axel would have been more inclined to say that they were ‘honouring the dead’.
They had their favourite graves. The grassy slope alongside Edvard Munch’s memorial plaque was just right for ‘Morning Glory’, Olaf Bull’s beautiful grave with its tall undressed stones lent a unique resonance to ‘Never No Lament’, perfect for two mouth organs, while they did honour to composer Johan Svendsen’s lofty obelisk, fittingly enough, with ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing’.
