The Discoverer Read online

  And that was why you had to save lives. In his mind’s eye, Jonas sometimes pictured people as being like walking organs. The first time he saw a dying child on television he realised what a tragedy this was, because what he beheld was a mighty organ into which no air, no spirit, no life was being breathed, one which, in all its senseless and ghastly complexity, was breaking down into its individual parts.

  Jonas Wergeland sat in Grorud Church, playing an organ which he had, so to speak, seen unveiled; he was playing Bach, the fugue which accompanied the prelude in E-flat major, marvelling at an invention which enabled him, with just ten fingers and two feet, to produce music so splendid, so powerful, that it penetrated right down into the foundations of the building. Perhaps, when his life was over, this is what would be cited as his greatest achievement: that he had, at one felicitous moment, succeeded in playing Bach’s prelude and fugue in E-flat major. He felt the tears falling, realised that he was crying, as if the music had also penetrated to his foundations. He did not know whether he was weeping out of grief or at the thought of an experience shared with his father or because of the beauty of the music, a beauty which reminded him of having his head inside a crystal chandelier sparkling with light and shot with rainbows.

  The fugue came to an end. Jonas Wergeland altered the stops, struck up the hymn ‘Lead kindly light’, and how he played: played joyfully, played wistfully, played as if he were a lifesaver, someone capable of breathing life into people. And from the church beneath him the song swelled up, the singing truly hit the roof, with a force unlike anything Jonas had ever heard before. Because he was not alone. The church was full. He had got there in good time, but the church was already packed when he arrived. That was why Grorud had seemed so deserted. Everyone was here. Well over a thousand people. It had come as a surprise to him. Who was his father? Were all of these people really here to honour Haakon Hansen, to pay him their respects?

  Jonas played. Down below, in front of the altar rail, lay his father. Not as if dead, but dead. Haakon Hansen had died ‘on the job’, as they say. Jonas was playing at his own father’s funeral, a funeral which some would describe as scandalous, others as baffling, while his mother, who had more right than anyone to speak on the subject, simply said: ‘No one would understand anyway.’

  Jonas played ‘Lead kindly light’, Purday’s lovely melody, he had the urge to improvise, introduce some provocative chords, produce innovative modulations while moaning and humming along like Glenn Gould or Keith Jarrett. His father would have liked that. Jonas was always nervous when playing for his father. Now too. Even though Haakon Hansen could not hear him. He lay in his coffin, dead. Yet Jonas played as if he could bring his father to life, was amazed to find that he still possessed it: the longing to be a lifesaver.

  He had trained so hard, so resolutely. Particularly during the year when he turned ten it seemed to him that he was more in the water than out of it. At Frogner Baths, at Torggata Baths, out at Hvaler, this was his main pursuit: practising staying underwater for as long as possible. Building up his lung capacity. He could swim underwater for longer than any of his chums, had no difficulty in swimming across Badedammen or the length of the Torggata pool. At Frogner Baths, where you could look into the upstairs pool through round windows, he scared the wits out of spectators by diving down and goggling out at them as inquisitively as they were peering in, rather like a seal in an aquarium – except that he stayed there for so long, on the other side of the window, that people began to shout and bang on the glass in alarm. These daredevil dives did not escape the attention of the lifeguards either: ‘Any more of your tomfoolery and you’re out on your ear,’ they bawled at him from their high stools.

  But it wasn’t tomfoolery, it was conscientious training. Jonas Wergeland was preparing for his great undertaking: that of saving a life.

  During this most intensive phase of his life-saving career, he also practised the technique of getting a half-drowned person back onto dry land. Daniel, who reluctantly consented to act as guinea pig, played the lifeless drownee with impressive realism and did his utmost to show just how difficult such a manoeuvre could be, with the result that Jonas sometimes became a mite over-enthusiastic. ‘You’re not supposed to strangle me, dummy! You’re supposed to save me!’ Daniel would gasp when they finally reached the shallows.

  Even more important, though, were the various methods of artificial respiration. On several occasions Jonas almost cracked Daniel’s spine when practising the Holger Nielsen method on his brother – equally uncanny in his simulation of unconsciousness. Daniel drew the line, however, at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This last, as it happens, was a story in itself. In the autumn when Jonas was in fifth grade – in biology class, as was only right and proper – the whole class had the chance to practice giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dummy, or rather: the top half of a female by the name of Anna – a clean-living version, if you like, of the more notorious Blow-up Barbara – over whose mouth they placed a strip of plastic, for fear, perhaps, of being smitten with unmentionable diseases. If they tilted the head back and blew properly Anna’s chest would rise. Jonas was praised by the teacher for his attempt. Anna’s breasts jutted upwards like two pyramids under her blue tracksuit top. In his imagination Jonas saw how she must have tripped and fallen into the water while out jogging and how he had saved her from drowning with his life-giving breath.

  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 le
prosy, 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.