The Discoverer (6 page)

Jonas walked off. Not another word had been said. People may not have thought there was any real danger. But Jonas knew that child would have drowned had not he, Jonas, been there just then. Did he feel proud, pleased? No. There had been something devastatingly unheroic about the whole deed. The setting for his act of heroism had been as wrong as it could possibly be. What bothered Jonas most of all was the fact of how easy it had been. How light the child had felt when he picked him up. As if he had overestimated the task, the weightiness of life. ‘What’s the matter, you’re shaking like a leaf?’
Daniel said when he got back, and handed his brother an ice cream. ‘I saved a child’s life,’ Jonas said with a sheepish grin. ‘Great,’ Daniel said, thinking it was a joke. ‘Come on, let’s go over to Ingierstrand instead. I passed a couple of real dolls just up the road.’ He started fervently humming a hymn. As far as Jonas could tell it was a mangled soul rendering of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

Jonas went through the rest of that day feeling hollow inside. It took him a while to sort out how exactly he felt. What was it that was wrong? He knew, though: he was eleven years old and he had attained his goal. Where do you go once you’ve reached the mountain top? He had nothing left to live for. What was he supposed to do for the next eighty years? What an anticlimax: all that swimming and diving practice – and all you have to do is to wade out knee-deep and stick a hand into the water. He remembered an incident involving his mother. She had been sitting at the coffee table, doing the most difficult game of patience, one she must have played thousands of times before without getting it to work out. And suddenly it came out right. As Jonas recalled, his mother had seemed not happy, but sad. That was how he felt after that day at Ingierstrand. Eleven years old, he thought; eleven years old and my life is over.

Jonas Wergeland sat high in a hallowed hall, in an organ loft which also offered a wonderfully clear prospect of the past. Daniel, that erstwhile soul freak, stood at the front of the church. Jonas listened to him praying, listened to him reading texts from the Bible, about vanity, but also about hope. Jonas kept one eye on his brother in the mirror as he reflected once again on his own reaction to his life-saving exploit. He felt some of that same hollowness now, though for a different reason. He had a vague sense of being dead. Felt as though he had actually been dead for years. That he was present, not at his father’s funeral, but at his own. He was dead because he had lost sight of a gift, lost sight of a goal in life. He was not yet thirty, but he had given up, or settled for second best. Second worst. Had he been asleep? Or was this simply a result of the shyness with which he had, for the first time, been
overcome
on that beach, faced with all those naked people? Because even though he may have maintained, unconsciously at least, a desire to ‘make a name for himself’, this shyness had long stifled any urge to expose himself to view. As an announcer he had, however, found himself a little cubbyhole where no one could see him and yet everyone could see him. He was alone with a camera lens, while at the same time entering a million living rooms. It was not unlike being an organist: he could stay out of sight while at the same time making the church tremble with his playing, making everyone quiver with emotion.

Sitting there on the organ bench in the church of his childhood, Jonas Wergeland saw that what he had taken for contentment was, in fact, a state
of torpor. For a surprisingly long time he had managed to ignore the question of whether he was making the best use of his talents. He was recognised on the street, he was forever seeing his own name – if not in lights, then certainly in newsprint – but that day, at his father’s funeral, he realised that his life was a huge anticlimax.

Jonas looked in the mirror. He saw his brother glance up at the gallery and launched into the opening chords of ‘Thine is the Glory’. Daniel had suggested ‘Abide with me’ but their mother wanted no hymns about
eventide
, insisted, instead, on ‘Thine is the Glory’, a song of praise. And Jonas had agreed, not least because it gave him the chance to play the wonderful melody from Handel’s
Judas Maccabaeus
.

The man at the centre of it all, his father, lying in his coffin, had died on the job. It had happened late one afternoon. Someone had been walking past the church and heard a great roar coming from it – the building had been positively shaking: it had sounded as though an enormous engine was running at full power in there. This seemed so odd that the vicar was called. He opened the door to be met by an ear-splitting din. It was coming from the organ. In the gallery they found Haakon Hansen, dead. Heart attack. He had slipped off the bench and under the console and lay across the pedal board as if he were asleep. Not that anyone could have slept with such a racket going on. The cluster chord of bass notes produced by the pressure of his father’s body on the row of pedals shook the whole church to its foundations, like an earthquake almost. ‘He looked as though he was hovering, like a fakir on a bed of notes,’ the vicar told Jonas. It was a fitting end. That was how a
musician
ought to die, Jonas thought. With the organ playing full blast. Everyone should exit this life – all those who had loved it, at any rate – to the
accompaniment
of just such a resounding peal of protest. If, that is, it ought not to be construed as a fanfare, bidding death welcome. Haakon Hansen had involuntarily composed his own requiem.

