Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
Viktor started visiting Jonas as Jonas had visited him and one day at the prison, when they were chatting about television, Viktor said that he had recently watched the
Thinking Big
series again. He understood now what an impact it must have had on him, how much of it he could remember, even though at the institution he had watched the programmes, regularly, in a very different, abstracted frame of mind. ‘I hope you won’t be annoyed if I say I like the programme on Harald Hardråde best,’ he said to Jonas. ‘That arrow didn’t just kill Harald Hardråde, it saved my life.’
I could not help thinking of both Viktor Harlem and the aforementioned programme when we were in Eivindvik, in Viking country, where there are traces dating back even further than Harald Hardråde. Outside the
churchyard
gate stood an ancient stone cross, and on a green hillside nearby we found a similar cross, carved in a slightly different style. Both could have been erected around the time when Christianity came to Norway, by kings such as Håkon the Good, Olav I or Olav II. The ground on which the
Gulatinget
, the first regional moot, was held had also lain somewhere in these parts, possibly in Eivindvik first, then at Flolid, where a stone now marked the site of the moot ground.
From Brekke we had sailed out into the fjord estuary, bore south, then made our way into Eivindvik’s nice, sheltered harbour, where we were assigned a berth alongside the local shop. Eivindvik was the perfect place in which to review our findings on Sognefjord and Viking times: with the pictures we had taken and the plethora of notes regarding rune stones and burial mounds – and the battlefields, like the bay off Fimreite where King Sverre won such a decisive battle over King Magnus in 1184. And only a little to the north of here, at Solund, Harald Hardråde had assembled his fleet before the disastrous expedition to England. Carl thought we should insert clips from Jonas Wergeland’s television programme into our presentation of Solund. I saw a circle being closed, I saw my two projects being juggled together to form a whole. I saw how, simply by being there, Jonas Wergeland had moved us to take a more radical approach to the OAK Quartet’s
products
, to wonder whether it was possible for us to transcend our medium, as he had once expanded the television medium.
From Jonas’s own ramblings it was clear that he was more interested in Dean Niels Griis Alstrup Dahl, of whom there were traces at every turn in Eivindvik. I could see why Jonas Wergeland would identify with someone
like Dahl: a Prometheus, a popular enlightener in the true sense. Dahl was an individual who wanted to think big, a man who squeezed ‘bread from stones’, who instilled culture in farmers and fishermen. Jonas said he liked the thought that his mother’s family came from around here, most likely from Verkland Farm, not far from Brekke.
Just before we were due to leave I was sitting alone in the saloon on board the
Voyager
, making a note of things to add to my manuscript. It was here in Eivindvik that I decided to write a frame story about the sail along
Sognefjord
, because I saw that the inclusion of this voyage would make a difference –
all
the difference – to the picture of Jonas Wergeland’s life presented in the final draft. Here, too, I realised that by observing him so closely I had come to see myself in a new light. In writing this account I had also changed my own life. I think this must have been what I had in mind all the time. That deep down this was why I had done it. I now knew, what is more, how I felt about Martin.
The previous day I had taken myself off to a bench outside the old church to read through the big notebooks which Jonas Wergeland had come up and handed to me with a smile, just like that, as we were sailing up Prestesundet towards Eivindvik. ‘I’d better add my pittance,’ he said, ‘my contribution to the collective epic.’ I sat there, reading the handwritten pages, surrounded by the scent of cherry blossom, and I make no secret of the fact that I was so moved that I frequently had to stop, as my emotions got the better of me. Here, at long last, I had the answer to my question as to why he had done it, why he chose to go to prison. I had known. But I had not known in quite this way. I realised right away that I would have to weave these stories into my own book. With his permission. I would probably have to synchronise our accounts of some events. In other cases the contradictions would be allowed to stand.
But still: even our joint efforts offered no guarantee. It struck me that I might have been writing with a confidence that was quite unwarranted. The true story about Jonas Wergeland might just as easily be the sum of all the untold stories about him. Even at that point, sitting outside the church, I began to have some doubts about his own version of events. What bothered me most were the passages in which he described all his ventures, even his television series, as failures. I could not agree with him. As I rested my eyes on the old vicarage, once the home of Niels Griis Alstrup Dahl himself, a memory surfaced. Things get a bit more personal here, there’s no way round it: the truth is, you see, that I not only think, I am quite positive, that Jonas Wergeland once saved me, and possibly even my life.
