It all began earlier that autumn. Laila was ‘a bit different’ as Mrs Five-Times Nilsen put it. I always had the feeling that she must have experienced something which other people rarely experienced. She was a couple of years older than me and lived in a rather seedy-looking Swiss-style villa up the road from the housing estate where I grew up. There were panes of coloured glass in the windows surrounding the veranda, but some of them were broken. For some reason I suspected Laila of having done this herself.
Laila was pretty. Pretty in a wild sort of way. And very well-developed, as they said. ‘She looks tarty,’ Wolfgang Michaelsen whispered. But I thought there was something exotic about her. She went barefoot all summer. To the boys, particularly those in the throes of puberty, she was the object of masturbatory fantasies and of contempt. Laila’s name cropped up regularly in sentences scrawled on walls and the sides of substations. There was something about her blatant sexuality, her lack of self-consciousness which was both appealing and daunting. I did not know why, but she had always liked me, often sought my company, would happily fall in beside me if we happened to meet. I liked her too. When she looked at me she really looked at me. She looked at me in a way which filled me with wonder.
One day, one autumn day, I asked her if she would like to come to the church with me. I asked her on the spur of the moment. We could listen to my dad playing the organ, I said, and she could see the new stained-glass windows, how lovely they were when the light shone through them. Once inside the church, however, I realised that I had lured her there under false pretences. I pointed hastily at the coloured panes of glass, like larger versions of the windows around her veranda at home. We all but sidled round the walls of the church and I drew her into the sacristy. I think she knew what was going to happen. Or what I was expecting that she would permit to happen.
We were in a room reserved for ‘sacred objects’. The church silver was kept in a big safe in the corner. Even in here the organ music could be heard quite clearly. I do not know whether I had actually planned it, but now that we were alone, seeing her standing right there in front of me, I was seized with a powerful urge to see her naked. Or, to see it. My head felt light, my breathing was weak. It was like an attack of some sort. Maybe she really was feeble-minded, and now her feebleness had been transmitted to my brain, my lungs. Something took control of me, something that spoke, asked her brusquely to take off her clothes. ‘Only if you promise not to touch,’ she said, did not seem frightened, did not seem unwilling. I nodded. Something inside me nodded. ‘Just look,’ she repeated. I nodded. My whole body was one throbbing pulse. ‘Hurry up,’ I heard a husky, unrecognisable voice say. She hurried up and suddenly there she stood, stark naked. I asked her to position herself up against the door leading to the pulpit, with her arms outstretched. It sounded like a command. She had hair under her arms, masses of hair under her arms — along with the black frizz between her legs these tufts of hair formed a triangle. Next to the door hung a crucifix. On the other wall hung pictures of former vicars. The thought that somebody might walk in, unlikely though it was, rendered the situation even more titillating.
She slid down onto the floor, as if she were a bit embarrassed. I was surprised by how much hair there was around her crotch, a real bush. I asked her to spread her legs. No, she said. Gone was her usual saucy air. Please, I said. Or did it come out as a command? Husky-voiced. She complied, but with her eyes lowered. So it was here, in a church sacristy, that I saw a cunt, for the first time. I say cunt, because I was thinking of Uncle Melankton. Until now the closest I had come to this mystery had been when Daniel showed me something which he claimed was a wisp of Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pubic hair. But here I was, looking at the female genitals in all their glory and prosaic majesty. And despite the fact that we boys had discussed all the ins and outs of this subject, and despite all the relatively innocent ‘dirty pictures’ which we had pored over, I was quite taken aback by the sight that met my eyes when Laila spread her legs for me, opening a safe, so to speak, and presenting the sacred objects.
Later I learned that John Ruskin, the famous aesthete, recoiled in horror when he discovered that the female pudenda were covered in hair, something for which the statues of antiquity had not prepared him. I was not that naive. But still I had to swallow, almost gagging, not because of the luxuriant growth of hair, rather like a swatch of shag pile, but at what lay underneath. Daniel, who had once seen a Swedish porn mag with pictures of a woman showing ‘the lot’, called it the Inlying Valleys. That triangle of hair was simply there to distract the attention from something far more interesting. And startling. The thought that came into my mind was of something raw. Raw meat. It looked as though she had a hundred grams of rare roast beef stuffed up inside that crack. I was filled with the same warring emotions as a squeamish medical student before his first dissection. It looked both enticing and repulsive. I had not expected there to be such long fissures. A great gorge with lots of side crevasses. I was panting with impatience, desperate to explore it. I firmly believe that for a few seconds there I saw before me a Samarkand, a place I had always dreamt of going.
I had promised not to touch her, but I could not control myself. My body felt swollen with desire. My head swam, as if this crack I beheld truly was the mouth of an abyss. I heard organ music playing in the church, but it seemed to fade away as I stuck my finger inside her, tried to stick a finger in, forced it in; she did not stop me, my body was numb, my mouth dry, I began to slide my finger, my hand, back and forth, unrestrainedly, knew I was hurting her but could not stop myself. Everything went black. I was brought to my senses by her stopping me. Firmly. I did not get it. According to the rumours, she had done it with everything from smoked sausages to gearsticks.
She sat before me, her back against the door to the pulpit. Still staring at the floor. I could hear the organ music again. And that she was crying.
A couple of days later the awful news reached my ears: someone had broken the stained-glass windows in the church. Thrown stones at them. It is hard to describe the shock and horror aroused by this. In local terms it was like the crime of the century. Who had done it? Who could have done such a despicable thing? By Grorud standards this was an act of vandalism on a par with that committed in Rome some years later, when a man knocked the arm off the Madonna in Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer. Ivan, who was for a long time a suspect, had an alibi. No one knew who had done it. But I knew. You might even say I did it myself.
Over the following weeks I tried everything to get Laila to talk to me again. None of it did any good. Sorry, I whispered, every time I came within earshot of her. But Laila would have nothing to do with me. Not only that, but she looked so woebegone, dejected. People remarked on it. What’s wrong with Laila, they said. Laila who was always so blithe and cheery. If I tried walking alongside her, she would stop, turn her back on me, or run away. That was the worst part: the way she turned her face away. That she would no longer look at me. Look at me as no one else looked at me.