The Discoverer

Jupiter

Behold this man. Behold this man, as he feels three tugs on the rope and slowly, after smiling uncertainly, proceeds to traverse, to edge out onto those dauntingly airy galleries. Behold this man as he inches across the rock face; see how with the caution of the novice he feels his way forward using all of his limbs, his whole body in fact, before shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I can sense how frightened, how truly terrified he is, and yet how full of the determination to do this, to see it through, make it to the top. And then, suddenly, as if something has ground to a halt, he freezes. He shuts his eyes. He looks as though he is listening to the wind, while at the same time concentrating hard, trying to place the scent emanating from the rock against which he is pressed. The bright sunlight glitters off the cliff face, sparkles in the runnels of meltwater. As far as I can see he is holding his breath. I have known it all along. This is the moment of truth. On a ledge, with a drop of hundreds of metres into the abyss only a step away. Here you live, or you die.

This is a second I shall remember.

Then he does the one thing I have begged him not to do. He half turns, while apparently hanging on tight with both hands. He looks out. Looks down. As if intent on defying something. Proving something. For a moment he seems to be completely dazzled by the Slingsby glacier far below. Or no, not dazzled, but stunned, panic-stricken. Psyched out, as they say. I refuse to believe it. That this man could be afraid of anything, a man who brought thousands of cars to a halt on Oslo’s Town Hall Square and who, by his mere presence, drew a cyclone to himself; a man who has been with three fair maids at once and who would not hesitate to dive to a depth of fifteen metres without an oxygen tank. Yet he hangs there, rigid. Still holding his breath. Or am I wrong? Does he bend down ever so slightly? I think — I know it sounds strange, but I almost believe he is trying to kneel.

One hand fumbles with the knot, as if he means to undo himself from the rope. ‘Sit!’ I call sharply. ‘Don’t look down.’ But he goes on staring, seeming more mesmerised than frightened now. Or infuriated perhaps, contemptuous. As if this were a set-to with Norway itself, a confrontation for which he has waited years — to stand on the edge of an abyss, without a safety net. I can see temptation written large on his face. He could let himself fall. He could realise the cliché which will forever be attached to his story: that of his downfall. The final, glorious headline.

‘You’re perfectly safe,’ I shout. ‘It’s all in your head.’ I’m jittery too now, I check that the coil of rope is securely fixed around the sharp rock next to me. I know I can trust Martin, who has led the way, hammering in pitons at regular intervals, and is now out of sight behind some large boulders, a short rope-length from the bottom of the chimney. Martin has climbed everything from the Bonatti pillar to Ama Dablam. But never with such a partner, a man who — according to the newspapers — lost his head and shot a woman straight through the heart. I am uneasy. The uncertainty of the figure huddled against the rock face radiates towards me. I may have miscalculated. Perhaps I should have said no after all. Then he turns to me. His face is calm. I can see that he is breathing, drawing the cool mountain air deep into his lungs, hungrily. He smiles, even raises his hand in a wave, traverses onwards.

Behold this man. Behold this man, the bearer of a mystery.

The rest of the climb went well, remarkably well. Down by the stone cottage at Bandet earlier that day I had been worried. A couple of times on the way up the ridge, on the toughest, most exposed stretch, I had considered turning back. I could see that he was gasping for breath, he looked a little lightheaded. The air was keen and thin. Over one stretch we secured our passage with a length of rope — mainly for his sake — and when we started climbing again he dislodged a rock which went clattering down the mountainside, leaving a whiff of gunpowder behind it. An omen. His fleece clothes and the harness made him look like a child — truly, in this situation, like a helpless child. And, funnily enough, I felt responsible for him.

‘Aren’t you a little afraid of heights?’ I had asked him when we set out from Turtagrø that morning.

‘I used to be. I’m a different person now,’ he said.

We reached Hjørnet — the Corner, slipped off our rucksacks. It was early in the season, and there was more snow than I was used to. Wetter and dirtier. We wouldn’t be able to switch to climbing shoes. It went fine, though, with no great problems — even over the few metres of real climbing up the Heftyes Renne, transformed now into a chill, slippery, icy chimney.

We reached the top around midday. I shall never forget the look of triumph on his face, the way he stretched his arms up and out. To the spring sky. All those years inside. Down. And now, only a couple of years after that first intoxicating taste of freedom: on the roof of Norway. Right at the very top. Everything below us seemed much lower, markedly so. I heard him murmur, partly to us, partly to himself: ‘I never thought I would make it.’ And a moment later: ‘But I knew I had it in me.’

We sat down beside the little cairn. He studied the commemorative plaque fixed to the stone as if expecting to find his name inscribed there. There too. I took the landscape shots I needed. He said not a word, just sat there looking at the view, could not seem to get enough of this, the most spectacular panorama in Norway. The massive Jostedal Glacier, Galdhøpiggen and Glittertind and all the other peaks of Jotunheimen. Alpine forms with peaks and crests, carved and gouged out by the ice. ‘Organ pipes,’ he muttered suddenly. ‘This has to be the world’s biggest organ, listen to the wind!’ From the massif on which we sat, two jagged ridges wound off like petrified vertebrae. ‘What are they?’ he asked. ‘Kjerringa og Mannen,’ I said — the Woman and the Man — and instantly regretted it. A strange look came over his face.

Behold this man.

We prepared for the downward journey. Just as I was wondering how he was going to cope with the abseiling, he turned the wrong way, towards the sheer drop to Skagadalen. I was about to call out, but the cry stuck in my throat. He stretched his arms out to the sides, as if about to do a swallow dive.

Why did he do it?

One has to start somewhere, and a good, not to say almost perfect, departure point — or even, to stick with the climbing motif: viewpoint — from which to examine Jonas Wergeland’s life would be another stony edifice, another gallery, a hallowed hall, a room with walls of granite, and an autumn day in the 1980s — an autumn day which would bring with it deep sorrow and wistful joy, as well as a strange mystery, an incident bordering on the scandalous. Nor is it entirely inappropriate that Jonas should be at the organ, an instrument befitting his history and the power which for so long he had exerted over the minds, not to say the souls, of the Norwegian people. Jonas Wergeland is playing the organ, framed by its gleaming, monumental face, making the whole church tremble with his playing, making the very stone, the bedrock of Norway, sing. He is not an organist, but he handles the instrument almost like a professional musician; he is an organist by nature, he might have been made for this part, this pose. No wonder he once replied when asked, in Samarkand, what he did for a living: ‘I am an organist.’

