They paid their bill and were escorted to the door by a concerned Bényoucéf: ‘You boys think too much,’ he said. ‘Bien sûr.’
The Great White Whale
And so, and here I am thinking of the discovery of the planet Pluto, in every life there are stories which are not immediately apparent but which you know are there due to their unseen effect on other people and the known stories. I fumbled about in the dark for a long time before coming upon the story I am now about to tell, one that ought to be told at this particular juncture, while we are on the subject of astronomy and molecular biology, since it was hardly a coincidence that the moon, La Luna, should have been the focus of world attention during the summer when Jonas Wergeland first shot his genetic package at a girl’s womb, or, as it is so grandly termed, made his sexual debut.
The house on Hvaler had stood empty since his grandfather’s death, and Jonas was not sure how he would take being back on the island again when he set foot on it in the middle of July, after several tedious weeks of sorting mail for the Post Office. But the minute he dumped his rucksack down in the yard between the nasturtium-covered rockeries, he began to feel that this summer might spell the beginning of a new era. This was Jonas Wergeland’s first summer as the Duke, and by a stroke of good luck he had two whole weeks to himself, before his mother and Buddha came down from Grorud. And, as if to physically mark the passing of a very difficult phase in his life, Marie F. appeared on, or floated onto, the scene.
Jonas was down on the jetty, seeing to a mooring line when she slid, suddenly and soundlessly, into his line of sight in a slender white kayak, an older model. She backed water, held still, smiled up at him. The oars glinted. She was not brown like the other girls: if anything she was pure-white. And pretty well built. Or voluptuous, Jonas decided later. She had fair hair and blue eyes and Jonas, standing there with the rope in his hand, in the middle of tying a half-hitch, felt that tingle starting all the way down at his tail-bone and slowly working its way up to the back of his neck as if his spine had turned into some kind of thermometer.
He stretched out on the jetty, on his stomach. She held the kayak still. They talked, while minnows and jellyfish glided past in the perfectly clear water, transparent as an aquarium. She came from Sandefjord but was studying at the College of Commerce in Oslo. She was visiting an aunt on the other side of the island. Jonas told her about his grandfather. They talked half the day away, while dapples of sunlight danced on the hull of the kayak, leaving rippling patterns on the sandy bed when the odd crab sidled past.
It was a two-man kayak and the next day, after she had got rid of the ballast, she took him out in it. The weather had been quite beautiful for weeks, the sea like a millpond most of the time. They paddled all the way out to Tisler. Jonas was surprised by just how fast they could move if they put a bit of effort into it; he loved the nice sound the slender vessel made as it sliced through the water, liked paddling in time, in sync, sitting behind her, copying her movements, watching the play of the muscles across her back, bare apart from the straps of her bikini, white skin and a faint tang of sweat from her armpits. ‘I prefer a kayak,’ she said, ‘because you sit so close to the water, almost become part of it.’ They had the sea pretty much to themselves, this being before the waters around the skerries were transformed into something akin to a motorway, trafficked by a constant stream of whining motor boats — a fleet whose numbers and aggregate value increased in inverse ratio to the general grousing about hard times and the size of the national deficit.
On the way back they took it a bit easier, partly because they had for some time been surrounded by the rolling backs of porpoises, like wheels in the water, accompanied by a lot of snorting; Jonas found it a bit frightening, while Marie F. was almost beside herself with excitement. Once the porpoises had swum off, she laid her paddle across the kayak and leaned back against his knees. He carried on paddling gently, far too gently to explain the pounding of his heart, and propped up against him like that, with her fingers trailing in the water, she told him about her love of the sea. ‘Just think, seven tenths of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean and yet we know next to nothing about it,’ she said. Jonas paddled in long slow strokes across the smooth water, black and pale-blue, aware of the scent of her hair, the soft body against his shins. ‘If we don’t start learning to understand the sea soon we’ll never survive,’ she said, straightening up, then she turned and looked at Jonas, a long look, before picking up her oar and sending the kayak shooting forward. Jonas always had the feeling that she was talking about herself.
Sometimes they went out fishing in the rowboat in the evening. No one was catching anything those days. Folk said the weather was too good. But Marie pulled in fish. Always. She kissed the bait before she let out the line and the fish would bite before the sinker reached the bottom, all kinds of fish: whiting, codling, even flounder. Marie F. fished for mackerel with a ground-line. She could have caught a whole boatful had it been necessary.
Jonas never caught a thing, he simply sat on the thwart, opening mussels and admiring her. Or sometimes he might take out his mouth organ and give her Duke Ellington’s ‘Isfahan’ as music to work by. Rowing them home, he watched her cleaning the fish, swiftly and expertly, while a flock of gulls gorged themselves on the guts that she tossed overboard.
She was an expert at cooking the fish, too. It was not just that she had the same magic touch as his grandfather for fried mackerel with the crispest golden skin, she also served Jonas such surprising dishes as, for example, fish roulade with slices of apple, Chinese fish soup, trout with bacon, red peppers and tomatoes, and, as if that were not enough, she showed him, to his astonishment, that you could actually eat fish raw. On one occasion she had succeeded, thanks to her magical kissing of the bait, in hauling in a catfish — a terrifying monster that made great show with its horrible teeth and jaws in the bailer before she managed to kill it — then later, when she was filleting the catfish, neatly and beautifully, she sliced off a chunk and offered it to him, and for the first time Jonas discovered, to his delight, how fish really tasted. In other words, Marie F. pre-empted Jonas’s introduction to the later so popular Japanese sushi by at least ten years.
I might as well tell you right here and now that Marie F. is none other than a woman who can now boast of a dazzling career in the Norwegian business world, regularly cited and featured in the media as one of the very few women to reach the top. After graduating from college, she joined the frozen-foods concern Frionor but soon left to set up her own company, which she ran with such rare flair and inventiveness that it rose to become the very flagship of all companies exporting Norwegian fish, and not only salmon; she was, it goes without saying, smart enough to avoid becoming reliant on the vagaries of the one fish-farming venture.
But as I say, on this particular summer the focus was on La Luna; it was the summer of the lunar landing, on one of those very nights when everyone was sitting at home, eyes glued to the television screen, to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon. Jonas, on the other hand, was filled with a longing for something much more down-to-earth: not a white planet but a voluptuous white body. Given the choice of being on board the lunar landing vehicle or sinking into the depths of Marie F., he did not have to think twice. That summer Neil was overshadowed by Louis Armstrong: What a wonderful world.