The Discoverer (15 page)

It could not be anything but a penalty. As Jonas was coming round, a few metres outside his beloved left touchline, as his mangled leg was being
examined
, through a haze of pain he saw Leo deposit the ball neatly in the corner of the net.

He had learned how easy it was to achieve his aims. And yet: was it worth the cost? They had beaten Lyn. Nonetheless, this experience had taught Jonas a lesson: he ought to have concealed his gifts. Although he could not have put it into words, Jonas was beginning to understand why his father preferred an anonymous existence on the organ bench at Grorud Church.

Although his painful encounter with Lyn lay in the future, as early as fifth grade Jonas knew that it was best to keep his thought experiments to himself. He did not tempt fate by causing more chaos in the skipping games. But he did still believe that skipping was an absolute prerequisite. He toyed with the term ‘mental gymnastics’, envisaged skipping as a way of building up his thinking muscles. He purchased a good, professional skipping rope, a
Lonsdale
with ridged hand-grips weighted to give it the right whip and speed. He found a suitable, unfrequented spot in the basement of the block of flats and started skipping all on his own. He liked to switch off the light, skip in the dark, caught inside the invisible bubble formed by the arc of the rope. He had watched the girls skipping, knew that there were lots of different steps. You
could skip forwards or backwards, or on one leg, then the other; you could sling the rope out to the side at set intervals, skip with your arms crossed, or a whole host of combinations. But what Jonas liked best was double skips or simply ‘doubles’. His thoughts flowed best of all with those. Maybe it was the swish of the rope that did it, but skipping doubles gave him a feeling of hovering in mid-air, of no longer being subject to natural laws or the laws of causality. And his reflections altered character, becoming more like the mode of thought he experienced when he dove down deep. When he skipped in the dark, he felt as though everything round about him began to glow, that he was like a dynamo, that he created energy, a force field. He was not simply doing mental gymnastics, he was practising for a great battle. He recalled pictures of boxers – fighters like Ingemar Johansson: massive characters, skipping as light as you like. As if they were training for something other than boxing.

Gradually his efforts began to pay off. He became capable of considering more than two thoughts at the same time. He managed to keep first three, then four parallel thoughts in the air. It was an intoxicating feeling. Like being on board a sailing ship with sail upon sail being run up mast after mast and everything moving faster and faster. Sometimes the basement smelled like the air after a violent thunderstorm. Soon, however, he also found that the more widely diverging his thoughts were in subject matter, the more exciting it became. It was like keeping an eye on several separate cogs in the workings of a clock at one time or, more correctly perhaps, several different sets of clock workings in different places in the room. It also seemed to him that time stood still, or went more slowly, the more simultaneous thoughts he managed to set in train. Jonas would not have been surprised had someone told him that he appeared to be skipping in slow motion. And now and again – he could have sworn it – he thought in a way that caused him to see his name written in lights in the darkness before him.

It can surely have been no coincidence that he should at this time have had a crush on the aforementioned triplets, Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis. Although he did not know it, he was also on the brink of one of the great milestones in the life of any individual: the moment when you press your cheek against the cheek of the one you love. For Jonas this would prove to be an even more powerful experience than his first kiss, simply because it came first. If it were possible to talk about a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ in Jonas Wergeland’s life, then it was one which involved skin rather than mucous membranes.

It can hardly have been because their father was a big man in the labour movement that the triplets exhibited such an uncommon degree of mutual solidarity that one could have been forgiven for thinking they lived by the
motto ‘All for one, and one for all’. It would, however, have been misleading to call them The Three Musketeers, since they were absolutely identical, at least to anyone who did not know them well. They all looked like troll dolls, or like the Icelandic singer of a future era, Björk Gudmundsdottir. Like the Beagle Boys from the Donald Duck comics they needed placards on their chests to differentiate them from one another. And since Jonas did not make up his mind until late in the autumn that was more or less how he managed to tell them apart – by the different coloured scarves they wore: red, blue and yellow. For Jonas those scarves were a tricolour waving over the land of love. But that still left him faced with a not inconsiderable dilemma: which one should he choose? There was something about the sight of them which made him think of a box of chocolates, the stunning prospect of all that
confectionary
, a golden tray full of delights, all equally tempting: ‘Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo’.