Scarcely an hour earlier, after collecting a pile of sheet music, he had closed the gate of the house he would soon be moving into and which people would dub Villa Wergeland, and set off down the road he had walked every day of his childhood. Wherever he turned his eye he risked becoming lost in memories: a life-threatening bonfire, the windows Ivan broke, the wallet in the ditch which brought him a heaven-sent fifty krone-reward, the magnetic, nipple-shaped doorbell on the front door of Anne Beate Corneliussen’s building. He sauntered along, wishing to prolong the poignant aspect of the moment. There was a strange mood in the air too. It felt as though there was no longer anyone living in the houses he passed. Even the shops looked deserted. It was an exceptionally dull day. Damp. The last leaves had fallen from the trees. The ground was covered with an indeterminate gunge, as if after an incredibly drunken party. The blocks of flats and the shopping centre reminded him of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union. The whole of life seemed suddenly drab and dreary. And yet — in spite of all this — he felt hopeful. As if he knew that behind all the greyness lay something else, something surprising. Something is about to happen, he told himself.

As his eye was drawn to a couple of solitary clusters of rowan berries, two rosy, bright spots in all the greyness, he found himself thinking of another grey day in his life. The year before, off his own bat, he had gone to Moscow with a friend and colleague from the NRK purchasing department who was attending a television conference there. They had stayed at the Hotel Ukraine, one of Stalin’s seven so-called ‘wedding-cake’ buildings from the fifties, all of which looked like squat, bulky versions of the Empire State Building. One morning he had crossed the grey River Moscow, meaning to walk to the Kremlin. Ahead of him lay Kalinina Avenue, broad and surprisingly empty-looking, despite the cars. The weather was clear, but a haze still managed to leach everything of colour. The distances seemed enormous, and almost in order to escape from those vast, empty spaces thick with the fumes from low-octane petrol, he took a right turn which led him into some narrower streets. Here he found more people. Women in headscarves, carrying baskets. And there were queues. Two in one short stretch. For eggs, perhaps, he thought. Or toilet paper? To these people, even the magazines he had bought at Fornebu airport, with their glossy adverts, would be objects as rare as rocks from the moon. He walked along, looking and looking, trying to take in the dreariness around him. Brown, grey, black. Hulking, homogenous buildings. Everything covered in a thin layer of grime. He fancied that he was wandering through a sort of populated desert. Always, when he came to a new place, he went exploring. As a small boy he had transformed every house he visited into an unknown continent. He was a Columbus, stepping ashore. The threshold was a beach. The hallway a jungle, the stairs a mountain, every cupboard a cave. But Moscow: so gloomy, so dispiritingly vast. This was obviously not a city one simply strolled through. Best be getting back, he thought, before I am engulfed by all this greyness.

The problem was, however, that he no longer knew where he was. And as if that weren’t enough, he desperately needed to go to the toilet. He cursed his bad habit of drinking too much coffee at lunchtime, while casting about in hopes of finding some building that was open to the public. He fell in with a stream of people who seemed to have been caught by a current and were being swept towards a façade with a large M over the doors. He had always liked the letter M, took this to be a good omen. He was not prepared, however, for the sight which met his eyes, for the way the stony desert gave way to a shimmering oasis.

In his mind he was in Moscow, in reality he was approaching Grorud shopping centre, casting a nostalgic glance in the direction of Wolfgang Michaelsen’s garden where every autumn as boys they had gone scrumping for glossy, green apples so juicy and so sweet that they even merited running the risk of the Michaelsens’ Rottweiler getting loose. There was a slight haze in the air, the sort of autumn mist that quickens the senses and which, rather than concealing things, seemed to bring them closer, even things that were a long way off. Chet Baker weather, he thought to himself. He felt nervous. Before him lay a sight which triggered memories of childhood theatricals, packed gym halls. The fluttering in his stomach might otherwise have been attributed to his own misgivings, a dawning sense of having come to a dead end. In his life. The problem had to do with his work at NRK TV. He was an announcer, and popular. And yet he wasn’t happy. He did not understand it. At some point in his life he had abandoned all of the goals he had set for himself as a youth. He had thrown in the towel halfway through a course in architecture, having previously dropped out of a course in astrophysics. By chance — and not really caring one way or the other — he had allowed himself to be led into a tiny television studio. For many years he had been more than happy with his good fortune, with having found a job where he could do so little, and yet, it appeared, mean so much to so many. But now it seemed that an old ambition was once more stirring. Something he had forgotten. Wanted to forget. His conscience still pricked him. He caught himself looking for a loophole, a way out, a way forward. Which may have been why now, on this day especially, despite his sense of confusion, he suddenly felt optimistic. He had a strong feeling that something awaited him. That it was only minutes away. That something, a curtain, would be pulled back and something else, he did not know what, would be revealed.

As in Moscow. Because, when he penetrated beyond the grey façade with the steel M over the doors it was like stepping into the foyer of a theatre. As though someone up in the flies had dropped a richly hued stage set into place right before his very eyes. He walked along broad, brightly lit corridors, gazing round about him in disbelief; found a toilet without any problem. He had always set a lot of store by mazes and the possibilities these presented. You set out to sail to India, and wind up instead on an unknown continent. You go looking for a toilet and stumble upon a metro station, a veritable treasure house. He seized his chance, followed the crowd, popped a five kopek coin in the slot and passed through the barrier. Moments later he was being transported down into the bowels of the earth on the steepest, longest escalator he had ever ridden, a wooden one, at that; then he found himself in a vast, glittering white chamber hung with magnificent chandeliers. A sunken palace. He was Alice in Wonderland, the victim of a supernatural occurrence. He took the hall in which he found himself for a glittering ballroom until a train came rushing in and stopped right in front of him.

Out of sheer curiosity he hopped on, only to alight at the next station — Plostsjad Revoljutsii, he later learned: Revolution Square. It was like entering a museum. The station concourse was full of bronze sculptures. As far as he could tell, they represented the different trades. He was about to take a closer look at a statue of a sailor when he almost bumped into a shabby-looking character sweeping the floor. The man stopped, leaned on his brush and examined Jonas. The look he gave him contrasted sharply with his down-at-heel appearance. Keen eyes studied the small Norwegian flag which Jonas was wearing in his lapel while in Moscow, a badge intended to serve much the same purpose as the tag on a dog collar: indicating which embassy to contact were he to collapse in the street. The cleaner stood for a while staring into space, as if deep in thought. Then: ‘Gustav Vigeland,’ he said at length, extending his arms to the statues round about them. Jonas nodded. There were certain similarities. ‘Gustav Vigeland,’ he responded. These two words pretty much said it all. Forged a bond between them. Encapsulated a whole story. Or so Jonas thought, until the Russian leaned towards him: ‘Fascism!’ he hissed, pointing eloquently at the sculptures. Jonas smiled uncertainly, tried to nod politely before continuing his tour. This man could easily be a professor of art, he thought, but now here he is, sweeping railway platforms for holding certain incorrect opinions on art.

