Jonas played ‘Lead kindly light’, Purday’s lovely melody, he had the urge to improvise, introduce some provocative chords, produce innovative modulations while moaning and humming along like Glenn Gould or Keith Jarrett. His father would have liked that. Jonas was always nervous when playing for his father. Now too. Even though Haakon Hansen could not hear him. He lay in his coffin, dead. Yet Jonas played as if he could bring his father to life, was amazed to find that he still possessed it: the longing to be a lifesaver.
He had trained so hard, so resolutely. Particularly during the year when he turned ten it seemed to him that he was more in the water than out of it. At Frogner Baths, at Torggata Baths, out at Hvaler, this was his main pursuit: practising staying underwater for as long as possible. Building up his lung capacity. He could swim underwater for longer than any of his chums, had no difficulty in swimming across Badedammen or the length of the Torggata pool. At Frogner Baths, where you could look into the upstairs pool through round windows, he scared the wits out of spectators by diving down and goggling out at them as inquisitively as they were peering in, rather like a seal in an aquarium — except that he stayed there for so long, on the other side of the window, that people began to shout and bang on the glass in alarm. These daredevil dives did not escape the attention of the lifeguards either: ‘Any more of your tomfoolery and you’re out on your ear,’ they bawled at him from their high stools.
But it wasn’t tomfoolery, it was conscientious training. Jonas Wergeland was preparing for his great undertaking: that of saving a life.
During this most intensive phase of his life-saving career, he also practised the technique of getting a half-drowned person back onto dry land. Daniel, who reluctantly consented to act as guinea pig, played the lifeless drownee with impressive realism and did his utmost to show just how difficult such a manoeuvre could be, with the result that Jonas sometimes became a mite over-enthusiastic. ‘You’re not supposed to strangle me, dummy! You’re supposed to save me!’ Daniel would gasp when they finally reached the shallows.
Even more important, though, were the various methods of artificial respiration. On several occasions Jonas almost cracked Daniel’s spine when practising the Holger Nielsen method on his brother — equally uncanny in his simulation of unconsciousness. Daniel drew the line, however, at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This last, as it happens, was a story in itself. In the autumn when Jonas was in fifth grade — in biology class, as was only right and proper — the whole class had the chance to practice giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dummy, or rather: the top half of a female by the name of Anna — a clean-living version, if you like, of the more notorious Blow-up Barbara — over whose mouth they placed a strip of plastic, for fear, perhaps, of being smitten with unmentionable diseases. If they tilted the head back and blew properly Anna’s chest would rise. Jonas was praised by the teacher for his attempt. Anna’s breasts jutted upwards like two pyramids under her blue tracksuit top. In his imagination Jonas saw how she must have tripped and fallen into the water while out jogging and how he had saved her from drowning with his life-giving breath.
One day when he returned home from Frogner Baths his mother sat herself down right across from him and looked at him long and hard, as if she were wondering whether his alarmingly red eyes were attributable to chlorine or to lunacy. ‘Why are you doing all this?’ she asked.
‘Because I have a talent,’ he said. ‘I can hold my breath.’ What he may perhaps have been trying to say was: I have a duty.
She was still looking him in the eye, but she could not help smiling: ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s okay to take life a little less seriously than you do.’
As an adult Jonas would remember these words whenever he had the feeling that he was making too big a deal of things. That is my curse, he told himself. I take life too seriously.
But just then all Jonas could think about was the day, sometime far in the future, when he would be put to the test. His life would culminate in this, the moment when he actually saved a life; his presence on earth would be justified by one sensational exploit, broadcast live, as it were, on prime-time television. Everything was to be a preparation for this. Daniel had a calendar with a metal plate on the back and a red metal ring. Most people moved the ring from one day to the next, but Daniel set it only around important dates. Jonas knew that the moment for his dazzling deed awaited him on one of those magnetic, red-circle days.
Then, one Saturday morning when they awoke to the Goldberg variation no. 6 and the smell of frying bacon, Jonas noticed that the red ring on Daniel’s calendar was circling that very day. For a second he construed this as an ominous sign. But his brother lay grinning in his bed. ‘Today you’re going to see so many naked women that you’ll never be the same again,’ Daniel said. Jonas breathed a sigh of relief, not knowing that this was also the day when he was to be put to the test.
Now though, for all the basic training of his boyhood, he was powerless. Down below in the church a father lay dead. Holding his breath would do no good. Artificial respiration would do no good. The day before, Jonas had stood by the open coffin, regarding his father’s body. Haakon Hansen looked as though he were alive. Intact. All that was missing, so it seemed, was a little cog. A glowing spot behind his ribs, that glow which wove the network of tiny links between his organs. As Jonas stood there beside the coffin an old question presented itself: What should you take with you? What makes life life? What gives life life?
Jonas Wergeland sat at the organ manuals, terraces of keys, putting everything he had into the playing: fingers, feet, his whole body. This was a day with a heavy red ring around it, a red-letter day for Grorud, one which would always be remembered — not least on account of the unforeseen intermezzo occasioned by an uninvited guest, a personage who showed up dressed in orange even though black was the order of the day, a jungle flower in a dim Norwegian pine forest. ‘Haakon Hansen was a Buddhist,’ was just one of the rumours which would circulate later. ‘For over thirty years we’ve had a Buddhist for an organist in Grorud Church.’ Jonas sat up in the organ loft, accompanying a packed church in ‘Lead kindly light, amid th’encircling gloom’. And they could have used the light, because it was an exceptionally grey autumn day outside. But the congregation sang fit to make the stained glass glow and the eye of God in the triangle at the top of the large fresco behind the altar look down with gladness upon them.
Before the service began, before making his way up to the organ loft, Jonas had stayed downstairs for a while. He had run an eye over the packed pews, listened to the murmur of voices, inhaled the scent of mingled perfumes. The mood was buoyant, not unlike the first minutes at a big party where the guests have not seen each other in ages. Before him, Jonas saw a cross-section of his own life, his life encapsulated in a church. Here were girls, now women, who had protested when he pawed their breasts; here were mothers, now elderly ladies, who had complained when he played the Stones’s ‘The Last Time’ too loud at Badedammen; here were old men, now ancients, who had shaken their fists at him when he knocked off their hats with snowballs. All tenderly smiling. This was a time for peace and reconciliation. Jonas spotted people he had not seen in years, folk from the housing estate; he nodded to Five-Times Nilsen and his lady wife, nodded to Bastesen the caretaker, who had actually shaved for the occasion, then he was tapped gently on the shoulder by Karen Mohr, the Grey Eminence herself: ‘Your father, he would have been worthy,’ was all she said. And Jonas knew: ‘No greater compliment could any man receive.’