Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

She sat before me, her back against the door to the pulpit. Still staring at the floor. I could hear the organ music again. And that she was crying.

A couple of days later the awful news reached my ears: someone had broken the stained-glass windows in the church. Thrown stones at them. It is hard to describe the shock and horror aroused by this. In local terms it was like the crime of the century. Who had done it? Who could have done such a despicable thing? By Grorud standards this was an act of vandalism on a par with that committed in Rome some years later, when a man knocked the arm off the Madonna in Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer. Ivan, who was for a long time a suspect, had an alibi. No one knew who had done it. But I knew. You might even say I did it myself.

Over the following weeks I tried everything to get Laila to talk to me again. None of it did any good. Sorry, I whispered, every time I came within earshot of her. But Laila would have nothing to do with me. Not only that, but she looked so woebegone, dejected. People remarked on it. What’s wrong with Laila, they said. Laila who was always so blithe and cheery. If I tried walking alongside her, she would stop, turn her back on me, or run away. That was the worst part: the way she turned her face away. That she would no longer look at me. Look at me as no one else looked at me.

Only one thing could help me. Or, why not: save me. So I waited. Waited to be forgiven, although I did not deserve it. I waited, hoping she would be magnanimous. That she would look at me again.

And at long last it happened, just before Christmas, but only after I had had a foretaste of it in the church, on my knees in that chamber next door to the sacristy, as I said a word out loud. When I embraced Laila in the snow outside the ironmonger’s, it was like an echo of an embrace I myself had felt.

As I knelt at the altar rail, in the minutes preceding my decision to utter that word, I thought of a milestone in my life, an incident which had occurred at Solhaug some years earlier. We had been playing rounders, a simplified version of baseball, on the flag green. One of the boys on the estate, Rikard, was a brilliant hitter. It was the same story again and again: when everybody else had struck out and desperation was setting in, Rikard would step up and save the day with a real cracker of a hit, one which allowed them all to run right round before the other team could get to the ball.

One Saturday afternoon something quite remarkable happened. I was fielding, standing ready by the flagpole, from which the handsome estate pennant fluttered lazily in the breeze, so I had a front-row seat, as it were, for the events that unfolded. The whole batting team was hopping up and down on the line as usual, waiting for Rikard, the last man in, to hit a sixer and get them out of trouble. Rikard strode up to the wicket armed with his dreaded bat. In woodwork, while the rest of us were toiling over stupid herons with beaks that were forever snapping off, Rikard was surehandedly turning a baseball bat that would have elicited appreciative nods from any craftsman. It was a particularly long, heavy bat, perfect for getting some extra spin on the ball. Rikard hit the ball, gave it such a phenomenal whack that it let out a deep sigh — a tennis-ball orgasm, a gasp at being hit so perfectly, at being launched into such a ballistic dream of a trajectory. It was the sort of strike known in baseball as a ‘home run’, the sort of strike that sent the ball flying right out of the park, or smashing into floodlights in a shower of sparks, the sort of strike that brought the crowd leaping to their feet with a roar.

There was only one thing wrong with this hit. It went too far. Because, down at the garages — where he spent pretty much all of his free time — Major Otto Ness was polishing his pride and joy, a black Opel Captain purchased the year before. The care which Major Ness lavished on his car foreshadowed, in fact, the worship of material possessions which the whole of Norwegian society was moving towards, a development which, in just a couple of decades, would take them from tree-planting and community parties to each man polishing his own car and scowling enviously at his neighbours. The Major had just completed the day’s beauty treatment, and was surveying his car with the same look of satisfaction he would have given a gleaming army boot. Major Ness — known to us, despite his spit-and-polish exterior, as Major Mess — was on the short side, to say the least of it: a right little runt. It was so funny to see him driving home with his head, or at least his uniform cap, barely visible, and his hands clutching, not to say straining at, the steering wheel, like a major trying with great difficulty to control his captain. No less comical was the sight of him walking alongside his wife, who was a head taller than her officer. But his vehicle, the Opel, was most definitely among the top brass of Solhaug’s relatively modest fleet of cars — in the Major’s own eyes it raised him to the rank of estate general; it made up for an outsize nag of a wife and a disappointing career in which he had ended up behind a desk, and not behind the guns. That car was his battleship, his tank, his command centre, from which he could rule the world. So, as far as he was concerned it was an open insult, a pure act of aggression, when a tennis ball, hit by Rikard, bounced defiantly on the ground once before thumping, not all that hard, but quite audibly, off the bonnet of Major Ness’s Opel Captain. With a magnifying glass one might have been able to spot a tiny mark. But in the Major’s world this was tantamount to vandalism of the worst sort, a downright declaration of war, in fact.

Major Ness reacted as he was wont to do. In a voice which was surprisingly loud and clear for such a puny little body he demanded to know who had hit that ball. And since he made it sound like a command, Rikard trailed all the long way across the green and down to the garages, where Major Ness pointed first at the ball, then at the car and thereafter, as if it were the natural conclusion, gave Rikard a belt round the ear, smack , which I heard all the way up by the flagpole — a ‘home run’ of a slap, you might say.

The Major had, however, committed one tactical error. His indignation had blinded him to everything else around him. But he had been seen. From above. From one of the second-floor balconies in the block of flats overlooking the flag green Rikard’s father, Mr Bastesen, had been a spectator — or perhaps one should say acted as umpire — to the whole thing. In a remarkably short space of time Rikard’s dad was out of the house and heading across the green towards the garages, and he did not come alone: on his way he picked up his son’s legendary baseball bat, decorated in time-honoured fashion with a branding iron in the Grorud School woodwork room. On his face, one of the blackest looks I can ever recall seeing. I would not call it anger. I would call it wrath .

Mr Bastesen was definitely not a man to be meddled with. Not only was he the caretaker at Solhaug, a person with whom it was best to stay on good terms, he was also a big, burly character who — we knew — lifted weights in the shed where the estate’s communal tools and equipment were kept. To us kids he was a fearsome figure, especially when marching back and forth across the greens behind a roaring lawnmower with tractor wheels. Or in the spring when he put out signs saying ‘Do not walk on the grass!’ On the other hand, like a beneficent god he was also quite liable to let us play in the sprinklers on hot summer days. There was some talk of a background in petty crime, whispers of jail sentences and a dodgy past as a bouncer at one of Oslo’s shadiest nightspots. And now here he was, large and menacing, descending — on tractor wheels, you might say — upon the garages, with one hand curled around a sturdy baseball bat which could beat the living daylights out of anything, no question, and everybody could see that he was positively seething with wrath over a crime of a far more serious nature than walking on the grass. I could not help thinking that Major Ness really was in a major mess now.