Jonas was right underneath Red Square, but he was not interested in taking the escalator up, out. Why see Lenin’s tomb when he could see this? He wanted to stay down here in this brilliantly illuminated secret. Here, in Moscow, they had built their sculpture parks underground. Jonas wandered on and off trains for hours, endeavouring to see as many stations as possible. A subterranean grand tour, he thought to himself. Proof that man had evolved beyond the caveman stage. He strolled through halls faced with every sort of polished stone, a genuine geological museum. Everything was spotlessly clean. Jonas walked upon gleaming tiles, down colonnades, amid copper and steel, surveying all manner of ornamentation: mosaics, reliefs, stained glass, statues of pilots and scientists. All of this decoration sprang from the ideal of bringing art to the people. He thought of his brother’s favourite writer, Agnar Mykle: ‘Socialism is clean bodies and classical music in the factories.’ And art in the metro stations, Jonas might have added. During his visit, Jonas came across nothing that told him more about the Soviet state and, not least, its part in the last war. He had seen something like this before: the Town Hall in Oslo. He went on walking and thinking, considering. What, today, was the greatest public space? Might it not be television, the box, the square common to all. In other words: wasn’t that the place for art — in palaces of a sort, beamed into people’s living rooms?

After a while he began to discover crossover points between lines, eventually he even found one line that ran in a circle. He would have liked to stay down there for days, becoming part of the network, until he realised that he had reached Kievskaja station, a short step from his hotel. Later he would study the patterns on the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral and visit the Kremlin with all its undreamt-of treasures; he would see monasteries and churches with incandescent icons and glittering domes, but for Jonas Wergeland nothing could compare with what he had experienced, the sights he had seen, in the underground: a maze of sunken palaces. ‘In Moscow,’ he would later say, ‘I learned that sometimes you have to go down into the depths in order to see the light.’

As he left Grorud station behind him, something told him that the Moscow experience was about to repeat itself, that something which had until now lain hidden awaited him. His current job with NRK was also the happy outcome of a story about going astray. In many ways it was the tale of needing the loo and making, therefore, a bit of a detour only, when all but sitting on the toilet, to be offered the chance to fill a vacancy. Now, though, he suspected that there was a sequel to this story, that his job as an announcer was merely the first — possibly dull — stage along a path that might almost have been said to lead to sunken palaces.

This suspicion was confirmed a moment later when he pushed open the main door of the church and that lofty room lay before him, suddenly much warmer, much brighter, much richer in scents and sensations than before. Myrrh, the thought flashed through his mind. Like a child in Sunday school, sticking goldfish onto a drawing of a fishing net in a book. Like Christmas Eve, he thought, in the days when the church was still a place filled with anticipation, with swelling organ music and coloured light from stained-glass windows. In the days before anyone told you there was no God.

Jonas Wergeland was playing the organ. Or rather: not playing, but weaving, playing Johann Sebastian Bach, causing transparent worlds to pour from the organ casing, causing a succession of veils to drop down over the lofty room. His thoughts flew in all directions. Forward in time. Back in time. Often, on his way home from school or from piano lessons he had popped into the church, where his father was the organist. On a couple of occasions — during serious crises in his life — he had lain on the red carpet in front of the altar, feeling as though he were dead. Then his father had played, usually fugues, and he had walked out again like a soul resurrected. To Jonas it seemed that his father played life into him. Blew life into a dead thing. ‘This is a control centre,’ his father had said, pointing to the instrument’s complicated keyboard. Jonas was more inclined to call it a rescue centre. He did not think of his father as an organist, but as a lifesaver. Maybe that was why, at an early age, he decided that this was what he, too, would be.

Jonas Wergeland sat on the organ bench in the church of his childhood, playing, weaving music into being, weaving thoughts into being, smiling as he pictured his mother’s horrified face, the look that met him when, as a boy, he shot up from the bottom of the bath gulping for air. She never spotted Daniel — a reassuring element — until it was too late. His brother would be perched on the toilet seat in the corner with the stopwatch they used when they went skating or lay in front of the radio listening to broadcasts of various sporting championships, as if they did not trust the lap times and final results quoted by the commentators.

‘Blast!’ Daniel always exclaimed, in dismay and delight — heedless of his mother’s stricken expression. ‘He flippin’ well did it again. A minute and a half.’

‘You owe me five krone,’ Jonas would gasp, his face tinged with blue, not altogether unlike the image of Krishna in Indian paintings.

Åse Hansen, normally the most even-tempered member of the family, remarkable for her stoic composure even when Rakel did not come home from parties or some ill-mannered relative ruined a Christmas dinner, was for a long time worried sick every time Jonas sneaked off to the bathroom and she heard the water start to run. It played merry hell with her nerves to know that if she peeked round the door she would see her son lying at the bottom of a full bathtub, holding his breath until his lungs screamed for oxygen. One day, when she could no longer turn a blind eye, she flung open the door just as Jonas’s head burst to the surface, with him coughing and spluttering from all the water he had swallowed. She gave him a telling off, asked him why on earth he was doing this.

‘I’m practising,’ he wheezed.

‘For what?’

‘To save lives.’

Well, there was really no arguing with that. His mother sniffed some remark or other and closed the door, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. But Jonas was in deadly earnest. Ahead of him lay a summer during which he would establish his goal in life. He practised with all the perseverance of the perfectionist. And he became very good.

Some people go through life without sparing the most profound existential questions more than an occasional heavy sigh. They want simply to live. Not to live for anything. For them it is enough just to scrape some money together, to seduce someone. And if that doesn’t do it, you can always go parachuting. To what extent such people are fortunate is not something we will go into here, because Jonas Wergeland belonged to another branch of humanity, to that group who from a very early age, possibly a little too early, begin to reflect on the purpose and the meaning of life. Jonas found this question as obscure as it was, for Daniel, crystal-clear: as far as his older brother was concerned the whole point of life was to be the best. At everything, no matter what. Daniel belonged to that category of Norwegian who from the moment they were born seemed intent on dedicating their lives to proving the truth of Gro Harlem Brundtland’s later assertion that ‘it is typically Norwegian to be good’. For Daniel, the whole point was to be able to ascend the winner’s rostrum, be it a high one like Mount Everest or a low-lying one like a woman’s mount of Venus.

Jonas, on the other hand, had come to the conclusion that the purpose of life was to make a name for oneself — the reason for this need be nothing more mysterious than that he was distantly related to the people in the Book of Genesis. Although, it could of course also have had something to do with the fact that he liked to walk around town looking at all the shop signs: Ingwald Nielsen, Thv. L. Holm. At night some names, such as that of Ferner Jacobsen, were even written in neon. He could stand for ages on Egertorg, staring at the jeweller’s where Aunt Laura had begun her career, admiring the lettering proclaiming DAVID ANDERSEN. More than fame itself, Jonas longed to see his name in lights. The world would read his name and know that it stood for something of great worth, right up there alongside silver, gold and precious stones.

