The Discoverer (4 page)

One day when he returned home from Frogner Baths his mother sat herself down right across from him and looked at him long and hard, as if she were wondering whether his alarmingly red eyes were attributable to chlorine or to lunacy. ‘Why are you doing all this?’ she asked.

‘Because I have a talent,’ he said. ‘I can hold my breath.’ What he may perhaps have been trying to say was: I have a duty.

She was still looking him in the eye, but she could not help smiling: ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s okay to take life a little less seriously than you do.’

As an adult Jonas would remember these words whenever he had the feeling that he was making too big a deal of things. That is my curse, he told himself. I take life too seriously.

But just then all Jonas could think about was the day, sometime far in the future, when he would be put to the test. His life would culminate in this, the moment when he actually saved a life; his presence on earth would be justified by one sensational exploit, broadcast live, as it were, on prime-time television. Everything was to be a preparation for this. Daniel had a calendar with a metal plate on the back and a red metal ring. Most people moved the ring from one day to the next, but Daniel set it only around important dates. Jonas knew that the moment for his dazzling deed awaited him on one of those magnetic, red-circle days.

Then, one Saturday morning when they awoke to the Goldberg variation no. 6 and the smell of frying bacon, Jonas noticed that the red ring on
Daniel’s
calendar was circling that very day. For a second he construed this as an ominous sign. But his brother lay grinning in his bed. ‘Today you’re going to see so many naked women that you’ll never be the same again,’ Daniel said. Jonas breathed a sigh of relief, not knowing that this was also the day when he was to be put to the test.

Now though, for all the basic training of his boyhood, he was powerless.
Down below in the church a father lay dead. Holding his breath would do no good. Artificial respiration would do no good. The day before, Jonas had stood by the open coffin, regarding his father’s body. Haakon Hansen looked as though he were alive. Intact. All that was missing, so it seemed, was a little cog. A glowing spot behind his ribs, that glow which wove the network of tiny links between his organs. As Jonas stood there beside the coffin an old question presented itself: What should you take with you? What makes life life? What
gives
life life?

Jonas Wergeland sat at the organ manuals, terraces of keys, putting
everything
he had into the playing: fingers, feet, his whole body. This was a day with a heavy red ring around it, a red-letter day for Grorud, one which would always be remembered – not least on account of the unforeseen intermezzo occasioned by an uninvited guest, a personage who showed up dressed in orange even though black was the order of the day, a jungle flower in a dim Norwegian pine forest. ‘Haakon Hansen was a Buddhist,’ was just one of the rumours which would circulate later. ‘For over thirty years we’ve had a
Buddhist
for an organist in Grorud Church.’ Jonas sat up in the organ loft,
accompanying
a packed church in ‘Lead kindly light, amid th’encircling gloom’. And they could have used the light, because it was an exceptionally grey autumn day outside. But the congregation sang fit to make the stained glass glow and the eye of God in the triangle at the top of the large fresco behind the altar look down with gladness upon them.

Before the service began, before making his way up to the organ loft, Jonas had stayed downstairs for a while. He had run an eye over the packed pews, listened to the murmur of voices, inhaled the scent of mingled perfumes. The mood was buoyant, not unlike the first minutes at a big party where the guests have not seen each other in ages. Before him, Jonas saw a cross-section of his own life, his life encapsulated in a church. Here were girls, now women, who had protested when he pawed their breasts; here were mothers, now elderly ladies, who had complained when he played the Stones’s ‘The Last Time’ too loud at Badedammen; here were old men, now ancients, who had shaken their fists at him when he knocked off their hats with snowballs. All tenderly smiling. This was a time for peace and reconciliation. Jonas spotted people he had not seen in years, folk from the housing estate; he nodded to Five-Times Nilsen and his lady wife, nodded to Bastesen the caretaker, who had actually shaved for the occasion, then he was tapped gently on the shoulder by Karen Mohr, the Grey Eminence herself: ‘Your father, he would have been worthy,’ was all she said. And Jonas knew: ‘No greater compliment could any man receive.’

