The Discoverer (7 page)

Why did he do it?

Jonas looked away, forced his thoughts to run along different lines, rested his eyes on Karen Mohr’s grey coat. Despite his brother’s solemn words to the family he was growing restless, as he had so often done as a boy, sitting up here in the gallery, practising his arithmetic by adding up the numbers of the hymns displayed on the wall. When, that is, he was not trying to break an imaginary code, to come up with the magic words that would cause the wall of the church to split open, the vicar to take a header out of the pulpit as the entire, topless Lido chorus hove into view behind him. Such was the osmotic effect of his erotic imaginings. They occupied a spacious chamber at the back of his mind and were forever percolating through, anytime, anywhere, even in church.

Or in a boat, even when he was in deadly peril. He had felt the first
stirrings
even before they set out, that time on Hvasser. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ she said as they hopped on board. It took a few seconds for it to dawn on him who ‘he’ was. People usually referred to boats as ‘she’. ‘Oak,’ she said, running a hand over one of the timbers. ‘Mahogany where you’re sitting, fir deck, hull of Oregon pine, spruce mast. I won the Færder Race in him. D’you know
anything
about boats?’ He nodded and shook his head at the same time. Despite all his holidays by the sea he knew very little about sailing. ‘Okay, you can start by emptying the bilges,’ she said, pointing to the hand pump. He pumped out the bilge water, heard the gurgling as it drained away, was not sure whether it was this or the sight of her, her navel, her brown thighs, which caused a ripple of excitement to run through him.

It was blowing harder now. The gulls seemed to be having trouble staying aloft. The halyards slapped against the mast and the wind sang in the shrouds.
She invited him into a rather untidy cabin for chocolate and biscuits, poured tea from a thermos. Jonas felt quite happy in the cabin despite the mess he liked the smell of it, the atmosphere, the feeling of being so close to the sea, closer here than outside. As if there were only a layer of skin between them and the waves. And yet it felt strangely safe. He found himself thinking of accordion music and Evert Taube’s songs of the sea. Her name was Julie W. and she came from Tonsberg. She was studying in Switzerland. Her father was a big man in shipping. Right, thought Jonas, so she’s a spoiled rich man’s daughter. She was bound to become a force to be reckoned with in sailing circles. He could tell by the Royal Norwegian Yacht Club badge on her cap. She asked him, not too pointedly, to turn his back while she changed. Jonas could not help catching a glimpse of her. A more than alluring glimpse. She tossed him some clothes: oilskins, sea boots, a life-jacket. The waves smashed against the side, filling the little room with burblings and gurglings. Little creaks and groans formed a titillating accompaniment to Jonas’s memory of her naked body.

Then they were under way, and he was too busy being amazed by the way she moved, almost dancing as she set the sails, heaved on ropes, cast off moorings, manoeuvred out of harbour, all without engine power – engines were for cissies, she said. ‘Wind the foresheet round the winch a couple of times, pull it tight and make it fast to the belaying cleat,’ she shouted at him, giving him some idea of how tough this was going to be, with commands in a language that was Greek to him. ‘Amateur,’ she sighed, coming over to do it herself. The only thing he could just about manage was to hold the tiller. They sailed with the wind, headed north up the lee side of Sandøya then bore east. Before too long, as they drew clear of Store Færder – having rounded a cape, so to speak – the swell hit them in earnest. Sitting there on board the
São Gabriel
, Jonas realised that he was heading into unknown territory, but was not at all sure that he wanted to discover it.

The boat sped across the waves, its sails turned to wings which looked as if they could take flight. ‘This is great,’ she yelled over the roar of the water, ‘we’ve got a broad reach the whole way there!’ He did not know what she was talking about, nor did he have any idea why she suddenly became so busy adjusting here and tightening there, until she explained that she was trimming the sails. ‘Feel how well he rides the waves,’ she cried once she was satisfied. Her face shone with what looked like pure joy. Jonas made out Færder lighthouse to starboard: an exclamation, a ‘Turn back!’ sign. To Jonas the boat seemed to skim over the waves, as if they were travelling into another element. ‘You’ll have to start bailing,’ she said, pulling her cap lower down over her brow. It suited her. He was conscious, despite a growing sense of panic, of a feeling
of expectancy, as if the knowledge that his life was in danger were acting as an aphrodisiac, inspiring the notion that she was also liable to run a hand over him, every part of him, while saying, whispering, something about oak, mahogany, Oregon pine.

