But what Jonas found most interesting about the organ was the fact that, while keys were positioned side by side on the manuals, their pipes did not sit side by side inside the organ so, for example, a C and a C sharp, which were right next to one another on the keyboard, could be almost two and a half metres apart inside the chest. When his father played all twelve notes on a scale, they would sound from all around the inside of the organ, especially when he coupled down voices from other manuals. Jonas loved it, made his father do it again and again, slowly, while his ears tried to follow the notes as they swelled out into the air around him. Jonas more than loved it; he almost went down on his knees in the face of this unexpected and totally different chain of cause and effect, looking upon it as a gift, this glimpse of another form of logic, one which — and this was the comforting thing — was connected to the logic outside, on the manuals, as if they were two parallel but different universes.
His father sat patiently on the organ stool, obeying the slightest hint, and this he did with pleasure because he knew that this finding out how the organ worked was in itself a kind of therapy: to discover that something so apparently complex did nonetheless make sense. So it was with hopes steadily rising that he allowed his son to crawl about in there, like an organ-builder’s apprentice, mapping out pipes and abstracts, complying with Jonas’s wish to hear all the voices one after another without a murmur and making not the slightest objection when his son declared that he thought the Cromorne sounded best played on the Choir, together with the Bassoon played on the pedals.
In due course Jonas learned a lot about the organ, including the fact that it was alive, that notes sounded different from one day to the next. Just as he learned that when he pulled out the stop that said ‘Mixture 3 fagot’, it came across loud and strong, like the last verse of a hymn, and it occurred to him that it was the same with people: now and again you might be in a ‘Mixture 3 fagot’ mood, but that the usual tone tended to be that of the ‘Principal’, the keynote of the Hauptwerk. For his own part, Jonas felt like a ‘Reed’, barely audible.
As time went on, however, Jonas slipped inside the organ chest simply to listen. He had found a broad plank, almost like a bunk, in the midst of the maze of pipes and there he would lie as if at the heart of an incredible machine — had he read Hermann Hesse he might have said glass bead game — for hours on end, week in, week out, month after month, letting his father play Bach for him until he could feel the music permeating his body like a medicine; or perhaps it was more that, having first put his body together, only now, with the help of time, could his father blow life into it. One day Jonas had the idea of taking the crystal prism — his most treasured possession at that time — from his pocket and placing it on his brow, and it was then, while he lay there as if on a bunk in the middle of the organ, with the prism on his brow and his father playing Bach, that he saw, felt in every bone in his body, possibly because the prism broke up the music in such a way that the brain apprehended it differently, that he was lying inside the very engine of existence. Because again, beneath everything else, this was what troubled him: the wheel. Why did Nefertiti die? Who turned the wheel? Who or what sat at the hub of the wheel? And as he lay there, Jonas realized that he himself was at the centre of the wheel, that he was lying still, and yet he was in motion. And lying there, at the centre of something he did not understand, with a prism on his brow that refracted the light and created a little rainbow somewhere out of eyeshot, Jonas was aware that he was slowly being healed.
No wonder then that Jonas Wergeland conceived a very special affection for organs, after lying for half a year on his back, listening to that blend of air and sound, the creaking of the sliders and clicking of the stops, while gazing at the swell, the little house, seeing how the little doors were opened and closed as his father regulated the volume with his foot and how the abstracts, trackers and tracker wires, all the filigree network surrounding him, moved in time with the movements of his father’s fingers. Of all the pieces of jewellery Jonas Wergeland saw in his life, Aunt Laura’s included, none was more beautiful than the organ with its tin and lead, its copper and ebony, against a backing of pine. Jonas was never fazed by computers and their microchips, not even the control room at NRK could impress someone who had seen an organ from the inside: the world, as it were, from the wrong side.
For a long time Jonas believed it was Nefertiti’s death that had driven him into the organ chest, but the real cause lay, of course, in the future. Not until he was a grown man, looking back over a long distance, did Jonas understand that his time inside the organ had equipped him for experiences and ordeals that were to come later in life.
But already that autumn Jonas had grasped that, in the little door in his father’s office, the one leading, that is, to the organ chest, he had found an unusual and original angle on life as a whole. Later, when faced with any apparently complex phenomenon, he would always look for this little back door, this entrance that would take him to the backside or the inside and provide him with a totally different viewpoint. ‘Crawl inside the organ,’ he would say to himself. So when, for example, Jonas stumbled across the Comoro Islands, he knew right away that this could be one of those rare angles that would lead him to the backside of a complexity, like someone taking you behind a grand building and showing you that it is a flat on a film set.
In later life Jonas Wergeland held the belief that everyone should have the chance to crawl inside an organ chest, even if none of them could enjoy the same privilege as himself: to be able to lie inside an organ while your own father sets the world to rights with his playing in a church built of granite, the stone of your childhood.
Bukhara
Aunt Laura’s flat looked like a bazaar. Where the walls were not covered in oriental rugs, they were hung with objects made of copper and brass; and crawling around the floor was a leopardtortoise with little gems affixed to its shell. Jonas had the feeling that the tortoise was forever going round in circles and that time stood still at Aunt Laura’s.
One day, Jonas was allowed to look on while his aunt cast a little head out of gold, and what intrigued him more than anything else — more than the complicated gravity casting technique — was the way she transformed four old wedding rings into molten gold in the crucible with the aid of a gas-gun, before pouring it into the mould. There was something about that molten gold that he would never forget, a colour and a sheen which he occasionally thought he detected in certain uncommonly good pictures. This was one of Jonas’s favourite occupations: to watch his aunt working, often wearing a leather apron like a blacksmith, in that corner of the room which had the look of a proper little industrial plant. Jonas found it hard to believe that you needed so many tools to make something so small.
Having cleaned and polished the gold head his aunt asked Jonas to fetch the tortoise, which was crawling about the floor. She studied it long and hard, from all angles, before he was allowed to set it back on the floor. And for anyone who has not yet guessed as much, it was, of course, Aunt Laura who first told Jonas the old Chinese tale about the world resting on the back of an ancient creature, Ao, a huge turtle; a tale which Jonas later recounted to Axel and which inspired their hunt for their teachers’ underlying and often shaky propositions.