The Seducer

by Jan Kjaerstad

Genres: Mystery; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Jonas Wergeland is a successful TV documentary producer and something of God's gift to women. But one day he returns from the world's fair in Seville to discover his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is not only a quest to find the killer but also a whimsical look at just how Jonas came to this particular juncture. Following the twists and turns of his life up to an unforgettable, edge-of-your-seat conclusion, this post-modernist novel is an international best-seller and winner of the prestigious Nordic Prize 1999, Scandinavia's highest literary honour.

Release date: May 1, 2005

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 610

Sample

Let me tell you another story. Although I do not know whether that is possible, not after all that has been written and said, but at any rate let me try. I have balked at it for long enough, I admit. I have put it off and put it off. But I have to do it. Knowing full well that this will sound unutterably provocative and appallingly high-flown, I will be straight about it: I do it not only for myself but for the whole of Norway.

I realize there are many people who believe they know everything there is to know about Jonas Wergeland, inasmuch as he has risen to heights of fame which very few, if any, Norwegians have ever come close to attaining and been subjected to so much media exposure that his person, his soul as it were, has been laid open as strikingly and in as much detail as those ingenious fold-out illustrations of the human body presented for our delectation in today’s encyclopaedias. But it is for that very reason, precisely because so many people have formed such hard-and-fast opinions about Jonas Wergeland, or Jonas Hansen Wergeland as his critics liked to call him, that it is tempting, even at this point, to say something about those sides of his character which have never come to public attention and which should serve to shed considerable new light on the man: Jonas Wergeland as the Norwegian Tuareg, Jonas Wergeland as a disciple of the Kama Sutra, as champion of the Comoro Islands and, not least, as lifesaver.

But to begin in medias res, as they say, or in what I prefer to call ‘the big white patch’, representing as it does a stretch of terrain of which Jonas Wergeland – all of his fantastic journeys notwithstanding – was totally ignorant, and which he would spend the remainder of his life endeavouring to chart.

It all started with Wergeland asking the taxi driver, who had been stealing curious, almost incredulous, glances at him in his rear-view mirror all the way into town, to stop at the shopping centre, just where Trondheimsveien crosses Bergensveien, a spot where Jonas had stood on countless occasions, contemplating the way in which all roads in the world are connected. Although he could not have said exactly why, Jonas wanted to walk the last bit of the way to the house, possibly because the light that evening was so enchanting; or because it was spring, the air smelled of spring, spring to the very marrow; or because he was glad that the plane journey was over, filled with a sense of relief at having cheated Fate yet again. Which brings me to another fact known to very few: how much Jonas Wergeland, globetrotter, hates flying.

Wergeland was returning home from the World’s Fair in Seville, but he was now making his way across ground which, for him, had every bit as much to offer as any World’s Fair, representing as it did that spot on the Earth’s crust which was closest to his heart. He strolled along, wheeling his lightweight suitcase behind him; breathing in the spring air as he let his eye wander over the climbing frame in his old kindergarten and beyond that to the stream down in the dip: the Alna, a stream up the banks of which he and Nefertiti had made countless expeditions, with Colonel Eriksen on a leash and an airgun over the shoulder, in search of its beginnings, which had long posed a mystery as great as the sources of the Nile once did. He walked past the old Tango-Thorvaldsen shoe shop, to which annual visits had had to be made: a sore trial to Jonas these, both because his mother could never make up her mind and because the shoes were always too big, agonizingly so, even after they were long worn out. It was spring, the air smelled of spring to the very marrow, and Jonas passed Wolfgang Michaelsen’s villa where he could almost hear the swooshing of the Märklin trains over the tracks of what must have been the biggest model railway in Northern Europe. Jonas strolled along, trailing his suitcase, smelling, listening, drawing the air deep down into his lungs; seeing in the twilight the coltsfoot, like tiny sparks of yellow growing along the side of the road and up the slope towards Rosenborg Woods, which they had used to call ‘Transylvania’, because they had had to cut across this bit of ground after the spine-chilling Dracula films they saw, far too young, at film shows in the People’s Palace. It was spring, the air smelled of spring, and Jonas was feeling extraordinarily fit and well, free, thanks to the air, thanks to the fact that the plane journey was over, or perhaps because straight ahead of him he had the low blocks of flats where he had grown up, or because on the other side of the road he could see his own house, popularly referred to as Villa Wergeland, sitting under the imposing granite face of Ravnkollen, in such a way that he sometimes felt protected, sometimes threatened by the very bedrock of Norway.

Jonas Wergeland turned in through the gate, trailing his suitcase. It was spring, the hillside smelled of spring, as did the air. It had that edge to it, Jonas noted: chill but bordering on the mild. He felt light, full of anticipation; he was happy, genuinely glad at heart to be home. The only thing causing him a twinge of unease was a touch of incipient nausea as if he might have eaten something dodgy on the plane.

He rang the bell, just in case anyone was home. No one came to the door. He let himself in, left his bag of duty-free and his suitcase in the hall before wandering into his office and sifting through the considerable pile of mail that had accumulated. Many of the letters were from people he did not know. Fan mail. He picked up the bundle of letters to read in the living room, to enjoy them, have a good laugh and roll his eyes at the weird notions that people had, their clumsy questions, then it occurred to him that he had better play back the messages on his answering machine. The first was from Axel Stranger: ‘If your Grace would be so good as to call me. Concerning a trivial matter which cannot wait: namely the future of mankind.’

