Fallen Angels

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘Wasn’t it mostly like that in Swedish films and Norwegian women’s magazines?’

  ‘We just had … desire.’

  ‘And you happily kept on playing. The Harpers survived?’

  ‘Except that we changed our name. In 1970. That was when the Norwegian wave came in. Lyrics had to be in Norwegian … and preferably dialect … and above all political. We started calling ourselves Harpegjengen, translated some of our old lyrics into Norwegian, but largely kept to the same music. We never tried to compete with the left-wing Vømmøl stuff.’

  ‘And Rebecca?’

  ‘At least we got through the stormy seventies. After we had Petter in 1972 she began to study and got involved in the women’s movement.’

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘But we managed well anyway. I even joined the eighth of March demo with a pram and everything, then went home and put the kids to bed afterwards, while she was at a women’s lib party.’

  I sighed. ‘The heyday of the separatists.’

  ‘Then Grete came along in 1979 and Rebecca had to interrupt her studies again. Then I noticed a new restlessness in her, as though it was a pregnancy she actually had no time for.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me? I’ve been the organist in various churches ever since 1970. First as a temp, then short fixed-term contracts and eventually, in 1980, I got a permanent post. Roughly parallel with that, I was drawn into the church. I formally joined the State Church in 1970 and today I’m much more involved in it.’

  ‘Really?’

  He looked at me solemnly. ‘It was the music that did it. Sitting there, alone, beneath the high vaulted ceiling, playing for myself, there was a moment when I experienced a sudden closeness … to something. A … what should I call it? An intimacy that I’d never experienced before. Whereas Rebecca was moving in the opposite direction, away from her childhood beliefs. This was a difficult process for her of course, with her background. She found it so difficult, I made her ask for help from our priest, Berge Brevik, but that only slowed down the process.’

  ‘So that was perhaps what ultimately made you split up?’

  ‘Me and Rebecca?’

  ‘No. I was thinking about you and The Harpers?’

  He appeared to be turning this over in his mind. ‘Yes, perhaps when it comes down to it, that was why.’ He tore himself away from his thoughts. ‘Well, Varg, let’s get going.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Let’s go to the poets.’

  ‘Ah, the Wessel and the Holberg. You know what the old actor said, don’t you? First I’ll go to the poets, then to the dogs.’

  14

  ‘Before we go, you have to see … my composing room.’

  He led me into the corridor and down to one of the furthest doors. There he opened a tiny closet of a room, so small that he probably had to go outside when he needed to turn over his sheet of music. A solid wooden shelf was attached to one wall and on it was a stereo system with all the latest features: turntable, tape and cassette decks, synth and sampler, drum machine and sequencer, all the bells and whistles.

  ‘This is where I compose,’ Jakob said proudly. He pointed to a digital audio workstation, an old-style piano and a gigantic computer keyboard. ‘The whole of my symphony orchestra is there in full evening dress at six in the morning if I choose. I can have the trumpets of Jericho blasting out and Ry Cooder’s slide guitar at the same time, if I want. I can honk a car horn, make telephones ring, select monkey noises from the jungle and the sound of New York traffic, owls hooting from the far side of the moon or whatever you want, Varg.’

  ‘Do you need it? The far side of the moon, I mean?’

  ‘Listen. I find a melody line and want to try it out on various instruments and at different speeds. The machine does this for me. I don’t play half as well myself – at least not without practising. And it can play all the instruments. I can only play a few. If I decide to write an arrangement I put together the orchestra. I key in all the various instruments and, hey presto! Then I can hear how it sounds.’

  ‘And what sort of things do you write?’

  ‘Right now I’m writing a symphony. My first. I’m calling it Black Mass because that’s what it’s about. The black religious Mass we all take part in, inside ourselves.’ He sent me an earnest look.

