The Discoverer Read online

  Sitting there on the organ bench in the church of his childhood, Jonas Wergeland saw that what he had taken for contentment was, in fact, a state of torpor. For a surprisingly long time he had managed to ignore the question of whether he was making the best use of his talents. He was recognised on the street, he was forever seeing his own name – if not in lights, then certainly in newsprint – but that day, at his father’s funeral, he realised that his life was a huge anticlimax.

  Jonas looked in the mirror. He saw his brother glance up at the gallery and launched into the opening chords of ‘Thine is the Glory’. Daniel had suggested ‘Abide with me’ but their mother wanted no hymns about eventide, insisted, instead, on ‘Thine is the Glory’, a song of praise. And Jonas had agreed, not least because it gave him the chance to play the wonderful melody from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus.

  The man at the centre of it all, his father, lying in his coffin, had died on the job. It had happened late one afternoon. Someone had been walking past the church and heard a great roar coming from it – the building had been positively shaking: it had sounded as though an enormous engine was running at full power in there. This seemed so odd that the vicar was called. He opened the door to be met by an ear-splitting din. It was coming from the organ. In the gallery they found Haakon Hansen, dead. Heart attack. He had slipped off the bench and under the console and lay across the pedal board as if he were asleep. Not that anyone could have slept with such a racket going on. The cluster chord of bass notes produced by the pressure of his father’s body on the row of pedals shook the whole church to its foundations, like an earthquake almost. ‘He looked as though he was hovering, like a fakir on a bed of notes,’ the vicar told Jonas. It was a fitting end. That was how a musician ought to die, Jonas thought. With the organ playing full blast. Everyone should exit this life – all those who had loved it, at any rate – to the accompaniment of just such a resounding peal of protest. If, that is, it ought not to be construed as a fanfare, bidding death welcome. Haakon Hansen had involuntarily composed his own requiem.

  Jonas’s father had always said he would die at the organ. Most people do reflect, from time to time, on where and how they would like to die. As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned one thing was for sure: he did not want to meet his end as he had once been certain he would: far out to sea, with no chance of rescuing himself, for all his life-saving practice.

  It had started out well enough. Despite a bit of a breeze it had been a perfect afternoon in Krukehavn, over on Hvasser. Jonas was down on the jetty where the pilot boats were moored, he was sitting reading about Venus, and although he was not looking up his eye was caught by a green object – the light made it shine like a precious gem – drifting towards him, bobbing up and down. Even at a distance he spotted the piece of paper inside it and instantly fell to daydreaming about dramatic missives from far-off lands, about the possible, subsequent headlines: ‘Message in a bottle from the Falklands’, or better still: ‘Young man receives gift of a million from Argentinian cattle baron’. That, too, would be a way of making a name for oneself. By sheer luck, pure coincidence.

  He clambered down to the water, fished out the bottle. The cork was only half-in, so there was little chance of it having come from Buenos Aires. ‘Bound for World’s End’ it said on the piece of paper he pulled out. Nothing else. In a neat hand. He turned to look back – towards the southern tip of the island, known as World’s End – only to be blinded by sunlight. Someone was bouncing it off a mirror at him. He could see nothing except this tiny, dazzling sun dancing in the hand of a person on a jetty a little way off. Then the light went out. Through the binoculars which had, the previous autumn, enabled him to see the moons of Jupiter for the first time he spied a figure, a girl, waving to him. He picked up his book, strolled ashore and along to her jetty. Why did I do it? he would ask himself later. Because I let myself be dazzled?

  By the time he reached the girl he had managed to get a pretty good look at her: T-shirt, shorts, bare feet – the only unusual touch was her hat, a white cap with a black skip like the ones worn by naval officers. She was laughing. ‘Nice one,’ he said, nodding at the mirror she still held in her hand. ‘I usually let people know when I want them to give me the sun. So, what was that note about?’

  ‘I heard you were looking for a berth.’

  ‘I’m going further than World’s End,’ he said.

  ‘I like a boy with ambition,’ she said, pointing at the binoculars round his neck. ‘I’ll take you wherever you want to go.’

  ‘Across the fjord?’

  ‘I’ll be getting under way in a minute.’

  ‘Now?’ he said. ‘But it’ll be night soon.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off her navel. Her T-shirt stopped shy of the waistband of her shorts, exposing her belly button: a small, mesmerisingly black hollow in her midriff, but one which was, nonetheless big enough for Jonas to feel that he could get lost in there. It struck him that he was more attracted to this hollow than to her. He gazed and gazed at it as if he had just discovered an unknown planet, here on Earth. He felt as if he was swirling round and round, as if everything – his eyes, his reason – was being drawn into a deliciously prurient vortex.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared,’ she said. To Jonas it sounded like downright ventriloquism. Her words issued straight from her navel.

  ‘It’s too windy,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s afraid of a bit of a blow,’ she said.

  ‘It’s blowing pretty hard, I’d say,’ he replied. He knew he shouldn’t have said this. She smiled, lowered her eyes to his crotch. He was a little embarrassed by her directness. He looked up at the pennants smacking against their flagpoles. These and the swaying trees further up the beach gave plenty of cause for concern.

  ‘What have you brought with you?’ she asked.

