But Jonas was, if he was honest, far more interested in the student who led the actual liturgy before and after the sermon, a girl in an ankle-length white surplice, a beauty who held him enthralled even with her back to him; he could not take his eyes off the dark tendrils that had broken free from the hair pulled up into a topknot and curled, little-girl fashion, over the nape of her neck. She moved in a solemn, almost trancelike manner behind the altar rail, looking so lovely against the backdrop of church silver and stained glass: embodying a kind of consummate innocence. She reminds me of a nun, Jonas thought, wishing it were communion, so he could sneak up and have a wafer placed on his tongue by her hand.
During the break before the students were to discuss each other’s performance and hear the voice coach’s comments, he mentioned her to Daniel. His brother didn’t know much about her, only that her name was Anne S., that she came from Fåberg in Gudbrandsdalen, from a strict Evangelical family, and that she was a wizard at Latin, Greek and Hebrew; she adored grammar, there was no one to beat her when it came to detailed exegeses. ‘She chose witches as her topic for her ecclesiastical history project, you know,’ Daniel said with a sly grin. ‘She wrote with particular insight on those witches who were accused of having sexual intercourse with an incubus – the devil – while asleep.’
‘She should have a go at you, then?’ Jonas said.
Daniel didn’t laugh: ‘I’d watch out for her if I were you,’ was all he said.
Jonas took this last remark as a joke. As he walked down Kirkeveien he could still see her in his mind, Anne S. behind the altar rail, those ethereal features, the rather timid eyes.
Jonas was not at all surprised to meet her again, later that autumn, at a wild party thrown by one of Axel’s many friends, a medical student – Anne S. had been invited because she lived in the same bedsit complex. While the others found escape from the daily round of lectures and cramming by letting their hair down in all manner of ways, she sat in a corner all by herself; she was wearing a white, embroidered blouse; her eyes were an almost uncanny blue. She seemed a little anaemic and rather out of place, like a Sunday-School girl among a crowd of hooligans, not to say bedevilled souls. When almost everybody else had collapsed on the floor in a state of hedonistic exhaustion and lay there surrounded by lighted candles, holding hands and listening to Keith Jarrett’s endless, introspective improvisations on the piano, Jonas went over to speak to her. As they talked he noticed how she searched him with those blue eyes, how she filled him with substance, qualities of which he knew nothing, but which – having learned from experience – he allowed her to pour into him, after which she asked him, with eyes demurely downcast, if he would like to come up to her place. And when Jonas said yes it was by no means simply because he felt sorry for her.
He thought the party had been too noisy for her taste, but it must have had more to do with the choice of music, or the quasi-religious mood, because once inside her bedsit she put on an album called Horses by the pretty innovative poet and rock musician Patti Smith – she played it quite loud, even though the music was raw and intense, with Smith’s rather nasal, singsong vocals. There was something primitive, shamanistic about the whole thing that seemed to fit Anne S., his memory of her silhouetted against the fragile glass altarpiece in Vestre Aker Church, that is.
He was no less surprised when she suddenly appeared carrying a tray of caviar and thin slices of toasted white bread. She then produced two small, fogged glasses containing what Jonas took to be iced water. She passed a hand over them: ‘It was water, but now it’s vodka,’ she said with a smile. ‘I just got off the boat from Denmark,’ she added, almost apologetically. Jonas eyed the wedges of toast heaped with black pearls, the goblets of ice-cold vodka. I managed to celebrate communion with her after all, he thought.
While they chatted, and the vodka was making his brain lighter, he drank her in with his eyes, the combination of blue eyes and hair blacker than ebony, aware as he did so that the button had been activated, felt an insistent pressure spreading from his spine out into the rest of his body, a pressure which told him in no uncertain terms that he was faced here with a woman who could help to steer his life in an unexpected direction. On her desk lay some books that aroused his interest. ‘I’m learning Chinese,’ she said.
‘What are you going to do with that?’