Jonas could not help but laugh, switched it off, he could listen to his messages later, now he just wanted to relax, open some of the precious booty from his duty-free bag, stretch out on the sofa, listen to music, look at a couple of letters, let his mind wander. He glanced towards the door of Kristin’s room. The bed was neatly made, cuddly toys and dolls all in a row; he concluded that she must still be with her grandmother, down at Hvaler.

Jonas headed for the living room with a smile on his lips, flicking through the bundle of letters in his hand, inspecting the handwriting on one while wondering what sort of music he should play. He was relieved to be back home, he was filled with a great sense of contentment: a feeling that might be described, to use a rather lofty word, as peace.

So there he stood, with one hand on the handle of the living-room door, Jonas Wergeland, the first artist of note in his field in Norway, the man with a silver thread running down his spine, balls of gold and, as someone put it in a newspaper article, a brain as sharp and polished as a great diamond; Jonas Wergeland stood there, feeling well pleased. Behind him lay a successful trip, one which had, what is more, given rise to a number of original ideas of which the people of Norway would reap the benefit in the not-too-distant future. And he had every reason to feel pleased with himself, no one could blame him for that; anyone in his shoes would have been pleased with themselves. Jonas Wergeland did not only have everything, he was everything, one might even go so far as to say that he ranked second only to the king. No wonder then that for many years he had referred to himself, in his head, as the Duke.

Jonas Wergeland stood with his hand on the handle of the living-room door in his own home and was instantly conscious of the metal itself, its coldness; he contemplated the brass, the little scratches on the surface. Again he was aware of that vague but distinct nausea, a surge of nausea. Suddenly he remembered the three loaves lying on the kitchen worktop, the fact that there had been no smell of new-baked bread when he walked in.

Jonas Wergeland stood with his hand on the door-handle and was filled all at once with a desire to stay just there for a long, long while, had no wish to enter the room, stood there knowing, like someone who has stepped on a mine, that he would be blown sky-high the moment he raised his foot. But he had to. He took stock as it were, recapitulating the whole of his remarkable career in the blink of an eye as if he knew he was about to suffer a dreadful loss of memory, before turning the handle, opening the door and pulling up short on the threshold. The first thing he noticed was a distinct smell, the sort that hangs in a room where the television has been left on for days on end. Then his eye fell on the picture of Buddha, before alighting on the figure lying on the living-room floor, a woman. She looked as though she was asleep, but Jonas knew she was not sleeping.

So there he stood, Jonas Wergeland, as so often before, at the end of a long, hard journey, a wave of nausea building up inside him, on the threshold of his own living room, in the most famous villa in Grorud. And I might as well reveal right here and now that here lies the heart of my story: Jonas Wergeland, standing in a room with a dead woman, caught in the colossal psychological big bang that gave birth to the universe which, in the following account, I intend to explore.

For those who do not know, I ought perhaps to add that the woman on the floor was none other than his wife.

Once more he was thrown into the vortex, as they picked up speed and were drawn relentlessly onwards into the next stretch of rapids to suddenly find themselves caught up in an inferno of white water and whirlpools as if they were riding a tidal wave or had been swept away by an avalanche, and it was all happening too fast, Jonas felt, far too fast, he had no time to latch onto the details and already had that feeling of nausea, that ghastly nausea that always hit him when he had flown too high, when everything was reduced to the grotesque. Jonas Wergeland sat, soaked to the skin, in a frail rubber dinghy with more or less sheer walls of rock flying past on either side: concentrating, amid all the thoughts whirling around in his head, solely on keeping a tight grip on the rope running around the rim, while flattening himself against the bottom like a terrified bird in the nest. Everybody has to die sometime, he thought to himself, and now it’s my turn.

Jonas cursed himself for being there, crouched on his knees as if in prayer, hanging on for dear life on this ride with death, at the bottom of a narrow gorge with only a thin layer of rubber between him and the rapids’ seething embrace, when he could have been lounging on the hotel terrace, sipping a highball and contemplating the weird assortment of hotel guests from every corner of the globe, maybe picking out an Ellington number on the piano, drawing applause from lethargic Swedish aid workers in desperate need of a bit of R and R. Or he could have done something sensible and, above all, perfectly safe, and taken a walk up to the dusty, neglected museum to gen up on the geology and history of the region, in a room right next door to Livingstone’s letters and measuring instruments and his partially mauled coat.

But instead, on an October morning in the mid-eighties, he had dutifully presented himself at the pool along with the others, to be briefed by a sun-bronzed smart-arse who took full advantage of the rather tense atmosphere, dishing out flippant bits of advice and telling macabre jokes, about the fearsome ‘stoppers’, for instance: a sort of vertical wave, usually occurring at the bottom of a stretch of rapids, which could drag a man under and keep him down there for ages. So it was with some misgivings that Jonas had filed along behind the others later on, as they clambered down the steep path to the bottom of the gorge through which the Zambezi continued its seething progress after the falls, zigzagging through deep and uncannily narrow canyons. The light was dazzling, the air as full of powerful odours as a chemist’s shop and humming with insect life. Halfway down the native bearers made tea for them and even sang a few songs, seeing to it that the party acquired a little local colour into the bargain.

Down by the river itself, at the point where they were to board the rafts, Jonas stood for a moment listening to the roar of the falls farther up, millions of litres per second thundering downwards into an inferno of a chasm, a phenomenon so daunting and yet so fascinating that he could see why some of the natives imbued it with divine significance, believing this to be the wellspring of the world. And indeed they were surrounded by a strange almost unreal landscape which left one with the very distinct impression that man had no business here, that this was a paradise for plants and animals and the little lizards in particular.

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.

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, but 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