People were still trickling in, even though the church was jam-packed.
Every face shone with that same special radiance, a sort of deep joy born of solemn purpose. Many of the mourners nodded quietly to him. Some of them strangers. Jonas was, after all, something of a celebrity, his face seen on television all the time. He exchanged nods with old teachers from elementary school and sales assistants from the shopping centre, from shops where he had bought his first football, his first blue blazer, his first pencil case. The whole of Grorud had turned out. Jonas spotted Tango-Thorvaldsen, who owned the shoe shop; he spied the dreaded barber and the drunken chemist, and wasn’t that the postman – an old, old man now – who had delivered the longed-for letter from Margrete? Jonas remembered, suddenly he
remembered
so much, and stranger still: he also seemed to remember, or to see, things which were to come, things which had not yet happened in his life, as if he were in the middle of an overture.

Up in the organ loft Jonas Wergeland was playing ‘Lead kindly light’, and as he played he was able to keep track in the ‘gossip mirror’ of what was
happening
at the head of the nave. The choir was like a florist’s shop, billowing with bouquets and beribboned wreaths like belated laurels. This, and all the people, brought home to him something which had never really occurred to him, and which he had possibly never completely understood until now; something which for some reason, given the situation, was a great lesson to him: his father had been a much loved man. Maybe that was the whole point of life: to be loved? Jonas’s eyes went to his family and relatives in the front pews. His mother was sitting next to Benjamin, his little brother, who had Down’s syndrome and who had stared uncomprehendingly at Jonas when told by him that unfortunately he could not begin the service with Abba’s ‘Ring Ring’. Maybe that was why he had refused to leave his new bow and arrow in the porch and now sat there happily drawing a bead on the angel on the altarpiece.

On his mother’s other side was Rakel, she too dressed in black. Though there was nothing unusual in that, she had always worn black. Big sister and rebel. Cheekbones like Katherine Hepburn’s. The pride and waywardness of an Irish actor. A true revolutionary her whole life through. A pioneer in what was arguably one of the most male-dominated of all occupations, a
samaritan
, a Sister – not only to him, Jonas, but to many, to thousands, of others. It was a privilege to have such a sister. In Jonas’s earliest memories she was no more than a face buried in a book, a collection of tales, the
Arabian Nights
; costumes and scents gliding through the rooms and turning the flat into a weird and wonderful place for him and Daniel, kids that they were. There they would be, taking life for granted, and Rakel would sweep into the living room, say something or do something, and all of a sudden they were not sure
of anything. He remembered her as a perpetually wry, reproving smile. And then she was gone, or at least reduced to collecting the scalps of a string of boyfriends, to leather jackets reeking of cigarette smoke and the roar of a 1000 cc: a black-clad whirlwind that popped in every now and again.
Eventually
, though, she settled down, made some choices, got married and moved far away; later, she would often live even further away, for years at a time, with just the odd letter from foreign parts to let them know that she was alive and well. She was the only truly sterling individual Jonas knew. She was the one person he admired most in all the world.

Nonetheless, he toyed with the thought that Rakel could have had a very different life, had their father not been a musician. That, when you came right down to it, it was their father who had kick-started her remarkable career. Because, if Haakon had not been an organist and Bach lover he would never have taken Rakel to Oslo’s Trinity Church on a late-autumn day in the
mid-fifties
. What happened on that day in Trinity Church? On that day Rakel met a lifesaver. A real lifesaver.

Rakel would tell the story of this event any chance she got. She had been seven at the time, and the mere fact of being taken into town by her father, to attend what she understood to be a very grand gathering, was wonderful. The sight of the building alone was enough for her. She was almost living in the
Arabian Nights
at the time, so the broad copper dome put her in mind of a magnificent mosque – all that was missing were the minarets. But more was to come, because no sooner had they entered the church and climbed up to the organ loft, where her father shook hands with the few other invited guests, most of them organists, than the guest of honour arrived, a man who, despite being almost eighty, was still strong and spry, with a good head of hair. ‘I thought he was so handsome,’ Rakel always said. ‘I thought it was the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in disguise.’

