Over the years Jonas would often wonder what it was about his organ that put him in this, in two senses, fortunate position, and since it could not possibly have anything to do with size or staying power, he thought it must be down to its form. When he inspected his member, particularly during the transition from limp to erect state — an activity in which all boys regularly indulge — he began to suspect that it had something to do with a bit of a curve, possibly in conjunction with the hint of a spiral form, not unlike the horn of a kudu for anyone who has ever seen one of those: that it was this which drove women wild, not least when they sat astride him, in which position they claimed to experience ‘an utterly divine pleasure’ as one woman put it — although, for the record, I feel bound to object to that adjective — or that he ‘hit the G-spot dead-on’ as another, more feminist-minded girl breathlessly informed him back in the days when there was a lot of talk about this particular phenomenon: a pure fiction, of course, if that is of any comfort to those women who have hunted for it in vain. As it happens, it was these comments on the source of the magic which gave Jonas Wergeland his first inkling of form as the be-all and end-all.
Early in the spring of his second year at high school Jonas became better acquainted with a girl in the class above him: Christine A., a girl with a delicate tracery of blue veins at her temples who was notorious for having an almost daunting gift for mathematics, a gift she would go on to develop, after graduating from high school, at various foreign universities, among them the world-renowned Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where she was a protégé of the pioneering Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg — in fact, in the mid-eighties the Norwegian television network NRK did a programme on her which Jonas watched with an interest that spoke to his colleagues of something more than mere professional curiosity.
Jonas, on the other hand, had no head for maths. Quite frankly, he hated maths, mainly because this subject persisted in remaining a closed book to him. There are two types of people in this world: those who understand the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise and those who do not. Jonas belonged most definitely to the latter group. He simply could not grasp why Achilles could never catch up with the tortoise, let alone understand such totally senseless conceptions as incommensurable quantities, irrational numbers and periodic decimal fractions. Geometry he could cope with, set theory too, at a pinch, but algebra … as far as Jonas was concerned algebra made about as much sense as ‘abracadabra’. His little red book was of no use when it came to mathematics, not even James Clerk Maxwell’s pithy warning as to the dangers of limited knowledge. That his marks reflected this shortcoming was the result not of laziness but sheer incomprehension.
Christina A. was not one of those razor-sharp minds who can add up quicker in their head than anyone else could with a slide-rule, or who laughed at their teacher’s pathetic blackboard antics; she was a deep thinker, her strength lay in posing unexpected questions, perceiving connections between different sets of problems, turning things on their head in the style of one of her heroes, the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer. Nor was she an out-and-out pragmatist, as a type, I mean. She took just as great an interest in other subjects, not least Norwegian. The school magazine ran a colourful portrait of her in which she was pictured against a blackboard covered in transcendent and elliptical functions, while the best part of the interview was taken up with her talking about authors such as Julio Cortázar and Iris Murdoch, names quite unknown to Jonas.
Christine A. was also a monitor in the reading room in which Jonas could be found dutifully dashing off his homework before class. More than once he had felt her eyes on him when she thought he wasn’t looking, and he had long since been alerted to her indubitably high calibre by that little, aesthetic lightning bolt between his shoulder blades. Once, on walking past her and noticing that the sheet of paper in front of her was covered in figures and letters, he was tempted to say: ‘Beats me how you can be bothered with anything so abstract.’
‘What makes you think it’s so abstract?’ she asked.
‘Algebra’s all Greek to me,’ said Jonas.
‘Well, I could start by telling you that the word itself actually comes from the Arabic,’ she said. ‘And see here …’ She drew a six. ‘Six is a perfect number. D’you think that’s abstract?’ Jonas thought it looked like a hard-on. ‘If it weren’t for numbers, for mathematics, mankind would still be stuck in the Stone Age,’ said Christine A., and when the school bell chose just that moment to ring she coolly asked him to wait behind.
When everyone, even the keenest chess players, had gone off to their classrooms she ushered him out of the room and led him, by the hand almost, up the stairs, past the gilt-lettered memorial plaques and the portraits of famous pupils, which always gave Jonas the feeling of being in a mausoleum, to the second floor where she let them in to room thirty-seven — one number that would come to hold some relevance for Jonas — where the school’s collection of antiquarian books was housed. Books for borrowing were also kept here, hence the reason that Christina A. had a key. Having little or no knowledge of these all-but secret chambers, Jonas stood for a moment running his eye around a room in which every available inch of wall space was taken up by bookshelves containing thousands of what looked like very old books indeed, with hide bindings in every shade of brown and spines of dull gold with patches of scuffed red showing here and there. Jonas could take books or leave them, but this quite took his breath away. The general impression, induced mainly by the galleries running round the three sides not overlooking the playground, with their stairs and iron railings, combined with the dust and the stuffy atmosphere, was of a set for a Gothic horror movie.
Christine A. pulled out an old book bound in parchment. ‘Feel this,’ she said. ‘Arithmetica Universalis,” Jonas read. Written by one Isaac Newton. An edition from 1732, if he read the Roman numerals aright. ‘Take a look inside,’ she said. Jonas leafed through the book, running his eye over words in Latin and rows of numbers with the odd set of brackets here and there; he could not help but find it beautiful. Christine A. produced another heavy volume bound in pale calfskin from a safe. Jonas opened it. ‘Ionnis Keppleri, Harmonices Mundi,’ he read, fingering the thick rag paper. ‘Kepler’s Third Law,’ she said. ‘A first edition from 1619.’ He pored over the text, the profusion of beautiful illustrations, the geometric drawings; ran his fingers over the letters, the indentations in the paper. ‘This must be worth a fair bit,’ said Jonas. ‘A quarter of a million kroner,” said Christine A. ‘Still think it’s abstract?’