Jonas considered many different options. For some weeks — apropos this business with the names — he was quite convinced that the whole purpose of life was to have a dish called after one. He had long been used to hearing people refer to such culinary delights as Janson’s Temptation or beef à la Lindström: names which might not conjure up images of silver or gold, but which certainly made the mouth water. His mother was surprised by the interest displayed by her younger son in the kitchen. But after several unsuccessful, scorched attempts at what he called a Jonas cake: a concoction involving bananas, cardamom and liquorice gums which had Daniel, his guinea pig, hanging over the toilet, throwing up — he started to think bigger.

How could anyone have missed it? All those books, a whole sea of articles and reports on Jonas Wergeland — and no one has mentioned the real prime motive behind everything he did. Because the fact is that Jonas made up his mind in the spring of the year when he turned ten. As he saw it, the answer to the question of the fundamental reason for living obviously had to be related to life itself: it was, quite simply, to save lives. Jonas made the sort of secret, solemn decision of which only a child is capable. One day, he vowed, he would save someone’s life. Most children do not give much thought to what they will be when they grow up. Even when coming out with the expected ‘A policeman!’ or ‘A ship’s captain!’ they are really not that interested. It is too abstract a concept. But Jonas meant it with all his heart when, in response to the grown-ups’ questions, he declared: ‘I’m going to be a lifesaver.’

From the very start he knew it would have to do with water. With drowning. He could not picture himself reaching out a hand to stop a runaway pram from careering downhill onto the electrified rails of the new subway line, all but stifling a yawn as he did so, or nonchalantly sticking out a foot to prevent some brat on a sledge from sliding into the path of a big truck. No, it would have to be something more spectacular. A real act of heroism. Preferably with masses of spectators. Grandstands full. He toyed for a while with fire as an alternative; in his mind he saw himself rescuing a woman from the licking flames in a burning building; pictured himself dashing out, coughing, his eyebrows singed, with the woman in his arms, just as the fire engines drove up with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring and the whole edifice collapsed in a deadly inferno behind him. In his imagination, the woman was always wearing lacy underwear and had her arms wrapped tightly around him, a reward greater than seeing his name — inscribed in letters of fire, so to speak — on any ‘Norwegian Fire Protection Diploma of Honour’.

But training for such an eventuality was not easy, and Jonas realised that it would have to be water — even though this was several decades before television series about lifeguards would become such a hit. For Jonas, this conviction went hand in hand with the knowledge that he was in possession of an extraordinary gift: it could not be for nothing that he had been endowed with his almost uncanny ability to hold his breath. Some day, possibly a cold winter’s day, in front of a stunned crowd, he would have to dive off a quayside to save a child that had fallen in and was lying many metres below the surface. There might even be ice, and he would have to find his way back to a little hole in it, like a seal. Shouts and cheers. Banner headlines. His name in shining letters. ‘Boy risks his own life’. The classic life-saving exploit. The sort of thing for which people were awarded the Carnegie Medal. Some day the call would come and he had to be ready. In his daydreams the child was usually a girl, a lass with wet hair and lacklustre eyes which, nonetheless, were turned up to him in a look of eternal gratitude.

Jonas trained with single-minded determination. Held his breath on the walk to school, held his breath in the classroom, held his breath before he went to sleep. He thought the hour of his great deed lay far in the future, that he would have to be patient. And then, only a year after he has made up his mind to be a lifesaver, with his basic training barely completed, it is upon him. The accident occurs on a day when he is totally unprepared for it, a day when he has almost forgotten about it or is, at any rate, thinking about something else. A day when the aim is not to save a life, but to see as many naked women as possible.

Jonas Wergeland sat on the organ bench. Remembered a dream he had put out of his mind, rejected as being far too naïve. Of being a lifesaver. The first time his father had taken him behind the organ and shown him the fan and the bellows it had reminded him of breathing, of being able to control your breath. Jonas thought, wove, his playing suddenly more inspired, as if he really could save lives, breathe life, spirit, into something that was dead; manipulated the stops as if he were Dr Frankenstein in his laboratory. There, in Grorud Church, he played Bach, the exquisite ‘little’ Prelude in E minor, a piece which starts out sounding like an improvisation, a playful exercise in runs and harmonies, but gradually slips into a more definite pattern, following a more distinct theme. Jonas had spent a long time practising to get it right, but now he simply sat there, weaving, or leaving it to Bach, the great weaver of the Baroque. Every musician knows that sometimes — on mysteriously blessed days — one can exceed one’s own musical and, not least, technical skills. For Jonas, this was one of those days. It felt good to play. There was something special about the contact between his fingers and the keys, an unusual sureness to his touch, even his feet seemed to dance of their own accord.

Jonas did not know that a woman clad in bright orange was about to enter the church beneath him and, indirectly, change his life. He was playing the organ, and because he happened to be playing Bach on the organ, a piece of music resembling a network within which everything was connected in a comforting and meaningful fashion, his thoughts kept revolving around his father. His father and him. Always these two, Haakon and Jonas. He knew he was the apple of his father’s eye, thought it might have something to do with a talent they shared, that his father saw something in Jonas which he recognised. He had the feeling that his father was trying to shield him from something, though he never knew what.

As a small boy, Jonas could have appeared on Double Your Money, answering questions on his father. He knew his every wrinkle, every scent, every story. He could describe the way his father ate grapefruit, or his virtual addiction to the National Geographic; he could detail his father’s method of cutting his toenails or repeat word for word the minutes-long spiels he recited every morning in bed as he stretched his limbs until they cracked. Jonas was the only one, so he believed, who knew of the great pleasure Haakon Hansen took in being able to paddle, edge, his kayak in and out of the little islets around Hvaler. And then there were his father’s breakfasts: bacon and egg every morning when there was no school. Instead of bawling out the standard ‘come-and-get-it’ refrain their father would sit down at the ivories of the piano in the living room and wake them with a rendition of Bach’s Goldberg variation no. 6, a piece which is only thirty seconds long, but which Jonas felt was the closest one came to the perfect work for the piano. His father played that same piece every Saturday and Sunday morning, year in year out; the pleasure of it stayed with Jonas for ever, that of waking to Bach’s Goldberg variation no. 6 and the smell of his father’s breakfast. ‘What more does a man need than Bach and a bit of bacon?’ as Haakon Hansen would say, thereby making his contribution to the great debate on the meaning of life. It was a weekend in itself: Bach and bacon. And bacon, mark you, that was as crisp as the music of Bach.

Jonas would be well up in years before he understood that even though you knew someone, you might not know them at all.

One day in April they went for a drive in his father’s Opel Caravan, these two, always just these two, Haakon and Jonas. A journey of discovery his father called it. Jonas had been given the day off school; he thought they were going to Gjøvik, but they had carried on past it and taken a road away from Lake Mjøsa, running inland. Jonas stared out of the window as they drove through a valley, feeling rather disappointed. Nothing but farms, a few scattered houses. Could anything be discovered here, in such a lonely spot? Just at that moment his father pulled up in front of a large, yellow-painted building at the head of the valley. On a sign on the façade tall, white letters gleamed in a rainbow arc: The Norwegian Organ and Harmonium Works. Jonas found it hard to believe that something as thrilling as this could be hidden away deep in the forest. A man greeted Haakon Hansen courteously when he stepped out of the car, as if he were a visiting prince. ‘Welcome to Snertingdal,’ the man said. Snertingdal — to Jonas it sounded as full of promise as Samarkand.

