The Conqueror

Disoriented

One thing that comes to no one as a matter of course is love, far less that hormonal jitterbug inside us so feebly termed ‘being in love’. After Jonas’s dream, that somewhat morbid dream of getting his hands under Anne Beate Corneliussen’s bulging Setesdal sweater was, as it were, squeezed to bits, he suffered for some time from feelings of unfulfilled desire, and certain girls in the parallel class — this was before mixed classes became the norm — were the object of many a long look. Not unnaturally, it was one of these girls who eventually caught his attention or, more accurately, grabbed Jonas’s attention. Henny F. was a pretty ordinary girl, and Jonas did not take any real notice of her until the class trip in eighth grade, in March of that year — and, I should add, with the entire class in the throes of puberty — when they spent a whole tremulous week up in the hills near Vinstra, where the attraction between the sexes was strong enough to start an avalanche and a number of new pairings saw the light of day or rather, the dark of night. There was one dinner in particular at which Henny F. made a big impression by displaying her talent for tying knots of spaghetti in her mouth with her tongue. What would it be like to kiss such a girl, Jonas mused.

The big breakthrough came on May 17, on the morning of Constitution Day itself, after they had been running amok with firecrackers for hours, destroying diverse bike handlebars and postboxes, as well as scorching the stockings of some of the mothers quite badly with the more capricious ‘jumping-jacks’, which shot dangerously this way and that — exploding, as they did, several times. Jonas attended the traditional ceremony in the Memorial Grove, where the Grorud School girls’ choir arranged themselves on the steps of the church and sang — at the top of their voices, as they say — ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, no more, no less, and there stood Henny F., wreathed by green birch leaves, along with the other girls in their thin white sweaters and red skirts and, not least, red bonnets which looked so totally out of place and yet utterly irresistible, especially on Henny F., and they sang, they sang so beautifully that Jonas felt his body go numb with delight. For there was something mystical about songs sung in harmony, he had discovered this for himself in first grade, when their teacher had taught them to sing ‘All the Birds’ in two-part harmony. With tireless patience she had taken half of the class out into the corridor and rehearsed the second part with them one by one. And when they sang this song that they had been practising and practising, ‘All the Birds’, for the first time altogether, it went surprisingly well, it didn’t merely sound twice as beautiful, it sounded ten times as beautiful, so beautiful that it made Jonas’s scalp tingle. This was an aesthetic milestone and a preparation for the day when Jonas would discover how much finer things became when you simply wove two of them together. But here was the girls’ choir, not the world’s best girls’ choir perhaps, but they were singing in harmony, singing ‘Now See the Groves Awaken’, a song Jonas had heard many times but which now, because of Henny F., standing there with a look of such fervour on her face, all-aglow in the midst of the group of girls, Henny F. with her throat straining eagerly and Jonas’s eyes fixed on her larynx, sensing as he did that this was the seat of her magic, acquired the semblance of pure beauty and gave Jonas a musical experience that not even Wagner at his most grandiose and extravagant could top. Standing there in the Memorial Grove, Jonas felt a pressure on his spine, felt something seizing hold of him body and soul, even though he had not yet deciphered the signals from the dragon-horn button he had swallowed as a little boy; and for the first time — or the second if one counts Margrete, a relationship which Jonas himself had pushed to the back of his mind — he understood that girls were different, that what he was now feeling, this longing, this throbbing, all-consuming desire, was something other than the more limited randiness triggered by Anne Beate Corneliussen’s pneumatic allurements. This was not the ABC of Sex; this was the Alpha and Omega of love.

He started walking home from school with Henny F., liked to hear her talk, this in itself enough: her voice caressing his ears, making him go all funny inside. Although these were the days of colourful, almost psychedelic, Flower-Power garb, she often wore more theatrical clothes than other girls, as if for her the world was a stage. On one occasion she invited him to her house, and he was introduced to her father, a violinist who, as one might expect, looked kindly on a son of the organist from Grorud Church. Jonas also got to see her room where, apart from a couple of diplomas for ski jumping, the walls were completely covered in pictures of pop groups cut from the countless music magazines that flourished during these years: groups Jonas knew next to nothing about, even though many of the same pictures were also stuck up on Daniel’s wall — and on the ceiling — at home. He noticed that the Hollies were much in evidence, a group which — as I’m sure even you are aware, Professor — was, not surprisingly, particularly strong on the vocals. She played him some singles: ‘Look Through Any Window’, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, ‘Bus Stop’, songs in which Allan Clark, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash created their distinctive harmonies, and to which Henny F. added an upper part, even higher than Graham Nash’s — no small achievement, had Jonas but known it. ‘Maybe you’ll be a star too one day,’ he said and pointed to a picture of Cilla Black sporting long, false eyelashes, ‘I mean, you’re so musical.’ She shook her head shyly: ‘Who me? No!’