  ‘I own no more than I can carry, I am a nomad.’ He jabbed a thumb at the rucksack slung over one shoulder, then realised that might not be what she meant. That this could be an existential question. That she was actually asking: ‘Who are you? Show me something from your civilisation.’ He handed her the book he was carrying, a textbook on the planetary system; he was reading up in preparation for the new term and course A 106 at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. She riffled through it briefly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There’s no knowing when this sort of thing might come in handy at sea.’ She shot a glance skywards. ‘You’ll see stars tonight, alright.’ Everything she said still seemed to him to have a double meaning.

  Beside them lay a Knarr, a thirty-foot wooden boat, sturdy and reassuring, but at the same time slender and graceful. It stood out, it had a regal, a noble, air about it, as did she. ‘São Gabriel,’ Jonas read. She saw him start. ‘Didn’t you pay attention in school? Vasco da Gama’s flagship?’ she said.

  But he was beyond paying attention now; he had been bewitched by a belly button, tossed into a whirlpool. They left Hvasser behind so quickly that he scarcely realised what was happening. Half an hour later it was all he could do just to hang on tight, they were moving too fast for his liking, the waves were too high, there was altogether too much foaming and frothing and surging and sighing going on round about him. Not only that, but it would be dark soon. Instinctively he held his breath, as if he were already under water. He knew that he had embarked upon an undertaking which he might well regret, or might never have the chance to regret, since he was in fact going to die, out here, in the middle of a storm-tossed sea.

  ‘Death is simple,’ his father had once told him. ‘You breathe out. You don’t breathe in. That’s all there is to it.’ After a while he had added: ‘Do you know why organ music is so beautiful? Because it’s a sustained act of dying, pure expiration.’

  Jonas had noticed the piece which his father had been rehearsing when he died. Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in A minor. It seemed so apt: to be playing a prelude at the moment of your death, an overture as postlude.

  Bo Wang Lee was the first to ask the question
which Jonas Wergeland would later consider to represent the very crux of existence: what should you take with you. It was a question which could be applied at all levels. What, for example, should one take to one’s death? The day before the funeral, Jonas had lingered by his father’s open casket long after the rest of the family had gone. There his father lay, in a dark suit, as if he were taking a nap before a party, or prior to some important engagement. A journey. What should he take with him? Somewhere in Africa, so Jonas had heard, coffins were designed as tributes to the deceased. A fisherman was given a coffin shaped like a blue tuna fish, a chief was laid to rest in a golden eagle. Haakon Hansen deserved more than a neutral white coffin. A kayak, perhaps. Jonas placed his father’s worn organ-playing shoes in the coffin, along with a book containing Bach’s six trio sonatas. A volume of the National Geographic also found favour in Jonas’s eyes.

  What should you take with you? What was life?

  The last notes of ‘Thine be the Glory’ faded away. The woman in orange had yet to make her appearance. Daniel began his address to the bereaved. Jonas crept over to the corner of the gallery from which, as a child, he had so often dropped bits of paper onto people’s heads. His eye went to the front pew, to his mother who seemed remarkably small all of a sudden, shrunken. Jonas had three decades of living behind him, but only now did he see it. He had got it all wrong. He had always regarded his mother as the more active of the two; she was the one who saw to the social side of things, who invited people over, organised parties, while his father was the quiet, reserved one, with few friends. Not for nothing had Jonas at a certain point in his life taken his mother’s maiden name, Wergeland. His mother was high days and holidays, his father was the bedrock and the humdrum. Jonas had the impression that his father would have liked to be alone, that he longed to lead a monastic life. He was, at any rate, an out-and-out individualist, a man who wanted to be his own symphony orchestra. Now and again it had even crossed Jonas’s mind that his father was, to some extent, a loser. Secretly, Jonas felt sorry for him. Which was also why he loved his father so much. But now. All these people. Over a thousand of them. This day showed that he might have been totally mistaken about his parents and their respective roles.

  And then, as his thoughts drift off down their own path, his eye is drawn to something, a hub, something inescapable, which he does not at first see, then suddenly spies: Margrete. A large M on a black wall. He starts, amazed that her magnetic attraction should be so strong even when he is seeing her from behind. She is sitting right below the pulpit with Kristin, their daughter. Margrete was wearing one of her strings of pearls. ‘I think your father would like it,’ she had said when Jonas had wrinkled up his nose at the gleaming white necklace. At first he couldn’t think why he had started at the sight of his wife. He looked at the nape of Margrete’s neck, noting how clearly it testified to this woman’s uncommonly upright carriage. But at the same time he noticed something else, so plainly that he would never be able to dismiss it. He saw how vulnerable it looked. More vulnerable when viewed from here than at close quarters. All at once he understood why he had been so startled: if he knew so little about his father, how much did he really know about Margrete? Later, it would seem to Jonas that things had been arranged thus for just this purpose: that he should be up in the organ loft and catch sight of Margrete’s long neck, adorned with pearls; as if he would never have discovered it, that tremendous vulnerability, had he not been observing her from so far away, and on such an occasion, with his father lying in his coffin, dead. Jonas was struck by a feeling – which he promptly fended off – that it all came down to her, even this funeral; that the centre lay here, at the nape of her neck, not up at the altar, not at his father’s coffin.

  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, a
s 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.