First they were ushered into the workshop where the pipes were bored. Jonas knew a fair bit about organs, but nothing about how they were made. He was so taken with the carpentry skills of a man working on a console with a manual keyboard that he had to be dragged away to the drawing office, from which they also had a grand view of the valley and the mill next door. To the accompaniment of a droning saw his father pored over the drawings for the new organ for Grorud Church — since that was, of course, why they were here; his father had been informed that work on the instrument would soon be finished. Enormous charts on a tilted drawing board showed the organ from different angles. His father nodded and smiled, traced lines with his fingers and enquired about details which meant nothing to Jonas. To him it looked like a cathedral, or the designs for some fantastical machine.

They were shown round the rest of the factory, saw the storage room and the cabinetmaker’s workshop in the basement where the great machines were housed and the façades, wind chests and wooden pipes were made. ‘See this, Jonas, cherry wood. And over there: ebony! This is a far cry from whittling willow flutes, eh?’ They proceeded to the first floor, to the pipe store and the tuning room where the pipes were given their first rough tuning. His father’s face lit up, he picked up pipes and blew into them. Each pipe had a life of its own, was an instrument in itself. Haakon Hansen was looking more and more happy, chatting incessantly to their companion about matters which went way over Jonas’s head, about the Principal and the Octave Bass, about the importance of the choir organ to the tonal quality of the instrument. Jonas watched as a man made a notch in a pipe with a knife and rolled back a tongue of metal with a pair of pliers, much as Jonas would have opened the lid on a sardine tin. He wished his mother could have been there, she would have loved this, working as she did at the Grorud Ironmonger’s. Jonas always got a great kick out of places which combined ironmongery with music, uniting his mother’s and his father’s work — in such situations he could well understand why two such different individuals came to be married to one another. He heard his father and the strange man talking about the German factory which had supplied the stops. Jonas loved all the secrecy surrounding the metal alloys for the pipes, it smacked of alchemy. I’m not in an organ factory, he thought. I’m on a visit to a wizard’s cave.

Then, to crown it all — a well-orchestrated surprise — their guide flung open the doors of the assembly hall, a room the size of a medium-sized church, and there, standing against one wall, all ready for playing, was Grorud’s new organ. A shimmering palace. Jonas’s father bounded over to the organ, looked back at the others, his arms outstretched to the gleaming façade, like a child unable to believe its eyes, while people stood there nodding, as if to say: ‘Yes, it’s yours, you can have it.’ Haakon Hansen switched it on, set the stops and began to play. He played the only fitting piece of music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in E-flat major, pro organo pleno, he played so resoundingly that he all but raised the roof. And as his father played, Jonas tried to grasp how everything he had seen, all those separate elements in so many different rooms — thousands of pipes, that alone — could conjoin to form such a palatial instrument, one capable of producing such glorious, polyphonous music — a whole that was so much more than the individual parts which he had seen. A sound which caused the body to swell. It was true, it was alchemy, gold was made here, but it was gold in the form of music.

Jonas knew, of course, that with this visit his father was trying to tell him something important, and on the way home Haakon did indeed say something, although it was no more than a single sentence: ‘Remember, that was just an organ.’ That was all. His father did not say another word on the drive home. Haakon Hansen never said too much. But in his mind Jonas could hear the rest: ‘So just imagine how everything in life fits together.’

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 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.’

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 Jonas 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 got 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.

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, 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.

No one needed to tell Jonas Wergeland that women were unpredictable, dangerous. Because once, late one night, he had been out in a sail boat in the middle of Oslo fjord, in a storm, along with a girl who seemed ready to risk being sunk rather than give way to a huge passenger ferry. But he need not have worried, they passed astern of it, with plenty of room to spare. She shot him a glance, smiled — or no, she didn’t smile: she smirked. He felt such an idiot. He was on the point of collapse. She, on the other hand, still had her captain’s cap firmly on her head and was in complete command of the situation; she loved this, Jonas could tell, enjoyed having control over tremendous forces, exploiting tremendous forces, the air, the water, because she was not sailing the boat, she was sailing the wind and the waves. Just as she was sailing his thoughts.

If, that was, she wasn’t stark, raving mad. Because things were moving far too fast; he was scared, truly terrified. She was the sort of woman who was quite liable to live her life according to that old chestnut from Ibsen: ‘And what if I did run my ship aground; oh, still it was splendid to sail it!’ The sea was black, dark edged in white. It had been a big mistake coming out with her. She looked as if she was quite capable of hoisting the spinnaker. And more: Jonas had the impression that she was planning to make love to him as resolutely and passionately as she sailed her boat through the storm. The water seethed, the storm thundered all around him. From time to time he heard a crack from the sail, it made him jump, he thought disaster had struck. He was sure his heart leapt into his mouth each time the boat slammed down into the trough of a wave, its joints creaking and rigging groaning; he had never been quite so literally caught between wind and water.

Despite being so afraid he could not rid himself of the thought that there was something epic, something mythic, about this voyage. He had the feeling that he was on a quest, that there was something he had to do, something he had to bring back: a golden fleece, a vital ice sample from one of the rings of Saturn. Or that this odyssey was a kind of training, a tempering process. And when he was most terrified, just when he had told himself: that’s it, we’re sunk, she would lean forward and kiss him, a hard, wet, salty kiss, more of a suck than a kiss, while at the same time, outwith the kiss, as it were, keeping an eye on the waves. And always with a sly grin hovering around her lips, as if this gruelling crossing was no more than a harebrained bit of teasing.

It should be said, though, that even Julie’s face eventually began to show signs of worry. The wind must have grown even stronger. ‘We’ll have to shorten sail!’ she suddenly yelled, as if their lives depended on it. She bent down to Jonas, put her lips close to his ear and told him what to do, so clearly and precisely that he realised this was a very risky manoeuvre. ‘Slacken the main sail halyard when I turn into the eye of the wind,’ she shrieked, giving him a nudge which bordered on being a kick. He was scared out of his wits, more or less crawled across the deck to the mast, praying to God. The water churned around his feet. She turned into the wind. ‘Move it, dummy! Loosen the line round the starboard cleat! And watch out for the corner of the jib!’ she yelled as he fumbled about. The sails were flapping wildly, cracking like whips, frightening him so badly that he was almost shitting himself. At last, though, he managed to carry out her order. ‘Make fast the luff cringle. Christ, you’re slow!’ He could hardly hear what she was saying. He spotted the eyelets on the sail, grasped what she wanted him to do, slipped the eyelet over the hook. Even this simple action sent his mind off down another track entirely, so much so that, terrified though he was, he could not help wondering what might happen later, if they survived. She would make him flap and crack just like those sails. Or no: she would sail him until his timbers rent. ‘Come here!’ she bellowed as she tightened the reef line on the after end of the boom. He managed to scramble back down into the well, totally done in, ripe for a rest home. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said. ‘You look as though you’d seen Old Neptune himself.’

