The Seducer Read online

  After yet another nerve-racking pep talk, delivered in the calmer part of the basin, they slipped slowly into the mainstream. ‘No way back!’ some wit called out as the raft picked up speed, heading down the river, which closed in relentlessly as they approached the first stretch of rapids, and right then and there Jonas knew, as one often does in the seconds after making a fatal decision, that he should not have done this, that this trip was bound to end in disaster.

  There were six rafts going down together, seven people in each one, including the man at the oars who, in theory, was supposed to be an experienced oarsman. Jonas looked at their man, a not particularly muscular-looking African wearing a sly grin, and felt far from reassured. Not only that, but the rubber raft seemed somewhat the worse for wear; and the grubby yellow lifejackets they were wearing did not exactly inspire much confidence either. Jonas had a suspicion that the whole lot dated from the Second World War and had been bought on the cheap. And here I would just like to add that the sort of modern innovations which are to be found nowadays up north, in the sheltered and strictly regulated confines of Scandinavia, helmets and wetsuits and the like, were of course quite unthinkable in these parts, and indeed would have been considered utterly ridiculous.

  Jonas was sitting right at the back, along with a female journalist and a photographer with his camera in a waterproof bag. On a scale of one to six these rapids were classed as a five, and thus they attracted enthusiasts from all over the world eager to try all their hearts could take of white-water rafting and daredevil games with the elements. Jonas held on tight, seeing a wave rising up dangerously high in the air ahead of them; he even took time to wonder for a moment how this could be possible, how could a killer wave shoot right up in the air like that, like a geyser, or appear to be heading straight for them, in the middle of a deep river, but his musings were cut short when the oarsman – who, thought Jonas, must be off his head – steered straight at the wave while the three at the front threw themselves forward into the column of water, then the raft was gliding up and over as if going over a big bump, while they whooped ecstatically, thereby revealing the whole object of the tour: to have fun, to flirt with danger, to switch off from some dull office job in Amsterdam or Singapore or Cape Town. According to their instructions, the three at the back, where Jonas huddled, were supposed to keep the raft level, but Jonas had no thought for anything but to hang on tight, gripping the rope running round the rim as if it were an umbilical cord of sorts, the only thing tying him to life; then, almost instinctively, he hurled a primal scream at the precipitous cliff faces, a howl that was totally drowned out by the deafening racket, or fury, of the river waters.

  Jonas knew there was no way this could ever turn out well. He had to ask himself whether this whole stupid exercise, casting himself out into the fiercest rapids in the world, might not simply be the manifestation of a covert death wish, or a means of escape, that he in fact had no desire to get under way with the venture which was to alter his whole career: that he could not face the thought of all those heated discussions, not to say arguments and hard-nosed deliberations over everything from budgets to people that would have to be gone through before he could have any hope of realizing the mammoth project he had in mind. On one quieter stretch, where the terrain also opened out, seeming to allow him a breathing space, oxygen for his brain, he thought not without some qualms of all the months of planning that lay ahead of him were he to pull it off: the colossal amount of groundwork, not forgetting all the jealousy, the backbiting and intrigue he would have to put up with. So perhaps this expedition was a final test, he thought, as everything closed in and the raft was once more caught up in foaming white waters that raced between sheer rock-faces, sweeping them along the bottom of a deep gorge, because if he made it through this, survived this ride between what looked like an endless run of rocky islets ready at any minute to close up and mash him to a pulp, as in some ancient Greek epic – except that nothing would have time to close up here, with everything moving at such a crazy speed – then he might even have some chance of overcoming the Norwegian rock-face, that massive hurdle denoted by lack of imagination and pettiness and an unwillingness to think big, all of which were so much the hallmark of the management team responsible for evaluating the project to which he was now, down here, about to put the finishing touches. That may also have been why he seemed to be constantly on the lookout for something on the dark cliffs speeding past, without really knowing what: an answer, a sign.

