But by the winter he had come to the conclusion – although he could not have said why – that he liked the triplet with the yellow scarf best, and the one with the yellow scarf was Hjørdis. By following the standard ritual of using middlemen to gauge the other party’s interest before making tentative overtures – a procedure which suited a shy boy like Jonas perfectly – before too long Hjørdis L. was officially his girlfriend. And only days later, when they had barely got to the stage of daring to hold hands, with gloves on, Jonas was to make contact, for the first time, with a girl’s skin.
He had on his skating cap, or Hjallis cap as they called it, after their speed-skating hero Hjallis Andersen. He was standing with a bunch of kids from his class in the cul-de-sac next to their building when Hjørdis came out wearing just an open anorak over her blouse, and her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. She said she was home alone. Everybody knew what that meant. Jonas’s chums slapped him blokeishly on the back, egging him on; they were all but shouting ‘Go for it, Jonas!’, as if this were a speed-skating race – ‘two insides and leave ’im standing’, ‘silver is failure’ and all that. He went up to their flat with her, discovered that the sisters’ rooms lay side by side down a corridor; he would have liked to have taken a peep into each of them, just to see if they were all decorated identically, but Hjørdis quickly pulled him through her door, into her room, which smelled faintly of Yaxa deodorant and had a bookshelf containing a fair selection of Gyldendal’s Girls’ Classics; a perfectly ordinary girl’s room, apart from the tennis racket in the corner and a large glossy poster of the American group The Supremes, also triplets of a sort, who had just had their first big hit. They sat next to one another on the bed-settee and proceeded to flick through a copy of New magazine – appropriately enough, since all of this was new to Jonas. She edged imperceptibly closer to him and he felt the warmth from her shoulder and her arm spreading through his body. A breathtaking scent emanated from her. She read out something from an agony column and laughed, he hadn’t heard a thing, but he laughed anyway to be on the safe side, it must have been funny; he laughed as he took in her fingers, her bare forearm, the pale skin with its fine bloom of golden hair. They went on leafing through the magazine, he turned the pages too, kept brushing against her hand. It felt as though someone was whipping a rope around them, generating a magnetic field. Suddenly she looked straight at him. Her eyes had a dewy look to them, the expression ‘eyes to drown in’ flashed into his mind. Or perhaps it was the actual thought of drowning, that this had to do with life-saving. Purely on instinct he laid his cheek against hers, gently. The touch immediately sent shivers running through him. It was such a surprise. The softness. And the warmth even more so. Added to which there was the smell, a girl smell which was even stronger at such close quarters and induced an uncontrollable tightening of his throat. He steadfastly maintained later that his first chemistry lesson began here, sitting cheek to cheek with a girl. She was still holding the magazine. He saw the golden hairs on her arm rise up, stand on end, as if electrified. The magazine slid to the floor. Her hands found his body, felt their way around him. They sat with their arms round one another, cheek to cheek, for a long, long time. Held each other and hugged. There were lots of variations on a hug, gentle or firm, quiet or energetic. Even the quiet hugs left them breathless and flushed. Jonas liked it best when his cheek barely grazed hers. He wished he could maintain this contact with her skin for ever, sitting like this with his nose close to the nape of Hjørdis’s fragrant neck. She pulled away, her eyes glassy, muttered something about homework, saw him out. The others were still hanging around in the cul-de-sac, like spectators waiting for an athlete to cross the finishing line. He gave them the thumbs-up, a victory sign, making sure that he could not be seen from the window.
He had not even had a chance to answer the other kids’ eager questions when Hjørdis also came out. But she only stayed for a moment before slinging the yellow scarf round her neck and pulling him back inside. His chums whooped and whistled, impressed by Jonas’s way with the girls. ‘She can’t keep her hands off you, you lucky dog!’ Once more, Hjørdis led him to her room. ‘What about your homework?’ he asked. She just had to have one more hug, she said with eyes one could drown in and pressed her cheek to his. Jonas seemed almost to have forgotten already how shockingly soft and warm it felt. Again the touch of her skin sent an electric charge running through him and the scent of her left him breathless. She managed to push him away just before he lost control.
As he was making his way back downstairs to his mates – who were still waiting impatiently for his report – Hjørdis came running after him, as if she had had second – or third – thoughts; she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him, laughing, back up to the flat. His chums’ shouts sounded more envious than acclamatory now. Jonas was proud of having such an effect on her. He followed her inside yet again; this time they simply stood hugging in the hall, but this was, if possible, even more exciting; he just could not get over the wonderful softness of it, the warmth. These hugs gave rise to the same ecstatic thrill inside him, and the scent of her took his breath away. She managed to prise herself loose the second before he lost his head and started pawing at the more forbidden parts of her anatomy. Jonas stood there, feeling this glorious sensation coursing through him. Did he think of Melankton? It was good, no matter what. It was like being a child and never tiring of hearing the same story over and over again.
