The Discoverer Read online

  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.’

  Rakel represented Jonas’s first encounter with a race which he would never understand: the bookworms of this world. Jonas simply could not comprehend how a book, a book with a title as innocuous as Out of My Life and Thought, could have such a powerful impact. Throughout her formative years Rakel had been an avid reader, the sort of child who had her nose buried in a library book even on the warmest of summer days. The light was invariably still burning on her side of the room when he went to sleep. She was quite capable of turning away boys at the door, when that time came. Then one day she simply got up, as if she had had enough of fiction, and went out into the real world. For good. Jonas could not rid himself – no matter how hard he tried – of a suspicion that the highly moral life she led was a natural consequence of all that reading; it would not have been possible without the ballast of thousands of tales.

  Whatever the case: if any Norwegian can be said to have done their bit to save lives, to relieve want, then it has to be Rakel W. Hansen: a woman deserving of any peace prize you could name. Jonas was downright proud of his sister. She was the most upright – the happiest – person he knew. Every time he looked at her he saw a face that said: I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live. So simple, so true. And hence so hard to accept. Jonas did his best, year after year, not to think about it, even when he arrived at the church and saw her mud-spattered black semi-trailer, an alien element – an almost extra-terrestrial object – among the parked cars. But in his heart of hearts he knew: she was the living, provocative proof that happiness lay in helping others.

  Jonas Wergeland sat in the organ loft in Grorud Church, playing the organ, feeling almost as if he were in the cab of Rakel’s colossus of a truck. He had the same lofty overview. Was in similar contact with tremendous power. He launched into the last verse of ‘Lead kindly light’, having first closed the swell box and pulled out the Oboe 8 and Gedact Principal 16 to produce an even warmer, richer sound. A comforting sound. He did not know that a bolt of orange lightning was about to strike, an event as unexpected and as inflammatory as him pulling out an unknown stop and suddenly introducing an incredibly dangerous and bewildering voice into the organ’s peal.

  The hymn came to an end. Daniel stepped up to the lectern, alongside the coffin. Jonas was struck by the symmetry of this arrangement. Two sons. The one playing the organ, the other officiating. One at the front and one at the back. Jonas had often asked himself how Daniel, that sex-obsessed Casanova, that rabble-rouser par excellence, could have ended up as a man of the cloth. Jonas recalled one Christmas in the early seventies when Daniel had stolen up to the organ during the sermon and pressed the button which set the church bells chiming. His father had been back in the vestry, reading a copy of the National Geographic. There was an awful row. ‘Why did you do it?’ the vicar had asked. ‘Because I wanted to protest against the American bombing of Vietnam!’ But now Daniel was himself a vicar, and did not expect to be interrupted. For once he did not spout a load of rubbish either. Jonas listened, deeply moved, to what his brother said about their father. A lot of people had asked if they might say a few words about Haakon Hansen, but their mother had said no to all of them. Daniel alone was to speak.

  In the mirror Jonas could see Daniel’s wife in one of the front pews, pregnant yet again and with three sons aged one, two and three crawling around her feet. Daniel must have been reared on ginseng. Or powdered rhinoceros horn. Jonas listened to his brother’s solemn eulogy, then all at once he smiled. A memory had come to him as he glanced to his right, at the point where the organ loft curved round. On that spot, for a number of years in his childhood, Daniel had stood with the Bermuda Triangle, the three ladies who led the congregation in the hymn-singing. Which was why, on a Saturday early in the summer between fifth and sixth grades, when they were on their way to Ingierstrand, he had been humming a snatch of a hymn – oddly enough it happened to be ‘Vain world, now farewell’. But this was not just any day, this was the day marked with a magnetic red ring on Daniel’s calendar. Not until they were on the bus was Jonas solemnly informed of the true objective of this expedition, as if they were commandos and the purpose of their mission could only now be revealed. They were headed for a bay on the other side of Ingierstrand. To a – pause for effect – nudist beach. Daniel gazed at Jonas with round, lustful eyes. Jonas never knew how his brother got wind of such things. He had even brought binoculars; he elbowed Jonas impatiently in the ribs when they got to their stop.

  As they walked, or more like tiptoed, through the grove of trees which lay between the road and the water, Daniel began to hum a snatch from another hymn, again one totally at odds with the situation: ‘Tread softly, o soul, and guard thy step’. He always hummed hymn tunes when he was thinking about girls, when he was feeling randy. There was a reason for this. He had once been told by a real hardliner of a vicar that the soul lay in the seed. This was, of course, something this clergyman of the old school said in order to persuade boys to control their urge to masturbate; he may not even have meant it literally. Daniel had, however, taken his words to heart. Some may laugh, forgetting, however, that many faiths take a far more complex view of the human seed than that held by the Lutheran school of sex education. In other words, Daniel had a problem, because he was probably the one person in the world least able to keep his hands to himself. If husbanding one’s semen was equivalent to husbanding one’s soul, possibly even in the sense of life, then Daniel W. Hansen was on very thin ice. The best diagnosis he could hope for was ‘permanently impaired spiritual faculties’.