  In any case he soon lost track of what his motive might have been, since it was all he could do just to hold on tight, just to be scared, so terrified that he became more and more convinced that this white speck, these white specks of boiling water, this endless roiling would be the death of him, that at some point his good fortune was bound to desert him, that good fortune which had saved his bacon in countless tricky situations in the most bizarre parts of the world: looking down the throat of a polar bear in Greenland; on a ledge ten storeys above the ground in Manhattan; in the Sahara, lying on his back in the sand with a sword at his throat. Jonas Wergeland recognized that characteristic feeling of nausea which never failed, a sure sign that things were about to go wrong, badly wrong; that this was where his luck ran out; he was going to die here, in a sort of existential toilet: one pull on the chain and you were flushed away in a swirl of water. No good spouting paraphrases here on Darwin’s revolutionary view of a term of a hundred of million years or any of the other argumentations which he had collected in a little red book and which had smoothed his path up the ladder of success. Here, between these cliffs, at this pace, all words were laid to earth, or rather, were washed away by the water. So Jonas was scared to death, assailed by regret, but it was too late, he knew that someone was going to be tossed out into those lethal rapids, and he had a nasty sickening feeling that that someone would be him. I know I have to go sometime, he thought, but why does it have to be in such an utterly ridiculous hair-raising fashion?

  I know it is hard to believe that Jonas Wergeland, so famed for his consummate sang-froid and prodigious self-assurance, for his courage in fact, could have been so afraid or had such morbid thoughts, but without in any way meaning to boast, let me make it clear once and for all, that my acquaintanceship with this man Jonas Wergeland is of a sort that I cannot expect anyone to understand, nor do I see any reason to elaborate upon it, but it does enable me briefly to recap on the following facts: Jonas Wergeland is sitting in a sixteen-foot rubber raft, racing down the rapids on the Zambezi river, knowing that someone, and most probably he himself, is going to fall in, and he is so terrified that not only is he shitting his pants and jumping out of his skin and so on and so forth – he is so appallingly frightened that, for some of the time at least, he is not really there; his mind deserts him, is out there floating on another plane, with the result that he actually succeeds, albeit involuntarily, in doing what one sometimes tries to do, although with no success, at the dentist’s, namely to think of something else entirely as the drill bores in towards the nerve in a tooth.

  The Great Discoveries

  Of all Jonas Wergeland’s more or less epic journeys, of all his, to varying extents, hazardous voyages of discovery, there was one which never palled, which stood as the most heroic, gruelling, groundbreaking and, not least, perilous, journey he had ever embarked upon: a journey to the interior of Østfold. This journey he made as a boy, together with Nefertiti of course and, at the moment when he set out, it ought to be said that they, or rather he, Jonas, considered this expedition to be just about as daring as sailing over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and consequently, after this, after they came back ‘to life’ as it were, he knew that anything was possible. From that point of view, Jonas could be said to have got the hackneyed theme of ‘young man sets out to see the world’ out of the way at the tender age of eight. Thanks to Aunt Laura, a lady given to chalk-white makeup, voluminous shawls and enigmatic hats, Jonas was familiar with such places as Isfahan and Bukhara, b
ut in Jonas Wergeland’s life it was that journey to the interior of Østfold which blew his childhood universe apart.

  But first let me say something about this childhood universe as it pertained to Jonas Wergeland. Philosophers and scientists are forever trying to come up with something smart to say about the nature of life – take, for example, all that artful talk about the world in a grain of sand. Not that I have any intention of depriving anyone of the illusion of being able to discover new ‘truths’, but if I might just point out that this is something which every child experiences, even if many of them do in time succeed, by the most amazing feat of erasure, in suppressing such insights. Every child inhabits all of history and all of geography in the most natural way possible. What those speculators in the meaning-of-life industry grope their way towards time and again are, in other words, merely scraps of a lost childhood.

