The Seducer

Aqua Vita

The mere prospect of it, the very façade of the organ was enough to take anyone’s breath away — without a doubt the most impressive Jonas had ever seen, with over one hundred burnished ornamental pipes. Standing there on its platform at the far end of the concert hall, fifteen metres high, it looked more like a little palace of pure silver. It was in fact the biggest tracker-action organ in the world, with 10,500 pipes, five manuals plus pedals and 127 stops — it almost beggared belief.

It was late in the afternoon, the guided tours were over for the day, and Jonas had been allowed into the famous building ‘as a special favour’ — Jonas Wergeland was frequently granted such privileges — by a Mr White, or ‘Edward’ as he insisted that Jonas call him, who actually claimed to know Ronald Sharp, the man who had built the organ. Mr White was kindness itself, he could not do enough for Jonas; a connoisseur of Linie Aquavit, that nectar of the gods from the other side of the world; a Norwegian and a man of some standing at that, Mr White had discovered that Jonas worked for Norwegian television and that he was on his way to New Zealand to do a programme on islanders of Norwegian descent.

Jonas seated himself on the organ bench before, or rather enclosed within, an enormous console, complete with a television monitor placed high up on the console and the facility for taping the music. It was like sitting deep inside a power station, linked up to a huge waterfall. Jonas set the registers as best he could, and his thoughts went to his father as he located the Principal in this masterpiece, although there were a lot of stops he had never heard of — Gamba, Schwebung, Unda Maris and — what was that: Vox Humana. He wisely left the couplers alone, likewise the combination buttons with their amazing capacity for electronic storage. Instead he began to play and was as captivated as always by the profusion of sound that poured out at the touch of his fingers and toes. Jonas Wergeland may not have been the only Norwegian to play the Grand Organ in Sydney Opera House, but he was the only Norwegian ever to play Duke Ellington on it.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? In but one way?

Jonas thought of the road from Grorud Church to this place, an ocean of a difference, an ocean between them, and it struck him that he was starting to become a bit blasé, perhaps because this overwhelming compression of the world in terms of time and space no longer left any room for excitement or dreams. In the toilet of the flat in Solhaug when he was a boy there hung a reproduction of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of Soria Moria Castle, a glimmer of gold on the horizon. ‘A long, long way off, he saw something glittering and gleaming.’ Jonas always used to think, when he was sitting on the toilet, that this picture was all about travelling, probably because the boy in the foreground had a knapsack on his back and a staff in his hand, but also because the toilet contained another special feature, a small bookshelf filled with copies of the National Geographic, the only publication, other than newspapers, which their father read. Jonas also used to leaf through these and it was here, in the toilet of a flat in Solhaug that he made his first journeys into the realms of imagination, accompanied by the churning motors of his bowels, as he browsed through issues containing features entitled ‘My Life in Forbidden Lhasa’ or ‘The Great Barrier Reef’ or ‘To the Land of the Head-hunters’, and even if he could make no sense of the headlines, he read all he needed to and more in the wonderful pictures. So already, here, the solid foundations of his mistrust of the written word — or, not mistrust but a firm belief that words were superfluous — were being laid, because the pictures said it all: weird and wonderful painted faces, giant clams that could snap shut around a diver’s foot and the golden roofs of the mausoleums of the seven Dalai Lamas at the top of the Potala Palace — ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Jonas had also thought of his father earlier that Sunday when he took a walk along the harbour front from Harbour Bridge to Pier One, the old wharf buildings recently converted into specialist shops and aromatic seafood restaurants — just as was happening all over the world in the eighties. Jonas eyed the crabs in their boxes, the selection of oysters on their beds of ice, the yachts and ferries out in the bay; felt happy to wander aimlessly, almost surprised that no one turned to look back at him as people were forever doing in Oslo.

Jonas strolled on down Darling Harbour, making for that part of the city at the very head of the bay which, within just a few years, would be transformed into a huge leisure area complete with aquariums and a maritime museum, and suddenly, as he was walking along Hickson Road, enjoying the fine weather, the unfamiliar surroundings, his eye was caught by something familiar, something akin to a Norwegian flag: the funnel on one of the ships at the quayside, black with two white rings, denoting that this was a Wilhelmsen ship. His paternal grandfather had been a sailor and Jonas knew all the different funnel markings by heart before he learned his alphabet. He followed the wire fence until he came to a gate which offered a good view of the ship and there he noticed a man coming down the gangplank, a man with a blissful expression on his face who, on reaching the gate, stopped in front of Jonas, obviously bursting to tell him something.