‘Shift over to the windward side.’ She more or less hauled him over and plonked him down to the right and a little in front of her when he took too long about it. They were sitting very close. She studied a sea chart, keeping her left hand on the tiller. The August sky was taking on the same hues as the insides of the conch shells his grandfather had left behind at the house on Hvaler. They were surrounded by seething water, in a constant swirl. What had become of Evert Taube, the sea songs, the accordion music? We’re sitting too close together, this can’t possibly go well, Jonas thought to himself, while at the same time fancying that there was some correspondence between the way she handled the boat, her expert manoeuvring, and what she might
possibly
do to him.

The wind was coming from abaft; he could no longer have said how hard it was blowing. Sometimes, when they were sailing so fast that they overtook a wave – great billows towering over them like ravening monsters three and four metres high – Jonas was certain that they were done for, that the bow would drag the boat under when it surged into the wall of the wave. Yet each time, as if witnessing a miracle, he saw the bow rear up again. Other times, when they were moving more slowly and were hit from behind by foaming breakers – in what seemed like horrible, insidious ambushes – he was equally convinced that the
stern
would be engulfed, only then to see how elegantly it lifted again – he sent a silent thank you to the boat’s brilliant designer – so that the waters slid away underneath them and buoyed them up, sent them scudding forwards, surfing, hanging for seconds at a time on the crest of a wave, as if they were flying through the darkness; as if they were not on their way from Hvasser to Hvaler, but were somewhere out in space, between Venus and Mercury.

She beckoned him over. He thought she was going to give him an order, but instead she kissed him, kissed him as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a succulent, provocative kiss, a kiss which, panic-stricken though he was, with the sea frothing menacingly along the lip of the well, left him wondering what it would be like to kiss her belly button, stick his tongue into that glorious little dot and roll it around in there. Might that not give him the feeling of disappearing, of being sucked under by a whirlpool; waking up in another galaxy? Wasn’t this – at long last – the woman he had been looking for?

They scudded over the waves. He could see that she was concentrating,
keeping an eye on the sails, noting the slightest flap, reading signs that he could not see, following every move of the boat as if it was a living creature; he noticed how firmly she gripped the tiller, yet how gently she moved it from side to side, as if she were not steering, but caressing the waves, leaving the boat to find its own way. He imagined her holding him, his penis, just that way, firmly but gently. ‘Haul in the foresheet a bit!’ she yelled, as if she had heard his thoughts and meant to give him something else to think about. She had brought them back into a broad reach. He was putting everything he had into it, but he kept ballsing up. ‘God, what a clumsy clod!’ she snapped, clearly annoyed by his ignorance of sailing terms. As far as Jonas was concerned this merely confirmed what he already knew: that girls had a language all their own. Nonetheless it seemed pretty obvious that something was going on between them, in the midst of the storm; that this sail was bound to
culminate
in, to carry on into, a race between two bodies, because this was only the foreplay, that much he understood, that much he could tell from the look in her eyes, the fury and the lust he saw glinting in them through the salty spray with which they were drenched every now and again.

The sea grew rougher and rougher the farther east they sailed. Then, dead abeam, Jonas spotted a ship. A massive vessel strung with tiny lights. A
starship
in space. It looked as though Julie, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, meant to cut straight across its bow. They were done for, he was sure of it. ‘Ease up!’ he screamed. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see we’re going to ram right into it!’

Up in the organ gallery, surveying the church below, Jonas Wergeland thought to himself that this too was a sea voyage of sorts – or a cruise, perhaps, what with everyone being so primped and perfumed. Against his will his eyes lingered again on the nape of Margrete’s neck – that enigmatic vulnerability – until he managed to pull them away and ran them over the rows of pews. He recognised more and more faces and once again it struck him what a springboard for memories this was. Although many years were to pass before Jonas realised that it was during this funeral service that the seeds had been sown of what was possibly his most famous programme, the one on Henrik Ibsen. It had something to do with the sight of a church wherein everything was condensed, to form a mesh, a net, in which the whole of one’s life had been caught. If, that is, it had not been inspired by hearing the
powerful
words from the Bible, by being confronted with the deepest solemnity. For what was the biggest challenge where Henrik Ibsen was concerned? It was to discover what actually occurred at the greatest moment in Norwegian literature. And this too involved a church.