Minutes later, as he was making his way across to the gang, to finally take his bow, so to speak, all three triplets appeared on their balcony. They were almost faint from suppressed giggling. The other two had been home all the time. Helga and Herborg had simply borrowed Hjørdis’s yellow scarf. Jonas’s chums were in stitches, they were almost rolling on the ground with laughter, they called him a bigamist and worse. As I said, the triplets might seem to have adopted the Musketeers’ motto: ‘One for all and all for one’. They shared everything, even boyfriends. Or maybe they had been trying to make him accept a package deal. Jonas hardly dared show his face at school the next day. But deep down he was really quite chuffed. When it came to the archetypal story of ‘My First Hug’, he won hands down with his ‘My First Three Hugs’. And he had, in fact, come close to realising his impossible dream: of being with them all at once. Jonas, in his skating cap, felt as though he had won gold, silver and bronze in the same race.
He was still puzzled, though, especially by the fact that every hug had felt equally good to him. Was it, then, something about himself he had discovered, rather than something about girls? He had thought the fact of being in love was an infallible Geiger counter, when maybe it was nothing but an animal response, a simple reflex, a bio-zoological process which had blithely picked out three different girls, each with equal certainty, to be the one for him. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that they had not each given him their own passport photo, they had given him three pictures of Hjørdis. He felt a vague twinge of fear. It was almost as if he had unintentionally discovered that there was no difference between one girl and another, they could all fill you with the same delight, were distinguishable only by the colour of their scarves. He had a mental picture of his future: a succession of women wearing different scarves, but otherwise absolutely identical. This led him, in turn, to imagine how impossible it would be to find what New magazine called ‘Miss Right’. If love endowed you, as Karen Mohr had implied, with fresh eyes, then he was definitely on the wrong track. She, Hjørdis, or the three of them, had shown him, rather, that love is blind. He shuddered. He thought of Melankton. Thanks to the triplets, Jonas was beginning to believe that it was not only the world and people which were flat, but possibly love, too. Was there such a thing as round love?
This was Jonas Wergeland’s first experience of the female sex. Right at the start he was made aware of how unpredictable they were, how different. The next day, Hjørdis came up to him in the playground to say she was sorry. Jonas shrugged it off as if it wa
s no big deal. Actually, he had lost interest, he ‘broke it off’ shortly afterwards. And even if he was not exactly mad at her, this may have been an instinctive rejection of girls who did not take love seriously. Who did not consider it absolutely central. The fact is, though, that Jonas himself did not know whether he had been moved by pride or fear. After all, if she could fool him with a hug, who could say where it might end.
Jonas often thought of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis, three girls so alike that you could take them for one. The funny thing was that in the years to come they began to branch out in different directions – became so unlike one another that they were known to some as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. More than anyone, it was the triplets who taught Jonas that nature and nurture did not necessarily say everything there was to know about a person. And although all three were passionate climbers, possibly because their births had coincided with the conquest of Mount Everest, it can be revealed that only one of them became a public figure, an eminent diplomat and expert on the Middle East. In interviews she always said the same thing: ‘As one of triplets you have to be a good mediator.’
It seems only reasonable that Jonas should have been torn between three girls at a time when he was also something of a mental bigamist – in making, that is, his first clumsy attempts to pursue several streams of consciousness at the same time. For months it became a regular routine with him to go down to the basement where, in the darkness, with the aid of the skipping rope he conducted his exhausting, but felicitous mental workouts. After a while, however, a new challenge presented itself: what was he to do with it, this discovery that he was capable of thinking multiple thoughts? So far it had simply been something beautiful, like sparkling crystals, like walking on air – a kick in itself. His dream of becoming a lifesaver, his first serious undertaking, having ended in a miserable anticlimax, he had become more and more convinced that the power of thought might hold the key to a worthy alternative, a possible new goal in life.
Could these parallel reflections save him from the flatness? Skipping gave him a reassuring sense of being inside a sphere, thanks to the arc of the rope. His observations, the layers of ramifying thoughts, could perhaps help him to get to the other side of things. What if he could plumb his own true depths through thought? Prove that reality was round. Even if the world was flat. If he was to be a discoverer, he would have to be the type who made discoveries with the mind, not with the eyes.
Or rather: Jonas suspected that his powers of imagination would make him good at a game such as chess, possibly very good, but then people would think he was a run-of-the-mill genius and he did not want to be a run-of-the-mill genius, he wanted to be an extraordinary human being. There were plenty of minor geniuses around, but few exceptional individuals. He aimed to be an exception.
Karen Mohr was clearly an exception. The more visits Jonas paid to her, the more he talked to her in that Provençal-style living room in the middle of an otherwise drab Norwegian housing estate, the more sympathy he had for this woman who believed that a moment could constitute a whole life. The way Jonas saw it, the reason she maintained her glowing complexion was that she lived under a mental sun lamp. He had the feeling that Karen Mohr also skipped, that she had succeeded in doing something which he had unconsciously been striving to do for some while: she had stopped time, she hung suspended in a permanent double skip.
‘I thought you worked with precious stones,’ Jonas said on one occasion as he stifled a contented belch, having just consumed one of her superb omelettes, a golden half-moon with a filling which was a delight to the palate.