Nevertheless she blossomed under his importunate attentions. To the surprise of her friends, at the eighth grade end-of-term party, to which their parents were also invited, she did a turn with another girl; they played nylon-stringed guitars and sung one of the year’s big hits, ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, in two-part harmony. For this they reaped, not surprisingly, a spontaneous burst of applause with lots of cheering, whistling and stamping of feet. Very few could have suspected, however, that at a later date this same girl — and this may not be entirely unconnected with her having known Jonas — would become one of Norway’s greatest singers — a lyric soprano, a diva, so they said — who spent part of each year abroad and had engagements on all the world’s most famous stages. Jonas stayed close to her throughout the evening. She was wearing an eye-catching and rather unusual mini-dress of deep-red velvet. In the crush he ran a stealthy finger over her shoulder, saw how it left a trail, like a signature.

On one of the first days of the summer holidays Jonas invited Henny F. to go orienteering with him. In a move to encourage people to try a different form of exercise, the Grorud Athletics Society orienteering club had set up a series of control points in Lillomarka. If you visited a certain number of control points in the course of the season, you won a badge. For Jonas this was, however, only an excuse; he borrowed Daniel’s map and compass and there they were, Jonas and Henny F., on a hot summer’s day in the woods, both tense with an expectancy that had nothing to do with orienteering.

Jonas wasn’t particularly handy with a map and compass and at one point, after finding five control points and punching their card amid rather exaggerated whoops of glee, they lost their way somewhere in the hilly terrain between Breisjøen and Alunsjøen Lakes: or rather, they had wandered on to the top of an out-of-the-way hill, a small mountain almost, where there should have been a control point, but where there was no control point, whereupon Jonas bombastically declared that this hill was not on the map, that they found themselves, in other words, in an uncharted region of Norway.

Henny F. has nothing against this. She removes her rucksack, pulls out a large chequered travelling rug and unfurls it, as one might cast a net, onto the grass. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s soak up the sun for a while.’ They are in a totally secluded spot and she promptly proceeds to take off her clothes, lies down in just her bra and panties, cotton garments with a pattern that gives them the look of a bikini. Jonas strips off too, sits down beside her in his underpants, which all of a sudden seem far too small. Both are pale-skinned.

‘What sort of sound does a dragon make?’ Jonas finds himself asking.

She turns and looks at him. Says not a word. Just looks.

‘That’s right,’ Jonas says. ‘No sound.’

He fell to studying the terrain, appearing terribly interested in something, placed the compass on the map and took his bearings, sat like this until Henny F. swept them off his lap with a resoluteness, bordering on resentfulness, that surprised him. ‘Forget that,’ she said, as if making a protest against all attempts to put the world in order at this moment. Jonas stayed perfectly still, forced himself not to glance down at Henny F., lying there next to him with her eyes closed, an outstretched girl’s body clad only in a few square inches of cotton. Jonas sat in a piece of uncharted Norway, feeling something he had not felt since Margrete: that he was positively shuddering with desire. Or confusion. Or bewilderment. If he had not realized it before, he saw now that behind all the fine theories about reason and intellect, human beings consisted to just as great an extent of chemicals and electricity, that people could at times be turned, at the push of a button, into a factory buzzing with hormones, all wilfully going their own way.

He slid down onto the travelling rug, on his back. A moment later he felt her finger brush his hand, her fingertips, and it is not much of an exaggeration when I say that this situation, from a subjective point of view at least, is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s fresco of the Creation, fingers touching, life coming into being. Because that is what it was like and that is how it would be every time a girl touched Jonas: as if he suddenly awoke, became someone else; he was no longer an ordinary boy, he was something very special.

He had to turn over onto his stomach, for several reasons. She began to stroke the back of his neck, his shoulders. Touching him ever so lightly, allowing her fingertips to no more than graze the hairs on his body. He had the idea that his skin had turned to velvet, that the pressure of her fingers had left a trail. She kept this up for some time, before lying back and starting to hum, possibly a Hollies song, ‘I’m Alive’, Jonas couldn’t have said.

He propped himself up on his elbows, leaned over her and, at long last, he did it, he kissed her, experienced a parallel to the phenomenon of two-part harmony: how, when they meet, two ordinary pairs of lips become more than the sum of their parts, so much so that suddenly he was drifting in all directions, he was both lying there and yet not lying there, because her tongue could not only tie knots in spaghetti, it could also suspend gravity and all the laws of cause and effect, besides showing him that the mouth was linked to every other part of the body, that there had to be cross-connections from the groove between his upper lip and his nose to the line bisecting his scrotum, as if they were, so to speak, on the same meridian. To Jonas’s mind the whole of his explosively randy body, every molecule, was invested in that kiss. And as if to reciprocate he worked his way down to her neck, her throat; was so worked up that, without meaning to, he gave her a huge love bite. He hoped, however, that she would interpret this as a stamp, a watermark, a sign of true love — something which need not be hidden underneath a polo-neck sweater but should be paraded like a medal: ‘Look, I’ve been kissed; I’ve been kissed by a randy, besotted boy!’

