On ordinary days Anne Beate often wore a traditional Setesdal sweater, and maybe it was its beautiful pattern which made Jonas feel that Anne Beate’s tits had an ornate look about them, that their swelling contours underneath her jersey were somehow the embodiment of the perfect breast’s form, just as the metre rod in Paris was the ur-prototype of a metre. Jonas was devoutly, or perhaps more accurately, hormonally convinced that the greatest joy in the world would be granted to whoever was permitted to lay hands on those breasts. Suddenly he remembered a song from Sunday Schooclass="underline" ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’. Jonas knew that that was just how it must feel.
Ironically, two obstacles lay between Jonas and the two objects of his dreams. For one thing, Anne Beate Corneliussen, the ABC of Sex, was alarmingly fickle and unpredictable. On one occasion, when a certain bold lad plucked up the courage to make an impertinent suggestion as they were walking through the front gate of Grorud Elementary School, she calmly removed his glasses, snapped them in two, then stamped on them, leaving the hapless lad to grope his way home, more or less blindly. Secondly, and possibly worse, she was sort of going out with Frank Stenersen, or Frankenstein as he was known, since children — like a lot of adults — confuse Dr Frankenstein with Frankenstein’s monster. Frank was nicknamed Frankenstein because of his size and his somewhat formidable appearance, to which a barbwire-like dental brace added a particularly striking touch. In other words, Anne Beate preferred the tougher lads, the kind with Beatles boots and long hair, who smoked and swapped condoms in the bike shed.
Frank Stenersen fitted this profile perfectly, his meanness was the stuff of legend; he had a soul like a bloody beefsteak. Every other day he earned himself a visit to the headmaster, on one occasion because, in the dining room, he had gone so far as to deface the portrait of Trygve Lie, Grorud’s famous son, with a stump of carrot. The most glaring example of his brutality was, however, the rumour that he had a fondness for hunting for songbirds’ nests so that he could smash the eggs, those harmless little blue eggs. Who could do such a thing? To cap it all — although perhaps this really explained it all — his parents were communists. And everybody knows that to be a member of the NKP, the Norwegian Communist Party, in the sixties was truly to be an outsider; it was tantamount to hanging a sign on your door proclaiming utter godlessness.
How does one become a conqueror?
Jonas wanted to try to be one; he wanted to act like one of the tough guys, wanted to act big in front of Anne Beate Corneliussen, the ABC of Sex. He commenced his offensive during the autumn when they were in eighth grade, during a curious event known as ‘Get in on the Act’. Jonas, who normally never performed in public, not even to play the piano, which he did rather well, had put his name down for this, and after having presented something quite different, something safe, at rehearsal, he made his move when they went live, so to speak, on the evening itself, in a stuffy gym hall so jam-packed that people were hanging from the wall-bars. Jonas did a kind of stand-up comedy act, with a routine that, in essence, involved reading out various fictitious letters to the headmaster from parents and fellow pupils. He put on a different voice for each letter, according to who had supposedly sent it, eliciting loud whoops and cheers from the audience — and from the other eighth graders in particular. The success of his turn may have been due not so much to the originality of his script, but to the lamentably low standard of the other acts. But if truth be told, Jonas had developed a certain talent for putting on different voices. This dated from the days when he had produced radio plays — a subject to which I shall return — and he won a well-merited round of applause for a lisping rendition of a letter complaining about how shocking it was, a proper disgrace to the school, that Miss Bergersen should have been seen coming out of Mr Haugen’s room with her hair all mussed up during last year’s class trip. That this was not so far from the truth did not make the ‘letter’ any the less piquant, nor did the fact that those lisping tones could so easily be traced to the staff room. The following lines were uttered through pinched nostrils, as Jonas mimicked one prim mamma: ‘Dear Headmaster: Please ask Miss Rauland to stop wearing blouses made from transparent fabric — my little Gunnar is forever locking himself in the bathroom these days.’ Stamping and clapping. Poor Guggen managed to slip out during the ensuing uproar. For a few seconds Jonas felt as if he had the hall, nay the whole world, in the palm of his hand.
And it worked. Jonas actually got to speak to Anne Beate. She sauntered up to him while he was at the drinking fountain during the lunch break the following day, bent her head down next to his and placed her fingers over the neighbouring holes to make the jet of water leap higher. Out of the corner of his eye Jonas saw how her Setesdal sweater bulged under her open anorak. ‘Why are you so interested in your English teacher when you could be friends with me?’ she said through moist lips. ‘Why don’t we get together after school?’ And when Jonas, after two seconds’ thought, suggested that they meet in the basement of his block of flats, she agreed without hesitation, and Jonas knew what she was indirectly agreeing to: he would get to feel her tits.
During the last classes of the day he wasn’t really there. He was an astronaut just before lift-off. He was going to see the far side of the moon. He was going to hold Venus and Jupiter in his hands. And Frankenstein didn’t know a thing. That he might ever find out was not something Jonas wanted to think about. But he couldn’t back out now; this was, as a Norwegian writer once put it, the whisper of the blood and the prayer of the bones, this was his chance, at long last, to discover for himself how ‘her ripe breasts shot out like lightning bolts from her body’, as Daniel had read, whispered, from the top bunk, his nose buried in a book by Agnar Mykle. Jonas ran all the way home from school. Anne Beate had finished school an hour before him, he saw her bike parked outside the entry — balloon tyres, everything about her was big; he opened the door and took a deep breath before descending into the underworld.
The basements. Many a tale could be told of the gloomy basements of Solhaug, the housing estate where Jonas grew up. They had served as the burial chambers inside pyramids where Jonas and Little Eagle had hunted for treasure, equipped with intricately drawn maps, scorched at the edges. They had been dripping caves inhabited by beasts and dragons, especially dragons. Those basements had formed the setting for the most wordless mystery plays, the venue for the meetings of secret clubs, where code words were whispered over flickering candle flames and rings set with glass diamonds changed fingers. They had been bunkers, especially after the weighty bombproof doors were installed — a delayed result of the Cold War. It is, by the way, quite amazing when one thinks, today, of all those bombproof doors and bomb shelters that suddenly became mandatory. The whole of Norway prepared for a life in the catacombs. Because it has already been forgotten that, although the fifties and sixties may in many ways have seemed a time of optimism, people — or at any rate all those who kept abreast of things — really did believe that an atom bomb could be dropped at any minute; it was an unpleasant fact of life, giving rise to a constant sense of insecurity which rendered the growing prosperity somehow even more intense.