The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad Page B

been a waste of talent – or had this decision actually been the saving of him? Perhaps it had to do with finding a balance in life. Between ambition and reality. Between conscience and opportunity. Whichever way Jonas looked at it, he had to admit – especially when he saw the pleasure his father took in keeping a kayak on an even keel – that Haakon Hansen appeared to be a harmonious, not to say contented individual.
    Jonas played ‘Love divine all love excelling’, all but dancing over the organ bench, balancing on his backside while his fingers flew over the manuals and his feet heeled and toed it over the pedals. Now he, too, could see the woman in orange. She took the last few steps up to the dais in front of the altar on which the coffin sat, to his father who lay there dead. In his Lambaréné. A Schweitzer to the people of Grorud. Jonas could not believe his eyes. A woman in orange. Like a member of another religion, another culture, he thought. And behind that thought another, of which he only caught the tail end: or someone from another dimension. A world beyond this one, running parallel to it. Once, when Jonas was small, his father had lifted him onto his lap and played a D major triad, D-F major-A, and explained to him that a piano did not have the capacity to bring out the almost imperceptible difference between an F major and a G flat the way a good violinist could. ‘There’s a blind spot there, between F major and G flat,’ his father told him. As usual that was all he said, but Jonas could finish it for himself: it was the same with life. Maybe this woman hailed from just such a spot. One that lay between the F major and G flat of life. For a moment, a few tenths of a second which also grew in depth like a complex chord, it occurred to Jonas that he might actually owe his life to this woman; that here, in the gossip mirror attached to the side of the organ, he beheld the root cause of his existence. She stood quite still before his father’s coffin, as if she were alone in the church. The hymn came to an end. Jonas laid his hands on the console and drew his feet back to rest under the bench, observing, as he did so, how the woman turned ever so slightly, for a second, and met his mother’s eye, saw her give an almost imperceptible little nod, saw his mother do the same. Then: the unknown woman went down on her knees. At that same moment a ripple of movement passed through the two angels in the painting on the wall behind the altar. Jonas could have sworn to it, did not think anyone had noticed but him. A stirring of their wings. And the coffin hovered. For a few seconds it hovered in mid-air.
    Not until years later, did Jonas realise that it was at that moment that he came up with the idea – in a flash, you might say – for his programme on Henrik Ibsen, one of the twenty-odd episodes of Thinking Big , a splendid television series in which each individual programme was as carefully arranged in relation to the others as the pipes in an organ. When that time came, he could not have said where he had got it from – he called it inspiration – but the image stemmed, of course, from this incident: with a woman kneeling in a church. And a possible miracle.
    Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Henrik Ibsen did not touch on the less sympathetic sides of the writer’s character: his arrogance and pomposity, hisruthless ambition and, at the same time, his pathological shyness, his pedantry and penchant for the formalities, not to mention all the shameless arse-licking he did in order to obtain honours, his infatuations with very young girls, his drinking, his sexual inhibitions. Nonetheless: seldom has a programme been so roundly condemned. Ibsen researchers and other members of the literati were particularly outraged, describing it as libellous. Because Wergeland’s story about Norway’s national bard – a fictional drama in the spirit of Brand and Peer Gynt – dealt with a man on his knees, a man