Jonas’s father had always said he would die at the organ. Most people do reflect, from time to time, on where and how they would like to die. As far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned one thing was for sure: he did not want to meet his end as he had once been certain he would: far out to sea, with no chance of rescuing himself, for all his life-saving practice.

It had started out well enough. Despite a bit of a breeze it had been a perfect afternoon in Krukehavn, over on Hvasser. Jonas was down on the jetty where the pilot boats were moored, he was sitting reading about Venus, and although he was not looking up his eye was caught by a green object – the light made it shine like a precious gem – drifting towards him, bobbing up and down. Even at a distance he spotted the piece of paper inside it and
instantly fell to daydreaming about dramatic missives from far-off lands, about the possible, subsequent headlines: ‘Message in a bottle from the
Falklands
’, or better still: ‘Young man receives gift of a million from Argentinian cattle baron’. That, too, would be a way of making a name for oneself. By sheer luck, pure coincidence.

He clambered down to the water, fished out the bottle. The cork was only half-in, so there was little chance of it having come from Buenos Aires. ‘Bound for World’s End’ it said on the piece of paper he pulled out. Nothing else. In a neat hand. He turned to look back – towards the southern tip of the island, known as World’s End – only to be blinded by sunlight. Someone was bouncing it off a mirror at him. He could see nothing except this tiny, dazzling sun dancing in the hand of a person on a jetty a little way off. Then the light went out. Through the binoculars which had, the previous autumn, enabled him to see the moons of Jupiter for the first time he spied a figure, a girl, waving to him. He picked up his book, strolled ashore and along to her jetty. Why did I do it? he would ask himself later. Because I let myself be dazzled?

By the time he reached the girl he had managed to get a pretty good look at her: T-shirt, shorts, bare feet – the only unusual touch was her hat, a white cap with a black skip like the ones worn by naval officers. She was laughing. ‘Nice one,’ he said, nodding at the mirror she still held in her hand. ‘I usually let people know when I want them to give me the sun. So, what was that note about?’

‘I heard you were looking for a berth.’

‘I’m going further than World’s End,’ he said.

‘I like a boy with ambition,’ she said, pointing at the binoculars round his neck. ‘I’ll take you wherever you want to go.’

‘Across the fjord?’

‘I’ll be getting under way in a minute.’

‘Now?’ he said. ‘But it’ll be night soon.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off her navel. Her T-shirt stopped shy of the waistband of her shorts, exposing her belly button: a small, mesmerisingly black hollow in her midriff, but one which was, nonetheless big enough for Jonas to feel that he could get lost in there. It struck him that he was more attracted to this hollow than to her. He gazed and gazed at it as if he had just discovered an unknown planet, here on Earth. He felt as if he was swirling round and round, as if everything – his eyes, his reason – was being drawn into a deliciously prurient vortex.

‘Don’t tell me you’re scared,’ she said. To Jonas it sounded like downright ventriloquism. Her words issued straight from her navel.

‘It’s too windy,’ he said.

‘Who’s afraid of a bit of a blow,’ she said.

‘It’s blowing pretty hard, I’d say,’ he replied. He knew he shouldn’t have said this. She smiled, lowered her eyes to his crotch. He was a little
embarrassed
by her directness. He looked up at the pennants smacking against their flagpoles. These and the swaying trees further up the beach gave plenty of cause for concern.

‘What have you brought with you?’ she asked.

‘I own no more than I can carry, I am a nomad.’ He jabbed a thumb at the rucksack slung over one shoulder, then realised that might not be what she meant. That this could be an existential question. That she was
actually
asking: ‘Who are you? Show me something from your civilisation.’ He handed her the book he was carrying, a textbook on the planetary system; he was reading up in preparation for the new term and course A 106 at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. She riffled through it briefly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There’s no knowing when this sort of thing might come in handy at sea.’ She shot a glance skywards. ‘You’ll see stars tonight, alright.’ Everything she said still seemed to him to have a double meaning.

Beside them lay a Knarr, a thirty-foot wooden boat, sturdy and reassuring, but at the same time slender and graceful. It stood out, it had a regal, a noble, air about it, as did she. ‘São Gabriel,’ Jonas read. She saw him start. ‘Didn’t you pay attention in school? Vasco da Gama’s flagship?’ she said.

