The Seducer

The Hub

With a few exceptions — one of which I have already mentioned — Jonas Wergeland had the best of all possible childhoods, a childhood so happy that its end was bound to come as a shock. There comes a day when, as one writer put it, the bubble of childhood bursts, and for Jonas that day came with Nefertiti’s death. Of course Jonas had always known that Nefertiti was too good for this world, but even so, when she died he was not prepared for it. In short, he fell apart. He took ill, became so ill that he had to be taken to hospital. Jonas Wergeland was sick right to the marrow and so cold that he thought he would never be warm again. The doctors at the hospital did not know what to make of it: a ten-year-old who languished in bed, pale and wan, and kept throwing up, vomiting fits for which they could find no cause, a boy with a body temperature well nigh as low as that encountered only in people who had miraculously survived record lengths of time in extreme cold. And one thing they would not have understood anyway, even if there had been gauges to measure that sort of thing, was Jonas’s feeling of being totally out of joint, of lying there like a carcass that had been chopped limb from limb. Jonas had only one thing to hold onto: a crystal prism which he clenched tightly in his fist and did not let go of, not even when he was at his sickest.

Jonas’s father was considered by many people to be a rather distrait and distant character. Where other fathers dreamed of cars and BMWs, Haakon Hansen dreamed of Bach and BWVs. Even Jonas had the feeling, when he was alone in the church listening to his father’s improvisations on the organ, that his father was endeavouring to create worlds, or a zone of his own, where he could be alone. But when Jonas came home from the hospital, still no more than a shadow of himself, Haakon Hansen showed that he did notice what was going on around him. And one day in late August, when Jonas came home from school, pale and miserable, and did not even want the egg and tomato sandwiches that had been carefully prepared for him, his father suggested — without the slightest bit of fiddling — that they should take a look at the new organ in Grorud Church. Okay, Jonas muttered, fingering the prism in his pocket, why not; there was something about his father’s fluttering fingers that made it impossible for him to say no.

From the moment they stepped inside the church and his father ranged himself alongside the altar rail and proudly pointed up at the gleaming new case, ‘based on a Principal 8 and an Octave bass 8’, Jonas noticed, to his surprise, that his nausea was starting to subside. Behind the organ’s glittering façade wooden slats fanned out in rays, making Jonas feel for a moment like the boy in Kittelsen’s picture; ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Up in the organ-loft his father was a whirlwind of activity, dashing hither and thither and telling Jonas about this new organ from the manufacturers in Snertingdal, really big, with twenty-nine voices and three manuals, with a tracker action and electric — action stop controls. ‘Almost 2,000 pipes, Jonas — imagine that!’ And excited though his father was, Jonas noticed that his hands had steadied, ceased their fluttering, as they always did around an organ. ‘Amazing,’ his father said again and again, pointing to couplers, mixtures and buttons for free combinations. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

But it was in the office, behind the organ, when his father went to fetch his music, that the truly amazing feature was revealed, when Jonas opened a small door. Where did that lead? Had it been there before? Jonas asked. That was the door to the chest, his father told him. Did Jonas want to take a look? He opened the door and they passed through a little room containing the blower and the bellows before his father opened yet another door, leading to the chest itself. ‘Go on in,’ his father said when Jonas hung back on the threshold. ‘This here’s kind of like the engine-room of the nave, if you know what I mean.’

I make no secret of the fact that the experience which awaited Jonas Wergeland here is one that I hold infinitely dear — the mere fact of being able to write about this episode makes this whole undertaking worth the effort, or perhaps I should say the trouble. For once, however, I must apologize for the fact that I have no choice but to describe it in the crude and narrow terms that this form and this language, which is to say this role that I have taken upon myself, dictate.

Jonas stepped across the threshold and promptly found himself inside the heart of the instrument, surrounded by pipes of all sizes, the largest sixteen feet tall, set at several different levels. It was a large room, or a little house, with other small houses inside the main house, boxes and walls. ‘What’s that over there?’ Jonas asked, whispering, as if he were inside a shrine, pointing as he did so at something he took to be a little organ in itself. ‘That’s the swell,’ his father said. Jonas went on gazing round about in disbelief, he did not know what to make of it all, but he liked it instantly; it was not, in fact, unlike the engine-room of a ship, possibly because of the steep and narrow steps leading up to ledges, and all the bridges one could walk along between the pipes.

‘Can I sit here while you play?’ Jonas asked.

‘Aye, aye cap’n! Full speed ahead!’ his father replied and went out.

Jonas heard his father settling himself on the stool in front of the console and leafing through his music. Then something strange happened; his father switched on the organ, which is to say the electricity that powered the blower, and Jonas heard, no he felt the space around him being filled with air, how the air streamed into the valves. It was like being in the countryside, in the wind, a warm wind. Jonas sat there, savouring this whooshing, and the clicking of the stops, noticing that already he was not as cold and that he was starting to relax, as if there were some strange accord between his father’s manipulation of the organ and his own nervous system.

Then his father started to play. Johann Sebastian Bach. Haakon Hansen was never in any doubt. If anyone could help his son, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. To Jonas, ensconced inside the organ chest, it sounded wonderful. Like hearing the music from within himself. He was inside the music, he was floating on it. His body became a pipe, or rather, every bone became a pipe, and since every bone was a pipe and since Bach’s music is more coherent than any other music, joining things up, Jonas felt his father’s playing putting him back together, reassembling his dismembered limbs, and there came a point when Jonas had the sensation, like a tremor running through him from top to toe, that his body had become whole once more; and since the music was surging around him in the most beautiful way, he started to cry, very softly.

