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.