Who were these people? Anne B., whom Jonas was seated next to at dinner, told him in her slightly husky voice that many of them were, like herself, members of Labour Youth while the rest were just friends. Although this may not have come as a shock to Jonas, it did serve as a sharp reminder that the Labour Party not only represented the workers but also this affluent, academic stratum of Norwegian society and their children, sophisticated teenagers who ate three-course dinners while discussing everything under the sun, who were active members of Amnesty International, who had hiked the length and breadth of Jotunheimen and knew the first three pages of A Farewell to Arms by heart, in English, not because it was part of their schoolwork but because they thought ‘Hemingway wrote so divinely’ — and beneath all this, or besides, they had it in them to stand at a gathering and sing ‘when I see a red flag flapping on a bright and clear spring day’ with feeling, mark you, real feeling. Once again Jonas was reminded of, and had to concur with, Gabriel’s theory of the multifaceted individual. Jonas could not bring himself to condemn this little circle, not least because they were at least endeavouring to find a third way, and being a young Labourite was not exactly the most opportunist option at a time when the majority of so-called politically-aware teenagers either joined the Young Socialists or the Young Conservatives. In the years that followed, Jonas was to find Labour Youth more amazing by far than the Young Socialists, later the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist Party. To Jonas’s mind, it was Labour Youth and not the Marxist-Leninist Party that was the real miracle.
After dinner, when they had once again fallen into conversation, this time in smaller groups, liberally supplied with expensive whisky and brandy, Jonas asked one of the girls, Guro, about this whole Labour Party business, whether it wasn’t ‘a complete dead loss in our day and age’. And it was during the course of her long explanation of why she was a member of Labour Youth, peppered with many an ‘at this moment in time’ and ‘we, for our part’, that realization dawned on Jonas: up to that point he had regarded these conversations as a casual flirt with political standpoints, little more than a mode of cultivated, not to say civil, conversation, but now he saw that many of the young people round about him actually were genuinely committed and had aspirations to a political career. The Young Socialist phenomenon was a mere flash in the pan but the Norwegian Labour Party was a party with a future, this girl Guro told Jonas, thereby revealing that such a sense of commitment was rooted not only in youthful idealism but also and to as great an extent in a rational plan of attack and a certain cynicism — and, indeed, no small lust for power. Or did Jonas really believe, Guro asked, handing him a glass of brandy, that future generations would be likely to compare a radical trade unionist like Tron Øgrim and a prime minister of Einar Gerhardsen’s standing — a pigeon dropping and a monument?
At one point during the party, while he was standing listening to a brief lecture, quite brilliant, on the extent to which a democratic system could ever gain control of the economic market forces, Jonas was struck by a sense of being in solitary confinement, or a sort of prison camp, like the one at Grini during the war, where all the leaders of the future sat biding their time while madmen played havoc with the country.
On the return of Anne B.’s parents — they, too, Labour supporters, Jonas learned — they had a drink with the young people, a drink which Mr B. mixed in a cocktail shaker, and again stayed for half an hour of polite conversation before retiring to the first floor. Immediately afterwards, as her guests were starting to leave, Anne B. asked Jonas if he would not stay behind, in fact she told him straight out that she would like him to spend the night there — in her bed. She did not beat about the bush; her gaze did not waver. Jonas muttered something about her parents, but she said it was okay with her parents. It was okay with her parents? Jonas repeated incredulously. ‘And I’m on the Pill, of course,’ said Anne B. ‘Mum advised me to start taking it last year.’ As I say, Jonas was here faced with a side of Norwegian society he had not known existed: second and third generation Labour supporters, fathers who mixed their drinks in a shaker and mothers who could coolly tell their seventeen-year-old daughters that they ought to consider using contraception.
So Jonas stayed. And when he climbed into her bed, naked, she boldly proceeded to stroke his body while she went on talking, remarking on the party guests, or commenting on what he had said about doing great things in a country of small men, saying that it was well said, that that was what she liked about him, that he could come out with such statements, even though she didn’t agree, the Scandinavian society had to be regarded as a social experiment, nowhere near finished. Anne B. carried on talking in this vein, one might almost say arguing, while she caressed him, stroking his skin, as if they were two sides of the same coin, caresses both, and Jonas had nothing against this, it did not get in the way of anything at all, just made it that much more erotic. She had, he noticed, a huge yoni; one by one his fingers slid inside it as he fondled her, an elephant yoni, large and wet like an open mouth, but he had no difficulty in filling her when she sat astride him, a position she choose both to illustrate her freedom of will, her deliberate decision on that particular night to choose him, and because she wanted to set the pace, starting out slowly and lingeringly, as if she could not quite believe that she had actually found a cock that could fill her completely; but then she was not to know that Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis, a penis that could become thicker or thinner, shorter or longer as required, like a zoom lens; she was not to know that Jonas Wergeland could fill any vagina exactly as that vagina longed to be filled, perfectly, to give a pleasure second to none, so to begin with she moved slowly, tentatively, still talking all the while, pursuing her line of argument, which involved a number of objections to Jonas’s quote from John Stuart Mill and which amounted, on the whole, to a discourse on finding the right balance, she said, accentuating the word ‘balance’ first one way, then another, while she rocked back and forth on top of him, soon starting to ride him faster and faster, bearing down harder, and he felt something happening to his body, felt it opening up, becoming receptive to something or other, something that was starting to take shape inside his head, new ideas, filling him with energy, even as she was talking to him and making love to him, both at once, and he loved it, he loved her voice, that slightly husky voice, as if she were forever talking, never gave her voice a rest, he loved the stream of words, the long sentences in which sub-clauses wove in and out of sub-clauses, while she never once lost the main thread of the sentence; he felt his own thoughts starting to turn in the same insistent way, the same way as she was making love to him, short, sharp thrusts alternating with longer, more rhythmic strokes, breathtakingly wonderful and stimulating, for her too, and as she approached a climax she could no longer keep her sentences in order, a fact which manifested itself first of all in her statements, in the way that her sub-clauses no longer hung together; and thereafter became more and more marked by sudden leaps and unfinished sentences, running out into disconnected preambles and such rhetorical expressions as ‘it is resoundingly clear’ and ‘quite the reverse’ until at last she was reduced to firing off single words and, in the long pauses between, her pelvis worked more and more frenetically until she stiffened with something that reached him only as a little gasp escaping her lips, a barely audible exclamation mark, after which he drove inside her as if giving her a standing ovation, as much for her long, oratorical performance as for the exceptionally fast, almost relentless, pace at which she had made love to him. And I hardly need add that it was this same strong-willed woman who — after changing her surname and taking her degree in socio-economics, it’s true — is now the leader of her party; a woman who, I warrant you, will leave behind her not a pigeon dropping, but an enduring memorial, a towering monument in Norwegian politics.