This, of course, was Mr White, Edward, and he could hardly believe his luck when he discovered that Jonas was in fact Norwegian. Eagerly he told Jonas, as if anxious to persuade him that they were related, that his great-grandfather had signed on with the first Wilhelmsen ship to call at Sydney, in 1895, the Tiger she was called — imagine that, incredible isn’t it? — which had sailed to Vladivostok with a cargo of railway sleepers before carrying on to Sydney, where she had taken on a cargo of hides for Europe. Did Jonas know that Wilhelm Wilhelmsen himself had been second mate on that ship; that same Wilhelm later to be known only as ‘the Captain’, who took over the running of the shipping line on the death of his brother Halfdan? Did Jonas happen to know anything about this Wilhelm Wilhelmsen?

‘There was this one time in the Mediterranean, in Marseille,’ said Jonas, taking it on the run, remembering something his grandfather had told him. ‘It was the first time Wilhelm Wilhelmsen, “the Captain” that is, had ever been served black olives. He tasted one, then he said: “Who the hell’s been pissing on these grapes?”’

Mr White doubled up with laughter, he was Sydney’s most appreciative listener, welcoming anything that came from Norway, that day at any rate. Because Mr White had just been allowed to come onboard the Wilhelmsen ship and been shown the sealed containers which held the Linie Aquavit in its old sherry casks, a nigh-on religious experience, since he had once been treated to a glass of Norwegian Linie Aquavit by a sailor but could not credit the story of its odd ageing process, 135 days at sea, well, he refused point-blank to believe it — imagine, a drink that involves a journey! — until this very day when he had seen the story substantiated so conclusively that he could remember everything his guide had told him about the whole of that long, involved voyage around the world, every single port. ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘that from this day on I’ll never drink anything but Linie Aquavit. Where can I get hold of it?’

When Jonas promptly promised to arrange this for him and wrote down the man’s address on the back of a receipt for a newly-consumed plate of oysters, nothing would do but that Mr White invite Jonas over to the Opera House, where he happened to occupy a top administrative post, and there was nothing Jonas would have liked better, he had in fact been planning to visit Sydney’s famous landmark the following day; he had, after all, dabbled in architecture himself and had frequently come across pictures of that renowned exterior, which simply cried out for metaphors, from copulating turtles to a ship in full sail. What he did not realize was that the building also housed a Soria Moria castle, a gigantic organ. As Nefertiti said: ‘There’s adventure to be found wherever you go.’

The instant he laid eyes on the organ, Jonas was struck, as he never ceased to be on his travels, by a sense of rediscovering something that he had lost, a part of himself, and in this case, because of the façade, he was reminded of a rib, a feeling so strong that he clutched at his breast. He wasted no time in asking whether it would be possible to try the organ, and, thanks to Mr White and Linie Aquavit, on that day nothing was impossible.

Whenever he sat down at an organ, Jonas’s thoughts turned to his father. I am not sure whether I have mentioned this, but Jonas had a wonderful father. Haakon Hansen may not have talked as much to his son as other fathers did, but he played for him a lot and this alternative upbringing, as Jonas himself called it, was to be of far-reaching significance in his life. ‘I was reared on the organ bench,’ he used to say.

Jonas loved to watch his father play, especially his feet, the way his shoes seemed to skip over the pedals of their own accord with the most fantastic dexterity, flicking back and forth from heel to toe, the one crossing over the other, as if in a dance, or a proper little puppet-show. One time, Jonas was allowed to paint faces on his father’s shoes, creating one good and one bad shoe which fought when his father’s feet flew over the pedals, a battle in which good and evil seemed constantly to take turns at having the upper hand.

Although Jonas found it hard to explain, his father’s playing had a way of firing his imagination. All fathers loom large in their children’s lives, even Freud figured out that much, and Haakon Hansen was not just a big man in Jonas’s eyes, he was the Ruler of the World. From the organ bench he held sway over the world with this complex machine of his; the register settings were actually top-secret orders sent out to his assistants. All of this was confirmed for Jonas when he saw how people reacted: no matter how much of an atheist Haakon Hansen may have been, he played with such feeling that it brought tears to their eyes.