  Jonas Wergeland and his friend through thick and – even more so – thin, Nefertiti Falck, grew up in Grorud, on a community housing development with the fine-sounding name of Solhaug – Sunnyhills – six low blocks of flats sitting at the top of Hagelundveien. Here, in the north-east corner of Oslo, within a relatively small area, the whole history of Norway was exposed to view. Here lay the forest where people could live as hunters and gatherers; here, on the farms around Ammerud, one could see the shepherd and the sewer, the whole of peasant society in the flesh. And behind the blocks of flats ran Bergensveien, bearing witness to a burgeoning commercial trade, not to mention highwaymen a little further up around Røverkollen – Robbers’ Hill; Norway as an industrial nation could be studied at close quarters, both in the quarries alongside Trondheimsveien and in the textile factories along the banks of the River Alna. Grorud was one of the few places which provided an almost perfect illustration of the saying: ‘Town and land, hand in hand’. And during Jonas’s formative years, the new service industries also began to shoot sky-high, quite literally, in the shape of garish supermarkets and, not least, the Grorud shopping centre with its Babel tower block, all twelve storeys of it, with, most importantly – a real fairground attraction this – a lift. All history was there, in one small patch of ground. No one told them this, but they took it in, so to speak, with mother’s milk, through play.

  And when it came to geography, Grorud was, like all other places in Norway, a result of the creative movement of the glaciers with its rivers and lakes, its fertile soil in valleys nestling between hills and steep mountainsides. The stark, almost vertical, granite face of Ravnkollen, rising up directly behind Solhaug, was a particularly dominant topographical feature, a sort of magnified version of the Berlin Wall which their mothers strictly forbade them to scale – in vain of course. Thanks to the childish imagination, the wide world, too, was to be found in nucleus in these few square kilometres: jungle, prairie, Sherwood Forest – you name it – it was all there, in miniature. In the world of childhood there is always a Timbuktu, some sort of outer limit and a Mount Everest, posing the ultimate challenge. Even the Victoria Falls were in principal anticipated at Grorud in the ‘waterfall’ down in the stream; for a child, a three-foot cascade is good enough.

  On a day in mid-May, in the year in which Gagarin broke the space barrier in his own way, Jonas and Nefertiti embarked upon their great expedition to inner Østfold. It all began when Nefertiti’s father received a letter, the envelope plastered with foreign stamps and in fact addressed to an aunt whom everyone believed to be somewhere abroad. Nefertiti’s parents only had a rough idea of where she had previously lived and since the letter did not look all that important they laid it on one side, with the result that Nefertiti, who had a feeling that her aunt had returned home and that they would be able to locate her, decided to deliver the letter personally. But when Nefertiti mentioned the name of the place to Jonas he was all against the idea, since to him it sounded as alien and, not least, as daunting as any exotic name from the unreal frames of the comic strips. ‘There’s adventure to be found wherever you go,’ said Nefertiti, ‘and we can’t spend all our lives sitting on our backsides in Grorud, can we?’

  So there he was, on the train, and it was strange how well Jonas was to remember that trip, the sharpness of every detail, especially from the point where the track branched, after Ski station, and headed off into the complete unknown: up to then the only place he had ever taken the train to was Frederikstad. He always remembered that expedition into inner Østfold more clearly than, let’s say, his trip to Shanghai: the moment, for example, when they crossed the River Glomma, having left behind them stations with such outlandish names as Kråkstad, Tomter and Spydeberg, and Nefertiti brought out a mouth organ. But Nefertiti did not play ‘Oh, My Darling Clementine’ or any other such tired old evergreen. No, she played ‘Morning Glory’ by Duke Ellington, no less, and she played that intricate melody beautifully on a gold, chromatic mouth organ, while they rolled along tracks flanked on both sides by black fields on which the first shoots were just starting to show; either that or spring-green meadows dotted with yellow flowers, and one with a whole herd of horses galloping across it and a gleaming white church in the background, like something Edward Hopper might have painted. She played so well, so divinely, that Jonas was able to take her cap round and collect a whole six kroner in jingling coins before they passed Mysen.