He slid into a rapturous haze, he was someone else, experienced for the first time the thrill of flipping up the cup of a brassiere, so surprisingly easy, as if the impulse were stored in the genetic makeup of his fingers, in the same way as a newborn baby instinctively knows how to suck. And Jonas Wergeland was finally treated to the delicious tactile sensation of a soft girlish breast filling the palm of his hand, and he didn’t even try, he knew he could never describe the feeling of that little nipple against the spot where the heart-line almost meets the life-line. Nonetheless, he understood — even in the somewhat cooler light of hindsight — that he was experiencing one of life’s high points, that that invisible cup-shaped imprint, every bit as unique as a fingerprint, had been branded upon the palm of his hand: that the spot which the nipple had touched, between his heart line and his indistinct life line would bear the mark like a tattoo forever.

And now, still with his hand inside the cup surrounding the soft stupa of her breast, as if conducting a religious act, receiving something, a gift, he let his eye flicker down over her crotch to the enticing mound beneath the cotton, where he could even make out the frizz of hair, a sight which left him breathless, although he knew more about Olympus Mons on Mars than about this bulge and could have told you more about the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean than about the cleft that opened up underneath it. And as he tentatively slipped his hand inside her panties and she did not protest, and as he then slid it further down through the rather sparse bush of hair towards that dome, he could not help thinking of Daniel reading aloud, thought to himself that now he was fondling ‘her secret recesses’ — an expression which, in fact, perfectly suited this intimate moment’s blend of solemnity and modesty, the very fine line between crippling shyness and wild hysteria. In any case, when at long last, after years of speculation, his finger closed in on that mysterious little organ, equivalent to the point at the very top of a Gothic arch, the ‘clitoris’, a word he had never dared to utter out loud, he had the feeling that he had merely grazed the surface of something greater, something mighty, which lay hidden inside her body, as if it were the top of a pyramid buried in sand, and this was, for Jonas, confirmed by the sounds she made, issuing from her larynx, as if from an incredibly complex instrument: noises which, as far as Jonas could tell, sounded like songs coming from deep down in the secret vaults of the body or, indeed, from the depths of the soul.

The sun went behind a cloud. Henny F. wrapped the ends of the plaid around them and snuggled up close to him. Two ordinary people, Jonas thought, two nothings who, when curled up against one another, formed a recumbent figure eight, symbol of infinity: who, together, became something else, a bigger figure. He liked that. He felt a rush of tenderness towards her, could not imagine how upset she would be when he ‘broke it off’ some months later, rather brutally perhaps and for no real reason, that she would be completely beside herself with grief, that there would be rumours that she had tried to kill herself, some mention of her mother’s sleeping pills; Jonas could not foresee all that now, was far too preoccupied with what she was doing to his ear, because she was kissing it, but at the same time seeming to sing into it, knocking him right off-centre and into a mind-reeling, almost vibrant state, despite the fact that he was lying safe and sound on the ground, so much so that when he tried to say something, it came out in a husky, unfamiliar voice, as if even his vocal chords were involved in this process. Jonas could not help thinking of the Japanese prints which Aunt Laura had shown him, of men with penises as big as gnarled tree-trunks; that was how he felt: pumped up, blown out of proportion, ridden by a lust that left him gasping for breath. All in all, this overpowering passion, exaggerated and yet undeniably genuine, was not unlike what he would later discover in opera.

Heart pounding, he rolled over onto his back and felt, with alarm almost — the alarm of anticipation, alarm at his own arousal — how her hand groped its way into his pants: how, with her eyes averted, she wrapped her fingers around his straining member and held it, gently, as if she didn’t know what to do with it, she just held it, softly but firmly, that was all, just held it, felt it. Jonas lifted his eyes to the treetops, the network of branches, felt his thoughts running along similar lines, spreading out and criss-crossing. For the first time he was conscious of his mental processes taking a particular turn when a woman touched him, as if his penis were a lever, flipping his whole intellect over into another dimension, one full of unsuspected connections. They, the women, moved him to fantasize in a different way by opening, with their touch, hidden doors in his memory, by quite simply setting in train the strangest stories. Suddenly he spied links between things that were far removed from one another, or the distance between things that lay close together; his thoughts darted here and there in explosive leaps — like those jumping-jacks — up and down between different levels of the brain, thus forming chains, ever longer chains of thought, forged by recollections, half clear, half blurred, which were tucked away in his memory and whose compass he did not comprehend until such moments; and that must have been why, perhaps because of the rug wrapped around them, he recalled the tent, while the sounds from her larynx made him think of songs, joyous songs, and the quaking inside him put him in mind of madness, or no, not madness, but the sense of being on the brink of something incomprehensible and yet so important that one burst into a language beyond all languages, trying if possible to fathom it, become another, others, someone. All these things that were racing around in his head were a result of the heady thrill she induced in him simply by clasping her fingers around his penis. Thanks to Henny F., he was not just lying there on some unknown hill in Lillomarka, he was also on the verge of transcending a crucial new barrier; he was, in short, on the trail of a story, pursuing the certainty that there was more to him, potential he had yet to realize.