After the summer holidays he had watched them on the sly when they were hula hooping in the playground, a circus turn that quite took his breath away: three identical girls with their hips gyrating in perfect synchrony. He also had a passport-size photograph of each of them, the sort everybody had to have taken at one of those machines if they wanted to be part of the
status-giving
and rather frenetic swapping game they played at that age, where the main point was not to have as many photos as possible, but to have the right photos – much in the same way as cards are exchanged in the business world and in diplomatic circles. A few of the girls’ photos had a high exchange value; you could, for example, get both Britt and Kari, maybe even Gerd into the bargain, for one Anne Beate. Jonas studied the pictures of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis through a magnifying glass as if faced here with the equivalent of those seemingly identical cartoons in weekly magazines in which you have to spot the differences; but he really could not perceive any dissimilarity between them. They were
absolutely
identical. Jonas was struck by an
outrageous
thought: what if he were able to go out with all three of them at once? What an unbelievably intense experience that would have to be?

But by the winter he had come to the conclusion – although he could not have said why – that he liked the triplet with the yellow scarf best, and the one with the yellow scarf was Hjørdis. By following the standard ritual of using middlemen to gauge the other party’s interest before making tentative overtures – a procedure which suited a shy boy like Jonas perfectly – before too long Hjørdis L. was officially his girlfriend. And only days later, when they had barely got to the stage of daring to hold hands, with gloves on, Jonas was to make contact, for the first time, with a girl’s skin.

He had on his skating cap, or Hjallis cap as they called it, after their
speed-skating hero Hjallis Andersen. He was standing with a bunch of kids from his class in the cul-de-sac next to their building when Hjørdis came out wearing just an open anorak over her blouse, and her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. She said she was home alone. Everybody knew what that meant. Jonas’s chums slapped him blokeishly on the back, egging him on; they were all but shouting ‘Go for it, Jonas!’, as if this were a speed-skating race – ‘two insides and leave ’im standing’, ‘silver is failure’ and all that. He went up to their flat with her, discovered that the sisters’ rooms lay side by side down a corridor; he would have liked to have taken a peep into each of them, just to see if they were all decorated identically, but Hjørdis quickly pulled him through her door, into her room, which smelled faintly of Yaxa deodorant and had a bookshelf containing a fair selection of Gyldendal’s Girls’ Classics; a perfectly ordinary girl’s room, apart from the tennis racket in the corner and a large glossy poster of the American group The Supremes, also triplets of a sort, who had just had their first big hit. They sat next to one another on the bed-settee and proceeded to flick through a copy of
New
magazine –
appropriately
enough, since all of this was new to Jonas. She edged imperceptibly closer to him and he felt the warmth from her shoulder and her arm
spreading
through his body. A breathtaking scent emanated from her. She read out something from an agony column and laughed, he hadn’t heard a thing, but he laughed anyway to be on the safe side, it must have been funny; he laughed as he took in her fingers, her bare forearm, the pale skin with its fine bloom of golden hair. They went on leafing through the magazine, he turned the pages too, kept brushing against her hand. It felt as though someone was whipping a rope around them, generating a magnetic field. Suddenly she looked straight at him. Her eyes had a dewy look to them, the expression ‘eyes to drown in’ flashed into his mind. Or perhaps it was the actual thought of drowning, that this had to do with life-saving. Purely on instinct he laid his cheek against hers, gently. The touch immediately sent shivers running through him. It was such a surprise. The softness. And the warmth even more so. Added to which there was the smell, a girl smell which was even stronger at such close quarters and induced an uncontrollable tightening of his throat. He steadfastly maintained later that his first chemistry lesson began here, sitting cheek to cheek with a girl. She was still holding the magazine. He saw the golden hairs on her arm rise up, stand on end, as if electrified. The
magazine
slid to the floor. Her hands found his body, felt their way around him. They sat with their arms round one another, cheek to cheek, for a long, long time. Held each other and hugged. There were lots of variations on a hug, gentle or firm, quiet or energetic. Even the quiet hugs left them breathless and flushed. Jonas liked it best when his cheek barely grazed hers. He wished
he could maintain this contact with her skin for ever, sitting like this with his nose close to the nape of Hjørdis’s fragrant neck. She pulled away, her eyes glassy, muttered something about homework, saw him out. The others were still hanging around in the cul-de-sac, like spectators waiting for an athlete to cross the finishing line. He gave them the thumbs-up, a victory sign, making sure that he could not be seen from the window.