That was not such a bad guess at that, she said, stroking one of the shells on the shelf. She probably could be regarded as a diamond-cutter of sorts. She was in the process of cutting a very big diamond, endeavouring to bring out the light in it. ‘I have spent years, many, many years on extracting every ounce from that day,’ she said. Jonas suddenly felt that he could discern different facets to her countenance, or that he was observing her from three sides at once, just as in the sketch on the wall. One thing, at least, was for sure: Karen Mohr did not have ‘a bit on the side’, what she had lay in the centre.
During his visits Jonas often noticed Karen Mohr run her fingers over a ceramic figurine or a smooth, round pebble on the shelf, with an absent-minded smile. Or she might pause beside the green plant which Jonas liked best because its leaves looked as though someone had taken the scissors to them – a mónstera, she told him later. Sometimes she would fall to fingering those elaborate leaves as if, through them, she was suddenly transported into reminiscences in which she relived certain inexhaustible seconds.
‘Did you leave right away?’ Jonas asked.
‘I stayed for some weeks,’ she said. ‘But I never saw him again, if that’s what you’re wondering.’ She poured herself a glass of Pernod. Jonas loved to watch the clear liquid turn greyish and semen-like when she added water. He had conceived the notion that this might be what fertilised her imagination.
Jonas’s eyes also lingered on the objects in her living room, as if he were understanding more and more of what he was seeing. At first he had thought that she was sad, hurting somehow, but he soon realised that she was happy; she was one of the most contented people he would ever meet. Karen Mohr taught Jonas that happiness could be something other than he had imagined.
‘It may be that we only live once during the years when we walk the earth,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘In which case we really have to cherish this time.’ She cleared the table. ‘I was lucky. I had those weeks by the Mediterranean. Some people, a great many, I think, have never experienced life – raw, vibrant life – in such a way.’
A lot of folk would, nonetheless, automatically have construed that eccentric living room of hers as being an escape from something. Jonas – possibly because he was a child – never thought of it that way. He understood, although he could not have put it into words, that even though Karen Mohr might retreat into a parallel world from time to time, she never lost sight of the ‘normal’ world. It was more as if that other world, her memories of Provence, was forever filtering through to enrich her life in Oslo. She said it herself: ‘I don’t live in another world. I live in two worlds. Compared to most other people, who inhabit just the one, I am twice as happy.’ It would be no exaggeration to say that Karen Mohr was one of the greatest teachers Jonas Wergeland ever had. A true educator. Someone who brought out the best in him. Broadened his mind. Raised his consciousness. She taught him that it was possible to live in two places at once.
In due course, Jonas received an explanation for her mysterious outings on that one evening each month. One Saturday afternoon when he happened to be there, she suddenly said: ‘It’s time you were going. I have to get changed. I’m going into town.’ It turned out that she was going to a restaurant at the bottom of Bygdøy Allé by the name of Bagatelle, commonly known as Jaquet’s Bagatelle, after the owner Edmond Jaquet – although actually by this time it was being run by his son Georges. The Bagatelle was still a colourful and popular restaurant when Jonas was at university, not least because Georges Jaquet kept his food and wine prices low enough that even Jonas and his friends could afford to eat there. And since they were studying astrophysics, they gave Georges Jaquet many more stars than the latter-day Bagatelle could ever boast.
On one Saturday evening in the month, Karen Mohr dressed in her best and dined alone at Bagatelle on Bygdøy Allé. She described to Jonas what a pleasure it was to be welcomed by the unfailingly charming Georges in his dark suit and be seated at a white-clothed table under a drawing by Le Corbusier himself, who also happened to be a cousin of Edmond Jaquet’s. Jonas’s mouth watered when she told him what a treat it was to read the menu – different every day and written in both French and Norwegian; the thrill of running an eye over such tempting offerings as turbot au vin blanc and riz de veau grand duc. And she always had a word with the head chef or the sous-chefs, often in French. Georges set great store b
y regular patrons like Karen Mohr; she could even take the liberty of nodding discreetly to journalist Arne Hestenes or Robert Levin the pianist. Jonas never asked her why she frequented Bagatelle, but he fancied that he knew the reason. She went there to contemplate her life. To consider the fact that she had turned down one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. Perhaps the name of the place helped her to reduce the whole episode to a mere bagatelle. Or maybe she was actually celebrating it. Whatever the case, it was not a nostalgia trip, but a salute to a moment. Jonas imagined her having snails as a starter, to check the speed of her reminiscences, ensure that they slid through her very slowly.
On another occasion in her flat, when Jonas was enjoying freshly baked croissants and Karen was drinking what she called café au lait, not from a cup but from a bowl, Jonas had asked her why she had turned down that painter, because he understood that she had rejected him, had said no to more than just having her portrait painted. Karen had thought for a moment, most likely because she was not sure whether Jonas would understand. Then she had said: ‘Even though I had only met him minutes before I knew that he was, how shall I put it, too simple. I could tell that he was a genius, and yet – perhaps for that very reason – he was too simple. Most men are too simple.’ To Jonas it sounded as if she were saying: too flat. Karen Mohr raised her bowl to her lips and took a sip. Jonas suspected that she was concealing a smile.
The Discoverer Page 13