Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

‘Well, there’ll never be an end to apartheid, that’s for sure,’ came the other man’s curt, bitter reply. ‘Never. We’re going to keep the blacks down for ever.’

At best, if this was a valid comparison, then perhaps one day the prosperous white areas around Sea Point would lie as deserted as the rusty ruins in South Georgia, Jonas thought. He could not know that things were happening behind the scenes in South Africa, that great changes were afoot, that just after New Year speeches would be made in the South African parliament, in this same city below him, which no one could have predicted and which would make a whole world believe that one truly could round a cape by the name of Good Hope.

Jonas could not resist it; he had to look out, down at the steep scree beneath them. His life hung, quite literally, by a thread, a cable.

His whole life depended on cables. He had known it for a long time.

There came a jolt. In his heart too. An echo inside him. The gondola started to move. Minutes later they were down. He stepped out, but his legs would not carry him; he dropped down onto a bench. The elderly man got into a waiting car, raised his stick to him before he drove off. Jonas couldn’t have said whether this was meant as a threat or a salute. But one thing he understood: we know nothing about what our dreams mean. And we know nothing, thank heavens, about what the future holds. We can never know what will happen the next second, the next day, the next year.

On the way to Greenmarket Square, moments after they had barely missed running into a man who dashed across the road, the taxi driver told Jonas that he had had the same dream three nights running: a whale swam in from Robben Island — the driver pointed across the glittering waters to the north-west — and coughed up a man on the beach at Sea Point, a black man wearing a royal crown. Now what did Jonas make of that?

It was not until the end of the sixties that Jonas’s Wergeland’s decision finally ripened, the one for which he had been searching for, dreaming of, impatiently and more or less constantly, ever since that day in the quarry years before: it was within the realms of music that he would become a king, conquer new territory.

Jonas had been playing the piano since the start of second grade and unlike a lot of children he actually enjoyed it. He did not think this had anything to do with his father, with having watched his father’s blissful face bent over the keys for as long as he could remember. It had to be due to a talent, to skills that had been slumbering inside him and which were now, at long last, being awakened. He had also been taking lessons, though with a different teacher from Daniel — both out of an inveterate need to do the very opposite of his brother and out of a sense of premonition. Daniel went to a lady who lived at the top of Bergensveien, while Jonas went in quite the opposite direction, to a teacher who lived on the other side of Trondheimsveien. As their names suggest, these were two widely diverse addresses: almost, so it would prove, like two different continents. Not surprisingly, Daniel chose his piano teacher according to his own, monomaniacal criteria, which were based more on an assessment of her physical attributes than her gifts as a teacher. So while Daniel had a teacher who tickled the hairs on the back of his neck with jutting breasts every time she leaned over him from behind to show him how to play the part over which he had just stumbled — more often than not on purpose — Jonas had a musical cicerone who galvanized his ears with lilting notes. And while for Daniel, right from the start, practice was a chore — his ‘I’ pitted against the piano — exercises were sheer hell, and the pieces themselves pearls cast before swine, Jonas experienced some of the pleasure promised by music books with titles such as The Piano and Me, Exercises are Fun and Pearls from the Baroque .

What sort of sound does a dragon make?

Jonas’s teacher lived in a spacious villa next door to the vicarage, on holy ground you might say, where lessons were overseen, not to say inspired, by ‘the four greats’: Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, whose semi-divine visages looked down from their frames on the living-room wall. If Jonas turned his head he could see the whole of the Grorud Valley spread out before him outside the window, as if the music lifted him up to the heavens, an impression which was reinforced by the smell of the place, since the kitchen always contained some freshly-baked wonder, plump Christmas cakes or plaited loaves, and thus the dances and ballads, marches and rhapsodies gave the illusion of making his mouth water. As a way of rounding off the lesson he would often sit with a fresh slice of coffee ring in his hand, listening while Fru Brøgger, who had the longest, slenderest fingers he had ever seen, demonstrated how Chopin’s ‘Minute Waltz’ really could be played in a minute — a feat so incredible that his ears just about fell off.

Fru Brøgger and her sensitive fingers may have been something of a rarity, who am I to say; at any rate, she was quite liable to interrupt a lesson so that they could watch the birds on the bird table in the garden instead; sometimes they even went out onto the steps to hear them singing, especially in the spring. Her real stroke of genius, however, was that as well as teaching him the obligatory short pieces, she also allowed Jonas to feel his own way into the world of music, making it a kind of game in which he could discover all its different elements: triads, tempo, dynamics or the mystery of major and minor. She allowed him, to use a high-flown word, to improvise. So — my apologies for getting carried away here — God bless the exceptions like Fru Brøgger, and the Devil take all those who kill an inquisitive child’s pleasure in playing the piano by making them slog away at exercises in fingering and legato playing — not that these aren’t necessary at a certain stage, but at other times they act as a total barrier to the art itself, to what music is: timbre, rhythm, melody.

With Fru Brøgger this was how it worked: instead of having to struggle through a saraband by Bach come hell or high water, particularly if she could hear that Jonas had not practised enough, they might play with the cycle of fifths — if, that is, she wasn’t telling him something about harmonics or the demanding nature of the contrapuntal technique. And in due course she introduced Jonas to the liberating world of jazz, with the aid of composer Maj Sønstevold’s little, but extremely stimulating, Jazz ABC . Nor did Fru Brøgger neglect to tell Jonas an anecdote that taught him something important about the love of music and a certain way of looking at life. Briefly told, it was a story about Maj’s husband, Gunnar Sønstevold, also a composer, who had come home one day and told his wife that he had been helping to move a big piano, only it had slipped out of their hands on the bend in the stairs and flown out of the window on the fifth floor. And in describing this incredible incident to Maj: how the piano had hit the ground with a crash, all he said was: ‘You should have heard that chord!’

After all these years with Fru Brøgger, with birds and minute waltzes and fresh-baked coffee ring, it was not surprising that it should be within the field of music that Jonas would spy a potential for conquest, or that he should first consider chords as posing the greatest challenge. It came to a point where he was practising for as much as two hours every day, to the great annoyance of the rest of the family. Buddha, when he appeared on the scene, was the only one who could not get enough of it, especially when it came to chordal improvisations, always crawled over and sat close to the piano when Jonas was playing.