  Now at this point I really ought to say something about Nefertiti, although nothing can really do her justice. She was the same age as Jonas, but unlike him, the mere sight of an ant could prompt her to point out that the ants had already evolved into at least ten thousand different species while at the same time asking Jonas why the life of human beings should be governed to such an extent by sight and sound whereas ants went wholly by taste and smell, a chemical form of communication; or she might ask what Jonas thought of a world that revolved around the woman, the female. Nefertiti had an unusually shaped head which she always concealed under a cloth cap; it was so uncommonly long at the back that Jonas sometimes wondered whether she might be from another planet. Her clothes and her appearance were pretty ordinary apart from the fact that she always wore her hair in plaits, had pearl studs in her ears and boasted the longest eyelashes in the world. These aside, Nefertiti’s most distinctive feature was her inexhaustible imagination, which ensured that no matter what she thought of or made, it was always different. She could make paper airplanes shaped like the Concorde of the future that glided endlessly through the air; she knocked together carts that made the kids from Leirhaug, the development down the road, scratch their heads and made rafts the like of which Huckleberry Finn would never have dreamed possible.

  Jonas Wergeland’s first stroke of genius, albeit unbeknownst to himself, was to choose a girl as his best friend. It was Nefertiti who taught him that women are, first and foremost, teachers, then mistresses – and above all that when you come right down to it, the female is a very different and, more to the point, a much more fascinating creature than the male.

  They alighted at Rakkestad, sniffed the scent of a sawmill on the other side of the railway track before walking up to the crossroads, where they stood with their backs to the Co-op, the sort of shop where you could buy anything, absolutely anything, from paintbrushes to three sorts of syrup, but which has, of course, since been pulled down, every last brick of it – in true Roman fashion, one might say – to be replaced, as in so many other places, by a standardized box of a petrol station.

  So here we have Jonas and Nefertiti standing between the Central Hotel and The Corner, gazing down Storgata like two cowboys coming to a lawless town and wondering whether they dare take the chance of riding through it. Which was perhaps not all that surprising, since Rakkestad, like so many small villages the world over, does give the impression of being the sort of place one instinctively suspects to be populated by an assortment of weirdoes – people who lie in their sickbeds keeping a precise tally of their whooping-cough fits and severity of same – and the sort of half-witted, hillbilly characters who are just itching to blow you away, sitting
at their windows with loaded shotguns, dribbling tobacco juice and leering and muttering under their breath all the while. In those days, before you came to Grandgården and on the same side, there was a kiosk known simply as ‘Langeland’ and right outside this Jonas and Nefertiti ran into three pretty hefty boys of their own age. One of them was bouncing a football, a rather battered lace-up football, while another, who was missing his front teeth, was fiddling with a formidable-looking catapult. Despite a warning nudge in the arm from Jonas, Nefertiti boldly asked them the way to Haugli General Store. The boys laughed. Did they know her aunt? ‘Sh’isnæ hame,’ laughed the boys, thereby erecting a language barrier that felt no less great than the one experienced by Jonas at a later date, when he heard the Bedouins talking among themselves at the foot of Jebel Musa. A sly grin spread across the face of the boy with the catapult, as he picked up a rather sharp-looking stone from the pavement and fitted it into the leather sling.

  Jonas, who had had his doubts about the trip from the very start, had plagued Nefertiti to at least let him bring his new gun, which could take several strips of caps at once, thus making a bigger bang, but Nefertiti had laughed at him: ‘Why don’t you take some glass beads and copper wire and be done with it?’ she said. ‘Or the Bible?’

  The boy with no front teeth had raised the catapult into what could only be called a menacing position when Nefertiti did something unexpected: she pulled out a yo-yo which Jonas had never seen before. She shot the yo-yo out into the air in such a way that it knocked the catapult out of the boy’s hand, caught it on the rebound, much like catching a boomerang, and then, before they had time to collect themselves, she proceeded to do the most amazing tricks with that yo-yo, leaving the boys standing there open-mouthed like kids at a circus – and, may I add, this performance of Nefertiti’s really was quite unique, this being long before the days of Coca-Cola yo-yos, when almost every self-respecting kid could do ‘Around the World’, ‘Rock the Baby’ and ‘Walkin’ the Dog’.