Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The mere prospect of it, the very façade of the organ was enough to take anyone’s breath away — without a doubt the most impressive Jonas had ever seen, with over one hundred burnished ornamental pipes. Standing there on its platform at the far end of the concert hall, fifteen metres high, it looked more like a little palace of pure silver. It was in fact the biggest tracker-action organ in the world, with 10,500 pipes, five manuals plus pedals and 127 stops — it almost beggared belief.

It was late in the afternoon, the guided tours were over for the day, and Jonas had been allowed into the famous building ‘as a special favour’ — Jonas Wergeland was frequently granted such privileges — by a Mr White, or ‘Edward’ as he insisted that Jonas call him, who actually claimed to know Ronald Sharp, the man who had built the organ. Mr White was kindness itself, he could not do enough for Jonas; a connoisseur of Linie Aquavit, that nectar of the gods from the other side of the world; a Norwegian and a man of some standing at that, Mr White had discovered that Jonas worked for Norwegian television and that he was on his way to New Zealand to do a programme on islanders of Norwegian descent.

Jonas seated himself on the organ bench before, or rather enclosed within, an enormous console, complete with a television monitor placed high up on the console and the facility for taping the music. It was like sitting deep inside a power station, linked up to a huge waterfall. Jonas set the registers as best he could, and his thoughts went to his father as he located the Principal in this masterpiece, although there were a lot of stops he had never heard of — Gamba, Schwebung, Unda Maris and — what was that: Vox Humana. He wisely left the couplers alone, likewise the combination buttons with their amazing capacity for electronic storage. Instead he began to play and was as captivated as always by the profusion of sound that poured out at the touch of his fingers and toes. Jonas Wergeland may not have been the only Norwegian to play the Grand Organ in Sydney Opera House, but he was the only Norwegian ever to play Duke Ellington on it.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? In but one way?

Jonas thought of the road from Grorud Church to this place, an ocean of a difference, an ocean between them, and it struck him that he was starting to become a bit blasé, perhaps because this overwhelming compression of the world in terms of time and space no longer left any room for excitement or dreams. In the toilet of the flat in Solhaug when he was a boy there hung a reproduction of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of Soria Moria Castle, a glimmer of gold on the horizon. ‘A long, long way off, he saw something glittering and gleaming.’ Jonas always used to think, when he was sitting on the toilet, that this picture was all about travelling, probably because the boy in the foreground had a knapsack on his back and a staff in his hand, but also because the toilet contained another special feature, a small bookshelf filled with copies of the National Geographic , the only publication, other than newspapers, which their father read. Jonas also used to leaf through these and it was here, in the toilet of a flat in Solhaug that he made his first journeys into the realms of imagination, accompanied by the churning motors of his bowels, as he browsed through issues containing features entitled ‘My Life in Forbidden Lhasa’ or ‘The Great Barrier Reef’ or ‘To the Land of the Head-hunters’, and even if he could make no sense of the headlines, he read all he needed to and more in the wonderful pictures. So already, here, the solid foundations of his mistrust of the written word — or, not mistrust but a firm belief that words were superfluous — were being laid, because the pictures said it all: weird and wonderful painted faces, giant clams that could snap shut around a diver’s foot and the golden roofs of the mausoleums of the seven Dalai Lamas at the top of the Potala Palace — ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Jonas had also thought of his father earlier that Sunday when he took a walk along the harbour front from Harbour Bridge to Pier One, the old wharf buildings recently converted into specialist shops and aromatic seafood restaurants — just as was happening all over the world in the eighties. Jonas eyed the crabs in their boxes, the selection of oysters on their beds of ice, the yachts and ferries out in the bay; felt happy to wander aimlessly, almost surprised that no one turned to look back at him as people were forever doing in Oslo.

Jonas strolled on down Darling Harbour, making for that part of the city at the very head of the bay which, within just a few years, would be transformed into a huge leisure area complete with aquariums and a maritime museum, and suddenly, as he was walking along Hickson Road, enjoying the fine weather, the unfamiliar surroundings, his eye was caught by something familiar, something akin to a Norwegian flag: the funnel on one of the ships at the quayside, black with two white rings, denoting that this was a Wilhelmsen ship. His paternal grandfather had been a sailor and Jonas knew all the different funnel markings by heart before he learned his alphabet. He followed the wire fence until he came to a gate which offered a good view of the ship and there he noticed a man coming down the gangplank, a man with a blissful expression on his face who, on reaching the gate, stopped in front of Jonas, obviously bursting to tell him something.

This, of course, was Mr White, Edward, and he could hardly believe his luck when he discovered that Jonas was in fact Norwegian. Eagerly he told Jonas, as if anxious to persuade him that they were related, that his great-grandfather had signed on with the first Wilhelmsen ship to call at Sydney, in 1895, the Tiger she was called — imagine that, incredible isn’t it? — which had sailed to Vladivostok with a cargo of railway sleepers before carrying on to Sydney, where she had taken on a cargo of hides for Europe. Did Jonas know that Wilhelm Wilhelmsen himself had been second mate on that ship; that same Wilhelm later to be known only as ‘the Captain’, who took over the running of the shipping line on the death of his brother Halfdan? Did Jonas happen to know anything about this Wilhelm Wilhelmsen?

‘There was this one time in the Mediterranean, in Marseille,’ said Jonas, taking it on the run, remembering something his grandfather had told him. ‘It was the first time Wilhelm Wilhelmsen, “the Captain” that is, had ever been served black olives. He tasted one, then he said: “Who the hell’s been pissing on these grapes?”’

Mr White doubled up with laughter, he was Sydney’s most appreciative listener, welcoming anything that came from Norway, that day at any rate. Because Mr White had just been allowed to come onboard the Wilhelmsen ship and been shown the sealed containers which held the Linie Aquavit in its old sherry casks, a nigh-on religious experience, since he had once been treated to a glass of Norwegian Linie Aquavit by a sailor but could not credit the story of its odd ageing process, 135 days at sea, well, he refused point-blank to believe it — imagine, a drink that involves a journey! — until this very day when he had seen the story substantiated so conclusively that he could remember everything his guide had told him about the whole of that long, involved voyage around the world, every single port. ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘that from this day on I’ll never drink anything but Linie Aquavit. Where can I get hold of it?’

When Jonas promptly promised to arrange this for him and wrote down the man’s address on the back of a receipt for a newly-consumed plate of oysters, nothing would do but that Mr White invite Jonas over to the Opera House, where he happened to occupy a top administrative post, and there was nothing Jonas would have liked better, he had in fact been planning to visit Sydney’s famous landmark the following day; he had, after all, dabbled in architecture himself and had frequently come across pictures of that renowned exterior, which simply cried out for metaphors, from copulating turtles to a ship in full sail. What he did not realize was that the building also housed a Soria Moria castle, a gigantic organ. As Nefertiti said: ‘There’s adventure to be found wherever you go.’