Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
At last, when it actually looked as though Harald Hardråde was gaining ground on the bridge, one of his adversaries, he too invisible, loosed an arrow from his bow. A resounding
twang
was heard, like a symmetrical echo of the programme’s opening scene. A fateful sound, a sound louder than everything else. There was a shot of the arrow flashing through the air, heading straight for the viewer, so lifelike and deadly, a bloody great arrowhead about to burst right through the screen. In a thousand homes people ducked, threw
themselves
off their chairs. A moment later, from the floor, they saw the arrow embedded in Harald’s throat and the sword slipping from his hand.
And it was this same pitiless ending, this grisly shot that caused history to take a different turn, so to speak, which also changed the story of Viktor Harlem. It was the shot that woke him, or so he said. He had clutched at his
throat, as if to pull out a hurtful arrow, and suddenly he could talk. ‘Well, that was a long trip, I must say,’ he exclaimed. ‘Where am I? Who are all these old folk? Wow, what a great chair, is it mine?’
Jonas read all about it in his cell a few days later. A medical miracle the papers called it. Sadly, though, all was not as it should be. Viktor had woken up, but he could not remember a thing. Where his head might have been designed by the Creator to take a sixty-watt bulb it now seemed to be running on twenty-five watts. He had no idea who he was, and he could remember nothing of his past. He could, however, remember absolutely everything else. He knew that Habakkuk was a prophet, that Ittoqqortoormiit was a region of Greenland and that the birr was the unit of currency in Ethiopia. He knew that Haydn’s mother was Anna Maria Koller and that his wife’s name was Maria Anna Keller. He knew that Galileo died in the year that Newton was born. He knew that B.B. King’s guitar was called Lucille. Everyone was baffled. Not least the doctors. Jonas alone guessed the truth. Viktor had spent a couple of decades watching television, to begin with only NRK and the two Swedish channels, but also the other channels as they came along. For some reason every single bit of what he had seen – snippets of news broadcasts and documentaries, natural history series, soap operas and music programmes – had lodged inside his brain. He remembered nothing from ‘the real world’, but everything from twenty years of television-viewing, from an artificial existence spent with his face turned to the television screen. He also had a rapid, rather staccato way of speaking, as if he were zapping between channels in his head.
But Viktor Harlem was to make the headlines again later. It so
happened
that his awakening occurred around the same time that the
Norwegian
version of the popular American quiz programme
Jeopardy
!
was first screened. Viktor, who was now back living with his mother – not that he remembered her, he simply accepted that she was who she said she was – was persuaded to apply for the show and passed the tough and pretty extensive audition with almost daunting bravura. As a contestant he was unbeatable. It was clear that he could answer just about anything, that is to say: answer in the form of a question. He had the most unbelievable fund of knowledge on everything from Ananga Ranga to orang-utans, and could differentiate without blinking between Lee Marvin, Hank Marvin and Hank Williams, not to mention Pasteur and Patorius. After becoming the all-time greatest
Jeopardy!
champion five times in a row, he was accorded the title of Grand Champion, as if he had suddenly joined the upper echelons of some
mysterious
brotherhood. Never before had a winner scooped up such
breathtakingly
large cash prizes or provided such stunning entertainment. Viktor’s
popularity soon reached such heights, helped along by all the press
coverage
, that the TV2 management decided, after consultation with the company which produced
Jeopardy!
for them, to break with the rules of the game just this once, to bow to public demand – with one eye on the advertising revenue, naturally – and invite him back on to the show. With equally fabulous success for Viktor and equally gratifying viewing figures for the channel. Viktor, who had reverted to his black polo necks and who, with his baby face and longish, wispy hair, looked rather like a seven-year-old Einstein, became something of a national hero. His staccato voice was soon to be heard on every talk show and his zap-zapping comments could be read in every newspaper and
magazine
. Jonas followed his friend’s
Jeopardy!
escapades from his cell, shaking his head in disbelief. This Viktor was almost the very opposite of the boy he had been when they were knocking back his illicit absinthe in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka and calling themselves The Three Heretics. The Viktor whom Jonas saw on television had a head bursting with facts, but his mind was a blank. He could answer any question on the most trivial subject, but he did not know who he was.
Viktor was now proclaimed Norway’s only Double Grand Champion, but the story does not end there. Once there were enough
Jeopardy!
