At the other end of the loft, deep in shadow, loomed a harmonium — what in Norway used to be called a ‘hymn-bike’ — a memento of their grandmother who had, by all accounts, been a God-fearing woman whose heart had burned for the mission service. Actually it was on this instrument that Jonas’s father had begun his musical career, one that had since led him to the organ in Grorud Church. When it was light, Jonas had been known to slip into the shadows and play triads, his feet pumping away at the pedals for dear life. It surprised him to find what a lot of noise it made; he pulled out some knobs and observed how more keys than he had fingers for were then pressed down, as if an invisible spirit were sitting playing alongside him. His grandmother, Jonas thought. The choral songbook, which for a long time he had believed to be full of songs about the sea and fish, was still there, shrouded — appropriately enough — in gloom and open at her favourite hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.
Jonas sits up in bed, can tell right away what Veronika has in mind. She cuddles up close to him, wearing a thin cotton nightdress with blue dolphins on it. ‘Why do we have to wait till tomorrow to eat the peach?’ she says, smelling like no one else: sweet, confusing. Jonas isn’t sure, he wavers: ‘But Granddad has to have a bit too, doesn’t he?’ he says. ‘He’s going to let us have it all anyway,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t you at least go and get it?’
Jonas tiptoes down to the kitchen, stands for a moment on the linoleum floor gazing in awe at the fruit on its silver platter, hovering in the bright summer night. A planet called China. He feels the pull it exerts on him. As if they belong together, he and the peach. He is Marco Polo. He picks it up and climbs back up to the loft, places it on the sheet in front of Veronika. They look at it. Jonas thinks it is divinely beautiful.
From an early age Jonas was always on the lookout for objects that were more than they seemed, things that in some way illustrated something he could not put into words. At home he had taken the works out of an old alarm clock. They sat on top of the chest of drawers. A tiny, transparent factory. He liked to look at the gears inside the metal frame, how the cogs turned, how they meshed with one another, not to mention the balance wheel, which pulsated like a little heart. Most mysterious of all was the spring, the spiral that powered all the cogs by slowly expanding. A coiled steel sling. ‘The only thing that spoils it a bit,’ Jonas told Little Eagle, ‘is that the works have to be wound up, that they don’t run by themselves all the time.’
Daniel had a similar set of clock workings, but he, of course, just had to try to unscrew the frame, with the result that bits went flying in all directions, a bit like splinters from an exploding shell. Jonas had gazed respectfully at the spring lying on the floor, ostensibly harmless and insignificant, almost a yard in length. He saw what force, what driving force it possessed. The secret lay simply in coiling it up.
The peach had some of this same quality about it. A tension. As of something compressed and capable of expansion.
‘Take off your clothes,’ Veronika says. Jonas does as he is told, tells himself that the peach demands this, it is a crystal ball which will not reveal anything if he keeps on his pyjamas. Veronika promptly puts one warm hand around his balls. Jonas watches in amazement as his penis rises up, skinny and eager. She puts the other hand around the peach and shuts her eyes. Then she lifts the peach to his mouth. Jonas feels the soft, furred skin against his lips: down, velvet, silk, all at once. He is filled with a fierce hunger. He’s got to have a bite of this fruit. The juice runs down his chin as he sinks his teeth into the skin. It’s good, deliriously good. Veronika takes a bite before offering it to him again. They take bites turn and turn about, sharing it, with her hand cupped around his balls all the while.
Later in life, Jonas would say that nothing could hold a candle to those first bites of a peach. It was a delight, a treat, the like of which he would never experience again — not even when he dined at Bagatelle in Oslo, in those days the first and only restaurant in Norway to be awarded two stars in the Michelin guide. As the juice and the flesh glided over his tongue and down his throat Jonas felt a glow emanating from the very cortex of his brain, along with a taste in his mouth, which gave him an inkling of continents, spheres, of which he knew nothing.
Veronika looked adorable, sitting there in her flimsy nightie with its pattern of blue dolphins. Jonas beheld the soft lines of her body, her ankles, calves, the blonde hairs on her arms, brown summer skin covered in golden down. They snuggled up together, taking turns to eat, licking and sucking up every shred, every drop.
At last all that was left was the stone. It looked like a minuscule, worm-eaten brain. ‘Can I have it?’ he asked, not knowing whether it was because the stone looked nice, or because he wanted to make sure that the evidence of the theft lay in his hands, even though he knew they could never wangle their way out of this particular jam.
Veronika let go of his balls, lifted up her nightie. She wasn’t wearing any panties. She displayed her genitals. Jonas sat quite still and took in this sight, didn’t touch her, just sat and looked, studying those lines, the gentle swelling, the fleshy softness, the dark slit. She spread those fleshy lips and showed him the inside. It occurred to him that the clitoris — not that he knew that word for it, of course — was a sort of fruit kernel. That this too lay at the heart of something juicy, a fruit, something that could cause the cortex of the brain to glow. At the same time, for some reason he thought of the Turk’s Head knot, saw this thing before him as a knot, a circular knot. Veronika slid her finger a little way into her slit, or knot, then stuck it into Jonas’s mouth. ‘Now we’re spliced forever,’ she said. ‘Now nothing can part us.’
Jonas slept soundly that night and wasn’t really feeling at all guilty when he came down to breakfast. Veronika and their grandfather were already sitting in the blue kitchen, staring as if in mutual sorrow at the empty silver platter. Jonas knew right away that his cousin had told their grandfather a tale in which all the blame rested with him, Jonas, alone — all alone; no matter what he said, he would not be believed. So he said nothing. They ate in silence, bread with cold mackerel from dinner the day before, and he was on the verge of telling a story, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He realized that the story was no good.
And afterwards? I don’t know what to say about what happened afterwards, Professor. It would be far too easy to psychoanalyse it. His grandfather was calm, he was perfectly calm when he went out into the forest with a knife: ‘Only one thing’ll do any good here — and that’s a good old-fashioned taste of the birch,’ as he said; he was calm when he took Jonas up to the attic and demonstrated the use of the birch twigs on the boy’s bare backside, rolled up his sleeves, giving Jonas the feeling that it was the tattooed dragon that was angry, that lashed and lashed at his behind; his grandfather brought down the birch again and again, beating steadily, with the same rhythm as when he rowed, as if he could keep it up for hours, but it was this very calmness that vouchsafed Jonas a glimpse of the towering rage, the almost berserker-like frenzy beneath the surface. There was something altogether a little too relentless, a little too self-righteous, a little too much solemn conviction in the blows his grandfather rained down on Jonas’s behind. For, no matter how he looked at it, Jonas could not see how the eating of this peach, however cheated his grandfather might feel, could justify a grown man with a lifetime of experience behind him putting a terrified little boy over his knee and thrashing him — on his bare behind, at that, and for a long time, for far too long — with a bundle of birch twigs, ceasing only just before the skin broke and the blood ran. It was a brutal, nigh-on wicked act, thought Jonas, young though he was. And it was during those seconds that it dawned on him that there was something wrong, possibly even seriously wrong, with his grandfather. That behind all those stories and yarns, behind the patient backward rowing, there lurked some dark secret, a tricky, inextricable knot. And this suspicion grew no less when his grandfather stood up and gave a sort of a sigh before walking over to the harmonium in the shadows and, with his back to Jonas, proceeded to play ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.