‘I want to become a missionary,’ she said. ‘I’ve applied to the Missionary College. Why stay here, casting pearls before swine, when China poses such a big challenge? A billion animists hiding behind a nonreligious façade.’
‘They’ll never let you in there to do missionary work,’ he said.
‘Patience,’ she said. ‘It’s only a matter of biding my time. It won’t be long before China starts opening up again. And until it does, there’s always Taiwan.’
Once again Jonas was taken by surprise. There was something about her that he couldn’t quite make out, the clash between her delicate appearance and the vodka, which she was really knocking back, although without getting as drunk as he was. Her eyes were veiled with sensuality, but at the same time full of innocence, or no, not innocence, but a lack of experience, an ignorance of young men’s lust. More records by Patti Smith were placed on the turntable, Radio Ethiopia he read on one sleeve, as if this too had to do with missionary work.
She began to sway slowly around the floor, dancing to ‘Ask the Angels’, looked at him as he sat there, befuddled by drink and with the taste of roe and raw onion in his mouth, looked at him with blue eyes, blue eyes and black, black hair, as she raised her arms over her hair, disclosing dark tufts under her arms and filling the room with a faint odour of perspiration. He got up and danced with her, they said nothing, merely glided around to the intense music, husky vocals, lyrics Jonas couldn’t quite catch, only a mystifying phrase here and there: ‘pissing in a river’. He put his arms around her, felt the pressure rise, felt both sure and unsure, wanted to conquer, or be conquered, was never certain which was which; there came a point, at any rate, when, by his reading of the situation, all he had to do was to lead her over to the bed, she would lie back unresistingly, surrender to a boy with experience, she was desperate for it, had been desperate for it for ages, but at that moment she suddenly stopped dancing, said something to the effect that she was tired, that she had things to do the next day, Sunday, those blue eyes once more apologetic, troubled. ‘Kiss me just once,’ she said before he left. He did so, greedily, pressing her up against the wall. ‘I said kiss,’ she whispered, ‘not crucify.’
Poor girl, he thought to himself on the way home, as confused as he was exasperated; all that vodka, and she was still terrified of her own sexuality.
Some weeks later he received a letter. Anne S. asked him to meet her in the Grand Hall. Jonas Wergeland knew that this was an offer he could not refuse, so on the Saturday evening he walked up Staffeldts gate to the Inner Mission Hotel – a building he had always admired for its clean lines – where a youth club meeting was under way in the Grand Hall. The mood in the lobby was lively; he had to hang about until the people in the hall broke into exultant song, and when she eventually appeared, dressed in a neat pleated skirt and a black leather biker jacket, she surprised him by leading him outside and round to the hotel side of the building, on the upper floors. Everything is happening much too fast for Jonas, but it seems to him – he would swear to it – that she doesn’t have a key, that she actually picks the lock on one of the doors. All of a sudden he finds himself alone in a hotel room with Anne S., black hair and blue eyes, with a look in them that speaks to him of a colossal hunger, either that or sheer, evangelical zeal. As if she were somehow out to convert him. And speaking of conversion: Anne S. never did become a missionary; in later years she was appointed to a top post with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, became a leading figure in the fight for the furtherance of women – not before time – in ultraconservative religious circles, and as such a missionary of sorts for her sex in a field full of invet
erate heathens.
The way Jonas construed it – or as he realized as soon as he received her letter – she had made up her mind to say goodbye to her virginal existence. She had opted for the Inner Mission Hotel, he thought, its safe, familiar surroundings, so that the transition would not be too abrupt. For once he was nervous, felt almost as if he were the instrument of higher powers. To a certain extent he had been chosen to take her virtue. He had a responsibility. He had to see to it that that an untouched girl received a gentle introduction into the intoxicating mysteries of sex. This was not like other adventures – not an outer, but an inner mission.
She undresses quickly, clearly embarrassed and yet at the same time impatient, climbs into bed and pulls the quilt up to her chin. Only one thing is worrying Jonas: that she will change her mind. But a moment later she lifts up the quilt for him – as if welcoming him into a tent – or perhaps I should say a tabernacle.