Grand
Champions
– twelve in all – a special tournament was held. For weeks beforehand the papers were full of it, with hundreds of column inches devoted to what might have been a showdown between the gods on Olympus. On an Easter weekend in the latter half of the nineties the scene was set for the actual final between the remaining Grand Champions – and a record viewing figure. With Viktor in the last three it seemed certain that everyone was going to get what they were hoping for: a tremendous fight. And a battle it
was
– with Napoleon playing a starring role.
Although Jonas very rarely watched the television in his cell, for obvious reasons he did follow Viktor’s bizarre career on
Jeopardy!
with ever-increasing wonder. To Jonas it seemed so ironic: you could be considered an expert on the world without having been consciously present in that world. On the other hand, he had to admit that he enjoyed the programme, and not only because it tended to suggest that the questions were more important than the answers. Like his countrymen Jonas had been fascinated by quiz shows of this sort ever since the first series of
Double Your Money
was broadcast in the early sixties – that same
Double your Money
which had played and would play such a curious part in Viktor Harlem’s life.
Before the much publicised Grand Champions Final that Easter, Jonas decided to take a hand in things. Not to spoil anything, but to try, if possible, to shake Viktor awake. Fully awake. Because Jonas knew something known
only to a few. Viktor had a complex. Which is to say: a complex of which he had no recall. As a child, in the days when everybody, absolutely everybody, watched the same programmes, especially on Saturday evenings, Viktor had been bullied terribly and had had to watch his father go seriously downhill after the latter, as a contestant on
Double Your Money
answering questions on the multi-faceted subject of Napoleon, had failed to answer one of the last parts of the 10,000-
krone
question. The fateful question was: What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz? The answer, which his father could not remember due to a mental block as freakish as it was unfair, was of course Jean Baptiste-Jules
Bernadotte
. In other words, the man later to be known as Karl Johan, the king who lent his name to Oslo’s main thoroughfare.
The memory of this gave Jonas an idea. He called the producer of
Jeopardy
!
, a former colleague at NRK who now worked for the company
responsible
for the quiz show. Jonas knew that this man could pull a few strings with the compilers of the questions for the
Jeopardy!
Grand Champions Final with no one being any the wiser. Despite the impropriety of the request, Jonas’s former colleague had immediately agreed to help. ‘Remember, we’re dealing with a sick man here,’ Jonas stressed. ‘We have to try everything.’
And so it came about that in this extraordinary final between the Grand Champions, in front of a million viewers, in the ‘Final Jeopardy!’ round in which the answer also had to be written down, Viktor suddenly heard the quizmaster announcing that the subject was Napoleon and the clue was: ‘The marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz.’
Even though Jonas knew the outcome, since the programme was recorded, he sat on the edge of his seat, his eyes glued to the screen, much the way we sometimes watch a suspenseful film again, even though we know how it ends. In his cell, Jonas held his breath as Viktor, in a studio in Nydalen in Oslo, stiffened when this tricky ‘answer’ was read out, as though, despite its name, only now did he understand that the programme was all about taking risks. For the viewers this was a dramatic moment. They saw Viktor Harlem put his hands to his large, babyish head, as if in pained confusion. This
reaction
lasted, however, only a matter of seconds and did not prevent him from writing down the question and reading it out, when his turn came, in a soft, tremulous voice: ‘Who was Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte, who later took the name Karl Johan?’ Strictly speaking this last part was not necessary, but Viktor had obviously wished to include it. Jonas never did find out whether this was just another fact which he had gleaned from watching the box, or whether it was a memory so traumatic and so powerful that it had broken through the wall from a past which he had forgotten.
Whatever the case, Viktor had outclassed his rivals, and now boasted the title of Supreme Grand Champion. There is also a little coda to the story. Afterwards, at an emotional press conference, Viktor recounted his traumatic childhood experience with his father and
Double Your Money
so movingly that the journalists presented him in their fulsome reports as a hero twice over. His father’s bitter defeat had finally been turned to victory.
In due course, Jonas also got to hear what had happened in the
contestants
’ room after the show. Viktor had sat down and started asking questions, delving and probing as if his whole life were suddenly a gigantic game of
Jeopardy
!