Later Jonas came to the conclusion that the organ had saved him. Or his father, or Bach, depending on how you looked at it. That the weight of his grief over Nefertiti had been punctured: lightened by the air that generated that music. That autumn, as if he were attending a course of treatment, at least a couple of times a week after his last class at school, Jonas would head straight across the road to the granite church, where he shut himself up inside the organ chest and let his father play for him. To begin with he would sometimes break into the music. ‘Which note does this pipe play?’ he was liable to call from inside the organ. ‘What does it look like?’ his father would call back. Then he would try first one then another until Jonas learned which note, on which manual, at which pitch, through the network of linkages, produced a sound from that particular pipe. The pipes connected to the pedals were situated in an especially out-of-the-way spot. Jonas wormed his way around the chest, up steps, balancing on crossbeams, inspecting every pipe made of tin, or rather of an alloy of which tin was the main component; inspected the square wooden pipes, the group of copper pipes in the centre, all the minuscule pipes smaller than piccolos. Occasionally he amused himself by pulling on the sliders, thus creating notes over and above those his father was playing, like a spirit inside the machine.

But what Jonas found most interesting about the organ was the fact that, while keys were positioned side by side on the manuals, their pipes did not sit side by side inside the organ so, for example, a C and a C sharp, which were right next to one another on the keyboard, could be almost two and a half metres apart inside the chest. When his father played all twelve notes on a scale, they would sound from all around the inside of the organ, especially when he coupled down voices from other manuals. Jonas loved it, made his father do it again and again, slowly, while his ears tried to follow the notes as they swelled out into the air around him. Jonas more than loved it; he almost went down on his knees in the face of this unexpected and totally different chain of cause and effect, looking upon it as a gift, this glimpse of another form of logic, one which — and this was the comforting thing — was connected to the logic outside, on the manuals, as if they were two parallel but different universes.

His father sat patiently on the organ stool, obeying the slightest hint, and this he did with pleasure because he knew that this finding out how the organ worked was in itself a kind of therapy: to discover that something so apparently complex did nonetheless make sense. So it was with hopes steadily rising that he allowed his son to crawl about in there, like an organ-builder’s apprentice, mapping out pipes and abstracts, complying with Jonas’s wish to hear all the voices one after another without a murmur and making not the slightest objection when his son declared that he thought the Cromorne sounded best played on the Choir, together with the Bassoon played on the pedals.

In due course Jonas learned a lot about the organ, including the fact that it was alive, that notes sounded different from one day to the next. Just as he learned that when he pulled out the stop that said ‘Mixture 3 fagot’, it came across loud and strong, like the last verse of a hymn, and it occurred to him that it was the same with people: now and again you might be in a ‘Mixture 3 fagot’ mood, but that the usual tone tended to be that of the ‘Principal’, the keynote of the Hauptwerk. For his own part, Jonas felt like a ‘Reed’, barely audible.

As time went on, however, Jonas slipped inside the organ chest simply to listen. He had found a broad plank, almost like a bunk, in the midst of the maze of pipes and there he would lie as if at the heart of an incredible machine — had he read Hermann Hesse he might have said glass bead game — for hours on end, week in, week out, month after month, letting his father play Bach for him until he could feel the music permeating his body like a medicine; or perhaps it was more that, having first put his body together, only now, with the help of time, could his father blow life into it. One day Jonas had the idea of taking the crystal prism — his most treasured possession at that time — from his pocket and placing it on his brow, and it was then, while he lay there as if on a bunk in the middle of the organ, with the prism on his brow and his father playing Bach, that he saw, felt in every bone in his body, possibly because the prism broke up the music in such a way that the brain apprehended it differently, that he was lying inside the very engine of existence. Because again, beneath everything else, this was what troubled him: the wheel. Why did Nefertiti die? Who turned the wheel? Who or what sat at the hub of the wheel? And as he lay there, Jonas realized that he himself was at the centre of the wheel, that he was lying still, and yet he was in motion. And lying there, at the centre of something he did not understand, with a prism on his brow that refracted the light and created a little rainbow somewhere out of eyeshot, Jonas was aware that he was slowly being healed.

No wonder then that Jonas Wergeland conceived a very special affection for organs, after lying for half a year on his back, listening to that blend of air and sound, the creaking of the sliders and clicking of the stops, while gazing at the swell, the little house, seeing how the little doors were opened and closed as his father regulated the volume with his foot and how the abstracts, trackers and tracker wires, all the filigree network surrounding him, moved in time with the movements of his father’s fingers. Of all the pieces of jewellery Jonas Wergeland saw in his life, Aunt Laura’s included, none was more beautiful than the organ with its tin and lead, its copper and ebony, against a backing of pine. Jonas was never fazed by computers and their microchips, not even the control room at NRK could impress someone who had seen an organ from the inside: the world, as it were, from the wrong side.

For a long time Jonas believed it was Nefertiti’s death that had driven him into the organ chest, but the real cause lay, of course, in the future. Not until he was a grown man, looking back over a long distance, did Jonas understand that his time inside the organ had equipped him for experiences and ordeals that were to come later in life.

But already that autumn Jonas had grasped that, in the little door in his father’s office, the one leading, that is, to the organ chest, he had found an unusual and original angle on life as a whole. Later, when faced with any apparently complex phenomenon, he would always look for this little back door, this entrance that would take him to the backside or the inside and provide him with a totally different viewpoint. ‘Crawl inside the organ,’ he would say to himself. So when, for example, Jonas stumbled across the Comoro Islands, he knew right away that this could be one of those rare angles that would lead him to the backside of a complexity, like someone taking you behind a grand building and showing you that it is a flat on a film set.

In later life Jonas Wergeland held the belief that everyone should have the chance to crawl inside an organ chest, even if none of them could enjoy the same privilege as himself: to be able to lie inside an organ while your own father sets the world to rights with his playing in a church built of granite, the stone of your childhood.