Johanne A. was also in a state of extreme well-being, indeed she would later say that — although she had no idea why — this time with Jonas caused her to change her mind, revived her wish to become a research scientist after all, with the result that — as well as doing some remarkable work for Doctors for Peace and carrying out some pretty risky assignments for the Red Cross in war-torn regions — she wound up as an international expert on tropical diseases, a conqueror within medicine, within a field in which the study of microbes was central, the investigation of the influence of these minute organisms on people’s lives, something which was about as hard to fathom as love, or the desire she was feeling now, a desire which, without any warning, almost made her take leave of her senses, to lie writhing under a man, hardly more than a boy, to whom she had only spoken for a few hours.
Jonas knew nothing of this, so preoccupied was he with the vigorous way in which she had gradually begun to move, with her vagina, which gripped him so tenderly, with the light, with the thoughts drifting into his mind, with words that passed into new words, images, a whole network of sudden similarities between widely differing entities. For if there was one thing Jonas had learned back in the days when Daniel used to lie in the top bunk and read aloud from Agnar Mykle’s works, it was that sex is all to do with metaphors, with executing unexpected pirouettes in the imagination: to be able, one moment, to say that her small breasts ‘had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass’ and the next to gasp out the words: ‘her breasts were like explosives under her jersey’. Jonas grasped very early on that sex had something to do with broadening the mind, of giving it span, that sex was not an end in itself, but a means by which to achieve something else, perhaps quite simply a means to creativity, a conviction which was now confirmed for him, here, as he lay on his back on the bed and she sank down onto him again and again, so warm and powerful that he could almost feel the springs in the mattress, even as something similar was happening to his thoughts, as she, or they together, transformed them into spirals, springs, with the ability to hop, free themselves from a chain that ran from A to B to C, and that was why he lay there, as she exerted a greater and greater pull on him, engulfing him even while seemingly trying to restrain herself, and felt how he built a bridge of metaphors, as from A to X to K, a bridge which suddenly led him to espy a similarity between his own erect penis and a lever, the sort of tool that enabled one to move objects heavier than oneself; and perhaps that was why, at that same moment, Jonas felt himself, or her, Johanne A., shrugging off something heavy, exposing some object that lay buried, braiding various fragments into larger chunks, and eventually a story, something about being in a forest, not in a modern flat, but in a primeval forest, much as this white apartment might conceal a mahogany chemist’s shop, because lovemaking was alchemy, a commingling of irreconcilable elements, a fact which she proved by entwining herself around him with greater and greater ardour, surprising ardour, perhaps, uncontrolled even; by casting herself over him with an intensity that generated light and linked him to a story he both remembered and did not remember, thus he could recall that milk cartons had also been around ten years before, but not whether they had been printed with a red four-leaf clover design or not, and yet he knew, as he lay there savouring the light, drifting in it, that together they could set it rolling — the story that was hidden and yet right there: in the blind spot, you might say. And while Jonas was concentrating on remembering, or seeing; on letting his movements spark off associations, as they were weaving their limbs together into a writhing knot, he heard Johanne A., involuntarily, and possibly unwittingly, begin to snort, to utter sounds, hoarse grunts which, in a parenthesis in his train of thought, afforded room for surprise that a girl like her, the owner of this ultra-modern apartment, a woman who obviously believed wholeheartedly in man’s potential for evolving into an even more intelligent being, that this woman could lie there like that, grunting wildly underneath him, as if her white coat came complete with a witch-doctor’s mask. Howsoever that might be, this only made him even more aroused; he was conscious of how his thoughts struggled to get a grip on some sense of a whole, wove themselves together, how the friction slid over into a feeling of lightness, as if she were lifting him up and at the same time urging him to move with greater intensity, until she could hold back no longer, though she bit her lip until it bled — she came with a long drawn-out howl, a downright bestial scream which ended with her letting her arms flop to the floor, like someone fainting away, and whether this was what it took, or whether Jonas was just about there anyway, at that very second, thankfully and with his mind in giddy freefall, he discerned the thread connecting the whirl of thoughts which she, or the two of them together, had generated inside his head.
