Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It was swelteringly hot, even in just shorts and a T-shirt the sweat was running off him. All eyes were on him. Jonas handed the crying child to the woman, trying hard not to look down at her breasts. Or at the dark, somehow menacing, triangle further down. He interpreted the look she gave him as a question: what the hell was he doing here, on a nudist beach, fully clothed? Although he may have misunderstood. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Jonas had known, of course, that he was shy. But only now, with all these eyes on him, did he realise how shy. He had always dreamed of having an audience, but he had never given any thought to his own reaction when confronted with a crowd of people, especially not such a collection of eyewitnesses. He felt as if he were caught in a Bermuda triangle of sorts, on the point of disappearing. Later he was to wonder whether he had actually grown shy, really shy, been struck, as it were, by stage fright, at that moment. Or by that moment. Often, afterwards, when he found himself on a stage, he would picture the people in the audience without any clothes on. ‘How come you’re so shy?’ a girl once asked him. He had not replied, although he had felt like saying: ‘Because I once had to save a life.’

Jonas walked off. Not another word had been said. People may not have thought there was any real danger. But Jonas knew that child would have drowned had not he, Jonas, been there just then. Did he feel proud, pleased? No. There had been something devastatingly unheroic about the whole deed. The setting for his act of heroism had been as wrong as it could possibly be. What bothered Jonas most of all was the fact of how easy it had been. How light the child had felt when he picked him up. As if he had overestimated the task, the weightiness of life. ‘What’s the matter, you’re shaking like a leaf?’ Daniel said when he got back, and handed his brother an ice cream. ‘I saved a child’s life,’ Jonas said with a sheepish grin. ‘Great,’ Daniel said, thinking it was a joke. ‘Come on, let’s go over to Ingierstrand instead. I passed a couple of real dolls just up the road.’ He started fervently humming a hymn. As far as Jonas could tell it was a mangled soul rendering of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

Jonas went through the rest of that day feeling hollow inside. It took him a while to sort out how exactly he felt. What was it that was wrong? He knew, though: he was eleven years old and he had attained his goal. Where do you go once you’ve reached the mountain top? He had nothing left to live for. What was he supposed to do for the next eighty years? What an anticlimax: all that swimming and diving practice — and all you have to do is to wade out knee-deep and stick a hand into the water. He remembered an incident involving his mother. She had been sitting at the coffee table, doing the most difficult game of patience, one she must have played thousands of times before without getting it to work out. And suddenly it came out right. As Jonas recalled, his mother had seemed not happy, but sad. That was how he felt after that day at Ingierstrand. Eleven years old, he thought; eleven years old and my life is over.

Jonas Wergeland sat high in a hallowed hall, in an organ loft which also offered a wonderfully clear prospect of the past. Daniel, that erstwhile soul freak, stood at the front of the church. Jonas listened to him praying, listened to him reading texts from the Bible, about vanity, but also about hope. Jonas kept one eye on his brother in the mirror as he reflected once again on his own reaction to his life-saving exploit. He felt some of that same hollowness now, though for a different reason. He had a vague sense of being dead. Felt as though he had actually been dead for years. That he was present, not at his father’s funeral, but at his own. He was dead because he had lost sight of a gift, lost sight of a goal in life. He was not yet thirty, but he had given up, or settled for second best. Second worst. Had he been asleep? Or was this simply a result of the shyness with which he had, for the first time, been overcome on that beach, faced with all those naked people? Because even though he may have maintained, unconsciously at least, a desire to ‘make a name for himself’, this shyness had long stifled any urge to expose himself to view. As an announcer he had, however, found himself a little cubbyhole where no one could see him and yet everyone could see him. He was alone with a camera lens, while at the same time entering a million living rooms. It was not unlike being an organist: he could stay out of sight while at the same time making the church tremble with his playing, making everyone quiver with emotion.

Sitting there on the organ bench in the church of his childhood, Jonas Wergeland saw that what he had taken for contentment was, in fact, a state of torpor. For a surprisingly long time he had managed to ignore the question of whether he was making the best use of his talents. He was recognised on the street, he was forever seeing his own name — if not in lights, then certainly in newsprint — but that day, at his father’s funeral, he realised that his life was a huge anticlimax.

Jonas looked in the mirror. He saw his brother glance up at the gallery and launched into the opening chords of ‘Thine is the Glory’. Daniel had suggested ‘Abide with me’ but their mother wanted no hymns about eventide, insisted, instead, on ‘Thine is the Glory’, a song of praise. And Jonas had agreed, not least because it gave him the chance to play the wonderful melody from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus .

The man at the centre of it all, his father, lying in his coffin, had died on the job. It had happened late one afternoon. Someone had been walking past the church and heard a great roar coming from it — the building had been positively shaking: it had sounded as though an enormous engine was running at full power in there. This seemed so odd that the vicar was called. He opened the door to be met by an ear-splitting din. It was coming from the organ. In the gallery they found Haakon Hansen, dead. Heart attack. He had slipped off the bench and under the console and lay across the pedal board as if he were asleep. Not that anyone could have slept with such a racket going on. The cluster chord of bass notes produced by the pressure of his father’s body on the row of pedals shook the whole church to its foundations, like an earthquake almost. ‘He looked as though he was hovering, like a fakir on a bed of notes,’ the vicar told Jonas. It was a fitting end. That was how a musician ought to die, Jonas thought. With the organ playing full blast. Everyone should exit this life — all those who had loved it, at any rate — to the accompaniment of just such a resounding peal of protest. If, that is, it ought not to be construed as a fanfare, bidding death welcome. Haakon Hansen had involuntarily composed his own requiem.

Jonas’s father had always said he would die at the organ. Most people do reflect, from time to time, on where and how they would like to die. As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned one thing was for sure: he did not want to meet his end as he had once been certain he would: far out to sea, with no chance of rescuing himself, for all his life-saving practice.

It had started out well enough. Despite a bit of a breeze it had been a perfect afternoon in Krukehavn, over on Hvasser. Jonas was down on the jetty where the pilot boats were moored, he was sitting reading about Venus, and although he was not looking up his eye was caught by a green object — the light made it shine like a precious gem — drifting towards him, bobbing up and down. Even at a distance he spotted the piece of paper inside it and instantly fell to daydreaming about dramatic missives from far-off lands, about the possible, subsequent headlines: ‘Message in a bottle from the Falklands’, or better still: ‘Young man receives gift of a million from Argentinian cattle baron’. That, too, would be a way of making a name for oneself. By sheer luck, pure coincidence.