He had not even had a chance to answer the other kids’ eager questions when Hjørdis also came out. But she only stayed for a moment before
slinging
the yellow scarf round her neck and pulling him back inside. His chums whooped and whistled, impressed by Jonas’s way with the girls. ‘She can’t keep her hands off you, you lucky dog!’ Once more, Hjørdis led him to her room. ‘What about your homework?’ he asked. She just had to have one more hug, she said with eyes one could drown in and pressed her cheek to his. Jonas seemed almost to have forgotten already how shockingly soft and warm it felt. Again the touch of her skin sent an electric charge running through him and the scent of her left him breathless. She managed to push him away just before he lost control.

As he was making his way back downstairs to his mates – who were still waiting impatiently for his report – Hjørdis came running after him, as if she had had second – or third – thoughts; she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him, laughing, back up to the flat. His chums’ shouts sounded more envious than acclamatory now. Jonas was proud of having such an effect on her. He followed her inside yet again; this time they simply stood hugging in the hall, but this was, if possible, even more exciting; he just could not get over the wonderful softness of it, the warmth. These hugs gave rise to the same ecstatic thrill inside him, and the scent of her took his breath away. She managed to prise herself loose the second before he lost his head and started pawing at the more forbidden parts of her anatomy. Jonas stood there, feeling this glorious sensation coursing through him. Did he think of Melankton? It was good, no matter what. It was like being a child and never tiring of hearing the same story over and over again.

Minutes later, as he was making his way across to the gang, to finally take his bow, so to speak, all three triplets appeared on their balcony. They were almost faint from suppressed giggling. The other two had been home all the time. Helga and Herborg had simply borrowed Hjørdis’s yellow scarf. Jonas’s chums were in stitches, they were almost rolling on the ground with laughter, they called him a bigamist and worse. As I said, the triplets might seem to have adopted the Musketeers’ motto: ‘One for all and all for one’. They shared everything, even boyfriends. Or maybe they had been trying to make him accept a package deal. Jonas hardly dared show his face at school the next day.
But deep down he was really quite chuffed. When it came to the archetypal story of ‘My First Hug’, he won hands down with his ‘My First Three Hugs’. And he had, in fact, come close to realising his impossible dream: of being with them all at once. Jonas, in his skating cap, felt as though he had won gold, silver and bronze in the same race.

He was still puzzled, though, especially by the fact that every hug had felt equally good to him. Was it, then, something about himself he had
discovered
, rather than something about girls? He had thought the fact of being in love was an infallible Geiger counter, when maybe it was nothing but an animal response, a simple reflex, a bio-zoological process which had blithely picked out three different girls, each with equal certainty, to be the one for him. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that they had not each given him their own passport photo, they had given him three pictures of Hjørdis. He felt a vague twinge of fear. It was almost as if he had
unintentionally
discovered that there was no difference between one girl and another, they could all fill you with the same delight, were distinguishable only by the colour of their scarves. He had a mental picture of his future: a succession of women wearing different scarves, but otherwise absolutely identical. This led him, in turn, to imagine how impossible it would be to find what
New
magazine
called ‘Miss Right’. If love endowed you, as Karen Mohr had implied, with fresh eyes, then he was definitely on the wrong track. She, Hjørdis, or the three of them, had shown him, rather, that love is blind. He shuddered. He thought of Melankton. Thanks to the triplets, Jonas was beginning to believe that it was not only the world and people which were flat, but possibly love, too. Was there such a thing as round love?