  In other words, Daniel had an insatiable need for soul and as luck would have it, this was the very year when he discovered soul music. So whenever Jonas heard the vibrant, emotionally charged songs of artists such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or James Brown ringing out of the loudspeakers in Daniel’s room he knew that his brother had ‘sinned’. Daniel actually believed that he could recharge his batteries, replace lost spiritual energy by listening to soul music. Sometimes, when Jona
s came home from school and the two of them were alone in the house, he had the feeling that the air in there was positively seething, the door almost seemed to be bulging. Things were to get even worse, or better, a couple of years later when Aretha Franklin broke onto the scene. In her, Daniel found his saving grace, a woman who really knew how to pour out her soul, to give of her abundance. Jonas found it a bit spooky, his brother’s fascination with the First Lady of soul’s energetic, insistent and, not least, slyly sensual, nigh on orgiastic, music. Daniel bought every one of Aretha Franklin’s records. And when her live double album of gospel songs came out – an indisputable milestone in rock history, incidentally – there seemed to be only one thing for him to do: capitulate, start studying theology. He was fulfilled. His search, his hunger, for soul had led him to the ministry. Jonas always believed that soul music was the moving force behind Daniel’s subsequent fiery sermons and charismatic public performances, his ability to improvise and to wail ecstatically while repeating variations on the same words and phrases over and over again. Not for nothing was he famed for his way of ‘ministering to the soul’. It was said that women in particular flocked to him to discuss their most personal problems.

  Due to his newly awakened interest, or his need, for soul, Daniel had also begun – long before this – to sing with the three so-called lead singers, three women who stood up in the gallery alongside the organ and led the congregation in song. When Daniel and Jonas were little, their father had had to put up with three quavery elderly ladies whom Daniel dubbed The Syrups, because they did all they could, in their farcically shrill vibratos, to slow down the tempo of every hymn their father played; they were always a couple of beats behind the organ. Then one day, in their stead, three buxom young women showed up to lead the congregation in song; and there was nothing wrong with their timing; Daniel thought they really swung – they sang with soul – just like the gospel-inspired backing singers he could hear on certain soul records. He had to get in on the act, found an excuse to join them, to be up there among them, singing with them, even though his voice was not all that great. Basically Daniel just stood there mumbling as if in a trance, encircled by three heaving bosoms. He confessed to Jonas that it was an elevating experience; he called these three busty ladies the Bermuda Triangle, a name which had nothing to do with the Holy Triangle, but with triangles of a quite different nature, and of such a calibre that he felt he was about to be engulfed by them. Thus it came about that Daniel, probably quite unwittingly, took to humming fragments of hymn tunes from his career as a choirboy in the Bermuda Triangle – or comical, hybrid soul versions of them – at the prospect of erotic encounters. It occurred to Jonas that one really ought not to laugh at this: one should have a sense of ceremony, break into a hymn each time one made advances towards a woman.

  They had reached their destination. They lay on the hillside right on the edge of the nudist beach, looking down on what was, at this time, years before the opening of a naturist beach at Huk on the island of Bygdøy, the closest secret retreat for those who, for some strange reason, found it liberating to strut about in the altogether even though they knew they made the perfect sideshow for passers-by and other prying eyes. It left Jonas cold. There was nothing particularly arousing about all those naked bodies. Daniel, however, was of a different opinion.

  A bunch of kids were playing in the shallows, not far from shore. At one point, when Daniel went off in search of a kiosk or a shop, Jonas was looking through the binoculars when he saw a toddler – he couldn’t have been more than two – disappearing beneath the surface. The child was in the middle of the group of children, but nobody noticed him go under. To begin with Jonas thought that he couldn’t be in any real danger. And yet time slowed down. He was suddenly aware of everything around him, the bark of the fir trees, a fly, a boat far out in the fjord. The hum of voices on the beach seemed disturbingly loud, as if someone had turned up the volume button. The toddler resurfaced. Jonas relaxed, a great weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. His eyes ached from staring so hard. But then the boy vanished from view again. Jonas fumed with irritation. Not least at the hopelessly apathetic mothers who could sit there chatting, scratching their not very sexy boobs and indulging in tittle-tattle while their kids were quietly drowning. He forced himself to lie still. Surely somebody must have noticed. The drone of the flies reverberated like a pneumatic drill. The ground smelled like a chemist’s shop. Jonas surveyed the other adults lying round about, intent solely on exposing as much skin as possible to the sun. Into his head came pictures of basking sea lions. It dawned on him that of all the people nearby he was the only one – thanks, perhaps, to his binoculars – to have seen the boy go under. He knew he had to do something, but some form of acute modesty or shyness held him back. He did not like the idea of having to run through those ranks of shamelessly naked people, betraying the fact that he had been peeping at them on the sly. And what if his eyes had deceived him? He saw himself diving into the water, creating unnecessary panic, pictured everybody pointing, standing there, stark naked, laughing at him. Besides: this was not what he had been training for.