He was still inside her. ‘Didn’t you come?’ she asked on recovering consciousness, so to speak. Her voice was tinged with guilt. She was still out of breath, and one corner of her mouth was red with blood. ‘Did you get satisfaction?’ she asked, as if it were important to her.
He lay there smiling: he too, out of breath, smiling for the first time in days. ‘Yes, I got satisfaction,’ he said at last. And it was true, although this word did not cover the phenomenon of orgasm in the normal sense. It’s true that he was also interested in gaining satisfaction, but not the sort that could be measured in millilitres of semen produced. For Jonas Wergeland — and I hope to return to this — the act of love was not necessarily about ejaculation but about enlightenment, about being lit up, about seeing.
The Jewel
So what sort of stories were they that Jonas Wergeland recalled, or suddenly understood, while this woman was biting herself until the blood ran from sheer pleasure underneath him? Your wrist is aching, Professor, I can see that, but we cannot stop now. Remember, we’ve embarked on a serious undertaking here. It is quite simply a matter of life or death.
For years, Jonas dreamed the same dream. For a period during his childhood he would start out of sleep several times in a month with a particular picture in his head, an image he could not, however, make anything of, since it was somewhat abstract. It had no recognizable thread to it; it was more of an impression.
Jonas had this dream for the first time when he was sick with a fever — he must have been around four at the time — on a night when his temperature rose to almost 105 and the sheet was in a tangle from all his tossing and turning. In his head, and possibly also in his fingertips, he had a sense of forms, strands of wool or piano strings, which coiled themselves around one another, changing from a tight knot into looser, more amorphous formations, as from a ball of yarn to a tangle of string. The odd thing was that these shapes did not only represent something bad, a nightmare, but also something beautiful, like the reflections in a kaleidoscope: a mesmerizing pattern, ceaselessly shifting, though still within certain limits. Maybe I’m dreaming about God, Jonas thought.
Then, quite by chance, he stumbled upon a clue to the obscure signals from his nervous system. It happened on one of those Sunday outings that a number of the families in Solhaug used to go on together. And in the spring. For it wasn’t just in the autumn that people went for walks in the woods — the autumn being the time when everyone seemed almost genetically programmed to start gathering in stores like mad, by means of berry-picking and mushroom-gathering. In springtime too, on Sundays after church, Åse and Haakon Hansen, Jonas’s parents, would don their well-worn walking clothes and rubber boots, not to mention rucksacks redolent of wartime and countless Easter skiing trips, gather the children together, meet up with the others and troop off to Lillomarka. Here, at different — but usually regular spots — practised hands would light a campfire; then they would make coffee, cook food and sit around and talk — feeling, in short, that they were doing what was only right and proper: what was, so to speak, expected of them as good Norwegians. Picnicking in the woods was a part of their national heritage: you only had to look at Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen and his love for the woods and the hills to see that. If you ask me, Professor, I think it would be just as fair to say that they were performing a ritual in memory of a not so distant past in which they had been hunters and gatherers, a theory which the stories they told round the campfire bore out, since these often had to do with hunting and fishing and the secret haunts of the chanterelle, interspersed with local legends about people who had lived here before and given the place its name. Be that as it may, Jonas loved being in the forest. He loved the smell of campfires and the unique flavour of grilled meat and roast potatoes served on scratched plastic plates along with slices of white bread covered in ash. He loved the way the adults were so keen to pass on the art of making pussy-willow flutes or bark boats. He loved sitting up in a tree and listening to the hum of the grownups’ voices, mingled occasionally with the squawk of a portable radio as some major sporting event got under way. Even Five-Times Nilsen and Chairman Moen relaxed and forgot for a while the plans for communal garages when they sat on a log with their eyes resting on a black coffee pot set over a campfire.