It was only when they reached China that Jonas realized what an impressive feat this had been, and how much it said about his brother; about his staying power, his ulterior motives and, above all else, his nigh-on criminal sexual appetite. Because it was the same story over again, the piano lessons found their parallel in the AKP. Not to beat about the bush, the truth was that deep down, behind all his iron-clad ideological convictions, the latterly so legendary Red Daniel, Jonas Wergeland’s brother, had only one motive for being a member of the AKP: to pull the chicks. I know it sounds hard to believe, and even Jonas would have scoffed at the idea had he not witnessed first-hand, on that trip to China, his brother’s virtuoso technique for laying even the most hard-line, red-hot, female Marxist-Leninists: in other words, watched him putting into practice the reductionist lesson their sister had taught them when they were little: behind all the fine words, all ways lead to that spot between a woman’s thighs. In those three weeks, Red Daniel climbed into bed with no less than four of the eleven girls in their party, and believe me, that called for no small amount of ingenuity and subterfuge — in many ways living up to the AKP’s own methods — since at best they all had to sleep two to a room; and one of the girls was actually married to one of the guys in the group, who was sitting, in well-known, vulgar Maoist fashion, discussing why the people of Norway had to oppose the EEC even though China was in favour of the EEC, while his wife was writhing in the throes of a vulgar and most welcome orgasm in Daniel’s room, with only a thin wall between them.
While still on the train to Moscow, from where they were to travel on by plane with the Chinese airline CAAC, Jonas had been mildly surprised to see his brother coming on to one of the girls in the party, but then, he thought, that was fair enough, Daniel had as much right as anybody else to flirt about a bit and maybe even find himself a steady girlfriend. Jonas could not, of course, have known that his brother’s sole and very short-term goal was to screw this woman, a teacher with an extremely determined chin, up against the door of the train toilet, in time to the rumble of the wheels over the railway tracks, until she forgot all about Lenin’s teachings and instead underwent a re-education of sorts, starting all over again at the first letter of the alphabet. But in the endless, flat expanses of Peking, in between visits to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs, not to mention the Forbidden City with its yellow roofs and 9000 rooms, even harder going than the Louvre, Jonas noted that his brother had changed ladies, and indeed that on their five days in Peking, which also included the usual round of somewhat tedious visits to kindergartens and printing works and car factories, he changed ladies twice — the last one being a hardened feminist to boot, a dentist with a steely gaze. Jonas had to smile when he overheard his brother condemning, absolutely and utterly, all forms of pornography — Daniel, who as a teenager must surely have held the Norwegian record for the number of decilitres of semen expended during tension-relieving sessions in the bathroom over a paper harem judiciously selected from Solhaug’s biggest pile of soft-core porn magazines.
Some years after the trip to China, when Red Daniel, like just about everyone else, had had enough of the AKP and was busily engaged in blandly denying that any of it had ever happened — as if he and they truly had recovered from a virus infection that had also wiped their memories clean — while at the same time reverting to his old familiar ways: completing his education swiftly and efficiently and passing with flying colours, Jonas had quizzed him about this. Why on Earth had he done it? What was so special about those girls? At that, Daniel had to sit down, as if the memory were too much for him, and in the same tremulous voice that Jonas remembered from the evening, lying in their bunk-beds, when his brother had described the feeling of the piano teacher’s breasts against the back of his neck, he told him what the AKP women were like in bed. ‘Honestly, Jonas, there’s no one like them, they’re pure dynamite,’ he said, thereby betraying that he, like all the other AKP leaders, did not regret a thing. Red Daniel’s eyes shone when he spoke about what it was like to have sex with the AKP girls, who had made love with a wild abandon and a passion that left Daniel lost for words. Jonas’s brother had in fact discovered that the AKP stimulated the sex drive, exactly like an aphrodisiac: how, thanks to its very one-dimensionality and contrived view of reality, this entire milieu was actually as fraught with repressed sexuality and sublimated eroticism as any extremist religious sect. All you had to do was help yourself. ‘I’m telling you, Jonas: after an inane two-hour long discussion on why we had to oppose the formation of the republic of Bangladesh — to wit: because China said so — even though those poor people down there were crying out with one voice for independence; or after an intense and totally ludicrous meeting to debate the necessity of “armed rev’-lution, like y’know”, these women were like overripe fruit, one touch and they fell, exploded with pent-up desire. They wanted to be eaten, they wanted to let their juices pour down over you.’ Jonas laughed, but Daniel swore that he had never experienced anything like the sex he had had with those women, forced to embrace asceticism, their heads spinning from having to keep track of so many outrageously contradictory and mutually exclusive assertions. Like starving souls they clung to him as if he were an oasis in the desert. Daniel’s real stroke of genius was to remind these bewildered girls — because even behind those determined chins and steely gazes they were bewildered — that they had bodies, that they possessed a beauty and an allure far above and beyond the bounds of the grandest Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. Sex with Daniel represented a shortcut back to the real world, a brief glimpse of normal life, something which all of those woman eagerly clutched at, if only for one night.
But Jonas knew nothing of this on that visit to China, nor would he have had anything against Red Daniel’s excesses, had it not been for one thing: also on the trip was a real working-class girl, a very quiet and, to Jonas’s mind, artless AKP girl who worked in a factory in Fredrikstad, without anyone having asked her to do so: a girl, in other words, with her working-class credentials in order, unlike Daniel, who had to hide behind a mother at Grorud Ironmongery. This girl, whom Jonas called ‘the Princess’, had a steady boyfriend back home in Fredrikstad, he too a true-blue worker, and during the trip Jonas learned that she had applied — applied! — to become pregnant but had had her application rejected by her comrades in the AKP. It was fine by Jonas if Daniel seduced teachers and dentists, those girls with the determined chins and steely gazes for whom, assuming that they did not shoot themselves, this merely represented a brief hiatus in their careers, after which they would be able to sport the AKP like a flower in their buttonholes, but he took a very dim view of his brother also entangling an innocent, trusting girl like the Princess in his net.
Which is exactly what happened in Shanghai, on the day that they visited the No. 1 Department Store in Nanking Street — now Nanjing Donglu — where almost all of them had bought shoulder-bags emblazoned with red Chinese characters saying ‘Serve the people’, a motto which Daniel had long since supplanted with ‘Love the people’. They were sitting talking and drinking green tea at the Peace Hotel where they were staying: once the famous Cathay Hotel, all mahogany furniture, velvet curtains and phoney opulence. The Princess was wearing a Chinese peasant shirt in silk which she had had made in Shanghai and was looking fabulous, to use a favourite adjective from the AKP vocabulary. She was laughing, she was happy, she was on the biggest adventure of her life and, to his despair, Jonas saw that she was besotted with Daniel.