The Seducer

The Invisible Man

And so in the same year in which statesman Trygve Lie died, Jonas Wergeland lay stretched out on the red carpet beneath the vaulted ceiling of Grorud Church, looking as though he had strained every muscle in his body in his attempt to reach an unbeatable smash from the opponent we call Life. No one seeing him lying there on the floor, as if dead, could have guessed that not long afterwards he would be the cause of the most appalling and to some extent sensational rumours as to how the church had been vandalized.

Outside the snow was falling, a constant sifting of light flakes that settled in a white film over everything, transforming the entire landscape — not inappropriately, really, with Christmas just around the corner. Jonas lay on his back in the choir, listening to this organ music with the weird timbres, music in keeping, not with the crystals of snow, but with the walls of the church, the different minerals in the granite, something far more mysterious and deep, light and weighty at one and the same time: long-drawn-out chords, with notes vibrant as little whirlpools, slowly changing and forcing him into a state of meditation, forcing him to look inside himself.

Light streamed in through the stained-glass windows, sending a shaft of light slanting through dim dust onto the pews right next to Jonas. He lay there, listening to the organ music, struck by how little he knew about his father. Where had he produced this from, his father, this music with the totally different logic, beyond major and minor: slow shifts striking out in all directions like a variety of possibilities all existing side by side. Jonas was to wonder about that day in the church for the rest of his life, and later he did ask his father what he had been playing. ‘Messiaen,’ his father replied, only Jonas thought he had said ‘Messiah’, which in fact seemed pretty apt: it was music worthy of a saviour. His father had played a piece from Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur, the birth of the Lord, first the part entitled ‘Le Verbe’, with the descending scale played on the pedals, and then the meditative piece to which he was now listening, motionless, on his back in the choir of the church: ‘Desseins éternels’, measured, introspective music with a most unusual setting, repetitions that were, nonetheless, all different, leaving him with an impression of ideas being weighed up, music that spun him into a cocoon, encased him, protected him. He twisted his head back and looked at the fresco, The Great White Flock, the crowd, felt that horror again, felt as though he were becoming invisible.

For this was, of course, the point, the final conclusion: with his grandfather gone, no one was telling him, and if no one was telling him, he was no longer a unique individual, and if he was no longer a unique individual, then he was just another face in the crowd, and if he was just another face in the crowd, then he was on the point of disappearing, becoming, quite literally, lost; and it was only now, with the death of his grandfather, that Jonas Wergeland realized what it was that he dreaded more than anything else: the thought of being invisible.

When do we become who we are?

Wrong question: When do we see who we are? Or what we are?

The threat of invisibility was to dog Jonas Wergeland all his life. A visit to Gardermoen many years later proved to be a particularly upsetting experience. After a memorable trip to Gudbrandsdalen, while he was studying at the College of Architecture, Jonas had suddenly been seized by a pressing need to find out more about his own roots and not least the countryside in which his mother had grown up, but which he had never seen, his grandmother, Jørgine Wergeland having left the area during the war — that grandmother who was now so old and frail that she made the V-sign if she so much as managed to get out of bed.

He drove into Gardermoen and parked the car next to the post office, walked across the road to the Shell station and was directed to an old man who lived nearby and who, as luck would have it, was able to point out the spot where his grandparents’ smallholding, his mother’s childhood home, had stood. Jonas sauntered pensively along Gardermoveien, past the Community Centre and the playing fields and then all at once there he was staring at his roots on the other side of the fence.

And what did he see?

Tarmac. An airstrip.

Where once there had been a smallholding, there was now a military and civil airport, an international zone so to speak. How had this come about?

In 1942, about forty properties had been bought up by the Germans, who were planning to extend the airport, or rather, build an airport, since in those days the airport was little more than an airstrip cutting across a field. Jonas’s grandmother had told him how a German wearing jodhpurs with a leather patch on the backside had come to the house and simply announced that they had a fortnight to get out, by order of the Wehrmacht. Most of the properties were family dwellings, but a handful, like Jørgine and Oscar Wergeland’s, also included as much as ten to fifteen acres of land: smallholdings supporting a few horses, cattle, some pigs and chickens, stables and byres. His maternal grandfather had also been a cobbler, with his own workshop on the premises, as well as doing the occasional stint with the local artillery regiment, the AR 2. The purchase was passed by the local council and his grandparents were paid the going rate — which was still a tidy sum of money at that time, although Oscar Wergeland never had any joy from it since, according to Jørgine he was so mad that he burst a blood vessel and died. He could not bear the thought of the Germans taking their smallholding away from them. After that, Jørgine moved to Oslo and bought the flat in Oscars gate.

