What surprised him was his father’s reaction. When the two thugs finally made off, he struggled to his feet, took Jonas’s hand and led him back to the car, smiling all the while and saying over and over again: ‘They didn’t touch my fingers, thank God, they didn’t touch my fingers.’ As if everything was fine because they had not broken his fingers. Jonas cried and cried. They climbed into the Caravan and his father managed to drive, not to the casualty department, but to Grorud Church, where he dragged himself up to the organ with several broken ribs and a face covered in cuts and bruises. Jonas noticed blood on the keys and that his father had lost at least one tooth, because he kept on smiling, muttering, ‘Thank God, thank God’; and he played; he played a piece that Jonas had never heard before, the music filling the church to bursting point; Jonas had no idea whether it was an improvised piece or what, only that it swelled, surged, rose and fell, going on and on as if his father were trying to press this senseless violence into some sort of pattern, refusing to accept that it might have been a random act. For a while, possibly because of the wind, the organ seemed to be puffing and panting, making Jonas think that his father was fighting some huge creature, a prehistoric monster, an impression which was further enhanced by the Gothic lettering on the stops, before the music suddenly slipped over into a more serene phase, calm and yet somehow weary, and eventually ran out into ‘Leid milde ljos’ in a strange, unfamiliar arrangement involving harmonies which seemed, to Jonas’s ears to verge on the impossible.
Later Jonas realized that this therapy, or whatever you want to call it, had been as much for his benefit. If there is one thing that children, especially boys, find hard to bear, it is injustice, the idea that wickedness can go unpunished. Which is why they read The Count of Monte Cristo and devour hundreds of stories about the lone avenger who returns to punish the bad guys and reward the good. It was this very way of thinking that his father had negated, as it were, at the organ, the entire chain of cause and effect; he lifted the whole thing onto another plane where — and Jonas was in no doubt about this — those brutal thugs got what they deserved. In this way the organ music also wiped away Jonas’s horrific experience, and he would, strangely enough, always remember this incident as something positive.
By the time his father had finished playing, his wounds seemed to have healed — his face no longer looked the slightest bit battered, the tooth was still missing, that was all. So what was life all about? That barbaric attack or the organ music?
Now here was Jonas Wergeland sitting at an organ himself, the biggest organ in the world, just about as far from Grorud Church as he could get. And at the thought of that bloody, yet positive, episode he experiences — right there, in Sydney, beneath a facade of gleaming ornamental pipes reminiscent of a gigantic, glittering mirror — some of the same feeling, as if it had been handed down to him — in other words, he catches a glimpse of another way of thinking, an inkling of hidden links, lines criss-crossing one another. He is playing, of all things, ‘Ved Rondane’ by Edvard Grieg, a song his father often played at funerals. Jonas finds the ‘Tutti’ button, plays the last part full out, producing cascades of sound that are, nonetheless, enigmatic. A bit like reproducing the song of the whales, he thinks, playing as he is with the sea right outside so that these notes could be carried all around the world by the life-giving water, even to Norway, like the lines on the map of the Wilhelmsen line’s sailing routes that hung on the wall of his grandfather’s outdoor privy, down by the shore on the island of Hvaler.
He finished off and turned around to find Mr White in tears.
‘Is something the matter?’ Jonas asked.
Mr. White shook his head. ‘Play something else,’ he said. ‘Please play something else.’
Jonas Wergeland sits back down at the manuals of the Opera House’s Grand Organ and plays ‘Leid milde ljos’ in an arrangement based on harmonies borrowed from Duke Ellington. And halfway through this enchanting hymn, Jonas feels the Opera House slide into the water, transformed into a mighty ship.
To Be or Not To Be
The night was overcast and quite, quite dark, with no moon. Gabriel was so drunk that his eyes kept falling shut. Jonas glanced from the barometer with its pointer stuck on ‘fair weather’ to an inclinometer, also broken. He was just about to get up and take Peer Gynt down from the bookshelf to check whether Ibsen, Norway’s national poet, really had been so misguided as to speak of the ‘kernel’ of an onion when he realized that something was wrong, something was very wrong.
It may seem hard to believe, in the normal way of looking at things, I mean, but I beg you please to believe me when I say that Jonas Wergeland received a warning in the form of a stanza of organ music, a little phrase from ‘Leid milde ljos’ which seemed to Jonas to be carried across the water and resonate off the hull of the boat.
Jonas raced up onto the deck to find himself confronted by the Skipper Clement, although of course he did not know the vessel’s name, only that it was huge, an absolutely colossal ship — there are those who may remember this elegant Danish ferry with its characteristic elongated funnel and its name in white letters amidships — and not only that, but that it was headed straight for them. Jonas’s first, albeit irrational, thought was that here was another vessel called the Norge about to go down, like that last one during the war, as if history were repeating itself; another circle; he hated circles, and yet he stayed put, held spellbound by the sight, which was indeed a beautiful one, indescribably beautiful, this ship that was almost on top of them, too big, too bright, too close, he had not the faintest idea what was going on here, this was not a boat but a swirling circle, it was an opera, a floating organ, it was Improbability itself once more taking probable form.
‘Light the lamps!’ he screamed to Gabriel down below. No reply from the saloon. ‘Where the hell’s the switch?’ yelled Jonas. He leapt down onto the well-deck, fumbled about, panic-stricken, looking for a switch.
No, he heard Gabriel saying down in the saloon, he only had paraffin lanterns, and they’d have to be prepared first. Why’d he ask? Were they going for a sail? Jonas peered down through the hatch and caught a glimpse of Gabriel standing in the glow of the paraffin lamp, pouring himself some more whisky then peering at the fob watch which he had pulled out of his waistcoat pocket as if wishing to confirm that the collision would take place at exactly the right moment.
The danger was, to say the least of it, overhanging. Jonas could almost see the bow towering above him like the posters one saw in so many Norwegian homes, picturing ships head-on. Jonas dashed across to the foghorn and cranked the handle like mad — that, too, was out of order. ‘Bloody hell, Gabriel, when did you last sail this thing?’ he had the presence of mind to say, or mutter to himself, as if even there, even then, he had come up with another angle that shed light on unknown sides of the character of the Norge’s owner. Jonas noted the life buoy hanging on the mizzen shroud; another second and the bow would be rushing down on, or rather slicing through, them. Then he remembered a lamp, just at the bottom of the hatchway, outside the toilet. He slid down the ladder, found it, up onto the deck, batteries were bound to be dead, or the bulb gone, but no, it worked and even gave off a good strong light. He aimed the beam at the ship, remembering something from his childhood, the joy of a new torch, the thrill when the light hit a wall a long way off, a sense of power, but here, a torch against a colossal steel plough; he felt a right fool, managed to angle the beam upwards at the Skipper Clement at the very moment that the bridge disappeared from view, and the ship was transformed into pure hull, pure bow, pure steel, pure death.