  At that moment Jonas learned something: it takes courage to realise your goals in life. You have to act, without fear of the consequences. He tossed the binoculars aside, leapt up. He ran for all he was worth: all those tedious boring 60-metre dashes in PE finally justified. He sprinted between two clusters of naked people, took the few metres into the shallows at a bound and plunged his hand into the water. It instantly made contact with a body, he hauled the child out. As he did so he noticed a bit of a stir on the shore: a woman, a naked woman, who had clearly only just begun to sense that something was wrong. How was that possible? was the thought that flashed through Jonas’s mind, but such things were possible, they happened all the time. He waded out of the water with a child in his arms. The child had been unconscious, but he started coughing and spluttering even before Jonas reached the shore: a thump on the back – administered by Jonas almost as an afterthought – was all it took. It was as far from giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a beautiful woman as he could get. This was not what he had been training for when he all but strangled Daniel and made Anna the dummy’s breasts jut upwards like two pyramids.

  It was swelteringly hot, even in just shorts and a T-shirt the sweat was running off him. All eyes were on him. Jonas handed the crying child to the woman, trying hard not to look down at her breasts. Or at the dark, somehow menacing, triangle further down. He interpreted the look she gave him as a question: what the hell was he doing here, on a nudist beach, fully clothed? Although he may have misunderstood. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Jonas had known, of course, that he was shy. But only now, with all these eyes on him, did he realise how shy. He had always dreamed of having an audience, but he had never given any thought to his own reaction when confronted with a crowd of people, especially not such a collection of eyewitnesses. He felt as if he were caught in a Bermuda triangle of sorts, on the point of disappearing. Later he was to wonder whether he had actually grown shy, really shy, been struck, as it were, by stage fright, at that moment. Or by that moment. Often, afterwards, when he found himself on a stage, he would picture the people in the audience without any clothes on. ‘How come you’re so shy?’ a girl once asked him. He had not replied, although he had felt like saying: ‘Because I once had to save a life.’

  Jonas walked off. Not another word had been said. People may not have thought there was any real danger. But Jonas knew that child would have drowned had not he, Jonas, been there just then. Did he feel proud, pleased? No. There had been something devastatingly unheroic about the whole deed. The setting for his act of heroism had been as wrong as it could possibly be. What bothered Jonas most of all was the fact of how easy it had been. How light the child had felt when he picked him up. As if he had overestimated the task, the weightiness of life. ‘What’s the matter, you’re shaking like a leaf?’ Daniel said when he g
ot back, and handed his brother an ice cream. ‘I saved a child’s life,’ Jonas said with a sheepish grin. ‘Great,’ Daniel said, thinking it was a joke. ‘Come on, let’s go over to Ingierstrand instead. I passed a couple of real dolls just up the road.’ He started fervently humming a hymn. As far as Jonas could tell it was a mangled soul rendering of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

  Jonas went through the rest of that day feeling hollow inside. It took him a while to sort out how exactly he felt. What was it that was wrong? He knew, though: he was eleven years old and he had attained his goal. Where do you go once you’ve reached the mountain top? He had nothing left to live for. What was he supposed to do for the next eighty years? What an anticlimax: all that swimming and diving practice – and all you have to do is to wade out knee-deep and stick a hand into the water. He remembered an incident involving his mother. She had been sitting at the coffee table, doing the most difficult game of patience, one she must have played thousands of times before without getting it to work out. And suddenly it came out right. As Jonas recalled, his mother had seemed not happy, but sad. That was how he felt after that day at Ingierstrand. Eleven years old, he thought; eleven years old and my life is over.

  Jonas Wergeland sat high in a hallowed hall, in an organ loft which also offered a wonderfully clear prospect of the past. Daniel, that erstwhile soul freak, stood at the front of the church. Jonas listened to him praying, listened to him reading texts from the Bible, about vanity, but also about hope. Jonas kept one eye on his brother in the mirror as he reflected once again on his own reaction to his life-saving exploit. He felt some of that same hollowness now, though for a different reason. He had a vague sense of being dead. Felt as though he had actually been dead for years. That he was present, not at his father’s funeral, but at his own. He was dead because he had lost sight of a gift, lost sight of a goal in life. He was not yet thirty, but he had given up, or settled for second best. Second worst. Had he been asleep? Or was this simply a result of the shyness with which he had, for the first time, been overcome on that beach, faced with all those naked people? Because even though he may have maintained, unconsciously at least, a desire to ‘make a name for himself’, this shyness had long stifled any urge to expose himself to view. As an announcer he had, however, found himself a little cubbyhole where no one could see him and yet everyone could see him. He was alone with a camera lens, while at the same time entering a million living rooms. It was not unlike being an organist: he could stay out of sight while at the same time making the church tremble with his playing, making everyone quiver with emotion.