The Hub
With a few exceptions — one of which I have already mentioned — Jonas Wergeland had the best of all possible childhoods, a childhood so happy that its end was bound to come as a shock. There comes a day when, as one writer put it, the bubble of childhood bursts, and for Jonas that day came with Nefertiti’s death. Of course Jonas had always known that Nefertiti was too good for this world, but even so, when she died he was not prepared for it. In short, he fell apart. He took ill, became so ill that he had to be taken to hospital. Jonas Wergeland was sick right to the marrow and so cold that he thought he would never be warm again. The doctors at the hospital did not know what to make of it: a ten-year-old who languished in bed, pale and wan, and kept throwing up, vomiting fits for which they could find no cause, a boy with a body temperature well nigh as low as that encountered only in people who had miraculously survived record lengths of time in extreme cold. And one thing they would not have understood anyway, even if there had been gauges to measure that sort of thing, was Jonas’s feeling of being totally out of joint, of lying there like a carcass that had been chopped limb from limb. Jonas had only one thing to hold onto: a crystal prism which he clenched tightly in his fist and did not let go of, not even when he was at his sickest.
Jonas’s father was considered by many people to be a rather distrait and distant character. Where other fathers dreamed of cars and BMWs, Haakon Hansen dreamed of Bach and BWVs. Even Jonas had the feeling, when he was alone in the church listening to his father’s improvisations on the organ, that his father was endeavouring to create worlds, or a zone of his own, where he could be alone. But when Jonas came home from the hospital, still no more than a shadow of himself, Haakon Hansen showed that he did notice what was going on around him. And one day in late August, when Jonas came home from school, pale and miserable, and did not even want the egg and tomato sandwiches that had been carefully prepared for him, his father suggested — without the slightest bit of fiddling — that they should take a look at the new organ in Grorud Church. Okay, Jonas muttered, fingering the prism in his pocket, why not; there was something about his father’s fluttering fingers that made it impossible for him to say no.
From the moment they stepped inside the church and his father ranged himself alongside the altar rail and proudly pointed up at the gleaming new case, ‘based on a Principal 8 and an Octave bass 8’, Jonas noticed, to his surprise, that his nausea was starting to subside. Behind the organ’s glittering façade wooden slats fanned out in rays, making Jonas feel for a moment like the boy in Kittelsen’s picture; ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’
Up in the organ-loft his father was a whirlwind of activity, dashing hither and thither and telling Jonas about this new organ from the manufacturers in Snertingdal, really big, with twenty-nine voices and three manuals, with a tracker action and electric — action stop controls. ‘Almost 2,000 pipes, Jonas — imagine that!’ And excited though his father was, Jonas noticed that his hands had steadied, ceased their fluttering, as they always did around an organ. ‘Amazing,’ his father said again and again, pointing to couplers, mixtures and buttons for free combinations. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
But it was in the office, behind the organ, when his father went to fetch his music, that the truly amazing feature was revealed, when Jonas opened a small door. Where did that lead? Had it been there before? Jonas asked. That was the door to the chest, his father told him. Did Jonas want to take a look? He opened the door and they passed through a little room containing the blower and the bellows before his father opened yet another door, leading to the chest itself. ‘Go on in,’ his father said when Jonas hung back on the threshold. ‘This here’s kind of like the engine-room of the nave, if you know what I mean.’
I make no secret of the fact that the experience which awaited Jonas Wergeland here is one that I hold infinitely dear — the mere fact of being able to write about this episode makes this whole undertaking worth the effort, or perhaps I should say the trouble. For once, however, I must apologize for the fact that I have no choice but to describe it in the crude and narrow terms that this form and this language, which is to say this role that I have taken upon myself, dictate.
Jonas stepped across the threshold and promptly found himself inside the heart of the instrument, surrounded by pipes of all sizes, the largest sixteen feet tall, set at several different levels. It was a large room, or a little house, with other small houses inside the main house, boxes and walls. ‘What’s that over there?’ Jonas asked, whispering, as if he were inside a shrine, pointing as he did so at something he took to be a little organ in itself. ‘That’s the swell,’ his father said. Jonas went on gazing round about in disbelief, he did not know what to make of it all, but he liked it instantly; it was not, in fact, unlike the engine-room of a ship, possibly because of the steep and narrow steps leading up to ledges, and all the bridges one could walk along between the pipes.
‘Can I sit here while you play?’ Jonas asked.
‘Aye, aye cap’n! Full speed ahead!’ his father replied and went out.
Jonas heard his father settling himself on the stool in front of the console and leafing through his music. Then something strange happened; his father switched on the organ, which is to say the electricity that powered the blower, and Jonas heard, no he felt the space around him being filled with air, how the air streamed into the valves. It was like being in the countryside, in the wind, a warm wind. Jonas sat there, savouring this whooshing, and the clicking of the stops, noticing that already he was not as cold and that he was starting to relax, as if there were some strange accord between his father’s manipulation of the organ and his own nervous system.
Then his father started to play. Johann Sebastian Bach. Haakon Hansen was never in any doubt. If anyone could help his son, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. To Jonas, ensconced inside the organ chest, it sounded wonderful. Like hearing the music from within himself. He was inside the music, he was floating on it. His body became a pipe, or rather, every bone became a pipe, and since every bone was a pipe and since Bach’s music is more coherent than any other music, joining things up, Jonas felt his father’s playing putting him back together, reassembling his dismembered limbs, and there came a point when Jonas had the sensation, like a tremor running through him from top to toe, that his body had become whole once more; and since the music was surging around him in the most beautiful way, he started to cry, very softly.
Later Jonas came to the conclusion that the organ had saved him. Or his father, or Bach, depending on how you looked at it. That the weight of his grief over Nefertiti had been punctured: lightened by the air that generated that music. That autumn, as if he were attending a course of treatment, at least a couple of times a week after his last class at school, Jonas would head straight across the road to the granite church, where he shut himself up inside the organ chest and let his father play for him. To begin with he would sometimes break into the music. ‘Which note does this pipe play?’ he was liable to call from inside the organ. ‘What does it look like?’ his father would call back. Then he would try first one then another until Jonas learned which note, on which manual, at which pitch, through the network of linkages, produced a sound from that particular pipe. The pipes connected to the pedals were situated in an especially out-of-the-way spot. Jonas wormed his way around the chest, up steps, balancing on crossbeams, inspecting every pipe made of tin, or rather of an alloy of which tin was the main component; inspected the square wooden pipes, the group of copper pipes in the centre, all the minuscule pipes smaller than piccolos. Occasionally he amused himself by pulling on the sliders, thus creating notes over and above those his father was playing, like a spirit inside the machine.