  I nodded pensively and cast my eyes over the walls, which were covered with written memos, sheet music, extracts from texts and black-and-white photos of Jakob himself in various settings, from the happy Bergen Beat years to Easter church concerts. ‘You’ve moved on quite a bit from where you started,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally. I’m forty-four. Music’s all about change and movement, and nothing ever sounds how it did twenty years before. Not even rock music, even though sometimes it might sound as if it does.’ He nodded towards the corridor again. ‘Are we off?’ I nodded back. We were off.

  *

  We went to the poets.

  Wessel had left behind him a pile of satirical verse, an opera parody in rhyming verse and a drinking house in Bergen. After a few beers it was hard to distinguish the clientele from the figures in the large portraits inspired by the poet’s most inebriated comic characters. Here there were theatre people, writers, business students and other drunks. We didn’t stand out from the crowd.

  Jakob leaned across the table, looked me in the eye and said: ‘Rock music is a religion. One of the slogans from sixty-seven. Rock is rhythm. And rhythm definitely has something religious about it. Rhythm and rituals. The basis of all religions.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Music is with us all the time. It’s the rhythm of our lives. The beating of your mother’s heart when you’re in the womb, the regular throb of blood through the umbilical cord and into your body. That’s the first music you hear. Later, if you’re lucky, the same mother sings you to sleep at night. Circus music. The school band on the seventeenth of May.’

  ‘The drums of the marching bands in spring?’

  ‘Christmas carols, hymns.’

  ‘Pop.’

  ‘Exactly. Pop! Sounds like the noise the cork makes as it’s released from a bottle of champagne. But pop is every generation’s popular music, from Strauss to Tchaikovsky, from Debussy to Gershwin, from Richard Rodgers to Lennon and McCartney. Viennese waltzes in one era, music hall songs in another. Languorous evergreens one decade, swing jazz another…’

  ‘And rock music in quite a number of…’

  ‘Yes, but there’s rock and there’s rock, Frau Beethoven. It’s a long way from fifties American rock ‘n’ roll to today’s synth rock.’

  ‘I thought it was electronics you worked on?’

  ‘Yes, but in its own way. What I do is research various forms of musical expression and combine them in new contexts. Create soundscapes.’

  I nodded. At the neighbouring table a heated debate about meta-literary devices in eighties European films had broken out and names like Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Betty Blue were being bandied about over beer. I knew nothing about any of them and had my hands full coping with Jakob’s music machines.

  After Wesselstuen we set out for Holbergstuen. Holberg’s comedies were still read and performed and he’d had a rich and varied career from slave-trader to baron. The clientele in his drinking parlour was a lot less studenty than it had been fifteen years earlier, apart from on 8th March because the female activists with their roots in the seventies still believed this was where it all happened. Or perhaps the change of style was more an illusion, because, judging by the level of drunkenness, most of those present appeared to have been supping steadily since 1968, so there was no reason to believe they weren’t the same people. Those who had once been students had advanced to becoming Masters of Alcohol with a variety of subsidiary subjects.

  Jakob had started to slur his ‘s’s and there appeared to be a loose connection up top. He leaned forward between two beer glasses and said: ‘The problem … The problem is combining the necessary with
… the necessary.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘What you have to do … with what you have to do,’ he continued.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The useful with … the useful.’

  I nodded wearily. I had a strange feeling in my head, as though I would never hold it upright again if I continued nodding.

  ‘Combining a j-j-job, like the one I have in the church … with co-co-composing.’

  As I didn’t respond, he carried on: ‘What can easily become … r-r-routine. With what should be your s-s-soul.’ After a moment’s reflection he added: ‘I have something to say, you see.’

  ‘And you say it with music, not words, as it says in the scriptures.’

  ‘Saint Reidar Thommesen? In the band leader’s firscht epischtle to the Oslo Theatercafe?’

  ‘Chapter two, verse three.’

  ‘But tha’s akshelly what I do, Verg. Music can express so much where words have no power. That’s in the scriptures too.’

