So, behind those bombproof doors, Jonas and Little Eagle had also been the sole survivors, new versions of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, consigned to living in a dark, desolate basement. But now Jonas was willingly going to let himself be bombarded. He thought of the explosion that would occur as he laid his hands on Anne Beate. ‘Her breasts were like explosives under her jersey…’
He would not, of course, switch on the light, that went without saying. He closed the door, heard the hollow echo resound down the basement passage, the sort of sound used in films to create a sense of dread, of claustrophobia. It was cold. It was pitch-dark. The air was so fraught with tension that he could hardly breathe. He bit his lip, groped his way along the walls in which wooden doors, rough and flaking, punctuated the stippled surface at regular intervals.
They had arranged to meet in the centre, on a landing that opened onto the next basement passage. His whole body was one great, pounding heart. Something was about to happen. He could hear a buzzing sound, like that from a transformer. Sensed danger. Lightning bolts shooting from breasts. High voltage. Something was about to happen. Two big tits, two hard nipples, switches that would turn his life around. He caught a whiff of something, the scent of an animal, a wild beast. Woman, he thought. A willing woman.
Something was wrong. But he could not turn round. He had to fight. He knew now what it was. He was ready to fight and not, in fact, afraid. He was all but expecting to be tackled from behind, for his legs to be knocked from under him. Nothing happened. He heard heavy breathing in the darkness. A fury. A fury that breathed. He was prepared to run into a body but was caught completely unawares by a fierce grip. A demonstration of raw power. A huge hand closes around his balls and pushes him up against the wall, a grip that holds him there, his limbs are paralysed. He knows who has him pinned up against the wall. Frank Stenersen. A communist, a real, live communist, and inside the bomb shelter. What one fears most of all. An enemy within.
Frank Stenersen. Frankenstein. There was no doubt about it. A monster on some kind of high, induced by an adrenalin-coursing lust for revenge. The other’s foul breath rammed Jonas’s nostrils; he thought to himself that the stench must stem from bits of food stuck between the metal wires of his brace. Then he felt the grip on his balls tighten and a sickening pain spread throughout his body. Every boy knows what I’m talking about, every one who has been rammed in the groin by a football or a knee. ‘Please,’ Jonas gasped. ‘Try to talk your way out of this,’ Frankenstein hissed through the wiring on his teeth. ‘Stop messing about,’ Jonas groaned. ‘So you wanted to grope Anne Beate’s tits, did you?’ Frankenstein said, squeezing harder, a little bit harder all the time. Jonas thought of Frankenstein and the story about the birds’ eggs. A soft squeal of pain escaped him. The pain was so bad that he saw stars in the darkness. Jonas felt that this entity that was him was merely a fragile illusion, that a firm grip on his balls was all it took to shatter it. ‘Write a letter to the Head about this, you lousy little prick!’ snarled Frankenstein. He squeezed still tighter for a second, before letting go — tossed Jonas aside like a fish with a broken neck. Jonas heard footsteps, heard the heavy bombproof door open and bang shut again. He lay there in the darkness, weeping, consoling himself with the fact that there had been no one to see. I ought perhaps to add that, after this incident, Jonas would always feel a tightening of his testicles whenever he found himself in a tricky situation, not only that, but a contraction of his balls could actually warn him that trouble was brewing. Like a Geiger counter detecting uranium, his testicles signalled danger.
Jonas got up, tottered over to the door, afraid for a moment that he had been locked in; he screwed up his eyes against the light, dragged himself up the steps. It seemed to him that he climbed upwards and upwards, that he made the ascent of something more than just a flight of steps leading to an exit. He had been dead, and now he was alive again. Either that or he had undergone a transformation, emerged as another person. And already at this point, long before he would learn that Frankenstein was not the name of the monster but of its creator, Jonas divined that by shooting a bolt of lightning through his balls, as it were, Frank Stenersen had turned him into a monster, or more accurately: had made him see that he had always been a beast, that the drool-making thought of conquering two strutting breasts was, at heart, monstrous. And above all, in a flash, when the pain was its height, Jonas Wergeland had perceived how dangerous, how wonderfully fiendish and artfully treacherous and yet how indescribably delightful and desirable and, not least, mysterious, girls were.
As Jonas staggered like a cripple out into the light, he realized that Frankenstein’s squeezing of his balls was not so much a punishment for chatting up Anne Beate as the penalty for having shown off on stage. For having made a boast that he could not live up to or for which he was not prepared to take the consequences. So even then, at the age of thirteen, Jonas Wergeland ought to have understood that performing in public, in the strangest, most roundabout ways, can get your balls in a squeeze.
Carl the Great
Is it possible to find a beginning, something that might have prepared us for the episode that shook, nay, stunned the whole of Norway? Might it lie in something as innocent as a journey abroad?
When, after four days surrounded by nothing but water, Jonas Wergeland stood on the deck and watched the green island slowly rise up out of the sea before him, truly rise up, as if it had been made for this moment, it occurred to him that this must have been how Columbus felt when he spied the first islands of the Caribbean — although he had been sailing for much longer and towards a quite different destination. Jonas had, nonetheless, the feeling that he was approaching an unknown continent. And as they slipped through the opening in the coral reef and found themselves, all at once, in Apia harbour, encircled by greenery, a green as bright as the slope running up to peaks he could not see — hidden as they were behind the first range of hills — the island on which he was about to set foot seemed to him like another Eden, a fresh start.
Why did Jonas Wergeland travel?
One day, Professor, someone will write a weighty treatise on the influence of Carl Barks on generations of Europeans. That’s right: Carl Barks — not Karl Marx. No one should be surprised when, one day, some individual becomes, say, Secretary-General of the United Nations and, to the question as to what his or her greatest influences have been, does not, as expected, say The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis or the works of Leo Tolstoy but quite simply replies: some cartoon ducks. In other words: those incomparable stories from the pen of American chicken farmer Carl Barks.
Jonas read very, very little as a child and adolescent, but he did devour every single Donald Duck comic issued from the fifties until well into the sixties — for reasons to which I shall return — and although he knew nothing about the contributing writers and illustrators, it was Carl Barks’s strips which made the biggest impact on him. So much so that certain stories were read as many as a hundred times, to the point where he knew them by heart; one might almost say they settled themselves as ballast inside him. Just as children of an earlier age had their hymns off pat, verse upon verse, Jonas knew the adventures of Donald Duck. Carl Barks opened wide the door not only onto the history of the world, including all its myths and legends, but also onto its geography. The countless expeditions Jonas undertook in the company of Barks’s heroes represented a grand tour not unlike that made by Niels Holgersson and his geese. Barks’s comic strips presented a first impression of regions and countries that never faded from Jonas’s mind. Considered from a certain angle, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Carl Barks who gave Jonas the urge to travel and to travel far.