In response he discharged a final volley of vomit, a solid mixture of bile and food. There was something about the illusory density of this stream of vomit that put her in mind of films about exorcism, made her think that Jonas Wergeland was acting like a man possessed. ‘I’ve been celebrating,’ he grunted, gazing curiously at the chunks of partially digested lamb and Brussels sprouts in the claret-coloured puddle on the ground. ‘I’ve been celebrating a great deed,’ he said as she struggled to haul him into a sitting position, propped up against the wheel of the cab. She looked down at herself. Her clothes were in an awful mess. She was just wondering what she was going to say to the owner of the taxi, what she was going to say to anybody, when Jonas Wergeland keeled over again, to land with his face in his own vomit.
It could have ended there, as a minor — still and all, just a minor — scandal, but then he started shouting, first hurling abuse at the woman who was trying to pick him up. ‘Get away from me, you fucking whore,’ he snarled, pulling himself to his feet unaided, as if he had suddenly sobered up. He stood facing her with a menacing look in his eyes — it was at this moment that the thought of rape crossed her mind. And as he stood there he began to hiss something that at first she could not make out, but which gradually became clearer: ‘I killed a man,’ he said. ‘I killed a man, d’you hear? I kicked the balls off him, the bastard.’
Then his legs gave way again, he slumped against the wheel. It was a bright summer’s night in June, just down the road from the Sinsen junction. A taxi driver stood looking down on Jonas Wergeland, a man who, at a time when television channels had to have a logo up in the corner of the screen so you could tell them apart, at a time when television seemed intent only on satisfying mankind’s basest needs, suddenly appeared on the scene and showed her, showed everyone that television could raise their level of cultivation. A young Norwegian woman, a viewer, stood there sadly regarding a man she admired, sitting on the ground in his own vomit, cursing and swearing. ‘It was as though I was suddenly looking at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ she said later. ‘Or rather, that he was Mr Hyde, that the Dr Jekyll bit was just something he had persuaded me to believe in for a long time.’ She was, as I mentioned earlier, studying English, so this analogy had not been plucked entirely out of thin air.
‘I made mincemeat of the son of a bitch,’ Jonas Wergeland gibbered, laughing all the while — laughing and laughing, roaring with laughter if, that is, he wasn’t sobbing. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t cut off his dick while I was at it!’
The woman had long since called dispatch. She crouched down beside Jonas Wergeland, who now seemed almost out for the count, and she wept. She wept because she had seen something precious, something she truly cared about, shattered. And his last words to her before help arrives, as he opens his eyes and fixes his gaze on the pale-blue, taxi company shirt are: ‘By Christ, you’ve got great tits.’
The whole world in his hand
Jonas and the female breast — it’s a long story altogether, that of men and breasts. In Jonas’s case, however, it had something to do with his brother. I’ve given a lot of thought as to who might have been the most important person in Jonas Wergeland’s life — a question central to our undertaking — and it would not surprise me to find that it was his brother Daniel, one year his senior. Daniel — dedicated hypocrite that he was — was, after all, the bane of Jonas’s life, so to speak. I will have ample opportunity to touch on Daniel’s bizarre career later, but first I must address this issue of the breasts.
No matter how different they might have been, throughout their adolescence Daniel and Jonas had one common interest: tits. Boys have different fetishes, but for the brothers, breasts constituted the very crux of life. Scientists have propounded the theory that the female mammary glands got bigger as human beings began to walk more upright, taking over from the backside as the main focus of attraction during the mating season. Daniel and Jonas were living proof that this theory has much to recommend it. The sight of breasts, anytime, anywhere, quite simply set the hormones churning, within Daniel especially; something clicked inside his head. A mere glimpse of the cleavage between two breasts was enough. Newspaper and magazine ads for bras made him positively sick with excitement. Jonas always felt that Daniel’s impressive attempts to become Norway’s skiing king, the self-inflicted torture of trekking hundreds of miles across the hills around Oslo winter after winter, dated from the day when he saw an old photograph from the Cortina Winter Olympics of 1956, of Hallgeir Brenden, winner of the 15-kilometre cross-country event, with his arms round Sophia Loren’s tits. Daniel lived, not in Sophie’s World, but in Sophia’s.
Sophia, Sophia, tits as wisdom.
Every evening for years Daniel would lie in bed and read aloud to Jonas; he read from two books in particular, which he had in some mysterious way got hold of and which he kept hidden inside the air vent in the wall of their room, as if to symbolize that these books represented a sort of safety valve for the pressure that was playing havoc with the boys: these were Agnar Mykle’s Lasso Around the Moon and Song of the Red Ruby. Daniel read certain passages so often, and with such feeling, that Jonas would never forget Mykle’s song of praise to breasts of all shapes and sizes, from the modest: ‘Her small breasts under the white jersey had a lovely shape, like the bowl of a champagne glass,’ to the more extravagant: ‘Her breasts were like explosives under her sweater, they looked as if they would blow up were anyone to touch the small, protruding detonator on each one.’ These uncommonly exalted bedtime readings, all these rousing metaphors, left Jonas, early on, with a suspicion — if not a vision — that, when all is said and done, eroticism and sexuality had to do with imagination and leaps of thought.
Many a time too, Daniel would lie panting in the top bunk, speculating on which material constituted the most provocative wrapping for breasts: what would form the optimum stage curtain for this greatest of all dramas. Silk? Flannel? Soft hide? Gleaming leather? Daniel could spend a whole night enlarging upon the cinematic cliché of ‘a wet shirt clinging to the skin’. Jonas suggested string vests, which would give the breasts the appearance of plump fruit in a net shopping bag. Daniel, for his part — where do they get it from? — was partial to wool. Each time he went to the lavatory, with that characteristic glazed look in his eyes, and turned the key in the lock, Jonas knew that his big brother had seen one of the estate’s well-built young mothers go jiggling past in a distractingly tight sweater.
Jonas, too, had his secrets: he daydreamed of how a breast would feel against the palm of the hand, he fantasized about its probable smoothness and warmth and wondered whether it would really be as Daniel said — a thought which prompted a dangerously warm flutter in the pit of the stomach: that a breast grew firm when touched, almost coagulated, to use a word he learned later in chemistry class; and above all perhaps, inspired by Agnar Mykle, he dreamed of nipples, their possible rigidity under the fingertip, like a switch; the mere thought caused his pelvic region to swell with anticipation. So potent was this fantasy that, when the time was ripe, Jonas attempted what could be said to be a pretty reckless marriage by capture.
This happened after Margrete, his first great love, had — as he saw it — ‘gone to blazes’, having dumped him in the most ignominious fashion before moving abroad. You had to pick yourself up. There were other girls. Jonas lived in Grorud, in northeast Oslo, which at that time was developing into an ever more populous satellite town. He had long had his eye on Anne Beate Corneliussen, known among the boys simply as the ABC of Sex. For if Anne Beate was remarkable for anything it was the two gravitational points under her jersey. Apples fell to the ground, and the boys’ eyes fell on Anne Beate’s breasts. She was, in short, the sort of girl who automatically becomes a drum majorette and marches ahead of the boys’ band in a tight uniform, holding that baton — oh, mind-boggling thought — with a firm, acrobatic grip and looking as though she had full control over the entire troop of boys, imperiously decreeing when they should raise their instruments and start to play.