Nevertheless she blossomed under his importunate attentions. To the surprise of her friends, at the eighth grade end-of-term party, to which their parents were also invited, she did a turn with another girl; they played nylon-stringed guitars and sung one of the year’s big hits, ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, in two-part harmony. For this they reaped, not surprisingly, a spontaneous burst of applause with lots of cheering, whistling and stamping of feet. Very few could have suspected, however, that at a later date this same girl — and this may not be entirely unconnected with her having known Jonas — would become one of Norway’s greatest singers — a lyric soprano, a diva, so they said — who spent part of each year abroad and had engagements on all the world’s most famous stages. Jonas stayed close to her throughout the evening. She was wearing an eye-catching and rather unusual mini-dress of deep-red velvet. In the crush he ran a stealthy finger over her shoulder, saw how it left a trail, like a signature.
On one of the first days of the summer holidays Jonas invited Henny F. to go orienteering with him. In a move to encourage people to try a different form of exercise, the Grorud Athletics Society orienteering club had set up a series of control points in Lillomarka. If you visited a certain number of control points in the course of the season, you won a badge. For Jonas this was, however, only an excuse; he borrowed Daniel’s map and compass and there they were, Jonas and Henny F., on a hot summer’s day in the woods, both tense with an expectancy that had nothing to do with orienteering.
Jonas wasn’t particularly handy with a map and compass and at one point, after finding five control points and punching their card amid rather exaggerated whoops of glee, they lost their way somewhere in the hilly terrain between Breisjøen and Alunsjøen Lakes: or rather, they had wandered on to the top of an out-of-the-way hill, a small mountain almost, where there should have been a control point, but where there was no control point, whereupon Jonas bombastically declared that this hill was not on the map, that they found themselves, in other words, in an uncharted region of Norway.
Henny F. has nothing against this. She removes her rucksack, pulls out a large chequered travelling rug and unfurls it, as one might cast a net, onto the grass. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s soak up the sun for a while.’ They are in a totally secluded spot and she promptly proceeds to take off her clothes, lies down in just her bra and panties, cotton garments with a pattern that gives them the look of a bikini. Jonas strips off too, sits down beside her in his underpants, which all of a sudden seem far too small. Both are pale-skinned.
‘What sort of sound does a dragon make?’ Jonas finds himself asking.
She turns and looks at him. Says not a word. Just looks.
‘That’s right,’ Jonas says. ‘No sound.’
He fell to studying the terrain, appearing terribly interested in something, placed the compass on the map and took his bearings, sat like this until Henny F. swept them off his lap with a resoluteness, bordering on resentfulness, that surprised him. ‘Forget that,’ she said, as if making a protest against all attempts to put the world in order at this moment. Jonas stayed perfectly still, forced himself not to glance down at Henny F., lying there next to him with her eyes closed, an outstretched girl’s body clad only in a few square inches of cotton. Jonas sat in a piece of uncharted Norway, feeling something he had not felt since Margrete: that he was positively shuddering with desire. Or confusion. Or bewilderment. If he had not realized it before, he saw now that behind all the fine theories about reason and intellect, human beings consisted to just as great an extent of chemicals and electricity, that people could at times be turned, at the push of a button, into a factory buzzing with hormones, all wilfully going their own way.
He slid down onto the travelling rug, on his back. A moment later he felt her finger brush his hand, her fingertips, and it is not much of an exaggeration when I say that this situation, from a subjective point of view at least, is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s fresco of the Creation, fingers touching, life coming into being. Because that is what it was like and that is how it would be every time a girl touched Jonas: as if he suddenly awoke, became someone else; he was no longer an ordinary boy, he was something very special.
He had to turn over onto his stomach, for several reasons. She began to stroke the back of his neck, his shoulders. Touching him ever so lightly, allowing her fingertips to no more than graze the hairs on his body. He had the idea that his skin had turned to velvet, that the pressure of her fingers had left a trail. She kept this up for some time, before lying back and starting to hum, possibly a Hollies song, ‘I’m Alive’, Jonas couldn’t have said.
He propped himself up on his elbows, leaned over her and, at long last, he did it, he kissed her, experienced a parallel to the phenomenon of two-part harmony: how, when they meet, two ordinary pairs of lips become more than the sum of their parts, so much so that suddenly he was drifting in all directions, he was both lying there and yet not lying there, because her tongue could not only tie knots in spaghetti, it could also suspend gravity and all the laws of cause and effect, besides showing him that the mouth was linked to every other part of the body, that there had to be cross-connections from the groove between his upper lip and his nose to the line bisecting his scrotum, as if they were, so to speak, on the same meridian. To Jonas’s mind the whole of his explosively randy body, every molecule, was invested in that kiss. And as if to reciprocate he worked his way down to her neck, her throat; was so worked up that, without meaning to, he gave her a huge love bite. He hoped, however, that she would interpret this as a stamp, a watermark, a sign of true love — something which need not be hidden underneath a polo-neck sweater but should be paraded like a medaclass="underline" ‘Look, I’ve been kissed; I’ve been kissed by a randy, besotted boy!’
He slid into a rapturous haze, he was someone else, experienced for the first time the thrill of flipping up the cup of a brassiere, so surprisingly easy, as if the impulse were stored in the genetic makeup of his fingers, in the same way as a newborn baby instinctively knows how to suck. And Jonas Wergeland was finally treated to the delicious tactile sensation of a soft girlish breast filling the palm of his hand, and he didn’t even try, he knew he could never describe the feeling of that little nipple against the spot where the heart-line almost meets the life-line. Nonetheless, he understood — even in the somewhat cooler light of hindsight — that he was experiencing one of life’s high points, that that invisible cup-shaped imprint, every bit as unique as a fingerprint, had been branded upon the palm of his hand: that the spot which the nipple had touched, between his heart line and his indistinct life line would bear the mark like a tattoo forever.
And now, still with his hand inside the cup surrounding the soft stupa of her breast, as if conducting a religious act, receiving something, a gift, he let his eye flicker down over her crotch to the enticing mound beneath the cotton, where he could even make out the frizz of hair, a sight which left him breathless, although he knew more about Olympus Mons on Mars than about this bulge and could have told you more about the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean than about the cleft that opened up underneath it. And as he tentatively slipped his hand inside her panties and she did not protest, and as he then slid it further down through the rather sparse bush of hair towards that dome, he could not help thinking of Daniel reading aloud, thought to himself that now he was fondling ‘her secret recesses’ — an expression which, in fact, perfectly suited this intimate moment’s blend of solemnity and modesty, the very fine line between crippling shyness and wild hysteria. In any case, when at long last, after years of speculation, his finger closed in on that mysterious little organ, equivalent to the point at the very top of a Gothic arch, the ‘clitoris’, a word he had never dared to utter out loud, he had the feeling that he had merely grazed the surface of something greater, something mighty, which lay hidden inside her body, as if it were the top of a pyramid buried in sand, and this was, for Jonas, confirmed by the sounds she made, issuing from her larynx, as if from an incredibly complex instrument: noises which, as far as Jonas could tell, sounded like songs coming from deep down in the secret vaults of the body or, indeed, from the depths of the soul.