They often paddled out to the islets to swim. Sometimes Marie F. read a book, Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. She was reading it in French. She was good at languages. One day she swam naked. Her skin was only a little whiter in the parts the bikini had covered. She looked magnificent, with a body that would have had a seventeenth-century painter scrabbling for his brush, the breasts of a fertility goddess. She gambolled about in the water. Jonas had to lie flat on his stomach to hide his erection. She dived, displaying an ample rear end, as if in triumph, before going under. Jonas was put in mind of a great white whale, one into which he would gladly — more than gladly — have stuck his harpoon. She turned onto her back in the water. Her blonde pubic hair shimmered, a golden fleece, enticing.
‘Come on in,’ she shouted. Bent double, he made his way down to the rock, and executed a swallow dive perfected at the Torggata Baths. She swam to meet him, gently wrapped her arms around him and let herself sink. He sank with her, down into the water, it seemed to him that they went deep down; she stopped, they were several metres underwater when she said something, bubbles rising to the surface, before putting her lips to his mouth and kissing him, kissing him long, as long as she had breath, and she could hold her breath for a long time, longer than Jonas who, despite the almost unbearable pleasure, the contact with her naked body, finally had to kick off with his feet and float to the surface.
‘What did you say?’ he gasped when she too broke the surface just afterwards.
‘Mon petit prince,’ she said.
On other occasions they dived together, put on masks and swam through corridors of red weed and sea anemone: a swaying, alien world. Marie F. shot fish with a simple homemade harpoon — all in all she was unfailingly inventive. Back at the house she poked around in the boathouse, checking out lobster pots and grapnels, lines and hooks, sorting and fixing, mending and splicing, lashing this and binding that. And all the time this whiteness, her skin, among the nets and ropes, her great body which Jonas’s eyes could not get enough of, which he longed for with something akin to anguish.
One afternoon when they were lazing on one of the islets, on a smooth rounded rock that oozed heat, Marie F. suggested that they should have a fishing competition. The one who caught the most fish in an hour could ask whatever they wanted of the other. Jonas had nothing against that, absolutely nothing against it. They positioned themselves one on either side of the islet, Jonas with his old rod and Abu reel, desperate to catch some fish — so eager that he actually kissed the spoon-bait before casting.
Jonas did not get a bite, only succeeded in reeling in the odd clump of weed when the hook became stuck. Marie F. came strolling up to him carrying six fine frying cod. They paddled back to the jetty. Up at the yard, before she left, she turned to him: ‘Meet me down at the boathouse tonight at eight,’ she said. It was July 29th, St Olaf’s Day, although that was the last thing on Jonas’s mind. On the western horizon, where the sun was setting, the sky was aflame — red, orange, violet — but he had no eyes for that, he was waiting for Marie F. down by the boathouse, and she came. ‘There’s a full moon tonight,’ she said, pointing to the beach, the tide. ‘The sea’s flexing its muscles,’ she said, smiling, in shorts and a sweater, white thighs, nothing under the sweater but swelling breasts. She nipped into the boathouse and brought out a sail, shook it, took him by the hand. ‘Remember, I can ask for anything I want,’ she said and led him by the hand to an old peter-boat that lay on the shore belly up; it had lain like that for years. They crawled underneath it, there was plenty of room, a vaulted space, she spread the sail out on the grass, asked him to undress and lie on his back, he did so, she did the same, gleaming white in the dim light; she took his penis in her hand, not smiling, very solemn, the air was filled with all sorts of smells: grass, salt, oil, tar, seaweed; she ran her eye over his penis, a different look on her face, ardent, a sort of a glow to her cheeks, an urgency, he never forgot the sight of her, her voluptuous white body as she raised herself slightly, then proceeded to ease herself down on to him, one hand to her vulva, opening the way, or the wonderful, almost explosive, feeling when, for the first time, he felt a woman’s labia against the tip of his penis, the moistness, the surprising warmth, and the nigh-on stupefying sensation of sexual excitement when she lowered herself right down on to him, burying him in her smooth, soft, warm vagina, or as Jonas himself would have put it: wrapped her yoni around his lingam. Never, not even in his wildest dreams, not even during his best wanking sessions, had Jonas imagined that it could be so indescribably, itchingly, staggeringly delightful.
And this is worth noting, because even though Jonas had been prepared for the unique potential of lovemaking by his parents’ fine demonstration, he could not help but be affected by all the murky rumours and fantasies that did the rounds among the lads, in which the monomaniacal lust after the female genitals also gave rise to an undying myth as to how dangerous it was: that sticking your dick into a woman’s vagina was like sticking it between two millstones, not to mention into the maw of a catfish, with the result that sex was not only bound up with longing, but also with a certain dread. Nevertheless, most of them agreed, perhaps as a consolation for having had to wait so long, that it came as a disappointment to all, that sex was highly overrated.
Not so for Jonas Wergeland. There, on St Olaf’s Night, under the belly of a peter-boat, with a sail under his back, he knew that he had never experienced anything more wonderful than the feel of Marie F.’s great, white body and most especially her smooth, velvety, warm vagina. It far surpassed all of his greatest hopes and dreams. And he was given plenty of opportunity to fix this moment in his memory, his first time, because they were in no hurry, lying there under the vault of the boat surrounded by the scents of seaweed, tar, oil, grass; Marie F. bent over him and let him kiss her breasts, let him lick the coating of salt on her skin while she gyrated, growing wetter, slicker, her juices running down over his thighs; he had entered a chamber full of precious oil, fragrant oil, warm oil, gurgling sounds, little splashes, like the sound of the waves when he lay in the bottom of the rowboat; she reared over him, large, white, moving gently and slowly, massaging him with oil, again he was reminded of a ball-bearing, had the feeling of being at the hub of something, in touch with a warm, intelligent being; her movements became more intense, his cock was awash, sloshing about in a springtide of warm oil, a wildly mounting pleasure, a thrill beyond anything he could ever have imagined, such softness, such smoothness, such whiteness; he had visions of diving, sinking down into warm water, and just before he came, just before he shot his own little drop of fluid into that deep mysterious ocean of female oils, he turned his eyes up to the timbers of the peter-boat’s hull and it occurred to him that they looked like ribs, that he was inside the belly of a whale.
They lay there for ages, on the old sail, under a vaulted roof bathed in the light of the full moon, while the sea showed its muscles in the slow run of the tide. They made love three times. At no time did Jonas feel lethargic or sleepy or depressed, as some people say can happen. He felt wide-awake, felt as if their lovemaking had opened his eyes: as if, rather than squirting something out, he had been filled up.
It will probably come as no surprise to anyone to learn that from that day on, Jonas Wergeland was blessed with the most amazing fisherman’s luck; and this luck was to stay with him all his life, ensuring that he could get a bite anywhere, all he had to do was put out his hook — he even caught catfish. At first he thought it was simply that the fish had at long last returned. A couple of years were to go by before he perceived the connection.