The faint sound of singing reached their ears from somewhere down below. It occurred to Jonas that he might have misunderstood. Maybe she wanted their encounter, the sex, to be a sin: a sin she committed with her eyes open, well aware of what she was doing, as if it were an act of blasphemy.
He felt her tremble and regretted this thought, felt a rush of tenderness, ran his hands gently, soothingly over her body, her skin, which was strangely cool. He was very aroused, possibly because she lay there so passively, so still, as if she did not know how to respond, or did not dare respond as her body was telling her to do. Only when, after many a long detour, his fingers reached her crotch, and he felt how moist, how wet she was, how ready as it said in the passages Daniel had read aloud to him when they were boys, only when he could not hold back any longer, but twisted round to the bedside table, where he had with the greatest discretion left out a condom which he now rolled onto his cock, deftly, with none of the clumsy fumbling of the first-timer, although the ring felt tighter than usual, his cock bigger; the condom sheathed it like a sausage skin as he rolled on top of her with a primitive pounding in his veins, placed his forearms against the inner sides of her thighs and spread them apart, a little roughly perhaps, and just for a moment there he thought she offered some resistance, tried to push him away, as if to say that he was taking her against her will, he could never be sure, because it only lasted a few seconds, then she relaxed and he slid as deep inside her as he could, but with such lack of control that he could not help seeing how her brow creased in pain. There might even have been tears in her eyes.
He managed to restrain himself, lay still, as if to give her time to get used to being filled for the first time, come to terms with the thought of having lost the seal upon her virgin status, it may have come as a shock, something over which one ought really to shed a tear. Jonas, for his part, had more than enough to do just enduring that warmth, as blissful as always, that almost stupefyingly good feeling, and when he began to move he was pleasantly surprised to find how well she clenched the muscles of her vagina together, so hard that the friction instantly gave rise to an itching sensation, an exceptionally powerful illuminating force, along with a fear that he was going to come right away, so turned on was he by being inside a nervous, naïve virgin.
All this time she lay with her eyes closed, unmoving, just crossing her arms over his back, her palms on his shoulder-blades, lightly pressing him down onto her, as if she were getting used to it, beginning to enjoy it, learning that sex was not only a part of God’s creation, but also a foretaste of the splendours of the world to come – something which the Islamic religion had long understood, of course, with its paradise pervaded with erotic dreams.
Then she turned away, and Jonas, worked-up to bursting point, felt sick with disappointment. He thought she’d had enough. But she simply turned around, onto all fours, inviting him to take her from behind, maybe because she didn’t want to be reminded of the word ‘missionary’ he mused and gazed hungrily at the long cleft, the swollen lips surrounding it, the damp, black tufts of pubic hair, before driving into her, panting with impatience; he watched his whole length disappear, right up to the ring of the condom and was again amazed by the way in which she gripped him with her muscles, how beautifully she pushed back against him, almost without moving; he took in the sight of her breasts swaying, dare one say, titillatingly, back and forth, a tiny gold cross dangling in the air in front of them, helpless-looking, forgotten; and when she twisted her head to the side, he noted with triumph the moment when her mouth dropped open, though no sound came out, as if a mask had fallen from her face, and she could no longer conceal from herself how wonderful this was, how absolutely heavenly, how divinely Jonas made love to her.
