The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad Page A

to leave.
    Jonas Wergeland sat at the organ in Grorud Church, playing ‘Love divine all love excelling’. Over the years he had expended a lot of energy on eluding women. Riding out storms. Had his father experienced something similar? Who was this woman walking up the aisle, stepping out like a bride, someone said, as if hearing in her head, not ‘Love divine all love excelling’, but Purcell’s Wedding March. Someone from whom he could no longer escape? Jonas had long suspected that there was a lot he did not know about his father. As a youth, almost grown, he had stumbled upon a scrapbook on his father’s desk. To Jonas this was as unlikely a discovery in the familiar surroundings of the family flat as a mineral from another planet. All the cuttings related to one question: whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. No one had known anything about Haakon Hansen’s interest in this subject. Could it be that his father had regarded his organ music as radio transmissions of some sort? Could it be that, whenever he played, his father was wondering: is there life out there?
    Later still, Jonas was to learn that something else had occurred on that day when Rakel and his father met Albert Schweitzer in Trinity Church. Perhaps it was because the celebrated guest saw the look of appreciation on Haakon Hansen’s face – or discerned something else there – that he asked Jonas’s father if he would also play something. The latter had hesitated. HaakonHansen was not known for showing off. Whenever Jonas was with his father and people asked what he did for a living, Haakon always replied: ‘I’m an organ-grinder.’ But the others persuaded him to play. So Haakon sat down at the fine old organ. He also played Bach, a trio sonata. Albert Schweitzer was thrilled, he spent a long time talking to Jonas’s father afterwards, about their mutual passion for organ playing, the architectonics of the music and, of course, the works of the cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Albert Schweitzer was particularly flattered to learn that Haakon Hansen had read his book on Bach, all 800 pages of it – this seemed to please him more than having won the Peace Prize – and he laughed heartily when the Grorud organist made so bold as to say: ‘I think it’s even better than your book on the mysticism of Paul the Apostle.’ Their conversation was so lively and went on for so long that it put the rest of the day’s schedule behind time. Schweitzer’s entourage more or less had to tear him away from Haakon Hansen, in the middle of a discussion about the incomparable timbre of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ in Saint Sulpice in Paris. ‘And wouldn’t you agree,’ Albert Schweitzer called back finally over his shoulder as he was dragged away, ‘that people play Bach too fast these days?’
    Only a few years later, Jonas met another organist who had been present at this meeting and who told Jonas that Schweitzer had been full of praise for Haakon Hansen. ‘You are a world-class organist,’ he had told Jonas’s father. ‘What are you doing tucked away in a small church in a Norwegian suburb?’ And it was at that point that Haakon had made the legendary remark – one which was to become a comforting motto in Norwegian organ circles: ‘We all have our own Lambaréné.’
    These fragments of a story conflicted with the hints their father himself had given the family about his early years. This new information seemed to speak of a possible career which was never pursued, of a light hidden under a bushel. ‘People still talk about his debut concert,’ one old organist told Jonas. His father had been on the threshold of a dazzling career as a musician when suddenly, for reasons that were never explained, he gave it all up in favour of a humble post as a church organist.
    Was this a sacrifice of some sort, or simply a move prompted by shyness, a shyness which Jonas felt he must have inherited? Had his father’s choice of career