The Seducer

Circle Circle

And so Jonas felt some of the same weariness, the same leaden awareness, that he was facing an opponent who was too strong for him, on the day when he walked, or rather, slipped through, one of the side doors of Grorud Church.

There are moments in life that can work a change on a person, moments when the spirit makes a kind of a leap, and I confess that I have hunted high and low for the minutes which would define the point when Jonas Wergeland became the person he is, which is to say in the sense that he arrived at a new understanding of himself: the fact is that Jonas Wergeland was one person when he walked into that church and someone else — someone else entirely — when he came out. And during the interval he would commit, or at any rate be blamed for, an act that all Grorud would talk about for years, presenting it with a shudder as a horrific act of vandalism.

Jonas had a close, almost organic, affinity with Grorud Church, a building that was about as old as the century and visible from every corner of the valley. To Jonas it was the archetypal church, and he had made hundreds of sketches of it from all sides and from the memorial gardens in particular, with the broad steps in the foreground and the weeping birch to the right in front of the tower. The church was built out of red Grorud granite, and when they were little, Jonas and Nefertiti had often played in the hollows in the hillside where the blocks had been hacked out, not far from the People’s Palace and the cinema. Granite held a particular fascination for Nefertiti, and she was forever extolling its virtues: ‘You do know, of course, Jonas, that the Ten Commandments were written on tablets of granite.’ Always, when he sat in the church, Jonas had the idea that somehow he was sitting inside the mountain, the mountain of his childhood, that the church was merely a part of Ravnkollen’s granite massif, moved a little way out onto the plain by the hands of men. So he felt no surprise either, later in life, when he visited Egypt; he had already seen what man could do with blocks of stone. The pyramids were bigger, it’s true, but they did not come as a shock. And no one, neither the Lutherans nor the Marxists, needed to tell Jonas Wergeland that labour was sacred; he saw, he experienced, the wonder of it every time he sat in the church. That building was every bit as much of a monument to Grorud’s masons as it was to a higher power.

It was the middle of December and it was snowing, the first fall of the winter. The air was full, saturated you might say, with great white motes that fell with uncanny slowness, as if the flakes were all but defying gravity. Once inside the door, Jonas brushed himself off, noting as he did so, that his father was rehearsing his Christmas repertoire: preludes and variations on the Christmas carols. There was no one in the office, no one else in the church, only him and his father.

Slowly, Jonas made his way up the aisle, between the pews to the choir where he stopped to contemplate the huge fresco by Per Vigeland on the semi-circular wall behind the altar, The Great White Flock, a painting which did not elicit the slightest tingle between his shoulder-blades but which even so, owing to all the hours he had spent in the church as a child, had acquired the character of something familiar and comforting. He lay down on his back, his head pointing towards the altar rail. He was cold, but when he lay like this on the red carpet the organ music seemed to enfold him, coming at him from all sides, wrapping him in a soft, warm eiderdown. Sometimes he stretched out like this in the evenings, too, and in the darkness he could almost see stars appearing beneath the vaulted ceiling, or felt as if the walls and the roof simply disappeared, giving him the impression that he was lying outdoors in a warm sleeping-bag, gazing at the heavens. As a grown man, Jonas would always have a weakness for Pythagoras’s idea that the planets combine to create harmonies, not because this theory was correct — any more than all the others that have been propounded, then or now, regarding the universe — but because it appealed to his imagination and tallied with the sensation he had had as a child, lying on the floor of the church in the dark, alive to the way the organ music created the most amazing kaleidoscopic nebulae on the ceiling — unless it was the other way round, and the organ music was an echo of the star-studded sky.

But this was the middle of the day, a Saturday, and although it was snowing, the light outside was strong and bright, bringing the stained-glass windows into their own, bathing the church in beams of colour. In the outside world this had been a year of revolt for students in many countries, not least in Paris, and it was also to be a memorable year in Jonas Wergeland’s life. He lay on the carpet, alone, in a church built of granite, aware that a kind of doubt and frustration, possibly even aggression, the like of which he had never known before, was threatening to paralyse all of his vital functions.

The top of his father’s head showed over the gallery rail: he could tell straight away when other ears were listening to his music, as if this did something to the acoustics of the room. He waved, was never surprised by Jonas’s visits to the church, only proud, as proud as any other father when their children come to see them at work.

Quite instinctively Haakon Hansen began to play Bach. So often it had been Bach. Up to this point in Jonas Wergeland’s life, Johann Sebastian Bach was the only one who could measure up to Edward Kennedy Ellington — in terms of emotional or therapeutic effect. The German baroque composer’s music acted as a lubricant, not unlike the chemical substance found in synapses of the brain cells, which formed the basis for an almost wordless communication and rapport between father and son — and possibly even common fantasies.

Outside it was snowing heavily, flakes so crisp that you felt you could make out every crystal, and see that no two were alike. His father was playing Bach, the strains of a trio-sonata filled the room and had much the same impact on Jonas as a flurry of soft snowflakes falling gently down to cover him, coat him in a layer of white, like an embalmment of sorts. But it did no good; the tension, the aggression, was in no way dissipated.

