Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

As they walked, or more like tiptoed, through the grove of trees which lay between the road and the water, Daniel began to hum a snatch from another hymn, again one totally at odds with the situation: ‘Tread softly, o soul, and guard thy step’. He always hummed hymn tunes when he was thinking about girls, when he was feeling randy. There was a reason for this. He had once been told by a real hardliner of a vicar that the soul lay in the seed. This was, of course, something this clergyman of the old school said in order to persuade boys to control their urge to masturbate; he may not even have meant it literally. Daniel had, however, taken his words to heart. Some may laugh, forgetting, however, that many faiths take a far more complex view of the human seed than that held by the Lutheran school of sex education. In other words, Daniel had a problem, because he was probably the one person in the world least able to keep his hands to himself. If husbanding one’s semen was equivalent to husbanding one’s soul, possibly even in the sense of life, then Daniel W. Hansen was on very thin ice. The best diagnosis he could hope for was ‘permanently impaired spiritual faculties’.

In other words, Daniel had an insatiable need for soul and as luck would have it, this was the very year when he discovered soul music. So whenever Jonas heard the vibrant, emotionally charged songs of artists such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or James Brown ringing out of the loudspeakers in Daniel’s room he knew that his brother had ‘sinned’. Daniel actually believed that he could recharge his batteries, replace lost spiritual energy by listening to soul music. Sometimes, when Jonas came home from school and the two of them were alone in the house, he had the feeling that the air in there was positively seething, the door almost seemed to be bulging. Things were to get even worse, or better, a couple of years later when Aretha Franklin broke onto the scene. In her, Daniel found his saving grace, a woman who really knew how to pour out her soul, to give of her abundance. Jonas found it a bit spooky, his brother’s fascination with the First Lady of soul’s energetic, insistent and, not least, slyly sensual, nigh on orgiastic, music. Daniel bought every one of Aretha Franklin’s records. And when her live double album of gospel songs came out — an indisputable milestone in rock history, incidentally — there seemed to be only one thing for him to do: capitulate, start studying theology. He was fulfilled. His search, his hunger, for soul had led him to the ministry. Jonas always believed that soul music was the moving force behind Daniel’s subsequent fiery sermons and charismatic public performances, his ability to improvise and to wail ecstatically while repeating variations on the same words and phrases over and over again. Not for nothing was he famed for his way of ‘ministering to the soul’. It was said that women in particular flocked to him to discuss their most personal problems.

Due to his newly awakened interest, or his need, for soul, Daniel had also begun — long before this — to sing with the three so-called lead singers, three women who stood up in the gallery alongside the organ and led the congregation in song. When Daniel and Jonas were little, their father had had to put up with three quavery elderly ladies whom Daniel dubbed The Syrups, because they did all they could, in their farcically shrill vibratos, to slow down the tempo of every hymn their father played; they were always a couple of beats behind the organ. Then one day, in their stead, three buxom young women showed up to lead the congregation in song; and there was nothing wrong with their timing; Daniel thought they really swung — they sang with soul — just like the gospel-inspired backing singers he could hear on certain soul records. He had to get in on the act, found an excuse to join them, to be up there among them, singing with them, even though his voice was not all that great. Basically Daniel just stood there mumbling as if in a trance, encircled by three heaving bosoms. He confessed to Jonas that it was an elevating experience; he called these three busty ladies the Bermuda Triangle, a name which had nothing to do with the Holy Triangle, but with triangles of a quite different nature, and of such a calibre that he felt he was about to be engulfed by them. Thus it came about that Daniel, probably quite unwittingly, took to humming fragments of hymn tunes from his career as a choirboy in the Bermuda Triangle — or comical, hybrid soul versions of them — at the prospect of erotic encounters. It occurred to Jonas that one really ought not to laugh at this: one should have a sense of ceremony, break into a hymn each time one made advances towards a woman.

They had reached their destination. They lay on the hillside right on the edge of the nudist beach, looking down on what was, at this time, years before the opening of a naturist beach at Huk on the island of Bygdøy, the closest secret retreat for those who, for some strange reason, found it liberating to strut about in the altogether even though they knew they made the perfect sideshow for passers-by and other prying eyes. It left Jonas cold. There was nothing particularly arousing about all those naked bodies. Daniel, however, was of a different opinion.

A bunch of kids were playing in the shallows, not far from shore. At one point, when Daniel went off in search of a kiosk or a shop, Jonas was looking through the binoculars when he saw a toddler — he couldn’t have been more than two — disappearing beneath the surface. The child was in the middle of the group of children, but nobody noticed him go under. To begin with Jonas thought that he couldn’t be in any real danger. And yet time slowed down. He was suddenly aware of everything around him, the bark of the fir trees, a fly, a boat far out in the fjord. The hum of voices on the beach seemed disturbingly loud, as if someone had turned up the volume button. The toddler resurfaced. Jonas relaxed, a great weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. His eyes ached from staring so hard. But then the boy vanished from view again. Jonas fumed with irritation. Not least at the hopelessly apathetic mothers who could sit there chatting, scratching their not very sexy boobs and indulging in tittle-tattle while their kids were quietly drowning. He forced himself to lie still. Surely somebody must have noticed. The drone of the flies reverberated like a pneumatic drill. The ground smelled like a chemist’s shop. Jonas surveyed the other adults lying round about, intent solely on exposing as much skin as possible to the sun. Into his head came pictures of basking sea lions. It dawned on him that of all the people nearby he was the only one — thanks, perhaps, to his binoculars — to have seen the boy go under. He knew he had to do something, but some form of acute modesty or shyness held him back. He did not like the idea of having to run through those ranks of shamelessly naked people, betraying the fact that he had been peeping at them on the sly. And what if his eyes had deceived him? He saw himself diving into the water, creating unnecessary panic, pictured everybody pointing, standing there, stark naked, laughing at him. Besides: this was not what he had been training for.

At that moment Jonas learned something: it takes courage to realise your goals in life. You have to act, without fear of the consequences. He tossed the binoculars aside, leapt up. He ran for all he was worth: all those tedious boring 60-metre dashes in PE finally justified. He sprinted between two clusters of naked people, took the few metres into the shallows at a bound and plunged his hand into the water. It instantly made contact with a body, he hauled the child out. As he did so he noticed a bit of a stir on the shore: a woman, a naked woman, who had clearly only just begun to sense that something was wrong. How was that possible? was the thought that flashed through Jonas’s mind, but such things were possible, they happened all the time. He waded out of the water with a child in his arms. The child had been unconscious, but he started coughing and spluttering even before Jonas reached the shore: a thump on the back — administered by Jonas almost as an afterthought — was all it took. It was as far from giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a beautiful woman as he could get. This was not what he had been training for when he all but strangled Daniel and made Anna the dummy’s breasts jut upwards like two pyramids.