Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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?

This was Jonas Wergeland’s first experience of the female sex. Right at the start he was made aware of how unpredictable they were, how different. The next day, Hjørdis came up to him in the playground to say she was sorry. Jonas shrugged it off as if it was no big deal. Actually, he had lost interest, he ‘broke it off’ shortly afterwards. And even if he was not exactly mad at her, this may have been an instinctive rejection of girls who did not take love seriously. Who did not consider it absolutely central. The fact is, though, that Jonas himself did not know whether he had been moved by pride or fear. After all, if she could fool him with a hug, who could say where it might end.

Jonas often thought of Helga, Herborg and Hjørdis, three girls so alike that you could take them for one. The funny thing was that in the years to come they began to branch out in different directions — became so unlike one another that they were known to some as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. More than anyone, it was the triplets who taught Jonas that nature and nurture did not necessarily say everything there was to know about a person. And although all three were passionate climbers, possibly because their births had coincided with the conquest of Mount Everest, it can be revealed that only one of them became a public figure, an eminent diplomat and expert on the Middle East. In interviews she always said the same thing: ‘As one of triplets you have to be a good mediator.’

It seems only reasonable that Jonas should have been torn between three girls at a time when he was also something of a mental bigamist — in making, that is, his first clumsy attempts to pursue several streams of consciousness at the same time. For months it became a regular routine with him to go down to the basement where, in the darkness, with the aid of the skipping rope he conducted his exhausting, but felicitous mental workouts. After a while, however, a new challenge presented itself: what was he to do with it, this discovery that he was capable of thinking multiple thoughts? So far it had simply been something beautiful, like sparkling crystals, like walking on air — a kick in itself. His dream of becoming a lifesaver, his first serious undertaking, having ended in a miserable anticlimax, he had become more and more convinced that the power of thought might hold the key to a worthy alternative, a possible new goal in life.

Could these parallel reflections save him from the flatness? Skipping gave him a reassuring sense of being inside a sphere, thanks to the arc of the rope. His observations, the layers of ramifying thoughts, could perhaps help him to get to the other side of things. What if he could plumb his own true depths through thought? Prove that reality was round. Even if the world was flat. If he was to be a discoverer, he would have to be the type who made discoveries with the mind, not with the eyes.

Or rather: Jonas suspected that his powers of imagination would make him good at a game such as chess, possibly very good, but then people would think he was a run-of-the-mill genius and he did not want to be a run-of-the-mill genius, he wanted to be an extraordinary human being. There were plenty of minor geniuses around, but few exceptional individuals. He aimed to be an exception.

Karen Mohr was clearly an exception. The more visits Jonas paid to her, the more he talked to her in that Provençal-style living room in the middle of an otherwise drab Norwegian housing estate, the more sympathy he had for this woman who believed that a moment could constitute a whole life. The way Jonas saw it, the reason she maintained her glowing complexion was that she lived under a mental sun lamp. He had the feeling that Karen Mohr also skipped, that she had succeeded in doing something which he had unconsciously been striving to do for some while: she had stopped time, she hung suspended in a permanent double skip.