It was June, school had just closed for the summer. They crawled under the fence and into a green meadow dotted with white clover, buttercups and a fair number of fine examples of that breed of cattle known as Norwegian Red. Jonas and Nefertiti liked watching the cows, they both got a kick out of seeing them munching sideways, and Jonas particularly enjoyed contemplating them when they lay quietly chewing the cud, while Nefertiti would become immersed in thought-experiments on how wonderful it would be if they had four stomachs and had to chew their food twice, thus deriving twice the pleasure from it — always assuming, of course, that the food was good.
Before they reached the cattle, however, Nefertiti’s attention was caught by a cowpat, a not exactly fresh one, with a good thick crust on it; Jonas failed to see why she absolutely had to sit down right next to that. But Nefertiti slipped off her little rucksack and spread a tablecloth on the grass, the sort of red and white checked cloth that Jonas would not see again until he set foot inside Bényoucéf’s restaurant, La P’tite Cuisine. They settled themselves on this, Nefertiti broke the bread and Jonas tore the silver-foil tops off the Mekka bottles. They lay back, propped up on their elbows, eating and drinking and observing the cows further down the field; they took their time, as much time as the ruminating cattle, savouring every bite, every sip, as if making up for the fact that they could not enjoy the food more than once.
Afterwards, Nefertiti fetched a stick and split the cowpat in two. It was in this clump of dung that she found the beetle, and the moment she laid eyes on it she practically dropped to her knees and stayed there, utterly spellbound, with not so much as a blink of her long eyelashes.
Jonas had seen her like this on a couple of other occasions, so lost in contemplation that she seemed to be in a trance. One time she had sat up in the loft, watching a candle burn all the way down. And one autumn she had sat crouched over a mushroom that was pushing its way through the tarmac behind the garages, as if this were a miracle that she would not have missed for the world.
So it was now. Suddenly there was no talking to her, she pushed her cap back from her forehead and brought her face right down level with the cowpat. She shushed Jonas when he tried to say something, pointing to the beetle as if she had just made a sensational discovery, like another buried Troy. ‘Look,’ she murmured. ‘Weird,’ she murmured. ‘Really amazing.’ The beetle had red wing-cases, it looked like nothing so much as a tiny red VW beetle on legs. Jonas supposed that it must very, very rare, for Nefertiti to grow so worked-up about it. The insect rooted about in the muck, not in the least put out by the two curious onlookers, helping itself, all undaunted, to the feast spread before it. Eventually Jonas grew fed up with all this dung-guzzling and asked Nefertiti if they couldn’t go now. She did not answer, or at least merely murmured: ‘Incredible, quite incredible.’ Jonas rose and walked off.
He wandered around Nybygga for a while, chucked stones at some little kids who had been making a nuisance of themselves, walked up to the kiosk to buy an ice-lolly, the really good sort that had a little plastic figure inside it, mounted on a round platform, and all you had to do was to break off the stick and grind off the rough edge on the tarmac. He got a queen, a pale-blue one, but he already had that one; he trailed back up to Solhaug where he tinkered with his bike, straightening his favourite Monte Carlo cigarette pictures on the spokes and wondering what could have happened to Nefertiti.
It was late in the afternoon. He strolled down to the corner of the green behind Number Four, where the Midsummer’s Eve bonfire had already been built, bigger and richer in content than ever. Chairman Moen and his lady wife came out, carrying their hideous old sofa, and both greeted Jonas with such unwonted friendliness that anyone would have thought they had been caught red-handed, unmasked in the act of committing some unforgivable betrayal. Jonas stood out on the point, looking across the fields on the other side of the stream, at an area on which, within a few years, the farm would be anachronistically hemmed in by huge tower blocks full of children named Desiré and Elvis — as if to prove that it really was true; Elvis was not dead — and where at that moment Nefertiti still sat hunched over in the middle of a bright green field, surrounded by cud-chewing cows.
Jonas went up to help his mother take in the washing. It was her day off, she had been doing the washing downstairs in the communal laundry room, and Jonas found her in one of the large cubicles where the laundry was hung to dry and which, later in life, Jonas would always picture as being full of white sheets. All in all, this would remain one of his clearest memories of Solhaug and his childhood: standing in those drying cubicles surrounded by the scent of freshly washed sheets, that and the fact that in those days everybody had white sheets, like so many blank pages, so that you felt you were standing on board a fullrigger, bound for some wonderful new world.
He followed his mother up to the flat, played some Duke Ellington records, ‘Concerto for Cootie’ and ‘Me and You’, took out his mouth organ and tried, for the hundredth time, to play ‘Cotton Tail’, but he could not manage it, he never could, it was impossible.
The others arrived home. His father from the church, with his briefcase full of sheet music; Daniel from the pool at Badedammen, scarlet from head to toe, as if anticipating the years when he would be known as Red Daniel. He was appallingly sunburnt; Daniel never could do things by halves, always had to go to the extreme, had to achieve a better tan than anyone else in one day. Rakel returned from the Gro Snack Bar, a guy on a motorbike had dropped her off at the door. She had already developed a fondness for lads who rode big machines, had made the leap, as it were, from A Thousand and One Nights to 1,000 ccs and embarked upon the astonishing career in which she would end up as a happy housewife in the cab of a Mercedes-Benz trailer-truck, which, from her point of view, was as good as any palace.
After dinner, one of the week’s seven standard meals, which had been to some extent ruined by Daniel and his protests against reciting Kipling’s ‘If’ in the Midsummer’s Eve show, Jonas ran over to Number One to ask after Nefertiti. No, she hadn’t come home. Did Jonas have any idea where she was?
So back he went to the field, crawled under the fence and into the meadow with its lush green grass, where the cows lay or stood about in the warm afternoon light, looking like an advertisement for Freia milk chocolate or for Norway in general. It smelled of the Earth’s very own factory, of photosynthesis, of fermentation in bovine stomachs, of life, of summer, of holidays.
‘Isn’t it about time you were going home?’ he asked Nefertiti.
Nefertiti did not answer, she was still totally absorbed in the beetle, which appeared to be doing exactly the same as when Jonas had left it earlier in the day: slowly burrowing through muck, a task of Sisyphean dimensions, due to the fact that Nefertiti kept lifting away bits of dung with her stick, so as not to lose sight of it. She knelt on the red and white checked cloth as if it were a prayer mat, staring at the armour-plated beetle with such intensity that anyone would have thought she was trying to magnify each individual detaiclass="underline" the antennae, the grooves in the dorsal collar, the compound eyes, the teeth on its front legs, the stripes on the wing-cases. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said again and, without taking her eyes off the beetle, motioned to Jonas to come down beside her.