The sail was well set, she bore onto the right course. ‘Good boy,’ she said with affected heartiness, slapping his thigh, blatantly, only a hair’s-breadth from his groin. ‘No reason to spoil the stars with a flare,’ she said. ‘But take a quick turn on the pump just to be on the safe side.’

The reefing did not seem to have slowed them down at all. He was trembling as badly as ever. What worried him most of all was the sight of the mountainous waves which came from behind, you could see them a long way off: black walls of water barrelling relentlessly closer. He tried to keep his eyes front, but was constantly having to glance over his shoulder at the giant rollers steaming down on them, the surging foam, the sea trying to lap him up like a thousand-mouthed beast of prey. That swelling roar reminded him — of all things — of organ music. ‘Right Jonas, time to set full sail,’ his father always said when he played organo pleno. But this roar had a sorrowful note to it, like the music for a funeral. Still Julie never faltered. Her set face shone with concentration and what might have been pleasure. More and more, Jonas was wondering what was going to happen when — if — they reached harbour, he fell to day-dreaming about this, he did not know why, but he sat there, terrified out of his wits, like a condemned man with a hard-on, fantasising about how she would rip off his clothes, demand that he take her from behind, like a mountainous billow, wash over and under her, lift her up, again and again. ‘If you don’t sit still I’ll have to put a safety harness on you,’ she yelled, again with that knowing smirk on her face, as he dodged the spray from a huge rogue wave.

It was getting late. She was taking her bearings from the lighthouses. For a long time he had kept his eye fixed on the Tresteinene light. It was so beautiful, quite unearthly. Mawkishly he thought to himself that his life had begun to flicker, like a light bulb just before it goes out, but the light did not go out, it went on flashing at its set intervals as they sailed passed it and Julie cut across the white sector towards Homlungen light, her eyes darting from side to side. She was keeping a sharp look out for spar buoys, barely visible in the gloom. Jonas held his breath until they had slipped past the lighthouse on its headland and he could see the lights of Skjærhalden.

He knew what would happen next. She would ride him like she had ridden her boat across the waves, there would be no reefing where he was concerned, she would not allow him any slack. She would screw him rigid, on and on until she drained his bilges, making him gurgle from top to toe, pumping him utterly dry. And yet it was not her, the woman, he feared, but himself, the forces he felt stirring within him. As if she had set all his sails, generating a potency he had not known he possessed, a desire that rendered him willing to drown if only he could poke his tongue into that navel; an urge so strong that he would not have been surprised to discover that he was actually still on dry land, on Hvasser, staring at Julie’s belly; to find, in other words, that this whole, crazy boat trip had taken place inside her navel.

As they glided in to the docks and he noted with relief that it really was Skjærhalden, and not Hvasser, he felt compelled to make a decision. Was his objective — was she, Julie — what he thought, what he hoped, she was? Or was he suffering from another attack of Melankton’s syndrome?

They were safe in harbour, securely tied up. Just when it looked as though she was about to drag him into the cabin — she had already tossed her cap through the hatch, in what seemed like the first move in a striptease act — he said: ‘Hang on, I need to feel solid ground under my feet first.’ And as she went aft to check the anchor line, he seized the chance to grab his rucksack and climb ashore. He strode off briskly to the bus stop, where the last bus for Fredrikstad was preparing to leave.

Jonas Wergeland sat at the organ in Grorud Church, playing ‘Love divine all love excelling’. Over the years he had expended a lot of energy on eluding women. Riding out storms. Had his father experienced something similar? Who was this woman walking up the aisle, stepping out like a bride, someone said, as if hearing in her head, not ‘Love divine all love excelling’, but Purcell’s Wedding March. Someone from whom he could no longer escape? Jonas had long suspected that there was a lot he did not know about his father. As a youth, almost grown, he had stumbled upon a scrapbook on his father’s desk. To Jonas this was as unlikely a discovery in the familiar surroundings of the family flat as a mineral from another planet. All the cuttings related to one question: whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. No one had known anything about Haakon Hansen’s interest in this subject. Could it be that his father had regarded his organ music as radio transmissions of some sort? Could it be that, whenever he played, his father was wondering: is there life out there?

Later still, Jonas was to learn that something else had occurred on that day when Rakel and his father met Albert Schweitzer in Trinity Church. Perhaps it was because the celebrated guest saw the look of appreciation on Haakon Hansen’s face — or discerned something else there — that he asked Jonas’s father if he would also play something. The latter had hesitated. Haakon Hansen was not known for showing off. Whenever Jonas was with his father and people asked what he did for a living, Haakon always replied: ‘I’m an organ-grinder.’ But the others persuaded him to play. So Haakon sat down at the fine old organ. He also played Bach, a trio sonata. Albert Schweitzer was thrilled, he spent a long time talking to Jonas’s father afterwards, about their mutual passion for organ playing, the architectonics of the music and, of course, the works of the cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Albert Schweitzer was particularly flattered to learn that Haakon Hansen had read his book on Bach, all 800 pages of it — this seemed to please him more than having won the Peace Prize — and he laughed heartily when the Grorud organist made so bold as to say: ‘I think it’s even better than your book on the mysticism of Paul the Apostle.’ Their conversation was so lively and went on for so long that it put the rest of the day’s schedule behind time. Schweitzer’s entourage more or less had to tear him away from Haakon Hansen, in the middle of a discussion about the incomparable timbre of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ in Saint Sulpice in Paris. ‘And wouldn’t you agree,’ Albert Schweitzer called back finally over his shoulder as he was dragged away, ‘that people play Bach too fast these days?’

Only a few years later, Jonas met another organist who had been present at this meeting and who told Jonas that Schweitzer had been full of praise for Haakon Hansen. ‘You are a world-class organist,’ he had told Jonas’s father. ‘What are you doing tucked away in a small church in a Norwegian suburb?’ And it was at that point that Haakon had made the legendary remark — one which was to become a comforting motto in Norwegian organ circles: ‘We all have our own Lambaréné.’

These fragments of a story conflicted with the hints their father himself had given the family about his early years. This new information seemed to speak of a possible career which was never pursued, of a light hidden under a bushel. ‘People still talk about his debut concert,’ one old organist told Jonas. His father had been on the threshold of a dazzling career as a musician when suddenly, for reasons that were never explained, he gave it all up in favour of a humble post as a church organist.

