The order to her brothers to drop their trousers stemmed, on Rakel’s side, from pure compassion. She was, after all, related to these two kids and felt, at any rate now and again, a certain responsibility for their upbringing. ‘Okay Mutt and Jeff, now the fact is that I don’t want you to be caught with your pants down later,’ she said. ‘So allow me to give you a basic introduction to anatomy.’
Most boys first learn about the nature and the secrets of the sexual organs through vague rumours and thereafter from more or less appropriate and abstract handbooks. But here, once and for all, Jonas and Daniel were given a concrete demonstration at close quarters. ‘These, boys, are called the testicles,’ she said, squeezing their balls lightly. ‘The pouch they hang in is called the scrotum. With me so far?’ She gave them that heavy-lidded, seductive look of hers which did not, in fact, betray any hint of lust, it simply was the way she looked at them. ‘Scrotum,’ the boys muttered. ‘A very delicate arrangement, guard it well. Have you heard of jock-straps?’ They were doing just fine as long as they stuck to pointing and naming, it became a bit more tricky when she rolled the foreskin back from the head of Jonas’s penis and it rose up to its, for his age, decent length, thus presenting his sister with the perfect cue for a brief lecture on the influx of blood and fungal growths. ‘D’you know what “wanking” means?’ They nodded. They weren’t that dumb.
This proved to be just the beginning. Their sister now proceeded to take off her own trousers and underpants and lie down on the bed. ‘Sit there,’ she said, pointing to the foot of the bed. They did as they were told, whereupon Rakel spread her legs to reveal the number-one talking point among boys which, for that very reason, seemed to Jonas to look rather like a keyhole, while at the same time he was surprised by how little hair there was and how much flesh. Then their sister moistened her middle finger and ran it down the length of her slit, causing the outer lips to fold back on themselves as if she were unzipping them, thus revealing the underlying substance of her genitals in all its prosaic reality, and you can take it from me that Jonas’s and Daniel’s hearts were pounding as hard as those of Howard Carter and his team the first time they shone their torches into Tutankhamun’s tomb. ‘No need to blush, boys. There’s a first time for everything.’ Their sister regarded them from under lowered lids. ‘Now listen carefully,’ she said. ‘In the years to come you’re going to hear a lot of weird things about the meaning and the purpose of life. Most of it is utter bullshit. I’m going to say this once and once only, so pay attention: for you boys, for men in general in fact, it all comes down to just one thing.’ She pointed between her thighs. Instinctively the brothers nodded as one. ‘There might be many a detour and plenty of smokescreens, but at the end of the day all roads lead to just one place,’ she said. ‘And this is it.’
After this rather philosophical preamble the lesson switched to a more practical level, with a review of all the different parts, their names and their function, all of this while a pungent odour pervaded the room. ‘And this, boys,’ she said, towards the end of the demonstration, ‘is the clitoris. Clitoris means “shut away”, because its hidden behind this fold of skin. And the significance of this vital feature seems to be pretty well hidden as far as most men are concerned. But remember: with a woman, reverse logic applies: our secrets lie on the outside, not on the inside, as men believe. So I’m telling you now: stick to the outside.’
That was the day on which Jonas realized that the female is an outsider with a feel for the marginal. Later in life he would often speculate as to what the clitoris of life might be, and it was thanks largely to women like Rakel that he always sought the essence of things on the periphery and not in the centre.
Rakel also told her brothers that they should never charge at the clitoris like a bull at a gate, but that when the time was ripe they should proceed with the greatest caution and sensitivity and, above all, take their time. ‘You’ve heard of Aladdin’s Lamp? Well it’s the same with a woman, rub her the right way and afterwards she will do the most magical things to you.’ Due to its dispassionate and scientific nature, this session never came anywhere near what is known as incest. In all respects it represented an informative lecture on the female anatomy — a demythologizing, if you like — which gave Jonas and Daniel a good head start on other boys of their age and left them forever in their sister’s debt. Jonas and Daniel did not have a great deal in common, but their sister meant more to both of them than almost anyone else.
Jonas told no one about Rakel’s lesson, with one exception. The following day he and Nefertiti set off to try out a kite which they had built to Nefertiti’s design and which Jonas had bet they would never get off the ground. While they were unravelling the cord at the top of the hill, Jonas told her what had occurred. ‘Did she also tell you about Bartholin’s lymph glands?’ said Nefertiti, fluttering her long eyelashes.
‘What’re they?’
The kite flew into the air and hung silhouetted against the sky like a spirit out of a fairy tale. Nefertiti sent it into a dive towards the hilltop before deftly levelling it out and making it loop-the-loop a couple of times. She passed the cord to Jonas. ‘A sort of irrigation system,’ she said.
It took a lot to impress Nefertiti.
In the weeks that followed, when Jonas thought of Rakel presenting her genitals to them, as it were, it was the totally fragmentary, detached aspect of it which struck him; it took such a long time to digest all the talk about the woman’s pleasure and other such advanced concepts. He had been treated to a demonstration of an object which, even though to begin with he had no idea what it was for, seemed as fascinating and alluring and complex as Wolfgang Michaelsen’s little steam engine.
Rakel was, in many ways, the most intelligent and original member of the family. There were many things in life which Jonas found it hard to understand, but possibly the greatest mystery was how Rakel should have ended up the way she did. As a housewife. Married to a long-distance lorry driver — a great guy, but still. Or maybe it was only naturaclass="underline" that a woman who had spent so much of her life immersed in fairy tales, so intense, so full of energy; who had eyed the world so seductively for so many years, was bound to end up being totally ordinary, like a space probe that has burned out its booster rockets getting itself out of the Earth’s atmosphere and was now drifting quietly in orbit. Because it ought to be said: Rakel may have become invisible, blended in, so to speak, with the bedrock of Norway, but Jonas could not think of many people who were happier than she, and in Rakel’s case this was no empty platitude — no matter how much Jonas tried to explain it away, what Rakel had was genuine enviable happiness, utter contentment.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The whole point of being human, as Gabriel told Jonas again and again, was to take over the direction of one’s own life. Why allow yourself to be defined by others. Be a king, for Christ’s sake! Did Jonas hear what he was saying? You had to pose your own questions, set your own terms! And at this point Gabriel invariably flung his arms wide, gesturing to the bulkheads surrounding them and reverently declared, his intonation perfect: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.’