He could feel that she wanted him, that her whole body wanted him. When he hesitated she muttered something about a coil, that she wore a coil, and that was how it seemed to him too, as she dug her fingers into his shoulders and dragged him down on top of her, that it was not a case of moving in and out but of being led round the round the turns of a coil, upwards or downwards, outwards or inwards. And again he had the impression of a light, as if in touching her clitoris he had flicked a switch. This was not lovemaking, this was illumination; she twined herself around him, made love to him passionately, as if grateful for the pleasure welling up inside her, accentuated perhaps by the unusual way in which Jonas Wergeland penetrated her, from another angle so it seemed, something which Jonas, when asked once, ascribed to the dragon-horn button which he had swallowed as a little boy and which he thought might have wedged itself in his spine, as an extra vertebra: a phenomenon which not only enabled him to pick up signals from certain women but also forced him to hold himself at a slightly different angle during sex; however that may be, he made love to her in such a unique way that she endeavoured to do likewise to him, pressed him so tightly to her that Jonas felt as though he was being transformed, acquiring a different, finer calibre, that something was happening to him, to his way of thinking, that the spittle in her kisses was an elixir which affected his memory more than his body, causing him to recall something, something very special, in a new way.
She grew wilder and wilder, clawed at him, leaving bloody welts down his back; this in turn drove him, unwittingly, to pull her hair as he rode her, pitching in to her, seized with an urge to be violent, in the grip of unbridled forces which simply surged up out of nowhere. ‘You’re killing me,’ she moaned, licking his throat compliantly and holding him in a muscular, vice-like grip; he plunged in, far in, again and again, not knowing whether they were fighting or making love, ramming into her so hard that the room rang with what sounded like the slapping of a wet floor mop. Suddenly she began to pull back every time he drove into her, as if taking evasive action, a strategy which goaded him into making a massive attempt to outwit her, to pursue her, hard, at different tempi, but to no avail, not until she did another about-turn, as it were, and went into the attack, threw herself at him with such ferocity that she screamed out loud. He made to respond, but all that came out was a snarl. He was incensed, or no, not incensed, he was aflame: filled with a frantic ardour, he was on the track of a cause, or in the act of inventing a cause, actually creating himself, re-creating himself, becoming someone different from the person he had been at the start of their lovemaking.
She was working in a daze, making love to him as if intent on sucking him up, laid bare her throat in such a way that he caught the gleam of her scar, a long gash running crosswise to the gold chain; she dug her nails into his shoulders. ‘I think I’m going to die,’ she whispered just before her body went taut, as if with a pleasure bordering on the unbearable, then caught her breath as her back arched and stiffened convulsively into a bridge which conducted him across to another world, far beyond that dark room, and yet composed of inexplicably similar elements. For, just as the sound of a cork rubbed against a bottle could, thanks to the imagination’s ability to make leaps, become the chirping of birds in a radio play, the friction caused by his penis moving inside her vagina made him think of a clearing in the forest; there was something about the smell of earth, the hearth, the charcoal, not least the way she coiled herself around him, which had long since conjured up the threads of a memory, a significant story, a narrative he might almost have been said to weave into being, using his member as the shuttle. Jonas Wergeland was not quite like other men. Ejaculation never came to him as a release, a feeling of something being loosed. To him it was more like a knot — a knot in which lots of threads were gathered together — drawn tight.
They lay quietly, still intertwined. Jonas strove to memorize this moment, to fix these images in his mind. He became aware that she was crying softly. He took this to be a sign of happiness, a reaction to overwhelming contentment. Like something bursting, but in a good way. Looking back on it, though, he was not so sure. He was never quite certain that he construed such situations correctly.
My Dear Fellow Countrymen
The threads he was tying together had to do with having ambition, with the mystery inherent in that a person can be moseying along one day, perfectly content with life, only the next to be seized by an unquenchable urge to do something, be someone, make a name for himself. Where does this impulse come from? Could there be a little steel coil inside the body that can suddenly be wound up like the spring inside the workings of a clock? And furthermore: is it possible to determine the precise moment when a person chooses his main path in life? In Jonas Wergeland’s case, it is. And, I hasten to add, to avoid any misunderstandings: it was not me who talked him into it.
To questions from well-meaning relatives as to what he wanted to be when he grew up, throughout his childhood Jonas always answered without hesitation: ‘A pilot!’ or ‘A chef!’ — thanks to Uncle Lauritz and Three Star Larsen, Ørn’s father, respectively. In time, however, he came up with a more original occupation, one that invariably made those selfsame relatives smile: ‘I’m going to be the Father of my Country,’ he would say. Now this idea had not been plucked completely out of thin air: Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen lived in the same building as Aunt Laura on Sofienberggata in the Tøyen district of Oslo. To be the Father of one’s Country, to lead the people, seemed to Jonas a promising — and by no means unattainable — future calling, to stand before a sea of people and say, as Gerhardsen had done, with a slight catch in his voice: ‘My dear fellow countrymen.’ And though this may have been a childish notion, yet it speaks of an exceptionally high level of ambition, a dream of achieving something great, which cannot be put down to his aunt’s Tøyen address. The explanation must have lain to as great an extent in his mother’s stirring stories — have patience, Professor, I’m getting there — not to mention his grandfather’s incessant stream of yarns, in which Jonas was always the hero, a fabulously well-equipped dragon slayer.