Someone was dead. His grandfather was dead. Omar Hansen lay in the grave under the pine trees on Kirkeøy alongside Melankton and all the other kith and kin, suddenly no more than an anonymous Hansen with a headstone that looked exactly like all the others, stone upon stone, grey upon grey: air, wind and nothingness.

Nefertiti’s death had come as a shock. His grandfather’s death left him, rather, with a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of rage. Infuriation with life itself.

One lovely autumn morning his grandfather had gone fishing in the peter-boat. He had sailed far out across the calm sea and it was only by chance, late in the day, that a fishing smack bound for Strömstad had altered course to check out the apparently empty boat, which had been drifting slowly in a wide circle far from shore as if caught in a maelstrom invisible to the naked eye. Omar Hansen had been found lying on the floor of the boat: his heart had given out. On the troll line hung seven beautiful mackerel like a tribute from Neptune.

Omar’s death meant that the tale had come to an end and as far as Jonas was concerned it was not just any old tale that had been cut short; it was his own, personal tale. No one was telling him now. He, Jonas, had come to an end. The very mainspring of his workings was gone.

This is, of course, a somewhat edited version of the truth. Jonas Wergleand’s frustration was rooted more in the fact that he no longer felt that he was special. However, it was really no wonder that his grandfather’s death should have provoked this crisis. As long as his grandfather was alive Jonas had, unconsciously for the most part, regarded himself as an exceptional person, an extraordinary human being, thanks to his grandfather’s endless and inventive stream of stories in which Jonas found himself woven into grand epic adventures and in which, what is more, he always played the hero. When his grandfather died, Jonas woke up to find himself — by his own lights, at least — exposed as being just like anyone else, just one of the crowd, a flake among other flakes. This was what made him feel so desperate: the thought of being just one of the crowd. To live the same sort of life as everyone else, to be caught in that circle, that totally predictable, drab greyness. At the same time, he knew what he wanted: to be a unique entity. Something quite different from the rest of the hoi polloi. But so far he had only been special because of others. Nefertiti, his grandfather: it was they who made him exceptional, not himself.

He lay on the floor in the choir of Grorud Church, directly above the crypt, where the bodies were kept. And that is what he felt like: a body. As in a dead body, as in any body. He felt like one of the living dead. He listened to the music. Outside it was snowing, huge feathery flakes, so dense that they seemed almost to be clutching at one another. The light streamed in through the stained-glass windows. White light transformed into colours. Jonas’s mind turned to Nefertiti’s crystal prism; it was there in his pocket, he never went anywhere without it; he ran his fingers over it, but it did no good — not now. Instead, he concentrated on the music, but that did no good either. Incredible. Bach did not help. Instead this music, which tended to put one in mind of snowflakes, felt suddenly heavy, oppressive, stifling. Mechanical. There was something so predictable about it, like circles, endlessly recurring circles, that it eventually seemed to Jonas as though the phrases were coiling themselves round his body, making it impossible for him to breathe.

‘Dad,’ he called out during a break in the music, aware that unconsciously he had just made the switch from ‘Daddy’. ‘Play something else,’ he called up to the gallery when his father’s head came into view.

If ever an Oedipal killing was committed in Jonas Wergeland’s life then it was here, now. Rejecting Bach was tantamount to rejecting his father. I repeat: Jonas Wergeland had a wonderful father, a father who proved once again that he was equal to the situation. Haakon Hansen looked down at Jonas, having detected the unwonted, almost desperate, note in his son’s voice. He said nothing. Disappeared from view. For a long time there was silence. Total silence. The light poured in through the stained-glass windows. Jonas stared up at the apse of the church, at the fresco, The Great White Flock. Christ in the middle, before a swelling sea of people. Jonas was suddenly filled with a deep loathing at the sight of this mass of humanity, people who all looked exactly alike, like little ripples on an ocean. He heard his father resetting the stops, shut his eyes, felt his limbs stiffening, like the premature onset of rigor mortis.

Jonas jumped when the organ surged into life. First came some swirling phrases which then gave way to weird — Jonas’s first instinct would have been to say ‘discordant’ — chords, that were sustained for a long, long time, sustained even when the pedals began to play a thundering descending scale. Jonas had never heard anything like it. It was horrible. Or was it horrible because it sounded as if the feelings inside him were here translated into a musical language? Jonas listened intently, trying to take in the evocative music that came tumbling down onto him, was thrown back at him from granite walls and ceiling, a landslide of organ music in which the sounds made by the pedals seemed to form a stairway running downwards, both terrible and majestic, grandiose and solemn, before this dramatic composition slipped into a new passage, quieter, and then — and this was the really weird part — a mixture of all sorts of things, including a dash of something else, of an atmosphere that Jonas associated with faraway places. Jonas heard it out, straining his ears; now and again it seemed to him that the notes lightly touched on something familiar that was promptly forsaken again. Jonas listened. Shut his eyes. Felt as thought the music were travelling in all directions at once. Backwards, too. Amazing. And the most fascinating thing of all: this music was totally unpredictable. Jonas listened to it as if he had never heard music before. He knew that something was going to happen. That this music would make something happen. He leaned backwards and looked at the fresco again, looking at it upside down, so that Christ was suddenly standing on his head, like a diver plunging towards the Earth.