People were still trickling in, even though the church was jam-packed. Every face shone with that same special radiance, a sort of deep joy born of solemn purpose. Many of the mourners nodded quietly to him. Some of them strangers. Jonas was, after all, something of a celebrity, his face seen on television all the time. He exchanged nods with old teachers from elementary school and sales assistants from the shopping centre, from shops where he had bought his first football, his first blue blazer, his first pencil case. The whole of Grorud had turned out. Jonas spotted Tango-Thorvaldsen, who owned the shoe shop; he spied the dreaded barber and the drunken chemist, and wasn’t that the postman — an old, old man now — who had delivered the longed-for letter from Margrete? Jonas remembered, suddenly he remembered so much, and stranger stilclass="underline" he also seemed to remember, or to see, things which were to come, things which had not yet happened in his life, as if he were in the middle of an overture.
Up in the organ loft Jonas Wergeland was playing ‘Lead kindly light’, and as he played he was able to keep track in the ‘gossip mirror’ of what was happening at the head of the nave. The choir was like a florist’s shop, billowing with bouquets and beribboned wreaths like belated laurels. This, and all the people, brought home to him something which had never really occurred to him, and which he had possibly never completely understood until now; something which for some reason, given the situation, was a great lesson to him: his father had been a much loved man. Maybe that was the whole point of life: to be loved? Jonas’s eyes went to his family and relatives in the front pews. His mother was sitting next to Benjamin, his little brother, who had Down’s syndrome and who had stared uncomprehendingly at Jonas when told by him that unfortunately he could not begin the service with Abba’s ‘Ring Ring’. Maybe that was why he had refused to leave his new bow and arrow in the porch and now sat there happily drawing a bead on the angel on the altarpiece.
On his mother’s other side was Rakel, she too dressed in black. Though there was nothing unusual in that, she had always worn black. Big sister and rebel. Cheekbones like Katherine Hepburn’s. The pride and waywardness of an Irish actor. A true revolutionary her whole life through. A pioneer in what was arguably one of the most male-dominated of all occupations, a samaritan, a Sister — not only to him, Jonas, but to many, to thousands, of others. It was a privilege to have such a sister. In Jonas’s earliest memories she was no more than a face buried in a book, a collection of tales, the Arabian Nights; costumes and scents gliding through the rooms and turning the flat into a weird and wonderful place for him and Daniel, kids that they were. There they would be, taking life for granted, and Rakel would sweep into the living room, say something or do something, and all of a sudden they were not sure of anything. He remembered her as a perpetually wry, reproving smile. And then she was gone, or at least reduced to collecting the scalps of a string of boyfriends, to leather jackets reeking of cigarette smoke and the roar of a 1000 cc: a black-clad whirlwind that popped in every now and again. Eventually, though, she settled down, made some choices, got married and moved far away; later, she would often live even further away, for years at a time, with just the odd letter from foreign parts to let them know that she was alive and well. She was the only truly sterling individual Jonas knew. She was the one person he admired most in all the world.
Nonetheless, he toyed with the thought that Rakel could have had a very different life, had their father not been a musician. That, when you came right down to it, it was their father who had kick-started her remarkable career. Because, if Haakon had not been an organist and Bach lover he would never have taken Rakel to Oslo’s Trinity Church on a late-autumn day in the mid-fifties. What happened on that day in Trinity Church? On that day Rakel met a lifesaver. A real lifesaver.
Rakel would tell the story of this event any chance she got. She had been seven at the time, and the mere fact of being taken into town by her father, to attend what she understood to be a very grand gathering, was wonderful. The sight of the building alone was enough for her. She was almost living in the Arabian Nights at the time, so the broad copper dome put her in mind of a magnificent mosque — all that was missing were the minarets. But more was to come, because no sooner had they entered the church and climbed up to the organ loft, where her father shook hands with the few other invited guests, most of them organists, than the guest of honour arrived, a man who, despite being almost eighty, was still strong and spry, with a good head of hair. ‘I thought he was so handsome,’ Rakel always said. ‘I thought it was the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in disguise.’
This gentleman was no less a person than Albert Schweitzer, in Oslo to be presented with the Nobel Peace Prize which he had been awarded the year before. As far away as Africa he had heard tell of Eivind Groven’s curiously pure-tuned organ and he had expressed a wish to play it. Now he was actually here, in Trinity Church in Oslo. He seated himself at the simple organ and played a little — not much, just a little — because his eye had been caught by the old church organ and everyone could see that the world-renowned musician’s fingers were itching to try it too. So of course he had to sit down at that fine Romantic organ — built in Norway, as it happens, by Claus Jensen — and after only a few bars he nodded his head vigorously in appreciation of the instrument’s tone. He played Bach; it may not have been the perfect organ on which to play Bach, but Albert Schweitzer clearly enjoyed what he was hearing. To Rakel, who was of course familiar with the piece he was playing, Schweitzer seemed to render that marvellous warp and weft of voices quite transparent, and more: the very bricks of the church suddenly appeared translucent. Everything expanded, but at the same time everything was connected. Rakel felt that she had learned a bit more about the breadth of a man. That one could care as much about church organs as about the black people in Africa. She knew instinctively, by observing the ease with which Schweitzer handled all the different manuals and pedals, that this was a man capable of doing several things at once. It came as no surprise to her, later, to discover that he could write high-flown works on the history of New Testament research, that he had the ability to cure such appalling diseases as malaria and dysentery, sleeping sickness and leprosy, or that he could edit Bach’s collected organ works. This was a man with respect for life at all levels, who had therefore taught himself to use instruments as diverse as the organ, the pen and the scalpel. ‘He was a juggler,’ she said. Not until Jonas met Bo Wang Lee did he understand what she meant.
Afterwards Rakel was introduced to Albert Schweitzer; he bent down and stroked her cheek. ‘It was Bach who provided me with the first funds for my hospital in Africa,’ he said in German, but Rakel understood him anyway. What she liked best about him was his rather bushy white moustache. ‘And he had kind eyes,’ she always said. ‘The boy I marry will have to have eyes as kind as his.’
Although she was only seven years old, and did not understand exactly who Albert Schweitzer was, all the things he had done and everything he did while he was in Oslo, she had been greatly struck by the fire in those eyes, the warmth of that brief handshake, the music that poured out into the church. Unbeknown to anyone else in the family, over the years she garnered various scraps of information about Schweitzer. Then one day, when she was fifteen and had long been a teenage rebel, there it was on her bedroom wall — causing her parents to shake their heads in disbelief: a picture of Albert Schweitzer, hanging between Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. A curious trinity. ‘Some day I’ll find my Lambaréné,’ she said. And in a way she did.