Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Only one thing could save him: if this longing to create something unique were to die inside him, if his aspirations sank to the level of his abilities. Then the problem would be solved and he could live a happy life, a normal life, just a face in the crowd.

The snow came tumbling down as if to order: it was almost Christmas Eve. Enormous white crystals transformed the whole of Grorud into a pretty Advent calendar. Jonas trudged up to the church to see if his father was there, he needed a bit of comforting. Or to hear some Bach — it came to the same thing. But his father wasn’t there, and the parish clerk was on his way out. Jonas decided to wait. ‘My dad’s bound to be here soon,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll just shut the door after me.’ But his father didn’t come. Jonas plodded upstairs to the balcony, stopped in front of the organ, eyed the instrument. As a little boy he had had the idea that the organ was a dragon, that the ornamental pipes were metal wings that might start flapping at any minute and fly off with the whole lot. A dead dragon, he thought now. Somebody killed it before I could get there.

Almost inadvertently he lifted some sheet music off his father’s pile: Rikard Nordraak’s ‘Purpose’ from Mary Stuart. They played it at weddings, he knew, so why not at a funeral too. He sat down on the bench and set the music up in front of him. He switched on the organ and heard the air rushing into the pipes. There was something invigorating about this. As if the organ meant to revive him. Fill him with oxygen. His father had explained to him how the organ was really a huge wind instrument. The sound was made by air vibrating. ‘Playing the organ is like steering a full-rigger,’ his father always said — then he would place his hands on the keys: ‘Listen, Jonas! Can you feel the wind filling the sails?’ To Jonas, it seemed more like making contact with a mighty spirit. When Daniel told him, after he started studying theology, that the Hebrew word for ‘spirit’ was the same as the word for ‘wind’, Jonas was not surprised, he had known it all along.

He started to play; played Nordraak’s beautiful ‘Purpose’ from the sheet music and felt something happen. As he played, as he changed the registration, allowing more and more voices to chime in with the surging music, as he got to grips, what is more, with the booming bass notes, working the pedals — it was easy using the pedals in this piece — he could hear how grand it sounded, how impressive. It reminded him of an experience he had had in the attic on Hvaler, with the harmonium, when the octave couplers had been engaged, and the keys had been pressed down without him touching them. It had been like having a spirit playing alongside him. For a while, sitting at the organ in Grorud Church, his feeling of transparency left him. Something about this instrument, the exultant tutti effect, the tremendous cascades of sound created at the touch of a finger, convinced him that he was better, greater, than he was. And he knew that this had to be the solution: to find a niche in life, a job, a business, in which he would have access to something similar to the organ, an instrument which could, as it were, inflate his ideas, in such a way that his thoughts, simple though they might be, would seem astounding, would touch people’s hearts like the sea of notes now encircling him, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

I do not know whether I need to say this, Professor, but there is at least a chance that it was here, on this organ bench, that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of the career you have seen unfold on the television screen. If, for Haakon Hansen, the organ was a full-rigger, for Jonas Wergeland, it was more like a lifeboat. Because, in the same way as the organ, television presented the most wonderful demagogic opportunities — for manipulation, for trickery even. Although he would never have said so, and although he was genuinely proud of his programmes, this thought did sometimes occur to Jonas, particularly when he was sitting at the main control desk in the NRK studios — he found it ominously reminiscent of sitting at the console of an organ.

But as he sat there, a fifteen-year-old, at the organ in Grorud Church, still bursting with the loftiest ambitions of his life, he would not — could not — accept it: the possibility of another strategy, that is. The longer he played, the more the granite crystals of the church seemed to oscillate with the music, the walls positively vibrating, the less the thought appealed to him. It’s all a big sham, he thought grumpily. He could well see why the organ had been called the Devil’s Instrument. To sit here playing ‘Purpose’ as if he were a whole orchestra wasn’t true originality. He was still a performer, not a creator.

With a discordant crash he stopped playing and switched off the organ, in panic almost, as if wishing to strangle at birth the monster he had been coaxing into existence. He got up from the bench and pulled out the puck — the puck he sometimes removed from the lacquer casket and carried in his pocket, especially in wintertime. He was standing contemplating it, staring at the scratches on it, those illegible hieroglyphics, when he felt eyes on the back of his neck. He turned to look down the church but could see nothing but the eye of God on the large fresco behind the altar at the far end. The eye of God inside a triangle. Jonas looked at the puck; it crossed his mind that it was a pupil. That the puck was this black thing that he could see through.

Just then he noticed a figure breaking free of the altarpiece, the painting entitled ‘The Great White Flock’, gliding out of the crowd and perching on the window-ledge overlooking one of the side-aisles, under the church’s magnificent, new stained-glass window, its pride and joy — anyone who has read Martin Luther may well recognize the phenomenon: a wee devil sat there laughing at him, leering and thumbing its nose. Jonas knew what it was: a little Hansen devil. A monkey. A gnome who was telling Jonas that there was only one path open to him in life: to imitate others. To be a sham.

Jonas acted instinctively. And in fury. He hurled the puck at the figure with all his might — and remember, Jonas Wergeland really could throw, so the puck hit the tiny devil smack in the face, and not only that, it also hit the stained-glass window. The sound of tinkling glass went on for ages. Who would have thought one small puck could do so much damage; it looked as though the whole window had spilled out, like water, to make patterns in the snow, like the glitter they sprinkled on plaster Christmas ornaments. And it occurred to Jonas — horror-stricken though he was, conscious though he was of what a dreadful scandal, what sacrilege this was — that the tinkling of the glass had sounded like his ice palace when it came crashing down, that there was some connection here, a connection between everything that fell and everything that was created in the moment of that fall.

For at that same moment he hears the main door opening, hears someone enter the church beneath him, shocked voices, he peeps over the edge of the balcony, sees the vicar and the chairman of the parish council, with snow on their shoulders and the hats they hold in their hands. They look up, spot him. ‘Who’s there?’ they shout.

A second passes. A whole life is shaped in that moment. You always think you have years in which to plan your path in life, and then, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, the choice is made.

Because it is now, for the first time and with unmistakeable clarity, that Jonas feels that pressure on his spine, that pressure which was to have such a determining influence on him later in life — not least where women were concerned. And all at once he understands the reason for this: it was Gabriel who had activated it, the button Jonas once swallowed, made of dragon horn, when he had squeezed his back earlier in the autumn; or at least that could be the reason, but whatever the case, Jonas realized that it was a gift, that he had discovered an uncommonly sensitive spot within himself. Something which would alert him to crucial situations, moments when a distinctive pressure, a great potential, made itself felt: episodes which, when considered as a whole, over time, might show him how, and in which fields, he could, with his endowments, become a conqueror.