Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

I ought of course to tell you how things went, in the years that followed, with this fervent commitment to the Comoros. In the autumn of 1976, Jonas received a letter from none other than President Ali Soilih, who had toppled the new state’s first president, Ahmed Abdallah, from power the previous January. And in this odd letter Ali Soilih, the utopian dreamer who initiated a most peculiar Maoist-cum-Socialist experiment on the islands, thanked Jonas Wergeland for his efforts on behalf of the Comoro Islands’ cause in Scandinavia and maintained that his fight up there in the north had been an inspiration to those fighting for full independence, which, as far as at least three out of the four islands were concerned, had been achieved in 1975. This letter meant such a lot to Jonas Wergeland that he had it framed, like a diploma, and showed it off whenever anyone accused him of lacking political awareness. How Ali Soilih found out that Jonas Wergeland had hoisted the Comorian flag in a school in far-off Norway was a mystery to Jonas and everyone else, and even though there is a very simple explanation I am not going to disclose it here and risk ruining the best part of this tale.

Because from there on, it is the usual story: of a commitment that gradually peters out. In Jonas Wergeland’s defence it should be said that he tried, he tried very hard to follow future developments in the Comoro Islands. Jonas did his best, somewhat resignedly, to keep track of the new parties and alliances that sprang up after his raising of the flag: the PUIC, FNU, UDZIMA, FNUK-UNIKOM and FD, to name but a few of the permutations of initials that Jonas found increasingly abstract. He valiantly endeavoured to keep abreast and still more valiantly to understand what was going on down there on those islands in the Indian Ocean: the power struggles and political proclamations. Not least, he tried to understand the employment and the presence of foreign mercenaries, primarily French, in various coups d’états. It almost became something of a hobby, rather like stamp collecting; Jonas Wergeland collected piece after piece of an African reality, the only thing being that the more pieces he accumulated the less he understood any of it. The Comoro Islands actually afforded an angle onto the whole African dilemma, lying as they did off the continent, like a lens through which the mainland could be viewed. The whole gamut of depressing factors was to be found there: a mixed-bag of ethnic groups, a ruinous colonial past, overpopulation, extreme poverty, food shortages, high infant mortality rate, low life expectancy, illiteracy, one-sided exports, political intrigue, governmental chaos, coups, abortive utopian socialism, mercenaries, the Muslim syndrome: a disheartening sum which in the end Jonas found impossible to add up. Or perhaps it was simply that he could not figure it out, not even after the mathematical breakthrough that brought him insight into equations involving several unknowns, the problem of infinity. Sometime in the mid-eighties — and, quite honestly, who can blame him? — Jonas Wergeland gave up, mind reeling, battered and bruised by incomprehensible facts. He threw in the towel. The Comoro Islands and Africa won on a technical knockout.

But as far as his debate with the Young Socialists as a high-school student, in the schoolyard, in that shed was concerned — that Jonas won. And it is important, as it was for Jonas Wergeland, to feel at least at one point in your life that you have an overview and that, perhaps precisely because of that overview, you manage to light on a cause that has not been taken up by everyone else. So even though, in the long run, the Comoro Islands affair ended in defeat, for Jonas Wergeland it represented unequivocal proof — as witness the letter from Ali Soilih — that it does actually pay to step in and do something to change the world. In those terms, Jonas Wergeland’s fight for the Comoro Islands was a glorious victory and, if I may say so, an example worth emulating.

With a few exceptions — one of which I have already mentioned — Jonas Wergeland had the best of all possible childhoods, a childhood so happy that its end was bound to come as a shock. There comes a day when, as one writer put it, the bubble of childhood bursts, and for Jonas that day came with Nefertiti’s death. Of course Jonas had always known that Nefertiti was too good for this world, but even so, when she died he was not prepared for it. In short, he fell apart. He took ill, became so ill that he had to be taken to hospital. Jonas Wergeland was sick right to the marrow and so cold that he thought he would never be warm again. The doctors at the hospital did not know what to make of it: a ten-year-old who languished in bed, pale and wan, and kept throwing up, vomiting fits for which they could find no cause, a boy with a body temperature well nigh as low as that encountered only in people who had miraculously survived record lengths of time in extreme cold. And one thing they would not have understood anyway, even if there had been gauges to measure that sort of thing, was Jonas’s feeling of being totally out of joint, of lying there like a carcass that had been chopped limb from limb. Jonas had only one thing to hold onto: a crystal prism which he clenched tightly in his fist and did not let go of, not even when he was at his sickest.

Jonas’s father was considered by many people to be a rather distrait and distant character. Where other fathers dreamed of cars and BMWs, Haakon Hansen dreamed of Bach and BWVs. Even Jonas had the feeling, when he was alone in the church listening to his father’s improvisations on the organ, that his father was endeavouring to create worlds, or a zone of his own, where he could be alone. But when Jonas came home from the hospital, still no more than a shadow of himself, Haakon Hansen showed that he did notice what was going on around him. And one day in late August, when Jonas came home from school, pale and miserable, and did not even want the egg and tomato sandwiches that had been carefully prepared for him, his father suggested — without the slightest bit of fiddling — that they should take a look at the new organ in Grorud Church. Okay, Jonas muttered, fingering the prism in his pocket, why not; there was something about his father’s fluttering fingers that made it impossible for him to say no.

From the moment they stepped inside the church and his father ranged himself alongside the altar rail and proudly pointed up at the gleaming new case, ‘based on a Principal 8 and an Octave bass 8’, Jonas noticed, to his surprise, that his nausea was starting to subside. Behind the organ’s glittering façade wooden slats fanned out in rays, making Jonas feel for a moment like the boy in Kittelsen’s picture; ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’

Up in the organ-loft his father was a whirlwind of activity, dashing hither and thither and telling Jonas about this new organ from the manufacturers in Snertingdal, really big, with twenty-nine voices and three manuals, with a tracker action and electric — action stop controls. ‘Almost 2,000 pipes, Jonas — imagine that!’ And excited though his father was, Jonas noticed that his hands had steadied, ceased their fluttering, as they always did around an organ. ‘Amazing,’ his father said again and again, pointing to couplers, mixtures and buttons for free combinations. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

But it was in the office, behind the organ, when his father went to fetch his music, that the truly amazing feature was revealed, when Jonas opened a small door. Where did that lead? Had it been there before? Jonas asked. That was the door to the chest, his father told him. Did Jonas want to take a look? He opened the door and they passed through a little room containing the blower and the bellows before his father opened yet another door, leading to the chest itself. ‘Go on in,’ his father said when Jonas hung back on the threshold. ‘This here’s kind of like the engine-room of the nave, if you know what I mean.’