Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Kamala is an exceptional individual. A woman of the ksatriya , or warrior, caste, brought up in the Delhi area, educated at Columbia University, New York, working at the University of Oslo. Her only real teething troubles in becoming a ‘Norwegian’ had been a couple of hard winters and a problem with the Norwegian ‘u’ sound. And of course — this was the seventies, after all — a dearth of vegetables, other than potatoes, carrots and cabbage, which was, for a foreigner, hard to credit.

After the first, almost inconceivably wonderful phase, came the break-up. I could not imagine what she saw in me, could not believe the love that had grown. I took fright. Actually took fright. She was gradually turning into Margrete, taking her place. Not least when she started telling stories from The Mahabharata . I had heard Margrete tell quite a few of those same stories. I had not asked Kamala to talk about The Mahabharata . It was too hard. The whole thing reminded me so much of Margrete. I broke it off. I said, I forced myself to say, that I did not want to see her any more. It was a stupid decision. This was just at the time when the first spiteful books about me were published amid a storm of publicity. I could not help but hear about them, even the most defamatory details reached my ears on the inside. Again the thought of suicide presented itself.

Then, out of the blue, came Kamala’s book on me. Or perhaps I should say ‘defence’. I read it. I wanted to get in touch, but did not. Then yet another book appeared, this time written by a professor, with Rakel’s help. I made up my mind to live. I asked to see Kamala Varma again. And when I met her, while out on a day pass, I was so overcome by emotion that I had to sit down on a bench. I saw that, although her skin was darker, she looked like Margrete. I saw that she very nearly was Margrete. It was not Kamala, but Margrete, whom I saw walking towards me. This time I did not take fright. I thought: This — this is mercy.

Kamala understood. She waited. She was there for me when I got out. I knew what it was: Love reborn.

I am a secretary. I am Kamala’s secretary. And I am a name at the beginning of a love story. I have done the one thing I have always dreamt of doing: I am hidden, while at the same time working in depth.

I observe her from the bed. She is sitting on the balcony in the bright night, simply gazing out across the fjord, at the approach lights atop Fimreiteåsen and Bleia, the shimmering snow-covered mountain beyond, between Lærdalsfjord and Aurlandsfjord. She is sitting several metres away from me. She has her back to me. And yet I have the strongest feeling that she is holding me in her arms.

It is only a few months since I saw her in a sari for the first time — on one of those rare occasions when she found reason to wear such a garment. And yet, at home, when I undressed her, I was never in any doubt that her naked body was even more beautiful than that long swathe of fabric with its lovely colours and marvellous patterns. When we made love, quietly, slowly, the sari lay over us like a tent. It struck me that we were two nomads whose paths had chanced to cross. Sometimes when I whisper her name, those three ‘a’s, it sounds like ‘Samarkand’.

I must have dozed off. I was woken by her switching on the bedside lamp. She was bending over me, looking down into my face. ‘I just wanted to see whether you might surrender your secret when you were asleep,’ she said.

There is a well-known adage which says that love bears everything, believes everything, hopes in everything, endures everything. To this should be added: Love changes everything.

The most important story has not yet been told. That of the emergence of a genius. How could one man enthral so many thousands, almost inspire an entire nation to change direction. How could anyone come up with an idea as exceptional as that conceived by Jonas Wergeland.

That seminal work of art Thinking Big , a feat unparalleled in the history of modern Norwegian thought, has faded from the minds of the Norwegian people. It is a puzzle, and more than a little depressing, but it is nonetheless a fact. Not that the programmes have been forgotten — clips from them are still doing the rounds. There is always a chance, in any gathering, of someone mentioning a scene in which Henrik Ibsen wanders around inside his own brain; or, while out skiing with friends, referring to a programme in which Fridtjof Nansen stood and wept. Jonas Wergeland had a gift for creating scenes as unforgettable as a riff, a phrase you simply cannot get out of your head — but people no longer remember the import of that series, that voyage of discovery, if you like. The great majority have forgotten how much his programmes affected them, inspired them, you might say; how, when they switched off the television, they had a powerful urge to talk to someone about what they had seen. A great many of them said the same thing: they felt like doing something. It is no exaggeration to say that, for a whole year, a couple of million Norwegians were on the verge of changing their outlook on life. Changing themselves.

Why did he do it? Or how?

A lot happened to Norwegian television during Jonas Wergeland’s time in prison. On the plus side possibly just one thing: the appearance of the first Negro television host. ‘Negro’ has to be the correct term here, since, even though they believed themselves to be living in a multicultural society, people said to themselves: Gosh, a Negro on NRK — much as the sight of an African in Oslo in the fifties made people turn their heads with a: Gosh, a Negro on Karl Johans gate. Other than that, it was the decline in standards which struck one, the increasingly desperate attempts to win viewers. And the monotony of it, a so-called diversity which, in actual fact, meant almost identical programmes on hundreds of channels, a diversity the essence of which was repetition. In the battle for viewers — read: money — all the television companies were offering the same product.

Jonas Wergeland foresaw this development even before the advent of his own glory days. On his return from Montevideo in the mid-eighties he gave a lecture at the NRK studios. Hardly anyone attended it. The organisers of the evening seminar — all honour to their names — wrote it off as a total flop. But since then that meeting has acquired a legendary status equal to that of the inaugural meetings of political parties which altered the course of history. And if everyone who boasts of having been in attendance truly had been there, the NRK headquarters would not have been big enough to hold them all.

What did he talk about? After a complete, and somewhat sardonic, rundown of the previous week’s broadcasts on NRK TV, he concluded by saying: ‘Television is a marvellous invention. Is this really the best we can do with it?’ The remainder of the lecture was devoted to a ruthless critique of his own work, as good as a confession, some said. Wergeland confined himself strictly to his own productions when it came to citing examples of unoriginality. From the platform he made a vow that from now on he was going to make programmes unlike anything ever made before. It might not be going too far to say that Jonas Wergeland wished to be a Negro on the Norwegian television scene; he wanted to come from the outside and show Norwegians strange things about their own country which they had never noticed. He wanted to turn the viewers into see-ers .

What happened in Montevideo?

In Montevideo Jonas Wergeland was down for the count. An observer would have doubted whether he was capable of conceiving any ideas at all. Because in Montevideo, in the far-off country of Uruguay, Jonas Wergeland spent most of his time slumped in a deckchair, all alone on a vast, deserted beach, staring out to sea, or rather the Rio de la Plata. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a Norwegian should have had the great revelation of his life while lounging in a deckchair, considering that Norwegians have grown up, so to speak, in chairs designed to allow one to recline at one’s ease. That deckchair was, for Jonas, what the bathtub had been for Archimedes.