On the way home his mother suddenly said, more to herself than to Jonas: ‘She wasn’t good enough for him. If you ask me she was a tart.’
Jonas pretended not to hear, but this comment confirmed his misgivings — paradoxical though they were, considering those white rooms — concerning the darker aspects of love, and the risk of losing one’s head completely.
He was to learn more about what it meant to lose one’s head that day at Sinober when he stood under the ski-trail signpost, those arrows pointing in all directions, staring as if bewitched at a gigantic white room covered in snow. He had agreed without a moment’s hesitation when Eva asked if he wanted to take a run over to Tømte with her, even though he knew that in order to get there they would first have to ski down to Movatn Lake. And Movatn was the main reason that Jonas had never gone beyond Sinobar. The slopes down to the lake were legendary, known for being among the very worst the whole of Nordmarka had to offer in the way of downhill runs. Even Daniel, fanatical skier that he was, referred to them with a faint shudder as the Slopes from Hell. And as if that wasn’t enough, there had been a bit of a thaw, then the surface had frozen hard again: the trails were covered in a lethal layer of ice.
Even on the first, not particularly taxing slopes, Jonas knew that he had embarked on a downright dangerous expedition. ‘Careful, now,’ Eva called over her shoulder a moment later, then the back of her red anorak disappeared over the top of something which looked to Jonas like an endless plunging descent, with steep slopes rising up on either side. The track was narrow and icy, there was no chance of ploughing; Jonas felt like he was on a bob-sleigh run; fir trunks loomed close, tightly packed, braking was impossible, he simply had to go for it, even though he had tears in his eyes and was travelling faster and faster over the glassy surface; and at the bottom there was a sharp turn to the left, one which the experienced skiers knew about, but not Jonas, with the result that he shot straight off into the forest at breakneck speed and crashed, inevitably and sickeningly, into a tree. Although to Jonas it was not a tree, but a high-voltage cable. He had known it was there ever since he fell in love, knew that he was bound to go careering into it sooner or later. For a few seconds everything went black. Or, not black: red.
He came round to find Eva standing over him. Fortunately he had hit the tree with his feet, with the sides of his skis first — there was an ugly gash in the trunk — even so he was battered and bruised and seemed to have broken, or at least sprained his leg, possibly tearing up his old football injury, the very source of his wrath. He could not get up. Then he noticed something which, for a moment, made him forget his pain. Eva was looking at him with a face which was unrecognisable, which pulsed with warmth, as if she were running a high fever. Jonas realised that Eva was in love, although in his dazed condition he thought that this was something which had only happened now, thanks to his accident. His battered state was the whole premise for her falling in love. The fact that he was done for. Down for the count. Not strong at all, no Lillomarka elk, but weak. She bent down to put her arms round him. Jonas caught a faint whiff of goat’s cheese, blackcurrant cordial and universal wax. She slipped as she tried to help him up, fell on top of him, almost on purpose, he thought. Jonas was conscious of her lips brushing his cheek, felt her breath on his neck, the smell of her, the softness; that ‘hard’, fit, muscular girl, and yet this softness. As if the contours of her body were more palpable through anoraks and sweaters and tights than if she had been naked. For a few seconds there, it seemed to Jonas that he could feel every millimetre of that half of her body which was in contact with his.
It was worth it all for that instant of intense closeness. Jonas had the feeling that they did not need to do any more than that. That this brief, electrified moment more than justified all the ski trekking, the months of red-hot expectation, the pictures of her which he had blown-up almost to the point of unrecognisability and caressed in his dreams.
They got to their feet, brushed off the snow. His leg hurt. She turned to run her fingers over the marks his ski binding had made in the tree trunk, as if he had carved their names inside a heart. Although he tried not to, eventually he had to meet her eye and as he held her gaze he saw it all, as in a red haze, a darkroom in which pictures were developed at lightning speed. Up to this point you might say that he had merely loved her with his eyes, and only now did his mind seem to catch up with his vision and compel him to perceive her in another way, forced him to consider whether his eyes might have been wrong. Again he was made aware of what a blessing and a curse it was to be able to extract all he could from a girl at their first meeting, or from the moment when he understood that things could get serious. He was unable to stop the thoughts that flew off into the future, there to branch out in all directions, as if he were standing at a crossroads, covering every possible ski route at the same time — and all in order to determine whether she was the person he hoped she would be. Within a matter of seconds he found himself delving, despite his youth and lack of experience, deep into the exhausted possibilities of wedded life, into the petty arguments of a fifteen-year-old marriage; and not only that, he also explored all of the alternative forks in the road, the various, hypothetical paths in life he encountered at different points along the way. He stood there gazing into her eyes, and in his mind he saw their first kiss, actually saw quite vividly how he caught the taste of raspberry jam, then saw them going to the cinema and, weeks later, how he touched her breasts — from outside a flannel shirt, it’s true; how he had dinner at her house, not only that, but that they had grouse, shot by her father, and then how, late one evening, in front of a roaring fire he slipped his hand between her legs; how they got engaged, the mad, passionate lovemaking in a sleeping bag; how they got married, the speech she made at the wedding, their first child, buying a house — log-built — dinners with friends, the general wear and tear, the quarrels over lopsided cheese-cutting. Everyone knows the expression ‘to undress her with his eyes’. Jonas carried on where others left off. Not only was Jonas Wergeland capable of simulating an orgasm, he could simulate an entire marriage.
They struggled back up the hillside to Sinober. She kept her body pressed close against his the whole time, acting almost as a crutch. They phoned from the café. Haakon Hansen drove up through Nittedal to collect him. As Jonas shut the car door she stared at him through the window with eyes that made him quake. He was hers, those eyes said, or so Jonas imagined. And she wanted him as he was now, hurt, an invalid of sorts, someone on whom she could take pity, care for, help. Jonas did not know whether he was misinterpreting all this. His mother had once hinted that maybe he took life too seriously. Sometimes Jonas thought that he also took love too seriously. Or was too scared. Scared of being disappointed. Scared of finding that not only the world but love, too, was flat. In other words: scared of catching Melankton’s syndrome.
When he returned to school a couple of days later, she came straight over to him at the morning break, wanting to hold his hand, to show that they were going together, although there had been no talk of this between them. He refused, but again she had looked at him with that feverish expression on her face which told him that any rebuff would be lost on her. At every break that day she came running happily up to him and groped eagerly for one of his hands. He kept them in his pocket.
By the last interval of the day the penny had finally dropped. ‘I can’t go out with you,’ he said, barely managing to get the words out before she grabbed him roughly and threw him to the ground, hard, right down into the slush. More in desperation than in anger. Several of the others saw it, whispered. She walked off. She sounded as though she was crying. Jonas could not understand how someone so apparently robust and strong-minded could react in such a way.