Jonas’s mother just sat and smiled, shaking her head ever so slightly, as if she were shocked but was nonetheless having an uncommonly good time and would not have missed this for the world.
The mention of art prompted Veronika to turn the conversation to an exhibition which was currently the subject of fierce debate in the newspapers: a move which led Sir William, after screwing up his face at the red wine, to make a show of his interest in the arts by proclaiming how appallingly bad the artist in question, a woman, was, while his tirade only served to betray the fact that he had not even seen the exhibition.
As their uncle took a forkful of the poisonous mushrooms and popped them into his mouth, causing Rakel to look down at her plate, a sly smile on her face, he asked, apropos this artist, if it were not the case that Jonas knew her and if it were not in fact the case that he had even gone out with her. ‘That would be just like you,’ he remarked, turning to Jonas. ‘You never did have any ambition.’
Journey to the Centre of the Night
The name of the woman to whom Sir William was referring was Dagny M., and Jonas had met her one Sunday at Katten, a popular bathing spot on the shores of Oslo Fjord, after his last dip of the year. Jonas Wergeland was, as we know, a keen swimmer. He had been sitting on the rocks, gazing out across the water, overcome by a strange melancholy, when he became conscious that someone was watching him — no, staring at him — and when he looked up she did not take her eyes off him but simply went on staring as intensely as if she were capturing him on film. The fact that she had strawberry-blond hair barely registered with Jonas, and he took no note at all of what she was wearing although that was pretty much par for the course: Jonas Wergeland seldom latched on to more than one feature of a person and in Dagny M.’s case this feature was her eyes, which is to say that piercing look. She had also made up her face in a striking manner which deliberately drew attention to her eyes, and that in itself was remarkable enough, this being the seventies and makeup not exactly what one could call a top priority with women of her age.
Jonas rose to his feet and walked up towards the road towards the bus stop and noticed nothing until she was right alongside him. He saw that she was also wearing nail polish and an unusual shade of lipstick and that her eyes were not green, as one might have thought and as the newspapers would often have it, but blue, very blue, brilliant blue eyes. ‘You’d better come with me,’ she said.
Only then, walking up the slope towards Mosseveien, did Jonas recognize that sign which he reckoned to be just about fail-safe: a shiver creeping slowly from his tail-bone to the back of his neck, to leave a tingling sensation between his shoulder blades as if a silver thread running up his spine had been gently warmed up. And so he did not hesitate to follow her. To say no would have been tantamount to refusing a very precious gift.
She took him to an old Swiss-style villa sitting on the hill above the road, with a magnificent view of the fjord. She wanted, quite simply, to paint him, have him to model for her, that is. The fact that she was an artist made no impact on Jonas, but he might have been surprised had he known how famous she would one day become. Dagny M. had a very rare gift: she was a trailblazer who would receive much acclaim in the course of her life, not to mention many international honours, for her groundbreaking works, and many people believed that she alone had saved Norwegian art from utter mediocrity and provincialism at a time when even criticism of new Norwegian art tended to be pretty poor, as was demonstrated, not least, by the embarrassingly judgemental response to her first exhibition.
‘Would you mind undressing?’ she said. So he took off his clothes, asked no questions. ‘Underpants, too,’ she said. He took off his underpants, and Dagny M. spent a long time studying his member, unashamedly, with a rapture that she made no attempt to conceal and which quite confirmed one of Aunt Laura’s favourite sayings, that the cock is a work of art.
‘Sit over there,’ she said, pointing to a chair. She worked feverishly for about an hour. Jonas had the feeling that she hardly looked at him or, if she did look at him, her glance flickered over his genitals rather than his face and the rest of his body. From the chair he could look out of the window at the scenery and the fjord. The light began to fade. He gazed down on the calm waters showing between the trees and the roofs of the houses and noted the lovely lines formed by the beach and the Nesodden peninsula farther out, an observation that gave him pause: never before had he taken pleasure in a landscape for the line of it.
‘Come back in a week’s time,’ she said with her back to him.
And Jonas came back. They exchanged no more than a word or two before he got undressed and sat down on the chair. She worked intently, glancing up now and again, glancing at his member. He came back each week for three months. She worked just as intently each time. He liked sitting there even though he did not understand how she could take so long to complete just one canvas. But he enjoyed being painted, it made him feel good, a bit like having his hair cut. He liked feeling her eye on him, liked being studied, appreciated. And he liked looking out of the window at the scenery, the trees and the rooftops, the fjord down below, the lines formed where the water met the shore. She always stopped when the light waned, when the clouds were stained red, and the water turned pure-white.
They said little to one another. She told him none of the things that would later be revealed in biographies of her life: that she had been plagued by illness, especially as a child; that she had fought a personal battle against angst, nerves; had led a footloose existence, wandering around Europe. She simply painted, feverishly, looking up now and again to feast her eyes on his penis.
The room could hardly have been described as a studio. Only the smell betrayed the presence of the paints, the tubes and bottles laid out on the little table next to the easel. Other than that, the room was neat and tidy and bore more resemblance to an office, possibly an architect’s office, what with the couple of slanted drawing boards and the filing cabinets with their shallow drawers for charts and drawings. Sometimes one had a feeling in this room of being on the bridge of a ship or in a control tower, due not least to the view and the massive and complex hi-fi system arranged on the floor under the tall windows, with its array of lights. To Jonas’s great delight Dagny M. listened to opera while she worked and during those months only once did she smile, when Jonas suddenly began to sing along, at the top of his voice, to ‘Deh vieni all finestra, o mio tesoro’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Autumn came, and the days grew darker. Outside the windows of the studio the landscape had fallen into a soft minor key as Jonas called it in his head. He was still in the habit of contemplating, with an interest as great and as freshly-aroused, the purplish hues outside, the tops of the pine trees, the winding coastline and now and again the column of moonlight on the water, as if his optic nerves underwent a change while she painted him. As the weeks progressed, more and more sketches were hung on the walls, sketches of which he could not make head nor tail, but in which he occasionally thought he recognized the shapes of airplanes, snow-castles, propellers and suchlike, sometimes just vague outlines which moved him to guess, to make associations: a scarab, a truck, a row of organ pipes, a caricature of Mao Tse Tung, penises of different shapes and sizes. Eventually these sketches came to form a frieze on the wall, a decorative feature, a sum which had nothing to do with the individual pictures.
Then, one evening, she was finished. The full moon hung outside the window, and a vibrant column of gold stretched across the waters of Oslo Fjord. She did not say that she was finished, she simply came across to him and kissed him without hesitation. She kissed him passionately, consummately, kissing him in such a way that they melted together in the dark, without faces, without lips, and he felt her kiss, her tongue, touch something at the very heart of him.