Jonas Wergeland stood by the fence, not all that far from where the school had once stood and stared at the runway, first surfaced by the Germans with concrete, which in turn had later been covered by tarmac — a bad idea, as it turned out, so bad that it had all had to be redone. Jonas had always known about this, but even so he could not quite believe it even when he saw it with his own eyes. One day a smallholding, the next razed to the ground and covered by concrete as if to seal up the past. And right then and there, standing by that fence at Gardermoen, it dawned on him that here lay the explanation for the feeling he sometimes had of being totally lacking in any roots, a feeling which the next moment would manifest itself in a niggling restlessness. There, at Gardermoen, at the end of a long runway, Jonas Wergeland understood for the first time why, right from the start, he had been condemned to the life of a nomad. His roots in the earth were gone — not even at his grandfather’s house on Hvaler was there a patch of cultivated land: that was a house coloured by ships and travel. Jonas’s only knowledge of the land had come from his mini-introduction in the school garden. Jonas Wergeland stood by a fence at Gardermoen, next to a strip of asphalt below which lay his grandparents’ smallholding, watching a plane come rolling towards him, lift its belly to him and take off; he just didn’t understand it, how it could happen so fast, from earth to air in one, two, three generations, from something concrete to something abstract, and possibly it was here — it’s merely a suggestion — as the ear-splitting roar of the jet engines spread across the countryside, that Jonas Wergeland realized he was going to have to take this to its logical conclusion and start with the most abstract and ethereal thing of all: television.

But these reflections belong to the future. Or do they? When Jonas reached this understanding at Gardermoen, he had the feeling that this vision, not just the story, I mean, but the vision of a strip of tarmac running across the former site of a smallholding, had always been there in his mind, like a prism in his memory.

In any case, Jonas was now lying on the floor of Grorud Church, listening to his father’s extraordinary organ music. Wrapped in a cocoon of music, a fine web. He looked up at the picture of the Great White Flock, figures seeming almost to run together into a surging sea of humanity.

Earlier that autumn Jonas had had an experience which had reinforced his fear of crowds. He had taken part in one of the many demonstrations against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, not so much because he actually felt strongly about it as because it made a change from all of the demonstrations against the USA, expanding the protest march selection, so to speak, by a hundred per cent — besides which, a couple of not exactly unattractive girls in the parallel class to his own had lured him into taking part. The following day there was a picture in the paper from the mass rally on Universitetsplassen, a shot of the crowd. And Jonas was nowhere to be seen. He knew exactly where he had been standing: in reality between one of girls, the one carrying a Czech flag, and the guy in the unmistakeable parka holding one of the poles of a banner, both of them clearly visible in the foreground of the picture. But Jonas Wergeland had disappeared, he could not understand it, held the newspaper photograph up to the light as if that might help, reveal a shadow that was not otherwise discernible, but he was, and he remained, quite literally out of the picture, as if Judgement Day had come and he had been dragged down into Hell, while the true believers remained behind, or like those pictures one heard about — in the Soviet Union, aptly enough — from which people had been erased as if they had never existed. Jonas puzzled over this for a long time but eventually had to drop it. Only later did he come to interpret it as a clear forewarning, and an equally clear hint, as to the consequences of his grandfather’s death: Jonas would become invisible, merge with the crowd. One snowflake in a flurry of flakes. White. Colourless.

When do we become who we are? When do we become more than we think we are? When do we open the door onto all our inherent potential?

Jonas Wergeland lay on his back in Grorud Church, while the snow settled in a soft, thick layer on the roof and on the ground around the granite walls. The snow also seemed to make the light that much more intense, a light that made the stained-glass windows in the church glow, come alive. His father was playing another piece now, ‘Les mages’, although Jonas did not know that was what it was called, he was simply aware of the unusual rhythm, as of something swaying, pitching — for some reason he found himself picturing a caravan, a procession, something in motion, planets orbiting around one another; he had a feeling of weightlessness, of tremendous clarity, of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Again his eye turned to the fresco behind the altar, the two angels, both holding stringed instruments, in the air above the mass of humanity, the Great White Flock, those completely identical figures. Jonas was sure of just one thing: he had to break out of the crowd; no matter what it took he must not become invisible. And so he lay there, letting himself be spun into a cocoon, letting himself be enveloped, wrapped up; he felt heavy but no longer afraid, because something was about to happen, he knew it, the music would make it happen.

Outside the snow was falling, packing the whole of Grorud in cotton wool, making everything hushed. A hush that made you prick up your ears. Jonas lay in the choir and listened, was struck by a sensation that the crystals in the minerals of the granite — the quartz especially — were somehow singing along to the music, had been set in motion. As if the whole church were in the process of turning into a conductor, linked up to something greater. His father had always supported the theory that there was a connection between music and stones; that, particularly in Grorud Church, an accord existed between the strains of the organ and the granite, something normally found only in the great cathedrals of Europe.

Jonas felt his body going numb or going to sleep in order to recharge its batteries, he lay inside a casing, preparing for a metamorphosis. He listened to the music, hearing how it abruptly changed. He shut his eyes, let himself be enfolded, affected, and all at once he knew, knew that it was not impossible; a person could lift a ton-weight of a cupboard or do away with seven lovers at one blow, or not die even, despite the fact that everyone said you were doomed to die, so why, he thought, why couldn’t a person turn out at any minute to be quite different from what they appear to be.