Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

I make no secret of the fact that the experience which awaited Jonas Wergeland here is one that I hold infinitely dear — the mere fact of being able to write about this episode makes this whole undertaking worth the effort, or perhaps I should say the trouble. For once, however, I must apologize for the fact that I have no choice but to describe it in the crude and narrow terms that this form and this language, which is to say this role that I have taken upon myself, dictate.

Jonas stepped across the threshold and promptly found himself inside the heart of the instrument, surrounded by pipes of all sizes, the largest sixteen feet tall, set at several different levels. It was a large room, or a little house, with other small houses inside the main house, boxes and walls. ‘What’s that over there?’ Jonas asked, whispering, as if he were inside a shrine, pointing as he did so at something he took to be a little organ in itself. ‘That’s the swell,’ his father said. Jonas went on gazing round about in disbelief, he did not know what to make of it all, but he liked it instantly; it was not, in fact, unlike the engine-room of a ship, possibly because of the steep and narrow steps leading up to ledges, and all the bridges one could walk along between the pipes.

‘Can I sit here while you play?’ Jonas asked.

‘Aye, aye cap’n! Full speed ahead!’ his father replied and went out.

Jonas heard his father settling himself on the stool in front of the console and leafing through his music. Then something strange happened; his father switched on the organ, which is to say the electricity that powered the blower, and Jonas heard, no he felt the space around him being filled with air, how the air streamed into the valves. It was like being in the countryside, in the wind, a warm wind. Jonas sat there, savouring this whooshing, and the clicking of the stops, noticing that already he was not as cold and that he was starting to relax, as if there were some strange accord between his father’s manipulation of the organ and his own nervous system.

Then his father started to play. Johann Sebastian Bach. Haakon Hansen was never in any doubt. If anyone could help his son, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. To Jonas, ensconced inside the organ chest, it sounded wonderful. Like hearing the music from within himself. He was inside the music, he was floating on it. His body became a pipe, or rather, every bone became a pipe, and since every bone was a pipe and since Bach’s music is more coherent than any other music, joining things up, Jonas felt his father’s playing putting him back together, reassembling his dismembered limbs, and there came a point when Jonas had the sensation, like a tremor running through him from top to toe, that his body had become whole once more; and since the music was surging around him in the most beautiful way, he started to cry, very softly.

Later Jonas came to the conclusion that the organ had saved him. Or his father, or Bach, depending on how you looked at it. That the weight of his grief over Nefertiti had been punctured: lightened by the air that generated that music. That autumn, as if he were attending a course of treatment, at least a couple of times a week after his last class at school, Jonas would head straight across the road to the granite church, where he shut himself up inside the organ chest and let his father play for him. To begin with he would sometimes break into the music. ‘Which note does this pipe play?’ he was liable to call from inside the organ. ‘What does it look like?’ his father would call back. Then he would try first one then another until Jonas learned which note, on which manual, at which pitch, through the network of linkages, produced a sound from that particular pipe. The pipes connected to the pedals were situated in an especially out-of-the-way spot. Jonas wormed his way around the chest, up steps, balancing on crossbeams, inspecting every pipe made of tin, or rather of an alloy of which tin was the main component; inspected the square wooden pipes, the group of copper pipes in the centre, all the minuscule pipes smaller than piccolos. Occasionally he amused himself by pulling on the sliders, thus creating notes over and above those his father was playing, like a spirit inside the machine.

But what Jonas found most interesting about the organ was the fact that, while keys were positioned side by side on the manuals, their pipes did not sit side by side inside the organ so, for example, a C and a C sharp, which were right next to one another on the keyboard, could be almost two and a half metres apart inside the chest. When his father played all twelve notes on a scale, they would sound from all around the inside of the organ, especially when he coupled down voices from other manuals. Jonas loved it, made his father do it again and again, slowly, while his ears tried to follow the notes as they swelled out into the air around him. Jonas more than loved it; he almost went down on his knees in the face of this unexpected and totally different chain of cause and effect, looking upon it as a gift, this glimpse of another form of logic, one which — and this was the comforting thing — was connected to the logic outside, on the manuals, as if they were two parallel but different universes.

His father sat patiently on the organ stool, obeying the slightest hint, and this he did with pleasure because he knew that this finding out how the organ worked was in itself a kind of therapy: to discover that something so apparently complex did nonetheless make sense. So it was with hopes steadily rising that he allowed his son to crawl about in there, like an organ-builder’s apprentice, mapping out pipes and abstracts, complying with Jonas’s wish to hear all the voices one after another without a murmur and making not the slightest objection when his son declared that he thought the Cromorne sounded best played on the Choir, together with the Bassoon played on the pedals.

In due course Jonas learned a lot about the organ, including the fact that it was alive , that notes sounded different from one day to the next. Just as he learned that when he pulled out the stop that said ‘Mixture 3 fagot’, it came across loud and strong, like the last verse of a hymn, and it occurred to him that it was the same with people: now and again you might be in a ‘Mixture 3 fagot’ mood, but that the usual tone tended to be that of the ‘Principal’, the keynote of the Hauptwerk. For his own part, Jonas felt like a ‘Reed’, barely audible.

As time went on, however, Jonas slipped inside the organ chest simply to listen. He had found a broad plank, almost like a bunk, in the midst of the maze of pipes and there he would lie as if at the heart of an incredible machine — had he read Hermann Hesse he might have said glass bead game — for hours on end, week in, week out, month after month, letting his father play Bach for him until he could feel the music permeating his body like a medicine; or perhaps it was more that, having first put his body together, only now, with the help of time, could his father blow life into it. One day Jonas had the idea of taking the crystal prism — his most treasured possession at that time — from his pocket and placing it on his brow, and it was then, while he lay there as if on a bunk in the middle of the organ, with the prism on his brow and his father playing Bach, that he saw, felt in every bone in his body, possibly because the prism broke up the music in such a way that the brain apprehended it differently, that he was lying inside the very engine of existence. Because again, beneath everything else, this was what troubled him: the wheel. Why did Nefertiti die? Who turned the wheel? Who or what sat at the hub of the wheel? And as he lay there, Jonas realized that he himself was at the centre of the wheel, that he was lying still, and yet he was in motion. And lying there, at the centre of something he did not understand, with a prism on his brow that refracted the light and created a little rainbow somewhere out of eyeshot, Jonas was aware that he was slowly being healed.