Was this a sacrifice of some sort, or simply a move prompted by shyness, a shyness which Jonas felt he must have inherited? Had his father’s choice of career been a waste of talent — or had this decision actually been the saving of him? Perhaps it had to do with finding a balance in life. Between ambition and reality. Between conscience and opportunity. Whichever way Jonas looked at it, he had to admit — especially when he saw the pleasure his father took in keeping a kayak on an even keel — that Haakon Hansen appeared to be a harmonious, not to say contented individual.

Jonas played ‘Love divine all love excelling’, all but dancing over the organ bench, balancing on his backside while his fingers flew over the manuals and his feet heeled and toed it over the pedals. Now he, too, could see the woman in orange. She took the last few steps up to the dais in front of the altar on which the coffin sat, to his father who lay there dead. In his Lambaréné. A Schweitzer to the people of Grorud. Jonas could not believe his eyes. A woman in orange. Like a member of another religion, another culture, he thought. And behind that thought another, of which he only caught the tail end: or someone from another dimension. A world beyond this one, running parallel to it. Once, when Jonas was small, his father had lifted him onto his lap and played a D major triad, D-F major-A, and explained to him that a piano did not have the capacity to bring out the almost imperceptible difference between an F major and a G flat the way a good violinist could. ‘There’s a blind spot there, between F major and G flat,’ his father told him. As usual that was all he said, but Jonas could finish it for himself: it was the same with life. Maybe this woman hailed from just such a spot. One that lay between the F major and G flat of life. For a moment, a few tenths of a second which also grew in depth like a complex chord, it occurred to Jonas that he might actually owe his life to this woman; that here, in the gossip mirror attached to the side of the organ, he beheld the root cause of his existence. She stood quite still before his father’s coffin, as if she were alone in the church. The hymn came to an end. Jonas laid his hands on the console and drew his feet back to rest under the bench, observing, as he did so, how the woman turned ever so slightly, for a second, and met his mother’s eye, saw her give an almost imperceptible little nod, saw his mother do the same. Then: the unknown woman went down on her knees. At that same moment a ripple of movement passed through the two angels in the painting on the wall behind the altar. Jonas could have sworn to it, did not think anyone had noticed but him. A stirring of their wings. And the coffin hovered. For a few seconds it hovered in mid-air.

Not until years later, did Jonas realise that it was at that moment that he came up with the idea — in a flash, you might say — for his programme on Henrik Ibsen, one of the twenty-odd episodes of Thinking Big, a splendid television series in which each individual programme was as carefully arranged in relation to the others as the pipes in an organ. When that time came, he could not have said where he had got it from — he called it inspiration — but the image stemmed, of course, from this incident: with a woman kneeling in a church. And a possible miracle.

Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Henrik Ibsen did not touch on the less sympathetic sides of the writer’s character: his arrogance and pomposity, his ruthless ambition and, at the same time, his pathological shyness, his pedantry and penchant for the formalities, not to mention all the shameless arse-licking he did in order to obtain honours, his infatuations with very young girls, his drinking, his sexual inhibitions. Nonetheless: seldom has a programme been so roundly condemned. Ibsen researchers and other members of the literati were particularly outraged, describing it as libellous. Because Wergeland’s story about Norway’s national bard — a fictional drama in the spirit of Brand and Peer Gynt — dealt with a man on his knees, a man who, in the course of a few minutes, underwent a total transformation.

The key scene opened with Ibsen — in Rome on business — sitting disconsolately outside an osteria in the magnificent Piazza Navona, drinking wine. He was turning over several projects in his mind, but it was the text of Brand which was giving him the most trouble. He was getting nowhere. Like Duke Skule in The Pretenders he was beginning to have doubts about himself, about his calling. He was afraid that the disparity between the absolute demands and the realities of the situation, between his aims and his abilities, was too great. He sipped his white wine, gazing at the fountain in the centre of the square, at Bernini’s evocative figures and the water splashing into the basin, the four jets meant to symbolise the world’s four great rivers and, hence, the four corners of the globe; tumbling water, a cascade which — as it was presented on television — reminded him of the waterfalls at home in Norway, the wild landscape of western Norway, the darkness of the water, dangerous forces, the magical powers of the water nixie, the risk of drowning: thoughts which moved him to drink more white wine, get even drunker. And in Jonas Wergeland’s rendering it was here, while looking at this fountain, that Ibsen conceived his ‘A verse’ — not printed until years later — which was recited as the screen darkened: ‘To live is — to do battle with trolls / in the vaults of the heart and the mind. / To write is — to sit in judgement on oneself.’

Henrik Ibsen got to his feet, a mite unsteadily, and wove off into the shadows as the sound of bubbling water intensified. The next shot showed the writer standing in a massive doorway, the next again in some dark place, a cave — a studio set conjured into existence by NRK’s best carpenters and designers. To the viewers it looked as though Ibsen had stepped inside his own brain or the vaults of his heart, and truly did have to do battle in there with trolls and dwarfs. They saw the writer being hunted, tormented, saw Ibsen’s innermost worries swarming around him in the form of ghosts: ‘You’re not Knud Ibsen’s son!’ snorted a gnome. ‘Why do you deny me?’ asked a father. Elves danced around Ibsen, chanting that he was bankrupt, bankrupt. A girl waved a poem at him, crying that he had broken their engagement; a policeman appeared to arrest him and take him off to do hard labour at Akershus Fort. ‘You have lost your faith in God,’ hissed a troll. The most distinct and most oft-recurring figures were, however, a woman and her son, a child whom one understood to be Ibsen’s own, the boy he had, at the age of eighteen, fathered on a serving maid in Grimstad ten years his senior. Henrik Ibsen sat in judgement on himself. His face bore the marks of pride and a passionate will, and of guilt, shame, pain and sorrow. His lips moved. Jonas Wergeland inserted a quote from Brand, the play on which Ibsen was then working: ‘O, endless the atonement here. — / In such confused and tangled state, the thousand twisted strands of fate’, and ended with Brand’s cry at the end of the third act: ‘Give me light!’

And as Henrik Ibsen raised his head, the whole scene opened out. In a stunning dissolve, Jonas Wergeland had the surroundings change from the hall of the Mountain King to the interior of a church, St Peter’s Basilica itself. Through Ibsen’s eyes one gazed straight up at Michelangelo’s breathtakingly high dome. A ray of light streamed down on him, and to viewers at home it seemed that the light alone brought the writer to his knees.

Jonas Wergeland held this shot for a long time, an eternity in viewers’ memories: Henrik Ibsen, the greatest of all Norwegian writers, on his knees under that vast dome, that prodigiously ambitious span, on his knees before the papal altar, under Bernini’s bronze canopy, right next to the steps leading down to the tomb of St Peter, the rock on which the whole Christian church was founded, while all around him the light grew stronger and stronger. It was a provocative image, an image which, for many, accorded badly with the Ibsen they knew: a stubborn, antagonistic character who could not write unless bristling with resentment. But to Jonas Wergeland, this was where all of Ibsen’s future masterpieces had their beginnings: with him kneeling, humbly, under a cupola, in a church.