In the spring of 1864, at the age of thirty-six, Henrik Ibsen began his
twenty-seven years in exile by travelling to Italy. It was a far from successful writer who left his native land, left Norway – in political terms a Swedish province, in cultural terms a Danish one. He was plagued by money troubles and had not yet written any work of real consequence, or at least not anything that could be described as world-class. It is not much of an overstatement to say that his life was – figuratively speaking – on the rocks.

For a long time Jonas considered centring the programme around Ibsen’s arrival in ‘the Beautiful South’, Ibsen himself having so often described what a revelation it had been to come down from the Alps: ‘from the mists, through a tunnel and out into the sunlight’; a dark curtain had been pulled back and suddenly he found himself bathed in the most wonderful bright light. In his mind Jonas saw images of the countryside, an evocative montage of
contrasting
scenes; was tempted, but eventually dropped the idea.

Because the moment of truth does not occur until the following year, on a summer’s day in 1865. The Ibsens are staying in the Alban Hills, at Ariccia, twenty kilometres from the Italian capital. Ibsen is working on
Brand,
but getting nowhere with it. But then, on a brief visit to Rome, things fall into place for him. The incident is described in a letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: ‘Then one day I visited St Peter’s Basilica […] and all at once I found a strong and clear Form for what I had to say.’ What can we take from this vague
statement
? What was it that Henrik Ibsen discovered in St Peter’s. Whatever it was, back at Ariccia he completely rewrote
Brand
, working as if in a trance. What had been a monologue became a dialogue. He turned an epic poem into a drama – and reaped the plaudits at home in Scandinavia. This was followed by his masterpiece
Peer Gynt
, and thereafter, almost singlehandedly, Henrik Ibsen created modern drama. Not only that: he also did much to influence, possibly even
change,
the whole tenor of contemporary thought. On that day in St Peter’s, something happened which was to put Norwegian literature on the map.

Jonas Wergeland’s theory concerning Ibsen’s experience in the Basilica bore little resemblance to anyone else’s. Because the way he saw it, and
presented
it in pictures and sound, not until he stepped into the gloom of St Peter’s was the outer light which Ibsen had encountered in Italy transformed into an inner light. And even though this provocative assertion found form in a key scene which was strongly criticised for its audacity and its
speculative
cast, many people regarded this programme on Ibsen as the lynchpin in a series which did for Norwegian television what Ibsen had done for the country’s literature. Thanks to Jonas Wergeland, NRK’s reputation not only reached formidable heights outside of Norway; his work led also – and far more importantly – to a renewed interest in Norwegian culture in general.

Wergeland did not, therefore, succumb to the temptation to start the programme with a train rushing out of a black tunnel, out into the light of the Mediterranean countryside; instead it opened with an allegorical scene prompting associations with life-saving. You had the impression of rising, along with the camera, after a long dive into the deep; ascending from the darkness towards a bright, shimmering surface, and as you broke through you heard the sound of heavy breathing and saw a bewildered Henrik Ibsen stumbling, wading almost, from the recesses of St Peter’s into the sunlit
summer’s
day. It was, in short, a programme about a man who not only came close to foundering, but who was actually drowning, until – quite unexpectedly, perhaps even undeservedly – he saved himself.

Another event which might have sparked the idea for the Ibsen
programme
, was the mysterious, as yet unexplained, incident which took place towards the close of Haakon Hansen’s funeral service, after the congregation had mumbled their way through The Lord’s Prayer, after Daniel had
sprinkled
the symbolic handful of soil on the coffin and given the blessing and everyone had sat down again; just as Jonas struck up the choral prelude to the final hymn, ‘Love divine all love excelling’. Jonas did not see the whole thing himself, but he heard about it later, in a wide variety of conflicting versions. Suddenly a woman had come walking up the centre aisle, a woman clad in a bright orange coat, like a flame, a foretaste of the cremation to come. Some people got quite a fright, the singing petered out. She had an intent look on her face, this woman. She looked dangerous, some said. She strode slowly up to the coffin as the singing swelled again, as if with ‘Love divine all love
excelling
’ the congregation meant to shield Haakon Hansen from the figure now making her way towards him; a note of discord in this harmonious ceremony. A disgrace, some whispered afterwards. Interesting, said others. Who was she, everyone asked.