This incident occurred on a beautiful autumn day, the sort of day that
sharpens all the senses, a day so ineluctably clear that you suddenly become sensible to the element air. It was no coincidence that I should have been inspired to conduct my experiment, or seen that it could be done, on such a day.
I was working at the time for an advertising agency, among bright, young things with hip lighters and slick business cards: a milieu in which the right sunglasses counted for more than moral backbone. It had been a hectic week: the Advertising Association’s gala dinner and awards ceremony on the Friday followed, on the Saturday, by a party to mark the fifth birthday of our
distinctive
little agency; a pretty riotous affair at which we fêted ourselves as if we were the very lynchpin of society. The latter do was held at one of the city’s rock clubs, one of those dingy venues which make you feel as if you’ve landed in a disused factory or the hallway to hell. The only decorative element in the vast, totally black hall were the television sets dotted around the room on little trolleys, each one hooked up to a video recorder. On these
monitors
we had our own ads running non-stop without the sound. I had been responsible for setting this up, it was also up to me to make sure that all the equipment was returned to the suppliers. On the Sunday, after only a few hours of fitful sleep, I went for a walk on my own, and that’s when the idea came to me. I don’t know why. It may have been the wistfulness encapsulated in such crisp, clear autumn hours, the detachment from life that they bestow. As I watched a maple leaf drifting gently to the ground, the thought settled in my mind, as crisp and clear as the air around me.
I ought to say that this was also a special day in another respect. I had woken that Sunday morning with a feeling of listless melancholy, of body and spirit, which I had long feared was going to engulf me completely. All I wanted was to stay there in bed with the curtains drawn for days. I had just come out of a relationship, so maybe that had something to do with it. Or maybe it was all the partying I had been doing, two bashes as vacuous and frenetic as only such gatherings can be. But even that could not explain it all. I knew my mother had suffered from depression; I had always been scared, terrified, that I might succumb to something similar. In my teens I had
sometimes
caught glimpses of a darkness that frightened me, but I had never felt anything like this vague numbness, this
weight
which was pressing down on me when I opened my eyes that Sunday. All my senses told me that I was in danger, that at any moment I could be hurled into some indefinable darkness. For the first time it occurred to me that my life might go the same way as my mother’s. The thought made my heart pound with dread.
So even as I tried to make the most of this clear autumn day, the keen, invigorating air, inside I felt gloomy and angst-ridden. It is hard to put it into
words, but I walked along beneath the flaming yellow leaves on the trees with an uneasy feeling that the world was grey. Grey and flat. It must have been this that rendered me so receptive. An idea that should have occurred to me before was forced to the surface by a semi-conscious sense of desperation, a vague horror that all the colour and depth would drain out of life.
When I got home I got out the tapes of Dad’s – or no, I had better
maintain
, still, the distance I have tried to observe throughout: Jonas Wergeland’s – television series. I kept them on the same shelf as Knut Hamsun’s collected works, since I happen to believe that this series ranks alongside the great works of Norwegian literature. I drove into the city, back to the club. As soon as I set foot in that vast, empty space and saw the television sets scattered about like basic forms of basalt or black marble I knew I was on the right track.
The smell of the party still hung over the barren, black-painted hall: cigars and booze, the whiff of expensive perfumes mingled with the indeterminate, aromatic odour of the somewhat disappointing food we had had. There were still a few bottles sitting about. The floor was sticky. Purely by chance I was dressed all in black and for a moment I had the feeling that I was merging with the room, that the massive hall was going to swallow me up. I shrugged it off and began to arrange the trolleys holding the TV sets and video
recorders
in a big circle. I thought of Stonehenge, that enigmatic arrangement of megaliths in England. On reflection, I seem to remember a newspaper
photograph
from the time when the
Thinking Big
series was first shown on NRK TV: a pensive-looking Jonas Wergeland pictured in his office, like an inventor in his laboratory. My eye had been caught not so much by his facial
expression
as by the screens in the background, flat panels arranged in a semi-circle. On them one could see large sheets of paper covered in writing, squares with lines running between them. It looked as though he was standing in a
many-sided
room packed with ideas.
