In many ways, his visits to Aunt Laura’s flat were akin to crawling inside the organ, although in the one instance Jonas had to lie on a hard wooden plank, while in the other he sank back onto soft silk cushions. In June 1964, the same year, strangely enough, when the James Bond film From Russia With Love went on general release in Norway, Nikita Khrushchev paid a visit to that country and while he was there Werna Gerhardsen, wife of the Norwegian prime minister, invited the first lady of the Soviet Union to pay a call on one of her neighbours in the Tøyen tenement where she lived, so that Madame Khrushchev could meet ‘a typical Norwegian family’ and see how they lived — the whole thing duly covered by the national press, naturally. Jonas often thought, laughing to himself, what a sensation it would have caused if the two first ladies and the whole entourage of reporters had rung the wrong doorbell and called instead on Aunt Laura, who happened to live in the same building as Prime Minister Gerhardsen. To some extent, however, he decided on reflection, it would not have been so bad, because in many ways Aunt Laura’s flat provided a different and necessary angle on Norwegian society. And there were times, when he was lying on his back on the sofa in Tøyen with a bowl of pistachio nuts on his chest, that Jonas saw it all so clearly: It was Einar Gerdharsen’s flat, right over his head, that was unreal and these things round about him, including Aunt Laura with a lump of gold on the anvil, that was the true Norway.
The flat’s unique character also owed something to the absence of a television. ‘What do I want with a television when I have forty screens in my living room, and every one of them presenting a wonderful story?’ Aunt Laura would say, pointing to the rugs on the walls around her. Jonas knew what she meant; he liked lying on the sofa, taking in one rug after another. If you tired of one — its colours, its patterns — you only had to let your eye move on. Although he did not know it, in this Jonas was anticipating the possibility that would be open to television viewers of the future, to switch from one channel to another using a remote control.
Aunt Laura was totally absorbed in her work at the bench at the far end of the room, and Jonas had gone over to pour her some more tea — as usual he had no idea what sort of tea it was, but it smelled good. His aunt was correcting the lineaments of the little gold heart ever so carefully with a graver. It was a fine sight, his aunt with her black-lined eyes and blood-red mouth bent over gold and silver, hand moving purposefully and surely. As a small boy Jonas had been allowed to sit alongside her and play with tongs and a piece of silver plate and was thus able to experience for himself the solemn, almost sensual feeling of bending the silver. He could sympathize with his aunt’s love and respect for these malleable metals, their durability: silver and, even more so, gold, metal of the gods, metal of the sun.
Jonas left the teapot with his aunt and went back to the sofa, where he sank down into the pile of cushions with one of his aunt’s sketchbooks, her ‘travel journals’ in his hands. He opened it at random and was promptly confronted with something that made him start: drawings of penises covered in rings, or with little swellings like warts. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, curious and a little afraid, holding up the book. Aunt Laura barely glanced up from under her black-lined eyelids then quietly went on working, quite unperturbed, on the gold head, while she explained to Jonas that in many societies, even in the West, men pierced holes in their members for rings and little metal rods. ‘If, for example, you have a pin stuck through the head of the penis, it’s known as ampallang,’ his aunt said matter-of-factly. ‘And if you have a ring, preferably of gold and set with small precious stones, through the skin at the side of the scrotum, that’s called hafada.’ As for the lumpy penises, those swellings he saw there, those were pearls, surgically inserted under the skin. Her aunt looked up at him. What was he making faces for? Why couldn’t men wear pins and pearls on their penises? They stuck them in their ties, didn’t they?
Jonas was not only making faces, he could virtually feel his own testicles smarting. Nonetheless, for the first time he perceived a connection between his aunt’s collection of penises and their aspects, those sketchbooks, and her jewellery, because it was clear that in some way all of those different organs, both with and without rings, inspired her.
‘You know the penis is a piece of jewellery,’ Aunt Laura said. ‘These men have simply taken that to its logical conclusion. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the cock is a work of art.’
As I say, Aunt Laura was not one for mincing her words.
Through all his comings and goings in the flat in Tøyen, Jonas gradually came to see that not only the rugs and the travelling but also these penises amounted to one and the same thing. As with the rugs and the travelling, when you came right down to it, this collection of penises also testified to the search for a good tale. The idea that the penis truly did contain a story, possibly concerning the secret of sexuality, had often occurred to Jonas when his aunt sat next to him on the sofa and showed him, with a pencil held between fingers adorned with spirals of gold, how this simple form harboured no end of possibilities.
His aunt switched off the lamp at the back of the room. She was finished working, and Jonas was allowed to see the result. On the bench was a silver cylinder, rounded at one end, sitting on a base of oxidized copper, or rather: you had to slide the base over the cylinder. No one needed to tell Jonas that he was looking at a lingam and a yoni. ‘But take a closer look,’ his aunt said. ‘See what you can do with the cylinder.’ And this was the surprise, because when Jonas lifted off the top, he found what looked like a large diamond, though it was in fact a chunk of crystal, cut into an oval, and faceted. Jonas tilted it and saw how beautifully the dim light was refracted by the glass as if through a prism. ‘Give it a shake,’ Aunt Laura said, her blood-red lips smiling eagerly. When Jonas shook the crystal, out slid four little feet and a head of gold, in much the same way as one of those Transformer toys that would appear in the shops a few decades later, and suddenly Jonas realized what it was: a turtle. He laughed. ‘Great stuff, Auntie!’
‘This is my turtle,’ said Aunt Laura, kissing him on the cheek. ‘The turtle that lies at the bottom of everything.’
Jonas stood there admiring his aunt’s work, popping the cylinder through the copper base, noting how neatly they slotted together, taking the top off the silver cylinder, shaking the crystal. Amazing. A silver penis. Ejaculating a turtle with a golden head. And only then — with that silver cylinder and crystal turtle in his hand — did Jonas understand what a lovely, nay, nigh-on perfect story this was. As if all of his aunt’s rugs and travels had been shaped, reworked into a piece of jewellery.
Later, Jonas lay back down on the sofa, in the pile of soft cushions, with a cup of sweet-scented tea on the table next to him. His aunt moved about the room, tidying up, bracelets jingling; she put the sketchbooks back in the chest alongside the precious four-volume edition of Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah. The room lay in shadow, the rugs on the walls became windows onto fabulous landscapes and when Jonas turned his head he could see the lingam on the workbench in the corner drawing all the light around it and storing it in the silver.