Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

At the age of twenty, in curlers and a headscarf, she was to be seen reading Schweitzer’s autobiography, Out of My Life and Thought , the book that would finally persuade her to leave the world of the Arabian Nights — if, that is, since she thought the great doctor bore some resemblance to Haroun al-Rashid, it should not be seen as a natural follow-on from it, one tale, or perhaps one should say one form of rebellion, running into another. Be that as it may, it was at this point that she decided what she was going to do with her life. It came to her as suddenly and clearly as the phrase ‘reverence for life’ by which Schweitzer was struck on a river in Africa, one evening at sunset as he sat absent-mindedly on board a steamboat butting its way through a herd of hippopotami.

Like Jonas, Rakel wanted to be a lifesaver, but she took a much more serious approach to this than him. Rakel always took things seriously. She decided what her Lambaréné would be. It had to be mobile. She acquired a heavy goods vehicle license and trained as a nurse, in that order; she learned how to reverse a truck and trailer into a garage with a proficiency that put paid to any jokes about women drivers, learned to administer injections in a way that made life flare up. Thereafter, she and her husband, Hans Christian — who could actually have given Albert Schweitzer a run for his money where kind eyes were concerned — drove trucks for just about every humanitarian organisation in the world, always going where the suffering and the danger was greatest. ‘I drive caravans through deserts of need,’ she was wont to say, as if the vocabulary of the Arabian Nights still lived within her. Rakel was a leather-jacketed, 400 horse power Mother Theresa transporting food and medicines across front lines in war-torn zones. With — so it was rumoured — Bach’s organ music pouring from a cassette player on the passenger seat. Rakel was the sort of woman who proved that ethics and aesthetics can go hand in hand. Her windscreen was forever being pierced by bullets, but it is said that only once did she get upset: when a piece of shrapnel shattered her cassette player. But just as the Paris Bach Society had presented Schweitzer with a piano with organ pedals, specially built for the tropics, so Rakel, after this incident, was presented by her fellow aid workers with a special, armour-plated cassette player. Rakel had no children, but — and this is not just an empty platitude — she and her husband had thousands of children. Jonas once asked her why she had taken up such a hazardous occupation — whether it was because, at the time, she had felt that there was no rhyme nor reason to life, or because she had felt guilty or whatever? She had stared at him as blankly as Benjamin was wont to do when Jonas said something which he, Jonas, believed to be laudably reasonable: ‘I did it because it’s a fantastic story,’ she said. ‘It’s the best book I’ve ever read.’

Rakel represented Jonas’s first encounter with a race which he would never understand: the bookworms of this world. Jonas simply could not comprehend how a book, a book with a title as innocuous as Out of My Life and Thought , could have such a powerful impact. Throughout her formative years Rakel had been an avid reader, the sort of child who had her nose buried in a library book even on the warmest of summer days. The light was invariably still burning on her side of the room when he went to sleep. She was quite capable of turning away boys at the door, when that time came. Then one day she simply got up, as if she had had enough of fiction, and went out into the real world. For good. Jonas could not rid himself — no matter how hard he tried — of a suspicion that the highly moral life she led was a natural consequence of all that reading; it would not have been possible without the ballast of thousands of tales.

Whatever the case: if any Norwegian can be said to have done their bit to save lives, to relieve want, then it has to be Rakel W. Hansen: a woman deserving of any peace prize you could name. Jonas was downright proud of his sister. She was the most upright — the happiest — person he knew. Every time he looked at her he saw a face that said: I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live. So simple, so true. And hence so hard to accept. Jonas did his best, year after year, not to think about it, even when he arrived at the church and saw her mud-spattered black semi-trailer, an alien element — an almost extra-terrestrial object — among the parked cars. But in his heart of hearts he knew: she was the living, provocative proof that happiness lay in helping others.

Jonas Wergeland sat in the organ loft in Grorud Church, playing the organ, feeling almost as if he were in the cab of Rakel’s colossus of a truck. He had the same lofty overview. Was in similar contact with tremendous power. He launched into the last verse of ‘Lead kindly light’, having first closed the swell box and pulled out the Oboe 8 and Gedact Principal 16 to produce an even warmer, richer sound. A comforting sound. He did not know that a bolt of orange lightning was about to strike, an event as unexpected and as inflammatory as him pulling out an unknown stop and suddenly introducing an incredibly dangerous and bewildering voice into the organ’s peal.

The hymn came to an end. Daniel stepped up to the lectern, alongside the coffin. Jonas was struck by the symmetry of this arrangement. Two sons. The one playing the organ, the other officiating. One at the front and one at the back. Jonas had often asked himself how Daniel, that sex-obsessed Casanova, that rabble-rouser par excellence, could have ended up as a man of the cloth. Jonas recalled one Christmas in the early seventies when Daniel had stolen up to the organ during the sermon and pressed the button which set the church bells chiming. His father had been back in the vestry, reading a copy of the National Geographic . There was an awful row. ‘Why did you do it?’ the vicar had asked. ‘Because I wanted to protest against the American bombing of Vietnam!’ But now Daniel was himself a vicar, and did not expect to be interrupted. For once he did not spout a load of rubbish either. Jonas listened, deeply moved, to what his brother said about their father. A lot of people had asked if they might say a few words about Haakon Hansen, but their mother had said no to all of them. Daniel alone was to speak.

In the mirror Jonas could see Daniel’s wife in one of the front pews, pregnant yet again and with three sons aged one, two and three crawling around her feet. Daniel must have been reared on ginseng. Or powdered rhinoceros horn. Jonas listened to his brother’s solemn eulogy, then all at once he smiled. A memory had come to him as he glanced to his right, at the point where the organ loft curved round. On that spot, for a number of years in his childhood, Daniel had stood with the Bermuda Triangle, the three ladies who led the congregation in the hymn-singing. Which was why, on a Saturday early in the summer between fifth and sixth grades, when they were on their way to Ingierstrand, he had been humming a snatch of a hymn — oddly enough it happened to be ‘Vain world, now farewell’. But this was not just any day, this was the day marked with a magnetic red ring on Daniel’s calendar. Not until they were on the bus was Jonas solemnly informed of the true objective of this expedition, as if they were commandos and the purpose of their mission could only now be revealed. They were headed for a bay on the other side of Ingierstrand. To a — pause for effect — nudist beach. Daniel gazed at Jonas with round, lustful eyes. Jonas never knew how his brother got wind of such things. He had even brought binoculars; he elbowed Jonas impatiently in the ribs when they got to their stop.