But he was beyond paying attention now; he had been bewitched by a belly button, tossed into a whirlpool. They left Hvasser behind so quickly that he scarcely realised what was happening. Half an hour later it was all he could do just to hang on tight, they were moving too fast for his liking, the waves were too high, there was altogether too much foaming and
frothing
and surging and sighing going on round about him. Not only that, but it would be dark soon. Instinctively he held his breath, as if he were already under water. He knew that he had embarked upon an undertaking which he might well regret, or might never have the chance to regret, since he was in fact going to die, out here, in the middle of a storm-tossed sea.

‘Death is simple,’ his father had once told him. ‘You breathe out. You don’t breathe in. That’s all there is to it.’ After a while he had added: ‘Do you know why organ music is so beautiful? Because it’s a sustained act of dying, pure expiration.’

Jonas had noticed the piece which his father had been rehearsing when he died. Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in A minor. It seemed so apt: to be playing a prelude at the moment of your death, an overture as postlude.

Bo Wang Lee was the first to ask the question which Jonas Wergeland would later consider to represent the very crux of existence: what should you
take with you. It was a question which could be applied at all levels. What, for example, should one take to one’s death? The day before the funeral, Jonas had lingered by his father’s open casket long after the rest of the family had gone. There his father lay, in a dark suit, as if he were taking a nap before a party, or prior to some important engagement. A journey. What should he take with him? Somewhere in Africa, so Jonas had heard, coffins were designed as tributes to the deceased. A fisherman was given a coffin shaped like a blue tuna fish, a chief was laid to rest in a golden eagle. Haakon Hansen deserved more than a neutral white coffin. A kayak, perhaps. Jonas placed his father’s worn organ-playing shoes in the coffin, along with a book containing Bach’s six trio sonatas. A volume of the
National Geographic
also found favour in Jonas’s eyes.

What should you take with you? What was life?

The last notes of ‘Thine be the Glory’ faded away. The woman in orange had yet to make her appearance. Daniel began his address to the bereaved. Jonas crept over to the corner of the gallery from which, as a child, he had so often dropped bits of paper onto people’s heads. His eye went to the front pew, to his mother who seemed remarkably small all of a sudden, shrunken. Jonas had three decades of living behind him, but only now did he see it. He had got it all wrong. He had always regarded his mother as the more active of the two; she was the one who saw to the social side of things, who invited people over, organised parties, while his father was the quiet, reserved one, with few friends. Not for nothing had Jonas at a certain point in his life taken his mother’s maiden name, Wergeland. His mother was high days and
holidays
, his father was the bedrock and the humdrum. Jonas had the impression that his father would have liked to be alone, that he longed to lead a monastic life. He was, at any rate, an out-and-out individualist, a man who wanted to be his own symphony orchestra. Now and again it had even crossed Jonas’s mind that his father was, to some extent, a loser. Secretly, Jonas felt sorry for him. Which was also why he loved his father so much. But now. All these people. Over a thousand of them. This day showed that he might have been totally mistaken about his parents and their respective roles.

And then, as his thoughts drift off down their own path, his eye is drawn to something, a hub, something inescapable, which he does not at first see, then suddenly spies: Margrete. A large M on a black wall. He starts, amazed that her magnetic attraction should be so strong even when he is seeing her from behind. She is sitting right below the pulpit with Kristin, their
daughter
. Margrete was wearing one of her strings of pearls. ‘I think your father would like it,’ she had said when Jonas had wrinkled up his nose at the
gleaming
white necklace. At first he couldn’t think why he had started at the sight
of his wife. He looked at the nape of Margrete’s neck, noting how clearly it testified to this woman’s uncommonly upright carriage. But at the same time he noticed something else, so plainly that he would never be able to dismiss it. He saw how vulnerable it looked. More vulnerable when viewed from here than at close quarters. All at once he understood why he had been so startled: if he knew so little about his father, how much did he really know about Margrete? Later, it would seem to Jonas that things had been arranged thus for just this purpose: that he should be up in the organ loft and catch sight of Margrete’s long neck, adorned with pearls; as if he would never have discovered it, that tremendous vulnerability, had he not been observing her from so far away, and on such an occasion, with his father lying in his coffin, dead. Jonas was struck by a feeling – which he promptly fended off – that it all came down to her, even this funeral; that the centre lay here, at the nape of her neck, not up at the altar, not at his father’s coffin.