Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

The instant he laid eyes on the organ, Jonas was struck, as he never ceased to be on his travels, by a sense of rediscovering something that he had lost, a part of himself, and in this case, because of the façade, he was reminded of a rib, a feeling so strong that he clutched at his breast. He wasted no time in asking whether it would be possible to try the organ, and, thanks to Mr White and Linie Aquavit, on that day nothing was impossible.

Whenever he sat down at an organ, Jonas’s thoughts turned to his father. I am not sure whether I have mentioned this, but Jonas had a wonderful father. Haakon Hansen may not have talked as much to his son as other fathers did, but he played for him a lot and this alternative upbringing, as Jonas himself called it, was to be of far-reaching significance in his life. ‘I was reared on the organ bench,’ he used to say.

Jonas loved to watch his father play, especially his feet, the way his shoes seemed to skip over the pedals of their own accord with the most fantastic dexterity, flicking back and forth from heel to toe, the one crossing over the other, as if in a dance, or a proper little puppet-show. One time, Jonas was allowed to paint faces on his father’s shoes, creating one good and one bad shoe which fought when his father’s feet flew over the pedals, a battle in which good and evil seemed constantly to take turns at having the upper hand.

Although Jonas found it hard to explain, his father’s playing had a way of firing his imagination. All fathers loom large in their children’s lives, even Freud figured out that much, and Haakon Hansen was not just a big man in Jonas’s eyes, he was the Ruler of the World. From the organ bench he held sway over the world with this complex machine of his; the register settings were actually top-secret orders sent out to his assistants. All of this was confirmed for Jonas when he saw how people reacted: no matter how much of an atheist Haakon Hansen may have been, he played with such feeling that it brought tears to their eyes.

There was one story in particular which had offered Jonas a glimpse into his father’s world: as a little boy he had accompanied his father to a funeral outside of Grorud — funerals in the surrounding area presented a welcome source of extra income for an organist — and afterwards they had driven down to the harbour in his father’s Opel Caravan for a look at the boats, as they did whenever his father played at a funeral and Jonas came along to act as a counterweight. More often than not they would head down towards the Blenheim , the passenger ferry to England which berthed just below Akershus Fort; if Jonas had tried once he had tried a hundred times to draw the elegant lines of that ship, the funnel especially, and he never tired of it. Late that afternoon they had passed beneath the monstrous cranes and strolled all the way out to the end of the quayside, down to Vippetangen, when suddenly two men jumped out from behind a shed and started to beat up Jonas’s father, two men in overalls, big, burly characters. Haakon Hansen did not have a hope, no chance to make a run for it even; they knocked him to the ground, hauled him back onto his feet then threw him to the ground again, kicked him in the chest and legs, spat on him, grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright so that one of them could hold him while the other punched him in the stomach and never a word spoken. Jonas stood there, looking on, screaming and howling, but they paid him no mind; it all seemed so totally senseless, an act of pure malice, either that or some ghastly misunderstanding. Jonas had never experienced anything so awful as to stand there watching his father being beaten until the blood spurted from his nose; the only sounds the awful thunk of punches and kicks and his father’s groans, for it was not just a father who was being roughed up before his very eyes, but the Ruler of the World.

What surprised him was his father’s reaction. When the two thugs finally made off, he struggled to his feet, took Jonas’s hand and led him back to the car, smiling all the while and saying over and over again: ‘They didn’t touch my fingers, thank God, they didn’t touch my fingers.’ As if everything was fine because they had not broken his fingers. Jonas cried and cried. They climbed into the Caravan and his father managed to drive, not to the casualty department, but to Grorud Church, where he dragged himself up to the organ with several broken ribs and a face covered in cuts and bruises. Jonas noticed blood on the keys and that his father had lost at least one tooth, because he kept on smiling, muttering, ‘Thank God, thank God’; and he played; he played a piece that Jonas had never heard before, the music filling the church to bursting point; Jonas had no idea whether it was an improvised piece or what, only that it swelled, surged, rose and fell, going on and on as if his father were trying to press this senseless violence into some sort of pattern, refusing to accept that it might have been a random act. For a while, possibly because of the wind, the organ seemed to be puffing and panting, making Jonas think that his father was fighting some huge creature, a prehistoric monster, an impression which was further enhanced by the Gothic lettering on the stops, before the music suddenly slipped over into a more serene phase, calm and yet somehow weary, and eventually ran out into ‘ Leid milde ljos ’ in a strange, unfamiliar arrangement involving harmonies which seemed, to Jonas’s ears to verge on the impossible.

Later Jonas realized that this therapy, or whatever you want to call it, had been as much for his benefit. If there is one thing that children, especially boys, find hard to bear, it is injustice, the idea that wickedness can go unpunished. Which is why they read The Count of Monte Cristo and devour hundreds of stories about the lone avenger who returns to punish the bad guys and reward the good. It was this very way of thinking that his father had negated, as it were, at the organ, the entire chain of cause and effect; he lifted the whole thing onto another plane where — and Jonas was in no doubt about this — those brutal thugs got what they deserved. In this way the organ music also wiped away Jonas’s horrific experience, and he would, strangely enough, always remember this incident as something positive.

By the time his father had finished playing, his wounds seemed to have healed — his face no longer looked the slightest bit battered, the tooth was still missing, that was all. So what was life all about? That barbaric attack or the organ music?

Now here was Jonas Wergeland sitting at an organ himself, the biggest organ in the world, just about as far from Grorud Church as he could get. And at the thought of that bloody, yet positive, episode he experiences — right there, in Sydney, beneath a facade of gleaming ornamental pipes reminiscent of a gigantic, glittering mirror — some of the same feeling, as if it had been handed down to him — in other words, he catches a glimpse of another way of thinking, an inkling of hidden links, lines criss-crossing one another. He is playing, of all things, ‘ Ved Rondane ’ by Edvard Grieg, a song his father often played at funerals. Jonas finds the ‘Tutti’ button, plays the last part full out, producing cascades of sound that are, nonetheless, enigmatic. A bit like reproducing the song of the whales, he thinks, playing as he is with the sea right outside so that these notes could be carried all around the world by the life-giving water, even to Norway, like the lines on the map of the Wilhelmsen line’s sailing routes that hung on the wall of his grandfather’s outdoor privy, down by the shore on the island of Hvaler.

He finished off and turned around to find Mr White in tears.