The rhythm, the movements grew more and more frantic, hers too, she appeared to have lost all her inhibitions, willingly gave herself up to a long pent-up lust, as if, having once become a sinner she could not get enough of sinning – like a missionary suddenly throwing herself, stark naked, into the ritual dances of the natives. He was growing more and more inflamed – yes, just that: inflamed, he felt his penis swelling to a size that astonished him, he could see it clearly from this position, and yet she was gripping him so tightly, despite his long, deep thrusts, that he was put in mind of a stallion he had once seen covering a mare, how the mare visibly held the stallion in place with her powerful internal muscles. He could not help groaning, growling, out of sheer, raw, ruttishness; he could see why Taoists gave sexual positions names such as ‘wild horse rearing’, ‘white tiger leaping’ or ‘the dragon’s claws’; half in a fog he saw that the condom was sliding off, or not sliding, being pulled off, the friction was simply too great, she was sucking it off him and he had to toss the rubber sheath to the floor before thrusting his cock inside her again, he could not stop, was working in a narcotic haze of pleasure, or in a sphere where powerful, dangerous, forces prevailed, out of the blue he remembered something about a transformer, and this should come as no surprise since all memories are stored away and can be recalled, as it were, at the turn of a key, but for some, perhaps the most important ones, a password is required, and that was what his women gave Jonas, which is to say a handful of them, whom – thanks to a gift, an extra vertebra of dragon horn in his spine, a gift of grace – he was able to recognize; if, that is, it was not the other way round: that that was how they recognized him. Be that as it may, their lovemaking had a special effect on him: something unfolded, or rose up from the dark recesses of his memory, like a genie from a lamp. Which explains why, as he hunched over Anne S. in that bed in the Inner Mission Hotel, his mind was split between the pleasure and a memory which was more or less pumped up to the surface, a not exactly happy memory, something to do with a switch, a lethal button; and even as he was struggling to assemble these fragments, from somewhere far off he caught what at first he took to be a stream of gibberish, like the glossolalic outbursts from the tent meetings of his childhood, then he realized that it was her, Anne S., that she was screaming dick, dick, crying out for more dick; again he was astonished, astonished by this word, dick, only common girls said dick, but here she was, yelling it out, what a lovely dick, she cried, he heard it quite clearly with one part of his mind but was too busy trying to remember, or to come, come in a way that was so gloriously, breathtakingly out of this world, somewhere deep inside among her powerful, blood-red, sucking muscles. You’ve just got to say fuck it, was the thought at the very back of his mind; you’ve just got to press a button and go for it, even if it kills you.
He slumped down, rolled over onto his back, thought he was going to pass out. She got up; Jonas lay with his eyes shut, going over his climax again in his mind, the convulsions of his orgasm which had also enabled him to complete a leap, bring to life a memory. She had been miraculously good. He felt like doing it again, as soon as she returned from the bathroom. He dozed off, started at the sound of the outer door slamming. When he looked up her clothes were gone – she had simply vanished into thin air. Jonas lay where he was, mind working, heard muffled sounds from the m
eeting in the Grand Hall. He got dressed, checked to see if she had forgotten anything but found nothing. She had, however, left her mark in the form of some good-going gonococci that, less than a week later forced him to make the trip to the fifth floor of the Oslo Health Centre. That really is so typical of Jonas Wergeland, Professor: to contract gonorrhoea after going to bed with a girl he was sure had to be the safest in the world.
Final Episode
Is it possible, as a 24-year-old, to experience one day of your life as a nine-year-old, and in such a way that it affects the rest of your life?
The memory Anne S. gave him – a story which is a result of all the stories I have told so far, and a prerequisite for all of those still to come – goes something like this: it is a Saturday, and Jonas and Ørn have just been home to dump their schoolbags when something exciting happens, one of those welcome breaks in the humdrum routine of the housing estate, on a par with the tarmacking of footpaths or the emptying of cesspits: funny little steamrollers and sewage trucks with hoses which gave off a stench that seemed to come from the nethermost regions of hell itself. A van pulled up beside the electricity substation, or ‘transformer’ as they called it, at the foot of the hill known as Egiltomta – which was, by the way, a spot as central to boyhood games of Cowboys and Indians as Monument Valley was to the westerns of John Ford – and out stepped a man in a smart, grey-blue uniform with shiny buttons and the letters ‘O’ and ‘L’ on a badge on his cap, though these initials had nothing to do with de Olympiske Leker – that is, the Olympic Games – they stood, instead, for Oslo Lysverker – the Oslo Electricity Board; this man was a technician, doing a routine check. You see we’re talking here about a springtime in the days when children went to school on Saturday morning and when, for most people, though they’ve forgotten it now, the working week did not end until early Saturday afternoon.
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