  ‘Most things have already been written and most tunes are plagiarism. Well disguised copies, the best of them, mind you. Yesterday was actually written by Schubert.’

  ‘Rubbish. It was Bach.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we still agree that…’

  ‘I say, as I always have,’ he interrupted. ‘On the first-of-May demos in those difficult days of yore I always assembled under the slogan: DON’T FORGET GERSHWIN!’ He glanced around furtively. ‘For some reason I always marched on my own.’

  It had gone quiet around us. Conspicuously quiet. We looked around. The crowd was thinning out. The waitresses were emptying ashtrays.

  But from the back room we could still hear the braying laughter of Paul Finckel, who was sitting at his regular table with a children’s writer on one side, an ex-footballer, now post-office employee on the other, and a varied assortment of ample bosoms opposite him.

  ‘Shall we go to a place called … the Hot Spot,’ I asked warily.

  Jakob’s face lit up and he shook off his sudden ennui. ‘Absolutely! The Hot Spot. The hottest spot in town.’

  As we stood up and strolled to the door, Paul Finckel stuck his head from around the partition, raised his glass and yelled: ‘Watch out for the sirens, boys. Watch out for the femmes fatales.’

  15

  It was well past midnight when we found ourselves outside the anonymous, four-storey-high so-called chimney house in the district between the bus station and the railway, which was concealing this week’s Hot Spot.

  The December night licked at our faces with a cold tongue, and somewhere up the mountainside barking came from a lone kennel. Canned disco music throbbed against the closed windows on the first, second and third floors. Curtains were drawn to muffle the sound, and if we hadn’t known better we might have assumed this was a private party.

  I gazed up at the grey façade. ‘Looks classy.’

  Jakob stood beside me. The fresh air had done him good. ‘It’s relatively discreet. You won’t get in without the passes we were given yesterday, and they check you over.’

  ‘The question is whether I’ll get in.’

  ‘Yes, you will. Anyway, they move from week to week. The backers own three or four similar condemned properties around the town centre and they move the event from place to place. The whole business is nothing but a cunning way to get round licensing regulations…’

  ‘And an equally cunning way to pocket illegal earnings?’

  ‘The place where we were yesterday is respectable … in a way. At least the façade was fine. Back there you could meet local politicians and police officers out on the town.’

  ‘And here? No police?’

  ‘Maybe. Not all of them take the enforcement of licensing regulations that seriously, and not many turn down a cheap drink. But you’ll probably meet all the other musicians here. Lots will have finished their gigs elsewhere and fancy a quiet drink before they crash out. There are theatre people, sales and ad folk, local jetsetters and anyone else who doesn’t feel like going home when the other places close.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like somewhere I’d thrive.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Varg. You might meet a woman here.’

  ‘What type of woman?’

  He smirked and went up to the door. He found an outside doorbell marked X. After ringing it, he stepped back and waited.

  Thirty seconds later a pale face appeared behind the glass pane in the door. Two critical eyes examined us both, then the face disappeared, there was a buzz and the door opened.

  A bodybuilder in a dinner jacket, size XXL, blocked the entrance, as friendly as a weightlifter convicted for doping.

  Jakob, who knew the procedure, held out the two passes and the heavyweight nodded. ‘Plus the cover charge.’

  Jakob turned to me as he put a hand into his inside pocket. ‘Have you got two Camillas?’

  ‘Two hundred kroner … each?’

  ‘Mhm. But that includes half a bottle of champers each.’

  ‘As exclusive as the building?’

  ‘The most exclusive there is – Opéra.’

  ‘O sole mio.’

  I took out two notes and paid. In return I was given a numbered voucher. I peered up at the doorman. ‘And what can I win with this? Some Hardanger embroidery from the Missionary Society or a toilet bag from Grand Magasin?’

  ‘Where did you pick up this cuckoo?’ the hammer-thrower asked Jakob.

  ‘I was standing under his tree.’

