Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

But this was the middle of the day, a Saturday, and although it was snowing, the light outside was strong and bright, bringing the stained-glass windows into their own, bathing the church in beams of colour. In the outside world this had been a year of revolt for students in many countries, not least in Paris, and it was also to be a memorable year in Jonas Wergeland’s life. He lay on the carpet, alone, in a church built of granite, aware that a kind of doubt and frustration, possibly even aggression, the like of which he had never known before, was threatening to paralyse all of his vital functions.

The top of his father’s head showed over the gallery rail: he could tell straight away when other ears were listening to his music, as if this did something to the acoustics of the room. He waved, was never surprised by Jonas’s visits to the church, only proud, as proud as any other father when their children come to see them at work.

Quite instinctively Haakon Hansen began to play Bach. So often it had been Bach. Up to this point in Jonas Wergeland’s life, Johann Sebastian Bach was the only one who could measure up to Edward Kennedy Ellington — in terms of emotional or therapeutic effect. The German baroque composer’s music acted as a lubricant, not unlike the chemical substance found in synapses of the brain cells, which formed the basis for an almost wordless communication and rapport between father and son — and possibly even common fantasies.

Outside it was snowing heavily, flakes so crisp that you felt you could make out every crystal, and see that no two were alike. His father was playing Bach, the strains of a trio-sonata filled the room and had much the same impact on Jonas as a flurry of soft snowflakes falling gently down to cover him, coat him in a layer of white, like an embalmment of sorts. But it did no good; the tension, the aggression, was in no way dissipated.

Someone was dead. His grandfather was dead. Omar Hansen lay in the grave under the pine trees on Kirkeøy alongside Melankton and all the other kith and kin, suddenly no more than an anonymous Hansen with a headstone that looked exactly like all the others, stone upon stone, grey upon grey: air, wind and nothingness.

Nefertiti’s death had come as a shock. His grandfather’s death left him, rather, with a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of rage. Infuriation with life itself.

One lovely autumn morning his grandfather had gone fishing in the peter-boat. He had sailed far out across the calm sea and it was only by chance, late in the day, that a fishing smack bound for Strömstad had altered course to check out the apparently empty boat, which had been drifting slowly in a wide circle far from shore as if caught in a maelstrom invisible to the naked eye. Omar Hansen had been found lying on the floor of the boat: his heart had given out. On the troll line hung seven beautiful mackerel like a tribute from Neptune.

Omar’s death meant that the tale had come to an end and as far as Jonas was concerned it was not just any old tale that had been cut short; it was his own, personal tale. No one was telling him now. He, Jonas, had come to an end. The very mainspring of his workings was gone.

This is, of course, a somewhat edited version of the truth. Jonas Wergleand’s frustration was rooted more in the fact that he no longer felt that he was special. However, it was really no wonder that his grandfather’s death should have provoked this crisis. As long as his grandfather was alive Jonas had, unconsciously for the most part, regarded himself as an exceptional person, an extraordinary human being, thanks to his grandfather’s endless and inventive stream of stories in which Jonas found himself woven into grand epic adventures and in which, what is more, he always played the hero. When his grandfather died, Jonas woke up to find himself — by his own lights, at least — exposed as being just like anyone else, just one of the crowd, a flake among other flakes. This was what made him feel so desperate: the thought of being just one of the crowd. To live the same sort of life as everyone else, to be caught in that circle, that totally predictable, drab greyness. At the same time, he knew what he wanted: to be a unique entity. Something quite different from the rest of the hoi polloi. But so far he had only been special because of others. Nefertiti, his grandfather: it was they who made him exceptional, not himself.

He lay on the floor in the choir of Grorud Church, directly above the crypt, where the bodies were kept. And that is what he felt like: a body. As in a dead body, as in any body. He felt like one of the living dead. He listened to the music. Outside it was snowing, huge feathery flakes, so dense that they seemed almost to be clutching at one another. The light streamed in through the stained-glass windows. White light transformed into colours. Jonas’s mind turned to Nefertiti’s crystal prism; it was there in his pocket, he never went anywhere without it; he ran his fingers over it, but it did no good — not now. Instead, he concentrated on the music, but that did no good either. Incredible. Bach did not help. Instead this music, which tended to put one in mind of snowflakes, felt suddenly heavy, oppressive, stifling. Mechanical. There was something so predictable about it, like circles, endlessly recurring circles, that it eventually seemed to Jonas as though the phrases were coiling themselves round his body, making it impossible for him to breathe.

‘Dad,’ he called out during a break in the music, aware that unconsciously he had just made the switch from ‘Daddy’. ‘Play something else,’ he called up to the gallery when his father’s head came into view.

If ever an Oedipal killing was committed in Jonas Wergeland’s life then it was here, now. Rejecting Bach was tantamount to rejecting his father. I repeat: Jonas Wergeland had a wonderful father, a father who proved once again that he was equal to the situation. Haakon Hansen looked down at Jonas, having detected the unwonted, almost desperate, note in his son’s voice. He said nothing. Disappeared from view. For a long time there was silence. Total silence. The light poured in through the stained-glass windows. Jonas stared up at the apse of the church, at the fresco, The Great White Flock . Christ in the middle, before a swelling sea of people. Jonas was suddenly filled with a deep loathing at the sight of this mass of humanity, people who all looked exactly alike, like little ripples on an ocean. He heard his father resetting the stops, shut his eyes, felt his limbs stiffening, like the premature onset of rigor mortis.

Jonas jumped when the organ surged into life. First came some swirling phrases which then gave way to weird — Jonas’s first instinct would have been to say ‘discordant’ — chords, that were sustained for a long, long time, sustained even when the pedals began to play a thundering descending scale. Jonas had never heard anything like it. It was horrible. Or was it horrible because it sounded as if the feelings inside him were here translated into a musical language? Jonas listened intently, trying to take in the evocative music that came tumbling down onto him, was thrown back at him from granite walls and ceiling, a landslide of organ music in which the sounds made by the pedals seemed to form a stairway running downwards, both terrible and majestic, grandiose and solemn, before this dramatic composition slipped into a new passage, quieter, and then — and this was the really weird part — a mixture of all sorts of things, including a dash of something else, of an atmosphere that Jonas associated with faraway places. Jonas heard it out, straining his ears; now and again it seemed to him that the notes lightly touched on something familiar that was promptly forsaken again. Jonas listened. Shut his eyes. Felt as thought the music were travelling in all directions at once. Backwards, too. Amazing. And the most fascinating thing of all: this music was totally unpredictable. Jonas listened to it as if he had never heard music before. He knew that something was going to happen. That this music would make something happen. He leaned backwards and looked at the fresco again, looking at it upside down, so that Christ was suddenly standing on his head, like a diver plunging towards the Earth.