The lectures were hard going, and student and after student dropped out — including, fortunately, those Pharisaic pains in the neck who found it necessary to argue about everything from improbabilities in the chronology of the work to impossibilities in the topography. Only a fraction of the students were still sticking with it by the time the colourful and relatively entertaining Inferno section had been completed and they moved on to the much greyer Purgatorio, in which Suzanne I.’s longwinded expositions and scholastic leanings came more into their own — and had a soporific effect on quite a few listeners. But Jonas — who was not all that impressed with the Inferno — he had, after all, spent several hours in a pitch-black grave — was growing more and more interested and looked forward — I was about to say: like a sinner — to Tuesdays, to Suzanne I.’s monologues about free will and the nature of the soul, not to mention her interpretations of Dante’s three dreams and Virgil’s discourses on love; he half-ran down the hill from the university — not to the Student Union at Chateau Neuf, where Axel and he occasionally attended one of the riotous gatherings in the amphitheatre-style auditorium and had no trouble imagining that they had been consigned to some wailing circle in the Inferno — but to the building next door, the old Divinity School, the top floor of which was home to the Institute for General Literary Studies, as if it had by some divine irony been set on a higher ledge on the Mountain of Purgatory than the theologians themselves.
By the time they got to the Paradise section, that pretty rarefied and by no means readily accessible ascension, fraught with transparent faces, indistinct souls and star-like spirits capable of choreographing their points of light into all manner of forms, only Jonas and three others were still sticking it out in the blue auditorium — even Axel the bookworm had opted out, muttering some sheepish excuse about a tough end-of-term exam. But Jonas sat there, still in the front row, and let himself be held transfixed, let the pressure build up inside him; he did not merely listen to what Suzanne I. was saying but paid as much attention to the way she said it, her gestures, the look on her face, especially when she was talking about light, about how Dante used light — as a kind of visual music — and even more so when she got onto the subject of Beatrice’s strange and problematic part in the whole thing, all while Suzanne I.’s amber necklace smouldered like embers at her throat. There was also something in what she said that tied in, in some strange way, with his own area of study, astrophysics, the exploration of the heavens, of the cosmos, those vast entities which were just about driving him round the bend with their staggering, nebulous dimensions, their billions upon billions of galaxies. You could say that in some ways Jonas found Dante’s text just as enlightening, even if it was six hundred years old. It seemed to him that Dante’s observations on the celestial spheres, based on Ptolemy’s theories, were at least as right or wrong as the theories about the universe with which he was confronted in his astrophysical studies. In six hundred years, today’s hypotheses would seem every bit as arbitrary as Dante’s, he thought. And I ought perhaps to mention here that it may have been Suzanne I., with her highlighting of the architectonic and symmetrical aspects of Dante’s work, who led Jonas Wergeland to cut short his astronomy studies and begin, instead, on a course which revolved around architecture.
Meanwhile, the days were growing longer and lighter, although the weather was still cold. At the last lecture, held appropriately enough just before Easter — which, of course, also plays a part in the Comedy — only Jonas and one other student turned up. Suzanne I. did not seem the least put out, although she had long been intrigued by Jonas Wergeland, a student who had sat steadfastly through all her lectures, without making a single note, it’s true, but apparently hanging on every word she said about the progress from darkness to light, as if it really mattered to him, gazing at her the whole time, gazing at her with something close to rapture, a look which could not fail to make an impression. Jonas, for his part, felt that during that last lecture she lifted him from one heaven to the next with her eyes alone, much as Beatrice’s radiant and loving eyes had done for Dante: felt also, again like Beatrice, that she looked much lovelier now than she had the first time he took his seat in the auditorium. So after this concluding lecture, in which she quite surpassed herself with her interpretation of the medieval view of woman as a possible channel to knowledge about the hereafter, not least in her discussion of the huge revelation in the last canto, the stream of effulgent images designed to help the mind reach out to a point beyond time and space — and after these expositions, which ought to have accorded any interested listener an insight into the whole of the Comedy, as the vault doors of national banks are occasionally opened to allow the man in the street a peek at the unforgettable splendour of the gold reserves, after all this she asks Jonas what he is going to do next.
And Jonas, who understood right away why he had sat through nine long lectures, and who had in fact also seen what she was getting at, that The Divine Comedy was actually a gigantic love poem, said that he was going take a walk into town. He knew what was coming. And it came: she suggested that they could walk down together. Jonas realized that he had made an impression, though of what sort he did not know; but we, Professor, acquainted as we are with the inexplicable frailties of the female of the species, know that simply by holding out through nine separate sessions, sitting up straight with his eyes aglow, by giving her his steadfast attention, he had won her in much the same way as a woman, no matter what she may say, is always bowled over by a man who gives her nine bouquets of red roses in quick succession.
It was the last really cold day of the year. She walked beside him wrapped in her black fur — mink, as far as he could tell. In the sunlight, however, it had a kind of golden sheen to it. Jonas caught her checking her reflection in a number of shop windows with undisguised self-absorption. He tried to bring up various topics of conversation as they walked down Bogstadsveien but was surprised to find that she appeared to be ignorant of most subjects: seemed, in fact, rather prickly, disagreeable. Only when he came out with one of his quotations did she show any interest. It was a thought lifted from Friedrich Nietzsche, taken from the only book by Nietzsche that Jonas had dipped into — or rather, from the only passage by Nietzsche which he had ever read: ‘Someone once said,’ said Jonas, ‘that anyone who fights with monsters must take care that he or she does not become a monster themselves.’ Suzanne I. looked at him in some amazement. ‘I was thinking of Dante and the Inferno,’ Jonas went on. ‘But what about the Paradiso? Would it also be the case that, when wrestling with angels, you would have to be careful not to become an angel?’ Suzanne I. had a wise answer to this. A very wise answer, Professor. And when they get to Homansbyen, where she lives, she invites him in for a cup of tea — typicaclass="underline" a cup of tea, what else?
Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?
The decor of the attic flat was surprisingly impersonal, almost as if she were just passing through. The paintings on the walls were pretty pedestrian efforts, more like pseudo-art. A window was open. It was cold in the room. She made tea. They sat facing one another in two old-fashioned armchairs. Light poured strong and intense through a skylight. Jonas thought she was waiting for him to say something about her lectures, the last one in particular perhaps — or maybe he should tell her that he had been to Ravenna — but when he made to speak she raised her hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ she says, sounding weary, as if outside the auditorium she wanted to stay silent — and preferably alone. She holds both hands around her cup; her fingers are plainly ice-cold.