The Discoverer Read Online Free PDF

rather: the top half of a female by the name of Anna – a clean-living version, if you like, of the more notorious Blow-up Barbara – over whose mouth they placed a strip of plastic, for fear, perhaps, of being smitten with unmentionable diseases. If they tilted the head back and blew properly Anna’s chest would rise. Jonas was praised by the teacher for his attempt. Anna’s breasts jutted upwards like two pyramids under her blue tracksuit top. In his imagination Jonas saw how she must have tripped and fallen into the water while out jogging and how he had saved her from drowning with his life-giving breath.
    One day when he returned home from Frogner Baths his mother sat herself down right across from him and looked at him long and hard, as if she were wondering whether his alarmingly red eyes were attributable to chlorine or to lunacy. ‘Why are you doing all this?’ she asked.
    ‘Because I have a talent,’ he said. ‘I can hold my breath.’ What he may perhaps have been trying to say was: I have a duty.
    She was still looking him in the eye, but she could not help smiling: ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s okay to take life a little less seriously than you do.’
    As an adult Jonas would remember these words whenever he had the feeling that he was making too big a deal of things. That is my curse, he told himself. I take life too seriously.
    But just then all Jonas could think about was the day, sometime far in the future, when he would be put to the test. His life would culminate in this, the moment when he actually saved a life; his presence on earth would be justified by one sensational exploit, broadcast live, as it were, on prime-time television. Everything was to be a preparation for this. Daniel had a calendar with a metal plate on the back and a red metal ring. Most people moved the ring from one day to the next, but Daniel set it only around important dates. Jonas knew that the moment for his dazzling deed awaited him on one of those magnetic, red-circle days.
    Then, one Saturday morning when they awoke to the Goldberg variation no. 6 and the smell of frying bacon, Jonas noticed that the red ring on Daniel’s calendar was circling that very day. For a second he construed this as an ominous sign. But his brother lay grinning in his bed. ‘Today you’re going to see so many naked women that you’ll never be the same again,’ Daniel said. Jonas breathed a sigh of relief, not knowing that this was also the day when he was to be put to the test.
    Now though, for all the basic training of his boyhood, he was powerless.Down below in the church a father lay dead. Holding his breath would do no good. Artificial respiration would do no good. The day before, Jonas had stood by the open coffin, regarding his father’s body. Haakon Hansen looked as though he were alive. Intact. All that was missing, so it seemed, was a little cog. A glowing spot behind his ribs, that glow which wove the network of tiny links between his organs. As Jonas stood there beside the coffin an old question presented itself: What should you take with you? What makes life life? What gives life life?
    Jonas Wergeland sat at the organ manuals, terraces of keys, putting everything he had into the playing: fingers, feet, his whole body. This was a day with a heavy red ring around it, a red-letter day for Grorud, one which would always be remembered – not least on account of the unforeseen intermezzo occasioned by an uninvited guest, a personage who showed up dressed in orange even though black was the order of the day, a jungle flower in a dim Norwegian pine forest. ‘Haakon Hansen was a Buddhist,’ was just one of the rumours which would circulate later. ‘For over thirty years we’ve had a Buddhist for an organist in Grorud Church.’ Jonas sat up in the organ loft, accompanying a packed church in ‘Lead kindly light, amid th’encircling gloom’. And they could have used the light, because it was an