, the only difference being that now the subject was anything but trivial. Because he had remembered who he was. He had come to his senses in two stages. After the arrowshot in the programme on Harald Hardråde he could only remember what he had seen on TV, which is to say over the past
twenty-odd
years. But after the Napoleon question he could remember everything about his life from his childhood up to the March day in 1972 when he had been strolling through the streets of Lillehammer with his two chums, Axel Stranger and Jonas W. Hansen; that was why he had put his hands to his head: in some way he had been feeling the pain of the blow from that block of ice, over twenty years delayed. Where were his two chums now? was the first thing he asked. And after that the questions came pouring out. What had happened to poor Krystle in the last episode of
Dynasty
. Why did he look so young? And why had no one given him the latest model of the Stressless Royal, with additional lumbar support and a neck rest that adjusted
automatically
? Thanks to all his television viewing, Viktor did not suffer from any sort of Rip van Winkle syndrome, he knew what a computer was and how the new Volvo looked. People, including the doctors, still did not know what to think. And they never would.
As far as Viktor’s physical condition was concerned time appeared to have stood still. When he woke up he was not pushing forty, he was
nineteen
. He not only looked nineteen, he also seemed to have the mind of a nineteen-year-old. When Jonas met Viktor in the visiting room at the prison shortly after the Easter holidays he felt as though he was shaking hands with, hugging, Viktor’s son. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Viktor said, with that hundred-watt bulb back in his head. ‘I know it was you who arranged for that question to come up, who else could it have been?’ And then, puzzled: ‘But what are you doing here, Jonas? You’re no murderer? And it’s not like a chunk of ice struck
you
on the head.’
‘That’s my business,’ Jonas said, making it clear that he did not wish to talk about it. Although he almost said: ‘A block of ice struck at my heart.’
It was a strange, and emotional, reunion. Jonas could not help feeling,
possibly because of Viktor’s disconcertingly youthful appearance, that it was only a day or so since they had parted in Seilduksgata and that they could simply pick up the threads of a conversation they had broken off twenty-five years earlier. ‘Over the past few days I’ve been reading
The Cantos
,’ Viktor said as he was leaving, with his old, familiar hundred-watt enthusiasm. ‘And do you know what? I understand it all now. Do you remember Venice? Ezra Pound was so wrong. I’ve waded through the whole thing again. It is a
masterpiece
. I actually think I have Pound to thank for the fact that I could answer so many questions on
Jeopardy!
’
‘I thought the TV might have had something to do with it,’ Jonas said cautiously, almost afraid that Viktor might have a relapse.
‘Oh, that too of course, but I’m sure I picked up a lot of those nonsensical facts from
The Cantos
,’ Viktor answered with a laugh. And added, serious now: ‘Pound really has written a work of genius. I think that when you started to read it aloud to me, somewhere in my subconscious I must have connected those extracts with all the books I studied in order to understand Pound’s verses – the books I built so many shelves for.’ Viktor’s baby face was shining, almost as if he felt this longed-for insight into
The Cantos
was worth the price he had paid: twenty years in hibernation – or perhaps one should say of education.
What became of Viktor after that Easter? He received masses of
tempting
offers, and one of these he accepted. In many ways the most logical one. Viktor did not only wake up, he also began to think big. He decided to help sell the
Norwegian Encyclopedia
. He took a job with its publishers,
Kunnskapsforlaget
, one of the country’s foremost promoters of knowledge – a post in their marketing department created just for him – and was involved in the launching of a new edition of a work which was to reference books what the Stressless Royal was to armchairs. Viktor also signed a lucrative contract in which he gave the publishing house permission to use him in their
advertising
campaign. He became, quite simply, the public face of Kunnskapsforlaget. ‘Learning keeps you young,’ Viktor announced from huge posters on walls all over the city where scantily clad models for H&M normally reigned supreme. For some time Viktor Harlem’s smiling and indecently youthful Einstein countenance was to be seen everywhere: ‘You too can be a champion!’ he declared. The campaign was, of course, a stroke of genius. Sales of the
encyclopedia
broke all records. Seeing Viktor, the
Jeopardy!
king, the Supreme Grand Champion, associated in this way with the
Norwegian Encyclopedia
, people automatically assumed that
this
was why he was so good at answering questions. Or asking them. The majority of Norwegians regarded Viktor as living proof that it paid to own a sixteen-volume encyclopedia. It appeared to
be conducive both to a healthy body and a healthy bank balance. So it was in large part thanks to Viktor Harlem that Norway in the nineties had no trouble defending its ranking as one of the top countries in the world when it came to the number of encyclopedias per head of population.