There was one story in particular which had offered Jonas a glimpse into his father’s world: as a little boy he had accompanied his father to a funeral outside of Grorud — funerals in the surrounding area presented a welcome source of extra income for an organist — and afterwards they had driven down to the harbour in his father’s Opel Caravan for a look at the boats, as they did whenever his father played at a funeral and Jonas came along to act as a counterweight. More often than not they would head down towards the Blenheim, the passenger ferry to England which berthed just below Akershus Fort; if Jonas had tried once he had tried a hundred times to draw the elegant lines of that ship, the funnel especially, and he never tired of it. Late that afternoon they had passed beneath the monstrous cranes and strolled all the way out to the end of the quayside, down to Vippetangen, when suddenly two men jumped out from behind a shed and started to beat up Jonas’s father, two men in overalls, big, burly characters. Haakon Hansen did not have a hope, no chance to make a run for it even; they knocked him to the ground, hauled him back onto his feet then threw him to the ground again, kicked him in the chest and legs, spat on him, grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright so that one of them could hold him while the other punched him in the stomach and never a word spoken. Jonas stood there, looking on, screaming and howling, but they paid him no mind; it all seemed so totally senseless, an act of pure malice, either that or some ghastly misunderstanding. Jonas had never experienced anything so awful as to stand there watching his father being beaten until the blood spurted from his nose; the only sounds the awful thunk of punches and kicks and his father’s groans, for it was not just a father who was being roughed up before his very eyes, but the Ruler of the World.

What surprised him was his father’s reaction. When the two thugs finally made off, he struggled to his feet, took Jonas’s hand and led him back to the car, smiling all the while and saying over and over again: ‘They didn’t touch my fingers, thank God, they didn’t touch my fingers.’ As if everything was fine because they had not broken his fingers. Jonas cried and cried. They climbed into the Caravan and his father managed to drive, not to the casualty department, but to Grorud Church, where he dragged himself up to the organ with several broken ribs and a face covered in cuts and bruises. Jonas noticed blood on the keys and that his father had lost at least one tooth, because he kept on smiling, muttering, ‘Thank God, thank God’; and he played; he played a piece that Jonas had never heard before, the music filling the church to bursting point; Jonas had no idea whether it was an improvised piece or what, only that it swelled, surged, rose and fell, going on and on as if his father were trying to press this senseless violence into some sort of pattern, refusing to accept that it might have been a random act. For a while, possibly because of the wind, the organ seemed to be puffing and panting, making Jonas think that his father was fighting some huge creature, a prehistoric monster, an impression which was further enhanced by the Gothic lettering on the stops, before the music suddenly slipped over into a more serene phase, calm and yet somehow weary, and eventually ran out into ‘Leid milde ljos’ in a strange, unfamiliar arrangement involving harmonies which seemed, to Jonas’s ears to verge on the impossible.

Later Jonas realized that this therapy, or whatever you want to call it, had been as much for his benefit. If there is one thing that children, especially boys, find hard to bear, it is injustice, the idea that wickedness can go unpunished. Which is why they read The Count of Monte Cristo and devour hundreds of stories about the lone avenger who returns to punish the bad guys and reward the good. It was this very way of thinking that his father had negated, as it were, at the organ, the entire chain of cause and effect; he lifted the whole thing onto another plane where — and Jonas was in no doubt about this — those brutal thugs got what they deserved. In this way the organ music also wiped away Jonas’s horrific experience, and he would, strangely enough, always remember this incident as something positive.

By the time his father had finished playing, his wounds seemed to have healed — his face no longer looked the slightest bit battered, the tooth was still missing, that was all. So what was life all about? That barbaric attack or the organ music?

Now here was Jonas Wergeland sitting at an organ himself, the biggest organ in the world, just about as far from Grorud Church as he could get. And at the thought of that bloody, yet positive, episode he experiences — right there, in Sydney, beneath a facade of gleaming ornamental pipes reminiscent of a gigantic, glittering mirror — some of the same feeling, as if it had been handed down to him — in other words, he catches a glimpse of another way of thinking, an inkling of hidden links, lines criss-crossing one another. He is playing, of all things, ‘Ved Rondane’ by Edvard Grieg, a song his father often played at funerals. Jonas finds the ‘Tutti’ button, plays the last part full out, producing cascades of sound that are, nonetheless, enigmatic. A bit like reproducing the song of the whales, he thinks, playing as he is with the sea right outside so that these notes could be carried all around the world by the life-giving water, even to Norway, like the lines on the map of the Wilhelmsen line’s sailing routes that hung on the wall of his grandfather’s outdoor privy, down by the shore on the island of Hvaler.

He finished off and turned around to find Mr White in tears.

‘Is something the matter?’ Jonas asked.

Mr. White shook his head. ‘Play something else,’ he said. ‘Please play something else.’

Jonas Wergeland sits back down at the manuals of the Opera House’s Grand Organ and plays ‘Leid milde ljos’ in an arrangement based on harmonies borrowed from Duke Ellington. And halfway through this enchanting hymn, Jonas feels the Opera House slide into the water, transformed into a mighty ship.