According to the programme’s version of events, Henrik Ibsen was, at this point, a disheartened man, plagued by thoughts of betrayal in his life and his art; a man who, in sitting in judgement on himself, was bound to find himself guilty. But on his knees under the dome of St Peter’s, under the image of the Almighty himself, he met with compassion, or rather: he was granted — like a gift for which he had not asked — forgiveness; he was set free. Brand was in all ways a reflection of this experience. Just as Ibsen had sacrificed a woman, Else Sophie from Grimstad, and the child he had with her, so too Brand sacrificed, ruthlessly, tragically, his wife and his son, and yet Ibsen concludes the play with a last line proclaiming: ‘He is deus caritatis!’ He is the God of love.

In St Peter’s, Ibsen found a light, a relief and a release which also rendered him receptive to the inspiration and, hence, the creativity which great art can bestow. The barbarians came to Ancient Rome and were civilised. So, too with Henrik Ibsen. Brand — the new, revised, visionary play, that is — was in many ways a response to the works of art in St Peter’s. Most of all to the dome. Michelangelo’s mighty vault gave Ibsen courage, the courage to give his imagination wing. To go out on a limb. The courage to go against the accepted taste, the courage to do something crazy. To say: On the contrary. All or nothing. The works of art in that church, and everywhere else in Rome, did not merely provide him with a new yardstick, they also prompted him to ask himself another question: what is a man. It was here, in St Peter’s Basilica, that Ibsen made up his mind to be a person who asked questions rather than one who answered them. It was here that he began to perceive the possibility of depicting people as no one before him had done.

Through Ibsen’s eyes, television viewers saw him discover the key to his future works. Looking up, he caught sight of the four large mosaic medallions at the four corners of the dome: the four evangelists, four writers, each of whom had presented his version of one man’s life. Ibsen may also have been reminded of the four rivers represented in Bernini’s fountain on the Piazza Navona. He had a vision: he was standing at the intersection point of four powerful spotlight beams, could feel their influence flowing through him, his mind could run in four directions at once. And at that very moment — so Jonas Wergeland postulated — it came to him, the idea of writing four different versions, four stories about the same man, only he would give him four different names: Skule, whom he had already portrayed, Brand, Peer and Julian. Four characters. And yet one. Presenting, when seen together, a picture of Mankind, its depth and its breadth.

Beneath that boundary-breaking cupola in Rome, Henrik Ibsen was liberated from his stunted self. He was free to become someone else, also as a writer. Henrik Ibsen had been transformed. He had blundered into St Peter’s as a troll, enough in himself, and walked out a man.

Jonas Wergeland was, as it happens, firmly convinced that Ibsen’s latterly so renowned sphinx-like countenance, his aloof demeanour was a mask he assumed to save revealing anything of his Caritas moment.

A number of people have pointed out that this programme rests on a somewhat objectionable assumption: that Ibsen died and was restored to life, became a new man. Became more than he had been. What people did not know was that Jonas had made this assumption on the basis of personal experience. In one discussion he did, however, claim that in Peer Gynt Ibsen himself had hinted at something similar. In several scenes, Peer appears to die, and yet goes on living — on the high moors, in the hall of the Mountain King, in the Asylum, on the boat home. As for Henrik Ibsen, from that summer on, more than one person observed a sudden and marked difference in his manner. He became more impulsive, for a long time he read nothing but the Bible and he changed his whole style of dress. This new sense of freedom boosted his self-confidence. The following year, in his ambitious application for a poet’s pension he wrote — in a hand which had also undergone an abrupt transformation — the words which Jonas Wergeland used as the title of his television series: Ibsen would, as he said, fight ‘to arouse the Nation and encourage it to think big’.

Jonas Wergeland, still merely an announcer with NRK television, sat in a church, at an organ, and he too saw a light of sorts: a woman clad in brilliant orange, on her knees before his father’s coffin. The final strains of ‘Love divine all love excelling’ still hung in the air. Jonas did not know whether this occurrence, the woman down by the altar, was going to bring everything to a halt, make time stand still, but he got ready, anyway, to play the postlude while the coffin was carried out to the hearse which waited to take it to the crematorium. Time went on. The strange woman got to her feet and met the eyes trained on her from the packed pews. The precious stones in her earrings flashed. What an amazing figure, Jonas thought to himself. In her orange coat, in such a gathering, she looked like a butterfly on a winter’s day, a peacock butterfly caught in a snowstorm. A creature who lifted the lid off this funeral scene to reveal that it was all about something else, something more. No one knew — no one ever discovered — who she was or why she did it. Whether she belonged to a past time or, as Jonas was inclined to believe, to a parallel time. As she walked — no, strode — up the aisle she seemed, wordlessly, to be saying: ‘You are wrong, this is not a church, it is a palace; that is not an organist in that coffin, but a king.’

Then she was gone. A glowing ember leaving behind it only ashes, dead and black.

Jonas, however, was left with the feeling that she had lit a spark within him. Or that she had blown more life into the tiny flame which he had become aware of earlier when his eye lighted on the nape of Margrete’s neck. He focused on his music, prepared to play the postlude, which was in fact a prelude. The same piece that his father had been playing when he died, Bach’s prelude in A minor. As if picking up where his father had left off. A triumph. Jonas raised his hands and, as he did so, in a flash he saw how the most disparate threads of life intertwined in this room, at this moment; how seemingly parallel, unconnected events suddenly came together to form harmonies, music, a prelude which showed him that his own life had not even begun yet. Did it always take a death to render complex matters simple?

Jonas played the first few bars, with the A note held as a pedal point, like a prolonged insistence on new beginnings, on life. Jonas threw himself into this work which, strictly speaking, he was in no way qualified to play, but which he managed to play nonetheless, played it so that the whole church shook. And the longer he played, the greater became the feeling of something of colossal importance welling up inside him, something which had long lain buried, and as he neared the end of the piece, as he caught himself holding his breath, one thought outweighed all others, the thought of taking his talent seriously, because he had the opposite problem from Ibsen: he had the ability, but he lacked the will. Jonas made the air vibrate with his playing, and perhaps because he had long since been imbued with the geometric beauty of this moment, and because the music felt like a crystalline net in which every fragment reflected all of the others, and because he was sitting in a small church, building a cathedral out of music, he found that he had already made up his mind: he longed to have more wind in his sails. He would approach his bosses at NRK and ask to be allowed to make programmes. And some day — again he was reminded of those metro stations in Moscow — some day he might create a series presenting the bright spots, the underground stations, in the collective life of Norway, a series of programmes which would encourage the whole nation to think big. Maybe, the thought struck him as the echo of the final chord died away and a hush fell in the church, such a series could even be regarded as life-saving.