She gets up. It is dark in the room. Her bracelets smoulder, the brass and copper. The odour of tobacco and sweat comes at him in waves from her. Without thinking about it he too gets up, stands motionless in the centre of the room. They crash into one another, collide in a fierce embrace, as if each means to press their body through the other. For a long time they stand there, kissing as though each kiss provokes a still more ardent kiss. The way Jonas saw it — this, at least, is how he rationalized it later — it may have been the danger he had been in, or thought he had been in, which had heightened his libido, the way war was said to do.
Jonas let the towel fall to the floor as she pulled off her clothes. They plunged straight into mad, passionate lovemaking, clinging to one another, Jonas did not know if he was standing or sitting or lying, felt like part of a giant knot of erect flesh and soft muscle, that together they became something greater, mirroring the ornamentation they saw all around them. The little flashes of light from her bracelets accentuated her nakedness, made her seem seductively foreign. And there was something about the combination of the street smells filtering through the open window and the pungent scent of her body, not least from her crotch, which made him think of the oracle at Delphi, imagine that he too was sitting above a deep cleft, breathing in fumes which put him into a trance, induced visions. Suddenly they were on the bed, where she threw herself on top of him, but she didn’t bounce up and down, she slid back and forth on him, so damp, so oily, that it could hardly be called friction, just warmth, a warmth which generated light; she rolled about on top of him, crumpling the sheets, pulled him down onto the floor where they wrapped themselves around one another, wrestling, while the sweat poured off them — not that they noticed; they tore at one another, almost coming to blows, to the music of jingling metal and the moist slap of limb on limb. They were like two irreconcilable ideas, unexpectedly juxtaposed, like a silver brooch and a puck, a union that set sparks flying; Jonas felt his thoughts crackling, flowing along unwonted lines, and he concentrated, with one part of his mind, on following them, giving them room, believed that he noticed a difference in the images in his head, depending on whether he thrust deep inside her or only a little way in, began to feel his way forward, alternating between slow and rapid strokes, growing more and more urgent, as if this was a search of some sort, as if he was rummaging frantically in a drawer, until all at once the thought of athletics came into his mind, perhaps prompted by their strenuous exertions, the heat, the sweat: either that or the fact that a few of the brickwork circles at Jantar Mantar — the memory simply floated to the surface — had reminded him of something for throwing: a reflection which led him to think of the elephant, something about the way in which the trunk had hurled him through the air, a recollection which, as he lay there, whipped up to bursting point by Inga V.’s movements, set him thinking about rotation and not only that, but feeling that something lay at the end of this, a story, an extremely important perception which held the key to some future event, a story about a device, an instrument; an occurrence which would say something about who he could be, someone he had not yet become — a persona which had nothing to do with astronomy, nothing to do with architecture. Underlying the pleasure he was now conscious of anger, or a desire to use the powers he felt inside him in some way; he would suddenly grab her by the hair, throw her over his shoulder or lift her up, hold her over his head, and it may have been these urges that caused something to happen to her, because she seemed to lift off, they both appeared to be floating in the air, and all at once she looked at him with eyes which did not really seem to see him; from the pit of her stomach there came a moan, stop, she said, stop, stop, I can’t take any more, she said, stop stop stop, she said, struck him, lashing out into thin air, oh, god, she said, grrr, the rest was drowned in gurgles that culminated in a little scream, a howl almost, as if she really had crossed over to the other side, propelled by a violent physical reaction, a surge spreading from her vagina outwards, and this made him feel proud, proud that together, through the combination of their inner fantasies and a few simple movements, two people could experience such pleasure, take themselves to such heights of ecstasy; and at the same time, this he knew, she might have been faking it, and he could never have told the difference, he would still have believed it to be an orgasm, and this did not depress him, on the contrary, he had always liked the thought of how little it took to persuade someone to make up their version of things, their own story, turn something small into something great.
The Great Bear
Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then it must be emphasized that later in life when Jonas Wergeland closed his eyes and thought of the women he had been with, he did not remember them as lovers but as storytellers. Through his encounters with these exceptional representatives of Norwegian womanhood he finally came to understand what Rakel, his sister, had been trying to drum into him for years: that sex and storytelling went hand in hand. And Eros came first, then the stories — not the other way round. Such was the doctrine of the Arabian Nights, according to Rakel. So Jonas Wergeland’s women did not just make love to him, they activated, they transformed the stories within him. A story that had been lying there for ages, like boring black graphite, suddenly stood revealed as a scintillating diamond — as here:
While Daniel’s promising athletics career was brought to a halt only by a serious case of tenosynovitis, a strained calf muscle which caused even Kjell Kaspersen — the former Skeid goalkeeper who was now treating sports injuries in a room at Bislett Stadium — to raise his eyebrows, Jonas’s career was relatively short and painless. In any case, he did not have his brother’s self-destructive determination, still less his motivation, because, as with everything else, when you got right down to it, Daniel’s sporting endeavours were just a way of showing off in front of the girls, a kind of strenuous foreplay before the foreplay. If Jonas was mad about athletics, then it was for the sport’s sake, for its inherent beauty.