He was a painter, he said. She had an extremely distinctive face. Would she allow him to paint her? Would she come back to his studio with him? Karen Mohr found this quite funny: artists like him probably said the same thing to all the ladies. And yet — she was tempted. There was something about this man which told her he was not just another artist. That he was more than that. That what she was being offered here was not the chance to visit his studio, to pose as a model, but a turning point in her life. She sat for a while, thinking it over as she licked her ice cream. He played with a couple of croissants from a basket on the table, stuck them on either side of his head, pretended he was a bull about to ravish her. He made a lovely sailboat out of a fork and a napkin; he looked as if he had trouble sitting still, always had to be doing something. But from time to time he would stop and just look at her with the blackest pupils into which she had ever gazed.
She indicated that she was in a quandary. He asked where she was from, asked if she was enjoying her visit to this part of France, asked if she had been to any art exhibitions, whether she was fond of animals, whether — this was important — she had tasted lavender honey. She was filled with a sense of tranquillity. Of gravity. Of light. Felt that she was being lit from within. Suffused with life. ‘I grew as he watched me. I felt as though I was being lifted up, that I sprouted wings,’ she told Jonas. ‘My head was perfectly clear. All of a sudden I could see through everything. See how everything was connected.’
That’s how it should be, Jonas was ever afterwards to believe. But just at that moment he was growing impatient: ‘What did you say?’
She had paused, deliberately taking her time, because she wanted the moment to last, wished she could sit there, under that probing gaze, and be discovered, be beheld with this same intensity, for all eternity. She felt as though, with those eyes, those senses, he discerned a multiplicity, saw things in her that no other man had ever perceived. He saw, she felt, her hidden beauty, all her potential for love. ‘The feeling of it was stronger than any kiss, if you know what I mean,’ she told Jonas. ‘I’m sure that not even … you know what, could compare with it.’
Jonas felt his heart pounding, though he could not have said why. ‘So what did you do?’ he asked.
‘I thanked him, but declined. Politely.’
She could tell that the man was disappointed, genuinely disappointed. Sad, even. He asked if it would be alright for him to draw her portrait as she sat there in the café. She nodded. He pulled out pencils and some sheets of paper, sat facing her, totally absorbed; covered a couple of blank sheets with black strokes. ‘I drew you before you were born,’ he murmured. She stayed perfectly still. Again she wished that time could be suspended. That she could sit like this and be studied, drawn, by this enigmatic, this dynamic man, for ever. ‘I felt as though he was unveiling me,’ she told Jonas, ‘really unveiling me, stripping away veil after veil.’
‘Until you were naked?’ Jonas flinched at the boldness of his own remark.
‘More than naked.’
When the stranger was finished, he stood up and handed her one of the sheets of paper. ‘Would you like me to sign it?’ he asked. She instinctively knew that this was more than the offer of an autograph; that it was meant as a gift, something which she could possibly trade in for a lot of money. ‘No, you don’t need to do that,’ she said, not even glancing at the sketch. He made ready to leave. ‘Would you come to the beach with me tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘If it is too hot for you, I can hold a parasol over your head while we walk along the shore.’ She shook her head. Although she was not really there, her body shook her head without her being aware of it. He walked away, stopped in the doorway and sent her one last searching, almost mirthful look.
Not until later, in her room, did she take out the sketch and examine it. She saw her own face. It definitely looked like her, that she could see, but it was a likeness that went far deeper than any photograph, although it was a very simple drawing, more like something a child would do. And he seemed to have drawn her face three times, as if he had been viewing her from three different angles at once. She sensed that, simply by being in his company for those minutes — and perhaps by being drawn by him — she had been given fresh eyes. He had transfigured her purely by observing her. She had been blind and his regard had been like a healing hand. She walked over to the window and opened the shutters. The countryside, the light, the people — everything had looked different. She had met a man, and the world was as new.
Jonas thought, but did not say out loud: that place, Mougins, was Karen Mohr’s Samarkand.
‘That’s it there,’ she said to Jonas, pointing to a framed drawing on the wall, next to one of the plants with the scarlet blossoms. Jonas went over to have a look at it. He had never seen anything like it. It was the sort of picture which, once seen, is never forgotten. A drawing that gave off sparks. Jonas remembered every line of it for the rest of his life. It could easily have been Egyptian, he thought to himself. Face on and side on at the same time. Although maybe he had seen something similar before, in real life: triplets.
Triplets were a rare sight in the fifties. But only months after Jonas came into the world, at the same hospital, three girls, identical triplets were born — a sensation which was duly reported in the press; in fact some papers actually gave more space to this than to the climbing of Mount Everest — an order of priority at which no one should wrinkle their nose, since the feat performed by every woman during childbirth is every bit as awesome as the conquest of the highest mountain in the world; you only have to look at print-outs from the latest CTG machines, the patterns of contractions like the silhouetted peaks of the Himalayas.
Jonas remembered the first time he had ever laid eyes on them; he must have been about four or five and he was in the grocer’s shop with his mother. No one had told him about the triplets. He just stood there staring at them, exactly as one is always told not to gawp at people who have something wrong with them. They were standing next to the crates of fruit and to Jonas they seemed as exotic as the bananas from Fyffes — a name which you always ended up spraying rather than saying. They stood in a huddle, staring back and sticking out their tongues at him in such perfect sync that he was sure there had to be only one girl, that he had been dazzled, was seeing double, triple. He had to shut his eyes several times before coming to the stunned conclusion that there actually were three of them.
These triplets grew up in Grorud, they lived at the bottom of Trondheimsveien, but he seldom saw them and on those occasions when he did run into them he tended to regard them more as bringing a touch of carnival to the neighbourhood, like some sort of freak show, or like April, May and June, Daisy’s three nieces in the Donald Duck comics. Seeing them swimming and diving together at Badedammen was tantamount to a preview of the synchronised swimming which Jonas was to see on television years later.
It wasn’t until school, though, that he really discovered them, more specifically in fifth grade, when suddenly it was okay to look at girls — when, indeed, this had become the boys’ favourite pastime. Jonas was tempted to don a pair of those special glasses he had seen people wearing in the cinema, with one red lens and one green, to see if the three of them would merge into one mind-bogglingly three-dimensional girl. He started taking more and more notice of them, to the point where he realised that he was in love — in love with all three of them at once. He was faced, in other words, with an apparently insoluble problem: which one should he choose? Or, as Bo Wang Lee would have said: ‘What should you take with you?’