‘From then on I saw the world through different eyes,’ said Gabriel. ‘And it made me a better actor. I remember all the arguments we had, John Gielgud and I, up in his flat, about those old theories that say you have to forget yourself on stage, as if we have this nucleus inside us, this individuality which constitutes our self and which will always get in the way of all the other roles we try to play. On this point, I always maintained — so strongly that I don’t think John ever forgot it — that, on the contrary, I was those other roles; that the potential for all of them was already there, inherent in me, it was only a matter of unearthing it.’
While Gabriel’s boat, the Norge, floated more or less motionless out in the sea lane, thanks to the tug-of-war between wind and current, and the Skipper Clement was drawing level with Oscarsborg, packed to the gunwales with people who were already having a high old time, letting their hair down, as if the ferry to Denmark were a stage-set on which they were expected to assume roles other than those they played in everyday life, Gabriel rose and went out to the galley.
Jonas thought he had gone out for more corned beef to replenish the plate on whose white china only a couple of slices of tomato lay in splendid isolation; instead Gabriel came back with an onion which he promptly and ostentatiously proceeded to peel, having first taken a long swig of whisky.
‘Few things annoy me more than Ibsen’s metaphor of Peer Gynt and the onion,’ he said. ‘It’s a poor look-out when an author comes up with a bad analogy, but it’s even worse when such an analogy is given credence and adopted as some sort of moral guideline, not to mention being elevated to the status of a kind of national emblem. Who in the world would expect to find a kernel in an onion? I mean, it’s nothing but a bundle of leaves! Botanically speaking, it’s the absolute height of nonsense! If it’s a kernel he’s looking for, then Peer Gynt ought at least to look at the rootstock or at the part to which the very innermost leaf is attached, the onion base, the point of growth, which is definitely not found in the middle of an onion.’ Gabriel snorted and commenced to remove layer after layer from the onion, laying them side by side on the plate in front of them while illustrating that Ibsen’s metaphor was enough to make you weep, wiping away the tears with a voluminous blue handkerchief. The most annoying thing about Ibsen was that he believed he was presenting a negative image of a human being, when in fact it was a positive image. Quite phenomenal. We were all these layers. What was wrong with that? To be oneself, which was what Ibsen was always going on about, actually meant accepting that people had many sides to their character and that it was the sum of these that was the kernel. ‘The greatest freedom, the very hallmark of mankind,’ said Gabriel, ‘is the freedom, at any time, to reinvent oneself, by drawing on all of one’s potential. That’s why you ought to be an actor, Jonas. To gain a clearer understanding of this. Reinvent yourself. Be a king. Be a duke!’
It was during the months following Gabriel’s reflections in this vein that Jonas found himself taking a fresh view of the portrait of himself as a one-year-old, which hung in the hall at home, the sort of portrait that was very popular in the fifties, presenting forty-eight different images of Jonas, each one just slightly different from the others, in one frame.
Now, however, he was on board an old lifeboat, examining a row of onion layers arrayed on a plate, before finally looking up to meet the eye of an old actor, well-oiled by now, who lit another Camel and was soon enveloped in a cocoon of smoke. ‘Be a duke,’ he repeated, but Jonas had lost the thread, he had caught a whiff of danger, although he could not have said what it might be: a drifting iceberg perhaps, or the Skipper Clement, now only a few hundred metres away from them in the darkness and looking, from the shore, like a resplendent floating palace.
Aqua Vita
The mere prospect of it, the very façade of the organ was enough to take anyone’s breath away — without a doubt the most impressive Jonas had ever seen, with over one hundred burnished ornamental pipes. Standing there on its platform at the far end of the concert hall, fifteen metres high, it looked more like a little palace of pure silver. It was in fact the biggest tracker-action organ in the world, with 10,500 pipes, five manuals plus pedals and 127 stops — it almost beggared belief.
It was late in the afternoon, the guided tours were over for the day, and Jonas had been allowed into the famous building ‘as a special favour’ — Jonas Wergeland was frequently granted such privileges — by a Mr White, or ‘Edward’ as he insisted that Jonas call him, who actually claimed to know Ronald Sharp, the man who had built the organ. Mr White was kindness itself, he could not do enough for Jonas; a connoisseur of Linie Aquavit, that nectar of the gods from the other side of the world; a Norwegian and a man of some standing at that, Mr White had discovered that Jonas worked for Norwegian television and that he was on his way to New Zealand to do a programme on islanders of Norwegian descent.
Jonas seated himself on the organ bench before, or rather enclosed within, an enormous console, complete with a television monitor placed high up on the console and the facility for taping the music. It was like sitting deep inside a power station, linked up to a huge waterfall. Jonas set the registers as best he could, and his thoughts went to his father as he located the Principal in this masterpiece, although there were a lot of stops he had never heard of — Gamba, Schwebung, Unda Maris and — what was that: Vox Humana. He wisely left the couplers alone, likewise the combination buttons with their amazing capacity for electronic storage. Instead he began to play and was as captivated as always by the profusion of sound that poured out at the touch of his fingers and toes. Jonas Wergeland may not have been the only Norwegian to play the Grand Organ in Sydney Opera House, but he was the only Norwegian ever to play Duke Ellington on it.
So how do the pieces of a life fit together? In but one way?
Jonas thought of the road from Grorud Church to this place, an ocean of a difference, an ocean between them, and it struck him that he was starting to become a bit blasé, perhaps because this overwhelming compression of the world in terms of time and space no longer left any room for excitement or dreams. In the toilet of the flat in Solhaug when he was a boy there hung a reproduction of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of Soria Moria Castle, a glimmer of gold on the horizon. ‘A long, long way off, he saw something glittering and gleaming.’ Jonas always used to think, when he was sitting on the toilet, that this picture was all about travelling, probably because the boy in the foreground had a knapsack on his back and a staff in his hand, but also because the toilet contained another special feature, a small bookshelf filled with copies of the National Geographic, the only publication, other than newspapers, which their father read. Jonas also used to leaf through these and it was here, in the toilet of a flat in Solhaug that he made his first journeys into the realms of imagination, accompanied by the churning motors of his bowels, as he browsed through issues containing features entitled ‘My Life in Forbidden Lhasa’ or ‘The Great Barrier Reef’ or ‘To the Land of the Head-hunters’, and even if he could make no sense of the headlines, he read all he needed to and more in the wonderful pictures. So already, here, the solid foundations of his mistrust of the written word — or, not mistrust but a firm belief that words were superfluous — were being laid, because the pictures said it alclass="underline" weird and wonderful painted faces, giant clams that could snap shut around a diver’s foot and the golden roofs of the mausoleums of the seven Dalai Lamas at the top of the Potala Palace — ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’