He made five more visits to Bygdøy Tennis Club and Finn Søhol. Serving and serving, again and again, the art of repetition. Again Søhol spread the handkerchief on the floor, in the service court this time, like a bull’s-eye at which Jonas was to aim, one which was gradually moved. ‘If you’re to force his backhand, you’ll have to serve first towards the centre and then out to the line!’ Søhol was far from satisfied but thought Jonas was improving. ‘To hell with the second serve, hit it as hard as you can every time, either you’ll win the point or it’ll be a double fault, all or nothing.’ During the last two sessions they also practised forehand returns so that Jonas, if he were lucky, would be able to return some of the ambassador’s serves. ‘You might be able to break his rhythm and win a few points on his serve, too,’ said Søhol.
Finally, Søhol set up a tennis machine on the opposing baseline to give Jonas the chance to really try out his forehand. It was a momentous experience: being bombarded by an incessant stream of yellow balls as in some ancient myth in which warriors sprang up from the ground as fast as the hero could hack them down. ‘Swing your racket well back,’ yelled Søhol, ‘now follow through. That’s the way. Well done.’
Fortunately, this time it was not a tennis machine on the other side of the net but Gjermund Boeck, the ambassador, and that gentleman was both startlingly red in the face and thrown quite off-balance by his prospective son-in-law, who was unexpectedly serving with uncanny accuracy and managing to return a good few of his own serves, transformed as if by magic so it seemed, into a future champion. As luck would have it, it was the ambassador himself who had chosen the Njård Sports Centre, which, with its wooden floor, gave Jonas an added advantage, since play moved even faster on such a surface.
Jonas tossed the ball into the air, noticed fleetingly how it hovered, started to rotate, transformed into Pluto, the most outlying and most obscure of all the planets in the solar system, offering an angle on the entire universe, before it dropped, and he turned it into a comet, a dazzling ace that left Margrete’s father gazing open-mouthed after it, and won a long hard second set 7–5 for Jonas. At that very moment he realized there was something up with his shoulder.
The ambassador, clearly exhausted, but determined, fiendishly determined, prepared to serve in the final, decisive set.
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?