This gentleman was no less a person than Albert Schweitzer, in Oslo to be presented with the Nobel Peace Prize which he had been awarded the year before. As far away as Africa he had heard tell of Eivind Groven’s curiously pure-tuned organ and he had expressed a wish to play it. Now he was
actually
here, in Trinity Church in Oslo. He seated himself at the simple organ and played a little – not much, just a little – because his eye had been caught by the old church organ and everyone could see that the world-renowned musician’s fingers were itching to try it too. So of course he had to sit down at that fine Romantic organ – built in Norway, as it happens, by Claus Jensen – and after only a few bars he nodded his head vigorously in appreciation of the instrument’s tone. He played Bach; it may not have been the perfect organ on which to play Bach, but Albert Schweitzer clearly enjoyed what
he was hearing. To Rakel, who was of course familiar with the piece he was playing, Schweitzer seemed to render that marvellous warp and weft of voices quite transparent, and more: the very bricks of the church suddenly appeared translucent. Everything expanded, but at the same time everything was connected. Rakel felt that she had learned a bit more about the breadth of a man. That one could care as much about church organs as about the black people in Africa. She knew instinctively, by observing the ease with which Schweitzer handled all the different manuals and pedals, that this was a man capable of doing several things at once. It came as no surprise to her, later, to discover that he could write high-flown works on the history of New Testament research, that he had the ability to cure such appalling diseases as malaria and dysentery, sleeping sickness and leprosy, or that he could edit Bach’s collected organ works. This was a man with respect for life at all levels, who had therefore taught himself to use instruments as diverse as the organ, the pen and the scalpel. ‘He was a juggler,’ she said. Not until Jonas met Bo Wang Lee did he understand what she meant.

Afterwards Rakel was introduced to Albert Schweitzer; he bent down and stroked her cheek. ‘It was Bach who provided me with the first funds for my hospital in Africa,’ he said in German, but Rakel understood him anyway. What she liked best about him was his rather bushy white moustache. ‘And he had kind eyes,’ she always said. ‘The boy I marry will have to have eyes as kind as his.’

Although she was only seven years old, and did not understand exactly who Albert Schweitzer was, all the things he had done and everything he did while he was in Oslo, she had been greatly struck by the fire in those eyes, the warmth of that brief handshake, the music that poured out into the church. Unbeknown to anyone else in the family, over the years she garnered various scraps of information about Schweitzer. Then one day, when she was fifteen and had long been a teenage rebel, there it was on her bedroom wall – causing her parents to shake their heads in disbelief: a picture of Albert Schweitzer, hanging between Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. A curious trinity. ‘Some day I’ll find my Lambaréné,’ she said. And in a way she did.

At the age of twenty, in curlers and a headscarf, she was to be seen reading Schweitzer’s autobiography,
Out of My Life and Thought
, the book that would finally persuade her to leave the world of the
Arabian Nights
– if, that is, since she thought the great doctor bore some resemblance to Haroun al-Rashid, it should not be seen as a natural follow-on from it, one tale, or perhaps one should say one form of rebellion, running into another. Be that as it may, it was at this point that she decided what she was going to do with her life. It came to her as suddenly and clearly as the phrase ‘reverence for life’ by which
Schweitzer was struck on a river in Africa, one evening at sunset as he sat absent-mindedly on board a steamboat butting its way through a herd of hippopotami.

Like Jonas, Rakel wanted to be a lifesaver, but she took a much more serious approach to this than him. Rakel always took things seriously. She decided what her Lambaréné would be. It had to be mobile. She acquired a heavy goods vehicle license and trained as a nurse, in that order; she learned how to reverse a truck and trailer into a garage with a proficiency that put paid to any jokes about women drivers, learned to administer injections in a way that made life flare up. Thereafter, she and her husband, Hans Christian – who could actually have given Albert Schweitzer a run for his money where kind eyes were concerned – drove trucks for just about every humanitarian organisation in the world, always going where the suffering and the danger was greatest. ‘I drive caravans through deserts of need,’ she was wont to say, as if the vocabulary of the
Arabian Nights
still lived within her. Rakel was a leather-jacketed, 400 horse power Mother Theresa transporting food and medicines across front lines in war-torn zones. With – so it was rumoured – Bach’s organ music pouring from a cassette player on the passenger seat. Rakel was the sort of woman who proved that ethics and aesthetics can go hand in hand. Her windscreen was forever being pierced by bullets, but it is said that only once did she get upset: when a piece of shrapnel shattered her cassette player. But just as the Paris Bach Society had presented Schweitzer with a piano with organ pedals, specially built for the tropics, so Rakel, after this incident, was presented by her fellow aid workers with a special,
armour-plated
cassette player. Rakel had no children, but – and this is not just an empty platitude – she and her husband had thousands of children. Jonas once asked her why she had taken up such a hazardous occupation – whether it was because, at the time, she had felt that there was no rhyme nor reason to life, or because she had felt guilty or whatever? She had stared at him as blankly as Benjamin was wont to do when Jonas said something which he, Jonas, believed to be laudably reasonable: ‘I did it because it’s a fantastic story,’ she said. ‘It’s the best book I’ve ever read.’