  ‘I hope you can vouch for him.’

  ‘Cuck-oo. You can have three wishes,’ I mumbled. ‘Dumbbells, a jockstrap and anabolic steroids.’

  Jakob raised both hands in defence. ‘We’re in puckish mood today. It doesn’t happen often. But this is one of those days. Can we come in?’

  Mr Grumpy nodded and indicated the way.

  We went up the first staircase. The pounding of the disco music got louder. It sounded like dinosaurs stampeding.

  ‘Is there any difference between the floors?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Later tonight the only difference will be where you can find room.’

  I glanced at him. ‘What are we actually doing here, Jakob?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Are we looking for someone?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Rebecca?’

  He stopped. The look he sent me was like quicksand. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  ‘Gro?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘She’s in the bosom of her family today. Video and Vimto. Routine creaking of the bed springs. Saturday-night fun in good old Norway, in the far north.’

  I hummed: “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

  He opened the door to the flat on the first floor and went in. The canned music engulfed us and it was as if we were hermetically sealed ourselves, only able to communicate with sign language or a foghorn.

  The flat was open and airy. The doors had been lifted off their hinges and from what had once been the hall we could go in a circle, from what had once been the kitchen to what had once been the bedroom, from what had once been the bedroom to what had once been the sitting room, from what had once been the sitting room to what had been a second sitting room.

  The light was dimmed to a tropical dusk by means of bare bulbs that had been painted red, purple and blue. The walls – and large parts of the floor and the ceiling – had been spray-painted in a colour that lay somewhere between black and purple. The furniture consisted of somewhat forlorn black plastic chairs of the kind you used to be able to find in the waiting rooms of unscrupulous estate agents in the late sixties. So, hardly anyone sat on them.

  Most people were standing or hanging from one another, and moving in a Pavlovian rhythm to the music surging in great waves from grandiose loudspeakers positioned symmetrically in all the corners. In a niche in what had once been the sitting room was a primitive bar where we could get the bottle of champagne we had already been overcharged for or part with even m
ore cash for a wide selection of drinks, from a demonstratively solitary bottle of Farris mineral water to the most expensive brands of whisky, typically in duty-free bottles.

  We started carefully, exchanged the first of the vouchers and found ourselves two chairs on the fringes of the mass of bodies, although our perspective was mostly abdominal.

  This hour belonged to those weary of life. Faces that could have been Methuselah or Peter Pan danced with bodies that could have been Mae West’s or Madonna’s. Black leather skirts that barely covered thighs danced with stone-washed jeans, and off-pink stretch pants reminiscent of men’s long johns, but unable to conceal the contours of a mole, rubbed with languid sensuality against flapping baggy Italian pants sewn with gold lamé thread. A woman with a bust like Cleopatra, a bottom half like a third-rate variety artiste and black Egyptian-style hair, a skin-tight, sparkly gold blouse, pink tutu and black woollen tights was dancing with a long beanpole of a man dressed in a strikingly conventional blazer and charcoal-grey slacks, his chin like the landing area of a ski-jump. A bottle-blonde with an Annie Lennox face was dancing alone in a black, knitted stove-pipe of a dress. She was ecstatically caressing her own flat chest, where only her erect nipples suggested which gender she was, and unless I had seen her ID I still wouldn’t have been convinced. Beside her danced an almost two-metre-tall bald guy in a dinner jacket, probably in his late forties, with a decorative young man of about seventeen wearing painfully tight jeans and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. A woman closer to sixty – a bombshell from the Diana Dors age – was dancing with a youngster of my age wearing a bow-tie, a spaced-out expression and a harlequin outfit like the clown he was. Behind them shadows merged with shadows, fingers moved suggestively in the vicinity of various genitalia, lips kissed necks and fresh air, tongues licked ears and hairy Adam’s apples, and amidst all this the shrill music pierced our taut eardrums like needles, at a decibel level that would cause contusions if you stayed there too long.