I slotted one tape, one programme from the series, into each video recorder. The machines were all of the same make and hooked up to one another in such a way that I could start them all at the same time with just one remote control. I pressed the button and there I stood, all at once, in the centre of a vast hall, in the centre of a circle of television screens, each showing a programme from Jonas Wergeland’s television series. The sets seemed almost to form an electronic membrane around me, as if I were inside a massive, life-giving organ, a breathing entity. Let me put it this way: I would not have missed it for the world. It was like being touched, caressed almost, by something, a quality, which was light-years away from the universe I
ordinarily
inhabited and by which I was surrounded in this room, in the shape of
mementos of a meaningless party: the dregs of wine in plastic cups and the reek of stale smoke, a slip of paper scrawled with headings for a pretentious speech tramped into some sticky gunge on the floor.
I tried to take in as much as I could, but at one point, possibly because I found it so overwhelming and needed to rest my eyes, I stood and watched the programme on Harald Hardråde, the king who had tried to do the
unthinkable
, to conquer England. I remembered my reaction, one time when the
programme
was being repeated, to the final scene: the bloody battle of Stamford Bridge represented solely by Harald himself, a king fighting an army which we could not see, yet did see. I had sat up, wide-eyed, thinking to myself that this was him, Jonas Wergeland, it was a self-portrait, an assertion that one man could have the width to populate a whole world. It was also a picture of Jonas Wergeland battling alone with a Titanic task, invisible to all but him; an attempt to achieve the impossible.
I stood in that black, party-fumed club with its dead echoes of here today, gone tomorrow music and inane adverts. I looked. I began to move my eyes from one screen to the next, as if they were different parts of a circular mosaic. The thought occurred to me that if all of the programmes were in the nature of self-portraits then Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in
fulfilling
an old dream: of living several lives at once. Standing there in that dark, factory-like space I slowly let my eyes travel round, feeling a little dizzy, but also amazed that I could actually manage to watch so many screens at once. It was an enthralling, almost unearthly, experience. At one point it crossed my mind that this must be what it was like to stand with one’s head inside a crystal chandelier, inside a circle of light.
I had seen every programme several times over, but never – obviously – at the same time. Suddenly – after twenty minutes or so – my subconscious told me that they were all connected, that if I could just manage to look at all the screens at once I would have the sensation of watching just one
programme
. I found an office chair on which I could spin round; I rewound the tapes, restarted them all simultaneously. And it was when I sat down on the chair and began slowly to rotate that the revelation came to me. The sum of the images I saw on each screen metamorphosed into a stupendous juggling act; I witnessed the way in which, throughout all these programmes, Jonas Wergeland kept so many images, impressions, in the air at once, as an expert juggler does with balls.
I spun myself round, a warm thrill running through me. These flat screens offered me a peek into wonderful depths, and filled me with an unfailing
certainty
that reality was round. In this almost vacuum-black hall, in which only hours earlier I had attended a superficial party, heard the stupidest things
being said, and made the silliest remarks myself, I was now having my life’s epiphany, an insight which filled my every smallest cell. At some point – although I had no sense of time – I developed the strong suspicion that the lines in each programme also fell in a very specific order, such that if I were to join together the pieces of the separate lines I would hear quite different sentences; a sentence ending in one programme would continue, like an
elaboration
of a statement, in another programme, while in a third programme it might be the music which picked up the thread, or added another dimension to the argument. At other times I had the idea that the whole thing evolved into a dialogue, that the programmes were speaking to one another. To me, in the state I was in and precisely because I was confronted with this
incomparable
work of art – stories subtly bound together to form a magnificent fresco – in a hall that stank faintly of leftovers and vomit, that reeked of adverts and commercialism and facile kitschiness, the screens, the programmes
surrounding
me seemed almost to come to life. I sat in a circle of pictures and sound which gradually expanded until it encompassed everything. I
remember
what I thought. I thought: this is my Samarkand. This black room.